SOURCE: Craciun, Adriana. “‘I hasten to be disembodied’: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body.” European Romantic Review 6, no. 1 (1995): 75-97.

[In the following essay, Craciun studies the prevailing opinions of science and epistemology during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a context within which she develops her thesis that Dacre's work, particularly her poetry, holds more complex, positive concepts of sexuality, the body, and the demon lover than we previously thought.]

And if it is in death that the spirit becomes free, in the manner of spirits, it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own.

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (217)

Charlotte Dacre¹ chose to rename herself “Rosa Matilda” after the demon lover in Lewis's The Monk, a gesture which invites us to re-examine the relationship between women and demon lovers. All work on the demon lover in the Romantic period shares the often tacit assumption that the demon lover is a preoccupation of male writers. But because Charlotte Dacre's work has more in common with the dark imaginations of Lewis² and Sade than with that of women writers such as Radcliffe, her work demands that we question comfortable assumptions about gender and the demon lover theme in this period. More importantly, Dacre's work requires us to question the boundaries some critics have begun to impose on Romantic women writers in general, through gender-complementary models of Romanticism which set up rigid distinctions between the canonical male writers and women writers.³ Dacre's work, then, will serve here as evidence of how women writers of the Romantic period held more complex and positive concepts of the body, sexuality, and the demon lover than we might imagine.

The neglect of Romantic women's writing has made possible what is essentially a circular argument concerning the demon lover: women were not interested in the demon lover because this figure, whether male or female, represents an essentially masculine obsession with male punishment of defiant women, or with the danger posed to men by the otherness of femininity.⁴ Rather than limiting the demon lover to such sociological or psychological functions, I suggest that we also re-contextualize the figure within late eighteenth-century competing discourses on the body and on imagination, and on the ability of each to deform and transform the other.

In Romantic period discourses warning of corporeal deformation—in the animated undead body, the unsexed body, and the nymphomaniacal body—we can also glimpse the era's growing realization that bodies are not immutable or naturally fixed.⁵ In each of these discourses, women are typically assumed to be the objects or victims of male imagination, never the subjects. In fact, as Mary Poovey argues, “by the last decades of the eighteenth century, [for women] even to refer to the body was considered ‘unladylike’” (14).⁶ Yet I believe that Charlotte Dacre's poetry, published in the two-volume Hours of Solitude (1805), is a powerful example of women writers' subtle evocations of bodies which may escape our modern criteria of how human bodies and sexualities are typically represented. In Dacre's poetry we can glimpse an imagined potential for corporeal transformation in the above-mentioned misogynist discourses on deformation. This essay will thus compare writing on these three types of unnatural bodies before concluding with an extended reading of Charlotte Dacre's “The Mistress to the Spirit of Her Lover,” a poem in the demon lover tradition in which a woman is haunted by her lover. Because the supernatural body of Dacre's demon lover, like the hysterical body in Foucault's Madness and Civilization, is “outside of all organic laws and any functional necessity” (147), it threatens the social body by embodying disorder, and reveals that the natural is a constructed category defined by precarious boundaries.

Eugenia DeLamotte, in Perils of the Night, argues that “the central dilemma of Gothic romancers” is exemplified in the way “their images of transcendence have a disconcerting way of reverting to images of mortality even as one contemplates them” (141). Though DeLamotte is concerned with boundaries of the self in her study, one can also consider this oscillation between transcendence and collapse of boundaries in terms of boundaries between and within bodies. By bodies and their boundaries I mean much more than bodies as naturally occurring, coherent entities which symbolize social or psychological relations between distinct subjects (e.g., the penetration of the hero's body into the heroine's representing his violation of her integrity, rights, safety, etc., a worthwhile and often-examined theme). Rather, I want to look at bodies as entities that are as much sites of ideological contention as is the definition and experience of the Romantic self. Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter is the example of recent theoretical work on the construction of bodies that is most relevant to my project, as Butler focuses on the social construction of materiality itself: “what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect” (2). The unstable and indefinable body of the demon lover will in fact illustrate Butler's contention that “materialization is never quite complete, [and] … bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (2).

The instability of the materiality of demon lovers and revenants (especially in the latter's decay) can be read as a symbol of the inability of the transcendent Romantic imagination to grasp the supernatural and the noumenal.⁷ But we can just as easily focus on the ability of these beings to transform themselves, most significantly their bodies, rather than on their inability to maintain material cohesion, and thus look at corporeal transformation as more than a metaphor for failed spiritual transcendence. Rather than embodying the noumenal, the supernatural demon lover or revenant embodies the phenomenal nature of all bodies, and this is most clear in the disturbing ease with which these mysterious figures change their shape, their size, and their sex. Thus, in addition to being an allegory of the “soul's immensity” and its desire to transgress all boundaries, as DeLamotte would argue (121), the demon lover is also the embodiment of the radical potential of all bodies, not just selves, to lose cohesion, organization, and even materiality as it is usually understood (as a naturally occurring, fixed state), and to perform material transformations. The decomposition of the living corpse, the immateriality of the phantom lover, and the often elemental composition (e.g., made of water or mist) of the demon lover, all attest to the volatile nature of bodies as they verge from degeneration to regeneration in an endless process of transformation.

