This study will compare the role and significance of the evil male character in three Gothic novels, Matthew Lewis' The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. The study will argue that these characters in the three novels are described in different ways, but the similarities among them predominate. In every case, the evil character is shown to be undesirable, and the message sent by the authors is that evil will be eventually punished. The evil male characters all serve the purpose of supporting the moral argument that good in some way will finally triumph.
At the same time, however, there is something contradictory at the heart of this moral use of the evil male character. All of these characters are intensely fascinating, at least as fascinating as the "good" characters, so that the reader finds himself or herself in the quandary of feeling more interested in the evil these characters create and represent than in the goodness which the novels mean to uphold.
The Gothic novel as represented in these three works portrays the struggle between good and evil, and in all cases good triumphs. In Radcliffe's novel, the evil monk Schedoni captures the reader's imagination and draws that reader into the psychology of evil. The message may be moral and may be bent in favor of goodness, but there are many examples of the authors' in all three books being sympathetic to the plights of their evil creations.
For example, Radcliffe first shows us Schedoni in terms of a trapped animal, a creature experiencing great suffering, and although he is quickly referred to as an assassin, Radcliffe certainly means to engender the reader's sympathies for this tortured man, along with a sense of dread:
There was something too extraordinary in the figure of this man, and too singular in his conduct, to pass unnoticed by the visitors. He was of a tall thin figure, bending forward from the shoulders; of a sal...