Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk

This essay offers a reading of Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) which attempts to elaborate Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that "the Gothic was the first novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to male homosexuality". I wish to do this by considering a number of interrelated contexts of production and reception for The Monk , namely, the generic pretexts of eighteenth-century pre- and post-Revolutionary French anti-clerical pornography and of British anti-Catholic genres from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Whig aristocratic libertinism; the French Revolution and British counter-revolution; renewed campaigns of homosexual persecution in Britain and Northern Europe; and, in particular, the relationship between the British Protestant state and homosexual persecution in the context of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation from the late 1770s. Into this mix of feverish Protestant pretexts, The Monk enfolds an Enlightenment tropology of light and unveiling, by way of contemporary French anti-clerical pornographic texts, particularly dramas, such as Jacques Marie Boutet de Monvel's The Cloistered Victims (1791) and Benoit Joseph Marsollier's Camille, or The Vault (1791), both of which feature the conventual punishment of live burial restaged in The Monk , as well The Convent (1792), by the Enlightenment feminist and Girondist supporter, Olympe de Gouges, which features the overthrowing of a convent, also restaged in The Monk . Reviewing the novel in 1797, and writing from a counter-revolutionary and nominal Anglican position—which nominally deplored both superstition and enthusiasm—Coleridge objected to the "blending , with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition", as well as to the text's "libidinous minuteness". Coleridge's reading attests to the fear that nominal Anglicanism, the "awfully true ... religion," cannot be distinguished from Catholicism, identified with "superstition". And this is indeed the fear that haunts the Protestant confessional state which came into being as a protest against Catholicism. Coleridges reading suggests a form of nominal Anglicanism haunted by a paranoid fear that it cannot separate itself from its diabolical other (a Catholic other to be distinguished yet again from the low other of Protestant enthusiasm). Read as a parody of these earlier Protestant pretexts, Lewis's text engages Francis Bacon's reference to the early seventeenth century Puritan reformers of the Church of Rome, as practitioners of the "superstition in avoiding superstition". And it is precisely this form of "superstition" that informs Coleridge's "awfully true religion" and his fear of Lewis' contamination of Protestantism by Catholicism. This formulation also suggests the contradiction underlying the British Protestant state, which held the repudiation of "superstitious" Roman Catholicism as a defining article of faith. "Superstition in avoiding superstition" suggests the circular structure of paranoia, a structure informing the institutional and legislative machinery of the British Protestant state from 1689, which is generated by the fear of a divided or double allegiance on the part of Roman Catholics to the state of Britain and the church of Rome. In this way, then, the Protestant confessional state, demanding allegiance to the single creed of Protestantism, but beset by the fear of a double allegiance, enacts its own paranoid Gothic plot. On one level, this historical Gothic plot can be seen to be engaged generically in the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel as the paranoid Gothic plot of anti-Catholicism. Both the 1780s, which saw the renewed campaign for Catholic Emancipation, and the 1790s, are significant periods in this history of the Protestant (specifically Anglican) confessional state. If anything, the 1790s constituted, as one contemporary commentator has argued, the "anni mirabili of ... pro-Catholic and ... pro-Irish sentiments on the Right". …