Paper Summary:

Analyzing Matthew Lewis's novel, "The Monk", this paper argues that the character, Antonia, functions as a secondary text onto whom the Gothic tensions of the novel are projected by means of dreams, reading, desire, and violence. The paper establishes a theory of the roles of female heroines, villains, and victims within the Gothic novel.

From the Paper:

"Antonia Dalfa, though one of the main female characters in the novel, is strangely absent from the busy production of texts going on around her. She writes no poetry or letters, sings no songs, and never narrates her personal history. Nor is she allowed to be actively involved in the production of plot. Besides falling in a very superficial sort of love with Lorenzo and becoming fascinated by Ambrosio, she makes few decision and takes fewer actions. Despite her silence and her lack of agency, however, Antonia is absolutely crucial to the workings of the novel: both its plot and its themes converge around her, and its climactic moment is the moment of her rape and murder at the hands of Ambrosio. Antonia is not a producer of narrative (meaning both the main plot of The Monk as a novel and the various narratives it encases); she is instead an absorber of narrative and an inspirer of narrative. Antonia reads, and Antonia is read. Her own unknowledgeable reading practices work to enforce her necessary innocence, and she functions in the novel as a sort of empty vessel or (to use a more apt metaphor) a blank page onto which the desires of the other characters are projected, or written. With her lack of agency and lack of self-awareness, she is not a Gothic reader and she cannot become a Gothic heroine. Instead, she is constructed as a Gothic victim: a sort of secondary text herself, a repository in which the tensions and desires running through the novel converge. Antonia must die she must be censored and erased at the end of the novel, because when she is purged from it, all of the ugliness contained within her has been purged from it, and the lives of the story of the young heroes can be contentedly resolved into a conventional, non-Gothic marriage plot."

Visitors who viewed this Analytical Essay also liked these:

• Analytical Essay # 129625 : "Moral Philosophy of Sylvia in "The White Heron"
• Poem Review # 111979 : "Inevitability of Choice in "The Road Not Taken"
• Analytical Essay # 49072 : "The History and Development of Race in the United States"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: