SOURCE: Craciun, Adriana. Introduction to Zofloya; or, The Moor, pp. 9-32. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Craciun highlights the literary significance of Dacre's unique female characters, focusing especially on how Victoria's assertive sexuality, sadistic violence, and willful desire for mastery embody traits of the male Gothic villain. The critic also discusses how Dacre's thematic distinction between natural sex and cultural gender along with her emphasis on active existence over fixed essence accounts for Victoria's corporeal transformations.]

CHARLOTTE DACRE AND THE “VIVISECTION OF VIRTUE”

The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre's best-known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), is unique in women's Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of the Marquis de Sade or M. G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, or Jane Austen. No heroine of Radcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in Zofloya, that “there is certainly a pleasure … in the infliction of prolonged torment.” Zofloya is remembered today chiefly for its innovative revision of Lewis' The Monk (1796); the sexual desires and ambition of Dacre's protagonist, Victoria, drive her to seduce, torture and murder, and like Lewis' Ambrosio, Victoria is inspired to greater criminal and illicit sexual acts by a seductive Lucifer, disguised as a Moor, before she too is plunged headlong into an abyss by her demon lover. Dacre herself chose as her pen name “Rosa Matilda,” a clear reference to the Satanic femme fatale of Lewis's The Monk. Dacre's conscious and public alliance with this demonic woman complicates any unproblematic reliance on the moralistic elements throughout her works, where she often urges female readers to follow sexually conservative and even misogynist moral prescriptives. Indeed, even Sade in his introduction to The Crimes of Love (1800) half-heartedly declared his purpose to be morally edifying: “I wish people to see crime laid bare, I want them to fear it and detest it, and I know no other way to achieve this end than to paint it in all its horror” (116).

Significantly, Swinburne admired the “remarkable romance of Zofloya” precisely for its Sadean overtones, and overtly linked Dacre's novel to Sade's Justine and Juliette:

The action of the three volumes [of Zofloya] is concerned wholly with the Misfortunes of Virtue in the person of “the innocent Lilla” (who is generally undergoing incarceration and varieties of torment throughout the course of her blameless but comfortless career) and the Prosperities of Vice in the person of “the fiendish Victoria,” who ultimately succeeds in accomplishing the vivisection of virtue by hewing her amiable victim into more or less minute though palpitating fragments.¹

The “Misfortunes of Virtue” and the “Prosperities of Vice” are, of course, the subtitles of Sade's novels Justine and Juliette, respectively. Swinburne clearly saw in Dacre's “remarkable work” a fusion of Sade's two novels, wherein the libertine heroine Victoria, like Juliette, dismembered her “sister” Lilla in a Sadean “vivisection of virtue.”

Contemporary reviewers of Zofloya were disturbed by precisely the pornographic elements of Zofloya that Swinburne delighted in, singling out the novel's sexual and criminal content as unfit for a woman writer and for women readers. The Annual Review, for example, lamented that the “principal personages in these wild pages are courtesans of the lewdest class, and murderers of the deepest dye,” and concluded that

[t]here is a voluptuousness of language and allusion, pervading these volumes, which we should have hoped, that the delicacy of a female pen would have refused to trace; and there is an exhibition of wantonness of harlotry, which we would have hoped, that the delicacy of the female mind, would have been shocked to imagine.²

Not surprisingly, Zofloya sold well, not despite but probably because of its “voluptuousness of language” and “exhibition of wantonness,” selling 754 of 1000 printed copies in six months, inspiring a pirated chapbook, The Dæmon of Venice, in 1810, as well as a French translation.³Zofloya also influenced Percy Bysshe Shelley's own Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and Medwin relates that Dacre's novel had “quite enraptured” the young Shelley.⁴

Zofloya's relation to The Monk and to Shelley's Gothic novels may have maintained readers' and scholars' interest in Dacre's novel up to this point, but as we shall see, it is the text's unusual evocations of the female body and feminine subject that are most valuable in the context of the history of sexuality and of the body. After embarking on a series of violent crimes, Victoria's body actually begins to grow larger, stronger, and decidedly more masculine. Dacre's whole range of works illustrates the disturbing possibility that sexed bodies are not “natural,” but are socially constructed and thus mutable, the most dramatic agents of transformation being the most “unnatural”: women's violence, their desire for mastery, and their sexual assertiveness. It is not surprising, therefore, that a writer whose texts do not comfortably fit our current models of the female Gothic or of feminine Romanticism also has much to teach us about the subtlety of women's evocations of the body, and of their awareness that the female body, even on the most basic corporeal level, is anything but natural.

