The Monk: History of Sexuality - Essay Example

The Monk”: History of Sexuality 2006 Introduction In History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), famous French historian of sexuality, deals with the topic of the medieval church and changing cultural mores in Europe. With order imposed on self-punishment by the Lateran Council of 1215, (an important meeting called by Pope Innocent III and attended by evangelists, bishops and abbots), Foucault asserts, the institution of confession became "one of the main rituals for the production of truth"; society became "a singularly confessing society" and "sex" became its "privileged theme"(The History of Sexuality, 1990, cited in Conger). The rite of confession eased the "transformation of sex into discourse" about transgressions and evils, a manifestation of cultural orderliness for coping with sexuality as disease that would also embrace, by the year 1900, drug, psychotherapy and science of teaching in addition to poetry. Associated with these amendments, the literature on sexuality is changed from an erotic art (“ ars erotica”) to a Science of sexuality (“scientia sexualis”) and that on the whole in due course passed its view from the gallant and heroic actions of the knights and pious deeds of saints to malefactors' undisclosed world and self- analysis (Sexuality, Foucault, 58, 61-62). Foucault's study provides a helpful new appropriate structure for the examination of Gothic novels like Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk, which is now read as literature on sexuality. Sex, Religion and the medieval church The system of confessions that, according to Foucault, takes into its fold numerous tales of human sexuality captivated "within an unrelenting system of confession" (Foucault, 61) have been condemned in The Monk as crooked and debasing and somewhat of the “devil's advocates”. The main promoter here is the monk, Ambrosio, Madrid's favored Capuchin superior in his nexus with the apologetic Rosario/Matilda, the ill-fated Agnes, the haggard Elvira and her good-looking daughter Antonia. Ambrosio is a glaring example of the medieval “penitential system”, for he is both a creation and an advocate of it. Lewis's narrator depicts his education at adolescence (for the order of St. Francis) disapprovingly: "while the monks were busied in rooting out his virtues, and narrowing his sentiments, they allowed every vice which had fallen to his share to arrive at full perfection" ( page238, Monk ).” The “vices” here consist of false notions, subservience, conceit, drive, contempt, rigidity, harshness and even brutality. He does not fit into this scheme and suffers from the conflict “between his real and acquired character" (page239), his “virtues” untried and frail, and his “vices” only unidentified owing to his stringent adherence of a self- inflicted “penitential seclusion”. Even after having such a flimsy “holiness”, he is venerated as the most favoured spiritual counsel of Madrid. Such is his alluring style and articulacy. The women eulogize him stridently not because of his godliness than by his gracious expression, imposing air. As if already trained by the church to relate confession to sex, "the noblest and fairest dames of Madrid" have started favoring a sexually appealing counsel to hear in secret to their trifling offenses .Even the pious nuns are not impervious of his allures, "it being absolutely necessary for every fashionable convent to have him for its confessor" (55). He does not even spare the purity depicted in the portrait of Madonna and looking at her portrait with the eyes of a seducer he secretly exclaims: Oh! if such a creature existed, and existed but for me! were I permitted to twine round my fingers those golden ringlets, and press with my lips the treasures of that snowy bosom! gracious God, should I then resist the temptation? Should I not barter for a single embrace the reward of my sufferings for thirty years? Should I not abandon—Fool that I am! Whither do I suffer my admiration of this picture to hurry me? Away, impure ideas! Let me remember, that woman is forever lost to me. (65) Ambrosio should be remembered as a monk who has no taken his virtues as his strong points (Conger, Confessors and Penitents…). Reconstruction of sexuality in the Monk In The Monk, Matilda, a novice entering into monk Ambrosio’s monastery in a young boy’s outfits to hide “his” gender and is gradually given in to murder, enchantment, incest and agony. From the eighteenth-century, Gothic literature have been almost absorbed with sexual slants and debauchery; sinful or deviant sexuality; gender wavering and porous identities, the suspicion and the horrors of homosexuality. Even the obssessive ideas about the cult of the monks can be treated to be an pre-modern link between Catholic Europe and buggery. These odd homosexual themes associate some of the eminent male authors of the early Gothic — Matthew Gregory Lewis notably among them. His works make a comple feed back to the increasing growth of homosexual and heterosexual bias on top of the crude and prevailing hatred/fear of homosexuals of the late eighteenth century (Fitzgerald, The Sexuality of Authorship). But, as we make out, there is an attempt to break the convention in The Monk, though very stealthily. One way to interpret this typically Gothic interchange of the outward, the superficial and the deepness, the inner is the cabinet and the drawer one giving way to the other, time and again. Nowhere is this association more accurately displayed than in Lewis’s description of the young boy Matilda changing into Rosario, the girl. Clara Tuite, in her article “Cloistered Closets” (2002), says that the secrecy (“closeting”) of thisMatila/Rosario interchange starts at the very instant “he” is revealed to be a “she”. Not that this is something unknown to Ambrosio. Earliere, we have come acroos romantic moments when “the feigned Rosario” declares to Ambrosio “I am a woman”( 79, 