OTHERING THE DIVINE IN THE GOTHIC: ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN MATTHEW LEWIS’S THE MONK AND ANN RADCLIFFE’S THE ITALIAN
Özet
This chapter explores anti-Catholicism as a driving socio-political and cultural force in late 18th-century English Gothic fiction, focusing on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797). Emerging alongside Romanticism and acting as an emotional antithesis to Enlightenment rationality, the Gothic novel served as a subtextual vehicle for expressing 18th-century England's deep-seated anxieties regarding Protestant supremacy, national identity, and the historical trauma linked to the English Reformation. By contextualizing these narratives within historical landmarks like the Act of Supremacy, the Jacobite Risings, and the Gordon Riots, this study demonstrates how Catholic Europe was framed as a primitive, superstitious, and despotic ‘Other’ against Britain's self-image of secular modernity and empirical progress. While both texts expose the hypocrisy, institutional cruelty, and patriarchal tyranny of the Catholic Church through predatory monastic figures and oppressive topographies like the Inquisition, they diverge significantly in their narrative execution. Radcliffe utilizes a rational aesthetic grounded in terror and the sublime, projecting Protestant anxieties outward onto external, calculating agents of the Inquisition to restore domestic order. Conversely, Lewis utilizes explicit supernatural horror and transgressive excess to internalize this historical hysteria, showing that true gothic terror originates from a repressed depravity within the monastery walls. Ultimately, this chapter argues that both authors construct an ideological binary that functionalizes Catholic degradation to implicitly validate and celebrate Protestant tolerance and modern secularism.
Anahtar Kelimeler: anti-Catholicism, the other, Gothic fiction, religious tyranny, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe
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