The Monk: A Romance

Matthew G. Lewis – 1796

This is the granddaddy of English Gothic novels, set in Spain in the era of the Inquisitions, and tremendously influential on Decadent-Romantic literature and everyone from Byron to Poe.  It was also hugely popular among general readers.  It wasn’t literary artistry that people responded to, though; it was The Monk’s relentlessly heady tone and its mix of lurid elements involving the erotic, the subversive, and the blasphemous.  The notion that humanity is hopelessly at the mercy of forces both natural and supernatural would have a huge influence on Romanticism and, later, the Surrealists.  The doomed hero of the book is Father Ambrosio, an idealistic, eloquent and handsome young priest whose weekly sermons draw great crowds of admirers.  He is oblivious, of course, to the fact that he is not necessarily just an effective instrument in God’s hands, and that his flock is mostly comprised of repressed women who swoon at his mellifluous voice and boyish good looks.  One day his eye is caught by a quiet but striking novice named Rosario, whose beauty is so alarming to Ambrosio that, after very brief moral qualms, he falls madly in love, making the boy his apprentice and constant companion.  It is only when Ambrosio is on the verge of seducing Rosario that the boy unveils himself fully and reveals that he is really a girl, Matilda, who disguised herself in order to gain entry into the abbey.  The fact that the boy is now a girl does nothing to dampen Ambrosio’s lust and they begin a mad and potentially scandalous affair.  In time, Ambrosio’s ethics dwindle to nothing as he becomes Matilda’s slave and she becomes the puppet-master of his evil deeds, which he must resort to in order to preserve his reputation.  There are several other plots connected to the story too, but I found the business about the priest’s corruption most fascinating.  The supernatural stuff is a little hard to take, and seems strangely unnecessary in a tale so filled with purely mortal wickedness.  Equally, the divine punishment in the novel’s deus ex machina climax is just as out of place as it is in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a bow to social demands of the day.  Interestingly, when Luis Buñuel co-wrote a screen adaptation of The Monk, he discarded the ending entirely in favor of one much more appropriate though no less outrageous.  Instead of Ambrosio lying broken-bodied on a pile of rocks while being picked at by birds, Buñuel has him rewarded by being elected Pope.