Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)

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When chemical and spiritual magic. The drawbacks of both the medical and the Antonia begins to revive, Ambrosio confuses this state with full conscious- spiritual intercessor unite in her character. As evidence of her solidarity she ness: Once Ambrosio has, with Matilda's help, misreading of Antonia's signals, Ambrosio assumes her passivity derives constructed a fiction of Antonia as the object of his desire, he wants it con- from consent rather than from the lingering effects of an opiate.

Part of his jured to life and he desires that Antonia receive the emotional and physical disgust after Ambrosio rapes Antonia stems from the fact that she is still love he feels he can offer her. However, Ambrosio misinterprets Antonia's alive to witness him, that her deathbed was staged rather than real.

When they declare their affection for one another, novel's criticism of the intercessor in the late eighteenth century. This ties necrophilia to spiritual intercession as well as to eighteenth-century emotional gap is commonly explained by the revelation at the end of the medicine. However, the dis- cism was a diseased religion.

Spain could, correspondingly, be viewed as connect between them also shows the vulnerability of boundaries in spaces a source of historical contagion. Contagious diseases such as syphilis were of dissolution: Antonia can only confide in an intercessor, and Ambrosio thought to have local cures: Ambrosio's and Antonia's diverse responses often thought to provide the antidote. The misreadings of one another's intentions Spain, and of a monastery and convent within the city of Madrid, would be are not equally valued: The attempted Within Madrid, the enclosed geographic spaces of the monastery and rape of Antonia at the deathbed of their mother amplifies the criticism of convent mirror the novel's criticism of the intercessor because of their iso- the deathbed as a space to die peacefully, where the relationship with the lation.

Much of the supernatural activity of The Monk takes place in the intercessor is supposed to be a meaningful part of death. Death is where Antonia's rape and death also reflect the novel's work with necrophilia, the two groups of celibates are joined: The burial ground is also the location where Antonia and Agnes, the Ambrosio's necrophilic desires. Matilda recommends the use of an opiate to novel's female characters, hover between life and death.

After discovering Agnes's preg- necrophilia still connects to common stereotypes of necrophilia: Agnes is given a philter, or draught, to fake her death and wakes living participant finds comfort in it.

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Strangely, although the necrophilic up two days later in the catacombs. Because her sins manifest themselves desires of Ambrosio are punished at the end of The Monk, Agnes's necro- externally as a pregnancy, she is un incorporable into the convent, and the philic activities are rewarded with the comfort of rescue, of marriage to burial ground is the place where she is concealed.

Although Agnes occupies the same space between life and death that drives Ambro- Agnes has had premarital sex, borne a child out of wedlock, and cud- sio's necro-erotic desires, although this space is not erotic for her, but vul- dled its "mass of putridity" each night, she has a relatively happy ending nerable and dangerous. Surrounded by catacombs, reminders of death, she and her necrophilia is portrayed not as deviant but as maternal. Agnes's experiences pregnancy, childbirth, and the death of her child.

Although her necrophilia sustains her through imprisonment and harms no one. Even family and the Marquis she loves believe her to be dead, Agnes lives. She so, the narrative's sympathetic treatment of Agnes's necrophilia compli- "expect[s] that every succeeding moment would be that of [her] dissolu- cates the criticism of Ambrosio's: However, there is an internal logic to the way necrophilia is section as "a superlative sentimental-camp conjunction of maternal pathos depicted in the novel. Although both forms of necrophilia are transgres- and the grotesque," but it goes beyond the "live burial" homage Tuite also sive, one comes from an abuse of the intercessor's power, and the other identifies.

Agnes's physical experience of dissolution parallels Ambrosio's physical It is still a little surprising that Agnes's false virgin birth and her all too corruption of the deathbed space. Like Ambrosio, who interprets the inti- corporeal, unbaptized infant are forgiven and rewarded.

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

She is not forgiven macy of the deathbed space as physical intimacy, Agnes also responds inap- because of any obvious penitence. Indeed, the words she uses to describe propriately to the space of dissolution by overattaching to the physical body her necrophilia are strong and unapologetic. Her sin is forgiven in spite of of her dead infant in a different form of necrophilia than that discussed pre- its gruesome extrapolation: When the com- viously. Her experience is sympathetic, in contrast to Ambrosio's, because fort Agnes finds in her dead infant is replaced by the comfort of her reunion it manifests itself as maternal love.

