Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk
Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel is a cri de cœur against sexual and cultural mores that reverberates to this day.
by Colin Broadmoor
Horror is not a feel-good genre. Horror disturbs us, frightens us, makes us uncomfortable with ourselves and our world. Horror can be a means of processing trauma, it can be a defense against social control, and it can be a weapon aimed directly at the heart of oppression. Horror is a blended scream: part rage, part terror, part exultation. Horror remains defiant.
In 1796, against a backdrop of deadly state violence targeting LGBT people, a gay teenager anonymously published what has since become one of the best-known examples of the English Gothic Horror. His name was Matthew Lewis and his book is The Monk. Lewis’s graphic depictions of incest, rape, murder, gender-bending, and illegal same-sex desire violated every major taboo of British society and drew immediate calls for censorship and criminal prosecution. Not bad for a debut novel.
These days, it’s not unusual to find the words “subversive” or “transgressive” nestled within glowing ad-copy or on the back cover of the latest franchise installment. Resistance will, after all, always be commodified—but if we allow transgression to become a mere buzzword, we undermine the revolutionary potential of art, especially art by marginalized members of society.
The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century, however, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:
As defined by the ancient civil or Canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality (Foucault 42).
This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state. In the British civil system, sex between men first became a capital offense with the promulgation of the tastefully-named Buggery Act of 1533. For 200 years, the law was rarely enforced—though, when it was, authorities staged it as a spectacle of violence for public entertainment and social control. Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk’s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: “By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.” In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities.
In the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a pogrom aimed specifically at gay men.
As sodomy was a capital offense, the standard of proof was high in such cases. To overcome this difficulty, the authorities—as always—expanded the law by creating a lesser offense of “assault with the attempt to commit sodomy” for which the burden of evidence was significantly lower. Though not hanged, the unfortunate men found guilty of “attempted sodomy” were exposed to the violence of the mob in the public pillory. These victims of the homophobic state were subject to great physical abuse, maiming, blinding, and occasionally death as the crowd (under the direction of the authorities) attacked them with filth and rocks.
It is specifically against this context of homophobic paranoia, when men were being murdered by the state and mob for acting on same-sex desire, that we must read Lewis’s choice to push the boundaries of homoerotic depictions in The Monk. For obvious reasons, homoeroticism in The Monk is coded, so it falls to the reader to identify indicators of same-sex desire within the text.
One of the most arresting homoerotic images in novel is the appearance of the youthful and desirable Satan whom Ambrosio—the eponymous Monk—finds himself “enchanted” by during an occult ceremony in a cavern:
A cold shivering seized his body, and He sank upon one knee, unable to support himself.
‘He comes!’ exclaimed Matilda in a joyful accent.
Ambrosio started, and expected the Daemon with terror. What was his surprize, when the Thunder ceasing to roll, a full strain of melodious Music sounded in the air. At the same time the cloud dispersed, and He beheld a Figure more beautiful than Fancy’s pencil ever drew. It was a Youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: A bright Star sparkled upon his forehead; Two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders; and his silken locks were confined by a band of many-coloured fires, which played round his head, formed themselves into a variety of figures, and shone with a brilliance far surpassing that of precious Stones. Circlets of Diamonds were fastened round his arms and ankles, and in his right hand He bore a silver branch, imitating Myrtle. His form shone with dazzling glory: He was surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light, and at the moment that He appeared, a refreshing air breathed perfumes through the Cavern. Enchanted at a vision so contrary to his expectations, Ambrosio gazed upon the Spirit with delight and wonder: Yet however beautiful the Figure, He could not but remark a wildness in the Daemon’s eyes, and a mysterious melancholy impressed upon his features, betraying the Fallen Angel, and inspiring the Spectators with secret awe.
Lewis, pg. 237
In Romantic Agony, Mario Praz describes the figure like this: “The Devil appears in the form of a very beautiful young man, his features overcast with melancholy–as is suitable for a fallen angel of the Miltonic school (with a touch, also, of Eblis in Vathek).” The reality goes much deeper than Praz suspects, however. Not simply a “fallen angel of the Miltonic school,” the erotic figure that makes such an impression on Ambrosio’s senses is no lesser literary personage than the fallen angel of Milton’s Paradise Lost—Satan, himself.
In Book III of Paradise Lost, Satan takes on the form of a handsome cherub to fool the watchful archangel Uriel. It is from that scene that the young Lewis “borrowed” the elements of his own sexualized Satan:
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling Cherube he appeers,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smil’d Celestial, and to every Limb
Sutable grace diffus’d, so well he feign’d;
Under a Coronet his flowing haire
In curles on either cheek plaid, wings he wore
Of many a colourd plume sprinkl’d with Gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a Silver wand.
