| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 96 === The Gothic novel becomes a vogue in the mid-eighteenth century, and its conventions still influence works today that try to fully present horror. The Gothic novel is distinct in its mood, style, and settings. It has established a tradition of horror fiction in which sexuality, violence, death, and immorality are interwoven. These themes work with supernatural power and spectral settings that transmits a deathly atmosphere. Put in such a context, characters cannot but feel the horror produced by those settings and the medieval style; henceforth, they are always situated in the mood of darkness which causes the feelings of sublime. These themes, settings, and style help the Gothic novel to form its own Gothic conventions which still influence the production of horror fiction. The first chapter analyzes how the sublime and uncanny effects produced by the conventions of the Gothic work against the morality of the time. Matthew Lewis manipulates the spectral techniques brought by the sublime and uncanny to pierce through the regulation of morality. The sublime effects transform horror experienced in reading into pleasure and the spectrality in supernatural descriptions makes the morality seem less apparent. The supernatural phenomena divert the reader from attention to issues of morality. The second chapter is to investigate how a set of standards concerning sexuality becomes binding and imperative to men and women in The Monk. In Lewis’s novel, womanhood is the incarnation of the sublime, its sublimity consisting of a force that compels male and female characters to obey regulations concerning sexuality. Thus, from the sublimity of womanhood, a sexual ideological develops in the novel, Staying pure and sacred in body and soul is not only binding to woman but also to man. The thirst for power on the part of the novel’s villains is an attempt to violate and destroy the power of womanhood; the novel’s heroes are trying to embody that power. The third and final chapter is to investigate how the gendered bodies determined the gendered identities with the assistance of Judith Butler’s theory of the gendered matrix, which defines gender types and forms gender identity. Following their gendered identity, each character is citing the corresponding ideological sexual strand. Their activities actually “cite” the gendered concept and perform the gender identity through their bodies. Even though the stereotyped characters seem flat, there is still a gray area in the novel where clear-cut gender’s performativity is improbable. Thus, on occasion, Lewis undercuts the gender constructions that he seems to endorse, making the Gothic and all the effects it produces a smoke screen behind which he can occasionally go against the grain of the (sexual) morality of his time. This double-layer quality of The Monk’s morality makes reading that novel an act of piercing through artistic forms and wondering if what lies underneath them represents indeed the novel’s core meaning.
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