I. UNDEAD BODIES

The demon lover can grow immense, a transformation often read as an allegory of spiritual transcendence (as in DeLamotte), though in the anonymous poem “The Bleeding Nun” based on this episode in The Monk, we have an opportunity to read this physical transformation literally, that is, corporeally.⁸ Raymond, thinking he speaks to his lover, unintentionally binds himself to the reanimated corpse of the bleeding nun with his vow that “Thou art mine, and I am thine, / Body and soul for ever!” The supernatural nature of the materialized bleeding nun is beyond the threshold of Raymond's perception because he imagines her to be his living lover, Agnes. Thus he easily “bore her in his arms away,” and yet when he finally becomes aware of her supernatural, “ghastly, pale, and dead,” nature, she is suddenly “A form of more than mortal size.” The horrifying outcome of Agnes' masquerade as a murderous and sexually transgressive ghost attests to the ability of all women's bodies to metamorphose into unnatural (because unfemininely large) bodies through the enactment of unnatural desires. Raymond is paralyzed with fear as his lover's body, no longer the diminutive object of his desire, becomes the monstrous subject of its own unnatural desires. The touch of the living corpse with its rotting fingers introduces decay and impotence⁹ into the body of Raymond, making the danger of the undead and demonic decidedly corporeal. Raymond's horror is indicative of the late eighteenth century's anxiety over (and also delight in) the disruptive potential of bodies, and women's bodies in particular, to exceed the boundaries of the natural.

The story of the bleeding nun is also, of course, symbolic of male fear of women's sexual agency and aggression. The sexually transgressive behavior of revenants, vampires and demon lovers, because they are typically incestuous, necrophilic, sadistic, or homosexual, is noted by all who write on the subject as an expression of the writers' dissatisfaction with the sexually repressive legacy of Christianity.¹⁰ But like the reading of the ability to grow immense as a spiritual allegory, the reading of the demon lover solely as fantasy of sexual transgression ignores the corporeal dimensions of transgression. Thus the bleeding nun's immense size, like the unusually large and unfeminine size of the female creature in Frankenstein and of Dacre's villainess Victoria in Zofloya, is not a metaphor for but a materialization of her unnatural, because unfeminine, desires and actions.

II. SEXED AND UNSEXED BODIES

Thomas Laqueur, in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, argues that in the eighteenth century, while the two sex model based on natural difference between men and women gained credibility,¹¹ this epistemological shift did not eliminate the previous one sex model. The two sex model instead established a “powerful alternative” which allowed for “a wide variety of contradictory cultural claims about sexual difference” (154, 175):

Whatever the issue, the body became decisive. …

It may well be the case that almost as many people believed that women by nature were equal in passion to men as believed the opposite.

(152)

The two sex model attempted to ground the ideology of women's passionlessness in empirical science, though as Laqueur shows, the scientific community was divided over which model to uphold. Despite the growing emphasis on a “biology of incommensurability” (152) and women's passionlessness, it is remarkable to note that the one sex model's insistence on female sexual desire and on the necessity for female orgasm in conception was never overturned, but rather was conveniently downplayed by advocates of sexual difference.¹² Though it is in many ways productive to generalize, as Mary Poovey does, that “[b]y the end of the eighteenth century … ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ were understood by virtually all men and women to be synonymous” (6), I find Laqueur's emphasis on the unresolved struggle over both the meaning of the sex “woman,” and whether or not such a distinct sex even exists, more compelling. By emphasizing the struggle over the categories of sex and gender, rather than the struggle's outcome (the conflation of sex and gender), we can give women's perspectives greater visibility.

In the light of Laqueur's insistence on the unresolvable conflict between the one sex and two sex models, Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females (1798), typically read as evidence of the era's deterministic insistence on natural sexual difference, could be read as a testimony to the instability of the two sex model. To unsex a woman as did Polwhele Wollstonecraft and others, and Sade did Charlotte Corday,¹³ is not to make her a man by simply reversing rigid gender polarities. To be an unsexed female, a monstrous “hyaena in petticoats,”¹⁴ is to be notfemale. The notfemale is neither male nor a utopian androgynous third sex, but like the hermaphrodite suggested by the hyena,¹⁵ the notfemale points to the limits of the two sex model even within the minds of its most passionate advocates. The unsexed, like the undead, remain indefinable in the natural order, making all distinctions between the sexes and between living and dead problematic.

III. NATURAL BODIES

Roy Porter argues that “Enlightenment England … reconceptualized sexuality as being an essential part of Nature,” making sexuality “[s]een now less as a sin or vice, and more as a part of the economy of Nature” (8, 7). Despite an increased tolerance for sexual expression (reserved for the most part for straight men), Enlightenment sexuality was restricted in its very naturalness, since Nature was typically imagined as benevolent, beautiful and ordered. Hence the sexuality of working class people, servants, homosexuals, and children, because it often exceeded the boundaries of the decorous and useful, often figured (in medical or conduct literature, for example) as potentially threatening to this “natural sexuality” enjoyed with unprecedented openness by many straight men. The Enlightenment incorporated sexuality within the cult of sensibility, thus civilizing it, which “seemed to solve that constant problem of the English Enlightenment: how individuals could indulge their own selfish passions without danger to the social order” (20). But women's sexuality became increasingly disruptive of the bourgeois social order during this time precisely because it threatened to disturb this “natural” order within the individual bourgeois subject herself, and within her supposedly natural body and sex.