Paradise Lost, III: 635-645
During Lewis’s lifetime, Paradise Lost was understood as sympathetic to Satan. Contemporary readers saw in Satan a rebel hero and scapegoat cursed for his nature by the same God who created it—an iconic stand-in for a man resisting a society that criminalizes his natural inclinations in the name of the same God who created those inclinations. In the 18th century, Milton’s poetry was identified by writers—including Richard Hurd, Joseph Addision, Edmund Burke, Nathan Drake, John Aikin, and Anna Laetitia Aikin—as a blueprint for “Gothicism,” the supposed literary ancestor of the Gothic genre. Romantic poets like Byron, Shelley, and Blake found much to admire and emulate in Paradise Lost, not the least of which being the possibility of Satan as antihero. As Neil Forsyth notes in The Satanic Epic, “The Romantic poets were especially inclined to take Satan at more or less his own evaluation as the poem’s hero speaking and acting from (in that wonderfully ambivalent phrase) ‘sence of injur’d merit.’” Satan was also already connected to sodomy within the eighteenth-century literary tradition: a chronicle of the demimonde, Satan’s harvest home: or the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts, (illustrated by an Authentick and Entertaining Story) And other Satanic Works, daily propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom was published in London in 1749.
Contemporary readers saw in Satan a rebel hero and scapegoat cursed for his nature by the same God who created it.
Milton’s work embodies what we now think of as the “English Canon.” By sexualizing and camping Milton’s Satan, Lewis achieves two things. First, he appropriates the legitimacy of Milton by refashioning The Monk as a direct literary descendant of a foundational work of English Protestantism. Second, Lewis creates the first openly queer reading of Paradise Lost by making explicit the latent homoeroticism of Milton’s epic. In this way Lewis can be seen as carving out a space for queer experience in the very heart of English Protestant orthodoxy. In The Monk, Lewis repeatedly produces queer possibilities—including the possibility of a homoerotic Paradise Lost—and contrary to heteronormative expectation, does not fully shut these possibilities down.
In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag writes, “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not.” There is something just noticeably extra about Lewis’s twink-Satan that allows him to be Milton’s Satan and simultaneously something more. This is Milton’s Satan seen through an erotic and camp gaze. The most strikingly camp element of the description is that which Lewis added to the Book III cherub-Satan from elsewhere in Paradise Lost: the circlets of diamonds around his wrists and anklets, an allusion to the adamantine fetters with which Satan is bound in the poem (Paradise Lost I:48). Lewis converts the epic into camp by transforming the unbreakable symbols of Satan’s punishment into bondage bling. The intended sign of oppression becomes a symbol of pride and self-acceptance.
Milton is not an obvious candidate for an erotic poet. Even limiting one’s options to the 17th century—evidentally a highly erotic time to be alive—a reader would need to ignore such names as John Donne, Andrew Marvell and John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester before settling on John Milton. However, if you were looking for a poet whose eroticism glories in ambiguity, edge cases, and bodily transgression and violation, you won’t go wrong with Milton.
Paradise Lost is a widely-acclaimed high-brow biblical epic. It’s also a weirdly sexual work, and Milton undergirds the poem with contradictory erotic tensions. Milton’s depiction of prelapsarian sexuality in Paradise Lost is… unorthodox. Mainstream Christian theology of the 17th century, both Catholic and Protestant, held that sexuality developed after the Fall of Adam and Eve and that the primary and justificatory function of sexual behavior was reproduction, as evidenced by religious prohibitions against various nonproductive sexual practices. Yet in Paradise Lost, prelapsarian (and therefore ideal) sex was frequent but never fruitful. Not only does the poem enthusiastically develop the erotic qualities of the relationship between Adam and Eve, it also exhibits a profound ambivalence—possibly even hostility—toward reproduction itself. For Milton, true unsullied sexuality was sex for sex’s sake.
Paradise Lost might have been one of the few “queer” works that young men like Lewis would have been encouraged to read.
In Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam, having already described his own amorous situation, asks Raphael to describe angelic sex. In response to this question, Raphael blushes and smiles—but he answers. As Raphael tries to explain to Adam the bliss of Angelic sexual union that transcends body and being, the first man becomes increasingly aroused. When Adam attempts to prolong his conversation with Raphael, he admits, “Desire with thee still longer to converse / Induc’d me” (VIII 252-53). This is angelology as foreplay. Adam and Raphael are engaging in a moment of shared eroticism. And shared homoeroticism.
If what we might call “queer readings” are available in Paradise Lost today, we should assume that they (or something like them) were also available to a sensitive reader like Lewis in the 18th century. Indeed, Paradise Lost might have been one of the few “queer” works that young men like Lewis would have been encouraged to read, considering how (per Foucault) the scope of education for young men was repeatedly narrowed to exclude non-heteronormative material.
It’s clear that Paradise Lost left an impression on Matthew Lewis. As a young man, Lewis frequently quoted the poem in his personal letters. The sexual and bodily ambiguity exhibited by Milton’s demons in Paradise Lost serves as the template for demonic bodies and sexuality in The Monk. And Milton’s rebel Satan, in Lewis’s hands, becomes the ultimate object of sexual desire—chiseled beauty, down to fuck, with a camp smile on those Luciferian lips.
