274
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thus far we might feel we were reading another description of justly
punished whores in Mrs. Sindair's brothel; but the next sentence
places us elsewhere: "A large rosary lay near her: opposite to her was a
crucifix, on which she bent her sunken eyes fixedly , and by her side
stood a basket and a small earthen pitcher." The convent in Gothic
novels, outwardly a symbol of self-control and reason , in reality exists
as a den of incarceration, just as the madhouse and the whorehouse do
in earlier literature; inwardly it harbors row after row of dungeons like
this one in
The Monk
where unreason is shut away. Within the farthest
reaches of this building, learns the heroine of
The Italian,
is a stone chamber, secured by doors of iron, to which such of the
sisterhood as have been guilty of any heinous offence have, from time
to time, been consigned. This condemnation admits of no reprieve;
the unfortunate captive is left
to
languish in chains and darkness,
receiving only an allowance of bread and water just sufficient to
prolong her sufferings, till nature, at length, sinking under their
intolerable pressure, obtains refuge in death.
The scene Lorenzo discovers in
The Monk
reminds us of numer–
ous other eighteenth-century descriptions of Bedlam cells as well as of
brothels-of Hogarth, Swift, and Smollett's
Sir Launcelot Greaves;
we
see again that just as in
Clarissa
these prisons are inhabited by women.
The bundle an inmate clutches is the corpse of her baby, an emblem of
her original female sin. Other women in the novel are also sisters of
Clarissa or Mrs. Sinclair. The bleeding nun Matilda (in reality a devil)
cries out at the point of death: "I lust for the enjoyment of your person.
The woman reigns in my bosom, and I am become a prey to the wildest
of passions." She appears as a Sybilline figure, combining irrational
prophecy with the erotic symbol of a dagger:
The monk beheld her with anxious curiosity. Suddenly she uttered a
loud and piercing shriek. She appeared to be seized with an excess of
delirium; she tore her hair, beat her bosom, used the most frantic
gestures, and, drawing the poniard from her girdle, plunged it into
her left arm. The blood gushed out plentifully.
And like Marina in the whorehouse she commands the submissive
male:
But a few days had passed, since she appeared the mildest and softest
of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as a superior
being. Now she assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her
manners and discourse, but ill calculated to please him. She spoke no
longer to insinuate, but command... .