As women's “natural” difference from men became the focus of much medical, educational, conduct and literary attention throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, a similar biological approach to sexuality and madness appeared at this time which gave these “biological” states a moral content. The growing preoccupation with the immorality of those indulging in “unnatural” sexual desires and acts (which for women came to include most sexual experience) and the virtue attributed to resisting such unnatural desires led to what Foucault identified as the shift from classical madness to the new medicalized and moralized insanity as a “just punishment” for immoral violations of natural laws (158). The unnatural body of the insane became evidence of “internal” immorality:

the internal order of the organs gave way to the incoherent space of masses passively subject to the chaotic movement of the [animal] spirits. … The hysterical body was thus given over to that disorder of the spirits which, outside of all organic laws and any functional necessity, could successively seize upon all the available spaces of the body.

(146-47)

The penetrable body that allows for this hysterical disruption thus lacks a

moral density; the resistance of the organs to the disordered penetration of the spirits is perhaps one and the same thing as that strength of soul which keeps the thoughts and the desires in order.

(149)

The disorder experienced by the hysterical body is not the (Platonic) “revolution of the depths to the heights but a lawless whirlwind in a chaotic space” (150), an apt description of the demon lover's body as it penetrates the “natural” body of its lover and begins to proliferate disorder.

IV. WOMEN'S BODIES AND IMAGINATION

In the eighteenth century, Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, imagination was “the source of sexual feeling” for women and hence also “the ultimate source of danger” (38). Bienville's Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus (1775),¹⁶ the first medical treatise devoted to this disorder, makes it clear that the imagination is the source of both female sexual pleasure and disorder, and in fact devotes an entire section to the imagination: “Observations on the Imagination, As connected with the Nymphomania.” According to G. S. Rousseau, Nymphomania is significant because “Bienville rejects an entirely mechanistic view of the nervous system and … argues that the brain and imagination influence each other in some reciprocal but unspecified way” (103). Bienville warns throughout his text that because “the imagination is the source of [the nymphomaniac's] disorder” (112) (and the perusal of novels frequently the catalyst), it must also be the source of the cure: “there are cases which will admit of a cure from a simple attention to the imagination; but there are no cases (or, at least, scarcely any) in which physical remedies can alone effect a radical cure. There is no constitution without a germ of this natural generative fire” (160). Bienville's text embodies the contradictory claims regarding sexual difference that Laqueur described; he argues that women's sexuality is natural (and that “Marriage alone cures” nymphomania [107]) and that its suppression is “capable of … causing a revolution, and disorder in the physical system of their nature” (160), while simultaneously emphasizing “the fragility of [women's] nature” (vii), their greater vulnerability to their distinctly sexualized body, and even the inhuman and sinister qualities of their bodies (he compares the cervix to a dog's muzzle and the womb's ligaments to bats' wings). Thus, despite his assurance of the naturalness of women's sexuality, the competing claims of difference compel Bienville to exclaim that “these monsters in human shape abandon themselves to an excess of fury” (37).

Nymphomania combines medical discourse with sensationalistic case histories, and is directed not to other physicians, but to parents and educators of young women, whom Bienville enlists as “secret physicians.” Bienville's appeal to a lay middle-class audience, and the mixed medical/literary nature of his own discourse, bridges the gap between medical and literary discourses to which modern readers are accustomed. Although the practice of literature and medicine have little overlap today, Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter argue that “the Enlightenment [was] … an exceptionally fruitful period in the interplay of literature and medicine” (3), in which, “[r]ather than C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures,’ there was … ‘one culture’ precisely because … much the same men—and it was necessarily males—were active in the fields of medicine, natural philosophy and general writing” (2).¹⁷ As we shall see, the interpretations and applications of medical discourse by women writers such as Charlotte Dacre are examples of women's representations of bodies which go beyond the endorsement of passionlessness or reticence toward a physicality with which we are already familiar. One example of women's re-interpretation of medical discourse is Dacre's novel The Passions (1811), on one level an expanded version of one of Bienville's narratives, keeping the name of the protagonist Julia, while also connecting Bienville's narrative to Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (also about a Julie). A discussion of The Passions is outside the scope of this essay, but it is significant to note that Dacre focuses her attention not on the innocent “victim” Julia, but on the corrupting anti-heroine of the text, Apollonia, giving her Luciferan aspirations and soliloquies which rival those of a Byronic hero and leave her misogynist origins in Bienville and Rousseau far behind.

Bienville describes nymphomania in lurid detail as an “incredible … metamorphosis” (136) that “can debase, afflict, and as it were unhumanize” (186) women, and, like Foucault (who discussed his work), argues that the ultimate danger of Nymphomania is social disorder through corporeal disorder: “it is from this general overthrow of all their relations to each other, that a delirium arises to destroy the order of ideas, and impels the person afflicted to affirm what she had denied, and to deny what she hath affirmed” (70). The “revolution … in the physical system” (160) of women will thus lead to a revolution in female manners, to use Wollstonecraft's expression. In the third, “desperate” stage of nymphomania, which is accompanied by sexual aggression and violence toward men, the nymphomaniac “sinks into a state of perfect reconciliation with the powers of her body” (70) and the body itself undergoes a physiological transformation, the brain's fibers becoming lax and penetrable by sensual desires, the clitoris growing “larger than in discreet women” (74), and the reproductive organs swollen and infested with tape-worms, tumors, or abscesses (80).

