Lewis's The Monk and the origins of the Gothic novel
From The Castle of Otranto to Matthew Lewis's The Monk: devil's pacts, bleeding nuns and the Inquisition in the English Gothic novel of the 1700s.
In 1796 Matthew Gregory Lewis, then barely twenty, published a novel that scandalised the English public and earned him for ever the nickname Monk Lewis. The Monk tells of the fall of Ambrosio, the revered superior of the Capuchins of Madrid, seduced by the mysterious Matilda and dragged, crime after crime, to a pact with the devil. The book became one of the best-known titles of Gothic literature.
The castle and its ghosts
The Gothic novel had been born little more than thirty years earlier. In 1764 Horace Walpole had published The Castle of Otranto, presenting it as the translation of an old Italian manuscript; its medieval setting, prophecies and supernatural apparitions became the ingredients of a new genre. Others followed, including William Beckford's Vathek, with its oriental flavour, and the novels of Ann Radcliffe, famous for mysteries that are rationally explained in the end.
Lewis chose the opposite path to Radcliffe's. In The Monk the supernatural is real and terrible: demons exist, magic has effects and damnation is concrete. Radcliffe in turn replied with The Italian of 1797, which took up religious settings and the courts of the Inquisition but with more measured tones and a different idea of terror.
Bleeding nuns and wandering Jews
Lewis had spent a period in Weimar in 1792 and 1793, where he perfected his German and met Goethe, and he wrote most of the novel in 1794 in The Hague, where he worked at the British embassy. From the German literature of the time, rich in ghostly ballads and tales of brigands, he drew many of the atmospheres that made the book so different from its English models.
Alongside Ambrosio's story, the novel weaves subplots full of elements drawn from German folklore, which Lewis knew well. The most famous is that of the Bleeding Nun, a spectre who walks the castle of Lindenberg every five years and whom the young Raymond mistakes for the woman he loves. He is freed from her persecution by the Wandering Jew, a legendary figure condemned to roam until the end of time.
Matilda, who turns out to be in the service of the infernal powers, introduces Ambrosio to magic. Lewis describes a scene of conjuration in a crypt, in language that aims at horror and suggestion rather than detail. Eighteenth-century readers recognised in it widespread fears about convents, religious hypocrisy and the powers of the Spanish Inquisition.
The final pact
Imprisoned and condemned by the Inquisition, Ambrosio finally agrees to give his soul to Lucifer in exchange for freedom. The demon carries him out of prison, but only to reveal the whole truth about his crimes and hurl him from a precipice in the Sierra Morena. The ending, brutal and without redemption, contrasts sharply with the salvation that Goethe would grant his Faust a few decades later.
The Monk had an enormous influence. In Germany E.T.A. Hoffmann drew on it for The Devil's Elixirs, and in England its success helped establish the Gothic imagination that would nourish Frankenstein, Dracula and countless ghost stories. Later editions, however, were toned down by the author himself, worried by the charges of obscenity levelled at the book and at him personally.