This edition’s lengthy title lists nearly all of the prurient, horrific elements of the main plot of the novel—a striking contrast to the 1796 advertisement’s list of poems.This scandalous marketing strategy aligns with the way the Marquis de Sade argues that as “the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all Europe has suffered,” The Monk and similar novels provided a necessary jolt of feeling to a desensitized populace.The paratexts of The Monk in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal a fervent contestation of the novel’s genre and literary worth that would result in a strained reconciliation similar to the uncomfortable scholarly responses I will examine later. In the twentieth century, after gothic novels had been long out of fashion, scholars began to assert that early gothic fiction deserved be exhumed and studied .Despite this step toward legitimacy, in the 1960s and ’70s American commercial publishers recognized that The Monk had the potential to appeal to the masses, and they printed editions with covers that brand the book anachronistically as different kinds of sordid genre fiction that were popular in the midtwentieth century. The book jackets of these popular editions are worth studying, as scholar Nicole Matthews writes that in addition to signaling literary value,package of blueberries book covers “help readers make sense of the kind of book they are about to read, giving an impression of its genre, its tone and the kind of audience it seeks.”
The collaboration of many people results in a book jacket that in itself has a great deal of power over the reading experience, and the ones that follow play up the novel’s licentiousness and menace, using generic tropes to convey what we could interpret as more nuanced suggestions. Like some of the online reviews of the novel that I will discuss in the next section, they incorporate feeling and textual analysis in a way that seems harmonious. The three covers below assert the importance of sensation in The Monk, while also portraying the novel’s characters and situations with insight. Because they present the novel as a conventional thriller of the type associated with less-discerning readers, we might assume that the pictures on the cover would be stock images chosen with only genre in mind. However, each of these covers attends to the text more than the highbrow covers I will turn to shortly, suggesting themes and illustrating the ambiguities of the novel’s relationships. The cover above is that of the Paul Elek Bestseller Library edition from 1960. At first glance the image would appear to fit any pulp mystery, with bright colors, a prominent attractive woman, and a suggestion of danger. The woman grips a dagger with a look of rage or disgust, while a shadowy monk enters through the doorway behind her. Though distorted, this image recalls the scene in the novel where Matilda threatens to kill herself while Ambrosio looks on. The cover enhances the suspense of this moment by styling the woman as a femme fatale and making it unclear whether the monk is surprising her in the act of cutting herself, approaching her without realizing she intends to stab him, or sneaking up on her to attack before she can.
In this way it takes an important thematic element of the novel—a shifting balance of sexual power and threat—and packages it as a racy thriller.This cover incorporates some of The Monk’s infamous blasphemy in a way appropriate to a mid-twentieth-century genre novel. The Sphere Books edition is from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, a series named after a best-selling midcentury author of thrillers and occult novels. The cover features Wheatley’s name more prominently than Lewis’s to label this as the kind of novel a Wheatley fan would enjoy. Though the woman’s black hood and crucifix identify her as Matilda, who poses as a monk, the zodiac symbols of the series ring the image, and these along with the black hood suggest a secret society more than a monastery. This mystical imagery not only appeals to the intended audience of the series but also reflects the manner in which the novel mixes Catholicism and devil worship. The long blond hair, cleavage, and caressing hands promise the sensual intrigue that the novel does indeed deliver, though the hands could also be poised to pull off the cowl and unmask the woman, or even to strangle her. In addition to selling the novel as an erotic thriller, this uncertainty accurately characterizes Ambrosio’s conflicting impulses of desire, righteousness, and violence, as well as evoking the issues of concealment and authenticity that recur in scholarship on the novel.This final genre paperback cover, of an Avon edition from 1975, depicts the behavior and narrative importance of several of the novel’s characters, though in the manner of a more modern sensational novel. Ambrosio, Matilda, Antonia, and the devil all appear, as a mysterious monk, a scorching temptress, a forlorn beauty, and a serpenthaired demon. Above the title appear the words “He signed a contract in blood with the devil!” using the horrid ending, like the 1818 edition did, to lure readers in.
