Romance redivivus

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.017

15 - Romance redivivus

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Scott Black

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

Agnes and the bleeding nun

Sometimes you get the ghost instead of the girl. In the long backstory of Raymond in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Agnes (Raymond's beloved) is imprisoned by her jealous aunt in a German castle. Agnes forms a plan to escape by impersonating the Bleeding Nun, a ghost who appears annually and for whom the castle gates will be opened. It would not be dignified, the skeptical, scoffing Agnes quips, to let the ghost slink out through the keyhole. Raymond waits for Agnes in a carriage and whisks her away. But once they stop to rest, Agnes disappears. It turns out that Raymond has picked up the actual ghost and left the disguised Agnes at the castle gates wondering where her lover is. The old, superstitious story that the modern, skeptical Agnes sought to use for her own purposes turns out to be true.

This scene is both a winking, self-conscious comment on Lewis's own project and a parable of literary history more generally. Old stories live strange afterlives in their retellings and even in their instrumental repurposings. The Monk itself is a joyously naughty romp through many residual narrative tropes, or at least tropes that are considered residual in recent accounts of the novel. In the midst of Enlightenment, at the end of the century in which realism rises and novels help to develop the formal technology of modernity, Lewis offers an outrageous fable of blasphemous crime, abused innocence, and demonic stagecraft.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 246 - 261

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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