Monstrous Space of Piranesi in the works of M.G. Lewis and W.H. Ainsworth

Abstract: Labyrinthine dungeons constitute a typical trope appearing in the Gothic literature of the 1790s, as well as in Victorian Gothic novels. The origins of this emblematic Gothic space were largely influenced by a series of engravings of the Italian painter G.B. Piranesi who in his sixteen prints entitled Carceri d’Invenzione depicted the interiors of vast prisons with tiny figures struggling in the huge illogical areas. The present study compares the oppressive architecture of the subterranean spaces in M.G. Lewis’s romance The Monk and a succession of stairs, trapdoors and cells in W.H. Ainsworth’s Tudor novel The Tower of London. While Lewis adds magic to enhance the monumental dimensions of the crypts in the Spanish convent, transforming it into a dark, daemonic realm, controlled by the oppressive institution of the Inquisition, Ainsworth, even when dealing with a historical topic, brings the Gothic prison to the Nineteenth Century Britain, transforming a typical Gothic setting into a national one