Historicizing “Sin”

The Quaker City certainly seems highly concerned with sex and sin, and without contextualizing Lippard’s life and work, it could be read as a sort of conservative tale encouraging morality.  However, with a little background information–

http://citypaper.net/articles/2007/03/22/monks-devils-and-quakers

–one finds that Lippard was a labor organizer and an ardent social critic.  “Throughout the novel, no social injustice goes unaddressed. His motto as a penny-paper crusading journalist — ‘Have something to say and say it with all your might’— serves him well”(Pettit, above text).  Therefore, although I agree with the other posters that the text is concerned with the clandestine ‘sin’ of the monks, it is difficult to see their acts as unusual or fantastic as would be the norm in the Gothic genre.  Rather Lippard places this sect of libertines firmly at the heart of Philadelphia’s society.  “And the monks of Monk Hall-who are they?  Grim-faced personages in long black robes and drooping cowls?…Ah no, Ah no, from the eloquent, the learned-and don’t you laugh-from the pious of the Quaker City…”(331).  He continues on to list various positions held by those within the group; they are within the legal and business sectors, as well as the church.  Here is the crux of Lippard’s sin, the social injustice of post-Revolution, urban America, and those who control the system are hidden away–out of view from the new democracy.  Cloistered inside the decrepit aristocratic structure that is Monk Hall.  The text does not explicitly state that the mansion was constructed/owned by an aristocrat, one can assume thusly because it was built in the pre-Revolutionary period by a wealthy foreigner(323).  “Soon after the Revolution, fine brick buildings began to spring up…” around the mansion(325).   Thus signalling, at least a mild redistribution of wealth because of the burgeoning democracy.  However, once Abijah K. Jones begins to inhabit Monk Hall and presumably begin his clandestine meetings of the wealthy and powerful, the surrounding buildings “…about to commit suicide and fling themselves madly into the gutter…”(325).  The regression of social welfare already visible and I think, firmly placed in the hands of these “Monks” (oligarchs, capitalists and bureaucrats).  Therefore, I think this text shifts away from a religious view of sin and toward one more akin to what we might consider social injustice.