“EVIL AND DESIRABLE”: Gothic Inversion and the Satanic Monster in 18th- and 19th-Century Fiction

This chapter explores the evolving representation of the devil and related Satanic figures in 18th- and 19th-century literature. Following the philosophical, scientific and theological upheavals of the Enlightenment, the devil became increasingly enmeshed in the world of literature and the artistic imagination. For many members of the educated upper classes, the devil no longer constituted a real and tangible threat to humanity but came instead to fulfil a largely symbolic function. In this chapter, I argue that the devil’s migration to the realm of literature manifests most explicitly in the figure of the Gothic monster, a being frequently linked to Satanic notions of transgression and inversion. The chapter focuses on Gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as well as Decadent works like Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) and JK Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891). By drawing these works into conversation with recent historical studies of Satanism, I argue that, in their capacity to evoke both terror and desire, repulsion and attraction, the Gothic monster reifies the very process through which the devil was transformed from a real-world threat to an imaginative symbol of human corruption.