The Latitudes of Homosocial Motility within Heterosexual Desire

in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk

 

Ambrosio’s textual authority, propelled, in part, by his capitulation to his sexual desires, is also governed by Matilda’s nefarious intervention. Through her, Lewis demonstrates the manner by which Ambrosio’s egregious schemes transpire, thereby asserting a patriarchal authority relegated by her presence and seemingly requisite friendship: “Let us forget the distinctions of sex, despise the world’s prejudices, and only consider each other as Brother and Friend. Live then, Matilda! Oh! live for me!” (89). This declaration illustrates not only Ambrosio’s homosocial sentimentality, but also the protean and indistinct characterization of both Rosario/Matilda and the relationship in which they thrive.

 

Therefore, as Ambrosio’s pronouncement implies, Rosario/Matilda’s sexualized command and feminine influences enfeeble the Monk’s power, which, in turn, privilege the woman within the male/female binary. As the seeming intermediary between the Devil and Ambrosio, Matilda’s semiotic motility pervades the confines of the homosocial sphere via the confluence of her feminine and occult autonomy as a masculine woman—as Lucifer himself. To this end, the Devil’s synchronous “maleness” and “femaleness,” in conjunction with his supernatural predominance, ultimately establishes his victory over Ambrosio: “I had already triumphed: My plots had already succeeded. Scarcely could I propose crimes so quick as you performed them. You are mine, and Heaven itself cannot rescue you from my power” (440). Disguised as a woman, who engenders both masculine and feminine characteristics, Satan deftly maneuvers within the homosocial and heterosexual bonds, essentially forging his mastery over Ambrosio through the conflation of his own desires with the Monk’s profligate sexuality.

 

In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick argues that, within the triangular transaction between men in possession of a woman, a man may “endanger his own position as a subject in the relationship of exchange: to be permanently feminized or objectified in relation to other men;” however, “success in making this transaction requires a willingness and ability to temporarily risk or assume, a feminized status (51 emphasis mine). Accordingly, Satan circulates within the Matilda/Ambrosio/Antonia triangular exchange and secures his control over Ambrosio as Matilda—as a woman—temporarily compromising his masculinity in order to gradually vanquish the Monk’s ecclesiastical, yet pretentious, proclivities:

           Drunk with desire, [Ambrosio] pressed his lips to those which sought them: His kisses vied with Matilda’s in warmth and passion. He clasped her voluptuously in his arms; He forgot his vows, his sanctity, his fame: He remembered nothing but the pleasure and the opportunity.

‘Ambrosio! Oh! My Ambrosio!’ sighed Matilda.

‘Thine, ever thine!’ murmured the Friar, and sank upon her bosom. (90-1)

Here, along with Ambrosio’s “supplications to no other Saint,” but the image of Matilda as the Madonna (81-2), Lewis objectifies Matilda’s body, further relegating Satan’s masculine existence as a woman “penetrated” by the other man’s emancipated sexuality and presumably masculine force. Still, only the man who can proceed through the stage of his effeminate position, “while remaining in cognitive control of the symbolic system that

presides over sexual exchange,” Sedgwick asserts, “will be successful in achieving a relation of mastery to the other men” (51). Though at first prostrate within a female body, Satan, as Matilda, perspicaciously transposes the idealization of Ambrosio’s masculinity into the egregiousness of his female counterpart, thus demonstrating Satan’s artful role as an object of both homosocial and heterosexual desire.

 

While Ambrosio’s homosocial affection for Rosario transvalues into his erotic desire for Matilda, their eventual companionate alliance elucidates the Monk’s effete manliness in comparison with the preeminence of her supernatural villainy. As both an incarnation of Satan and as Satan himself, Matilda destabilizes Ambrosio’s religious agency, which thus inverts the narrative and homosocial authority between the Monk and Matilda. His fondness for his painting of the Virgin Mary tacitly bespeaks his subordination to women, demonstrating, for Matilda, the amalgamation of his spiritual torment with his repressed sexual desires: “I heard you extol the praises of my portrait. I was an eye-witness of the transports, which its beauty excited in you…which you loved unconsciously” (82). Ambrosio’s erotic obsession, conveyed under the semblance of religious devotion, hence corresponds with Julia Kristeva’s theorizations concerning Bellini’s paintings of the Madonna in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art: “Those afflicted or affected by psychosis have put up in its place the image of the Mother: for women, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand, for men, a hidden god but constantly present through occult fantasy” (240 emphasis mine). Matilda’s semiotic power moreover kindles and aggrandizes the Monk’s ignominy while also subverting the tenor of his piety and, more importantly, his patriarchal dominance.

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