Zofloya or The Moor (Oxford World's Classics)

Product Information

Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 111; E.J. Clery, Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, (Devon: Northcote House), (2000) 2004, p. 107;. The third meeting of our book group focused on one of the lesser-known Gothic writers of the early nineteenth century, Charlotte Dacre ( c. 1772-1825), and her second novel Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) . Born Charlotte King, Dacre was the daughter of the moneylender John ‘Jew’ King ( c. 1753-1824), who famously engaged in an adulterous affair with the actress Mary Robinson in 1773. Dacre’s writing career began with the publication of several poems in the Morning Post, before she moved on to write four novels, of which the other three were: Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), The Libertine (1807) and The Passions (1811). Zofloya makes "explicit ideological links between knowledge, power, and sexuality." [12] One character after another is seduced, this seduction leads them to their loss of power and control: See also Jennifer L. Airey, '"He Bears No Rival Near the Throne": Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 30.2 (2018), 223-41. This is one of the few texts that briefly analyses Berenza's position as narcissistic patriarchal critic. Some literary critics were in favour of Dacre's characterisation of women. The Passions wrote: "Cast in a different mould than those of her precursors, her heroines do not exhibit any elegance or artificiality of diction, nor coy daintiness of mien, nor any inveterate ingenuousness of character…Miss Dacre's women are not one-dimensional beings concerned with propriety or taste. They think, feel and reason." [17]

Not to be missed - I'd never heard of this book before the course but would definitely recommend it for any one who is interested in Gothic or 19th Century literature. Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. by Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Rosa Matilda's Romance. This Day is published, ZOFLOYA; or, The MOOR: a Romance of the Fifteenth Century, in three volumes. By Charlotte Dacre (Better known as ROSA MATILDA) Author of the Nun of St. Omer's, Hours of Solitude, &c. Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, Paternoster-row". Morning Post. 15 May 1806. p.2. Perhaps it is also a testament to the reality of male-dominated academia that The Monk remains an enduring classic while Zofloya is all but forgotten. Dacre’s novel is just as compelling, provocative, multi-faceted, thought-provoking, scary, and entertaining as The Monk—and yet this Oxford World’s Classic edition is the only re-printing by a major publisher. I imagine one could get an entire PhD in nineteenth century literature and never read Zofloya. Only Gothic specialists, it seems, have it on their radar. And even they may miss it. While unconsciously he thus reposed, a female chance to wander near the spot. She had quitted her house for the purpose of enjoying more freely the fresco of the evening, and to stroll along the banks of the lake; the young Leonardo, however, arrested her attention and she softly approached to contemplate him- his hands were clasped over his head and on is cheeks, where the hand of health had planted its brown red nose, the pearly gems of his tears still hung- his auburn hair sported in curls about his forehead and temples, agitated by the passing breeze-his vermeil lips were help open and disclosed his polished teeth-his bosom, which he uncovered to admit the refreshing air, remained disclosed and contrasted by its snowy whiteness thee animated hue of his complexion."(103)See Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) for a discussion on eighteenth-century conduct manuals, the rise of the novel, and feminisation of discourse; and Ann Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1992) for an examination of political tracts and writings promoting a 'moral revolution in female manners' in response to the French Revolution (p. 10). For discussions on gothic fiction and domesticity, see Kate Ellis's The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), which analyses how Ann Radcliffe's gothic classics, The Mystery of Udolpho (1794) and The Romance of the Forest (1791), domesticate the sublime in revealing the oppressive structure of the home, rather than portraying the terror produced by nature, the focus of masculine gothic. Dacre] is precisely the sort of woman author unlikely to have appealed to Victorian critics—one tarred both by Romanticism and by reaction; one who wrote both 'sundry novels in the style of the first edition of The Monk' and political ballads for the popular press. Moreover, in neither her associations nor her novels was she likely to win friends among those twentieth-century scholars seeking to exhume the worthy works of forgotten women writers. Dacre is not quite early enough to be forgiven her lapses in emotional taste; her political commitments are not easily assimilated into later twentieth-century norms; she is conventionally associated with male Gothic; her novels are populated by sexually predatory, physically violent, mother-hating women of whom the narrations appear to approve. In sum, Dacre is precisely the sort of writer whom canons, both established and revisionist, are designed to exclude, an exclusion this edition hopes, in part, to rectify. (xiv) Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 167-203. Aroused by the white male, white female sexual desire in this novel is repeatedly frustrated by that white male, who proves increasingly impotent as the novel unfolds. Count de Loredani cannot satisfy his wife, who elopes. Count Berenza, the vitiated libertine, cannot arouse or gratify his wife, and visibly wastes away before our eyes, poisoned by the lemonade he so adoringly drinks from his wife's cup. Henriquez is besotted by the pale Lilla, but is unable to consummate his sexual desire for her, impaling himself instead on his own dagger. In the figural discourse of this text, white male bodies literally become smaller, weaker, less potent". [10] Leonardo di Loredani: son of Laurina and the Marchese, a year older than his sister Victoria, he is "unable to resist, in any shape, the temptations of his heart". He runs away from home when his mother leaves the family, and eventually is lost entirely to the power of his mistress Megalena.

