by Jerrold E. Hogle
[Hogle, Jerrold E. "The Ghost of the Counterfeit -- and the Closet
-- in The Monk." Romanticism On the Net 8 (November
1997) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ghost.html>]
When Robert Miles in his book Gothic Writing rightly sees a "pattern
of false leads" (1) in Matthew Lewis' The Monk , he
doesn't tell the half of it. Like others who have recognized the same
motif, he doesn't expose how far or how deep that pattern
goes -- or enough about why it arises -- within the novel or in its
literary, economic, and cultural foundations. (2) In point of
fact, there is no level in The Monk that is not fake and a faking of
what is fake already. It is not just that the abbot Ambrosio
falls in lust with the picture of the Virgin in his cell (3) and that
the picture turns out to be a portrait of Matilda, the succubus
who comes to him in her own succession of deceptive veils, starting
with that of the boy-novice Rosario. (4) It is also, in the
first place, that all passionate desire in this book is really aroused,
intensified, and answered by images more than objects or
bodies, by signifiers (to use the Sausserean term) more often than
signifieds or referents. Ambrosio shifts his lustful desires from
Matilda to Antonia only when he is "pursued . . . to his Cell . . .
by Antonia's image" after hearing a petition from her in the
Capuchin chapel, (5) and that shift becomes an actual pursuit only
after Matilda has shown him another image: "the scene" of
Antonia undressing in a magic "mirror of polished steel". (6) Don Raymond,
in his turn within the novel's subplot, pursues the
Agnes he loves first through the screen-figure of her mother, who views
him as her lover all too readily, (7) and then behind the
image of the Bleeding Nun visualized in a "drawing" at the Castle of
Lindenberg, (8) the figure which finally appears to him as
the "animated Corse" itself when he thinks he is fleeing Lindenberg
with Agnes in a Bleeding-Nun disguise. (9)
Moreover, each such image appears as part of a surface, itself a set
of deceptions, covering what turns out to be an even
deeper and more hidden deception. By the end of The Monk , we find
that even Matilda, not to mention all the different forms
she takes, has been a false lead among a great many contrived and manipulated
by Lucifer, himself a great shape-shifter, to
entrap Ambrosio into such irredeemable sins as the rape and killing
of Antonia, actually his sister, and the very sexual
murder-in-bed of her mother Elvira, actually his own mother too. (10)
On top of (or really beneath) all this, the "bedrock levels"
of existence in this novel when all veils seem stripped away turn to
out to be blatant textual allusions -- parodic signifiers of
other signifiers -- as when Ambrosio slowly expires on a craggy riverbank
during what is explicitly a seven-day inversion of the
Creation in the Bible, (11) a "Genesis [in] reverse". (12)
Confronted as we are with all this fakery by Lewis, who even puts forward
a crafted and crafty self-image in a verse Preface
modelled on Horace, (13) it is not enough for us to say 200 years later
that The Monk simply shows the reduction of reality for
Lewis to "textuality" and "appetitive surface" (14) or that the "world
of The Monk is theatrical" at all points "because every
word and act is a work of art, and every work of art a pretense". (15)
We even stop too short if we rest, as several have, on
Lewis' Anglican-Protestant castigation of the sensual artifice in Catholic
icons and of what can happen when one accepts a
Catholic script for existence that both includes such enticing figures
and condemns the feelings they arouse. These readings of
Lewis' book are accurate, but they do not fully explain the wider cultural
and literary context that the novel plays out. After all,
The Monk is the most extreme enactment up to 1796 of what the "Gothic
Story," so named by Horace Walpole, could include
and achieve particularly in its use of signs pointing to signs. Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto in 1764, which Lewis quite
directly echoes in his play The Castle Spectre in 1797, (16) began
the so-called "Gothic" mixture of genres in earnest,
especially when Walpole added that label in his Second Edition, (17)
by presenting all the ghosts of past sins in his story as
walking signifiers, the signs of fakes, from the spectre of a figure
who steps out of a portrait (much as the Bleeding Nun will
seem to for Raymond) to enlarged mobile fragments of an effigy that
stands atop the tomb of Otranto's first Prince in the central
crypt beneath the Castle. (18)
Even the "explained" Gothic ghosts in the novels of Ann Radliffe, whose
rationalized sentimentality Lewis tries so hard to
counter in The Monk , were usually, as in that wax corpse placed within
a frame at Castle Udolpho, (19) the very sorts of
