Howells perceives Ambrosio as “powerless to escape from his guilt-ridden obsession” and “caught up in a web of guilt-ridden erotic fantasy.”Peter Brooks claims that Lewis builds a fictional world driven by “forces which are both beyond man’s control and yet inhabiting within man, as they inhabit within nature.”These scholars and others appear to be showing their own dominance over Lewis by exposing his manipulations, but they are accepting the idea that he allows no autonomy for his characters, similar to how we saw that scholars bridled under and submitted to the novel’s tendency toward objectification. By suspiciously reinforcing the existence of absolute control in the novel, scholars overlook the text’s evidence of culpability and possibility. The scholars quoted above insist that Ambrosio is powerless within the narrative despite the fact that he ruins or destroys many lives. Stephen Ahern takes issue with this kind of reading, arguing that “the narrative leaves plenty of room for individual agency.”He explains that “the monk’s actions cannot be excused as the product of passions beyond his control” because it is Ambrosio’s “willful blindness” that dooms him and his moments of uncertainty or regret that had the potential to save him.Lewis dramatizes Ambrosio’s paralyzing choices and missed opportunities throughout the novel. And yet it is true that Ambrosio also feels compelled. Ahern explains this apparent contradiction with the argument that Lewis is exposing the cruel delusion implicit in the rhetoric of sentimental love. However,hydroponic nft the rhetoric of desire is only one manifestation of a more pervasive verbal phenomenon in The Monk.
In this section, I will consider how the novel uses a rhetoric of necessity with which characters attempt to order each other’s present and future, and sometimes even past. These characters constantly recontextualize the situation they inhabit, attempting to reorient each other toward a perception of the possibilities and impossibilities that serve them in the moment. After close-reading how they do this, I will suggest that it can provide a model for recontextualizing our own situation as literary critics writing about sensational novels under the current scholarly constraints. As Napier and several characters in the text point out, the refusal of mercy is the primary sin in the novel.Yet Lewis does not portray his repeated scenes of desperation only as ones in which a powerless person begs for compassion from a hard-hearted and powerful one. In each of these scenes, though one character clearly has more power in the situation and the less powerful character can only ask for mercy, the way that character often does so is by striving for control of the more powerful character’s movements, thoughts, and feelings and by claiming the power to narrate events. Kilgour refers to Lucifer, the most influential character, as the “infernal author Satan,” but many characters appear to be struggling for authorial control.By looking closely at four of the scenes in which one character has the choice to act either maliciously or forbearingly, I will show that in these crucial moments of decision, both characters repeatedly use grammatical features like verbtense or mood to deploy power. In these exchanges, each one verbally conveys that there is no possibility for choice, even as their competing necessities and inevitabilities demonstrate that there is.
The first of these scenes of contestation occurs early in the novel, when Ambrosio finds Agnes’s letter from Raymond planning her escape from the convent and, refusing her pleas for mercy, turns the pregnant nun over to the domina to be punished. This summary implies that Ambrosio holds all the power in the situation, but the scene allows for more complexity. Napier and Ahern have identified Ambrosio’s pitilessness and subsequent regret in this scene as formative for his character, and many other scholars have likely overlooked it because of Agnes’s theatrical and sentimental emotional displays , but closer attention to the verbal exchange between Agnes and Ambrosio reveals the two to be engaged in a struggle for control of the perception of their situation. In this and other scenes, modal auxiliaries suggest whether a future course of action is possible, likely, necessary, inevitable, or recommended. We might expect an ethical negotiation like this one to feature several instances of could, may, might, should, and would, but here and elsewhere Lewis largely refrains from using these modal verbs and prefers must, shall, and will, making characters speak as if the future is already written while they argue over what that future will be. Another important aspect of this and other such scenes is Lewis’s reliance on the imperative mood. Imperatives can be interpreted as pleas, requests, and suggestions, but they always take the form of a command, which, along with the extent to which Agnes seizes control of narrating the future in this scene, makes her appear to have a great deal of autonomy even as, practically, she has none. Early in their exchange, Agnes sounds as if she possesses more power than Ambrosio. Ambrosio uses the modal auxiliary must to present his own choice as being out of his hands. Against Agnes’s objections, he announces, “I must read this letter” and “This letter must to the prioress.” He defers to authority to decide his behavior, as if his future actions have already been dictated by the rules of the Church. He uses few imperatives, and only physical ones like “stay” and “hold.”
