276
PARTISAN REVIEW
Spain, a holy man of ice; but when the nun Matilda seduces him, he
embarks on a spectacular career of clandestine vice, one that leads him
finally to the virginal, Clarissa-like figure of Antonia. Held in check by
the threat of exposure and public disgrace, he threatens to explode his
narrow, confining cell:
With the direst imprecations he vowed vengeance against her: he
swore that, cost that it would, he still would possess Antonia.
Starling from the bed, he paced the chamber with disordered steps,
howled with impotent fury, dashed himself violently against the
walls, and indulged all the transports of rage and madness.
Throughout these novels of religious incarceration, libidinous nuns
and monks attempt to break free like Ambrosio into unrestrained
sexuality, urged to it by their liberating isolation. The "Blooding
Nun" of
The Monk
is one extravagant case; the monk Medarus in
E.
T.
A. Hoffman's
Die Elixier des Teufels,
another.
Yet it is not simply sexual activity that the buried, unreasoning life
of convents reveals. In these hidden worlds the ordinary family outside
their walls becomes the target of the energies generated within. In
La
Religieuse
a cruel and inaccessible father thrusts his illegitimate
daughter, Suzanne, away from his family and into conventual exile,
while two other daughters enjoy his love (and perhaps as important,
his money). In
Melmoth the Wanderer
the young Moncada is forced to
enter a monastery by his father (actually by two fathers: his real one and
the cruel family-confessor "father"); his younger brother, however,
basks in parental favor; and in an hysterical interview Moncada's
mother rejects his appeal
to
her, disclosing his illegitimate birth.
Moncada thus becomes a sacrificial victim for his father's lust and his
mother's sexuality. (An unnamed monk later leads Moncada down into
a symbolic underworld in a doomed attempt
to
escape; he there reveals
himself
to
be a parricide who has earlier entrapped his sister and her
lover in these same passages and watched them starve to death.) In
The
Monk
we again meet an Oedipal pattern, where Ambrosio kills his
mother but rapes the surrogate, his sister. And Chateaubriand's
Rene
shows us a sister stretched out upon a funeral slab-part of her
entrance ceremony into the convent- confessing her love for her
brother. Clearly these Oedipal configurations, not present in earlier
fictions of madhouses and brothels, shock us with the power of
unreason and even justify the confinement that makes them possible.
But two further points shou ld be noticed here. The first is how often
the incarcerating house is destroyed by these incestuous chi ldren:
