The novel is criticised for too closely mirroring The Monk, a prominent Gothic Novel published only ten years before by Matthew Lewis.
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Count Ardolph fulifills many of the criteria for sadistic personality disorder as proposed in the Third Edition of American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, such as taking pleasure in the psychological suffering of others, lying for the purpose of inflicting pain on others, using violence to establish dominance in a relationship, and restricting the autonomy of people with whom he has a close relationship.