The Latitudes of Heterosocial Motility within Homosexual Desire in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk*

textual authority, propelled, in part, by capitulation to sexual desires,

governed by nefarious intervention, the manner by which egregious schemes transpire,

a patriarchal authority relegated by requisite friendship:

“Let us forget the distinctions of sex, despise the world’s prejudices, and only consider each other as Brother and Friend. Live then ! Oh ! live for me !”

homosocial sentimentality, but also the protean and indistinct characterization of the relationship in which they thrive !

 

sexualized command and feminine influences enfeeble power,

privilege the woman within the male/female binary. in turn.

the seeming intermediary between semiotic motilities pervades the confines of

homosocial sphere via the confluence of feminine and occult autonomy—Lucifer himself.

to this end, the Devil’s synchronous “maleness” and “femaleness,”

in conjunction with his supernatural predominance, ultimately establishes his victory:

“I had already triumphed: My plots had already succeeded. Scarcely could I propose crimes so quick as you performed them. You are mine, and Heaven itself cannot rescue you from my power.”

Satan deftly maneuvers within the homosocial and heterosexual bonds,

forging mastery through the conflation of his own desires with God's profligate sexuality.

 

what would Man do ?

“Endanger his own position as a subject in the relationship of exchange: to be permanently feminized or objectified in relation to other men ? Temporarily compromising his masculinity in order to gradually vanquish his ecclesiastical, yet pretentious, proclivities ?"

          

‘Thine, ever thine!’ murmured the Friar, and sank upon her bosom.'

Satan’s masculine existence as a woman “penetrated” by the other man’s emancipated sexuality, hid masculine force. Though at first prostrate within a female body, Satan perspicaciously transposes the idealization of masculinity into the egregiousness of his female counterpart, thus demonstrating His artful role as an object of both homosocial and heterosexual desire.

 

“Those afflicted or affected by psychosis have put up in its place the image of the Mother: for women, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand, for men, a hidden god but constantly present through occult fantasy.” (emphasis thine !).

*cobbled from here