The back cover titillates with “Two beautiful women! An unholy lust!” In this image, the monk appears in the center, taking up more space than the other characters, recalling how Lewis makes Ambrosio’s thoughts, feelings, and actions central to the novel. His face is in shadow, but his sensual lips are apparent, just as Lewis portrays Ambrosio as being secretly lustful. The woman on the left encircles the monk, her dress and hair merging with flames and the devil looming above her, similar to how Matilda can be read as an extension of Lucifer who seduces Ambrosio into sex and hellfire. The woman on the right faces away from the monk, clutching herself protectively, her dark hair and clothing making her barely distinguishable from the monk’s robe and the tomb behind her in a manner akin to the way Lewis deemphasizes her subjectivity. The black robe of the monk contrasts with the red-tinted characters surrounding him, suggesting that Lewis depicts the other characters as background objects that bring Ambrosio’s identity into focus through temptation and conflict. As trade publishers like the ones above worked to convince fans of midcentury genre fiction that The Monk would be a sexy, thrilling page-turner, critical efforts to legitimize early gothic novels intensified, allowing scholarly publishers to present Lewis’s novel to readers as a canonical work that could be abstracted from its sensational appeal.Trevor Ross has described the English canon-making project as one that attempted to distance literature from worldly concerns and uses and redefine it as an object of personal appreciation and edifying moral feelings.Oxford University Press in particular has published several editions of The Monk over the years that construct the novel as an object of refined appreciation through their covers and their choice of writers to introduce the novel. In 1973, OUP released a hardcover edition with an introduction by Howard Anderson, a scholar of the eighteenth century. This first OUP edition has a plain brown cover, and it was listed for sale in England at four pounds, approximately $51 today, which suggests OUP intended it for serious scholars only. The covers of the paperback OUP editions that followed, which would have been more affordable for the average reader, still bear little resemblance to the sensational paperback covers of Avon et. al.On both of the above covers, from 1977 and 1985, the words “Edited with an Introduction by Howard Anderson” signal subtly to readers that the novel has been meticulously attended to by someone with scholarly training. Both establish a spooky atmosphere, butthey are much more subdued in color and content than the other paperback covers. Because they both depict Catholicism, they offer a potential reader more clues about the story than the plain brown hardcover, but the images don’t reveal specific aspects of the plot. In these paperback versions, it seems as if Oxford was trying to position The Monk as an approachable but literary novel,nft hydroponic and the vagueness of the cover art could be a way of rising above the erotic, gruesome, blasphemous specificity that tarred the novel’s reputation in the eighteenth century, instead attempting to lift it into the more abstract realm of the classics. They present the novel from a critical distance that allows it to blend in with the canon of important novels that enable a rarefied appreciation of literature.
Neither the commercial covers nor university press covers entirely misrepresent the book, but they prepare readers for drastically different kinds of experiences that will become particularly relevant when we look at the generic categorization and critical moods of the novel’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception. The commercial covers promise the sensations that The Monk does indeed offer: the pull of mystery, shiver of terror, shock of horror, and tingle of eroticism. They introduce important characters, settings, relationships, and situations. The depictions of the characters even imply some of the interpretations that scholars have explicated: that sex and violence, sex and religion, or religion and violence are sometimes indistinguishable from each other; that Ambrosio, despite his darkness, is the most accessible character; that Ambrosio, despite his centrality, has no free will. Yet despite the complexities these commercial covers reveal to an attentive viewer, they also imbue expectations that would likely create friction for many readers. Their repackaging of the novel with the visual tropes of popular mid-twentieth-century genres could leave readers unprepared for the way Lewis treats his subject matter, particularly the feelings of disgust they might experience at his brutal, graphic descriptions of rape, murder, and decay; for the intellectual pleasures of the philosophical and literary aspects of the novel; or for the linguistic and stylistic frustrations presented by a text originally published in 1796. By depicting situations from the text in ways typical of pulp novels of the mid-twentieth century, they distort the particularities of The Monk’s plot to conform better to midcentury genre formulas and prime readers for conventions they won’t actually encounter. Meanwhile, the Oxford paperback editions distort The Monk’s particularities by erasing them or by blurring them . The university press covers offer an abstraction of a classic novel, one that has something to do with religion but is most compelling for its membership in an exclusive club gatekept by a reputable publisher and scholar. Readers of those editions who had no prior knowledge of Lewis and who skipped the introduction would be unprepared for the manner in which The Monk actually is a genre novel—its compelling plot, gothic tropes, stock characters, and evocation of base feelings. Readers expecting sensational fiction could still find what they sought in The Monk, but those expecting a lofty classic might have a more difficult time adjusting. More recently, Oxford University Press attempted to accommodate readers of genre fiction, publishing a sensationalized edition that may surprise anyone familiar with their approachably scholarly branding. For example, the 2008 and 2016 Oxford World’s Classics editions are introduced by Emma McEvoy and Nick Groom, professors who study gothic and romantic literature and culture. Both of those covers feature images of monks without context, with Oxford’s traditional white bar near the bottom with the author, title, andseries in small print. The 2002 pocket-sized hardcover edition, in contrast, includes an introduction by horror novelist Stephen King and features a jacket design that looks more like a mass-market horror cover than an Oxford World’s Classics one. King has a BA in English and has taught high school, but his scholarly credentials are not on par with the academics who write the other introductions. This shows in the citations for his introduction, which consist, in their entirety, of The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, McEvoy’s introduction to another Oxford edition of the novel, and the novel itself.And in a gaffe that would embarrass a scholar, he refers to Matilda as “Martha.”These details cast doubt on whether King performed much research or even read the novel very carefully before composing his introduction, but his authority, unlike a scholar’s, is not much damaged by doubts like these. His credibility stems instead from his decades of experience writing successful horror novels and even essays on the horror genre.He is an expert on sensationalism.