deceptions that Lewis intensifies in his tale. They were portions of
a general Radcliffean pattern (20) in which all perceived
existence is "spectralized" in painted or ghostly representations that
keep us from any real contact with a natural or physical
"other." Though Walpole and Radcliffe are certainly as anti-Catholic
as Lewis, they lead into The Monk by configuring all the
referents of all words and images in their "Gothic" worlds as finally
and blatantly counterfeits of a counterfeited life. Far more
than actual people or objects, these signifiers recall the portraits
of his father and uncle that Shakespeare's Hamlet shows his
mother, using the term "counterfeit" to describe them, in the play
that is the principal source for Walpole's "Gothic" and much of
its immediate progeny. (21) What does it mean, then, that Lewis' deepest
and ultimate levels of existence in The Monk are
counterfeits in a Gothic tradition by then only three decades old --
or that they are, more precisely, ghosts of what are
already counterfeits from earlier textual sources that go at least
as far back as Shakespeare? (22)
I want to argue that Lewis' daemonic novel has the shocking force in
our culture that it still does, not because of the sexual
license or the use of German sources in it so fervently attacked at
the time, but because it enacts and thus partially exposes a
particular cultural agenda of both its time and today that underlies
and motivates what I call "the ghost of the counterfeit" in the
rise of the Gothic during the later eighteenth century. This agenda
is an ideological endeavor to fashion a viable selfhood for the
class-climbing, mostly bourgeois person that employs hollowed-out signs
of more antiquated Western power-centers (ghosts of
counterfeits) as ways to market or "sell" the acquisative and uncertainly
grounded self in an increasingly capitalist world verging
on the full arrival of mechanical reproduction. As Andrea Henderson
and E.J. Clery have recently shown in the early Walpolean
Gothic without saying much about The Monk , the Gothic as a form of
fiction and theater arose after 1750 to help rising
Western middle-class and some higher-class readers deal ideologically
with the conflicting attractions of "two modes of
personal valuation," one of them "based on social rank and blood lines,
reflecting an older and more static [land-based,
aristocratic, and priest-dominated] order and the other based [supposedly]
on individual merit and associated with
capitalist-class imperatives and the growing strength of the market
economy". (23)
I would add, with some help from Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange
and Death , that this economically- and class-based
tug- of-war was already under way during in the era of Shakespeare.
The valuing of signs precisely as counterfeits became
prominent at that time, as Baudrillard shows and we can see in the
use of "counterfeit" in Hamlet , because there could coexist
in that use of symbols two wishes of the rising classes in the Renaissance:
a longing for older, supposedly unchangeable grounds
of status on which all signifiers might be based (the part of the counterfeit
that seemed "true" and "grounded" by medieval
standards) and a desire to transfer the signs of older powers to members
of the rising mercantile orders who could now possess
them without having inherited them (the aspect of the counterfeit that
is rhetorical, uprooted, and fake). (24) When the
neo-Gothic in the eighteenth century reworks this highly theatrical
Renassiance sense of the sign, as Otranto did by its author's
own admission, (25) it both leaves behind and intensifies the conflict
in the sign viewed as counterfeit -- thereby creating the
"ghost of the counterfeit" -- at a time of increasing capitalism and
an expanding mass market dominated more and more by
acquisitive investors, entrepreneurs, and retailers. The Monk , I contend,
both within and against its use of discredited old (and
Catholic) icons, plays out the consequences of this social transition
as they occur in the personal quest for a higher-class
selfhood. Lewis shows with great force how, in this quest, many incohate
visceral desires gain their direction and objects from
simulacra of counterfeits that cannot fulfill the self-completions
they claim to offer their worshipers. Desire becomes aroused by
once-meaningful counterfeits now turned into exchangeable simulations
of former domination that seem to offer the self greater
powers of independence but actually subject that self to the conditions
and controlling ideologies of the middle-class market.
The Monk remains frightening, as well as Gothic, because it tells us
so much about what we both want and want not to
confront: the ways we desire and are kept from desiring in the modern
capitalist world that had largely, if not completely, come
into being by the end of the eighteenth century.
