This is it! We've reached the end of The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. We've seen ghost nuns, murders, illicit sex, sorcery, and the fucking Devil. In the penultimate chapter we get a strange "fake ending," in which we see the denouement for all the heroes. But what about Ambrosio, the actual main character? Well, perhaps less surprisingly than usual, it's the Spanish Inquisition!
Plot Summary
- The narrator gives us a short overview of the city's reaction to Ambrosio's crimes and imprisonment, going from shock to anger and, eventually, forgetfulness.
- Ambrosio is not having a great time in his cell. After some scene-setting, he's dragged before the panel. Our attention is drawn to the cruel implements of "the question," and then we're told that they not only want Ambrosio to confess to his actual crimes, but to crimes he did not commit -- after all, he did not actually engage his soul to the devil or perform any magic. At least, no grimoire stuff. We might think using an enchanted myrtle branch counts, but not in this case.
- Ambrosio is a fucker, and he knows he's a fucker, but he refuses to admit to something he didn't do. So he gets the ever living shit tortured out of him. Matilda is there too, and tells them she did it all, Ambrosio didn't do any magic. They don't just want to punish Ambrosio for crimes, they want to burn his ass, so they hold out for the confession.
- If you're thinking, hey, maybe torture isn't an effective method of eliciting information, then you're right! You'll just get the answer you want, or the one the victim thinks you want!
- Ambrosio is tossed into his cell and, after a long wait in which he does the Big Gothic thing of pacing around and tormenting himself, Matilda appears. She's wreathed in beautiful light and says she's leaving. She's accepted that there was no way out but death and therefore finally consented to sell her soul to the devil. He's given her the power to leave, and will keep her the rest of her life in incredible splendor and pleasure.
- Matilda asks Ambrosio to come with her, to sell his own soul. Her argument is that they're both big fucked, they're going to hell when they die no matter what, and so they might as well not die of fucking fire.
- Ambrosio still quails. Despite all he's done, he believes he can still repent and avoid eternal damnation. Now, this is very different than just before Maltilda came in, because a lot of his self-torment is coming from how he's convinced he can't be forgiven, something that, as we noted several chapters ago, is expressly against Christian doctrine. This is probably an important point for understanding the novel. Lewis may not have liked Catholicism very much, but it does seem that he was fairly happy with the basics of Christianity as he saw them (that is, the Church of England version).
- Matilda finally gives up, but she leaves a book. If he reads a sentence from a particular page backwards, the devil will appear and Ambrosio can do the deal himself. Matilda disappearas.
- Ambrosio is tortured again. He finally gives in and provides the confession they want. His burning is set for a few days hence, as they'd already scheduled a big old party auto-de-fe at midnight and wanted Ambrosio to headline it.
- Back in his cell, Ambrosio torments himself some more until he gives in and summons the devil. He's not a pretty bishounen this time, he's got the bat wings and everything now. They have a back and forth which is honestly interesting but if you're into pop culture depictions of sorcerous magic you should probably just read the book at this point. Ambrosio finally agrees and gets down to signing a contract. At the last moment he freaks out and throws the pen away.
- The devil, understandably pissed off to have traveled for a business meeting at which no business was done, fucks off, but not before telling Ambrosio that the next time he summons the devil, the devil will either get the deal or just kill Ambrosio himself.
- Night of the burning, Ambrosio hears the distant sounds of someone coming and summons the devil again. After some more prevarication, he signs up and the devil whisks him away. He asks to be taken away from the jail. He forgot to ask for the whole "long and luxurious life" part.
- The devil takes him to some mountains and sets into his "The Real Ending Speech." The devil knew Ambrosio wasn't really pious, because of all the stuff a few chapters back about the unnaturalness of raising children to this stuff and so on. He decided to fuck Ambrosio up. Matilda is a devil, formed to look like Ambrosio's Madonna poster (remember the weird story where she said she had someone paint it to look like her?). Oh, and Antonia is Ambrosio's sister.
- Yeah. Cast your mind way back. Remember how Elvira and Antonia were always inexplicably comfortable around him? Remember how Ambrosio suddenly feels revulsion at having had sex with her (raping her) but still somehow loves her? And also, there's that whole story about how Elvira, when she had to flee the country, somehow left her son behind but took her daughter? And how Ambrosio was dropped off at the abbey? Yup.
- Then the devil makes fun of Ambrosio for giving in, for sucking so bad, and for not remembering to ask for cool long life and riches and shit, and then he throws Ambrosio off a mountain.
- The book ends with a frankly shudder-movie-worthy scene where Ambrosio, still alive but unable to see, crawls on his horribly injured body towards the sound of water until a flood comes down and finally kills him.
And That's the End!
