Whereas we see Agnes and Matilda using several imperatives to command Ambrosio’s attention, contemplation, and compassion, Antonia’s quoted imperatives are few and usually physical, and rather than commanding Ambrosio’s body alone , Antonia’s physical imperatives generally make herself the object of the demand, as she tells him, “Let me go!”; “take me from hence!”; “Unhand me”; “Convey me from hence”; “Let me return to the house.”This difference in imperatives is understandable, considering that in the previous scenes the threat to the women was that Ambrosio would leave to report them and here it is that he would stay; even so, this verbal acknowledgment of his power over her own body detracts from the authority of her commands. She further diminishes her importance by demanding mercy “for God’s sake” rather than for her own.Though she asserts a certain future when she informs him, “[S]tay here one moment longer, I neither will nor ought,” this claim is so uncharacteristic that “[t]hough the monk was somewhat startled by the resolute tone in which this speech was delivered, it produced upon him no other effect than surprise.”After Lewis has established that Antonia possesses no control over the narrative,hydroponic dutch buckets he becomes as inattentive to her words as Ambrosio is.
He merely references her attempts to prevent Ambrosio from raping her: she “once more had recourse to prayers and supplications. This attempt had no better success than the former”; Ambrosio is “[h]eedless of her tears, cries and entreaties.”Even after the rape, when she nearly convinces Ambrosio to set her free with her persuasive description of a future that would spare him punishment, Lewis uses only indirect speech: “she besought his compassion in terms the most pathetic and urgent . . . she offered to quit Madrid immediately. Her entreaties were so urgent as to make a considerable impression upon the monk.”In what is potentially Antonia’s most powerful moment in the novel, in which she convincingly narrates a future for herself that does not end in murder, Lewis uses his own narrative control to suppress hers. Meanwhile, Ambrosio’s speech illustrates his transformation from a holy man to a libertine, but it also reveals the continuity in his character. Whereas previously he used the modal auxiliary must to defer to the rules of Catholicism, now he uses it to defer instead to the rules of lust. He defends his intention to deflower Antonia by claiming, “I burn with desires which I must either gratify or die,” and commands her, “let me . . . teach you to feel those pleasures in my arms, which I must soon enjoy in yours.”Just as he previously represented his future actions as being predetermined by religious mandates in order to avoid owning his choices to expose Agnes and Matilda, now he depicts the inevitability of his choice to rape Antonia, as if his only real choice was to rape or to die.
To argue, as Brooks does, “that Ambrosio’s drama is in fact the story of his relationship to the imperatives of desire” seems to be endorsing Ambrosio’s own rhetoric of necessity, which has been proven false before.And just as Ambrosio previously used his narrative power to distort others’ visions of the future into what sound like impossible and unacceptable proposals and to deny responsibility for his destructive choices, he does these things again when refusing to grant Antonia her request to return home after he rapes her. He rages, “What? That you may denounce me to the world? that you may proclaim me a hypocrite, a ravisher, a betrayer, a monster of cruelty, lust, and ingratitude? No, no, no! . . . Wretched girl, you must stay here with me! . . . Have you not plunged my soul into infamy? . . . ’tis you who will cause my eternal anguish!—you, wretched girl! you! you!’ The final scene I will analyze is the climactic interaction between Ambrosio and Lucifer, when Lucifer offers to save Ambrosio from the Inquisition in exchange for his soul but ultimately kills him. Scholars have focused on the gruesomeness and biblical language of Lewis’s description of Ambrosio’s suffering and death, but it is also worthwhile to consider what precedes this horror as the culmination of the novel’s repeated assertions and denials of control. In this scene, Lucifer reveals himself to be the supreme master of Ambrosio’s narrative, but Lewis undermines Ambrosio’s claims that he has had no choice in his actions.
Lucifer deploys Ambrosio’s own preferred style of accusatory rhetorical questions and statements of inevitability: “Are you not guilty? Can such enormous sins be forgiven? Hope you to escape my power? Your fate is already pronounced . . . mine you must and shall be.”He revises Ambrosio’s understanding of what he has done by disclosing that it was his mother whom he murdered and his sister whom he raped, commanding him to “tremble at the extent of your offences!”He even claims authorship of the events that led to Ambrosio’s sins, revealing, “It was I who threw Matilda in your way; it was I who gave you entrance to Antonia’s chamber.”In possession of demonic power, Lucifer can influence the course of Ambrosio’s life and his perception of the past and future, easily achieving the narrative control that the other characters have been vying for. Yet despite Lucifer’s considerable sway over Ambrosio’s fate, Lewis suggests that the idea of inevitability is often fictive. When Lucifer presents Ambrosio with the choice to sign his contract and formally renounce his soul or to wait to be tortured and nonetheless face what Lucifer states is his inescapable spiritual doom, Ambrosio still attempts to control the situation by ordering Lucifer away and insisting that he “will not sign the parchment.”Even as his determination fades when confronted with the same rhetoric of inevitability to which he has subjected others, he still tries to disclaim responsibility for his actions. But even though he attempts to take refuge in terms of necessity, he ends by taking ownership of his decision: “I must—Fate urges me—I accept your conditions.”Once Ambrosio is in his power, Lucifer insists upon Ambrosio’s guilt as he simultaneously takes credit for tempting him, and he even castigates Ambrosio for his mercilessness. Finally, before wrecking Ambrosio’s body and soul, he reveals that right up until the moment Ambrosio signed the document, he had the opportunity to escape his doom, as the Inquisition had pardoned him. He tells Ambrosio, “Had you resisted me one minute longer, you had saved your body and soul,” presenting him with an alternate version of events that is now foreclosed, in the form of a counterfactual conditional, but using the past perfect tense in a way that cruelly evokes the reality of his salvation, as if it had actually happened in some other timeline.The novel ends with the suggestion that even in a narrative full of apparent inevitability, no conclusion is truly foregone. My reading of The Monk above is simply that—my reading. I don’t claim that my way is the only way to interpret these scenes, but I do argue that it offers a perspective that hasn’t been included in the critical conversation so far. The critical conversation about The Monk has been shaped by many competing forces, including its failed presentation as a Radcliffean sentimental gothic novel and its early scandal,bato bucket as well as its competing marketing as a sensational work and an abstracted classic. The work of publishers and scholars that validated The Monk as an object of analysis has often included minimizing the ways the novel is sensational. When scholars have written about its sensational qualities, they have produced readings that are uncomfortably situated within the limited critical approaches to novelistic feeling. Critical objections to The Monk’s sensationalism can overstate its negative consequences and end up implying that Lewis forces all his readers to become voyeurs and dehumanizers. Close readings, on the other hand, can elide appreciation of Lewis’s style and his lustful or brutal subject matter, making these scholars sound startlingly like amateur critics who write about their approval of Antonia’s rape and murder.
