SOURCE: "Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis' The Monk," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, April, 1979, pp. 65-79.

In the following essay, Lydenberg investigates "Lewis's ambivalence toward his authorial responsibility" as moral judge in The Monk.

The Gothic novel is rarely, if ever, celebrated for its stylistic or thematic subtlety, and Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk is usually considered one of the more exaggerated and crude examples of the genre. Such assessments, however, overlook a basic ambivalence shared by most Gothic novelists towards the supernatural and sexual extravagance associated with this mode of popular fiction.¹ The consistency with which a Gothic novelist of such major influence as Ann Radcliffe collapses her supernatural and superstitious fictions with rational explanations suggests that ambivalence towards the excesses of Gothic terror may be characteristic of the genre itself.²

This ambivalence is particularly interesting in Lewis' work because...