In taken her punishment, and has learned from it. She has learned the lesson the catacombs, necrophilia is the only form of love available to Agnes, and Hunter aimed to teach his students about self-reflection in the face of death, it is all that can sustain her during the imprisonment: When we remember that Ambro- sio's betrayal of Agnes's confidence early in the novel led to the discovery My Infant was no more; nor could all my sighs impart to its tender of Agnes's pregnancy in the first place, her necrophilia can also be consid- frame the breath of a moment.

I rent my winding-sheet, and wrapped ered an indirect result of Ambrosio's untrustworthiness as an intercessor. I placed it on my bosom, its soft arm folded The novel criticizes the corruption of the intercessor at the deathbed scene, around my neck, and its pale cold cheek resting upon mine. Thus did but Ambrosio is also a corrupt confessor who finds it more important to its lifeless limbs repose, while I covered it with kisses, talked to it, wept, see that Agnes is punished by her convent than made accountable to God and moaned over it without remission, day or night I vowed not for sexual transgression.

Considered thus, Agnes's infant is a casualty of to part with it while I had life: Its presence was my only comfort, and the Church's interference in the natural desires of two people who wish to no persuasion could induce me to give it up.

It soon became a mass of marry. Ambrosio himself was given to the Church and separated from his putridity, and to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting Object; To sister as the result of an illicit union, so the novel implies that the Church is every eye, but a Mother's. In its treatment of marriages and children, the Church mate space of the deathbed after the death of her infant.

However, her itself fails at intercession and mediation. The people of Spain are able to use officials often clash, but their problems distill to individual corruption. Anomalous characters like The nobles Lorenzo and Raymond, acting out of individual interest, are Ambrosio and Matilda are punished, but they are still set off as excep- somehow able to produce a papal bull instantly when they try to release tions.

Neither medicinal nor spiritual solutions to deathbed intercession are the pregnant Agnes from the convent. This plot is foiled when the two shown to provide a functional matrix in a novel where individual corrup- men are confronted with the Prioress's lies that Agnes and her child are tion cannot be permanently contained. The lying religious figure is more successful than the Inquisition, and the Prioress foils even a papal bull.

In spite of the Prioress's attempts to deceive, however, this deception ultimately fails, resulting in the rescue NOTES of Agnes and the capture of Matilda and Ambrosio. Antonia also receives a proper burial after her murdered body is discovered. Yet once Matilda 1. For recent scholarly perspectives on the role of mediation in the long eigh- teenth century, see the collection This Is Enlightenment, ed. University of Chicago Press, In the novel, 2. John Bender's and Michael McKeon's chapters in This Is Enlightenment are Catholicism fails to govern itself and when agents of Satan are punished, especially useful to the study of mediation in novels and other prose works.

It is not John Bender, "Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment," and God who addresses Ambrosio and berates him, sentencing him to die: Clifford Si skin is Satan.

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature - Routledge

University of Chicago Press, , , According to Ann Campbell, Lewis "dissects the objects of his satire as Clifford Siskin and William Warner Chicago: University of Chicago The reading experience of The Monk revives the dissected and attempts Press, , , Laqueur's summary is of an anecdote from Jacques-Jean Bruhier's Disserta- to breathe life anew within-an act that is eerily similar to Ambrosio's in tion sure I'incertitude des signes de la mort, 2nd ed.

The narrative structure of The Monk has also been interpreted also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, especially pages 1, Laqueur, Making Sex, 4. Corporeal Abjection as Autobiograph- penetrating. Lewis's use of a setting that summons Catholi- 7. Maria Purves has opened up discussions of the role of Catholicism in the cism at its most institutionally corrupt not only demonstrates that institu- English Gothic novel, finding that the novels are not simply anti-Catho- tional corruption but also highlights institutional failings when it comes to lic, but that they show stronger sympathies for Catholicism than has been mediating between the human and the divine, as well as the living and the previously assumed.

