The murder and madness, sex and sorcery of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1795) makes its world familiar to twenty-first century readers of Stephen King or audiences of television shows like The Walking Dead. The righteous are tempted and fall, the innocent are manipulated and slain, women are imprisoned in crypts, men are seduced, heirs are lost, young love is frustrated, marriages are thwarted, demons are exorcised; we find blood on nun’s habits, a burning cross on a stranger’s head, vipers, wands, poison draughts, and daggers in this eighteenth-century Gothic novel. What makes the novel “Gothic” and different from other types of novels at the time are the horrors wreaked on its pages—horrors whose effects are meant to incite readers’ fear and disgust. At the same time, the Gothic novel was very popular in eighteenth-century Britain; its overwhelmingly terrorizing images did not drive audiences away. One critic contemporary to Lewis notes that The Monk “has neither originality, morals, nor probability to recommend it,” and yet “it has excited and will still continue to excite, the curiosity of the public. Such is the irresistible energy of genius” (The European Magazine 110). Against the normative rules, then, the novel entices the reader to partake of its energy and ponder the apparent contradiction between wanting to read about murder and taking pleasure in its telling. In a way, the reader leads a textual double life, in which his or her desire to know overcomes any concern about the morality the reviewer mentions. The desire to know is not abated by believable explanations or neat resolutions, and yet, despite the lack of “probability to recommend it,” The Monk’s critic recommends it.

Lewis’ work disrupts the very narrative form that might unfold in sequence the rationales behind mysterious motivations and outrageous actions. This formal rupture echoes the failures in family lineages that undo the sequence of aristocratic genealogy at the heart of the novel, leaving procreation an exercise in heterosexual futility. In short, the novel challenges the limits of categories to contain textual and bodily forms, and, by reveling in a full range of human and supernatural behaviors, it gestures toward alternative forms of both. The Monk is a rather queer novel if we take queer to mean “the open mesh of possibilities, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made to) signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, Tendencies 8).

Alongside the many horrors of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), we find the ostensibly less-horrible Romance plot elements. In such Romance plots—also called courtship or marriage plots—authors fashioned their one true pair from a young man and a young woman. As a convention of the novel, the courtship plot stretches back to novelist Samuel Richardson, who labeled it “a new species of writing” (Richardson lii). Although the Aristotelian definition of comedy includes a culminating marriage, the novel’s emphasis on psychological particulars of desire and domesticity transforms the comic form into a study that represents falling in love and getting married as the most ordinary course of human events. As conflict drives narrative, the many obstacles the young lovers must overcome shape the action until they can be united in such a story. Whereas a Romance plot might include distressing separations or letters gone astray, the Gothic novel conjures for the couple hyperbolic difficulties that are always presented as supernatural, sometimes unraveled as the natural misperceived. The Gothic takes Romance conventions and weds them to horrors resolved only when the terror is ended and social order is restored: closeted skeletons are cleared, evil is vanquished, and a marriage arranged. In The Monk, the obstacle to love is not just the concerned family members represented as “ordinary” in a plot; instead, The Monk introduces an extraordinary evil to be vanquished in the form of a nun and a monk, each of whom intervenes in the two different courting couples. An eighteenth-century novel reader might expect a friar to perform the rites of marriage, not to destroy it. Yet this monk, Ambrosio, emerges as the secretly noble foundling who is represented as a sex-obsessed rapist and murderer. Early in the novel, the young couples endeavor to make their way to the altar. The evil and the marriageable converge to crowd into a chapel for the famous monk’s sermon. They assemble not “from motives of piety or thirst of information” (Lewis 7). Instead, “the Women came to show themselves, the men to see the Women” (7). The world of this novel is immediately organized into two opposing categories based on a definition of sex that indicates anatomy identifies and differentiates one group of bodies from another. Further, anatomical sex becomes a function of sexuality by allying these bodies with particular behaviors. At the same time, that sexuality is defined by the subject and object—“men to see the women”—effectively channeling desire into a particular form of sexuality. Church attendance in the Capuchin chapel is a heterosexual affair. Moreover, by referring to “the women” and “the men,” the ritual appears to represent a universal practice and, as such, represents these bodies and these practices as the norm. To be in this space, characters are both appropriated by and identify with these categories in order to perform the rituals and recognize the roles each is to play. Lewis’ characters make sense of each other in terms of differences figured as prior to their participation in the ritual. A very few words create a system of intelligibility that sets in motion a narrative of normative desires and heterosexual relations assembled in the church.