Both Ambrosio and Don Raymond as Lewis renders them, we find, are embroiled
in self-marketing to the point of facing what
that effort really entails in the Spanish Renaissance (the place and
time of the novel's setting) and in the late eighteenth century
(the time of the novel's composition by a young English diplomat at
the Hague). (26) Ambrosio, always seeking but unsure of
his possibly high-class origins, (27) becomes the supreme performer
of the most marketable Catholic scripts and postures of his
age so as to be the "matinee idol" of a highly acquisitive audience,
all of whom come to church mainly to show off their social
and economic standings. "To seek for true devotion" among any of them,
we are told at once, "would be a fruitless attempt",
(28) even though they all offer counterfeit postures of devotion, the
first of many fakings in the book of what have become the
"ghosts" of behaviors that once had meaning for people. On Ambrosio's
side, too, his apparent ability to manipulate these
spectral forms and his consequent rhetorical success prompt "splendid
visions of aggrandizement" in his mind's eye, (29) as
though he were a class-climbing entrepreneur engaged in "Renaissance
Self-fashioning" and later bourgeois self-marketing. At
the same time, Lewis' monk becomes the prisoner of the symbolic assumptions
in the hollowed-out forms he uses, to the point
where he is pulled into the fear and self-punishment demanded by the
very religious images that he finds sensually attractive. To
use faked images from the past for acquisitive ends as though these
icons really contained some of the powers once granted to
them -- powers thereby made available, it seems, to later class-climbing
users of them -- is to be pulled into the very pasts that
such users try to rise beyond in employing ghosts of counterfeits.
The relative sexual freedom encouraged by the capacity to
redirect outmoded figures, as Ambrosio restyles the portrait of the
Virgin, is interdicted by the symbolic prohibitions attached to
the very symbols being used. Raymond confronts the same paradox when
he and Agnes try to use the Bleeding Nun to cover
their escape from sexual constraint only to find that the totality
of history and moral injunctions carried by that figure forces them
into even harsher forms of the very confinements by past dictates that
they keep trying to avoid. (30) Even within a cultural
order increasingly distant from old alliances of symbols and meanings,
the codes by which that person chooses to "market"
himself or herself turn out to be restrictors of the desire apparently
encouraged by the more and more bourgeois free enterprise
in which the old symbols are now being used.
This entire oxymoronic condition of being, moreover, is intensely "Gothicized"
in an additional way when The Monk takes
another tendency of Gothic writing further than it had ever been taken
before. The combination of sensual attraction and moral
interdiction in the sign pulled back and forth between older meanings
and marketable effects is made most intense in this novel,
somewhat as it is in The Castle of Otranto , when it is placed at the
deepest physical level of the novel's world, here the
cryptic depths beneath the Church of the Capuchins. It is not only
that the majority of the most venal sins take place near that
level, where Ambrosio rapes and kills his own sister (31) and Agnes
is nearly starved and her infant done to death on the
orders of a sadistic Prioress. (32) There is the monk's and Matilda's
summoning of Lucifer at the deepest level of all, at which
point this Daemon is sold to Ambrosio in an exaggerated version of
the way Matilda is marketed to him through the picture of
the Virgin and the figure of Rosario. Lucifer first appears in a form
of angelic "perfection" (as in images of the Virgin) but also as
sensuously "naked," as a repository of promised wealth (his limbs being
wreathed in "Circlets of Diamonds"), and as a young
man exceedingly "beautiful" to Ambrosio (as Rosario is earlier). (33)
The other side of this Janus-faced figure later turns out to
be an "Apparition" with talons for feet and "living snakes" for hair
(34) -- a Gryphon and Medusa all in one -- but the duplicity
and multiplicity behind all of Lucifer's possibilities remain consigned
to Hellish catacombs beneath the public eye and
day-to-day consciousness. Using the tradition of Satan as both Fallen
Angel and self-disguiser, Lewis has taken the pursuit of
sensuous bodies, increased wealth, and even young men in his class-climbing
hero, along with all the castigations of sin in the
Catholic icons that Ambrosio worships, and positioned their most extreme
forms in an underground and a sort of unconscious
within which they seem to be removed from social and even personal
life above ground. This removal is actually deceptive, as
Lewis makes us see, since the violence in these depths is very above
ground in Ambrosio's bedroom murder of his mother (35)
and the turning of the Prioress's sadism against her when she is torn
to pieces by an angry mob after her deeds have been partly
misrepresented to the public. (36) Even so, The Monk intensifies its
"Gothic" mode to the point of showing that the
post-Renaissance pursuit of identity through marketing the self with
ghosts of counterfeits can be further counterfeited and
covered by being consigned to a distant and private depth that can
even be labeled "low" and "evil" despite its activities being
basic to conscious existence. One way in which The Monk anticipates
the later production of the Freudian "unconscious" to
account for symptoms of middle-class life, as Lowry Nelson, Jr., Leslie
Fiedler, and Peter Brooks have shown it to do, (37) is
the novel's way of "throwing off" into a nether region -- or "abjecting,"
as Julia Kristeva would say in Powers of Horror -- the
actual, mixed, and very fluid process of middle- class quests for identity
through counterfeits as though that process were not
the dominant mode of self-formation it is and as though it were morally
monsterous when it displays itself too directly.