The nymphomaniac's physical metamorphosis shares with the undead body's animated decay a surrender of the proper subject to the power of the body. This body is not a proper, organized body, but a body without proper boundaries, like that of the revenant Alonzo the Brave in Lewis' ballad, through which “The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out.”¹⁸ Women's imagination, unrestrained by reason and indulged by the “fatal rage of Masturbation” (174), materializes as the hysterical, penetrable body Foucault described. In the prose version of Dacre's “The Mistress to the Spirit of Her Lover,” the Mistress specifies that it is the imagination which allows her to give the spirit of her lover an ephemeral material cohesion. The absence initially encountered by her imagination bears a synecdochic relationship to the absence of all natural bodies:

Sometimes thy features seem to waver—it must be in the twilight, when all has a dubious shade; but I cannot always catch those loved features—it appears to me as though they were fading wholly away; but suddenly, by an effort of the imagination, I again identify them, and secretly determine never more to look off of them.

(emphasis added)

Dacre's emphasis on imagination, transcendence, and the sublime (consistent themes throughout her works) is evidence that women Romantics did concern themselves with philosophical and poetic issues central to canonical Romanticism. But Dacre's use of the imagination, in this context of bodies, falls outside the categories of Enlightenment imagination as dangerous, disruptive illusion and Romantic imagination as redemptive vision.

The Mistress' imagination can be seen as a destructive, sexualized illusion that draws her to her death, much as one woman in Bienville's narrative admitted to being “seduced by the illusions of the imagination” (78). At the same time, however, her imagination creates cohesion and synthesizes identity. Imagination's relation to disorder is thus paradoxical, taking place on the threshold of the Romantic redemption of Enlightenment imagination. G. S. Rousseau argues in “Towards a Social Anthropology of the Imagination” that because Enlightenment science's “promise of an organic marriage of the spiritual (imagination) and the material (animal spirits, fibres, nerves)” was thwarted, “powerful minds like Coleridge [and] Wordsworth” are responsible for providing a “new phenomenology”: “The diseased imagination was … romanticised, endowed with an aura of glory it had never known” (15). But Rousseau neglects to gender his assessment of the new Romantic ideology of the visionary imagination, for the diseased imagination remained, and became associated exclusively with women, even in the works of feminists like Wollstonecraft (which is one reason some critics are attempting to distance women Romantics from imagination's Romantic ideology). The Mistress' imagination embodies the conflicted nature of Romantic imagination because of its debt to Enlightenment diseased imagination, and the poem foregrounds the role of gender in this conflict. Dacre's poem is clearly Romantic and visionary, yet the female gender of the speaker allows for the possibility of reading the poem as an example of women's diseased imagination; this contradictory reading is precisely why we must resist a gender-complementary reading of a “feminine Romanticism” which would neatly resolve the conflict.

V. DEMONIC BODIES

The Mistress senses within her lover Foucault's “lawless whirlwind in a chaotic space”:

That aerial form, which no atoms combine,
Might dizzily sport down the abyss of death,
Or tremble secure on the hazardous line.

The dizzying indeterminateness of the Lover threatens to engulf the mistress herself, yet she desires to share his remarkable ability to tremble secure on the line between ostensibly distinct states, to enter and emerge from the abyss. The poem's subtitle provides us with an easy explanation for the Mistress' passionate visions of her dead lover: “The Mistress to the Spirit of her Lover, Which, in the phrenzy occasioned by his loss, she imagined to pursue continually her footsteps.” The Mistress has gone mad, a possibility she herself considers in the verse version of the poem: “Oh! Lover illusive, my senses to mock— / 'Tis madness presents if I venture to think.” But we can do more than cite the Mistress' dangerously passionate desire for her Lover as the cause of her madness.¹⁹ If we read passion according to Foucault, “as a chance for madness to penetrate the world of reason” (89), then the Mistress' passion is more than a clinical explanation for her “delusion,” since passion

laid … man open … to the infinite movement that destroyed him. Madness, then, was not merely one of the possibilities afforded by the union of body and soul; it was not just one of the consequences of passion. Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned against that unity and once again put it into question. … Madness was one of those unities in which laws were compromised, perverted, distorted—thereby manifesting such unity as evident and established, but also as fragile and already doomed to destruction.

(89)

The apparition of the Lover puts into question the unity of body and soul, for the Lover may be a reanimated body without soul, an immaterial soul, or neither. In the figure of the Lover the Mistress glimpses the fragility and insufficiency of this unity, and of each half of the unity. Body and soul become stable entities in their own right, and only momentarily, through the effort of her imagination. She attempts again and again to fix the true nature of her Lover, either body or soul or both, while experiencing him in an impossibly contradictory series of senses: corporeal, immaterial, aural, imaginary, celestial, demonic, elemental.

The most remarkable aspect of the Lover is his liminal quality. Appearing at twilight, the time when the Gothic's powers to disturb Enlightenment clarity are at their height, the figure of the Lover is in a constant state of flux and inhabits a threshold:

Ah! wilt thou not fall from that edge of the steep?
The pale moon obliquely shines over the lake;
The shades are deceptive, below is the deep,
And I see thy fair form in its clear waters shake.

