Gothic Fiction - Developments in Continental Europe, and The Monk

Developments in Continental Europe, and The Monk

Contemporaneously to English Gothic, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe. The roman noir ("black novel") appeared in France, by such writers as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil; Gaston Leroux; Baculard d'Arnaud; and Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, Madame de Genlis. In Germany, the Schauerroman ("shudder novel") was published by such writers as Friedrich Schiller, author of The Ghost-Seer (1789), and Christian Heinrich Spiess, author of Das Petermännchen (1791/92). These works were often more horrific and violent than the English Gothic novel.

The fruit of this harvest of continental horrors was Matthew Gregory Lewis's lurid tale of monastic debauchery, black magic, and diabolism entitled The Monk (1796). Though Lewis's novel could be read as a pastiche of the emerging genre, there was an element of self-parody that had been a constituent part of the Gothic from the time of the genre's inception with Walpole's Otranto. Some contemporary readers were appalled by Lewis's portrayal of depraved monks, sadistic inquisitors, and spectral nuns, and by his scurrilous view of the Catholic Church, but The Monk was an important development in the genre.

The Monk also influenced established terror-writer Anne Radcliffe in her last novel The Italian (1797). In this book, the hapless protagonists are ensnared in a web of deceit by a malignant monk called Schedoni and eventually dragged before the tribunals of the Inquisition in Rome, leading one contemporary to remark that if Radcliffe wished to transcend the horror of these scenes she would have to visit hell itself.

The Marquis de Sade used a Gothic framework for some of his fiction, notably The Misfortunes of Virtue and Eugenie de Franval, though the marquis himself never thought of his work as such. Sade critiqued the genre in the preface of his Reflections on the novel (1800) which is widely accepted today, stating that the Gothic is "the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded". This correlation between the French revolutionary Terror and the "terrorist school" of writing represented by Radcliffe and Lewis was noted by contemporary critics of the genre. Sade considered The Monk to be superior to the work of Ann Radcliffe.

Other notable writers in the continental tradition include Jan Potocki (1761–1815).