ABSTRACT
The publication of The Monk has often been identified as both cause and effect of a degeneration of taste, in which readers’ craving for thrills demanded increasingly graphic forms of realisation. While the seeds of the gothic were sown earlier, it wasn’t until the 1790s that, in J.M.S. For Edith Birkhead the gothic’s premature flowering and rapid decay was a natural evolution, in which the possibilities of the form, realised too completely, produced its own destruction. The writing of the original text had been in part a collaborative effort, in which Percy Shelley’s role was that of the gothic master, ordering the disorderly speech of his faithful servant, and giving it meaning. In the text, however, male creation is identified with science, thus marking the transformation of the gothic villain, the Godwinian philosopher, into the mad scientist whose descendants include Drs Moreau and Jekyll.