The public inscription of heterosexuality becomes individualized desire when two “young, and richly habited” noblemen hear a female voice complaining about the crowd; they turn momentarily to see a woman who does not hold their attention, but focus their energy to behold her quiet young niece, Antonia (8). The young woman warrants a full-bodied description detailing the whiteness of her skin and her dress, the color of her hair, the length of her neck, continuing all the way down to her feet, where they spy “a little foot of the most delicate proportions” (9). The men appreciate each part of her body in turn, first for its aesthetic merit (her “symmetry and beauty might have vied with the Medicean Venus” [9]), and then for her likeness to the mythological Hamadryad, a figure of nature destined to live and die with the tree it was born in. The narrated details of her body serve “to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative” (Butler, Bodies 2). This heterosexual imperative is embedded in a complex matrix, the elements of which do not establish a causal narrative; in other words, the body is gendered, but without gendering, there isn’t a way to sex and sexualize a body. The moves that identify what is masculine and what is feminine do not have a visible beginning or end; nor is there a fixed direction of the multi-directional flow. As part of the matrix in this two-body system of knowledge, Antonia is described by adjectives indicating a set of traits that accrue to the female form. Antonia is delicate and elegant, her foot is small, her bosom, skin, and dress are white. Such adjectives flow back to her body: her delicacy and elegance indicate that she does not have the sword-wielding strength that her admirers will shortly demonstrate in the narrative; her tiny feet (adorned in silk shoes, given the fashion of the late eighteenth-century) would not be able to break into a run; her pale skin means that she spends much of her time confined inside, away from the sun; her white dress symbolizes purity, in other words, virginity. Antonia’s difference is marked as a material difference, made so through the words chosen to describe it—her body recalls Venus rather than Apollo—but there “is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices” (Butler, Bodies 1). Antonia demurely resists participating in their discourse—which of course makes her the perfect object of it—but the two men press on, marking their own characters as active—curious and insistent—and signifying that hers enacts the passive spectacle the men come to see. The active and passive behaviors leverage the cataloged physical traits into a gender assignment that makes two differences seem complementary and desirable one to the other and so produces a narrative that is heteronormative—what appears to be the normal course of human events is heterosexuality.

The careful choreography of the heteronormative couple emerges from a complex continuous and continual staging of “normal” visibly defined by what it is not. If Antonia appears appealing set next to her middle-aged aunt Leonella, who, with her feline name is a kind of early modern “cougar,” she is defined by her difference from the flirtatious aggression her aunt indulges in with Don Christoval. The comic function Leonella performs is a faint, but important, assertion of a sexuality beyond the pale. That the comparison is comic means that it is a familiar enough situation that readers would laugh at it. So naturalized is the comparison, that it seems inconsequential to the dossier of desirability and heterosexuality assembled, and yet it inaugurates the extraordinary interplay of sexual identifications that must be, to use Judith Butler’s vocabulary, foreclosed and/or disavowed to produce the normative subject. Antonia represents a normative position within the circumscribed space in which gender operates as “the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture” (Butler, Bodies 5). Her chastity is frequently referenced, but her identification as the “chaste, and gentle, young and fair” woman “who would be some good Man’s blessing” becomes vexed when the reader encounters her first reaction to Ambrosio during his sermon (Lewis 38). In a description suggesting orgasm, Antonia “felt a pleasure fluttering in her bosom which till then had been unknown to her, and for which She in vain endeavored to account” (8). This fantasy-driven auto-eroticism was not among the activities recommended for young women in the eighteenth century; forty-six editions of A Guide to Old Age, or a Cure for the Indiscretions of Youth (1799), warn that young women will “have their minds as well as their bodies frequently enervated by shameful practices” (Brodum 212–13). “By these filthy activities,” argues the doctor, their bodies are rendered:

The warnings that begin by establishing the “natural” desire of men for the “tender sex” suggest, too, that masturbation will provoke women’s “unnatural distaste for the male part of the creation, for whom they were by Providence destined” (213). In short, women would find such an experience so pleasurable that they would have been in danger of spending too much time masturbating and not enough time making themselves available to appropriate husbands. The written description of Antonia’s blushes and flutters would have been as titillating to its readers as it is obvious to us. For all, it functions as a textual transgression that problematizes the gendered “chastity” attached to Antonia. If the “construction of gender operates through exclusionary means,” then “woman” excludes age and sexual appetite, and “chastity” excludes church-pew orgasms.

