A psychoanalytical exploration of 'The Monk'

Introduction

Psychoanalysis has been at the forefront of literary criticism since its popularisation circa 1900 and is a valuable method of exploring Gothic literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick posits that ‘certain features of the Oedipal are consistently foregrounded’ in the Gothic and this is most certainly the case in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). From the protagonist’s unrelenting desire to have sex with a teenager who turns out to be his sister, to killing off her as well as his own mother, the Oedipal nature of this text is undeniable. This blog post is concerned with a psychoanalytical exploration of the character of Ambrosio in The Monk, with passing reference to similar Oedipal anxieties that are present in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Though both of these texts were published pre-Freud, dissecting them through a psychoanalytic lens opens up a wealth of meaning.

Ideas surrounding the unconscious and repressed desires are by no means new by 1900, but Sigmund Freud in The Interpretations of Dreams (1899) provides part of our vocabulary for understanding psychoanalysis. One of his most infamous concepts being the Oedipus Complex:

Sigmund Freud

  

The Oedipus Complex is a psychological condition, that occurs during what Freud refers to as the Phallic Stage of development. It is during this stage, according to Freud, that a child develops a desire to sexually possess their mother, and kill off their father in order to take his place. However, in Lewis’ The Monk, it is the sister - Antonia – that takes on the Oedipal role of mother and father; Ambrosio rapes her but also kills her. It is worth noting here that Ambrosio stabs Antonia with a phallic object; her body is again being forcibly penetrated by Ambrosio. The atrocities that Antonia will be subjected to at the hands of Ambrosio are foreshadowed multiple times throughout the novel. Firstly, in Lorenzo’s vision in which Antonia is unwillingly clasped in the arms of a ‘Monster’ (p.28). What happens to Antonia is further alluded to by the gypsy fortune teller when she predicts, ‘that destruction o’er you hovers;/ Lustful Man and crafty Devil/ Will combine to work your evil’(p.38). This prefiguring adds, along with the ambiguity of how Ambrosio came to belong to the monastery, to the shock at the revelation that Elvira is Ambrosio’s mother and Antonia is his sister. Retrospectively, this eerie foreshadowing that permeates the whole of the novel also acts to intensify the uncanny sensation Antonia and Elvira both experience when they first encounter the Monk:

Even before He spoke, (…) I was prejudiced in his favour. The fervour of his exhortations, dignity or his manner, and closeness of his reasoning, were very far from including me to alter my opinion. His fine and full-toned voice struck me particularly; But surely, Antonia, I have heard it before. It seemed perfectly familiar to my ear. Either I must have known the Abbot in former times. (p.250)

This ‘familiar’ sentiment Elvira feels towards Ambrosio is an explicit example of the ideas Freud postulates in his 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’, which literally translates as ‘the unhomely’. Freud defines Das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, as sensory encounters which evoke haunted feelings of distrust. These visceral feelings arouse the repressed desire to return ‘home’. In The Monk, the uncanny surrounds Ambrosio, Elvira and Antonia because of Ambrosio’s desire to return to the ultimate experience of home: the womb. These uncanny feelings are evident in the scene after the rape of Antonia:

He raised her from the ground. Her hand trembled, as He took it, and He dropped it again as if He had touched a Serpent. Nature seemed to recoil at the touch. He felt himself at once repulsed from and attracted towards her, yet could account for neither sentiment. There was something in her look which penetrated him with horror. (p.387)

The uncanny repulsion Ambrosio feels here is elevated to a sublime level; he is both ‘repulsed’ and ‘attracted’ back to Antonia’s body but cannot rationalise why. This contradiction of feelings represents, in psychoanalytic terms, Ambrosio’s ambivalence towards Antonia. Before the rape scene we are told: `The innocent familiarity with which She treated him, only encouraged his desires' (p.256); the more innocent she appears, the more vehement Ambrosio’s desires become. Lewis’s choice to liken Antonia’s body to a snake invokes the biblical imagery of Satan in the Garden of Eden. This allusion to evil is reinforced with the description of Antonia’s body being followed by the sentence: ‘Nature seemed to recoil at the touch’. The likening of Antonia’s body to a serpent, at this point in the novel, takes Ambrosio’s narrative descent to evil full circle; Ambrosio being bitten by a serpent and Matilda’s decision to suck the poison out in order to save him is the catalyst for Ambrosio’s moral decline that follows. This decline and route into self-destruction is indicative of Ambrosio possessing, in Freudian terms, an excessive death drive. Ambrosio’s discarding of his monastic oaths are perfectly encompassed in the following quote: ‘Drunk with desire ... he forgot his vows, his sanctity, and his fame; he remembered nothing but the pleasure and opportunity' (p.90). It is this drive towards self-destruction and seeking pleasure that leads Ambrosio into pursuing his sister thus fulfilling the Oedipal prophecy.