The Lover trembles, shakes, hovers above the hills and beneath the water, “speaks in a low murmuring voice”: he is the embodiment of perpetual motion and indistinctness. Dacre's poetry contains many similar supernatural figures,²⁰ usually male and made of mist, rain, shadow, fog, or light, which have a characteristic physical indistinctness and thus invoke the sublime.²¹ The Mistress, rather than fearing this fatal lover drawing her toward destruction, desires this indistinctness and the indistinguishable pain and pleasure that his presence brings her: “Follow me, follow me over the earth; / Ne'er leave me, bright shadow, wherever I rove. … / Thou formest my pleasure, thou formest my pain.” The Mistress' description of her dead Lover as a “Vision of beauty” celebrates his physical beauty: his “heavenly form” is “habited in robes of mist, and his silvery hair undulates upon the gale,” and he has a distinctly Luciferan air, being both “luminous” and “celestial” yet having a “shadowy form” which leads the Mistress to ask, “Art thou from earth or from heaven exil'd?” She finds this hazardous mixture irresistible even though, or perhaps because, his beauty carries the taint of death and physical decay which connects his materiality to natural forces: “sometimes me thinks upon my glowing cheek I feel thy breath, but it is cold and damp.”

She desires to mingle her living body with his (undead) body, and draws his body into her own in a demonic version of inspiration:

I respire eagerly the bleak breeze that passes over thy dubious form; I inhale it with ardent, melancholy delight, for it is impregnated with thy spirit.

The demonic nature of their physical interpenetration lies not merely in his “dubious” nature, alluding to the infernal origin of traditional demon or revenant lovers. The bleak breeze carrying the spirit of the dead is an allusion to the physical and social threat that the decomposing body brings to the living, which is one basis of the traditional vampire and revenant legends. What is remarkable about the Mistress' response is that she respires eagerly the pestilent air, inviting the disorder of the plague into her body in order to share the indeterminate undead state of her Lover. She both re-creates and maintains his incoherent physical presence outside her by an effort of the imagination, and draws this mingled Life-in-Death into herself, becoming “impregnated” by an immaterial spirit in order to bring about the eventual destruction of her own physical integrity as she nears the edge of the abyss. Their passionate union will in fact bring about dissolution of all “natural” unities.

Thus their final embrace in the verse version is much more than the Mistress' symbolic self-destruction—it is self-transformation. In the embrace of the living and the undead is the possibility of transforming the “natural” living body into a supernatural body:

Lo! see thy dim arms are extending for me;
Thy soul then exists, comprehends, and is mine;
The life now is ebbing which mine shall set free;
Ah! I feel it beginning to mingle with thine.

Traditionally, the fatal lover draws the hapless heroine toward death, which is one possible reading of this ending of Dacre's poem. Yet it is the Mistress who desires to mingle with the Lover in an embrace that is suggestive of both necrophilia and sexual ecstasy, and it is her own generative imagination that empowers the Lover to take shape and beckon to her. Dacre's poem “Edmund and Anna” contains a more traditional version of a heroine's suicide upon the death of her lover, which ends, however, in an even more explicitly sexual embrace of death: “‘Dear Edmund, I come,’ She stretches her arms out, and dies!” It is as such a unity of eros and thanatos that most critics characterize the demon lover's transgressive erotic power, yet this eros/thanatos unity is typically thought to appeal solely to the male imagination, and to function as a threat in women's imaginations. This unnatural mingling of the living and the undead, however, is on one level also a coded version of female sexual pleasure and agency, for the Mistress herself conjures the object of her affection, the demonic lover, and urges him to pursue her, reversing the familiar trajectory of male desire which limits the woman to the status of origin and object of male desire.

The Mistress has little in common with the trusting victims of the demon lover ballads who are horrified to discover their lovers' supernatural state.²² Like Charlotte who took the name of the era's most famous demon lover, Matilda, the Mistress identifies with the demonic figures themselves. The Mistress' despair is clearly due to her inability to be certain of her Lover's material or spiritual presence; yet I would argue that part of her pleasure in seeing him arises from his very indistinctness, and her pain from her own increasing desire to become like him, rather than for him to become like her. Thus her cry, “Oh! vain combination!—oh! embodied mist!” is one both of despair and envy. And in “To the Shade of Mary Robinson,” Dacre makes this same gesture of identification toward the spirit of the well known poet she admired, asking “why not, sometimes, in thy form light and airy, / Deign in the deep wild my companion to be?” Conscious of a women's poetic tradition, Dacre also uses the demon lover as poetic muse (as male Romantics did), celebrating Robinson's poetic talents in a poem that also reads as the lover lamenting and invoking the beloved to “glide distant before me.”

Dacre's fascination with the indistinct or unbounded nature of bodies is not limited to supernatural bodies. In Dacre's poem “Tu es beau comme le desert, avec toutes ses fleurs et toutes ses brises,” for example, the speaker describes her male lover much as the Mistress described her phantom lover:

Thy perfect form, of atoms pure combin'd,
Fair habitation for a lovely soul,
Seeming too much for mortal clay refin'd,
Such bright effulgence mantles thro' the whole.