Antonia’s pleasurable indulgences continue after her exit from the sacred confines of the church. In the street she discovers a very different sort of homily delivered by a “gypsy.” There, Antonia beseeches Leonella to “indulge [her] this once! Let me have my fortune told!” (36). In the “Gypsy’s Song,” the fortune-teller first erases Leonella’s sexuality by admonishing her to “Lay aside Your paint and patches, lust and pride” because:

As the “gypsy” circumscribes Leonella’s role, her song establishes the perimeter around her desire, foreclosing any opportunity for post-menopausal sexual practice by making it laughable in a sing-songy tetrameter (it still upholds the male-female pairing, however). While Leonella is identified as pathetically transgressive, the “gypsy” subsequently predicts how Antonia’s sexual future will be foreclosed. The prophesy, coming on the heels of Antonia’s physical episode, first establishes her value in a normative economy: “You would be some good Man’s blessing” (38). At the same time, the gypsy ends any possibility of continuing auto-eroticism or “that unnatural distaste for the male part of creation” (Brodum 213). This “Gypsy’s Song” episode indicates that the normative is intensely regulated: the episode shuts down Antonia’s orgasmic micro-transgressions, even as it indicates how unstable the definitions that accrue to her are. Antonia’s satisfying experience plays along the line dividing the normative/non-normative, in part because her ignorance of the sensations proves her sexual naiveté. Simultaneously, it adds a titillating (and, therefore, complicating) detail to the language of purity built around her in this “highly gendered regulatory schema” (Butler xi). The line between the sanctioned and the transgressive is blurred at best, and yet, at the same time, enforced to a character’s grave peril. As such, the line becomes the site where the gendered subject must be continually and continuously performed as a matter of life and death. The “performative” compulsion of gender and sexuality does not mean “perus[ing] the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donn[ing] that gender for the day, and then restor[ing] the garment to its place at night” (Butler, “Preface” x). Rather, the social regulation of norms plays almost like an actor directed to “keep doing this until we get it right,” even though getting it right is never a possibility, except that there are no actors that exist before the play; or, put another way, the performance of gender is the “forced reiteration of its norms” as a way to prove the stability of the norms, while at the same time making visible how unstable those norms are (Butler x).

Challenges to the norms move beyond the micro-transgression of a heterosexualized identity in rather spectacular ways. Consider the activities of many other characters who roam the narrative, including the second core couple, the unhappy apparition of a murdered woman, and Antonia’s mother: Agnes has sex with Raymond while she’s a nun; Beatrice wanders through a castle destined to play the post-mortem role of the Bleeding Nun for her part in a love triangle that ends in double murder; Elivira, Antonia’s mother, is slain for cock-blocking Ambrosio, whose sexual thirst would only be slaked by the young virgin (who turns out to be his sister); and Matilda begins the narrative as the young monk Rosario, but reveals him- / herself to be a sexually potent woman, who serves the demon-leading Ambrosio to his damnation. At this juncture, the reader encounters how “the mobilization of the categories of sex within political discourse will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce and foreclose” (Butler 4; my emphasis). At the heart of The Monk is an enactment of this haunting, as Lewis makes visible not only where the line is apparently fixed, but also what settles on both sides of that line. For a novel that many argue represents a cautionary tale in the service of reinforcing normative sexuality, The Monk seems oriented toward haunting those boundaries through both the characters’ identifications and the social practices, particularly those around the marriage plot. Wendy Jones contends that:

