by Matt Cardin
Then Ambrosio signs his soul over to Lucifer in exchange for being rescued from human punishment. His fate is far worse than the Inquisition could have managed:
He [the Daemon] released the sufferer. headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river’s banks . . . The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio’s wounds . . . The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eye-balls with their crooked beaks . . . six miserable days did the Villain languish. (127)
Matt Cardin
Source: Lewis, Matthew. [1796] 1845. The Monk. New York: Moore & Jackson.
It is easy to see how religion, sexuality, and gender stand out as prominent themes throughout the novel. Set in seventeenth-century Spain, Lewis’s text is safely distanced from his own time and place, but it was clearly influenced by the violence of the French Revolution, discussions of the slave trade, and attitudes toward homosexuality at the time. Further, it demonstrates the evils of Catholicism characteristic of the Gothic and features a series of both tyrannical and pure women, culminating in the shape-shifting Matilda. Ambrosio, embracing his pact with the devil, murders Antonia’s mother and fakes Antonia’s death in order to fully possess and rape her, an act that culminates in her death and his arrest by the Inquisition. When word of what Mother St. Ursula has done reaches the people of Madrid, the crowd riots and tramples her in one of the most graphic scenes in Romantic literature: an act of the people against oppression. Agnes is found clutching the corpse of her baby, and Ambrosio, facing death, allows Matilda to entice him once more to sell his soul, an act that initiates his death and ends the novel. A short list of further side plots includes folkloric figures like the wandering Jew and the bleeding nun, encounters with bandits, family tyrannies, and incest.
The Monk was both inspired by and inspired other forms of literature. Lewis drew heavily on shorter texts, many of which he translated and stitched together with his own graphic twist. He admitted to being strongly influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the last of which is often discussed in opposition to Lewis’s novel as examples of female and male Gothic. Whereas Radcliffe’s novels feature scenes of terror and the explained supernatural, Lewis’s supernatural is real, and it leads to the graphic scenes of horror for which he is known. Radcliffe answered Lewis’s novel with another of her own, The Italian (1797). The Monk incited a series of adaptations in the form of dramas, pantomimes, poems, and chapbooks. But growing interest in Gothic literature by women has drawn attention to the prominent rewriting of The Monk: Zofloya (1806), by Charlotte Dacre, referred to by some scholars as the “female monk” for her open idealization of the author. Zofloya features the same level of graphic gender and sexual engagement, with the added shock of its female authorship. Despite harsh criticism from reviewers such as Coleridge, Lewis’s novel also inspired canonical writers, such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. It was, unsurprisingly, praised by the Marquis de Sade, who much preferred it over Radcliffe’s work.
Twenty-first-century readers and scholars hail The Monk for its establishment of bold transgressions within institutions and identities, offering critiques of justice, religion, family, and tyranny as well as extensive explorations of morality and desire that would become trademarks of the Gothic tradition. Its use of underground and closed-off spaces creates a rich multilayered and recognizable comment on the dangers of repression and the power of the return of the repressed. It thus offers a keen illustration of claustrophobia in terms of both space and social structures. A novel preoccupied with excess, it presents a villain who is himself victimized by not only the devil and his temptations but the unrealistic expectations of the institutions that hold him in multiple layers of incarceration, making him an unsettlingly easy character with whom to sympathize. The extent to which the social structures within the text have its villains, victims, and monsters allows the Gothic to juxtapose them with the supernatural, exposing pervasive and, as such, invisible sociopolitical injustices. Unnatural repression of desire creates a master/slave relationship that causes rather than prevents damaging perversity. That Lewis offers readers the same enjoyment of excess through his prose creates a tense and uneasy bond between the reader and the novel’s characters that would be replicated in subsequent Gothic works.
A renewed consideration of Gothic texts produced during the 1790s and their influences has brought The Monk into the twenty-first-century classroom, where its intertextuality has revealed its prominent place within the Romantic literary scene. The 2013 edition of the novel through Valancourt Press includes an introduction by Stephen King, which outlines the extent to which current writers are also indebted to the vociferously transgressive moves of Lewis’s first novel and its championship of horror.
Laura R. Kremmel
See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Terror versus Horror.
Further Reading
Brewer, William D. 2004. “Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 2: 192–207.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. [1796] 2004. The Monk: A Romance. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press.
Macdonald, D. L. 2000. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Miles, Robert. 2000. “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.” In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 41–57. Oxford: Blackwell.