Dacre's poetry resounds with such subtly erotic celebrations of the beloved's body, which emerge from the poetry if one begins to read for different types of natural bodies, not just human bodies. Comparing the “perfect form” of the male beloved to a natural body—a desert full of flowers and scents—is not a euphemistic or hesitant gesture, but one which breaks down barriers between types of bodies and explores their interconnections. As the speaker contemplates the body of her beloved, she identifies with and is drawn into him much as the Mistress had been: “from me my impassion'd soul does steal, / As anxious to identify with thine!” Though clearly on one level a coded reference to sexual ecstasy (being literally outside oneself), this process of identification with the lover is also a process of transformation through the agency of scent and wind:

Ambrosial air doth ever thee surround
Thy proper atmosphere—its pow'r I feel
With such strange influence as persuades me well,
Near me thou com'st, tho' sight may not reveal.

As with the Mistress' supernatural lover, this lover's “strange influence” emanates beyond the boundaries of his body, and in fact draws the speaker outside the boundaries of her own. His physical presence is not bounded by the visible outline of his body, for she senses the power of his physical presence even when she cannot see him. The light (“bright effulgence”), scent, and breeze that emanate from the male beloved are also found in supernatural figures, and thus both natural and supernatural bodies in these poems share a similar fluidity and ability to transcend ostensibly natural boundaries.

If in our rediscovery of writing by women Romantics we wish to read for their thoughts on the body and on sexuality, we need thus to begin to read differently; we must allow for representations of bodies which may be beyond the threshold of our current assumptions of what constitutes bodies. We would do well to apply to women Romantics' representations of bodies the advice that the Wandering Jew gave to Raymond about the Bleeding Nun's body: “Though to you only visible for one hour in the twenty-four, neither day nor night does she ever quit you” (178).

VI. “I HASTEN TO BE DISEMBODIED”: DACRE AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The body is more than the acultural object of the mind's repression and discipline; as Foucault argued in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, the sexed body is a constructed “artificial unity [of] anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures” (154), both a product and an agent of power, as well as a site of resistance. The Romantic period's conflicted notions of the imagination represent a particularly complex understanding of the interplay within the mind/body binary, in which bodies are both objects of repression and social production, as well as agents in their own right. The imaginative faculty can in fact productively alter the shape, nature, and powers of the body, and can therefore in a sense materialize. But the body can therefore also dematerialize and rematerialize, as it performs actions and acquires qualities that place it outside the threshold of normative materiality, as different criteria of corporeal coherence are applied. And as Bienville warned, the degeneration of the body completes the vicious circle as the body sinks into unbridled pleasures and further exacerbates the imagination.

The degeneration of the nymphomaniac's internal organs parallels the decay of the living corpse—both bodies are in the process of dematerializing and rematerializing as something different. The primacy and identity of each category, mind and body, are therefore impossible to sustain, as is the stable relation between them. Even when the Mistress determines that the apparition does possess her lover's true soul, exclaiming that, “Thy soul then exists, comprehends, and is mine,” she is no longer in possession of her own soul. The act of mutual possession is one of mutual displacement, as in the case of Raymond and the bleeding nun, and Heathcliff and Cathy; if his soul is hers, then her soul must be his.

Heathcliff makes the same gesture forty years later in Wuthering Heights when he is no longer able to live with his soul in the grave. Indeed, Dacre's poem bears an uncanny resemblance to Brontë's novel. The Mistress' affinity for the demon lover is shared by Cathy, for, as Peter Grudin argues in The Demon-Lover, “[a]s Catherine and Heathcliff exchange roles, it is she who assumes that of the demon-lover,” and this role exchange “symbolizes the final dissolution of the barriers between insider and outsider” (142, 152). Heathcliff's desire to be haunted by his lover is identical to the Mistress', and the last lines of Dacre's poem are prophetic of Heathcliff's necrophilic attempt to mingle with Cathy's decomposing body, and of the legend of the two lovers haunting the moors:

Soon will … my soul too be free. My body, which is of concentrated atoms, shall lie by thine in the narrow grave, which it will not deny me to share with it; and then together shall our spirits wander over the mountains, or re-visit the scenes of our youth.

J. Hillis Miller argues that what haunts the center of Wuthering Heights is not the presence of original union between lover and beloved, but the absence of this union, an argument that applies to Dacre's poem as well. Miller states that “This ghostly glimpse [of an original union between lovers] is a projection outward of a oneness from a state of twoness within. This duality is within the self, within the relation of the self to another, within nature, within society, and within language” (68). I would add to this list the lack of unity within the body, and within the relation of the mind or soul to the body. Thus the Mistress' dream of disembodied spirits re-united, and united in themselves, functions like the traces of original union in Wuthering Heights—they are a manifestation of the absence of such a natural unity in experience. The Mistress, like Heathcliff, sees in the dubious form that haunts her “a faint resemblance unto the charms of my beloved,” a trace of his presence in a world where presence is always mediated and constructed “by an effort of the imagination.”

Like the Mistress, the speaker in Dacre's “Song of Melancholy” is clearly suicidal: “I come, I come, gloomy shadows! I hasten to be disembodied!” Yet we can also say that their desire to be disembodied, like Heathcliff's, speaks of more than the soul being liberated from the prison-house of flesh. To be disembodied from the “natural” body leaves open options other than being an immortal soul. The speaker who hastens to be disembodied, whose “days are a dim mist” (67), could share the indeterminate threshold state of an unsexed female, of the “unhumanized” nymphomaniac. These bodies, like Dacre's supernatural figures (which the Mistress embraces), are defined by what they are not; they are placed at the boundaries of the human or the female. The very persistence of unsexed, undead or otherwise unnatural bodies is a haunting reminder that the nature of bodies is never stable. Whether feared or desired, and they are usually both, bodies outside the natural order attest to the supernatural powers of all natural bodies.

