All Roads Lead to England: The Monk Constructs the Nation

The Gothic is frequently read in terms of transgression and punishment. Although my reading also makes use of that dialectic, I try not to assume that transgression occurs whenever an outwardly rational individual taps the irrational depths which are part and parcel of the human make-up. Rather, I wish to contextualize Freud, to ask who specifically punishes whom in what manner and for what reason. In the paper that follows, I intend to suggest that Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) performs the English nation. This nation lacks a unitary identity; however, rather than dedicate itself to difference, a reformed political leadership, now culturally (or at least outwardly) middle class, pretends to unity, and builds unity, through the hierarchical appropriation of a colonized Other. Liah Greenfeld distinguishes between the nation as a "sovereign people" and the nation as a "unique sovereign people." As a "sovereign people," the nation comes into being in sixteenth century England, because Henry VIII's breach with Rome means that rather than pre-nationalist Catholics he will rule free and equal Englishmen. In other words, the nation enters the (modern) world as a democracy, although of course in the sixteenth century England lives through the first only of what will prove a series of democratic revolutions. Despite its limited immediate success, the nation as a democracy, because it defines the "people" as the bearers of sovereignty, is potentially an all-inclusive political community. The "people" have no narrowly defined national meaning; to the extent that they are English historically, their Englishness is not necessarily geographically bound and is thus, implicitly, available to the world. "A nation coextensive with humanity," writes Greenfeld, "is in no way a contradiction in terms." A "sovereign people," however, does not exhaust the meanings of the word "nation." At virtually the same time that the English transform into a "sovereign people," they develop as a "unique sovereign people." That is to say, the word "nation" in addition covers any territorial, historical, political, ethnic, religious and linguistic identities, to name a few, which the English claim distinguish them from the French, say, or from the Spanish. English uniqueness is thus constructed negatively and it directly contradicts popular sovereignty. It colonizes where a democracy, in theory, includes even the genuinely, specifically (but misnamed) Other. Uniqueness, therefore, requires maintenance. It must be established—and established again, and again—in the face of (imputed) difference. Although "the original, non-particularistic idea of the nation" lingers, since the later sixteenth century the nation has been most readily interpreted as a collectivity with a very specific identity. Thus, Homi Bhabha presupposes a "unique people" when he distinguishes between a "pedagogical" articulation of the nation and a "performative" one. The former approach casts the nation-people as the "historical 'objects' of a nationalist pedagogy"—that is, the uniquely English absorb, from the powers-that-be, the currently preferred version of the national genesis. At the same time, however, the nation-people are "the 'subjects' of a process of signification"—that is, they perform the nation, construct it, by imposing coherence on "The scraps, patches and rags of daily life." In the process, they cannot help but notice that daily experience is, indeed, fragmented, that the certainty of the past does not reach into the present. Whenever the performative thus disrupts the pedagogical, Bhabha argues, the nation reveals the heterogeneity of its people, causing the constructed Otherness of other nations to disintegrate as well. Arguably, these moments of becoming, or of coming undone, throw the English back on their potential as Greenfeld's "sovereign people," their potential for radical democracy. That Greenfeld's and Bhabha's analyses of nationhood are relevant to The Monk is fairly …