Through its parsing of desire, Jones proposes, The Monk defines the necessary complement, bad desire, which is represented as “repressed desire, which can never know its true object and therefore incapable of satisfaction… the violence of repression both perverts it and adds fury to its pent-up force… and represses natural instincts” (238). Good desire, following this line of argument, is the desire that ends in the plot driven to a marital ideal and love itself. Yet, to my mind, what Jones identifies as the “good desire” delineated in The Monk includes precious little happily-ever-after and more coupling that ends with death, destruction, and familial as well as eternal damnation. Glimpses of a post-marital state reveal family dysfunction predicated on unauthorized marriages, pre-marital relations, jealous rages, and incestuous desires. A novel in which the characters are, as Kate Ellis asserts, “rewarded with domestic happiness at the end of their respective stories” just never materializes (Ellis 131). Antonia never experiences domestic happiness, and any promise of that ends brutally, as Ambrosio spirits her away to a crypt to rape her. Lorenzo, her professed love, ends debilitatingly sickened by Antonia’s death and ends up in an arranged marriage by acceding to his Uncle’s desires. The only thing to recommend that engagement is “when the Duke proposed to him the match [with Virginia]… his Nephew did not reject the offer” (419). The only marriage performed is mentioned on the heels of the disturbing death of Raymond and Agnes’ infant, who expires while its mother is chained deep in the crypts beneath the abbey and monastery properties. The nuptials of Raymond and Agnes receive a single, perfunctory sentence, recording that “the marriage was therefore celebrated as soon as the needful preparations had been made” (418). The next phrase, “This being over…,” ends any mention of marriage (418). Little in The Monk recommends marriage or heterosexual relations, which are very often represented as ridiculous, misguided, and even violent.

Yet, marriage was expected to produce new generations for aristocratic families to enlarge the family tree and to ensure the smooth transfer of property and prestige from one generation to the next. Among the heirs apparent to their respective aristocratic families are Antonia and Ambrosio, but Antonia does not have an as-yet legitimated claim to her genealogy, and Ambrosio was kidnapped and left as a foundling at the Capuchin Monastery door. Missing heirs and lost children were recognizable complications to Lewis’ first readers, and the stories of how characters were lost and then found become part of establishing the mandate of genealogical succession and proper social order. Less recognizable to Lewis’ readers would be narratives that included scenes of insemination, pregnant bodies, and the post-partum maternal body. The bodies that perform those acts would have been assumed (a body has to produce a baby and heir) but excluded from the narratives as readers expected bodies to enter the narrative fully formed and sexed. Lewis’ work unsettles those expectations by making these bodies visible as suffering and wretched, pushing the story of aristocratic succession beyond the pale it had erected for itself. Facts of heterosexual life that had been unwritten in popular romance novels of the time become legible in The Monk to reveal the paradoxes of a domain that excludes the very acts that make it possible.

Although a necessity for the whole undertaking of genealogy, pregnancies are not fruitful here. No infants survive and no heirs are produced, making The Monk a sterile recommendation for either companionate or arranged marriages. Noble blood is tainted and spilled by imprudent or unsanctioned marriages, as well as by the “unbridled debauchery” of heterosexual liaisons (173). The noble blood of two families spills when, pregnant out of wedlock, Beatrice murders her lover to run off with his brother, who in turn slays his gravid paramour out of shame for his part in the conspiracy. Antonia is penetrated, but genealogy is disrupted by both Ambrosio’s status as brother and because he murders her before any outcome of the ejaculate is established. In this novel, Spanish society organized around genealogy is in shambles. As actors in what would have been positioned as cautionary heterosexual tales, these characters can be said to promote the dominant narrative: that one must find a class-appropriate opposite sex, marry primarily to continue the family line, and avoid any pleasurable debauchery in sexual relations. The examples might, in fact, serve to prohibit certain behaviors and foreground “the setting apart of the ‘unnatural’ as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality” (Foucault 39).