For The Monk to reveal and conceal so much about the middle- class process
of self-formation by the end of the eighteenth
century and since the Renaissance, after all, is for Matthew Gregory
Lewis to half-disguise and half-expose many aspects of his
own middle- to upper-middle-class life. As the son of a rising politician-father
but also of a beloved mother who fled from her
marriage more openly than some, (38) Lewis was perpetually betwixt
and between in his social position, quite like Ambrosio
behind his rhetorical facade, even though that character turns Lewis'
self-division over his parents into a complete ignorance of
who they are for most of the novel. Such insecurity in Lewis is surely
one reason why he was frequently irritating in his
continuous and slightly obsequious social climbing and so was often
name-dropping, according to Sir Walter Scott, "always
[with] dukes and duchesses in his mouth". (39) At the same time, however,
being so much of an outsider just within the
boundaries of "inner" social circles, Lewis could take an ironic view
of rising middle-class pretensions such as his own, as The
Monk clearly shows from the very beginning. In this connection, he
could also be both satirical and guarded about the
semi-concealment of his homosexuality, the preference he may have revealed
in his attachment to the younger William Kelly
and in Byron's sense that he constantly "fill[ed] up his table with
young enseigns". (40) In Ambrosio's brief homosexual
attraction to Matilda as Rosario and the way it recurs "in the depths"
when he sees the "beautiful" adolescent Lucifer--moments
presented as both scintillating and sinful -- Lewis' Monk does recast
that ambiguous moment in Walpole's Castle of Otranto
when Prince Manfred, ostensibly pursuing a woman with whom he can sire
an heir, encounters Frederic, Marquis of Vicenza,
and the Marquis finds himself "accosted by [a] Manfred, who, flushed
by wine and love, had come to seek him , and to
propose to waste some hours of the night in music and revelling". (41)
As Walpole does in thus tracing and erasing his own
sexual preference in and from his book, Lewis both acts out and conceals
that kind of desire, flirting with but finally resisting any
"coming out," in the monk's pursuit of counterfeits that definitely
turn out to be false leads worthy of social and superhuman
punishment. Matthew Lewis is both the class-fixated "insider" inclined
to condemn Ambrosio's excessive class-crossing, the
author who appears in Daniel Watkins' Marxist article on this novel,
and the ambivalent closet-gay outsider struggling to be and
not be what he is in George Haggerty's insightful account of the sadly
constricted but visible homosexuality throughout much of
the eighteenth-century Gothic.
