THE MONK Questions

Dear Students,

Although I cannot say I will provide questions every week, below are just a few preliminary questions on The Monk to help you get started. You DO NOT have to answer these questions. Feel free to draw from them if you like, or develop your own. I would also encourage you to read each others' responses, as well (a list of links to student blogs is forthcoming). Good luck!

1) “Many young girls, from morning to night, hang over this pestiferous reading, to the neglect of industry, health, proper exercise, and to the ruin both of body and of soul…The increase of novels will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom” (The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, 1792)

As we can see from the above sentiments, the leisurely practice of reading was once considered a potentially dangerous, if not downright lascivious, activity. This criticism had a particular trajectory towards the ever increasing female readership in the later eighteenth century, and female readers were often couched in terms of either “peril” or “pleasure” in reference to their reading practices. Although a mass reading public is perhaps commonplace now, in the eighteenth century this transition was fairly new and the “intimate” act of reading was often referred to as potentially subversive politically, socially, and sexually. As Jacqueline Pearson has pointed out in her book Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835, this period saw a “constant elision of textuality and sexuality, especially in the case of women, whose reading is repeatedly figured as a sexual act or to reveal their sexual nature” (87). For your post, consider the many ways in which so-called “subversive” sexual acts or sexuality play a part in The Monk. What are some of the explicit and implicit messages being directed in this novel towards women? What are the tropes or “stereotypes” of women as constructed in the novel. What are the (limited?) roles that women are allowed to play? How are women sexualized (or not) within the novel? How is female sexuality being defined in this novel? Also, how is male sexuality being constructed within this novel? As you read, pay careful attention to actual acts of reading on the parts of various characters in the novel, and explore how reading in The Monk can be potentially "dangerous" or even sexual.

2) These questions about gender and gendered sexuality bring me to my next question. Michel Foucault in his book The History of Sexuality discusses the keen differences between sex (the biological act) and sexuality (the social constructions surrounding the biological act). To put it another way, “sexuality” is what we think of as “sexy,” i.e. being a “sub” or a “dom,” so to speak, leather, fishnets, muscles, cheerleading uniforms, fancy cars, and so on, all of which have very little to do with the actual sexual act, itself. Every society at every moment in history produces certain discourses in terms of defining “sexy” and “sexuality.” For Foucault, ideas of “sexuality” are often couched in terms of “power” and “knowledge.” Explore how The Monk defines a certain type of sexuality in terms of power relationships and in terms of knowledge (or bringing things out into the open). Notice moments of eroticism and examine what precisely makes them so. What sorts of narratives is Lewis producing about sexuality?

3) It is perhaps of little surprise that Lewis was condemned of charges of blasphemy for certain scenes in The Monk. Continue to explore the Lewis’s criticism of Catholicism. To what extent is his criticism religious or philosophical? In other words, in indicting institutions such as monastic orders and The Spanish Inquisition, how does Lewis actually work to define Enlightenment principles of rationality, law, and free will?

4) Make an attempt to apply some of the theories and ideas we read this past week from Hogle and Freud's essay to this novel. What does this novel suggest about class, revolution, sexuality, female representation, the "blurring" of boundaries, etc? What might be considered some "uncanny" moments in the novel? Where do we see a "return of the repressed" in the novel?