According to Burley, "The subordinate characters' knowledge and understanding about their master's sexuality allows them to use this knowledge as power to overthrow their master so they themselves become the master. The subordinates understanding of the power they possess also helps them to assert control over their superiors". [12] Parallels between Zofloya and Matthew Lewis's The Monk [ edit ] Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge: London, 1996), pp. 1-13. Contemporary critics have asserted that Zofloya 's title character mirrors the character of Matilda in The Monk. "Not only does Dacre reverse the gender of the principle[ sic?] characters from The Monk but she also changes the race of the arch-villain, insisting on the darkness of Zofloya's skin". [9] An assassin enters the home of Victoria and Berenza at night. He attempts to stab Berenza in his sleep, but Victoria awakens and defends her lover by taking the dagger in her arm instead. The assassin flees, and Berenza awakens, shaken. He is impressed by Victoria's action and no longer questions her love for him. Victoria decides not to tell Berenza that she noticed that her long-lost brother, Leonardo, was the assassin. The one other ‘serious’ use of anapestic meter in Hours of Solitude occurs in the highly ambiguous elegy ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’. Robinson, of course, was something of the ‘poster-girl’ for critiques of the debased status of women through the 17905. Robinson had also some not entirely savoury connection with Dacre’s father, the usurer and gangster John King. See Anne K. Mellor, ‘“Making an Exhibition of Her Self”: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts for Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000), 271–304.

Dacre ends the story with a short paragraph, commenting on the novel. She claims that her story is more than a romance. She comments on human nature, their passions and weakness, and "either the love of evil is born with us, or we must attribute them to the suggestions of infernal influence." [2] Characters [ edit ] Dunn, James (December 1998). "Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence". Nineteenth-Century Literature. Berkley, California: University of California Press. 53 (3): 309. doi: 10.2307/2903042. JSTOR 2903042. The perpetrator of domestic ruin can therefore either be Victoria or Berenza. There has been critical contention about the patriarchal undertones of the text, and more specifically, whether Berenza fits the portrait of an oppressive patriarchal figure. Adrianna Craciun argues that Dacre deviates from the female-gothic tradition in representing the 'central institution of marriage' as a 'nightmare' and 'compact with the devil'.24 Conversely, Carol Margaret Davison views marriage in the novel as an 'equal opportunity enslaver' and Berenza as a victim of Victoria's cruelty.25 Though Berenza does not fit the portrait of the Radcliffian patriarchal villain, as he does not imprison or attempt to rape Victoria, he does not represent an image of mild and benevolent masculinity either. 26 On the contrary, he adopts the position of a domineering male figure whose willingness to relinquish status, in marriage to a woman of compromised sexual worth, remains dependent on her corresponding willingness to forgo autonomy. Berenza's acceptance of Victoria remains conditional on her ability to conform to a normative gender role, an identity that requires her to become docile, maternal, and sacrificial. As for the horror, this was the second time that a gothic horror actually made me shivery (the first beind Dracula). The horror of manipulative relationships is on point in this one. While critics have focused on Zofloya and on his erotic relationship with Victoria, they have not explored the ways in which Dacre interweaves the subversive desires of Victoria, Zofloya, and her husband, Berenza, characters whose identities are interwoven and exaggerated by gender and racial categories.7 This essay therefore examines how Zofloya destabilises cultural categories and gender codes by employing the masquerade aesthetic of role reversal in its depiction of these relationships. It furthermore engages sexual politics, feminine virtue, and transgressive modes of desire within the context of patriarchal imperialist attitudes. The text displays female consumption of the sexualised, raced body alongside male consumption of the maternal, religiously coded body, portraying the collision and collusion of patriarchal and colonial structures. It further interrogates the cultural ideal of the pure maternal body, simultaneously destabilising the Madonna/whore dichotomy and patriarchal imperialist notions of motherhood as bearer of home and empire. Victoria not only kills her husband by aligning with the devil, but her hypersexuality, as postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha claims of the colonised figure, 'problematizes the sign of racial and cultural priority'.8 Essentially, the notion of the female body as bearer of culture and race collapses when mothers and their daughters sacrifice maternal and domestic virtues to gratify their sexual desires.

J.F. Blumenbach, ‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. T. Bendyshe (London: n.p., 1865), p. 264. One might suggest that had the designation ‘Moor’ been active in the mid-nineteenth-century, the Fante and Mandinka might well have emerged as Moorish peoples. Zofloya is known for its use of female characters who deviate from the standard notions of virtuous femininity in the early nineteenth century. The prominent female characters Victoria and her mother Laurina transgress in ways that were deemed inappropriate in this time period. Because of this, many critics consider this novel a deviation from the standard Gothic work, and characterize it as a part of the "Female Gothic". Beatriz González Moreno, an English professor at University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, wrote of Zofloya, "Dacre's novel constitutes a strategically crafted and singular work of complex Female Gothic that speaks to its time by challenging various established views regarding women's nature and roles". [5]uncommon sensations filled her bosom, as she observed her proximity to the Moor. The dim twilight increasing to darkness, which now began to spread its sombre shadows around, threw a deeper tint over his figure, and his countenance was more strongly contrasted by the snow white turban which encircled his brows, and by the large bracelets of pearl upon his arms and legs. (p. 150) Zofloya (Satan) The Moor: servant of Henriquez. First appears in Victoria's dreams. He claims he can help Victoria fulfill her every wish and desire. He gives her poisons to destroy the lives of those around her. In the end, he reveals his true self; he is Satan. Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 36. However, Nicholson does not assert the novel to be a morality tale, proclaiming it as a mere "performance" of Dacre's imagination. [3]