These overt statements of support for Lewis’s misogynistic motif may appear starkly different from scholarly assessments, but I will argue that a similar acceptance of the novel’s attitude toward women emerges in scholarly treatments of The Monk if we look closely enough. For instance, in some of the pioneering gothic studies, though scholars do not express approval of the way the novel’s female characters are brutalized, they evoke a similarly brutal attitude toward femininity when they write about the novel’s genre. Even today, scholars traditionally discuss Lewis and Ann Radcliffe together because of the common narrative that The Monk responded to The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian responded to The Monk, and revisiting some of the earliest instances of this comparison reveals that implicit in it can be a misogynistic attitude. The gendered genre binaries that scholars utilize when contrasting Radcliffe and Lewis sometimes cast the two authors as a sheltered, timid woman and a wild, bold man. For instance, in 1978 Howells writes that “Lewis is shocking and subversive in a way that Mrs Radcliffe never was in his exploration of the dark irrational hinterland of the human mind,” as if he is an intrepid explorer.More troublingly, some early scholars create scenarios in which the Lewisian man menaces the Radcliffean woman. Montague Summers writes that “Mrs. Radcliffe shrank from the dark diablerie of Lewis,” and Michael Sadleir narrates, “Into the firelit refuge of the Radcliffian novelist the follower of Lewis would fain intrude, haggard and with water streaming from his lank hair, shrieking . . . then,nft growing system when he had struck the company with silent fear, he would wish to vanish once again into the howling darkness.”45 The seemingly inoffensive idea that Lewis’s novel unsettled the status quo looks not quite so inoffensive when coupled with imagery that recalls the way his male characters violate his female ones.

Even scholars who object to the novel’s treatment of female characters can end up aligning themselves with the perspective they censure through their own interpretive methods. Feminist critic Judith Fetterley, writing in 1978 about the masculine tradition of American authorship, argues that “a female reader is co-opted into participation from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself.”Building on this description of coercive reading, she writes, “Powerlessness is the subject and powerlessness the experience,” as female readers are forcibly alienated from the classic literary plots of men dominating women.Using a similar framework to Fetterley’s, feminist critics have repeatedly called attention to the novel’s tendency to objectify and show contempt for women,but some suggest that readers have no choice but to inhabit a masculinized, heterosexual, lascivious, dehumanizing point of view while reading, as if the novel forces readers to take a position they find abhorrent. Under the control of Lewis’s narrative, they imply that there is no possibility of reading his abused female characters sympathetically. In describing the rape scene, Howells observes that it reads like pornography, and though she clarifies that its carnal account is not sexually exciting, she maintains that “there is for us the voyeuristic fascination of watching how far conventional limits can be transgressed,” as if the depiction of a taboo compels all readers to become mesmerized spectators and leaves no option of withdrawing in disgust.Elizabeth Napier concurs, arguing that Lewis’s writing inspires “a kind of prurient curiosity that depends upon withdrawal and distance.”Though the novel appears to advocate for compassion, she claims, the way it aestheticizes sex and violence makes pity impossible for readers.

She writes that Lewis “puts the reader in the novel’s most crucial moments in the position of a voyeur” and makes his victimized characters “undergo punishments so extreme as to excite horror rather than pity,” and she hints that Antonia desires the man who rapes and kills her and thus prevents readers from having “[a] correct response to this purest of characters.”Napier disallows the possibility of readers having a simultaneously aesthetic and emotional response, or being capable of feeling both revolted at the violence and sympathetic for the victim, or reading Antonia’s warmth toward Ambrosio as that of a sibling, or being capable of a “correct” response to a victim even if that victim is not irreproachable, or even reading against Lewis’s authorial prompts in order to feel into fictional suffering. These scholars’insistence that Lewis’s distancing techniques allow for no emotional connection with his female characters ends up sounding like an acceptance of the novel’s voyeurism and misogyny rather than the objection that they likely intend. Close reading, which could provide an antidote to the distance and disconnection that many feminist critics identify, can end up performing an uncomfortable sympathy with the text as well. Fredric Bogel recently championed close reading as a practice of what he calls “true infatuation”—intense attention to the text that is comparable to erotic obsession.This erotic textual obsession, when applied to The Monk, can become unseemly. When scholars take time to analyze the passages in which they find Lewis’s writing most effective, their careful literary analysis begins to sound like they are reveling in the sensational violence and sex. Robert Kiely observes Lewis’s tendency toward abstract, indirect writing and descriptions of Ambrosio’s sensible bewilderment, in contrast to which “the encounters with female corpses are, in addition to their intrinsic unpleasantness, stylistically striking.”

