Twilight of The Virgin Idols

Twilight of the Virgin Idols:Author(s): Joseph Drury
Source: The Eighteenth Century , Vol. 57, No. 2, Special Issue: Bruno Latour and
Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies (Summer 2016), pp. 217-233
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/eighcent.57.2.217
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Twilight of the Virgin Idols:
Iconoclash in The Monk
Joseph Drury
Villanova University
What has been made explicit, what was lying latent before, will remain with us
forever and cannot be thrown aside and forgotten, that’s what the Enlightenment
is all about.
—Bruno Latour, “An Imaginary Dialogue on Modernity 2.2”1
A recurring theme of criticism on the eighteenth-century gothic novel has

been its ambivalent treatment of the Enlightenment and its various others—
superstition, Catholicism, or the “sacred” more broadly. On the one hand,
gothic novels are said to be invested in the secularizing project of emancipating
individuals from superstition, which they expose as a form of manipulative
social control deployed by despotic authorities; on the other hand, they are
seen as reflecting new anxieties about the limits of modern scientific progress
and the continuing vulnerability of the supposedly autonomous human subject
to forces beyond rational apprehension. As Anne McWhir puts it, “Walpole,
Lewis and Radcliffe might all have agreed . . . in denying powers beyond rea-
son and a reasonable religious faith—but in various ways all the Gothic writ-
ers express and acknowledge the influence of such powers.” The novel that
has posed the most problems in this regard is surely Matthew Gregory Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), a work that, as many scholars have noted, combines satirical
commentary on the follies of superstition with spectacular depictions of super-
natural beings. The consequence is that the reader is left “vacillating between
belief and disbelief, between credulity and superstition on the one hand and
scepticism and enlightenment on the other.”2
A scene from towards the end of The Monk captures both the severity of
the novel’s rationalist critique of Catholic “superstition” and its tendency to
draw back, almost simultaneously, from the more radical implications of that
critique. The hero, Lorenzo de Medina, is attempting to escape the rioters who
have stormed the convent of St. Clare following the revelations about the prior-
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 57, no. 2 Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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23925.TX_ECTI_TheoryInterp_57_2.indd 217 6/6/16 11:44 AM
218 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
ess’s inhumane treatment of his sister Agnes, when he stumbles across a group
of nuns who have taken refuge in the sepulchre where members of their order
are laid to rest. The nuns beg Lorenzo to help them find a way out of the sepul-
chre, which they think is haunted by ghosts. When Lorenzo tries to strengthen
them against such “attacks of superstition,” he is immediately silenced by a
series of mysterious groans, which he eventually traces to a statue of the virgin
saint to whom the convent is dedicated.3 One of the nuns tells him that the
statue is famous for performing miracles and infers from this that the groans
they are hearing must be St. Clare herself lamenting the destruction of the con-
vent. But the enlightened Lorenzo is not satisfied with this explanation and is
approaching the icon to inspect it more closely when the nuns, seeing his inten-
tion, start to warn him of the terrible punishments that have befallen those who
touched the statue in the past. They point to a shrivelled hand hanging off its
right arm that, according to a story told them by the prioress, once belonged to
a thief who broke into the sepulchre at night and attempted to steal a ruby from
one of its fingers. Having once set a sacrilegious hand on the miraculous statue,
the thief could never after remove it and was only able to depart the scene
of his crime by having it amputated. Despite the nuns’ threats and prayers,
however, Lorenzo subjects the statue to a “thorough examination” (314), which
soon reveals that it is made not of stone, but painted wood. A small iron knob
under its arm, when pressed, allows him to remove the statue from its pedestal,
whereupon he discovers the opening to a gloomy cavern at the bottom of which
he finds his sister. Emaciated and deranged, she has been sentenced to live
out her days in solitude and darkness as a punishment for breaking her vow
of chastity. Next to her is a rosary and a crucifix, while clasped to her bosom
is the putrid corpse of the baby she has just delivered, so that the scene itself
constitutes a kind of uncanny inversion of the Madonna and Child, a flesh-and-
bones counter-image that, in contrast to the statue of St. Clare, exposes rather
than conceals the horrifying human consequences of the Church’s tyranny and
corruption.
Looked at on its own, Lorenzo’s assault on the statue is an unambiguous
and exemplary act of Enlightenment iconoclasm: free and rational enquiry
breaks open an idol and liberates a victim of superstition.4 Sacrilege against
a virgin saint restores Agnes to her family and lover and allows her to rejoin
the normative ambit of affective and reproductive relations. For Robert Geary,
moreover, the statue of St. Clare exemplifies the manner in which Lewis’s “de-
sacralized” gothic undermines the traditional Christian belief in a providential
order: “Saint Clare is, both figuratively and literally, an empty shell, capable
only of disguising the sadistic depths beneath the convent’s ineffectual struc-
ture of redemption.”5 If the novel’s main plot describing Ambrosio’s spectacu-
lar fall demonstrates the moral corruption that is the inevitable consequence of
the idolatrous reverence accorded the Church in Catholic Europe, the climax
of the novel’s subplot in this scene seems to illustrate the Enlightenment’s so-