“THE MONKEY’S PAW”
“The Monkey’s Paw” is a short story by W. W. Jacobs (William Wymark Jacobs, 1863–1943), first published in the September 1902 issue of Harper’s magazine and included in his collection Our Lady of the Barge that same year. Inspired by the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp from The Arabian Nights, the story is about how people who interfere with fate do so to their sorrow. The theme is summed up in the epigram: Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.
Sergeant-Major Morris, recently returned from India, visits the White family bearing the eponymous talisman, which he claims is cursed. It can grant three wishes, but greed clouds the holder’s head. Its previous owner used his third wish to ask for death. Mr. White rescues the mummified paw from the fire after Morris attempts to destroy it. The wish for £200 to clear their debts is satisfied when their son Herbert is mangled by a machine the next day. Their second wish is for Herbert to be alive again. Herbert returns that night and, although his appearance is not described, his mother’s actions in barricading the door against him indicate what a monster he must be. Mr. White’s third wish is for Herbert to be dead again.
Although “The Monkey’s Paw” is often cited as an example of great American literature, the author was born and lived in England all his life. The story is something of a departure for Jacobs, who wrote primarily humorous and satirical stories or seafaring tales. His early works were praised by the likes of Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, and Christopher Morley.
The story has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century fiction and film, and it has been widely anthologized, including in literature textbooks widely used in American public schools. It was performed as a one-act play in 1907, has been filmed numerous times (as early as 1933), was adapted for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, and provided the inspiration for works as diverse as operas, rock music lyrics, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, and episodes of the TV programs The Monkees and The Simpsons.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power.
Further Reading
Chesterton, G. K. 1953. “W. W. Jacobs.” In A Handful of Authors: Essays on B
ooks and Writers, edited by Dorothy Collins, 28–35. New York: Sheed and Ward.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1997. “An Overview of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’” In Short Stories for Students, vol. 2, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 146–159. Detroit, MI: Gale.
MONSTERS
Horror literature and film have a long and productive history of engaging with and using monsters. Much of the early horror narratives drew from mythologies, folklore, and theological tradition, though they were limited by the moral standards of the day, so explicit detail is often vague rather than concrete. Early examples include the appearance of Satan as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806). The monster narrative as it would be recognized today draws from these mythic, religious, and folkloric influences, and synthesizes these with more modern cultural concerns. Some of the most influential and notable texts in this tradition emerged from British romanticism and, particularly, the summer at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that served as the point of origin for two highly influential monster texts. One is John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which was published in 1819 and became one of the founding texts of modern vampire fiction, presenting the central monster as a romantic and aristocratic figure. The more famous text from 1818, and perhaps the most influential “monster” text in horror, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Shelley mixes theological and mythic narratives around the creation of humanity with new technological advances in science to create an extremely compelling new monster text. Both of these texts became extremely successful upon publication, spawning a host of theatrical adaptations throughout the 1800s.
The figure of the vampire with its mix of aristocratic hauteur, violence, and simmering eroticism became exceptionally popular throughout the nineteenth century. Key texts include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s 1847 serial Varney the Vampire as well as Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla of 1871–1872. These texts solidified the tropes and expectations of the vampire monster, which would reach its high point with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.
Things That Should Not Be
The word “monster” comes from the Latin word monstrum, meaning a divine omen, portent, or warning, by way of the French monstre, meaning a creature afflicted with a birth defect or biological abnormality. Etymologically, therefore, a monster is a creature that exhibits some abnormality or deformation that serves as a warning or portent of something morally and/or metaphysically amiss. An understanding of this embedded meaning helps to illuminate the monstrosity of zombies (abnormally animated corpses), werewolves (abnormal hybrids of human and beast), vampires (undead bloodsuckers), Frankenstein’s monster (a loathsome, animate mass of sewn-together corpse parts), serial killers (normal-looking people concealing murderously deranged psyches), the giant insects of atomic age horror movies (tiny natural creatures enlarged to abnormal proportions and thereby made lethal), and many other such things. In all of these cases, the monster is horrifying because it is, on some level, a “thing that should not be” (as Lovecraft might have put it), an entity that inspires fear and loathing not only, and not even primarily, because of what it does, but because of what it is.
Matt Cardin
As products of the cultural anxieties of their time, monsters have been subject to much critical attention as scholars trace their various contexts and analyze how this impacts the monsters of a particular era. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culturally shocked in the aftermath of Darwin’s research on human nature and experiencing cultural change and instability at home and abroad, show a deep preoccupation with degeneration and devolution. This finds expression in a wide range of texts, including Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). To become monstrous was to lose one’s humanity. In a world where Darwinian evolution had replaced the religious as the source of human subjectivity, a person could become animal or abhuman with terrifying ease. The cultural and social upheaval of the early twentieth century further exacerbated this tendency as exemplified through the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and his so-called Cthulhu Mythos, famously first presented in Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928.