KIiely meditates on the power of Lewis’s specificity and simplicity of style in these scenes where women are dead or dying, writing that passages like the one where Ambrosio chokes and suffocates Elvira or the one where a mob tramples the prioress interrupt the conventional and “possess an energy and realism for which the reader is not fully prepared.”Though Kiely means to make the point that the directness of Lewis’s violent writing makes the violence more awful and the victims more human, his appreciation of forceful style sounds like an appreciation of violent action in this context. George Haggerty similarly venerates Lewis’s skill with violent scenes, analyzing how his combination of abstractions and vivid carnage in his description of the prioress’s mutilation makes the scene conceptually and viscerally effective. He goes so far as to claim that this philosophical brutality is the only effective technique Lewis could have used to make readers feel this scene without having another character’s reactions to prompt them: “Without the filter of a responding consciousness, there is no other way to assure affective success. If we are disgusted, Lewis has succeeded.”The tendency of literary scholars to write as if their own response is the only possible one can be jarring when they linger appreciatively over scenes of violence or sex that obviously provoke very different responses in other readers. Writing in this mode, Ahmet Süner delves into the sexuality of a moment that I will revisit shortly, in which Matilda bares her breast, contending that Lewis’s language enhances the erotic effect of the scene even as it appears to be modestly euphemistic. He writes, “The sensation . . . overtakes the metaphor, taking over the object; consequently, the object is surrendered to the bare mechanics and bare metaphoricity of sensation . . . all these clichéd metaphors are already chewed and devoured so that they may unobtrusively give way to the free flow of desire.”His own language as he analyzes Lewis’s sounds like a sexual encounter, or a sexual assault: “overtakes,” “taking over,” “surrendered,” “bare,” “devoured,” “free flow of desire.” Süner likely intended this sexualized analytical language to reinforce his point about the passage’s prurience, but it ends up seeming as if Süner has been absorbed into the voyeurism and sensual ecstasy he was trying to parse. When scholars analyze Lewis’s sensational writing,nft hydroponic system whether they chafe at it or embrace it, they often implicate themselves. Because of the ways that normative scholarly methodologies shape discussions of sensation, critiques or close readings of The Monk’s depictions of violent rage and transgressive desire can implicate scholars, but they are also limited in the ways they can address Lewis’s portrayals of other feelings. The suspicious critical mood informs the way scholars approach Lewis’s less embodied descriptions of emotion, which they tend to find false. For instance, scholars have written that the hero Raymond’s horror upon encountering a ghost has “the behaviouristic detail of a theatrical performance,” that Ambrosio’s frequent confusion of mixed emotions makes him “flutter and reel” like a sensible heroine, that Agnes’s grief over her dead child is part of an “over-the-top tableau” typical of Lewis’s “theatrical excess,” and that the sadness of Antonia’s reunion with her beloved and her mother’s ghost as she dies “is undercut by Lewis’s parodic manipulation of Sentimental conventions.”Whether these scholars assume that Lewis is forced to write in the style of drama or sentimental novels because of a lack of available fictional options or that he is performing a critique of these modes, they generally do not find these emotional moments worthy of sustained critical attention.

What options exist for scholars who want to write about the novel’s emotions but don’t have an acceptable scholarly method for doing so without either dismissing its portrayals of fear, confusion, and sadness as ineffective or analyzing its portrayals of lust and rage in ways that become disturbingly aligned with those feelings? This is the bind I found myself in after rereading The Monk with the voices of these scholars in my head. A lay critic’s comparatively broad range of affective choices do not fit comfortably within a scholarly role. What ended up working for me was to approach emotional scenes not through feeling but through seeing, by first considering how artists have illustrated them. My next section will show how this kind of consideration can reveal a variety of affective and interpretive possibilities in a single textual moment, and my final section will explore what these possibilities can open up in the text itself.In this section, I will return to visual analysis, focusing on illustrations rather than book covers. Rachel Schmidt writes that illustrations of narratives require that the artist engage in a process of interpretation that will enhance certain effects of the text for readers.In the case of Don Quixote, Schmidt argues that early illustrations were involved in shaping the novel’s critical reception. Many of the illustrated editions of The Monk that I could find actually appear to have little in common with the novel’s critical reception, unlike its twentieth- and twenty-first-century book covers. Whereas the book covers represent extremes of sensationalism or abstraction and thus illuminate the mixture of extremes that I have argued are operating uncomfortably in certain scholarly treatments of the novel, the illustrations present a wider range of feelings, and many are indeterminate in their affect. In contrast to book covers, which govern readers’ impressions of the book as a whole early in the reading experience, illustrations represent carefully chosen moments and provide visual cues for understanding them. The moments that are chosen for illustrations and the ways particular artists interpret them provide multiple possibilities for contextualizing an emotional situation at a particular point in the text. After viewing every illustration I could locate, from soon after the novel’s publication to the 1980s, I discovered that the moment in which Matilda exposes her breast and threatens to end her life is by far the most common visual representation from the main plot of the novel.This is perhaps in part because it allows artists to titillate with nudity, though what is arguably the most sensual scene, when Ambrosio spies on Antonia bathing, was illustrated in only one of the editions I found. The moment of threatened suicide, occurring in the scene where Rosario reveals herself to be Matilda, is also likely a subject of fascination because the scene is when the stable ground of gender identity gives way in the novel, which some artists emphasize by portraying both figures in their entirety, so viewers can see that they are dressed identically in monks’ robes. Interdependent with Lewis’s portrayal of sexuality and gender in the scene, though, is his portrayal of power. As I will examine in my close readings of the next section, the drawn-out scene in the novel features complex, shifting power dynamics . The illustrations I will compare all freeze the scene in the urgent standoff before Ambrosio surrenders his control over Matilda’s fate, and the choice to represent this moment of possibility implies that this is one of the key decisions that determines the course of the novel.