This paper argues that the sublime in The Monk: A Romance (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis results from the failure of aesthetic dichotomies, particularly in the undecidability of perception through portraiture. While the late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction has often been framed within Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; expanded second edition, 1759) and Ann Radcliffe’s emphasis on terror over horror in her posthumous essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), Lewis’s The Monk disrupts these critical traditions. My paper examines the aesthetic challenges that The Monk imposes on the Burkean/Radcliffean framework. By incorporating Vijay Mishra’s The Gothic Sublime (1994) and Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, my analysis reinterprets the Gothic sublime as an undecidable dilemma of perception. This paper analyzes three modes of perception—the gazed portrait, the gazing portrait, and the undecidable—highlighting the third, which demonstrates how portraiture complicates the visual relationship in The Monk. Moreover, as a literary example of two stories in one, The Monk comprises a major narrative of Ambrosio’s downfall and a minor one of Don Raymond’s encounter with the Bleeding Nun. Notably, each story features a portrait: one of Madona and the other of the Bleeding Nun. To analyze them, I divide my analysis into two sections. In the first, I focus on the portrait of the Bleeding Nun, and in the second, I turn to the portrait of Madona.

Authors:
Yu-Hsuan Lin, National Chengchi University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Yu-Hsuan Lin is currently an MA student in English Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. His research interests include 18th- and 19th-century British literature, the Gothic, deconstruction, and theories of visual culture.

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