Even though I found a way to write about The Monk’s emotional scenes without falling into these critical traps, I still found myself limited by critical attitudes. After considering several sentimental illustrations from The Monk, I planned to write about the sentimentality of the novel—the way characters repeatedly find themselves physically incapacitated by emotion. Unlike many scholars, I experience these moments as affecting, even though they are conventional. Yet, I knew that building an argument around this response would mean confronting other scholars’ insistence that these moments are insignificant, false, or parodic, and that sentimentality itself is embarrassing at best and unethical at worst. Deborah Knight provocatively challenges philosophical and critical dismissals of sentimentality by arguing that they actually replicate what they dismiss by being clichéd and reductive and taking pleasure in performing virtue.Of course, there are truly objectionable features of the sentimental mode. Ahern writes that “[t]he tragedy of the sentimental mode of being results from failure to recognize that one’s version of reality is a lie, which if enforced by a bearer of power is done at the expense of others.”104 As bearers of critical power, if we wish to challenge the overreach of sentimentality and other forms that encourage objectification, we should also make sure that we are not actually reinforcing objectification or projecting our own reality onto others. In the same way that Lewis’s characters contest the narratives of reality that others project onto them and recontextualize their situations, we have the ability to contest the critical narratives that we have inherited and attempt to resituate ourselves more comfortably as literary scholars writing about emotion. One way to do this is by stepping outside of our own preferred medium to gain perspective. Approaching The Monk through its images—book covers and illustrations—allowed me to temporarily disentangle myself from my own disciplinary constraints. It also offered a different set of interpretations than the ones I found in scholarly treatments of the novel, as did reading online reviews. Those interpretations were not scholarly, and I don’t mean to claim that that fact makes them somehow purer in their affect, a myth that Deidre Lynch dispels in her study of the historically produced love of literature that has defined the reading practices of scholars and amateurs alike.But non-scholarly interpretations have the benefit of being less limited by the affective norms of criticism. Even Rita Felski offers only a modest remedy for scholarly feeling beyond suspicion in her suggestion that critics approach texts “as energetic coactors and vital partners in an equal encounter.”Felski draws on actor network theory in this formulation, but she acknowledges that her choice to focus on the relationship between readers and texts while excluding the many other coactors involved in this relationship is not in line with ANT’s consideration of multiple mediators.By involving more participants in my discussion of The Monk—advertisements, publishers, newspapers, critics from different eras with different professional statuses, book jackets, illustrations—I am attempting to account for more of the novel’s uncomfortable situation in scholarship today, and to offer more possibilities for us to reorient ourselves with different critical moods. Wildfires can have substantial effects on nutrient cycling and community composition both above- and below ground , making them important drivers of ecosystem processes . Furthermore, wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity in many regions of the world . Independent of soil type, wildfires have been shown to decrease the total amount of carbon in surface soils through combustion, releasing it as carbon dioxide, while much of the remaining carbon is transformed into black carbon or pyrogenic organic matter . PyOM encompasses a heterogeneous spectrum of compounds, but is predominantly composed of aromatic and polyaromatic compounds, depending on the source material, the temperature, and duration of pyrolysis . PyOM is generally thought of as being relatively recalcitrant, with PyOM sometimes persisting for hundreds or thousands of years . During intense wildfires, soil surface temperatures generally reach >500–800°C, and the temperature declines dramatically within the top 5 cm of soil . While organic matter in surface soils may be completely combusted or pyrolyzed during fire, in deeper soil layers, non-pyrolyzed organic carbon is released where the heat from fire was enough to kill cells, but not hot enough for combustion or to catalyze the formation of PyOM. This soil layer defined by a heatinduced release of nutrients has been termed the “necromass zone” . Thus, post-fire soils often contain surface layers infused with PyOM, and necromass zones with abundant organic matter directly below.