84) and highlights the truth by ripping “open her habit to reveal her breast.” For Tuite, the exposure rather than divulging a vital truth, serves as “a strategy of evasion. This unveiling is in fact not an unveiling but a re-veiling in female costume”. Rosario’s sudden change into the female Matilda only highlights Lewis’s effort to hide the “homoerotic” relationship between the neophyte and monk (Fitzgerald, The Sexuality of Authorship). Being “queer” and “unoriginal”at the same time, the Gothic is an ideal place for studying substitutes to the still strong Quixotic interpretation of the author as male, heterosexual and independent. One of the top instances of this Gothic substitute is the independent “queer” Gothic copier, Matthew Lewis. Using Judith Butler’s revealation that the grapnel insinuating —gender—is a sort of restriction that demands the uniqueness of any traditionally defined gender identity (Fitzgerald, The Sexuality of Authorship). Butler argues that all gender is “an effect,” created, executed and finally mimicked: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself” (43, 175). This applies to the creatuons of “Female” and “Male” Gothic just as well and eventually to what has served as their “original,” without hesitations-- the conventional “ gendering” of authors as male (Fitzgerald, The Sexuality of Authorship). Obsession and the medieval society Foucault aggressively argues that far from being sexually reticent, Western society has propagated ideas focused on sex since the medieval times, as illustrated in Gothic literature. The Gothic tradition has definitely chipped in this cultural mania, nowhere further than in The Monk maybe, palpably. Yet the novel also gets along significantly on that obsession, as one can infer. It marks that obsession as obsolete while it reproaches the idea of the custom of confession as lapse, as a treatment that instead of healing, kills. Like in Foucault's History of Sexuality, it condemns the hounding of tender love and lovers whatever background are they from. As Rosario reveals that she is hopelessly in love with Ambrosio, she also admits that she has come to connect religion with sexuality. Her training in moral education in home pushes her away so much from the "vice, dissipation and ignorance" of the young Spanish men she encounters that she can only like churchmen, an awe that, after she meets Ambrosio, she promptly develops into an neurotic fascination for him. Although she insists at first that her only wish is to share with him a platonic "eternal friendship" (83) Although she insists at first that her only wish is to share with him a platonic "eternal friendship" (83), in due course she tells him that she "lusts for the enjoyment" of his "person" (108). All through the period of slow self- revelation, Rosario/Matilda molds him/herself in the role of a “penitent “and her alluring exposé in the shape of the confession adequate to capture the confessor each time he sincerely plans throwing out the neophyte or running away from his/her sight. "I resolved," Matilda persists after her first exposé of her gender, "not to leave the discovery of my sex to chance—to confess the whole to you, and throw myself entirely on your mercy and indulgence” The reader finds that inhibitions and moral taboos are ultimately crushed as Ambrosio discards his swears of sexual abstention to "riot" with Matilda "in delights till then unknown to him" (Conger, Confessors and Penitents…227). The Matilda-Ambrosio relationship relation takes the readers of The Monk from the age-old idea of Gothic as a portrayal of the macabre, grisly tales of midnight assignations, supernatural cures and charms and amulet, of horrible conjuration scenes. We encounter another possible monastery, which portrays a society-in-flux, where homoerotic closeting is slowing giving away to rebellious love. Matilda is the temptation the evil spirit employs to hook Ambrosio's soul, a spirit that Foucault admires. The Monk: the social context The Gothic is often interpreted in association with contravention and castigation. Even though it has some elements to define it in that way one might as well try not to take up that stance every time a superficially balanced person delves the unreasonable deepness, which are an essential part of the human frame. Rather, one may approach Freud for enquiring who explicitly castigates the Norman kings governed Britain legally authorised by their Greek forerunners since, from their British ancestors, they became heir to the kingdom unconditionally. Gradually, Brutus and King Arthur acknowledged Anglo-Saxonism, or Gothicism, which commanded that the English are a Germanic people and the lawful successors of Germanic liberties placed significantly in a supposedly ancient Saxon parliament. Lewis's selection of the Gothic genre is clearly a political and he successfully assures to defend the "traditional" liberties of the English people against people who, even if not exactly strangers, have obtained the relatively outsider’s taste for monarchy brought into the kingdom by William the Conqueror. Obviously, Anglo-Saxonism seeks the falsehood of a "unique people." For the English, thus, the problem of personal freedom and self-rule shows up as a matter particularly annoying. No wonder that following the French Revolution politicians worriedly debate whether England had by now, got back her "old Gothick constitution," or whether additional improvement was required. In the 1790s, Edmund Burke and William Godwin started taking severe and adverse stances. According to Burke the new "conservative"—right. England had re-associated with freedom of her indigenous, gothic past through the Magna Carta and then, through the Celebrated Revolution. Nothing mire, he asserted could be done in the last part of the eighteenth century, except to carry on developing biologically. On the contrary, restricted imperial power and an exclusive parliament could hardly make any mark on