Other narratives emerge, however, that challenge how the normative has become “the natural” and, at the same time, showcase for readers everything that they fear (and want to know) about the foreclosed territory. Wendy Jones argues that the novel “shows that disastrous consequences, including the intervention of the supernatural, are incurred only when characters respond to oppressive forms of authority” (144). Organizing social relations around a heterosexual genealogy and the procreative acts required to reproduce it is represented as oppressive and unnatural. For Agnes, the process of childbirth and post-partum maternity is written as unnatural, given that labor and delivery take place in a dungeon, and she has no idea how to care for the infant. Despite being described as possessing the requisite anatomy, she does not intuitively (that is, naturally, essentially) know how to offer her breast to it, and so the infant expires. Because no birth referenced in the novel produces any “natural” subject, the procreative dictate is neutered. As a framework for the un-sanctioned marriages and the gruesome outcomes of childbearing, the genealogical model starts to look bankrupt. If genealogy acts as historical goal, then the telos, or endpoint, of that history does not coincide with the end of the novel. A long chapter on Ambrosio’s Inquisition interrogation, his deal with the demon, and eventual torture closes off the novel, supplanting any happy ending. Lewis’ novel does not simply offer a gentle reproval for marriageable youths or propose any happy resolution to smooth over the trials and tribulations. While it produces in spectacularly graphic detail a study in what not to do, the novel also supplies negative models far beyond any human experience that make the tale ridiculous: Don’t run off with a lover or you’ll end up a bloody zombie; don’t marry the wrong woman or you will produce a monk who turns rapist and murderer.

That space opened by the ridiculous creates an opportunity to investigate and challenge the line drawn between who is socially valued and who should be rejected. Lewis’ novel makes it:

Marrying for love, bearing children, consolidating aristocratic power, and producing particular forms of sexuality constitute legible domains, and yet, at the same time, they represent “unthinkable and un-livable” experiences, too. What appears livable in one context emerges as unthinkable in another: sexual relations inside the abbey compared to such relations outside the abbey, as well as heterosexual sex between Agnes and Raymond versus Ambrosio’s rape of Antonia, all work to position normative in non-normative territory and vice versa. A space designated as the site of assumed celibacy, the convent and monastery, becomes a hotbed of desiring bodies and sexual assignations. Ambrosio “abandoned himself to his passions in full security” with the “feigned Rosario” while “the honour of Agnes was sacrificed to [Raymond’s] passion” (234–35; 186). The processes by which the non-normative produces the normative through negation is a vexed business: if heteronormativity is the valued practice, then fixing heteronormativity in a place where it is not normal muddies the values. In particular, the hetero/homo opposition is unsettled by a character who claims she is a woman, yet dresses as a man so that s/he might have sex with a man in a monastery.

The complex arrangements of gender play and performance between Ambrosio and Rosario/Matilda make legible new configurations even as those relationships are represented as not-the-norm. George Haggerty argues that “the monastery is a precursor of the sexual laboratory, and in a sense it functions as the controlled environment in which the habits of an unfamiliar species can be studied” and where “Male-male relations are being examined, even if they are held up as a sign of horror and disgust” (Haggerty, Queer Gothic 71). To vivify heteronormativity, then, the homoerotic plays the spectre that haunts it. In a genre defined by hauntings and muddied identifications, the ghostly “Bloody Nun” is but one of many (and she was written as heterosexual). Among those spectral figures is Rosario, whose dual gender identities and relation to Ambrosio do not precisely enact a heteronormative logic that holds it up as a sign of horror and disgust. Rather, the descriptions of Ambrosio’s desire for Rosario are represented in terms that suggest gentleness, mutual affection, generosity, and reciprocity; instead, it is Ambrosio’s relationship with Matilda that incites horror and disgust for its coercive dynamic and the couple’s relentless drive toward rape and murder. The reader is introduced to Rosario when he enters Ambrosio’s room with a small gift, “A few of those flowers, reverend Father, which I have observed to be most acceptable to you” (43). Just prior to Rosario’s entrance, Ambrosio engages in verbal self-flagellation over his erotic reaction to a painting of the Madonna in his cell. He assures himself that “what charms me, when ideal and considered as a superior Being, would disgust me, become Woman and tainted with all the failings of Mortality. It is not the Woman’s beauty that fills me with such enthusiasm; It is the Painter’s skill that I admire, it is the Divinity that I adore!” (41). Ambrosio’s rejection of the “Woman tainted” is answered by the gentle knock of the novice monk, Rosario, who brings flowers for Ambrosio’s room. When together, each changes the other for the better: Rosario assumes “an air of gaiety” which is reciprocated in “a tone milder that was usual” for “no voice sounded so sweet to him as did Rosario’s” (42). For all the disgust Ambrosio expresses at the painted face of the Madonna, “he could not help sometimes indulging a desire secretly to see the face of his Pupil” (42–43). After Rosario reveals that he is a woman (and the pronoun remains “he” until the word “woman” is spoken), s/he conspires to remain at the monastery by continuing to cross dress as a man. The sexed body ostensibly remains female, while the public gender identity is performed as masculine.

