SOURCE: "The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 5, No. 2, May, 1975, pp. 136-46.

In the following essay, Grudin assesses the "formal coherence " of The Monk, claiming that evidence for its structural unity exists in an interpretation of Matilda as a demonic being.

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;
 Thou art too ugly to attend upon me.
 Go, and return an old Franciscan friar,
 That holy shape becomes a devil best.

(Doctor Faustus, iii, 25-28)

Until recently Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk has hardly sustained the critical and popular interest it inspired when it first appeared in 1796 when Coleridge, one of the novel's earliest reviewers, found it so attractive and appalling.¹ Subsequent changes in taste and literary decorum soon relegated the novel to relative obscurity. During most of the twentieth century those who have discussed it have barely outnumbered...