Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Journal of a West India Proprietor

Abstract

The analogy between women and slaves has figured in feminist discourse from the early modern period to the present. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, suffering like Matthew Lewis’s Agnes de Medina amidst “the vapours of a dungeon,” fears that resistance may be pointless: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (Wollstonecraft 1: 88).¹ Outlining a theory of crowd psychology dependent on the idea of repression, Wollstonecraft draws an analogy to explain why women, subjected to arbitrary force, take their diversions to extremes: “Slaves and mobs have always indulged themselves in the same excesses, when once they broke loose from authority” (5: 152).² The woman/slave analogy implies that the system of patriarchal power is a vestige of a tyrannical old regime in which dominance depended on physical coercion. The analogy functions rhetorically to endorse reforms that, in relations between the sexes, would include companionate marriage and the egalitarian family. In the context of the persistent analogy between women and slaves, an examination of Matthew Lewis’s relations with his Jamaican slaves will provide a gloss on both sexual hierarchy and elite suppression of popular culture in his early novel, The Monk (1796), even though it was written many years before he himself became a slaveholder.