Amateur critics now label Parsons’s novel “so bad it’s good” because of its sentimental conventions, but Lewis’s novel has become a “good” bad novel—bold, unruly, and virile, as we might expect from a work that came to be known as the epitome of the “male gothic” subgenre. Online reviews of The Monk praise its sensational sex scenes, murders, and even rape, and academic criticism of the last four decades often discusses control, heterosexual male voyeurism, and violence against women in the novel while minimizing its sentimentality. Though I separate sentimentality and sensationalism in this chapter, I am aware that the historical and textual construction of sentiment and sensation are complex and sometimes intersecting. Eighteenth-century definitions of the terms sentiment and sensation sometimes overlap, especially when they converge in novels of sensibility.Stephen Ahern describes these affective styles as points on the continuum of the rhetoric of sensibility, as repeatedly in early fictional forms “a representational mode preoccupied with pathos moves from sentimentality to increasing sensationalism,” revealing “a drive to represent ever more extreme forms of excess,blueberry packaging containers as if writers of sensibility narratives needed to satisfy their readers’ desire for perpetual novelty.”
For the purposes of this chapter, I am using both terms similarly to how twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have employed them when dismissing representations of feeling in novels—dismissals informed by not only eighteenth-century works but also nineteenth-century American sentimental novels, Victorian sensation fiction, sentimental soap operas, and sensationalized news media, among many other cultural influences.I will use sentiment when alluding to the conventions of emotional expression that critics have characterized as overblown, false, and clichéd. Philosopher Deborah Knight, in her examination of aesthetic treatments of sentiment, contends that the negative implications of the term itself can lead to “the prejudice of treating everything that could . . . be called sentimental as simply unworthy of further aesthetic consideration.”I will use sensation when referencing plot elements that critics have described as prurient or gratuitously shocking, such as descriptions of sex or violence. Pamela Gilbert writes that Victorian sensation fiction, which inherited many of gothic fiction’s conventions, “was thought to appeal directly to the ‘nerves,’ eliciting a physical sensation with its surprises, plot twists, and startling revelations . . . It was thought to be written and read quickly rather than discerningly; a ‘mass-produced,’ disposable consumer product.”The sensational aspects of the plot, which I will briefly summarize before beginning to sketch the argument of this chapter, are the ones that dominate critical accounts of feeling in the novel and present the most obvious critical challenges.
The Monk features two intertwined plotlines: one that follows the gradual corruption of a holy man and one that narrates the adventures of two young people in love. It is the first of these, the main plot, that I will be concentrating on most in this chapter, since this is the storyline that has garnered the most critical attention. This plot tells the tale of Ambrosio, who begins the novel as a monk with an impeccable reputation who, raised by the Church, has devoted his life to pious pursuits. Early in the novel, Ambrosio reports a pregnant nun, Agnes, which leads to her harsh and gruesome punishment. Soon after condemning Agnes, Ambrosio learns that his friend Rosario is not a fellow monk but a woman named Matilda , who prevents him from reporting her too by threatening to stab herself in the heart. Though Ambrosio attempts to remain virtuous, Matilda soon initiates him into the pleasures of the flesh, a sin that Ambrosio quickly follows with others. Ambrosio, newly awakened to his sexual urges, becomes obsessed with an innocent young woman named Antonia . With Matilda’s encouragement, he makes two unsuccessful attempts to rape her and is prevented both times by Elvira, her mother . After the second attempt, he murders Elvira to keep her from exposing him. As news of Agnes’s fate ignites mob vengeance, Ambrosio retreats into the catacombs with Antonia, whom he has drugged, and eventually rapes and murders her. When he is caught, he faces the judgment of the Inquisition and chooses to escape execution by signing over his soul to Lucifer, whom Matilda has taught him to summon. Lucifer, after transporting Ambrosio to a remote location, leaves him to die a horrible death.