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DRURY—TWILIGHT OF THE VIRGIN IDOLS 219
lution: sacred objects used to inspire superstition and conceal truth must be
touched, knocked off their pedestals and broken apart. Once disenchanted, the
apparently monolithic stone of the Church turns out to be nothing but paste-
board machinery, a gimcrack theatrical device for exploiting the credulity of
the faithful.
Yet the broader context of Lorenzo’s dethroning of the rule of superstition
complicates such a univocal reading of gothic’s political meaning. The whole
episode takes place against the backdrop of an iconoclastic riot in which the
enraged citizens of Madrid respond to the revelations about Agnes’s apparent
murder by reducing the convent to a smouldering ruin, causing the death not
only of many of the rioters themselves, but also many nuns “who were per-
fectly innocent, and unconscious of the whole affair” (337). Some critics have
read the “popular fury” (337) Lewis describes in this episode as an allusion to
recent events in France, particularly the Reign of Terror, during which the hasty
justice of Revolutionary Tribunals saw many thousands of innocent people sent
to the guillotine in front of crowds of angry sans-culottes.6 Others have sug-
gested that it is meant to invoke the specifically anti-clerical and iconoclastic
violence of the Revolution’s de-Christianization movement.7 The oddly in-
consistent representation of “superstitious” objects elsewhere in the novel has
raised similar questions about the novel’s perspective on the Catholic Church.
The statue examined by Lorenzo turns out to be a fraud, but the crucifix, goblet,
and relics used by the Wandering Jew to exorcize the Bleeding Nun, for ex-
ample, prove highly effective—a puzzle that has led one critic to argue that, in
spite of its apparent anti-Catholicism, The Monk presents “a distinctly Catholic
view of objects.”8 Noting the allusions to early eighteenth-century sentimental
depictions of monastic life in the portrayal of Matilda’s seduction of Ambrosio,
Maria Purves has gone so far as to claim that The Monk was written “not in a
spirit of iconoclasm,” but simply “with the intention of revitalizing the cloister
theme for a market which was more than ready for a new version of these old
motifs.”9
Such a wholesale retreat from the more radical view of the novel may not be
necessary, however, if it is read as an example not of Enlightenment iconoclasm,
but of an Enlightenment “iconoclash.” Coined by Bruno Latour in 2001 for an
exhibition he organized in Germany with the Austrian artist and curator Peter
Weibel, this term in its most literal sense describes the interpretive uncertainty
that so often surrounds the breaking of images and icons. What does the act of
breaking represent? What are the motivations behind it? Is it merely destructive
or does it serve some constructive purpose as well? According to Latour, we
call an action iconoclasm when we know the answers to these questions, when
we think we know why the image is being smashed; an iconoclash, on the other
hand, refers to a situation when, for whatever reason, we don’t know the
answers or when answering them seems to require further investigation. The
iconoclash, therefore, is also an occasion and focal point for the anthropologi-

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cal study of iconoclasm, a project that is modelled by the collection of essays

Latour presents in the exhibition catalogue.
This kind of work is important for Latour because he takes iconoclasm—a
kind of discourse as well as a kind of action—to be the definitive critical gesture
of the “Moderns,” by which he means those who subscribe to the theoretical
polarization of politics and science, subject and object, humans and nonhumans
that he argues was first established during the Scientific Revolution, even if its
central assumptions can be found at earlier moments in the history of monothe-
istic religions. Although in practice the new facts about the physical world that
began to proliferate from the Enlightenment onwards were produced through
increasingly extended networks of co-operating human and nonhuman agents,
the Moderns talk of an objectified “nature” as if it had always existed “out
there” and was simply waiting to be discovered. Iconoclasm is characteristic
of modernity because it takes aim not so much at particular objects but at a
way of thinking about objects that the Moderns find intolerable. For everyone
else—that is, for “nonmoderns”—the more overtly the mediating objects, in-
struments, and institutions used to apprehend reality are fabricated, the more
worthy they are of reverence and respect; for the Moderns, on the other hand,
to reveal that a truth has been constructed through the use of such instruments
is to expose it as a fetish, and thus to make it a legitimate target for critique or
even violence. But since no knowledge of any kind can be produced without
mediating devices (Latour calls them “factishes”), iconoclasm is immediately
followed by regret and reconstruction, “as if the destroyer had suddenly real-
ized, that something else had been destroyed by mistake, something for which
atonement was now overdue.”10 To tell the story of the iconoclastic gesture,
therefore, is necessarily also to tell the story of how indignant modern critique
always gives way to a disconcerting ambivalence.
Latour’s framework makes it possible to see that The Monk is indeed an
iconoclastic work, but one that also reflects self-consciously on the value of the
mediating instruments the iconoclast sets out to destroy. Taking as his principal
target the idol of sexual purity, Lewis’s novel seeks to expose the “natural”
humanity that is repressed by the fetishization of virginity in a pair of plots cen-
tering on monastic life, in the manner of revolutionary French anti-clericalism.
The Monk represents Catholic piety as a form of sublimated sexual desire, an
idolatry of the flesh that both responds to and denies the virgin icon’s sen-
sual provocation. In both plots, sexual intercourse with virgins is figured as
the paradigmatic iconoclastic act; but whereas in the case of Lorenzo this con-
summation takes place within the bounds of marriage and thus points to the
need for some traditional institutions to maintain social order, Ambrosio’s rape
of Antonia, like the destruction of the convent, illustrates the terrifying con-
sequences of smashing idols without making plans for the mediating objects
and institutions that will necessarily have to take their place. The diabolical
supernatural forces that keep erupting into this iconoclastic narrative—from

