Zofloya; Or The Moor

"The term ‘ Gothic novel’ didn’t come into being until the end of the nineteenth century. It was popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Ann Radcliffe can be described retrospectively as using Gothic trappings in her novels. Radcliffe—who was by far the best-selling, best-paid author of the 1790s—popularized the ‘explained supernatural’. This occurs when terrifying and apparently supernatural incidents are all—like in Scooby-Doo —eventually explained as occurring through various mechanisms, instruments, or accidents. In Radcliffe, it is suggestion that gets the mind working to create a sense of infinity, or of ‘the sublime’ (as Edmund Burke describes it). The mind’s encounter with an image it cannot comprehend is a heightening experience, but one which also annihilates the self. This was a favourite aesthetic effect of the late eighteenth century. By contrast, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk is a revolting novel about power, corruption, brutality, rape, torture, murder, and black magic. Here, the supernatural has a powerful grip on human experience: magic, enchantment, and spells form the fabric of this novel. Women writers of this period are therefore usually associated with Radcliffe and the explained supernatural. But Charlotte Dacre is the opposite: she positions herself in the Lewisian horror tradition by writing a novel about murderous and vile Venetians, and their attempts to slake their almost bestial lusts. In Zofloya , the central character—Victoria—ends up forming a pact with a mysterious, exotic, Orientalized figure—the Moor—who provides the means by which she can seduce one of the characters and then murder her husband. I find this book fascinating. It’s a novel written by a woman full of nasty female characters and problematic mother-daughter relationships, in which women kill other women. It’s highly unusual. Readers at the time were horrified. It has been difficult to fit this novel into conventional accounts of the Gothic because it doesn’t align with Radcliffe or Mary Shelley, and certainly not with Jane Austen, who was writing at almost exactly the same time. It shows untrammeled desires and lusts that seem out of place in feminist critical constructions of the canon of women writers. It’s an outsider text that challenges categories—something the Gothic characteristically does—through the supernatural, violence, and sensationalism. It’s a hallucinatory novel, which uses dreams and dream worlds. When it was written, dreams were increasingly seen as portentous, or somehow key to the mysteries of one’s own identity. In the novel, you’re never certain what is a dream. Is Zofloya actually a projection of Victoria? You’re never sure. Although he is literally diabolical, he may simply be a manifestation of her morbid sexual desire. I would compare Zofloya to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chambe r. The title story of this work, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, is based on Bluebeard’s castle and is—to me—Carter’s invitation to female readers to embrace much more violent and transgressive sexual fantasies than are commonly accepted. In other words, it offers women permission to see themselves as victims in sadomasochistic games and posits that this itself could be thrilling. Carter wrote a very interesting book about the Marquis de Sade — The Sadeian Woman —which is about how sexual fantasies can be liberating for women. She says that these tales are not just about victimization, oppression, and patriarchal tyranny; rather, she argues that we have to be a lot more sophisticated in our ways of thinking about fantasy. And Dacre is doing something similar."