ABSTRACT
Considering the view of artistic authority and creation expressed in The Monk, it seems fitting that most of Lewis’s other works were either editions or translations, primarily from the German. Like The Monk with a young man looking at a beautiful veiled woman, whose voice attracts his attention and makes him want to see behind the veil. In Udolpho, there is frequently no predictable relation between presentiment and fulfilment, and a striking discrepancy as well as narrative distance between mystery and its revelation, effect and cause. In The Monk, however, the relation between presentiment and fulfilment is too strict, setting up a world in which analogy itself has been caught up in a rigidly governed and determined mechanistic system of cause and effect. The Dantesque model suggests a linear model for narrative, involving, too, a progression from darkness to light.