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the Bleeding Nun to Lucifer himself at the end—thus make the same point Ed-
mund Burke sought to impress on the British public in his response to the revo-
lutionary iconoclasm of the 1790s, that the effort to emancipate oneself from
traditional idols and obligations ultimately involves the adoption of new ones
which are likely to be no different, and probably much worse, than the ones
that have been destroyed. “Chase the factish through the door,” says Latour, “it
will come back through the window.”11 Rather than an outright rejection of the
philosophical spirit and feminist politics of the Enlightenment, The Monk, like
Latour, models an inclusive, self-reflexive form of enlightened inquiry that is
alert to the risks that threaten to undermine any project of social and political
liberation.
SMASHING IDOLS
The characteristic iconoclastic gesture of The Monk is the exposure of religious

hypocrisy. While the discovery of Agnes under the statue of St. Clare reveals
the full extent of the tyranny and brutality concealed behind the Church’s front
of piety, more important for the dynamics of the novel as a whole is the way
that tyranny is shown to result from the prioress’s obsession with protecting
her order’s reputation for sexual purity. Agnes must be buried underneath the
statue of a virgin saint because public knowledge of her sexual activity would
undermine her order’s power to inspire reverence. The real fetish in this scene,
therefore, is not so much this particular statue, but the virginity for which stat-
ues so often stand in the novel. Antonia is twice compared to the Venus de
Medici (13, 232), while the Capuchin monks are said to believe that “it is easier
to inspire with passion the marble statue of St Francis, than the cold and rigid
heart of the immaculate Ambrosio” (206). Just as being a virgin in Lewis’s Ma-
drid is to be as lifeless and bloodless as a statue, so failing to be a virgin is to
risk being buried by one. In both cases, the idol of virginity demands a human
sacrifice. The natural, desiring human body is concealed or repressed in order
to sustain the illusion of sanctity.
The novel smashes “the idol of Madrid” (45) by exposing the humanity be-
hind Ambrosio’s saintly surface, the fabricating hand that crafts the object of
public devotion: once Matilda arrives on the scene, Ambrosio is not a virgin for
long. But it also implies that the whole dogma of sexual purity as a discipline
that brings the devotee closer to God is a social construction that has no basis in
reality. Agnes breaks her vow, but she is clearly a better person than the prior-
ess. Indeed, the extreme sexual naivety of both Ambrosio and Antonia leaves
them unable to recognize the internal desires and external threats that they
must resist in order to be actively virtuous rather than merely innocent. As a
social and devotional practice that mediates the individual’s relationship with
the divine, in other words, chastity proves to be as ineffectual as it is bogus.
To the extent that the need to keep up the appearance of being immaculate

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requires that Ambrosio ignore his feelings of compassion for Agnes and con-
nive in her cruel treatment, the cultivation of sexual purity is shown to be an
obstacle rather than a conduit to authentic religious feeling.
Although representations of the sexual transgressions of monks and nuns
had been a staple feature of anti-clerical literature for centuries, such attacks en-
joyed a new popularity and prominence in France during the early years of the
Revolution. Lewis himself saw, admired, and later translated one such work,
Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel’s Les Victimes cloîtrées (1791), a play that, ac-
cording to a contemporary English spectator, was “evidently written to inspire
horror and indignation against the priesthood, and to place monks in particular
in the most atrocious point of view.”12 In fact, Lewis’s willingness to indulge
virulent anti-Catholic feeling would have put him at odds with mainstream
British opinion in the mid-1790s, which increasingly objected to the way the
clergy was being treated by the revolutionary authorities. Though the need for
reform was accepted, most English observers felt that the nationalization of the
Church at the end of 1789 went too far by undermining the principle of prop-
erty. The treatment of non-juring clergy—those who refused to swear an oath
of loyalty to the new constitution—was also decried, especially after the Sep-
tember Massacres of 1792, when Parisians panicked by the approaching Prus-
sian army murdered hundreds of priests held in the city’s prisons, including
an entire fraternity of Carmelite monks. By the end of 1793, even the so-called
Constitutional clergy were under suspicion for being counter-revolutionaries.
Thousands fled, many of them to Britain; of those who stayed, many had to
give up the priesthood or were forced to marry, while those who disobeyed the
ban on public worship were subject to persecution and arrest.13
Throughout this period iconoclasm, both official and unofficial, was wide-
spread. The nationalization of the Church led to successive waves of appro-
priations of religious objects, beginning with metal ones that might be melted
down and turned into coin or arms to help the nation pay off its debts or fight
its enemies. But as the de-Christianization movement gathered pace across the
country in late 1793, attacks on Catholic buildings, objects, and images became
less discriminating and more symbolic. Radicals sought to cleanse the entire
country of Catholic signs, often with the explicit sanction of the authorities.
Cathedrals were destroyed, monasteries were smashed beyond repair or razed
to the ground. Crosses, pulpits, altars, confessionals, and statues were burnt or
broken up. In one particularly elaborate ceremony, the famous “Black Virgin”
of Le Puy was blindfolded, carried in a cart, guillotined in the town square and
then set on fire. Newspapers and journals featured iconoclastic images that cel-
ebrated and justified this destruction. A print published in June 1791 depicted
the miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary at Boulogne-sur-Mer surrounded
by offerings from devotees. The accompanying text ridiculed reports that the
statue had moved of its own accord during a recent mass, claiming that it had
actually been animated by a crafty priest concealed behind the image: “rather