Dacre's female characters provide an important contrast to those of better-known Romantic women novelists, including Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams. These writers, according to Anne Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (1993), are representative of women Romantics and distinct from male Romantics because they present a model of female subjectivity which favours rational and egalitarian intersubjective relations and rejects the use of power to master an Other, whether the Other is nature, knowledge, or another human subject. While “feminine Romanticism” does justice to and illuminates the writing of some women writers of this period, we need to begin to explore the works of women that do not neatly fit such gender-complementary models.⁵

In Gothic studies, similar gender-complementary models have shed light on the unique qualities and interests of women's Gothic writing. Dacre's revision of The Monk in Zofloya challenges gender-complementary models of the Gothic in such works as Kate Ellis's The Contested Castle (1990), and William Patrick Day's In the Circles of Fear and Desire (1985). Both of these critical works in effect identify a female Gothic that centres on an embattled heroine (typical of Radcliffe), and distinguish this from a male Gothic, which focuses on a rebellious hero (masculine because exiled from the domestic sphere, according to Ellis, and because he seeks to control rather than adapt to his world, according to Day). Dacre's heroine Victoria is exiled, seeks to master her world and those in it, and is decidedly sadistic, tormenting and murdering for the pleasure of exerting her will; she is thus neither within the female nor male Gothic traditions but somewhere in between. In one important respect, of course, Zofloya does fit the female Gothic tradition, for it reveals the marriage plot to be literally infernal. Zofloya shows that patriarchy and its central institution, marriage, are literally nightmares, and that these nightmares are real, and fatally so. Dacre's shattering critique of marriage as a compact with the devil (a “bond of destruction” in her poem “The Skeleton Priest”)⁶ marks a dramatic addition to the range of critiques of patriarchy found in the female Gothic.

But Victoria is not a female Gothic heroine, nor is Zofloya's plot that of the female Gothic: Victoria's character and her quest are those of the male Gothic villain. Anne Williams terms the female Gothic a “revolutionary” genre because it counters the misogyny of the male Gothic such as Lewis's (in which the female and the maternal are vilified as dangerous Others), by imagining the male as a potentially dangerous Other who can be transformed by love; in William's words, “The Female Gothic plot is a version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’” (145). As is Zofloya, of course, but in an entirely different way. Dacre's Beauty loves not the Prince she recognizes as the true self within the Beast, but instead the Beast himself, and the beast in herself. Williams argues, correctly I think, that “the line between the Male Gothic and pornography is not easy to draw” (106); Dacre's reviewers consistently pointed out that her novels crossed this line and were, in effect, pornographic. By focusing on a female subject of violence, with aggressive sexual desires, Dacre's Gothic is revolutionary in a different way than is female Gothic. While “negative” female characters such as Victoria do exist in women's Gothic literature of the period, they are typically secondary characters, dark doubles of the central heroine whose violence and destructiveness must be expelled from the text before the proper heroine can reach her desired goal (examples include Maria de Vallerno in Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance, Laurentini in her The Mysteries of Udolpho, and most famously, Bertha in Jane Eyre). Because Dacre gives centre stage to such a villainess in Zofloya, as well as in her last novel The Passions (1811), her work marks an original and significant departure from the more familiar tradition of women's Gothic writing.

The few details we have of Dacre's unusual life offer us some insights into her unusual female characters. Charlotte Dacre (b. Charlotte King, 1771-72?-1825) was the daughter of the famous Jewish self-made banker, writer, blackmailer and supporter of radical causes Jonathan King (b. Jacob Rey, 1753-1824), and his first wife, Deborah, whom he divorced in 1785 to marry a countess. Known as the “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). Dacre's novels and poems often take up the theme of women abandoned by unfaithful partners, as it appears her mother was, yet Dacre's own marriage in 1815 appears to have occurred after a lengthy extramarital affair. According to Ann Jones, Charlotte King, “spinster,” married the Tory editor of The Morning Post, Nicholas Byrne, in 1815 (it thus appears that “Dacre” was itself a pseudonym), yet their children appear to have been born long before this date. 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 (Jones 226).⁷

Placing Dacre on a political spectrum, given her texts and what little we currently know about her life, yields conflicting results. Her father's radical and scandalous politics, her own status as outsider because Jewish, and her long-term illicit relationship might suggest that she identified with outsider or opposition political causes, at least on the level of social policy. Yet poems such as “On the Death of the Right Honorable William Pitt” (1806), in which Pitt is elevated to “a Saint in Heaven,” and “Mr. F[o]x” (1806),⁸ in which the radical leader is lampooned, indicate that Dacre was politically conservative. We also know that her husband Nicholas Byrne, who was mysteriously murdered in his office in 1833, was “a zealous Pittite,”⁹ and we can presume Dacre shared her husband's support of Pitt's politics, given that they named their son William Pitt Byrne. Moreover, passages in The Passions clearly and violently attack radical feminists such as Wollstonecraft, suggesting Dacre was anti-feminist; yet she also wrote a poem “To the Shade of Mary Robinson” celebrating the memory of that outspoken republican feminist and Della Cruscan poet (see Appendix C). We therefore must keep in mind the often sharp distinction between a writer's class and gender interests; Dacre's Pittite politics, and her questionable caricatures of feminism, need not (and do not) coincide with an acceptance of the ideology of domesticity and passionlessness.

