The Monk by M. G. Lewis: Revolution, Religion and the Female Body

Agnieszka Łowczanin

doi:10.1515/texmat-2016-0002

Authors

Agnieszka Łowczanin University of Łódź

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2016-0002

Abstract

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depictions of women. Lewis plays with public and domestic representations of femininity, steeped in social expectation and a rich cultural and religious imaginary. The novel’s ambivalence in the representation of femininity draws on the one hand on Catholic symbolism, especially its depictions of the Madonna and the virgin saints, and on the other, on the way the revolutionaries used the body of the queen, Marie Antoinette, to portray the corruption of the royal family. The Monk fictionalizes the ways in which the female body was exposed, both by the Church and by the Revolution, and appropriated to become a highly politicized entity, a tool in ideological argumentation.

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Author Biography

Agnieszka Łowczanin, University of Łódź

Agnieszka Łowczanin teaches in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź. Her main areas of academic interest are the diversities and paradoxes of the eighteenth century, and the potentialities of the Gothic in literature and film. Together with Dorota Wiśniewska she co-edited a volume of critical essays All that Gothic (2014), and published numerous articles on various aspects of the Gothic. Since 2009 she has been one of the editors of DeKadentzya, a journal of Polish poetry, prose and art. She is now working on a book which traces the expansion of the Gothic to the territory of Poland at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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