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than being a religiously valuable object, the miraculous statue was identified in
the print as a false idol that was open to manipulation—the clergy and women
that are shown bowing down before the sculpture and gesturing towards it
excitedly are idolaters honouring a false god.”14
What is striking about The Monk, however, is the way Lewis eroticizes the
homage paid to idols. Antonia’s “fluttering” (20) response to Ambrosio’s ser-
mon in the opening chapter is echoed later by Matilda, who, as part of her se-
duction, recalls the moment when she first heard Ambrosio speak: “from that
moment,” she tells him, “you became the idol of my heart” (56). For Matilda,
as for the credulous masses, Ambrosio’s reputation for severity and chastity
only intensifies his allure. But of course, Ambrosio is not just the object of
this kind of erotic adulation; it quickly becomes clear that the “blind idola-
try” (375) he himself feels for the picture of the Virgin Mary he keeps in his
cell is also rooted in sexual rather than spiritual passion. Though he tries to
reassure himself that it is the “Divinity” the image represents that he adores,
he cannot help fantasizing about “such a creature” actually existing, so that
he might run his fingers through her “golden ringlets” and kiss her “snowy
bosom” (39). Just as idols in The Monk turn out to be made of flesh and blood,
so idolatry is revealed to be a precariously mediated form of sexual desire.
Far from acting as an example to others that opens a path towards piety, the
virgin idol is a provocation, an incitement to erotic fantasy that seduces rather
than transcends the body.
This is also, of course, the logic of the veil, which in The Monk always has the
effect of inviting sexual attention rather than prohibiting it. The veil that covers
Antonia’s face and bosom in the opening scene merely directs the attention of
Lorenzo and his companion to the “delicacy and elegance” of her figure, and
to the parts of the body that “peep” (13) out from behind her clothes and hint
tantalizingly at the appearance of the rest. But rather than repressing his desire
for what is concealed by keeping his distance, Lorenzo establishes himself as
one of the novel’s principal iconoclasts by immediately finding an excuse to
remove the veil, perhaps the most characteristic gesture of gothic iconoclasm.
Lorenzo is also the one who unveils the crimes of the prioress at the end of the
novel, and he is also highly critical of the public festival of St. Clare, which fea-
tures a parade of virgin saints and culminates with “the most beautiful virgin of
Madrid” (297), covered in diamonds and rich clothes, being wheeled through
the streets on “a machine fashioned like a throne, rich with jewels, and daz-
zling with light.” Since Lorenzo sees that this young woman has been turned
into a “fine statue,” however, he offers her no tribute at this stage other than
“cold admiration” (299–300). No idolater himself, he observes “with disappro-
bation and contempt the superstition, which governed Madrid’s inhabitants,”
and sees the revelation of the prioress’s hypocrisy as an opportunity “to free
them from their monkish fetters” (297–98). Having exposed her abuse of power
and rescued his sister, Lorenzo ends the novel by marrying the virgin from the

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festival—her name turns out actually to be Virginia—once she has been per-
suaded by Agnes to “lay aside all thoughts of the veil” (339). The best way to
break virgin idols, it seems, is to take them out of the cloister and marry them.
FROM ICONOCLASM TO ICONOCLASH
Yet if sex within marriage is presented as the novel’s ideal iconoclastic solu-
tion to the Catholic Church’s virginity fetish, iconoclastic sex with virgins
unmediated by the institution of marriage is presented as being fraught with
danger. As Wendy Jones has observed, even as The Monk endorses the pursuit
of erotic fulfilment, it also carefully distinguishes between “good” and “bad”
forms of desire, associating the good kind—open, appropriately directed, and
satiable—with the novel’s young couples, and the bad kind—repressed, per-
versely directed, and insatiable—with Ambrosio.15 Because Lorenzo is not an
idolater and has legitimate, openly romantic feelings for virgin idols, if he feels
anything for them at all, his breaking of them can be a rational, well-regulated
business; for the idolaters, on the other hand, who have intense but tightly con-
strained emotional investments in their objects of devotion, breaking free turns
out to be a much more destructive and unpredictable process which leads to
rape rather than marriage, violence rather than order. The main plot involving
Ambrosio thus retraces the overall trajectory as well as many of the details of
Lorenzo’s narrative, but alters them subtly in order to illustrate the disquieting,
dangerous side of the gothic iconoclash. For example, Lorenzo’s socially sanc-
tioned public meeting with the veiled Antonia at the church is reproduced with
a salacious and transgressive twist during Matilda’s seduction of Ambrosio.
As she plays her harp to soothe him to sleep, the cowl that partially conceals
her from his view intensifies sexual curiosity by stimulating the imagination,
in just the way Antonia’s veil had aroused Lorenzo. Like Lorenzo, moreover,
Ambrosio is permitted to see behind the veil, behind which he discovers “an
exact resemblance of his admired Madonna” (73). The veil removed from the
object of his idolatry, Ambrosio’s enjoyment of Matilda loosens the restraints
that bind sexual desire, which is now free for further, more extreme subversions
of Church discipline.
The instrument of Ambrosio’s emancipation is of course Matilda herself,
the novel’s most radical proponent of Enlightenment critique: “unnatural were
your vows of celibacy,” she tells Ambrosio: “man was not created for such a
state: and were love a crime, God never would have made it, so sweet and
irresistible!” (194). If spoken by Lorenzo in relation to the sub-plot involving
Agnes, this critique of alienating sexual repression would sound just and wise,
yet here it comes from the mouth of a diabolical temptress. Later, in her frustra-
tion with Ambrosio’s timid objection to her use of magic, Matilda articulates
the broader values of the Enlightenment: “you are still too much the monk,
your mind is enslaved by the prejudices of education; and superstition might