Rather than lament our lack of access to Dacre's “true” intentions (e.g., in letters or memoirs), I suggest we use her relative anonymity as a test case for examining how gendered readings, especially according to gender-complementary models of “female Gothic” or “feminine Romanticism,” to a large extent depend on an author's biography and their sex, and therefore in a sense re-produce a circular argument as to what constitutes a woman's text. How would we read Zofloya, for example, if we did not know the sex of the author, much less whether or not she identified herself as a feminist?

I believe that readers of Dacre's novel, past and present, would have assumed the author to be male if it had been published anonymously or with a male pseudonym, as readers had done with more famous examples such as Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. The reviewer for The Annual Review, as we saw, was distressed by this dissonance between the sexual content of Dacre's novel and Dacre's sex, and the New Annual Register also confirmed that Dacre's writing came dangerously close to that of a male author censored and prosecuted for his novel's illicit and blasphemous content: “a stimulating novel after the manner of The Monk—the same lust—the same infernal agents—the same voluptuous language. What need we say more?”¹⁰ We need say much more, of course, because this same lust, voluptuousness, and infernal temptation were those of a woman.

Ultimately it is not any subversive intention in Dacre's work that is most valuable, but the subversive effect in the pleasure she clearly takes, and her characters clearly take, in what Swinburne termed the “vivisection of virtue.” Dacre, like Austen, Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft, clearly warns her readers against the dangers of excessive sensibility in women, a task that R. F. Brissenden argues Austen shares with Sade.¹¹ Yet unlike Austen and Wollstonecraft, Dacre does not attempt to persuade through reason or moral example, but rather to demonstrate a doctrine of destruction strikingly similar to Sade's. Gilles Deleuze explains the critical difference between persuasion and demonstration in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1991), where he argues that if we understand Sade correctly, we expect no instruction from him, because

the intention to convince [in Sade] is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate. He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. … The point of the demonstration is to show that the demonstration is identical to violence.

(18-19)

Dacre by no means demonstrates, in Adorno and Horkheimer's words, “the identity of domination and reason” (119) that Sade obsessively pursues. However, I think that she abandons persuasion for the morally questionable task of describing, in sexually charged terms, irrational, vicious and violent behaviour in women. Dacre in effect demonstrates the identity of passion and destruction, and the pleasures found in both.

Following Swinburne's example of more than a century ago, I suggest that, rather than rely on our knowledge of Dacre's gender (as reviewers had done) or her feminism—in other words, on our assumptions of what makes a “woman's” text or a “feminist” text—we recontextualize Dacre within the tradition she was writing in and against, namely that of Lewis and Sade, in order to trace a more complex relationship between women writers and “masculine” discourses. For although her anti-heroines may fail by traditional feminist standards (e.g., they are destroyed, and do not establish a stable, subversive subject position), they do succeed in Sadean, destructive terms, as Swinburne says of Victoria: she “ultimately succeeds in accomplishing the vivisection of virtue.”

Dacre's association with Lewis's school of horror began with her first novel, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), which she dedicated to Lewis, and her placement in the “male” Gothic tradition of horror, as opposed to Radcliffe's “female Gothic” school of terror, is significant. In that same year she also published Hours of Solitude, a two-volume collection of poems, many using the demon lover theme.¹² Dacre's demon lovers and revenants in these poems are remarkably diverse, however, ranging from the ghost of poet Mary Robinson that the speaker summons to haunt her, to sensual explorations of passionate love beyond the grave, to a female revenant who returns not to destroy but to warn the future female victim that her lover is a vampyre. In her third novel, The Libertine (1807), Dacre again explored women's sexuality in frank terms, leading one reviewer to protest that “readers who can be amused, with such prurient trash as the Libertines [sic], must have their mental appetites depraved, and their understandings warped in no common degree.”¹³