At a time when the state fueled its spectacle with the broken bodies of gay men—tortured, murdered, erased—Matthew Lewis was developing into his own sexuality…a sexuality that he knew made him a target for socially-sanctioned violence. He wrote The Monk when he was almost nineteen, looking down the barrel of a lifetime of suppression, shame, humiliation, and fear. In The Monk, one of the few recorded pre-Rock & Roll screams of youth in revolt, Lewis violates every sexual taboo of Georgian England—except one. Early on, the book toys with same-sex desire when the monk falls for a young acolyte in the monastery. But this is just the ol’ bait-and-switch: the pretty young acolyte is quickly revealed to be a young woman in disguise. It’s almost as if Lewis is rubbing society’s face in the fact that it can accept incest, rape, and murder—anything but “the love that dare not speak its name.” He then rips Satan out of the best-known biblical epic in the English language by one of the most celebrated Canonical poets and makes the bad-boy of Christianity hot.
It was traditional for men about to be hanged for sodomy to renounce their behaviors before the audience of the gallows. Thus was homophobic “justice” served by making the victim complicit in his own condemnation. There is a similar ideological function served by the pressure on homosexual authors, after allowing their text to explore homoerotic alternatives to heterosexuality, to reject the queerness of their own work—something we have seen throughout all ages of English literature.
This pressure to recant falls most strongly on Lewis at the end of The Monk. All right, you’ve had your fun—say the 18th-century arbiters of acceptable queer fiction—now give us the happy ending where the guy gets the girl. As long as the text concluded by celebrating heterosexual unions, all the text’s youthful cheekiness and boundary-pushing would be forgiven. But he didn’t and it never was.
The Monk is “queer art” not just because it represents a “queer perspective” or “alternative voice”, but because it resists and rejects the logic of compulsory heterosexuality.
The book does end with some successful heterosexual pairings, but none are happy and in each case the spouse is at best a proxy for the true, unobtainable object of desire. Lewis resisted the literary tradition’s heteronormative influence: by camping Milton’s Satan, he created his own proto-queer reading of Paradise Lost and discovered a place for queer identity within that same Canon. The Monk is “queer art” not just because it was made by a gay man, not just because it represents a “queer perspective” or “alternative voice”—The Monk is queer art because it resists and rejects the logic of compulsory heterosexuality. The Monk was a targeted attack on repressive social and sexual mores.
Ironically, The Monk would probably be harder to publish today than it was in 1796. Technically a YA #ownvoices novel itself, the book runs up against our own puritanical impulses when it comes to literature: it’s one things for kids to write this stuff, but you can’t let them read it! Depictions of rape and incest make it much less likely to be targeted to readers of Lewis’s own age when he composed it. Even unhappy endings—Lewis’s final act of resistance—are now dismissed as “grimdark,” “reactionary” and even “harmful.” Furthermore, The Monk is now part of the Canon, and is therefore immediately suspect.
We claim that we want “transgressive” fiction, but a truly transgressive work will shock, offend, and distress its readers—and we are less comfortable with that idea today. In reality, we only really want comfortable transgression, which is why we are happy to celebrate break-throughs in “representation” that appear to transgress but never directly challenge the power structures at work in our oppression.
As it exists under capitalism, publishing embraces ideas of “market” and “demographic cross-over.” The silencing of certain perspectives is always chalked up to “market forces”—Sorry, kid, nobody would PAY to read that… But these industries don’t just cater to the tastes of paying audiences: they shape these tastes. They reproduce over and over certain formulas and tropes until the presence of the trope/formula becomes mandatory. Nice YA Dystopia you got there, kid, but where’s the love-triangle? The homogeneity of ideas is not a failure of capitalism—it is an intentional product of it. Today, you will rarely find works of resistance published, and when you do it is always about “inverting tropes,” thus reifying the “reality” of these tropes even by criticizing them.
In this magazine, R.S. Benedict has previously written about how Horror makes itself ungovernable in spite of cultural and corporate pressure to render it inoffensive and more easily consumable. In The Monk, Matthew Lewis fulfilled the promise of Horror by intentionally writing a book that would shock, disgust, and outrage his own repressive society. Lewis challenged the state’s monopoly on the power of violent spectacle with his own horrific spectacle of violence and eroticism—just as 20th-century groups like ACT UP relied on camp and outrage to create a spectacle indicting American society in the AIDS crisis and coverup. He appropriated the power of the Canon by camping Milton and the great Christian Epic. Lewis used Horror to send a big fuck you to a society and culture that was actively murdering people like him. That The Monk remains shocking and offensive by modern standards is a sign both of its enduring spirit and of how little our cultural norms and sexual politics have shifted over the last 200 years.
The Monk was vanguard literature for a sexual revolution that still has not arrived. It falls to us to continue the fight against compulsory heterosexuality. It’s time we committed ourselves to joining the forces of transgression, subversion, and resistance. It’s time we fell in line with the army of fallen angels—Sexy Snack-Satan marching at the fore. There can be no comfort or happy endings in literature, until we have won happy endings in life.
Colin Broadmoor is a Contributing Editor at Blood Knife. He is a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