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make you shudder at the idea of that which experience has taught me to prize
and value” (202). Not only does Matilda contrast “superstition” with “experi-
ence,” but she also claims that her magic is based on the same principles of
“natural philosophy” (229) suggested by Lorenzo’s careful examination of the
statue of St. Clare. By associating the modern epistemological alternative to su-
perstition with a kind of Faustian necromancy, with its own mediating objects
and instruments, Lewis suggests the “symmetrical anthropology” that guides
Latour’s comparative studies of modern and nonmodern forms of knowledge.
In The Monk, as in Latour’s iconoclash, “we see one group of people covered
with amulets scoffing at another group of people covered with amulets.”16
The uncanny parallels between Ambrosio’s and Lorenzo’s iconoclasm con-
tinue to mount as the two stories reach their horrifying climaxes in the sep-
ulchre below the convent. Once he has had his way with Matilda, Ambrosio
quickly loses interest in her and begins to look around for another virgin idol
to break. He soon settles on Antonia, whose “delicacy” and “modesty” inspire
the same idolatrous devotion that he had once felt for his picture of the Virgin.
Using a series of enchanted objects supplied by Matilda—a magic mirror, a
branch of myrtle, and a potion that when consumed mimics the symptoms of
death—Ambrosio finally finds himself alone with Antonia in a different part
of the sepulchre, just as Lorenzo hears the groans coming from the statue of St.
Clare. Thus at the very moment Lorenzo is hearing the story of the thief who
attempted to steal the jewel from the statue’s finger, Ambrosio is ogling the
“treasures” of Antonia’s body and preparing to steal the jewel of her virginity.
Just as Lorenzo subjects the virgin idol to a thorough examination, Ambrosio
sits watching impatiently for Antonia to revive from her slumber, scarcely able
to “command his passions sufficiently to restrain himself from enjoying her
while yet insensible” (325)—that is, while still as cold and lifeless as a statue.
Finally, just as Lorenzo begins to “touch” the statue of St. Clare, ultimately re-
moving it from its pedestal, so Ambrosio begins the unwanted “caresses” (328),
which culminate in the brutal rape that leaves Antonia permanently “deprived
of honour” (335). At the end of both plots, moreover, the iconoclast discovers
his sister—one to his relief, the other to his horror.
Of course, unlike Lorenzo, Ambrosio immediately feels remorse for his icon-
oclasm. The “icono-crisis” over, the destroyer, as Latour notes, becomes “sud-
denly uncertain about the role and cause of destruction that, before, seemed so
urgent, so indispensable.”17 Yet if Lorenzo understandably feels no equivalent
pangs of regret following the discovery of his sister, one has to remember the
reason he agrees to go with the nuns down into the sepulchre: he wants to
make up for having started the riot that has put their lives in danger in the
first place. The sight of the prioress being beaten to a pulp by an angry mob
fills him with “the utmost horror” (306), while the conflagration that engulfs
the convent leaves him feeling “shocked at having been the cause, however
innocent, of this frightful disturbance” (308). The hammer, Latour concludes,

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always “strikes sideways, landing on something other than what the iconoclast
wanted to break.”18 Despite the obvious differences between Ambrosio and Lo-
renzo, their iconoclastic attacks on virgin idols have remarkably similar—and
remarkably catastrophic—consequences.
ICONOCLASH AND REVOLUTION
How might we explain these unsettling parallels? For Peter Brooks, both stories
end in the sepulchre because they both explore “the area of the mind, where
our deepest and least avowable impulses lie.” Like other gothic novels of this
period, he argues, The Monk can be seen as an expression of the broad reaction
against Enlightenment rationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, which
reasserted the existence of forces in the world that cannot be comprehended and
controlled by the conscious mind. But the notion of the sacred that the gothic re-
vives, he argues, has been stripped of any moral content and exists only as “an
interdiction, a primitive force within nature that strikes fear into men’s hearts
but does not move them to allegiance and worship.” Displaced into the psyche,
the mystery of the sacred is rearticulated not as an ethical principle, but as “a
complex of taboos,” which in the novel take the form of supernatural forces that
must be “acknowledged, combatted, propitiated, conjured with.” This is why,
in The Monk, the supernatural always appears in response to “man’s excessive
erotic drives, as a representation of the forces within himself which he must
recognize and struggle with.” The Bleeding Nun that derails Raymond’s elope-
ment with Agnes, like the demons summoned by Matilda, dramatizes the way
“liberation” and “erotic fulfilment” at this particular psycho-historical junc-
ture are necessarily tied to the “idea of transgression” and the “profanation of
idols,” even though there is no longer any ethical commitment to the principle
of sexual purity.19
Brooks, of course, is not alone in reading the gothic novel as a kind of pre-
Freudian scoping out of the realm of the unconscious. But others, most notably
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, have resisted the plumbing of gothic’s depths, find-
ing in its characters and figurative conventions a commitment, rather, to the
importance of surfaces. For Sedgwick, the veil does not conceal and prohibit
sexuality and is not a metaphor for the repression against which desire revolts;
rather, the veil represents “sexuality itself—sexuality as error, as the driving,
transitory illusion that a specific object can adequately answer to desire.” The
self, like sexuality, can never be liberated, because it does not come from the
inside; rather, its character is “impressed on it from outside” through social and
material relations.20 Similarly, if we follow Latour’s way of thinking, the back-
lash against iconoclasm in The Monk and the unintended consequences that
follow the removal of the veil have to be understood as coming not from behind
the veil—that is, from the complex of taboos buried deep within the recesses
of the psyche—but from the veil’s tensile surface. Because of the intricacy and