The novel is shocking for many readers even today, as numerous scholars and amateur attest to, and it is the shocking nature of the text that makes it difficult to approach in a scholarly manner—a contention that will be at the heart of my argument. I arrived at my argument for this chapter through a series of personal experiences with The Monk that I later realized illustrate particular scholarly challenges with Lewis’s novel and its present reception. When I first read the novel, I carefully annotated the first several pages before finding myself sucked into the plot, staying up late to learn what happens next. Before reading it a second time, I studied several scholarly analyses of the novel, paying special attention to treatments of its emotional features. On my second attempt with The Monk, I succeeded in reading slowly and thoughtfully, but I came away with only the material to reiterate the arguments that scholars had already made. I found more analytical traction when approaching the novel through its marketing history, online reviews, and illustrations, which allowed me to return to the text with new possibilities for reading the feelings it portrays and evokes. On revisiting the scholarly criticism, I realized that the normative methods of writing about sensation academically produce readings of The Monk that can be profoundly uncomfortable, in which feminist critics claim that no one can sympathize with Lewis’s violated female characters or close readers luxuriate in his portrayals of lust and carnage. Daniel Gross, in his recent book Uncomfortable Situations, emphasizes how responsible considerations of mixed feelings necessitate attention to the broader context, not to individual psychology or a single set of social norms.The mixed feelings to which he refers are the ones within sentimental literature, but his study informs my approach in this chapter. In the case of The Monk, the uncomfortable situation includes the way the novel, its publication history, and its critical history encourage conflicting affective responses and the way conventions of critique limit the acceptable practices for writing about this multiplicity of feelings. For example, in a five-star review on Goodreads, one amateur critic writes, “[T]his book turned out to have EVERYTHING that made a novel awesome : romance, poetry, murder, death, kidnapping, evil schemes, satire, social commentary, rape, incest, ghost, demons, poison, secret underground entrances, a devil that throw a guy off a cliff, and FUCKING great PLOT TWISTS!”Amateur critics have the freedom to express appreciation for The Monk’s most sensational qualities—like its “awesome” kidnapping and rape—without excusing them. This presents a notable contrast to scholars, who may have no way of writing comfortably about the novel’s excess except by claiming that it exists in service of something more literary. Rita Felski describes the emotionally inflected procedures of scholarship thus: “Academic cultures are governed by distinctive protocols and behaviors, including a stance that we might call professional suspicion. That is to say, a detached, dispassionate, and skeptical demeanor that has become a defining stance in modern purveyors of knowledge.”This prevailing “critical mood” that Felski identifies is an attitude that orients scholars toward texts in certain ways that I will explore later in the chapter in order to demonstrate how both suspicion and absorption can operate uncomfortably on scholars who write about sensation in The Monk. In order to explain the particularities of the novel’s vexed reception, I will begin by discussing The Monk’s production history,blueberry packing boxes emphasizing the ways it encourages two very different kinds of readings and leads to a moment where these two approaches intersect with notable awkwardness. Shifting focus to reception, I will analyze patterns in the affective responses of amateur and professional critics, considering especially how amateurs’ candor about the novel’s sensationalism contrasts with scholars’ uneasiness.
After elucidating these responses, I will explore an alternate route to discussing feeling in the novel via a comparison of its illustrations. By this detour, I will finally arrive at the text itself and demonstrate the kind of close reading that had been foreclosed to me when I had tried to read The Monk first like a lay reader and then in the dominant scholarly mode. What I hope to offer is one way in which scholars could open up more options for writing about sensational novels and resisting critical trends that no longer fit in this disciplinary moment.The paratexts of the first edition of The Monk reveal how it was positioned early on as a respectable and even sentimental novel. Literary theorist Gérard Genette defines the paratext as the accompaniments to a text that make it a book. The paratext includes elements that surround and situate the text, like its title, which he calls the peritext, and elements beyond the text, like advertisements, which he calls the epitext. Together, the paratextual elements work as spaces of entrance into the text where the author or publisher tries to influence a reader’s interpretation. These elements carry their own messages and have become objects of study for literary scholars.The first edition of The Monk, published by Joseph Bell, includes several signifiers of sophistication, like a “Table of the Poetry” that lists the page numbers of Lewis’s interpolated poems. Even before encountering the poems listed inside the book, a potential reader might have seen an advertisement printed in one of London’s daily newspapers on the day of the book’s publication highlighting its refined qualities over its sensational ones. The names of the included poems take up most of the advertisement and appear in capital letters, whereas its fantastical conventions appear in regular title caps near the bottom.Even more tellingly, the advertisement prefaces the list of poems with “THE MONK, a ROMANCE, interspersed with the following Pieces of Poetry.” Though the novel’s title in the first edition is simply The Monk: A Romance, the advertisement elides the title with a description of its contents in a way that establishes a connection between the novel and the work of Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe’s successful 1791 novel was titled The Romance of the Forest, Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, and the full title of her most popular novel was The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. As I found no earlier novels with similar titles, I assume that Lewis’s publisher Bell used these words in the advertisement to suggest that the novel is Radcliffean, particularly in the sense of being highly literary for a supernatural romance. It is even possible that inattentive readers could have mistaken the work for one of Radcliffe’s own, since the first edition includes only Lewis’s initials, buried at the end of the preface. The characterization of the novel as one of Radcliffean sophistication may have shaped readers’ focus to some extent, as many early critics praise the poetry, and Sir Walter Scott remembers The Monk’s most appealing literary innovation as its verse, which “captivated” readers.Bell’s subtle alignment of The Monk with Ann Radcliffe’s sentimental gothic novels would soon be overpowered by critical outrage when his October 1796 second edition revealed Matthew Lewis as the author and a member of Parliament.Michael Gamer observes that the reviews following the second edition did not liken it to Radcliffe’s “respectable” gothics but rather to erotic novels like Fanny Hill or German “shudder novels,” both of which supposedly presented dangers to public morality.Despite or more likely because of reviews like this, The Monk went through at least six official editions and many more unauthorized editions and abridged versions between 1796 and 1798 alone.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were numerous chapbooks, or bluebooks, that excerpted Lewis’s novel, usually in thirty-six to seventy-two pages and at affordable prices.One of these bluebooks, from around the time of Lewis’s death in 1818, exemplifies how some publishers chose to capitalize on the scandal of The Monk and underscore the novel’s sensationalism. Priced at sixpence , it includes the most appalling scenes from the novel. The frontispiece shows Ambrosio signing a contract with the devil in lurid colors, depicting the sordid ending of the book on the very first page.