SOURCE: "The Monk" in Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972, pp. 27-40.

In the following essay, Gose undertakes a psychoanalytic survey of The Monk, noting its "unresolved tensions" of "sexual conflict, violated taboos, and self-destructive impulses."

According to Freud we must look behind conscious daydreaming, as well as behind unconscious sleep dreaming, for keys to the unsatisfied primitive desires of the self.¹ According to Jung, when investigatingsuch fantasy, we sometimes find ourselves in the presence of a vision that transcends the bounds of the immediate self and its limitations.² If we admit the premise of either theory, we are likely to find ourselves approaching fiction as something other than literature. We may if we wish search a novel for keys to the author's psychological problems, or for certain archetypes, universal "superhuman" types, or character relations. But if we do we will have subordinated...