'Monk' Lewis as Literary Lion

With the revelation that the anonymous author of The Monk was none other than Matthew Gregory Lewis, Esq., newly-elected M.P., came a storm of criticism that cemented an identification in the public imagination between the author and his scandalous text and characters. The public's fascination with the "perversions" of the novel's main characters (including the "lascivious" Ambrosio and the demon-transvestite Matilda) led to readings of Lewis's character as author and man through the lens of the characters in his novel, a move which was epitomized in Lewis's nickname: "the Monk". The overwhelming popularity of The Monk also led to personal celebrity for Matthew Gregory Lewis, with its accompanying attempts to locate the truth about the novel's author in the relationship between his body and his text. However, just as efforts to condemn the novel and its author never achieved complete success, neither did the outcry surrounding the novel result in utter condemnation of its author and his talents. Instead, Lewis seems to have achieved the impossible by transforming what might have proved to be a disastrous success de scandale into a substantial reputation as one of the most successful literary lions of his day. As Lewis was aware, writing in the debased genre of the Gothic novel was an unlikely route to literary laurels, since the genre was commonly constructed as the province of hack writers, especially women. As a man who rose to fame as a Gothic novelist, a form conventionally thought of as "light," and therefore "well adapted to female ingenuity," Lewis's masculinity as well as his literary authority would already have been called into question by his choice of genre. Critics in this period often refer with some anxiety to the gender confusion which could result when men wrote in such "feminine" genres, casting the literary act as a kind of transvestism. For example, one critic, reviewing yet another novel authored by "A Lady," cautioned men against the temptation "to shelter themselves under petticoats" by choosing a female pseudonym in order to exploit some manly reviewer's chivalrous impulses. He warns: "such an author would not find it easy to undress himself, and, in his own person, claim the bays bestowed upon the Lady." Such gender stereotyping clearly complicated Lewis's relationship to the literary and critical establishment, by making it easier to cast him as effeminate and call into question his literary authority. In the aftermath of The Monk's success, moralists were horrified by the proliferation of anonymous cheap editions of the novel, as well as the increase in mostly-anonymous female writers who adopted Lewis's popular style. With no author whom they might attack on moral or legal grounds, outraged critics they inevitably fell back on castigating Lewis for these productions as well. As the author of Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London claims after reciting a long list of complaints against the morality of The Monk and its author: "Another evil is example; forth step hundreds of novelists, who ape the perverted genius of the author of the Monk . . . forth have rushed from the press of late days swarms of these things, and many from female pens too, which will as scientifically excite the passions, as any chemical preparation which may be made up." The language of invading plague this satirist employs reveals his sense that Lewis has let loose an uncontrollable horde of anonymous female hack writers who threaten society with their dangerously drug-like novels. Unlike Lewis, whom the author represents as possessing a certain "genius," even if it is of a perverted kind, these novelizing hordes merely "ape" Lewis's example, manufacturing passionately …