Lewis himself stretches this instant into a paragraph, slowing the action as he describes how “[t]he friar’s eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger,” settling into Ambrosio’s gaze as “his eye dwelt” on Matilda’s nudity, and evoking the enormity of Ambrosio’s fatal abandonment of self-control as “a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination.”I will show how it is control that comes to the fore when we compare multiple illustrations of the scene, as different artists explore the indeterminacy of this moment when each character holds power over the other, before Ambrosio submits to Matilda’s will and his own desire. The illustrations of Matilda and Ambrosio’s struggle of wills suggest dramatically different interpretations of the situation through positioning, gesture, facial expression, and visibility of the dagger. While these illustrations of the scene are truer to the novel than the pulp cover’s depiction that I examined earlier, they still sometimes represent it in sentimentalized ways that, at first glance, have little to do with the situation Lewis conveys. As the first editions of The Monk were published without any illustrations, the earliest image I found that represents this scene is a watercolor by British artist Charles Reuben Ryley that the Lewis Walpole Library estimates to be from around the time of the novel’s publication, 1796. From a distance, a viewer may perceive only a man threatening a woman. Ambrosio leans toward Matilda with arms raised menacingly, and she braces herself and holds up what appears to be a defensive arm. On closer examination, a viewer could notice the exposed nipple that is nearly camouflaged against the shadow of Matilda’s robe,hydroponic nft system the fact that one of her hands holds open the robe, and the dagger that partially blends into the background foliage.
Matilda appears to be composed, looking directly into Ambrosio’s agitated face. Because Ambrosio is hunching, their heads and toes are on a level with each other, suggesting parity. In this image, Matilda exposes her right breast, not her left, as in the novel. Though she points the dagger near her heart, the fact that she gratuitously reveals her chest on the opposite side implies that she is tempting him with her sexuality, an artistic interpretation founded in other scenes from the novel. Here, it provides more evidence for the perception that though Matilda initially appears helpless, she is in control of their encounter, subtly undermining Ambrosio’s attempts to overpower her. Even illustrations that use similar compositions suggest drastically different readings of the what is at stake in this moment of indeterminacy. In both images below, the figures appear close together, low in the frame, centered or nearly so, of roughly equal height and on a level with each other, surrounded by the garden.The one on the left is an anonymous engraving from the French Maradan edition of 1797, the earliest illustrated version of the novel I found. Though the page features a caption in which Ambrosio blames his impending doom on Matilda, the image suggests a sentimental serenity. The soft folds of the robes and the stylized grace of the figures’ physical attitudes make it appear as if the two are dancing rather than that Ambrosio is attempting to prevent Matilda’s suicide. Matilda gazes at Ambrosio with a look that seems adoring while baring both of her breasts, which the engraver renders in sensual detail. The gently rounded, untrimmed trees and shrubs create an Edenic atmosphere. The lone indicator of peril amid this calm scene is Matilda’s dagger, which is well defined but small, thin, and easily ignored. Ambrosio’s gaze might be resting on her chest , and his heavy lidded eyes negate any sense that he may be alarmed. In contrast, the illustration on the right appears stark and urgent.
Ambrosio, instead of being stunned when Matilda raises the dagger, as he is in the text, is rushing to stop her. With his eyes fastened on Matilda’s large, prominent dagger, he places his hand on the arm with which she holds it. Matilda’s indistinct breast is more legible as the target of the dagger than as the enticement of a lover, and her expression is resolute. Compared to the Maradan illustration’s ripples and curves, the lines of the robes and sculpted trees are stiff and forbidding. The former image emphasizes the sensuality of the scene; the latter, its threat, which, unlike the earlier threatening image, portrays Ambrosio not as an aggressor but as Matilda’s would-be savior. The first engraving seems to suggest that the most significant outgrowth of this moment in the text is Ambrosio’s sexual awakening, an occurrence which the image presents as mutually desired. The second implies that this moment is most important as the seed of the destruction that follows, which it clearly attributes to Matilda. The two final illustrations I’ll consider both highlight the erotic and destructive aspects of the scene, though they imply very different things about Ambrosio’s self-control. One is an illustration from an 1891 American edition, one of many in which the story is reprinted with the more sensational title Rosario; or, The Female Monk. The illustration, by August Leroy, shows Matilda revealing her breast with a guarded expression and Ambrosio grasping her sleeve with what appears to be a smile, as if he doesn’t notice the poniard Matilda holds. Meanwhile, the knife is pointing at his groin. The last is a woodcut from a 1984 Folio edition illustrated by George Tute, who makes Matilda’s voluptuous body the focus of the image.Her white breast against the prevalent darkness draws the eye and makes the point of the dagger pressed to it more conspicuous.