Agnes also uses physical imperatives , but she additionally demands his attention and tells him to “think” and most frequently to feel, demanding that he take pity on her.Though Agnes is imploring, she is also commanding him to feel and act in a certain way and asserting her own idea of the future: “Father, compassionate my youth! Look with indulgence on a woman’s weakness, and deign to conceal my frailty! The remainder of my life shall be employed in expiating this single fault, and your lenity will bring back a soul to heaven!”Her use of the modal verbs shall and will rather than the more pleading could suggests that the situation has already been resolved in her favor and the fate she describes is a certainty rather than being reliant on Ambrosio’s unlikely mercy. As Agnes claims narrative control, Ambrosio resists. He uses rhetorical questions to demonstrate his imperviousness to her demands for compassion, responding in a manner intended to shut down dialogue and distort her version of the future to reflect his own perspective: “What! shall St Clare’s convent become the retreat of prostitutes? Shall I suffer the church of Christ to cherish in its bosom debauchery and shame?”Whereas Agnes used shall in the sense of will to denote necessity in her version of the future, Ambrosio uses shall in the sense of ought to reframe her necessary future as her ridiculous misconception of what is appropriate. Agnes responds by redoubling her imperatives for Ambrosio to heed her and take pity on her and her unborn child and then assures him, “If you discover my imprudence to the domina, both of us are lost,” using the form of a factual conditional statement to represent the deadly consequence of his intended action for her and her baby as a fact so incontrovertible and emergent it deserves the present tense.He again deflects with a scornful rhetorical question and counters with his own narrative of the future: “Shall I conceal your crime—I whom you have deceived by your false confession?—No, daughter, no. I will render you a more essential service. I will rescue you from perdition, in spite of yourself. Penance and mortification shall expiate your offence,hydroponic channel and severity force you back to the path of holiness.”His emphasized first-person pronoun repossesses his agency from Agnes, and he reasserts his control of his future and hers, characterizing himself as a holy hero in a narrative of her salvation. As Agnes is about to be carried away, she has lost the ability to affect her fate, but retains the ability to affect Ambrosio’s sense of what has happened. She reclaims their narrative, recasting the present and future as the fatal past: “You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue; but would not; you are the destroyer of my soul; you are my murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn infant’s!”She rejects his formulations in which he either has no choice or acts heroically, retelling their story as one in which he is clearly at fault, substituting could and would for his must and will.
She then predicts a future in which he will be punished by God for his cruelty and delivers her final command to him, that when that time comes, he “think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon.”Her words wound Ambrosio, as he suffers “[a] secret pang at his heart,” and Matilda soon gives him reason to shout in torment, “Agnes! Agnes! . . . I already feel thy curse!”The second scene I’ll consider is the one where Matilda reveals herself as a woman and convinces Ambrosio not to report her, and it is the only one in the novel in which a supplicant obtains mercy. Süner and other scholars have focused on the sensational moment when Matilda exposes her breast and Ambrosio becomes paralyzed by lustful indecision, but before this moment there are many others in which their power struggle is more verbal than physical. Max Fincher argues that Matilda’s rhetorical effectiveness in this scene is the first example in the novel of the recurring figure of the woman who verbally dominates men.When examining her rhetoric, though, we can see that it is very similar to Agnes’s from the previous scene and to Ambrosio’s own—the main difference is that she gives no ground in their verbal competition for control over the narrative. Matilda uses imperatives at least eighteen times in the scene, covering a full range of orders, including the physical , attentional , intellectual , and emotional .Meanwhile, Ambrosio, shaken, gives no commands for some pages, deferring to authority that he claims forecloses his ability to veer from the course of action that is dictated by the Church. He tells her, “I feel that duty obliges my treating you with harshness; I must reject your prayer . . . the laws of our order forbid your stay . . . my vows will oblige me to declare your story to the community. You must from hence.”He maintains that the Church has already decided his future actions, but he also shows discomfort with his cruel choice by tempering his certainty somewhat and disclaiming his responsibility further by making duty, vows, and religious laws the subjects of his statements. Matilda verbally outmatches Ambrosio at every turn. As Ambrosio softens his resolve, he also softens the rebuking rhetorical questions he used to resist Agnes’s vision of the future, now sounding equally searching and disapproving: “can you really hope for my permission to remain among us? Even if I were to grant your request, what good could you derive from it?”His use of the subjunctive mood still suggests that it would be impossible for him to allow her to stay, but he seems both curious and concerned, lacking the contempt he demonstrated in his questions to Agnes. Matilda, in contrast, transitions easily from a rhetorical question freighted with criticism to an accusatory dismissal of his stated intentions to a vivid evocation of her preferred future and a declaration of virtuous love: “Can you be less generous than I thought you? I will not suspect it. You will not drive a wretch to despair; I shall still be permitted to see you . . . and, when we expire, our bodies shall rest in the same grave.”When Ambrosio attempts to harden his resolve, she threatens to kill herself, and her physical threat is made more credible by the present tense: “the moment that you leave me, I plunge this steel into my heart”; “Tell me that you will conceal my story; that I shall remain your friend and your companion, or this poniard drinks my blood.”88 In her attempts to gain control of the situation, Matilda reaches extremes that Agnes and Ambrosio do not, but her verbal techniques are only an amplification of theirs, not a display of aberrant feminine power. The third of these scenes, in which Ambrosio rapes Antonia, has drawn scholarly attention for the horrific way Lewis portrays the rape, but the scene is also significant in showing Antonia’s comparative rhetorical weakness and, notably, Lewis’s suppression of most of her speech.