Notes

1. Most of the biographical information on Dacre in the modern introductions to her works (e.g. by Sumners, Reiman, Varma, Knight-Roth) contain significant inaccuracies; the information presented in my essay is based on Ann Jones' account in Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers in Jane Austen's Age, which corrects previous mistakes, acknowledges lingering mysteries, and to which I would only add the confirmation that Charlotte Dacre was indeed the sister of Sophia King (see below). Charlotte Dacre (b. Charlotte King, c. 1772-1825?), better known as “Rosa Matilda,” was the daughter of the famous Jewish self-made banker, writer, blackmailer and radical supporter Jonathan King (b. Jacob Rey, 1753-1824), known as “Jew King.” John King was a visible figure in London society, “had direct dealings with Godwin, Byron and Shelley” according to Donald Reiman (vii), and “displayed a long record of political opposition” according to historian Iain McCalman (38). Along with her sister Sophia King (later Fortnum), also a novelist and poet, Charlotte (King) first published Trifles of Helicon (1798), which the two sisters dedicated to their father by name. Although her identity as the daughter of John King has been disputed in the past (by Reiman and Sumners), this version of Dacre's biography is substantiated by the reappearance of Charlotte King's poems in Charlotte Dacre's Hours of Solitude (1805). According to Jones, Charlotte King, “spinster,” married the editor of The Morning Post, Nicholas Byrne, in 1815, and it thus appears that “Dacre” was itself a pseudonym. Nicholas and Charlotte Byrne had three children, William, Charles, and Mary in 1806, 1807, and 1809, respectively, who were all baptized much later in 1811, though “If these were indeed the children of the couple who were married in 1815, it suggests that there had been some sort of liaison while Byrne's first wife, Louisa, was still living” (Jones 226). Charlotte Byrne died in 1825 at the age of 53, thus placing her birth in 1771 or 1772, ten years earlier than what her own prefatory remarks indicated in the 1805 Hours of Solitude when she gave her age as 23.

   Summers, in his introduction to The Fortune Press edition of Dacre's Zofloya, ranks Dacre third in prominence among Gothic writers, after Lewis and Radcliffe. Zofloya (1806) was very popular in its day, pirated in a chapbook in 1810, translated into French and German, and strongly influenced P. B. Shelley's own Gothic romances. Dacre's influence on P. B. Shelley and Byron has attracted some critical attention, examples of which are Stephen Behrendt's Introduction to Shelley's Zastrozzi and Irvyne, McGann's “‘My Brain is Feminine’: Byron and the Poetics of Deception,” and Montague Summers' “Byron's Lovely Rosa.” Extended discussions of Dacre in her own right can be found in Ann Jones' Ideas and Innovations, Robert Miles' Gothic Writing 1750-1820; A Genealogy and Sandra Knight-Roth's Charlotte Dacre and the Gothic Tradition (unpublished Dalhousie thesis). For a complete list of works by Dacre, exclusive of the uncollected poems she published in The Morning Post, see my Works Cited.

2. Dacre dedicated her first novel (which went into three editions by 1807), Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805) to Lewis, and in her popular Zofloya (1806) revised The Monk into a woman's “outsider narrative,” to use a term which Kate Ellis in The Contested Castle argues applies only to male Gothic plots. Even Dacre's contemporaries were struck by her work's resonance with Lewis' school of horror, as one reviewer compared Dacre's Zofloya to The Monk: “the same lust—the same infernal agents—the same voluptuous language” (Rev. of Zofloya. New Annual Register 27 (1806): 372-73).

3. Examples of gender-complementary models of Romanticism include Marlon Ross' The Contours of Masculine Desire and Anne Mellor's Romanticism and Gender. Both Ross and Mellor, despite their differences, clearly distinguish between canonical male Romanticism and women's writing of the period, either arguing that women were not and could not be Romantic (Ross), or that women had a complementary “feminine Romanticism” (Mellor). Kate Ellis, in The Contested Castle and William Patrick Day in In the Circles of Fear and Desire, make gender-complementary claims for the Gothic which are valuable for the works they discuss, but which, I would argue, could not apply to Dacre's work, just as similar models of Romanticism could not apply, because of the complexity of Dacre's female characters.

