Queer Urges and the Act of Translation

The fourth chapter of the book turns to Matthew Lewis, author of the scandalous 1796 novel The Monk. More than many of his contemporaries, Lewis was able to blend intricate and learned allusions to Greek and Roman literature into the popular frame of his Gothic texts. This chapter argues that he uses these allusions to give voice to particular anxieties: about the consequences of Gothic publishing and, particularly, about his own queer desires. The chapter begins by examining the translations in The Monk of poems of Horace and Anacreon, both explicitly homoerotic texts from antiquity. Second, it turns to The Love of Gain (1799), a free translation of a satire of Juvenal, which Lewis used as a covert means of defending his career as an author of Gothic texts. Finally, I turn to a translation of Goethe in Lewis’s ballad collection, Tales of Wonder (1800), and a classicizing parody of that translation in the accompanying volume, Tales of Terror (1801), both of which comment implicitly on Lewis’s own specific authorial and erotic anxieties. Rather than truly blending Gothic and classical, Lewis uses the erudite allusions to antiquity to open up a new channel of communication within popular works, giving voice to desires and fears that would otherwise have remained unsaid.