The Oedipal anxieties evident in The Monk, have an affinity with those expressed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though, in Frankenstein the protagonist, Victor, and his wife are not blood related, they were raised as siblings and Victor often refers to Elizabeth as ‘my more than sister’ (p.38). Victor also embodies ambiguous feelings towards his mother – when he is suffering from a severe fever, Victor believes he has seen his wife but as he embraces her she morphs into his mother:

I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms. (p.59)

The ominous detail that this vision comes to Victor in a dream suggests that Victor’s desires to ‘embrace’ his mother are already firmly manifest in his unconscious. The use of the words ‘delighted’ and ‘surprised’ almost echo the unexplainable attraction Ambrosio feels to Antonia’s motionless (but not at this point dead, yet) body. 

Lacan (1901-1981)

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan is another key figure within the realm of psychoanalysis whose theories allow for an opposing interpretation of the unconscious motives behind Ambrosio’s actions. Lacanian philosophy differs to Freudian thinking in many ways, but most notably Lacan postulates that a child’s traumatic relationship with the mother begins much earlier than the Oedipal, Phallic Stage; Lacan deemed that the most critical phase of development comes pre six months of age: The Mirror Stage. This is when the child recognises itself as an embodied entity with limits. A sense of selfhood only emerges through the process of self-splitting; as (mis)recognising oneself in the mirror. Lacan argued that the urge for human beings to feel united would haunt them for their entire existence thus causing a constant desire to compensate for something that is lost. Anne Williams reinforces this idea when she posits that, ‘the Male Gothic is a dark mirror reflecting patriarchy’s nightmere (sic), recalling a perilous, violent, and early separation from the mother/mater denigrated as “female”’(p.107). A Lacanian reading of The Monk explicitly draws attention to the fact that Ambrosio has spent his life incarcerated in the monastery, without knowing his family. His pursuit of Antonia could be read as the recognition of familiarity and a desire to console the lost part of himself by connecting with Antonia.

Conclusion:

Part of the brilliance of Gothic literature lies in its ability to encompass multi-layered allegories and it can be reductive to only consider a text in relation to one theory, especially when there are so many opposing theorists just within one particular discipline - such is the case with psychoanalysis. For example, Anne Williams interprets the events surrounding Ambrosio in The Monk as ‘an unconscious revenge fantasy [that is caused by] leaving Ambrosio behind when she [Elvira] fled with his father’ (p.116). I’d go as far to suggest that this is a weak interpretation of the text and lacks sufficient evidence; the majority of misery Ambrosio causes is directed towards Antonia and less so towards Elvira. As I hope this blog post has demonstrated, in psychoanalytical terms, Ambrosio's conflicting desires can be explained through the Oedipus Complex. Ambrosio’s desires also manifests through the continual ominous foreshadowing, Lewis’ biblical diction and the presence of the uncanny.

Food for thought:

• Schaulust, or ‘pleasure in looking’: Ambrosio’s voyeuristic fixation in watching Antonia undress in the enchanted mirror fetishizes her and renders her an embodiment of the male gaze.
• The Church as a representation of displaced desire. Due to Ambrosio’s lack of father figure, the Church takes on the role of exchanging power.
•  Castration anxiety and the emasculation of Ambrosio.
• There is a more overt Oedipal conflict in Frankenstein: The creature is evil because Victor, his father figure, has rejected him.

List of References:

Blakemore, Steven, ‘Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion In

"The Monk"’, Studies in the Novel, 30.4 (1998), pp. 521-539

Bronfen, Elisabeth, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992)

Brooks, Peter, ‘Virtue and Terror: The Monk’, ELH, 40.2 (1973), pp. 249-263

Doyle, Barry, ‘Freud and the Schizoid in Ambrosio: Determining Desire in The Monk’, Gothic Studies, 2.1, (2000), pp.61-69

Forrester, John, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997)

¾ ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’, translated by James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1922)

Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Jones, Wendy, ‘Stories of Desire in the Monk’, ELH, 57.1 (1990), pp. 129–150

Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Mirror Stage’ and ‘The Freudian Thing’, in Ecrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 2001)

Lewis, Matthew, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) (Subsequent references are given in parenthesis in the blog post)

Morris, David, "Gothic Sublimity", New Literary History, 16.2 (Winter 1985), pp. 299-319

Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Edwardian Age (London: Routledge, 1996)

Richardson, Alan, ‘Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind’, New Literary History, 31.3 (Summer 2000), pp. 553-572

Rogers, Robert, A Psychoanalytic Study of The Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Routledge, 1986)

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (London: Penguin Classics, 2003)

Watkiss, Joanne, “Violent Households: The Family Destabilized in the Monk (1796), Zofloya, or the Moor (1818), and Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)”, Gothic Kinship, ed. Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 157-173

Williams, Anne, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) (Subsequent references are given in parenthesis in the blog post)

Zizek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991)

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