Godwin. His gothic villain was not the ambitious English Jacobin the new-found enemy of the English tradition but gothic belief itself. Around 1793-94, both, in separate discourses, argued that man must get rid of government totally since its medieval bewilderments hindered the free use of good sense and hence weakened individual independence. Matthew Lewis gets the message as a diplomat. The Monk confirms its author's social rank and his declared conservatism even as it celebrates in the revolution so feared by Burke. Because the gothic Monk recommends the gothic nation and because it portrays that scheme in gothic form, the novel has been pulled together out of tales put together from inner tales and so on (Tienhooven, erudite.org). Individual, tradition, and changes The problem is how to read Ambrosio's haste to be castigated. Certainly, after 1776 and 1789, sexual release had become a trendy symbol for political release and for revolution. Maybe, in The Monk, sex is more than barely a figure of speech: it is revolution by itself. As the opposite of purity, of good values, of the openly shown traditionalist behavior that places the word sex as un-Spanish. Yet, in The Monk, sex, as revolution, also in some way, at times, seems true. How could this truth be integrated? Is Ambrosio a hero? Does he bring a convincing review of the drawbacks of Spanish identity? Does he go up against national identity per se? Is he, probably, the free spirit imagined by Godwin, who breaks the prevailing English institutions that incarcerate him, and whose moral integrity blends him into a society of equals? Is that the true spirit of the time Ambrosio lived through? At times, Ambrosio repeats the philosophy of Godwin. It does not take much time for him to revert to medieval art of magic and to subjugate to the indulgence of his senses. Lewis lampoons Godwin but not without numerous displays of the latter's assertions that institutional domination is what makes the menacing revolution. Thus, the monks who bring up Ambrosio from childhood ought to have much, maybe all, of the responsibility for perverting the monk's essential good nature—for making him into "the model of virtue, and piety, and learning.” Man and woman relation Mathilda is portrayed in The Monk as a meek, pitiable type. Lewis describes: As [Mathilda] spoke, her eyes were filled with a delicious langour. Her bosom panted: She twined her arms voluptuously around [Ambrosio], and glewed her lips to him...No longer repressed by the sense of shame, He gave a loose to his intemperate appetites: While the fair Wanton put every invention of lust in practice, every refinement in the art of pleasure, which might heighten the bliss of her possession, and render her Lover's transports still more exquisite. Ambrosio rioted in delights till then unknown to him: Swift fled the night, and the Morning blushed to behold him still clasped in the embraces of Mathild (The Monk, 224). The traditional Gothic novel generally does not offer a utopian idea of the liberty of women. The central motif of the confined and the dying woman and the blend of related motifs that go with it (absent mothers; dodgy males) divulge the conflict within the Gothic novel for power over women. Gothic heroines are almost always confined within a definite path of their adventures. In The Monk, Agnes is bolted within the prisons of the Inquisition with her dead baby. The long line of devil-husbands and perilous fathers, beginning with Manfred fits this pattern also. In a legal system in which marriage means death, the husband and the father who endorse the interests of family and bloodline through marriage are a cause of menace and death. Manfred divulges himself to be a devil father in addition to a slapdash husband. Because he appreciates his dynastic necessities above family bonds, Manfred rids off Matilda: "I do not want a daughter," he says. In the Gothic struggle over the control of the woman by matrimony and right, the bending of the woman's body and her possessions become noticeable in a number of novels. In the 18th century, possession of the woman by marriage stood for possession of the woman's belongings. It is their rank as successors that provide gothic women like Isabella, Emily and her aunt as attractive possessions-- the fight for ownership of property is performed on the body of the woman. As the body and property of the woman are blended as things for yearning, Gothic novel speak more about the ravenousness of suitors and husbands (Anoli, Horrors of Possessions). Conclusion In The Monk, Matthew Lewis adopted the style of gothic literature – the eeriness, the dark rooms, the dominating male and the dominated female, the closeting of human lives – to portray the medieval culture and society. The monk, who is shown as the deviant character ultimately turns out not so much of a bad person. Lewis in fact lampoons the gothic form to show the hypocrisy of the religious taboos and social norms. Works Cited Conger, Syndy M., Confessors and Penitents in M. G. Lewis's The Monk, retrieved fromhttp://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/confessors.html Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990. Lewis, Matthew G., The Monk, Original text, variant readings, and "A Note on the Text", introduction by John Berryman New York: Evergreen/Grove Press, 1959 Fitzgerald, Lauren The Sexuality of Authorship in The Monk, retrieved from http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36-37/011138ar.html Tuite, Clara. “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk.” Romanticism On the Net 8 (Nov. 1997). 18 Dec. 2002. . Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Tienhooven, Marie-José, All Roads Lead to England: The Monk Constructs the Nation, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005777ar.html Anoli, Ruth Bienstock, Horrors of Possession: The Gothic Struggle with the Law, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/anolik24.htm Read More