The “self-conscious fleshliness” of Dacre's poetry, to use Jerome McGann's apt description, associated her with the earlier Della Cruscan poetic school of which Robinson and Hannah Cowley (“Anna Matilda”) had been prominent members, and which had come under attack as excessively effeminate and self-indulgently sensual (as well as republican) in satires such as William Gifford's Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795).¹⁴ Byron's infamous attack of Dacre's poetry as “prose in masquerade” and of herself as one of Della Crusca's last “stragglers” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is but one example of how Dacre's contemporaries associated her with this influential but now discredited group. The Della Cruscans lacked manliness, as the Monthly Literary Recreations remarked in an 1807 essay on the state of “poetical excellence”:

for … an affected sensibility and glitter of imagery, they gave up energy of thought and diction, manly feelings, and even sense; such were the Laura Marias, the Robinsons, Jerninghams, Edwins of later years, and such the Rosa Matildas, the Hafiz, and other newspaper writers of the present day; though thanks to the keen satire of the above-mentioned author [Gifford], that sweetly-effeminately poetical junto are put to flight in a great measure, and an over affected simplicity has usurped its place, and crept into the works of some of our really otherwise excellent authors: such as Southey, Wordsworth, and others, who remind us very much, when they descend to what they call their beautifully simple style, of the namby pamby songs of the nursery.¹⁵

Wordsworth is charged with affecting a “namby pamby” simplicity in response to the effeminacy and elaborateness of contemporary verse such as Dacre's, and as Jerome McGann and Roger Lonsdale have argued, Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads consciously rejects the language of women for the language of a “man speaking to men.”¹⁶ Thus Dacre's writing is excessively feminine when compared to the self-consciously manly new poetic standards put forward by Wordsworth, yet her writing, particularly her prose, is also dangerously unfeminine when compared to that of contemporary domestic women novelists such as Maria Edgeworth and Jane West. Not only as a novelist but as a poet, then, Dacre defies easy classification, falling either behind, or I would argue also ahead (and certainly outside) the trends, both of style and subject matter, of women contemporaries. Dacre's association with Lewis's school of horror thus marks a point where the “sweetly effeminately poetical” and the masculine pornographic meet, and where the gender of each discourse, poetic and pornographic, needs to be questioned.

Victoria's fearless appetite for sexual knowledge and pleasure was in fact the focus of much moral disapproval in reviews of Zofloya. As Ambrosio's sexual and moral liberation is inspired and perhaps directed by the infernal influence of Matilda in Lewis's The Monk, Victoria's sexual and moral liberation is influenced by Satan in the form of the seductive Moorish sorcerer Zofloya. But Dacre goes even farther than Lewis did in questioning the external origin of Ambrosio's lustful, violent desires, for unlike in The Monk, the infernal agent enters Zofloya midway through the novel, after Victoria has begun her seductions. The reviewer for Monthly Literary Recreations found Lucifer's superfluousness indicative of the novel's “disgusting depravity of morals,” since Victoria is depraved before Satan arrives: “The supernatural agent is totally useless, as the mind of Victoria, whom Satan, under the form of Zofloya, comes to tempt, is sufficiently black and depraved naturally, to need no temptation to commit the horrid crimes she perpetrates.” As many critics argue, in The Monk Matilda's influence is in effect a projection of the pious monk's own unspoken destructive desires; similarly, Zofloya's influence on Victoria, urging her on to increasingly violent crimes, is clearly a projection of her own destructive desires. Thus the submission of the protagonist to the infernal agent, through the selling of the soul, is in both novels, on one level, a liberation.

Yet Dacre also deliberately describes Victoria's eventual submission to Zofloya's will as a marriage, and his attempts to convince her to depend on him are expressed in the language of romantic courtship. Here Dacre highlights the subjecting (not liberatory) function of heterosexuality and its central institution, marriage, since as Foucault¹⁷ has argued, the promise of “liberated” sexual desire is power's most attractive ruse. The story of Victoria's downfall is thus also the story of the loss of social identity, mobility and independence that a woman suffers in marrying her lover, who then becomes her legal master after having acted the part of her devoted and enthralled servant:

“Now then, Victoria!” cried the Moor, but not in the gentle voice in which he had been wont to address her—“now then, thou art emancipated from falling ruins, from hostile guards, from fear of shame, and an ignominious death. … I have watched thee, followed thee, and served thee until now:—If, then, I save thee for ever from all future accidents—all future worldly misery—all future disgrace; say—wilt thou, for that future, resign thyself entirely to me? … wilt thou unequivocally give thyself to me, heart, and body, and soul?”

Thus, unlike Ambrosio, who is destroyed through liberating the excesses of his own desires, Victoria is destroyed through her submission to another, a husband, who ends her existence as mistress of her own will by gaining her wifely submission through the false promise of protection.

Dacre's contradictory accounts of Victoria's “evil” render any moralistic pretences the novel may profess dangerously unconvincing, as critics from the early reviewers to Robert Miles have observed:

Four discourses offer competing explanations for the origin of Victoria's evil: a religious one of fallen nature and satanic temptation; a sentimental, libertarian one of nature/nurture; its Sadean variant (“Is not self predominant through animal nature?”

(Dacre 1806, II; 171);

and one of paternal and class responsibility. Typically, these explanations are left in contradictory and irresolute condition.

