The Monk: A Romance

The festival of St. Clare functions as the climax of The Monk, as both storylines (Ambrosio/Matilda/Antonia and Don Lorenzo/Don Raymond/Agnes) culminate and cross paths in the underground crypts of St. Clare. The festival witnesses an orgy of violence and destruction followed by a restoration of social and moral order as the narrative metes out rewards and punishments to its characters.

The festival of St. Clare provides the stage for the novel’s harshest critique of Religion, Power, and Hypocrisy. The novel portrays the festival as a prideful display of the corrupt church’s wealth and power; the Prioress of St. Clare can hardly conceal “her secret pride at displaying the pomp and opulence of her Convent” (269). The narrative also suggests that the processional—a display of the convent’s most beautiful nuns—is meant to titillate the crowd rather than inspire religious feeling. In these chapters, Don Lorenzo voices the perspective of an 18th-century “enlightened,” rationalist thinker:

His good sense had pointed out to him the artifices of the Monks, and the gross absurdity of their miracles, wonders, and supposititious reliques. He blushed to see his Countrymen the Dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free them from their monkish fetters (266).

Violating a religious taboo by touching the statue of St. Clare, Don Lorenzo discovers that beneath the convent’s superficial religious faith lies a foundation of violence and oppression; the statue of St. Clare conceals the imprisoned and starving Agnes, the “Victim of Cruelty and tyrannic superstition” (271).

If these chapters seem to imply that readers should free themselves from the “artifices” and “fetters” of organized religion, however, The Monk swiftly counters this idea. Instead, it portrays rebellion against religious authorities as disastrous and replaces the corrupt Ambrosio and Prioress of St. Clare with new, more disciplined religious leaders. Both Don Lorenzo and Mother St. Ursula are at first eager to expose the hypocrisy of the Prioress of St. Clare to the public, but they soon regret sharing these revelations as they lose control of the enraged crowd. To have Mother St. Ursula “rend the veil from Hypocrisy” and expose the truth about the convent would seem like a fitting conclusion to this storyline (270). However, this exposure of the truth results in uncontrollable destruction and the murder of innocents:

The Rioters heeded nothing but the gratification of barbarous vengeance […] confounding the innocent with the guilty, [they] had resolved to sacrifice all the Nuns of that order to their rage, and not to leave one stone of the building upon another (275).

 Even as it criticizes religious hypocrisy, The Monk does not advocate for a revolt against religious institutions, suggesting that any such uprising inevitably leads to violence and social chaos. Instead, the novel replaces the Prioress of St. Clare with the virtuous Mother St. Ursula as the new head of the convent, and the Spanish Inquisition (often considered one of the cruelest and most inflexible institutions of the Catholic Church) plays a heroic role by capturing and punishing the dangerous Ambrosio and Matilda. In its depiction of the festival of St. Clare and the ensuing riot, The Monk blows up religious authority—tearing apart a nun and burning down a convent—but the remainder of the novel restores the traditional religious order.

This restoration of order after fantastical and chaotic events includes a reaffirmation of both traditional class structures and gender roles. Both Ambrosio and Antonia present a problem for the traditional class structure, as they are the offspring of a commoner (Elvira) and her aristocratic husband. Moreover, Don Lorenzo’s love of Antonia threatened to create another “unequal alliance” within this hierarchical society. Antonia’s tragic death, however, frees Don Lorenzo to marry the appropriately upper-class (and virginal) Virginia de Villa-Franca, and these noble and virtuous characters retire from Madrid to live out their days on an aristocratic estate. Both Don Raymond and Don Lorenzo cross class lines in the course of The Monk (i.e., Don Raymond travels through Europe disguised as a common man, and Don Lorenzo falls in love with Antonia), but both men return to their original class positions at the narrative’s end.

Similarly, the narrative’s conclusion reinstates the boundaries of femininity that Matilda has violated. First flouting gender boundaries by daring to cross-dress, Matilda breaks every rule of 18th- and 19th-century femininity in the course of The Monk: She openly expresses sexual desire and even demands sexual satisfaction; she takes on a dominant, controlling role in her relationship with Ambrosio; she employs secret knowledge of sorcery and magic to gain demonic power; and she engages in intellectual debates with Ambrosio in which she uses logic to convince him to abandon God and pursue satanic power. In her last encounter with Ambrosio, Matilda enumerates the delights of a life lived outside the bounds of social and religious conventions, and she adopts the language of a revolutionary in her emphasis on personal liberty: “I go impatient to exercise my newly-gained dominion. I pant to be at liberty” (329). After not only introducing this incendiary female character but also portraying her as incredibly alluring—Ambrosio finds it difficult, in this scene, to resist Matilda’s “wild imperious majesty” (328)—The Monk then disavows and destroys Matilda’s character. Satan reveals to Ambrosio that Matilda is not in fact a human woman; she is instead a demon disguised as a woman, sent by Satan to destroy Ambrosio. This twist erases Matilda’s violation of gender norms, as she is revealed not to be a woman after all. Antonia’s and Agnes’s fates similarly reinforce traditional gender norms. Having lost her social and moral value by losing her purity (however unwillingly), Antonia dies; her symbolic death in the tomb of St. Clare becomes real. Agnes, in contrast, does recover from her sexual transgression and ends the novel happily married; she only achieves this happy ending, however, after prolonged suffering and torture, which the narrative recounts in horrific detail.

The final chapters of The Monk complete Ambrosio’s fall from grace into sin, death, and damnation. Ambrosio follows the classic literary narrative of a fallen soul by agreeing to a “Faustian bargain” with Satan. Named for Goethe’s work Faust, such a bargain refers to a sinner selling his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly power and pleasure. Ambrosio, however, makes a poor Faustian bargain and cannot free himself from the devil’s manipulations. Satan forces Ambrosio to literally reenact his metaphorical “fall,” killing him by dropping him from a great height onto a rocky wasteland. Like Mother St. Ursula at the Festival of St. Clare, Satan chooses the most dramatic possible moment to “unveil” the full truth of Ambrosio’s crimes, and just as the “unveiling” of the prioress leads to further violence and chaos, Satan’s “unveiling” of Ambrosio only increases the despair and pessimism that characterize the final pages of The Monk. Ending with the image of a “blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing” man condemned to eternal damnation (339), The Monk seeks to horrify readers with its grim depiction not only of Human Frailty in the Face of Temptation but also of human obliviousness to the “snares” of evil.