양날의 포르노그라피

Abstract

This essay aims at re-illuminating The Monk (1796) which has been notoriously criticised for its lewdness and obscenity within the frame of recent debates on pornography. One big branch of the debates is firmly built on the belief that misogynous pornography is in complicity with patriarchy in subordination and objectification of women through sexually explicit and servile representation of women. On the other hand, some critics maintain that pornography can be used as an effective way of expressing not only female sexuality but various ‘different’ sexual identities that have been marginalized in a patriarchal society. Given the ambivalence for which The Monk is so famous, it is not unexpected that the text seems to accomodate both arguments. If one reads the text focusing on Antonia and other main characters who gain a happy conclusion at the price of accepting the dominant sexual ideology, The Monk becomes a women-hating and women-belittling pornographic text, where female bodies are simply either objects of male sexuality or a disgusting, corrupting and mangled mass. However, if one focuses on Matilda, who transgresses all fixed categories of sexual identity, gender identity, and even human/non-human identity, The Monk becomes a subversive, obscene, and pornographic text, where female desire for liberty can be fully gratified. Besides, The Monk as a pornographic text also contains the unspeakable crime of homo-eroticism safely repressed in the depth of the Ambrosio-Rosario story, from which it flees into a hyper-heterosexual relation of Ambrosio and Matilda before readers detect the latent homo-eroticism of Lewis himself.