(Miles 181)

Victoria's violence, and Dacre's intentions, cannot be neatly explained by any of these models of evil, and though the bad example set by her mother is repeatedly cited by the narrator as the cause of Victoria's “love of evil,” the narrator contradicts herself repeatedly by also offering competing explanations, which leads Gary Kelly to conclude that the novel is “hopelessly self-contradictory on the causes of the evil” (106). Yet as the General Review pointed out, “Zofloya has no pretension to rank as a moral work.”¹⁸Zofloya's resistance to rank as a moral work is formidable, and goes against the grain of most women's writing of the period, which, I suggest, again invites us to read Dacre as we would Lewis or Sade.

Zofloya celebrates Victoria's capacity for sexual desire and pleasure; her desire for Zofloya the Moor is itself transgressive, not because it is blasphemous as is Ambrosio's desire for Matilda (who modeled for the portrait of the Madonna) in The Monk, but in part because it grows as the novel progresses and Zofloya grows more demonic. Unlike the conventional woman in a demon lover ballad who is horrified to see her lover revealed as infernal, Victoria, like several of Dacre's poetic narrators, finds his supernatural and infernal origins arousing:¹⁹

Never, till this moment, had she been so near the person of the Moor—such powerful fascination dwelt around him, that she felt incapable of withdrawing from his arms; yet ashamed, (for Victoria was still proud) and blushing at her feelings, when she remembered that Zofloya, however he appeared, was but a menial slave, and as such alone had originally become known to her—she sought, but sought vainly, to repress them; for no sooner (enveloped in the lightning's flash as he seemed, when it gleamed around him without touching his person),—did she behold his beautiful and majestic visage, that towering and graceful form, than all thought of his inferiority vanished, and the ravished sense, spurning at the calumnious idea, confessed him a being of a superior order.

(3: 130-31)

Victoria's desire, because it is for a Moorish servant who was once a slave, also “crosses class and racial taboos” (Miles 188), but her desire grows as does Zofloya's class status (and stature, literally) in her eyes, undercutting the subversive charge and highlighting the novel's significant racist and orientalist dimensions. Dacre in fact may have read an earlier novel, Zoflora, or The Generous Negro Girl (1804), and may have transformed the persecuted slave Zoflora into the persecuting former slave Zofloya, thus offering an unsympathetic and unsentimental (though thoroughly exoticized) portrayal of a black slave in the year preceding the passage of the anti-slave trade bill.²⁰

Reviewers picked up on Zofloya's racism (casting the devil as a black man, and vice versa): the General Review thus parodied the novel's faint attempt at moralising: “if the devil should appear to them [young ladies] in the shape of a very handsome black man, they must not listen to him.”²¹ The Literary Journal made the connection between Zofloya's race and his evil origins even clearer: “Satan … had the decorum to lodge himself in a black body, so as to be something in character.”²² But the irresistible beauty of Zofloya's black body, of his eyes and voice, is emphasized throughout the novel, so that while Victoria's desire for him cannot be separated from the racism and orientalism inherent in conflating a black man and the devil, neither can her desire be reduced to these racist dimensions.

It is in this unusual and conflicted heroine that Zofloya's greatest value lies. The novel traces the progress of Victoria and her brother Leonardo, who are exiled from an “idyllic” patriarchal family because of their mother's adultery and her abandonment of them. It is Victoria who is the novel's protagonist, who actively pursues her desires for wealth and power, never submitting and seldom wavering in moments of personal danger. Possessing an “unflinching relentless soul” filled only with the “ambitious, the selfish, the wild, and the turbulent” sensations, Victoria's ability to “inflict pain without remorse” and revenge her own injuries likens her more to a Satanic hero than to any heroine of the period (with the exception of Sade's). Her brother is overshadowed in the narrative by his lover, Megalena Strozzi, who like Victoria derives her pleasure from mastering others. The women in Zofloya strategically use their sexuality to enchant or command men, and it is this process of mastery itself that is the source of their pleasure.

The “vivisection of virtue” that Dacre undertakes in Zofloya is, as Swinburne's vivid metaphor suggests, conducted to an important extent on a corporeal level. Victoria violates the natural difference between the sexes to such an extent that her body itself is transformed into a larger and decidedly masculine form. Victoria's increasingly physical masculinization reveals the anxiety (and hope) of Dacre's age that perhaps the two sexes themselves (and not merely the gender identities they supposedly establish) are not fixed or natural.

