Contagions

The Sleeping Beauty topos in The Monk and Dracula

Abstract

A hundred years separate two of the most successful masterpieces of English Gothic Fiction: The
Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. The significance of
this circumstance goes beyond the mere chronological coincidence and is revealing of a close
connection linking the two texts. Such a connection, made up of a network of allusions, echoes,
anticipations and cross-references, derives from a specific set of narrative situations that The Monk
presents and Dracula redefines in order to reflect new and different axiologies.
These situations are centred on the motif of the Sleeping Beauty and its variations, a narrative topos
whose morbid connotations both novels emphasize in a typically Gothic manner. The analysis of
the ways in which Lewis and Stoker develop this motif sheds light on the dialectical relationship
connecting the two texts, and, with specific reference to Dracula, provides a new interpretative
perspective based on a metaliterary reading of Stoker’s novel, of the dark desires and evil pleasures
it evokes one hundred years after Lewis’s The Monk.