Purves's arguments are useful to keep in mind when dying. Early in the novel, Antonia has a vision of her future, in which "a reading The Monk, especially when considering that the novel offers sym- pathetic Catholic characters with whom the reader is meant to identify, loud burst of thunder was heard. Instantly the Cathedral seemed crumbling regardless of how much The Monk elsewhere delights in portraying institu- into pieces; the monks betook themselves to flight, shrieking fearfully. Not only does Antonia foresee her tragic fate, but that fate is tied to the 8.

Ralph Houlbrooke, "Death, Church, and Family in England between the physical dissolution of the church. The novel's institutions permeate each Late Fifteenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," in Death, Ritual, and other too deeply to fully solve the problem of human intercession at the Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke London and New York: Prior to, and immediately following, the Reformation, there were deathbed.

Even if The Monk acknowledges deeply rooted problems within funeral masses to be arranged, elaborate last rites to be performed, rituals of an institutional framework, it also looks beyond institutions at the role of prayer to be followed, and extensive deathbed vigils to be kept. This more gentle evolution can certainly be accounted for: Although Ambrosio dies a slow and humiliat- ated with death Representations of female statues have special resonance, according to Michael tions 5, no.

Although it is probable that in official circles Finn's article on medicine and the works of the nineteenth-century French "surgery and philosophy nourished one another," Cohen argues that "the writer Rachilde. Finn describes the female statue as having "a highly complex eighteenth century was heir to a dualism that posited the world as the prod- image of confliction.

In one sense, it stands as a narrative marker of reclaimed uct of a fall from oneness, purity, and eternal bliss into mixture, contamina- innocence and virginity. But it also acknowledges an original physical and tion and the transitory" William Hunter, Two introductory lectures, delivered by Dr.

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

William rience that leaves the individual with a powerful sense of disconnection. London, Century French Studies 34, nos. Houlbrooke, "Death, Church, and Family," The Monk could be seen to follow this pat- An Introduction," Eighteenth- tern, with Ambrosio's continual attempts to replace his absent mother and Century Fiction 21, no.

George Haggerty, Queer The term "necrophilia" was first used extensively after , when it was Gothic Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Lewis, The Monk, Critical discussions of necrophilia that align the term with deviance tend to Molesworth, "Syllepsis, Mimesis, Simulacrum," McLean, "Lewis's The Monk and the Matter of Reading," also reasonably be characterized as pathological" , later describing in Women, Revolution and the Novels of the s, ed.

Linda Lang-Peralta, necrophilia as the "culmination" of this pathology In discussions of Michigan State University Press, MacLean earlier novels such as The Monk, which are even more removed from mod- gives an interesting reading of this worm-rose connection. Human Nature in Wuthering Heights," Philosophy Monk," Romanticism on the Net 8 November , accessed April 15, Enlightenment ledge, , Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Porter, "Death and the Doctors," See Zigarovich's revised version of "Courting Death" in For more on eighteenth-century literary representations of mesmerism, see this volume.

Animal Magnetism and Medical Quack- Palgrave Macmillan, , Robert Burns, "Death and Doctor Hornbook: A True Story," lines , Jesse Molesworth also recognizes the importance of this opening scene in the Robert Burns Country, accessed April 15, , http: The Monk and the Grammar of Authenticity," Criticism 51, no. Buchan, Domestic Medicine, , Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning.

Pornography and the Gothic. Oxford University Press, , Houlbrooke, "Death, Church, and Family," 37, As the role of the clergy Romanticism on the Net 8 November Accessed April 15, Two introductory lectures, delivered by Dr. William Hunter, to Science, Myth, and Prejudice," Eighteenth-Century Life 24 were left corrected for the press by himself. Lewis, The Monk, , Prefiguring Frankenstein," edited by Judy A. Ann Campbell, "Satire in The Monk: Exposure and Reformation," Roman- Laqueur, Thomas. Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Campbell provides an interesting McLean, Clara D.

By identifying "the way in which social interroga- Science, Myth, and Prejudice. The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic. The Monk and the Grammar of Authenticity. Chi- and Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Buchan, William. University of Wales Press, Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner, eds. Uni- Burwick, Frederick L. Animal Magnetism and Medical Quackery.

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Prefiguring Frankenstein," Tuite, Clara.

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