According to Foucault, the eighteenth century's fascination with hermaphrodites and the question of their “true” sex is indicative of modern Western society's pursuit of the truth of sex.²³ The truth of Victoria's sex becomes increasingly unclear as she proceeds to seduce, dominate, torture and murder. Her body, no longer a “natural” entity, is redesignated as unnatural (specifically, “unnaturally” large and masculine) according to her actions, in an illustration of Judith Butler's (and Foucault's) problematization of the supposedly stable distinction between “natural” sex and “cultural” gender: “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’” (Butler Gender Trouble, 7). Dacre illustrates exactly how sex is a product of gender, and not the other way around.

Victoria's corporeal transformation makes sense given the period's increasing suspicion that the natural, and especially the naturally sexed body, was not fixed but mutable. In addition to growing larger and more masculine, Victoria's body also grows darker, so that one can read her corporeal degeneration also as a sign of miscegenation. Her darkness is increasingly emphasized, as is Zofloya's, particularly in contrast with the milk-white Lilla, as in the scene where Henriquez awakes after having slept with Victoria while drugged, and is horrified at her appearance: “those black fringed eyelids, reposing upon a cheek of dark and animated hue—those raven tresses hanging unconfined—oh, sad! oh, damning proofs!—Where was the fair enamelled cheek—the flaxen ringlets of the delicate Lilla?” (3:89). Victoria and Zofloya's increasingly large bodies also owe something to the racist discourse of miscegenation, for as H. L. Malchow has recently argued, “[b]y the early nineteenth century, popular racial discourse managed to conflate … descriptions of particular ethnic characteristics into a general image of the Negro body in which repulsive features, brutelike strength and size of limbs featured prominently” (18). Yet darkness and “more than mortal” size and strength also belong to other competing discourses of the period, among them medical and supernatural.

The mutability of body shape and size with which modern readers are most familiar—weight control—also emerged as a socially desirable possibility in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the novel according to Pat Rogers, and it is the novel that “responds to, and creates, a growing uncertainty about the reliability of body shape … it starts to seem malleable rather than eternally given” (183). Victorian scholarship has already begun to explore the period's interest in politics of the body, especially regarding women. Jill Matus, for example, has recently explored how in the Victorian era, “although being sexed was understood as a natural, pre-given biological condition, it was at the same time conceived as unstable, even precarious” (10). Of course the Romantic and Gothic traditions can claim one of the most spectacular novels of corporeal mutability, Shelley's Frankenstein, and it is significant to note that the primary reason Frankenstein destroys the female creature prematurely is his fear that her great size will allow her to rape men and choose her own destiny (like Victoria).

Yet for the most part, women's own perspectives on the body in the Romantic period have only begun to be examined, and it has typically been assumed that the burden of bourgeois propriety was simply too powerful for (middle-class) women to seriously resist. As Mary Poovey argues, “by the last decades of the eighteenth century, [for women] even to refer to the body was considered ‘unladylike’” (14). Yet Thomas Laqueur has argued that this ideology of passionlessness and incommensurable sexual difference was one of several competing sexual ideologies: “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). Laqueur argues that in the eighteenth century, while the two sex model based²⁴ on natural difference between men and women gained credibility, this epistemological shift did not eliminate the previous one sex model in which the sexes existed along a continuum, and women's sexual passion was a given.

Despite the growing emphasis on a “biology of incommensurability” (Laqueur 152) and women's passionlessness, women writers such as Dacre, Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft clearly rejected the ideology of women's passionlessness, and perhaps even questioned the immutability of the binary two-sex-model. 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.

Dacre rejected the doctrine of incommensurability in which women's passionlessness was grounded, not only by writing of women's passions, as had Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft, but by also showing how the two incommensurable, distinct sexes were capable of mutating. Early in Zofloya, when she seduced her lover, Victoria had been described as possessing a countenance “not of angelic mould; yet though there was a fierceness in it, it was not certainly a repelling, but a beautiful fierceness,” and a figure that was “graceful and elegant.” After committing two murders (one of her husband) and attempting to seduce her affianced brother-in-law Henriquez, Victoria is described as possessing a “masculine spirit,” whereas she had been consistently described as bold, independent and inflexible, without reference to gender. After this degeneration of her feminine “spirit,” it is her body that is suddenly masculine when compared to that of her rival, Lilla, Henriquez' fiancée, whom Victoria has kidnapped and will soon murder. No longer a stunning seductress, in comparison to Lilla Victoria is suddenly less feminine and perhaps no longer female, as if a “hidden deformity” similar to Appollonia's had emerged:

“He would have loved you [said Zofloya] had you chanced to have resembled Lilla.”

“Ah! would,” cried the degenerate Victoria, “would that this unwieldy form could be compressed into the fairy delicacy of hers, these bold masculine features assume the likeness of her baby face!”