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
strength of its connections to other mediating devices, the critic who wishes to
tear off a veil must also tear up the whole network of human agents, objects,
and practices that it is helping to hold together.
To understand the novel’s ambivalent attitude to iconoclasm, therefore, we
need to turn not to Sigmund Freud, but to the political discourse of the late
eighteenth century—in particular, the philosophy of Burke, the writer who per-
haps comes closer than anyone in the period to anticipating Latour’s anthro-
pological approach to modernity. For Latour, it is important to protect images
and idols not because destroying them breaches some taboo deep within the
unconscious, but because it is impossible not to make use of them, no mat-
ter how many one destroys. For Burke, likewise, civil society simply cannot
function without its institutions: “every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every
sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the
human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than necessary,
in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man; whose prerogative it is, to
be in a great measure a creature of his own making.”21 It is precisely because
political and religious institutions have been so painstakingly constructed over
the centuries that they are worthy of respect. Destroying them not only does
away with valuable political “instruments of wisdom,” but constitutes an act of
violence against the collective that makes use of them.22
To make this point, Burke famously used the example of the revolutionary
crowd’s violence against Marie Antoinette during the attack on Versailles in
October 1789. Though not of course a virgin idol, the Queen was nonetheless
a female icon, whose profanation signalled to Burke the end of the age of chiv-
alry, “that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like
a wound.”23 The iconoclastic blow struck against the institution of the monar-
chy, in other words, turns out also to strike at the centre of a whole system of so-
cial relations that has curbed and controlled masculine aggression in Europe for
centuries, subduing “the fierceness of pride and power,” obliging sovereigns to
submit to “the soft collar of social esteem,” and compelling “stern authority to
submit to elegance.”24 In the new revolutionary order, however, “a queen is but
a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order,”
while “all homage paid to the sex in general . . . is to be regarded as romance
and folly.”25 This scenario is almost identical to the one described in The Monk.
By removing the veil that has served for centuries as a way of enforcing respect
and reverence for unmarried women, the iconoclasm of Lorenzo and Ambrosio
unleashes an orgy of misogynistic violence, its power intensified by years of
constraint, which Lorenzo’s chivalrous interventions at the end can only par-
tially and belatedly mitigate. Lewis’s novel thus seems to be asking the same
questions posed by many contemporary non-Western feminists sceptical of the
secular West’s complacency about its own record on violence against women: is
modernity and openness always better for women than religion and restraint?26
Which is worse, the veil and the regime of patriarchal repression represented

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
by Agnes’s suffering, or freedom and the new kind of violation epitomized by

the assault on Marie Antoinette and figured in the novel not only by Antonia’s
rape, but also by the enchanted mirror that Ambrosio uses to watch a porno-
graphic moving image of her taking a bath?
Burke’s specific objections to the dismantling of France’s monasteries and
the pensioning off of monks and nuns are founded on his own symmetrical an-
thropology.27 Comparing the “ancient founders of monkish superstition” with
“the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour,” Burke finds “the
superstition that builds, to be more tolerable, than that which demolishes—that
which adorns a country, than that which deforms it, . . . that which disposes to
mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real injustice—that which
leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which snatches
from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial.”28 The belief in the rights
of man is as much a superstition as religious faith, and if he must choose be-
tween them, then Burke prefers the iconophile who constructs a society than
the iconoclast who strikes one down. Like Latour, Burke challenges the as-
sumption that the objects that the religious use to worship their idols are in-
trinsically less valuable than those used by the Moderns to worship theirs: “are
the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man,” he asks,
“than ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petits maisons, and petits
soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence sports
away the burthen of its superfluity?”29 If the French are prepared to tolerate
the fetishism of commodities and the new iconography of the Revolution, in
other words, why not the worship of objects deemed sacred by the pious? If
immediate practical utility is the only measure of an object or an institution,
what makes these secular tokens so much more valuable than the images and
relics of saints?
The symmetry of Burke’s anthropology explains why emancipating one-
self from tradition in The Monk does not bring about the end of superstition or
the obligation to negotiate with supernatural forces through mediating agents
and objects. Raymond’s attempt to liberate Agnes from the veil while making
a mockery of superstition by having her dress as the Bleeding Nun ends up
drawing down upon him the unwanted erotic attentions of the actual Bleeding
Nun, who must then be exorcized with the help of the Wandering Jew and his
bag of relics. Ambrosio’s emancipation from monastic discipline, likewise, not
only requires the assistance of Matilda’s black magic, but also ultimately that he
sign away his soul to Lucifer. Far from returning the iconoclast to “nature,” the
pursuit of freedom simply leads to a far more dangerous set of mediations, ties,
and obligations and a far more diabolical array of powers to be appeased. Yet
the forces unleashed by iconoclasm do not come from the unmediated, interior
space of the psyche; on the contrary, they come from a highly mediated out-
side, in the form of demonic antitypes of the virgin idols the iconoclast has de-
nounced. Rather than debunking these hostile agents and translating them into