4. Toni Reed, in Demon Lovers and Their Victims, makes the feminist, though reductive, argument that the male demon lover popular in ballads for centuries is a trans-historical manifestation and instrument of men's oppression of women through rape and murder. Works on the demon lover in male-authored fiction which explore the psychosexual function of the (usually female) demon lover for the male imagination include Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony, Joseph Andriano's Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, Barbara Fass' La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism, Peter Grudin's The Demon Lover, Carol Senf's The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, and Liselotte Kurth-Voigt's “‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ as Femme Fatale in Romantic Poetry.” Nicolas Kiessling, in “Demonic Dread: The Incubus Figure in British Literature,” provides a helpful survey of the three separate traditions—Judeo-Christian, Early Germanic, and Celtic—from which early nineteenth-century demon lovers were derived. Kiessling argues that these multiple origins account for the contradictory, both destructive and positive, associations with this figure. Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth differs significantly from most works dealing with the demon lover in that she focuses on the feminist potential of the Victorian myths of demonic and angelic women. Auerbach's project is to reconstruct a submerged Victorian cultural consciousness in which women, through their symbolic association with demonic powers, possess the power of self-creation and cultural transformation. While my project is indebted to Auerbach's focus on metamorphosis between cultural types (e.g. demonic and angelic women) and on “a woman with a demon's gifts’” (9), her “archaeological” methodology and its reliance on a universal and unconscious Victorian mythology differs from my own methodology, which does not attempt any such reconstruction of a collective unconscious or mythos.

5. The mutability of body shape and size with which modern readers are most familiar—weight control—also emerged as a socially desirable possibility in this period. Pat Rogers, in “Fat is a Fictional Issue: The Novel and the Rise of Weight Watching,” argues that personal weight management began in the early nineteenth century, and that the novel “responds to, and creates, a growing uncertainty about the reliability of body shape … it starts to seem malleable rather than eternally given” (183).

6. Poovey goes on to argue that women writers found paradoxical ways to express their socially suppressed desires and experiences regarding their sexuality. My argument differs from Poovey's in that I am attempting to expand our criteria of what constitutes corporeal representation in Romantic women's writing by looking beyond sexuality as the defining indicator of corporeal experience.

7. Such a reading would be aware of and resistant to imagination's “Romantic Ideology” as described by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation.

8. Published anonymously in Lewis' Tales of Wonder, v.2 (1801). Other examples of the demon lover growing immense upon disclosing its supernatural nature include the traditional ballad “The Demon-Lover,” in circulation since the seventeenth century and published in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3) and, significant for the purpose of this essay, Dacre's Zofloya and Lewis' The Monk.

9. In the Bleeding Nun incident in Lewis' novel, Lewis emphasizes Raymond's growing resemblance to a corpse as he becomes clammy, cold, lifeless, mute, and even impotent in the Medusal gaze of the Nun: “struck by something petrifying in [the Nun's] regard,” his “nerves were bound up in impotence, and [he] remained in the same attitude inanimate as a statue” (170).

10. Scholars who make this argument include Mario Praz, Devendra Varma, Peter Grudin, and Joseph Andriano.

11. Until the eighteenth century, female bodies were essentially inferior and “cooler” versions of male bodies, with complementary though internalized genitals, and human bodies in general were related to other natural bodies and phenomena through correspondences and homologous features.

12. Surprisingly, “up to the early 1840s almost all authorities believed that coitally induced ovulation in humans as well as other mammals was the norm” but that within the new two sex model, women could not sense the orgasms they experienced (184).

13. Sade had “unsexed” Charlotte Corday, stating that because of her “barbarous” crime, she was “like those mixed beings whose sex is impossible to determine, [and who] directly belongs to neither” sex (qtd. in Chantal Thomas 74-75).

14. Walpole had thus described Wollstonecraft in his letters.

15. “The hyena … was long thought to be hermaphroditic” (Laqueur 19).

16. First printed (in French) in Amsterdam, 1771. For a feminist account of Nymphomania's role in the construction of female sexuality, see Carol Groneman's “Nymphomania—The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality.”

17. Roberts and Porter cite as British examples Bernard Mandeville, Mark Akenside, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, and John Locke, to which we should add John Keats.

18. “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine,” published in The Monk (1796).

19. Philip Martin, in Mad Women in Romantic Writing, discusses Romantic mad women in the context of this period's successful conflation of the categories woman and insane.

20. Examples include a whole series of elemental poems, such as “Wind” (which in some ways anticipates Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”), “Fog,” “Will'O'Wisp,” “Mildew,” “Frost,” and “Thaw,” as well as “The Lover's Vision,” “The Power of Love,” and “The Doubt.”

21. In Dacre's novel The Passions, one of the characters meditates for several pages on the nature of the sublime experience (a familiar occurrence in her works), discussing Longinus and specific qualities of Burke's sublime, such as terror, immensity, distance, and, significant for the purpose of this essay, indistinctness: “indistinctness … is a character of the sublime. The clouds rest on the highest mountains … The mind's eye … catches a glance of some mysterious form—imagination pursues it till sense almost totters, and the idea becomes lost. A blue vapour ascends from the lakes like the smoke of subterranean fire …” (1. 37).

22. Dacre's Hours of Solitude also contains examples of this more traditional interpretation of the demon lover as destructive masculinity, such as in “Death and the Lady,” and “The Skeleton Priest; or, The Marriage of Death,” where the doomed woman is told that as “the wife of the tomb,” her marriage is in reality “A bond of destruction” and a “murderous compact.” What is destructive about Dacre's demon lovers here and in Zofloya is not their sexual desires but their desire to marry and thus legally control their wives.

Works Cited

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Bienville, M. D. T., M. D. Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. Trans. Edward Sloane Wilmot. London, 1775. Rpt. with Onanism by S. A. Tissot as Onanism/Nymphomania. New York: Garland, 1985.

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———. George the Fourth. London, 1822.

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———. The Libertine. 1807. 4 vols. New York: Arno P, 1974.

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