In 1790s, canonical English Romantic poets implemented the strategy of exclusion against the Gothic literature. For example, Wordsworth denigrated it in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800),” citing each generic category, as “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” But behind their strategic underestimation, there loomed large the cultural backlash against the hellish confusion, let loose by the destructive desires manifested in the leveling project of the French Revolution. The transgressive outrages done by the revolutionary furore, especially on the part of women participants on the important Revolutionary journées came to be the subjects of some English conservative artists in the 1790s, such as Issac Cruikshank, Johan Zoffany, and James Gillray. As they are compared to the cultural constructions of the Revolutionary Festivals, in which the Liberty and newly restored Nature were represented as allegorical female figures, the feminine, gone mad at the goads of the enlightened Satanic seduction, seemed to pose an apparent threat in these artists’ eyes. Matthew Lewis’s Rosario/Matilda in The Monk, the thesis of this paper argues, embodies the misogynistic fear of the kind instigated by those historical events encountered in the French Revolution. Ambrosio’s downfall showed the tragedy of transgressive desires which transcend the limits of the taboos imposed on by the customs and habits of his society. Matilda’s machinations of letting her portrait painted in the image of Madonna “produce the effect upon” him of instigating his desire, which is “the desire of the Other, of Mother as Primordial Other” (Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do 265). Not only does Ambrosio succumb to her seduction, but also is taunted and even humiliated by her audacity. In H. L. Mencken’s ominous definition, “revolution is the sex of politics” (qtd. in Paulson, Representations of Revolution 239). But in The Monk, by the narrative’s sleight of hand, Ambrosio, the outcome of his parents’ morganatic marriage, seems not so much to exemplify Mencken's apocalyptic axiom as to fulfill the cultural role imposed on him by the entrenched English conservative encampment, gratifying its implicit position that the transgression of class boundaries in any kind would result in such a disaster.