It is the fluidity of corporeal identity that is significant, for Victoria will indeed transform her body into that of the absent and ideally feminine Lilla. Henriquez, drugged and spellbound, will believe Victoria to be his Lilla and will make love to her under this spell, thereby temporarily granting the masculine Victoria the “fairy form” of the properly feminine and unquestionably female Lilla. Victoria's “materialization” as Lilla is much more than a Gothic trapping: materialization, to use Judith Butler's rather Gothic term, is inseparable from issues of power and how one (or in what form of “woman” one) can exercise more of it. As Butler succinctly puts it, “what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours … will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect” (Bodies That Matter, 2).

That a degenerate and “unwieldy” woman such as Victoria can resemble and become the fragile Lilla suggests the primacy of performance over fixed essence. Butler's concept of performative gender, and of sexual difference as one of its ongoing productions, can thus be effectively applied to Romantic female subjectivity and corporeality in Dacre: “woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification” (Gender Trouble 33). Dacre reveals how her women characters enact such an ongoing process of self-creation and self-destruction as they take whatever actions and roles are necessary for survival, which in their eyes is synonymous with increased power over self and others. In constantly drawing attention to the desire to master shared by Victoria and Megalena (and Appollonia in Dacre's The Passions), Dacre offers a version of female subjectivity that is not complementary to male subjectivity, but which dissolves the boundaries that her contemporaries and ours would like to fix between the genders and between bodies. If a fixed feminine subjectivity embodied in a “natural” female body was and is crucial to a larger ideological process of naturalizing a rational and benevolent bourgeois identity, then Dacre effectively deprives her readers of the consolations of femininity and benevolence.

Dacre insists that female and male subjects are driven by a will to power and possess an infinite sadistic capacity, which in her age translates into a “love of evil.” The metaphor she typically uses to characterize the subject is that of struggle, as in this quotation from The Passions, spoken by the novel's sole survivor: “mine is a fearful struggle. I oppose myself to myself. … My heart is as a land which is the seat of war, the rival powers combat, but vanquish which may, the wretched land is savaged and destroyed” (4: 18). The outcome of the internal struggle, like that of the external one, is always destruction and fragmentation (or vivisection), so that her characters' inter-subjective and intra-subjective struggles collapse into one another, and problematize the boundaries between external reality and internal experience, a feature characteristic of the Gothic's psychological complexity.

In the last line of Zofloya, Dacre poses the novel's central question regarding this “love of evil” in such as way as to suggest that the widely-held and supposedly “reasonable” faith in human benevolence is in fact as reasonable as believing in “infernal influence” as the cause of crimes “dreadful and repugnant to nature”:

Either we must suppose that the love of evil is born with us (which would be an insult to the Deity), or we must attribute [such crimes] (as appears more consonant with reason) to the suggestions of infernal influence.

The world Dacre's characters inhabit never operates according to reason; on the contrary, the unreasonable “love of evil” is shown by Dacre to be neither “repugnant to nature” in general, nor to women in particular, but rather to constitute a will to power which is both constructive and destructive.

Bienville's Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus (1775)²⁵, the first medical treatise devoted to this disorder, provides an excellent medical context against which to read Dacre's novel, for Victoria on one level illustrates the dangerous degeneration a sexually active woman is capable of undergoing, and there are indications that Dacre had read Bienville. Reviews of Dacre's novels consistently expressed disgust with the excessively sexual language of her prose (complaints about her “bombastic” language are typically linked to her language's shocking voluptuousness), and one review noted the singular inappropriateness of a woman novelist knowing, much less using, medical terminology for female sexuality:

Here the language in general is bombastical; new words are introduced, such for example, as enhorred and furor, the latter of which is certainly used in the language of medicine, but in a sense which delicacy will not permit us to explain.²⁶

The furor the reviewer (and Zofloya) refers to is the furor uterinus, or nymphomania, medical language fit for a misogynist medical treatise such as Bienville's, intended to demonstrate women's “imbecility” (Bienville vii), but absolutely “odious and indecent” in a woman writer's Gothic romance.

Bienville's text embodies the contradictory claims regarding sexual difference and women's propensity for sexual desire and pleasure that Laqueur described; Bienville argues that women's sexuality is natural 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) and their greater vulnerability to their distinctly sexualized bodies, which therefore demand regulation. 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 Bienville's work), argues that the ultimate danger in 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).²⁷

Dacre's heroines in both Zofloya and in her last novel, The Passions, follow a similar process of nymphomaniacal degeneration, but because Dacre gives us complex characterizations of the women and their motives, her novels critique, and do not merely internalize, such medical representations of women's sexuality and subjectivity. In fact, The Passions unites a critique of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse with a rendering of one of Bienville's case studies from Nymphomania, and like Zofloya focuses on the mental and physical degeneration of women under the influence of violent passions. In Bienville's narrative, a young innocent woman, Julia, is “initiated into the secrets of Venus” by a “voluptuous procuress of lascivious pleasure,” her young friend and waiting-woman, Berton (165). In The Passions, Dacre focuses her attention on this minor character Berton, giving her the ambitious, intellectual aspirations of Lucifer, and setting her against the domestic, Eve-like ideal of Rousseau's Julie. Dacre's Appollonia not only destroys the emotional and sexual tranquillity of Julie's domestic isolation, but she destroys the lives of all but one of the characters in the novel, and is herself a victim of the violent passions she inspired. Rather than simply embodying the misogynist stereotypes of women as either virtuous virgins or degenerate whores, Dacre's two types are both shown to be dangerously unstable.