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the strictly internal entities posited by psychoanalysis, one might read them in-
stead as figures for the external, but invisible “beings of metamorphosis” that,
according to Latour, traverse our “psychogenic” networks and either shatter
the self or ensure its subsistence, depending on the efficacy of the therapeutic
techniques we deploy in our transactions with them. Deprived of the whole
arsenal of Catholic rituals and devices that has mediated the faithful’s dealings
with these beings for centuries, Ambrosio and Raymond are left hopelessly ex-
posed: “if there is anything guaranteed to produce insanity,” notes Latour, “it
is an autonomous ‘self,’ without attachments and without an owner; it will be
left without care, without defence against attacks; it will encounter the beings
of metamorphosis only as entities that threaten or betray it.”30 To protect them-
selves from these beings, Ambrosio and Raymond have no choice but to turn to
new, less proven methods practiced by shadier, less reputable agents
THE POLITICS OF NON-M ODERNISM
Yet just because Lewis’s iconoclasm causes him, according to the logic of
the iconoclash, to recoil and reflect on its destructiveness through the lens of
Burke’s conservatism, one need not conclude that he ultimately shares Burke’s
outright anti-modernism. Rather, his ambivalence about the iconoclastic ges-
ture suggests the need for an approach to the gothic that, like recent studies
of eighteenth-century science, rejects simple binaries opposing modernity and
tradition, Enlightenment scepticism and religious belief. As many historians
have shown, natural philosophers in the eighteenth century were often moti-
vated by religious convictions; their conclusions were founded on religious as-
sumptions about the world and they sought legitimacy and social approval by
allying themselves with religious authorities. Indeed, so inextricable was their
concern with both God and nature, argues Peter Harrison, that any attempt to
define the contours of the relationship between “science” and “religion” in this
period is to “project back in time a set of concerns that are typically those of
our own age.”31 Simon Schaffer claims in his contribution to Latour’s Iconoclash
collection that it is no less of a mistake to assume that the great Protestant natu-
ral philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were invested in
iconoclastic denunciations of superstition and idolatry alone; on the contrary,
he warns, “the gestures that tore down old icons were always accompanied by
the building of new ones.” Thus Francis Bacon’s “great instauration” of the sci-
ences required not only that the false “idols” of the mind be smashed, but that
they be replaced by the new “icons of invention”—Robert Boyle’s air-pump
and Robert Hooke’s microscope—that featured so prominently in the early ico-
nography of the Royal Society. Isaac Newton followed up the optical investi-
gations that he hoped would reform natural philosophy and expunge forever
the impostures of idolatry with a career as head of the Royal Mint, working to
restore public confidence in the true value of the nation’s coins, the mediat-

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
ing artifacts of the eighteenth-century monetary system. In both examples, one

finds the characteristic “double vision” of the iconophile: “devotion to appari-
tions mixed with an insistence on immediacy.”32
If early gothic novels are composed of the same paradoxical mixture of
apparitions and iconoclastic rejections of mediation, it is because they share
eighteenth-century natural philosophy’s sense of the interconnectedness of
God and nature and the impossibility of destroying false idols without replac-
ing them with new ones. In this sense the gothic can be seen as the culmination
of the long tradition of eighteenth-century British writing, explored by Ronald
Paulson, which takes as both its subject and formal principle the ambivalent leg-
acy of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Protestant iconoclasm. Gothic clearly
owes a particular debt to the same mid-century fascination with melancholy
iconoclastic spectacles—old church windows with their stained glass window
removed, for example, or cathedrals with “rows of headless statues”—that
Paulson argues led to the aesthetics of the picturesque, “an art of the patched-
together and composite” that he contrasts with Jonathan Swift’s preoccupation
with broken objects and desecrated idols. But he also acknowledges that the
instability and violence caused by iconoclasm became a much more immediate
threat after the outbreak of the French Revolution, and that authors and artists
at the end of the century were faced with a new set of aesthetic challenges as a
consequence.33 Gothic fiction departs from the pattern of “breaking” and “re-
making” characteristic of Enlightenment natural philosophy and earlier liter-
ary responses to iconoclasm in the darker, more pessimistic view it takes of the
social and political consequences of swapping out one set of idols for another.
Where the great figures of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century natural phi-
losophy, from Bacon to Joseph Priestley, dwelt on the social, political and moral
progress they assumed would follow from the establishment of new idols, and
the mid-century Graveyard poets mourned nostalgically for the loss of the old
ones, gothic novels imagine unintended consequences and unforeseen dangers,
and warn darkly of the powerful forces let loose during the period of transfor-
mation and upheaval.
The politics of the gothic novel, then, are neither modernist nor anti-
modernist, but nonmodern. For a contemporary parallel to the gothic’s nuanced
relationship to the iconoclastic violence of the French Revolution, one could do
worse than look to Latour’s response to the most recent eruption of the veil into
French politics. In September 2003, following yet another round of complaints
about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in French public schools, President
Jacques Chirac appointed a commission to investigate the possibility of passing
a law that would prohibit the wearing of any “conspicuous” signs of religious
affiliation in French public schools. The law was eventually passed in March
2004, but only after a prolonged and tumultuous public debate. As Joan Scott
observes in her book on the controversy, not only was the headscarf repeatedly
referred to as a “veil” in this debate, as if it covered the whole face rather than

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
just the hair, ears, and neck, but the supporters of the ban drew explicitly on
the tradition of republican laïcité that they understood to be a principal legacy
of the French Revolution: “the old concern about women and religion (and the
state’s particular responsibility for the weaker sex) was transposed in 2003 onto
Islam but with a twist: Muslim girls stood in for all vulnerable children, and
the supposed pressure from their fathers, brothers, and imams to wear heads-
carves recalled the once formidable power of Catholic priests.”34 Latour made
his own view on the matter clear in an opinion piece he wrote for Le Monde in
January 2004, “The Republic in a Headscarf,” in which he accused supporters
of the ban of mistaking a far-right attack on a harrassed minority for a defence
of the republican ideal: “the work of the secular Republic,” he argued, playfully
evoking the iconography of the Revolution, “is to unravel (détricoter) and knit
together again (retricoter) multiple identities, not to impose an outfit (habit).” If
the republic truly wants to recover its secular spirit, it must first and foremost
undertake “the search for the universal necessary for coexistence.” To suspend
this inquiry by imposing a particular understanding of French identity was to
“put an end to the history of the nation” and to “freeze in place” current affili-
ations and inequalities.35
The problem, for the gothic as for Latour, therefore, is not the ideals of the
Enlightenment, but the failure of the Moderns to understand those ideals cor-
rectly. If Lorenzo escapes Ambrosio’s fate, it is because his iconoclastic desire,
unlike Ambrosio’s, is never for unmediated access to the authentic “nature”
figured by the unveiled virgin, but is always carefully routed through institu-
tions, the normative protocols of courtship and companionate marriage that
the novel offers as the enlightened, Protestant alternative to the Catholic cult of
virginity. The Monk thus anticipates Latour’s distinction between two very dif-
ferent kinds of iconoclast: the pure, “classic,” dangerous type who wants to re-
move all “intermediaries and to access truth, objectivity, and sanctity”; and the
more reflective, constructivist type, who does not believe it is either possible or
desirable to get rid of idols and images and who opposes only “freeze-framing,
that is, extracting an image out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if
it were sufficient, as if all movement had stopped.”36 The project of the Enlight-
enment is not to unveil hidden truths or smash false idols in order to liberate
once and for all some timeless, long-repressed essence of humanity. Human
nature, the nation, sexuality, God—all such abstractions are in need of constant
revision and renewal lest they harden into empty dogma. The achievement of
the Enlightenment was to have established a particularly compelling set of new
instruments for construing these universal principles. But to attempt to destroy
the old alternatives and to pursue a fantasy of direct access to absolute truths
was as misguided and dangerous then as it is now.