Yikes, we might say. I think, for a writer who spoiled Antonia's grisly fate like 3 times throughout the novel, he did a pretty good job of telegraphing the accidental incest angle without showing all his cards. Of course, it's deployed to raise the final moment of the novel to a fever pitch, to kind of replicate Ambrosio committing his worst sin just before being killed -- he doesn't, but revealing it like that has a similar effect dramatically. And this reminds me once again of Shakespeare, because Hamlet has a very good chance to kill Claudius but it's right after Claudius confesses and prays. It's not enough for Hamlet to kill Claudius -- he wants Claudius to burn in hell, and he worries that he'll go to heaven and thus lets him live, which leads to... well... the rest of the trainwreck of the play.
The incest angle is probably drawn from Walpole, though Lewis draws from so many sources it's difficult to be sure. At any rate, even in The Mysterious Mother it's parent/child and not sibling/sibling.
Religion and The Monk
I've talked a bit already about how Lewis keeps criticizing Catholicism throughout the novel, but you can also see a consistent kind of piety in the heroes that is humble, quiet, often transactional (not in that they pray for boons, but that they give the churches money for masses and such in order to help the dead), and usually both positively good and lacking in evil. So the person is both doing good and avoiding evil. Ambrosio, on the other hand, isn't really doing much good. You might argue that even if his heart's not in it, or that he's gratifying his pride by becoming so famous that at least his preaching is doing good by spreading more thinking and belief in religion. But the book doesn't agree, I think.
I think Lewis's take on how religion works is that it's personal, that it isn't involved in what one does but what one is. That's pretty standard for a particular thread of Protestantism of course, which is how we get people calling for genocide and then saying they're good people, because a priori they're good, "good" is a condition, not a series of actions.
However, Lewis is no theologian -- the bad people do bad things too. But I think the thing the book is trying to talk about is upbringing. People raised in good environments turn out good and those in bad environments turn out bad. Ambrosio and Antonia are, after all, siblings, and ended up as polar opposites. He's also making much more obvious statements about how Catholicism is a "bad environment" for people.
Superstition but also there's the devil
It's worth briefly pointing out that so many of Lewis's characters talk about all ghosts and magic as "superstition" but in the novel itself it turns out they're very wrong, and even after encountering evidence they keep going. After all, Lorenzo believes Raymond when the latter says he encoutered a ghost and an immortal man. But he still insists it's silly superstition to think the catacombs could be haunted.
As the editor of my edition puts it, the characters are Enlightenment beings on the surface, but Lewis is deeply conflicted about the Enlightment, so under the surface the older things lurk.
And that's, after all, a lot of what went into creating Castle of Otranto in the first place. A kind of Miltonian defiance of what is and what apparently "ought to be."
This is the last big point I want to make, and something that's important to consider to the history of the gothic as a genre. It's a product of the Enlightenment world, and it looks backwards in time (for now) precisely because it wants to imagine another world, one that isn't the Enlightenment.
Without losing the thread, or without straying from it for too long, there was a movement in England in the decade before Otranto called The Graveyard Poets. Exemplified by Thomas Gray, a friend of Walpole's, they were basically goths, walking around in graveyards, imagining being dead, and so on. It all seems very tame to us now, but given that the mass of poetry1 was about order and correctness, and maybe exploring the growing tension between town and country, the Graveyard Poets were weird. They reminded us we're all going to die! They reminded us that all dead people are the same, and class distinctions don't matter! Simply, they undermined the egoism of the Enlightenment's confidence in human rationality.
And the gothic writers wanted in on that. So, to speak about The Monk specifically, the characters are all scrupulously rationalistic: Ambrosio, who has literally witnessed the Devil being summoned in a circle, still poo-poos someone for saying she saw a ghost. Raymond, who made out with a ghost, still poo-poos people for superstitions. The book contorts itself to give us rationality-bros in a setting where they aren't very natural in order to slap them down.
And I think this is part of why the gruesome horror nature of the book is important: it's not just being edgy (though it is), it's not just reveling in gross shit (though it is), it's sharply contrasting the heavy, human, corporeal, meaty life and its inevitable, gross, end with the clean marble lines of the Enlightenment imagination. We aren't made of marble, we're made of meat and soul. We aren't vaulting over the heavens on wings of rationality, we're quivering in horror at a glimpse of worms writhing in dead flesh.
The gothic will continue to do this, to undermine the safety of rationalism, even as it moves geographically and temporally. Whatever the new rationalism is in culture, the gothic will set itself in opposition to it. That's part of what makes science fiction such a driving power in literature: it's a sub-species of the gothic and, remembered or not, that opposition to rationalism is built into the dna, even as the rationalism bros took it up in the early 20th century and tried to circle back around to sweeping the vault of heaven with their jetpacks and spaceships.
-
not all of it, but the main curated bits of it -- the 18th century curated itself, and we're still trying to step outside their own views of their poetry
