ThinkIR: The University of Louisville\u27s Institutional Repository
Abstract
When Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis\u27s 1796 gothic masterpiece, The Monk , signs a contract relegating his soul to Satan and eternal damnation, he has reached the culmination of 442 pages of mental anguish, of his self wrestling with his conscience to overcome what philosopher Paul Ricoeur terms the servile will (The Symbolism of Evil 151). In the novel, Ambrosio, a monk the reader discovers has become the pawn of Satan, hurls himself down a path to damnation in consciousness, a phenomenological path that leads to the damnation of his own self. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore this path through the rich symbols present at each step. Hermeneutic-phenomenology--specifically the work of Ricoeur supplemented by works of other phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl--will provide the foundation for interpretation of the symbols along Ambrosio\u27s phenomenological path to damnation. This will reveal that Ambrosio\u27s self, in effect, damns itself after it progresses down the steps of the path. Ambrosio\u27s conscience acts as the self\u27s internal mirror, striving to present a true picture of his self, which resists this truth as it is defined and shaped through false intersubjective constitution with the characters, events, and settings in the iv text, which leads to Ambrosio\u27s existence in what philosopher Jean Paul Sartre terms bad faith. This work will also trace how Ambrosio\u27s conscience, as it struggles to present truth to Ambrosio\u27s self, evolves from Ricoeur\u27s idea of the unhappy conscience to the accused and condemned consciences to what I deem the damned conscience as Ambrosio\u27s self moves from Ricoeur\u27s objective pole of sin to the subjective pole. I will expand the steps to damnation from Ricoeur\u27s defilement, sin, and guilt in his The Symbolism of Evil to include original sin and the seven deadly sins at the beginning of the path, and punishment as the final step of the phenomenological path to damnation. In addition, this work posits the symbolism and themes in Lewis\u27s work with other works of gothic literature such as Charlotte Dacre\u27s Zofloya: or the Moor (1808), Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allen Poe\u27s Ligeia (1838) and The Black Cat (1843), Robert Louis Stevenson\u27s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula (1897). Works of gothic art by Romantic artists such as Henry Fuseli, Francisco de Goya, and William Blake are also analyzed in relation to symbolism and themes in Lewis\u27s work