The link forged between gender identity and sexed body made in the opening scenes of the novel is uncoupled in Rosario/Matilda’s relationship with Ambrosio. When at the height of her powers, Matilda is described as forceful and aggressive, while Ambrosio vacillates between ardent physical desire and abject self-reproach for his newly developed habits. At a moment of weakness in his resolve, Ambrosio is chided for its being “weaker than a Woman’s” (268). Sorting through the complex relations of sex to gender and Rosario/Matilda to Ambrosio results in a panoply of configurations, including male body to male body; female body to male body; feminine behaviors to masculine behaviors, but transposed onto the male and then female body; masculine to masculinized character; feminine body and femininized character. The dizzying array of subject positions begs the question of whether desire between these two characters is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, lesbian, ad infinitum. The “phantasmic abundance” of pleasure written through Rosario/Matilda seems the better choice than what we might call the “heteronormativized” relationship of Ambrosio to Matilda (Butler 98). The identifications here are “multiple and contested” and appear to “reflect in a dense or saturated way the possibilities of multiple and simultaneous substitutions” (Butler 99). Not even our own contemporary binarized categories of “butch” and “femme,” “top” and “bottom” account for the fluidity. Ultimately, according to Judith Butler, “Insofar as a number of fantasies can come to constitute and saturate a site of desire, it follows that we are not in the position of either identifying with a given sex or desiring someone else of that sex; indeed, we are not, more generally, in a position of finding identification and desire to be mutually exclusive phenomena” (99).

The desire to explore the relation of identification and desire, as well as to make legible the multiple and contested gender and sex roles in Gothic novels has yielded many new studies of the genre. Among those who have written extensively on the Gothic and sexuality, George Haggerty, notes that Lewis’ novel “can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the kinds of inner conflict that the emerging crisis of homosexuality made inevitable” (Haggerty, “Literature and Homosexuality” 343). The Gothic novel makes visible those conflicts in behaviors, identities, and sexualities that function as the ne plus ultra that delimited heteronormativity by excluding other forms of gender and sex. By making legible that which has been foreclosed, “these works are liberating—not only because they were able to bring such issues—if not the issue—out into the open, but also because they challenge conservative opinion about both the nature of literary expression and the terms of ‘private’ experience” (Haggerty 350). The critical moves to make this salient and important point have often pointed toward Lewis and other “male Gothic” novelists, like Horace Walpole and William Beckford, as forbearers who opened up the possibility of critique and liberation. The genealogy of a discourse of difference plays an important part in untangling the social and political history of categories cast not as categories at all, but as natural facts of life, and the novelists who produced that discourse are important figures to identify with. Haggerty recovers Lewis from a lukewarm “attempt to evaluate the long-standing tradition that Lewis was homosexual” undertaken by Lewis’ biographer, Louis F. Peck (348). In response to Peck’s argument for “insufficient evidence either way,” Haggerty ponders whether we might “accept the implications of Lewis’ extravagant and long-term financial and emotional commitment to the young William Kelly as a sign of sexual attachment,” adding that Byron described Lewis as “‘a middle-aged man who fills up his table with young ensigns, and has looking-glass panels to his bookcases’” as suggestive of “the nature of Lewis’ taste” (348). The history of queer identity can emerge from a discourse that works by insinuation, or “that which can only come into being indirectly, through allusion, secrecy, theatricality, etc.” (Roulston 761). By identifying novelists whose gender and sexual identifications were previously unspoken means that the history of sexuality is not just a history of (re)productive sexual relationships between opposite sexes. Reimagining the historical record is an inclusive move that gives human shape to the phantasmagorical figures of non-normativity for a community that needs recuperation.