Though Matilda holds the knife and the viewer’s gaze, Tute positions her below Ambrosio and facing away from the viewer, which could imply that she is less powerful and less important than Ambrosio. He appears impassive, with a grave expression and a palm raised to command her to stop. He holds his other hand up defensively, but it blends in with the folds of his robe and does not diminish the impression of his dominance. In these five illustrations, Matilda appears in turn to be victimized, determined, amorous, desperate, and unreadable. Ambrosio seems to be dangerous, pleasant, distressed, admiring, and forbidding. It may seem that some of these visual interpretations must actually be misinterpretations, but each one, whether straightforward or ambiguous, has a basis in the text’s complex negotiation of authority and feeling. Comparing illustrations in this way has several possible benefits for literary scholars writing about novels like The Monk. This practice encourages us to see beyond our own subjective responses to a novel or the limited responses enabled by our current critical norms, because when we are able to view several different interpretations of the same textual moment, we are less likely to conclude that there is only one way to respond to it, as several scholars have done with scenes and characters from The Monk. Though the early marketing of The Monk as a sentimental work failed due to scandal, sentimentality persists in many illustrations of the novels and invites readings that take Lewis’s use of the mode seriously. The visual medium allows us to reconsider the emotional portrayals in the text, because it can vivify passages that we may have dismissed because we find the writing too conventional to be effective, as with scholars’ responses to Lewis’s sentimental and theatrical descriptions. Some scholars have argued that Lewis must have intended these ineffective portrayals to be critiques or parodies, but most illustrations present the text’s moments of terror, indecision, and desperation as sincere, making it clear that recent scholarly ways of interpreting the text’s emotional qualities have been narrowed by current critical lenses. Even the act of noticing what passages have been illustrated can be generative, as it may help us determine where others have located the imaginative energy of the text and which moments distill some of the essential dynamics of a novel, as the encounter between Matilda and Ambrosio does. When the same or similar moments from the text have been illustrated multiple times, they can suggest patterns in the novel that we may not have observed. The illustrations of The Monk that I found often depict moments of danger and desire, which mirrors the critical focus of scholars and online reviewers. However,nft channel seeing multiple visual portrayals of the novel’s violence and sex made it clear that nearly all of them feature two characters, and these two characters are most often positioned in ways that emphasize the balance of power between them. And alongside these sensational illustrations are other representations of power between two characters that are neither aggressive nor sexual. In addition to illustrations of Matilda and Ambrosio’s confrontation, Ambrosio lusting over Antonia, Ambrosio murdering Elvira and Antonia, and Lucifer carrying Ambrosio to his death, there are images of Agnes pleading with Ambrosio to preserve her secret and Lucifer demanding that Ambrosio sign his demonic contract. With these latter scenes, and even in many of the more sensational ones, artists often freeze the scene in a moment of decision.
This tendency of illustrations to emphasize choice and complex relational dynamics in The Monk differs from illustrations of other gothic novels that I could find, which suggests that these motifs are significant in the novel. The illustrations of Ann Radcliffe’s novels that I located are generally of scenes of terror that focus on an individual’s experience—the cloaked monk frightening Vivaldi in The Italian, Emily fleeing from the black curtain or from the castle of Udolpho, and several images of Emily discovering a corpse. The gothic illustrations collected in Maurice Levy’s “Images du Roman Noir” most often portray a clear imbalance of power in which a heroine is imperiled: a woman is carried down a cliffside, threatened atop a gothic castle, menaced by men with weapons, dragged across a room or into a closet.These images of scenes from other gothic novels do not emphasize the struggle in relations of power or the choice in fatal moments the same way images from The Monk do, which makes Lewis’s situations of possibility worthy of further attention. Though scholars are certainly justified in arguing that the accumulation and amplification of scenes of sex and violence are a defining pattern of The Monk, we could also envision the narrative as being built on these moments of choice, in which one character holds tenuous power over the fate of another. Seeking out the moments of decision that illustrators represent allowed me to see many more of them, and to observe that whole scenes contain many moments in which characters vie for control. Thinking in terms of the various illustrated iterations of the same instant prompted me to notice the verbal iterations of control within and among scenes, which made it clear that power in The Monk is more complex than scholars have acknowledged. Considering how similar scenes in the novel contain repetition with difference is essential in emphasizing the novel’s kaleidoscopic power relations, as well as the struggle, precarity, and choice involved in Ambrosio’s downfall, elements that many scholars minimize when they focus on Lewis’s authorial control. Even more importantly, what this reading makes clear is that there are more options for discussing feeling in The Monk than the current scholarly parameters have allowed us to see.Felski’s claim that the prevailing scholarly mood of the last several decades has been a suspicious one is especially helpful in considering the way scholars have focused on issues in The Monk that harmonize with distrust. Multiple studies analyze the role of characters’ various kinds of concealment, which I will address in my discussion of Ann Radcliffe’s Italian in the next chapter. Even more informative for this chapter’s consideration of how scholars have argued that Lewis disallows certain feelings in response to particular scenes is the way scholars have dealt with the issue of control in the novel. Several prominent scholars interpret The Monk’s tightly constructed plot of Satanic manipulation or Lewis’s ostentatious writing style as evidence that Lucifer and Matilda dictate Ambrosio’s actions and Lewis attempts to dictate his readers’ responses to an unusual degree. For instance, Maggie Kilgour contends that Lewis “gives the reader a sense of power and control over the narrative” but in reality “keeps us outside, to make us marvel at his authorial powers.”David Punter argues that he “tries to be more cynical than his audience, and to dominate it by means of this cynicism.”