The flagrant emphasis of "Monk" Lewis' novel, then, on self-creation
and the cultural repression of the self, all within the pursuit
of identity using ghosts of counterfeits, comes from how acutely aware
Lewis was and how much he disguised or buried of the
conditions within which self-definition was constructed in the 1790's
by people of his class, especially those as uncertain as he
was about the precise "grounds" and sanctions of his rising yet also
marginalized status. In the ways The Monk displaces these
obsessions and fears onto ghosts of counterfeits recalling late medieval
and Renaissance settings, thus abjecting them "back
there" while playing them out as well, it points more than any Gothic
novel of its century to how this whole method of identity
construction was getting under way even in the 1400's and how hyperbolic
extensions of Renaissance self-fashioning through
Catholic icons could therefore speak to and cloak the struggles and
abjections involved in forming a self at Lewis' own
moment. For him to "come out" with any hope of middle- and upper-class
endorsement was to style himself with the aid of
recast symbols from older orders, some of them Germanic, and to find
that those symbols demanded the suppression, the
"undergrounding" in the middle-class market, of the very passions and
desires that they might be used to fulfill. The Gothic
ghosts of what was already counterfeit since the Renaissance, given
these conditions, could articulate desires of the self not
connected with those signifiers in the past but also had to present
those same longings as interdicted by old standards now
being employed to sustain middle-class hegemonies and newer ideologies
of bourgeois family life. Like his Ambrosio, Lewis
had to let his passions out and put them back in the closet by the
same fake means of self-articulation. On one level, the result in
The Monk , as Wendy Jones says, can be the apparent drawing of a definite
cultural line between "good" and "bad" desire,
leaving some of Lewis' own desires on the "bad" side. (42) But on the
level I have tried to suggest here, that line is very hard to
draw because the same Gothic ghosts of the counterfeit are used to
point in both directions. Whether we choose to emphasize
its more conventional or more subversive tendencies, an anomalous condition
quite typical of the Gothic, The Monk after 200
years remains a novel in which we are still able -- or can still refuse
-- to confront the ongoing struggle, Lewis' and ours, to craft
a rising middle-class self with the most marketable signifiers left
over from the past.
Notes
(1) Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993) 160. (back)
(2) Such as Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) 107-08.
(back)
(3) Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973) 40-41; hereafter abbreviated
as The Monk. (back)
(4) The Monk 57-58. (back)
(5) The Monk 242. (back)
(6) The Monk 270-71. (back)
(7) The Monk 133-34. (back)
(8) The Monk 138.(back)
(9) The Monk 160. (back)
(10) The Monk 439-40. (back)
(11) The Monk 442. (back)
(12) Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England 117. (back)
(13) The Monk 3-4. (back)
(14) Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750-1820 162, 168. (back)
(15) Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England 108. (back)
(16) As in Jeffrey N. Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992) 172. (back)
(17) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W.S.
Lewis and Joseph W. Reed, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982) 15. (back)
(18) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 23-24, 18. (back)
(19) Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1966) 248-49, 662.
(back)
(20) So well defined by Terry Castle in his article "The Spectralization
of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho" [in The
New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity
Nuss-baum and Laura Brown (London:
Methuen, 1987) 231-52]. (back)
(21) William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982) 321. (back)
(22) As important a source ofr Lewis as he is for Walpole, as we see in The Monk, page 7. (back)
(23) Andrea Henderson, "'An Embarrassing Subject': Use Value and Exchange
Value in Early Gothic Characterization," in At
the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist
Criticism, ed. Mary A Favret and Nicola J.
Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 226. See also
E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction,
1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 72-79. (back)
(24) Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton
Grant (London: Sage, 1993 [1976]) 50-53.
(back)
(25) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 8-10. (back)
(26) Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) 15-19. (back)
(27) The Monk 40, 236-37. See also Daniel P. Watkins, "Social Hierarchy
in Matthew Lewis' The Monk," Studies in the
Novel 18 (1986): 115-42. (back)
(28) The Monk 7.(back)
(29) The Monk 39. (back)
(30) The Monk 172-78. (back)
(31) The Monk 391-92. (back)
(32) The Monk 406-17. (back)
(33) The Monk 276-77. (back)
(34) The Monk 433. (back)
(35) The Monk 303-04. (back)
(36) The Monk 355-56. (back)
(37) Lowry, Jr. Nelson, "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel," The Yale
Review 52 (1962) 242-43; Leslie Fiedler, Love and
Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960) 109-16; and
Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk,"
ELH 40 (1973): 249-63. (back)
(38) Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis 1-7. (back)
(39) Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis 45. (back)
(40) George Haggerty, "Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth
Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis," Studies
in the Novel 18 (1986) 348. (back)
(41) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 103. My emphasis. (back)
(42) Wendy Jones, "Stories of Desire: The Monk," ELH 57 (1990) 133-34. (back)
Jerrold E. Hogle
University of Arizona
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