At the same time, assembling a literary genealogy such as this has its drawbacks, as it attempts to establish origins and lineages. This kind of legitimating project gives Lee Edelman occasion to ask, “What if that very framing repeats the structuring of social reality that establishes heteronormativity as the guardian of temporal (re)production?” (181). He argues that “the pattern of the logic of repetition… projectively mapped onto those read as queers, informs as well the insistence on history and on reproductive futurism that’s posited over and against them” (181). Instead:

Situating Lewis on a (linear) timeline from oppression to liberation is enticing, but it is also fraught as a critical move. The very temporality invoked by recuperating the author for queer history works by the same logic it seeks to undo. The logic of genealogy is, as noted above, a logic of heteronormativity that relies on oppositions of normal and hetero- against not-normal and not-hetero, on a smooth succession from one generation to the next. In order to disrupt such a logic, the terms of investigation have to be changed from “queerness-as-being” to “queerness-as-method” (Doan viii–ix, Roulston 762). The Monk provides some of the evidence we might use to embrace queerness-as-method: the novel unmoors sexual behavior from sexual identity and gestures toward an unacknowledged non-normativity of heteronormativity. While the non-normative defines the normative from without, the normative is not a unified by either practice or population in the novel.

Temporality itself is challenged, as the narrative moves back and forth from story to story, many of which cross each other’s time lines. The reader must jump from one historical moment and geographical space to follow, for example, Raymond’s story, which he relates in retrospect, and within which the reader is given the story of the Bleeding Nun, set generations before Raymond’s explanation of his relationship with Agnes. The historical record for the Bleeding Nun is characterized by its temporal gap (and its specter) as Agnes comments “in all the Chronicles of past times, this remarkable Personage is never once mentioned” as she begins her tale “in a tone of burlesqued gravity” (139). Tales within retrospective accounts merge and then are disturbed by a teller’s present moment as Raymond’s stories of past trials are punctuated with comments directed at his present listener, Leonardo, to regale the cleverness of his servant Theodor in his pursuit of Agnes. The novel moves to scenes of Ambrosio and Matilda that seem to have occurred during the time that Raymond was relating the story. A straight, linear narrative would reflect some of the same structural qualities that a genealogy might, and the novel’s queerness can be seen in its method of story-telling. Genre itself is unsettled as the work includes several poems both lyrical and narrative, making clear that fixed, unified categories can’t be strictly applied to Lewis’ work either.

The Monk provides little in terms of form or content from which an “ancestral genealogy” might be reconstructed. Tracking a subject to identify with assumes that a stable identity is out there awaiting our recuperation and that a continuity of subjects and experiences exists prior to the search for it. Yet, Lewis’ novel itself disturbs the terms of identity, questions normative histories and challenges the narrative moves that produce and maintain normative identities and linear histories. The hyperbolic pressure applied to the two-body system of desire, and the slippage between desires and practices points toward the failure of constitutive categories to make sense of the myriad gender and sexual configurations the novel’s represented bodies inhabit. Lewis articulates what could not be stated, describes what has been made invisible and excluded, and offers sexuality as indecipherable and desire as incoherent. As if to foreshadow the broken frames in the hall of family portraits, Lewis breaks the narrative frame in the novel’s “Dedication.” There he claims that he makes visible all plagiarisms “of which he is aware,” but suggests that others may yet lurk unbeknownst to him. In other words, the knowledge is and will always be incomplete. Between what has been intentionally copied and what has been unwittingly (or unacknowledged wittingly) reproduced, Lewis intimates that there are some things that cannot be made visible. The line of textual ownership for the reader is fuzzy— it is unclear how a reader might negotiate the conundrum of recognizing based on their reading and knowledge, and trying to figure out if Lewis knew about that or not. If we see it and think that we know it, does that make it so? Using the logic here, how does one “read” behaviors and assemble them into a dossier of “sexuality”? Where is the line drawn that would inscribe the difference between one type of unspoken desire and another? Does an act define an identity? Does an unacknowledged desire dictate an identity that one would not make public? Lewis’ addition to the Gothic canon takes the reader into an imagined world where gender and sex slip into shifting configurations. In this world, narratives do not account for the practices of desire, chronology does produce or represent a genealogical imperative, and all bodies are queer.

Works Cited