The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk

When Robert Miles in his book Gothic Writing rightly sees a "pattern of false leads" 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. 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 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. 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, 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". 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, and then behind the image of the Bleeding Nun visualized in a "drawing" at the Castle of Lindenberg, 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. 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. 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, a "Genesis [in] reverse". 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, 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" 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". 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. …