Because the definitions of gender have no currency in the
sepulcher below the sexually segregated institutions of the convent
and friary, as Brewer points out (199), Ambrosio’s deposed prestige
tacitly informs his resolution to rape Antonia in the catacombs. A
realm, figuratively evading the strictures of the patriarchal order,
the dungeon permits the Monk to revitalize his debilitated stature
by assaulting the body of Antonia. According to Sedgwick, the male
protagonist, actively circulating within the spaces of homosociality,
“both acts out and exploits the schism between public and private
aspects of women’s status as objects of possession and exchange” (57).
Therefore, Ambrosio’s rape of Antonia implicitly demonstrates the
resurgence of his masculinity and, significantly, Matilda’s semiotic
command within their homosocial bond: “The very excess of his former
eagerness to possess Antonia now contributed to inspire him with disgust;
and a secret impulse made him feel, how base and unmanly was the crime”
(384 emphasis mine). Here, in an attempt to subvert Matilda’s sovereignty,
he intuitively equates his transgression with her feminized persona,
which ironically reasserts her feminine dominance while also reinforcing
his subjugation within their homosocial dynamic. “[I]nstead of sharing
gestures, touches, and cutaneous sensations,” Sedgwick notes, “the
characters find themselves competing absurdly for quantities of afinite, material commodity” (58 emphasis mine). The Monk and Rosario/Matilda’s
homosocial relationship is thus revivified via their joint conspiracies,
but Ambrosio’s crimes against his mother and sister—the objects of
his disdain and lust—tacitly denote Matilda/Satan’s conquest: “‘Would
to God, that I had never seen [Matilda’s] face’” (390). Since the
Monk rejects Antonia after the rape, he relinquishes his masculine
ascendancy as ravisher, in turn illuminating the manner by which Matilda’s
semiotic forces infuse his own moral disintegration and supplant what
is left of his ephemeral authority.
To this end, having “baffled the Inquisition’s fury” and eluded perpetual damnation (428), Matilda irrevocably triumphs over Ambrosio, and the Devil can hence cease to disguise himself as a woman. Using Lévi-Strauss’s theorizations on male homosocial desire, Sedgwick reveals: “the normative man uses a woman as a ‘conduit of a relationship’ in which the true partner is a man” (26). As a channel of exchange and seduction, Satan promulgates the significance of his female semblance at work: “‘It was I who threw Matilda in your way; It was I who gave you entrance to Antonia’s chamber’” (440). The Devil intimates that without invoking the Monk’s heterosexual desires, Ambrosio would not be privy to his pernicious intrigues, wherefore Matilda’s masculinized sense of womanhood provoked the Monk’s homoerotic desires. The Devil’s fleeting status as a woman thus establishes his ultimate mastery over Ambrosio: “You are mine beyond reprieve” (440). This pronouncement moreover restores the homosocial bond between the Monk and Rosario/Matilda, again privileging Satan—the woman—within their triangular exchange. Tellingly, the parallels between Matilda’s fall from grace and Lucifer’s repudiation of God’s laws are also manifest: “I am no longer a candidate of heaven! I have renounced God’s service, and am enlisted beneath the banners of his Foes…The Infernal Spirits obey me as their Sovereign” (428).
Because of Satan’s willingness to assume a feminized identity, he triumphs over
and destroys Ambrosio through the fusion of his own desires and the Monk’s wanton sexuality. Through a number of complex homosocial and heternormative transactions, Lucifer utilizes the homoerotic body of Rosario/Matilda to destabilize Ambrosio’s heteroerotic desires and tacitly circulate Matilda’s semiotic power. Through her sexual allure and the intervention of her masculine influences, Matilda secures her dominance within their homosocial bond—a relationship Ambrosio believes he governs. Because Matilda uses his physicality and patriarchal stature to tempt and rape Antonia, Satan’s power is restricted to the confines of the Monk’s homosociality and heterosexual appetites though these proclivities also serve to undermine Ambrosio’s dominance. Thus, as the locus of his desire and an object through which they must impose their power, Antonia’s body serves to emblematize her brother’s subsequent demise and, more importantly, his effete and cursory preeminence within the bonds of male homosocial desire.
Works Cited
Brewer, William D. “Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.”Gothic Studies 6.2
(November 2004): 192-207. MLA Bibliography. 4 April 2008 <http://0search.epnet.com.torofind.csudh.edu>.
Kristeva,
Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art.
Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk: A Romance. 1796.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.