As the twentieth century developed, historical changes forced change upon the presentation of the monster. The Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s made pop-culture icons out of both Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula, with Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931) becoming wildly popular. The performances of both Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Dracula created an enduring image of what these monsters were supposed to be, a conception that endures to the present day. The decades that followed featured new monsters as horror responded to new cultural stimuli. The age of the atomic bomb gave rise to new expressions of fear in science fiction–influenced horrors such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Seigel, 1956; based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers), Gojira (dir. Ishirô Honda, 1954; known in the West as Godzilla), and The Blob (dir. Irvin Yeaworth, 1958).
As the Cold War ended and youth culture became increasingly important to cinema audiences, a new kind of monster was made: the slasher. Beginning with controversial films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the new monsters were murderous figures that preyed upon the young and the reckless. Notable examples in this genre include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Last House on the Left (dir. Wes Craven, 1972), and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The slasher genre drew inspiration from director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, often identified as the first slasher film, which was adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1960 novel of the same title. Both the novel and the film are centered on the character of Norman Bates, whose twisted psyche makes him a true human monster. Meanwhile, even as this new trend developed, the more traditional monster narratives that drew on religious or spiritual themes became increasingly derivative after the successes of both Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), the former based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and the latter adapted by William Peter Blatty from his best-selling 1971 novel.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the horror monster as killer was increasingly replaced with the horror of the zombie. Thanks to the success of films such as George A. Romero’s Living Dead series (1968–2009) and novels such as Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), the figure of the zombie has increasingly been seen as a metaphor for the state of subjectivity under late capitalism, articulating a range of fears around race, the spread of disease, and the rise of consumerism. Zombies have become part of modern pop-culture, with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic books spawning a franchise that includes video games and a high-profile television show. Despite the notion that such monster texts may be considered “lowbrow,” the zombie has become ubiquitous, suggesting that now, more than ever, there is a desire to experience new monster narratives.
Jon Greenaway
See also: Bloch, Robert; Carmilla; Cthulhu Mythos; Dracula; The Exorcist; “The Great God Pan”; The Monk; Mummies; Psychological Horror; Rosemary’s Baby; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Vathek; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft; Zombies.
Further Reading
Asma, Stephen T. 2009. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hogle, Jerrold E. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skal, David J. 1994. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Penguin Books.
MOORE, ALAN (1953–)
While he has produced short stories, novels, poetry and other, more difficult to classify literary and performance pieces, English writer, occultist, and magician Alan Moore is best known for his work in comic books and g
raphic novels. Moore is among the most important comics writers of the last half-century, having exerted an incalculable influence not only over that medium, but also over Anglo-American popular culture broadly since the 1980s. Moore often works in, around, and through the horror genre, and his work was crucial to the turn toward darker themes and Gothic aesthetics that spread through the world of British and American comics in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of Moore’s fictions, both sequential art and literary, contain elements of supernatural horror.
Moore’s darkly toned work with British independent comics magazines Warrior and 2000 AD led to his assignment to work on DC’s then fairly formulaic monster-focused series, Saga of the Swamp Thing. Moore scripted it from 1983 to 1987 to tremendous acclaim, contributing to a renewed popular interest in horror comics that would lead DC to create their new mature-readers imprint, Vertigo, which would publish some of the most important horror and fantasy titles of the late 1980s and 1990s, including Swamp Thing spin-off Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Moore’s work on Swamp Thing drew on his interest in American Gothic literature and folklore, flirting with a “monster of the month” approach while creating more complex narrative arcs. It fused classical horror tropes and monsters including werewolves and vampires with psychedelic science fictional concepts reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick’s darker moments and anticipatory of the approach taken by the 1990s TV series The X-Files. Moore would push his interest in complexly structured and maddeningly paranoid plots far further in the Victorian Gothic series From Hell (serialized 1989–1996, collected 1999), illustrated by Eddie Campbell. Combining horror and historical metafiction, this reimagining of the Jack the Ripper murders remains among the most ambitious graphic novels ever created, and was instrumental in the surge of popular interest in neo-Victorian Gothic fiction that continues to this day. It was adapted to film by the Hughes brothers in 2001.