“The Bundle, Which Lay Upon Her Breast”: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, M.M. Bakhtin, and the Possibility of Menippean Gothic

A study of the endurance of ancient Greek and Roman fiction in the eighteenth century (an era when the apparently Anglo, seemingly modern Gothic novel came into being), this article unearths undetected yet explicit or nearly explicit allusions to Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Petronius’ Satyricon, Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, and Virgil’s Aeneid in The Monk, Matthew Lewis’s 1796 Gothic novel par exellence. In particular, I re-examine the role of a lesser-known subplot character, that of Lorenzo’s manservant, Theodore, in which the youth variously writes, tells stories, and then infiltrates the Abbey of St. Claire—a mission that is shown to be decisive, as it both sets into motion the destruction of the abbey, and resolves The Monk’s realist narrative. Darker and more dangerous and violent than its classical antecedents, The Monk transmogrifies the classical tradition, subverting it into a thing of terror and dread. Thus, here I seek to trouble two dominant assumptions—first, that Gothic fiction is a response to the failures of the Enlightenment, and second, that it was invented in 1763 by Horace Walpole. Rather than starting from scratch to depict scandalous plots and mount transgressive critiques, Matthew Lewis mined classical literary history for the very outré and counter-discursive elements that became essential hallmarks of Gothic writing.