Zofloya, is really only the evil of desire, insofar as it marks Victoria and places her, or rather displaces her, in a social structure. In an effective display of the ways in which private desire can be projected as ruthless Law, Zofloya himself casts Victoria into oblivion with a 'loud demoniac laugh' at the novel's close. This is the «perverse» laugh of the desiring heroine herself as culture represents her.
Matthew G. Lewis's central plot in
After Ambrosio's desire for Matilda cools, he turns his lascivious attentions on the young Antonia, daughter of the proud Elvira, his confidante. Having employed occult arts to enter Antonia's bedchamber and render her defenseless against his lust, Ambrosio is interrupted by Elvira, who challenges and accuses him. He responds by murdering Elvira in one of the most brutal scenes of Gothic fiction: he grabs her, throws her on the bed, stifles her face with a pillow, kneels on her stomach, and struggles mercilessly as she wraps her arms around him in her final agony, until he realizes that she has become a 'Corse, cold, senseless, and disgusting.'
More than a hundred pages pass before the reader is informed that this woman with whom Ambrosio is struggling on the bed of his proposed sexual violation is in fact his own mother. The excessive emotion of what turns out to be the only 'bed scene' in the novel, a scene between a sexually confused young man and his mother, seems in retrospect the emotional center of the work.
Antonia, who is therefore Ambrosio's sister, is not spared the incestuous obsession of the unfortunate friar. Toward the close of the novel, he discovers her in the underground vault of the Convent of St. Claire: -235-
Naturally addicted to the gratification of the sense, in the full vigour of manhood, and heat of blood, he had suffered his temperament to acquire such ascendancy, that his lust was become madness… He longed for the possession of [Antonia's] person; and even the gloom of the vault, the surrounding silence, and the resistance which He expected from her, seemed to give a fresh edge to his fierce and unbridled desires.
After Ambrosio accomplishes Antonia's «dishonour» in the 'violence of his lustful delirium,' he curses her fatal charms and blames her for his fall from grace. He determines further that she must never leave the dungeon. When she tries to escape, he kills her by plunging his dagger twice into her bosom-suggesting at once his incestuous desire and the murderous impulse it harbors.
Such scenes are usually dismissed as merely sensational. It seems to me that however sensationalistic such scenes seem, they are also as political as anything in late-eighteenth-century fiction. It is the nature of patriarchy to make incest, for instance, its most basic prohibition; for unless the terms of familial desire are carefully controlled, according to the logic of patriarchy, the fabric of society will break down. Studies by anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and others have demonstrated that the distribution of power depends on the control of intrafamilial relations by means of an «exchange» of women and that the incest taboo serves as much a political as a sexual function.
When Ambrosio «rapes» and murders his mother Elvira for getting in the way of his desire for Antonia; and when he rapes and murders his sister Antonia because she comes to represent the hideousness of his own desires; he violently transgresses the most basic law of patriarchal culture. After Ambrosio is informed of his incestuous violations, during the closing pages of the novel, he is horrified. But this horror comes so late that the effect of the incest is at least potentially subversive and that by abusing the relations between himself and his mother and sister he is doing more than giving his villainous character an appallingly misogynist twist. The act of incest is political because it defies the attempt of society to control desire. Cultural critics have suggested that the regulation of marriage ties is a restriction that serves the purposes of the patriarchy; Ambrosio at the very least defies such a restriction in his experiments with 'perversion.' In raping and murdering the women in his life, moreover, Ambrosio underlines the other, the forbidden desire that Rosario at first represented. At one point in the midst of Ambrosio's decline into wickedness, the narrator tells us that in a -236- moment of reflection 'He regretted Rosario, the fond, the gentle, and submissive.' If Ambrosio must be forced to fulfill the role of the male in patriarchal culture, he does so violently, with none of the subterfuge at work in the society around him. He turns the romantic fiction inside out in order to show that sexuality is always about power and that power, perhaps more importantly, is always about sexuality.
Michel Foucault, the French historian of sexuality, would argue that this attempt at subversion is not only doomed to failure but is in fact an aspect of the extension of cultural control that he calls 'the deployment of sexuality.' Foucault claims that sexuality itself becomes a mode of social knowledge and control. 'In a society such as ours,' he says, 'where the family is the most active site of sexuality, and where it is doubtless the exigencies of the latter which maintain and prolong its existence, incest… occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot.' But Lewis exposes this 'affective intensification of the family space' and ridicules the terms of the Oedipal «fantasy» almost as directly as Foucault does. By turning the Oedipal «fantasy» into vivid and horrifying reality, Lewis exposes the very process of cultural control that Foucault came later to describe. What Foucault calls the pathologization of pleasure has its fictional equivalent in a novel like
The characters in Charles Robert Maturin's
In the most famous of the interpolated tales, for instance, 'The Tale of the Spaniard,' Alonzo de Monçada tells the story of his own incarceration at the hands of the Inquisition. The political abuses of the Inquisition are hideous and disturbing, as are the intrusions of infernal temptation; but Maturin makes the body itself the site of transgression. The body, in other words, traps the subject within an ideology that literally dismembers the body for its own purposes. When Monçada and a guide are pushing their way through an underground passage, which is so con-237- stricted it almost to causes suffocation, Monçada says that he 'could not help recollecting and applying' a story about a group of travelers exploring the vaults of the Egyptian pyramids. 'One of them… who was advancing as I was, on his hands and knees, stuck in the passage, and, whether from terror, or from the natural consequences of his situation, swelled so that it was impossible for him to retreat, advance, or allow a passage for his companions.' When the others realize that this companion threatens their own survival, their guide 'proposed, in the selfishness to which the feeling of vital danger reduces all, to cut off the limbs of the wretched being who obstructed their passage.' At this suggestion, the companion manages somehow to squeeze himself out of the way. 'He was suffocated, however, in the effort, and left behind a corse.' What is interesting here is not just the vivid portrayal of the physical effects of fear. Notice that the community of travelers is beset by fear because one individual has «blocked» their passage. They have no trouble planning to free their own way by dismembering the person before them. It could be said that this act, this brutal and self-centered substitute for castration, helps to dramatize the ways in which bourgeois culture handles the individual. Castration, figurative or literal, is all there is for those who stand in the way of what the culture values most, in this case its own survival.
When later in his tale, Monçada hears the tale of illicit heterosexual love in the confines of a monastery, the result is strikingly similar. In this case, his companion tells him the story of a novice and her growing sentimental attachment to a young monk. The narrator, a 'parricide,' gives the following account:
One evening as the young monk and his darling novice were in the garden, the former plucked a peach, which he immediately offered to his favourite; the latter accepted it with a movement I thought rather awkward-it seemed like what I imagined would be the reverence of a female. The young monk divided the peach with a knife; in doing so, the knife grazed the finger of the novice, and the monk, in agitation inexpressible, tore his habit to bind up the wound. I saw it all-my mind was made up on the business-I went to the Superior that very night. The result may be conceived. They were watched.
After setting a trap for the two, after he is certain that they have arranged to spend the night together, the
