Gothic repetition (so to speak)

My Gothic course is nearing the end of The Monk (sex! blasphemy! murder! in-- wait, we haven't quite figured that last out yet).  However, given that Book Two remains on my mind (and, with any luck, will soon get off it), I was struck by Lewis' references to the Bible in II.4.  The narrator begins by warning parents that the Bible, far from teaching virtue, "can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast"; in fact, it "but too frequently inculcates the first rudiments of vice," thanks to its erotic explicitness.  (Although the narrator is not explicit about the explicitness in question, it's possible that he has the Song of Songs in mind.)  Although Lewis appears to be going for gratuitous shock value here, there are some ironic conjunctions here--ironic, given the novel's roisterous anti-Catholicism--with anti-Protestant polemic, which sometimes represented women's Bible-reading in a similarly dangerous light.  (The Catholic novel Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829), aka one of the nineteenth century's very worst novels, takes exactly this line.) 

In any event, good mama Elvira determines that "Antonia should not read it, till She was of an age to feel its beauties, and profit by its morality: The second, that it should be copied out with her own hand, and all improper passages either altered or omitted."  What strikes me here is not the Bible bowdlerization, although that's certainly of interest, but the way in which this moment dovetails with Walter Scott's The Monastery (1820): Lady Avenel originally intended that her daughter Mary Avenel would be "so far advanced in age" that she could understand the Bible before Lady Avenel would begin teaching her about it (as it happens, Lady Avenel dies before that can happen), and the Bible that Mary inherits from her mother is heavily annotated and interleaved with her comments.  Indeed, what really grabs Mary's attention is a Biblical commonplace book in her mother's writing, containing "those affecting texts to which the heart has recourse in affliction, and which assure us at once of the sympathy and protection afforded to the children of the promise" (III.5).  In Lewis, the Bible is a dangerous text, a trigger for the worst forms of sexual desire; innocent (virginal) youth must encounter it through the protective haze of the mother's virtue.  (Much as the married Dorothea Brooke can read Smollett, it appears that the married, and hence sexually enlightened, woman can read the Bible.)  Reading the Bible becomes, in a way, the act of reading the mother's mind. 

For Scott, however, what is at stake is not sexuality, but theology, and the mother excerpts instead of censors.  Scott's Bible troubles the intellect rather than inconvenient body parts.  By the same token, part of the charm of the commonplace book is that it "com[es] from a hand so dear," just as Elvira uses "her own hand."    But Scott dwells far more intensely on the materiality of that hand's work--the book overstuffed with notes, extra pages, and MSS--than Lewis does.  In both cases, the mother's authority trumps that of any other, but in Scott, Lady Avenel's interventions are intended to draw her daughter into a sense of Scriptural and theological tradition (after all, Mary still inherits a complete and unexpurgated Bible).  Lewis' mother, by contrast, actively "feminizes" the Bible.  Not, as it happens, that it will save her daughter from the Monk's machinations...

 

Comments

[tatiana.larina]

But perhaps if Antonia, who is so innocent that she does not know "what constitutes the difference of Man and Woman", had read the unexpurgated version of the Bible, she would have been better prepared to ward off Ambrosio's advances. Instead, she does not realize what his intentions are almost until the moment of the rape.

[jthompson]

Yes, and there is a mother's version of the Bible later, in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Lizzie Leigh," with Mrs. Leigh memorizing all of the "merciful" parts and reciting them to rescue her "fallen" daughter.

[dexter]

Concerning the attitudes-has much changed in, say, contemporary USA?