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
NOTES
1. Bruno Latour, “An Imaginary Dialogue on Modernity 2.2,” available at http://
www.bruno-latour.fr/node/370.
2. Anne McWhir, “The Gothic Transgression of Disbelief: Walpole, Radcliffe and
Lewis,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York,
1989), 29–47, 43, 41.
3. Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk [1796], ed. Christopher MacLachlan (London,
1998), 311. All references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
4. For a discussion of the close, constitutive relationship between Enlightenment
science and Protestant iconoclasm, see Rob Iliffe, “Lying Wonders and Juggling Tricks:
Religion, Nature, and Imposture in Early Modern England,” in Everything Connects: In
Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honour, ed. James E. Force and David S.
Katz (Leiden, 1999), 185–209.
5. Robert F. Geary, The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change
(Lewiston, 1992), 65, 66.
6. See, for example, Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH
48, no. 3 (1981): 532–54.
7. See James Whitlark, “Heresy Hunting: The Monk and the French Revolution,” Ro-
manticism on the Net 8 (November 1997).
8. Lisa Naomi Mulman, “Sexuality on the Surface: Catholicism and the Erotic Object
in Lewis’s The Monk,” Bucknell Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 98–110, 100.
9. Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular
Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff, 2009), 99.
10. Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?: Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?,” in
Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, ed. Latour and Peter Weibel
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 14–37, 15.
11. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, trans. Catherine Porter and Heather
MacLean (Durham, 2010), 31.
12. John Moore, A Journal During a Residence in France, from the Beginning of August to
the Middle of December 1792 (London, 1793), 113.
13. For a broad overview of history of the Church during the French Revolution, see
Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Basingstoke, 2000).
14. Richard Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (Oxford,
2012), 121.
15. Wendy Jones, “Stories of Desire in The Monk,” ELH 57, no. 1 (1990): 129–50, 133.
16. Latour, Modern Cult, 5. For a discussion of “symmetrical anthropology,” see La-
tour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 91–96. Latour
writes: “if anthropology is to become comparative, if it is to be able to go back and forth
between moderns and nonmoderns, it must be made symmetrical. To this end, it must
become capable of confronting not beliefs that do not touch us directly—we are always
critical enough of them—but the true knowledge to which we adhere totally” (91–92).
17. Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 15.
18. Latour, Pandora’s Hope; Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999), 271.
19. Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” ELH 40, no. 2 (1973): 249–63, 258,
251, 259.
20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the
Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96, no. 2 (1981): 255–70, 257, 261.
21. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Conor Cruise
O’Brien (London, 1968), 189.
22. Burke, 267.
23. Burke, 170.
24. Burke, 170–71.

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC
25. Burke, 171.

26. See, for example, Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban,
and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 339–54.
27. For a discussion of Burke’s defense of French monasteries and its relation to his
own political commitment to toleration for Catholics in Britain, see Derek Beales, “Ed-
mund Burke and the Monasteries of France,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 2 (2005): 415–36.
28. Burke, 269–70.
29. Burke, 273.
30. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans.
Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), 188, 301. Latour himself suggests that “the countless
‘special effects’ of horror movies may well be the best expression of this particular meta-
physics” (202).
31. Peter Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” The Jour-
nal of Religion 86 (2006): 81–106, 84–85, 86.
32. Simon Schaffer, “The Devices of Iconoclasm,” in Iconoclash, 498–515, 508, 502, 501.
33. Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (New
Brunswick, 1989), 20, 7.
34. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007), 107.
35. Latour, “La République dans un foulard,” Le Monde (17 January 2004); the transla-
tion is my own.
36. Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 26.

163.178.171.11 on Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:32 UTC

Twilight of The Virgin Idols

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Twilight of the Virgin Idols:Author(s): Joseph Drury

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/eighcent.57.2.217

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A recurring theme of criticism on the eighteenth-­century gothic novel has

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cal study of iconoclasm, a project that is modelled by the collection of essays

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The characteristic iconoclastic gesture of The Monk is the exposure of religious

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FROM ICONOCLASM TO ICONOCLASH

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ICONOCLASH AND REVOLUTION

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by Agnes’s suffering, or freedom and the new kind of violation epitomized by

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THE POLITICS OF NON-­M ODERNISM

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ing artifacts of the eighteenth-­century monetary system. In both examples, one

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25. Burke, 171.

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A recurring theme of criticism on the eighteenth-century gothic novel has

THE POLITICS OF NON-M ODERNISM

ing artifacts of the eighteenth-century monetary system. In both examples, one