Both in Zofloya and The Passions, Dacre uses a similar (and popular) narrative device of two complementary female characters, much like Sade's Justine and Juliette; most significant for the purpose of this discussion, however, is the degree to which these two types are embodied differently, and most interestingly, how one type of body, that of the proper woman, can degenerate into an unsexed, unfemale, and unnatural body through physical and emotional violence.²⁸ The virtuous and the vicious body, Dacre repeatedly demonstrates, are dangerously mutable, and the catalyst for their degeneration is most often female sexual desire.

Dacre's vivisections of virtue, like Sade's, do not merely invert the terms of the debate by focusing on “masculine” behaviour (e.g., cruelty, violence) in women; these portraits of destructive women leave neither vice nor virtue intact, but show how both categories, not just the “unnatural” one, are socially constructed, and similarly destroyed. Because Dacre deals so often with complementary doubles, her femmes fatales could be dismissed as nothing more than misogynist stereotypes of improper women, of women who take on masculine qualities without challenging the underlying assumptions about gender. Dacre's femmes fatales subvert the persistent category of the proper woman, however, not only by embodying its antithesis, but by demonstrating the instability of these categories themselves. Her femmes fatales are thus subversive in the same way that masquerade is according to Terry Castle: through their ambiguity, not their simple role reversal. Though the atomizing ideology of bourgeois individualism was persistent and the ambiguity of the masquerade temporary, we should not underestimate the force of such ambiguity, Castle argues in Masquerade and Civilization. Similarly, though the proper “natural” woman was established as a distinct, pervasive norm by the end of the eighteenth century, we find in literature of the period examples that she existed alongside temporary anomalies, monsters and phantoms. Though at the conclusions of Dacre's narratives transgressors are punished, the temporary exploits of such transgressive women momentarily reveal (to a largely female audience) the violent disorder of female subjectivity, and its violent repression by demonic masculinity, a significant accomplishment. And the bourgeois moral order is not re-established at her novels' conclusions, because generally most of her characters do not survive—the innocent and the guilty are alike destroyed, as the chapbook version of Zofloya, The Dæmon of Venice, emphasized in its closing sentence: “Thus the precipice was the grave of two, the innocent Agnes [Lilla] and the wicked Arabella [Victoria].”²⁹

The contagious potential of Dacre's critique lies in the process of reading itself, in its controversial function in the production (and destruction) of subjects and even bodies. The danger of reading sentimental fiction is a ubiquitous theme in this period, and it is central to all of Dacre's novels, as well as to Bienville's Nymphomania. The Literary Journal had warned in mock medical terms that Dacre's imagination (like the nymphomaniac's) is both diseased and infectious:

this malady of maggots in the brain is rendered still more dreadful by its being infectious. The ravings of persons under its influence, whenever they are heard or read, have a sensible effect upon brains of a weak construction, which themselves either putrefy or breed maggots, or suffer a derangement of some kind.

The medical context this reviewer provides, albeit satirically, highlights Dacre's own exploration of the dangerous properties of imagination, and of nymphomania, in Zofloya. Dacre's “extravagant language,” her “overwhelming all meaning in a multitude of words” (Literary Journal, 635), marks a fascinating intersection of medical and poetic discourses of passion and imagination, of how they are experienced physiologically, psychologically, socially, and even supernaturally, and why they are each both pleasurable and dangerous.

Significantly, Dacre gives her readers access to the immoral pleasure felt by her vicious heroines as they set out to seduce and destroy (and the epistolary format of The Passions allows us, like Rousseau's original text, to read the first-hand accounts of adulterous passion, and more importantly, of Appollonia's passion to destroy). In focusing on the productive power of literature (whether it is withheld or provided) on young women, Dacre foregrounds the extent to which the proper woman and her improper complement are alike effects of power. Dacre's texts instruct women readers not only that women's sexual desires are capable of destroying both self and others, a conservative and often misogynist concept, but that the naturally asexual and domestic woman held up as the alternative ideal is as unnatural as her “degenerate” double.

Though the anti-heroines in both Dacre's Zofloya and The Passions are punished and denounced by the narrator as improper models for female behaviour, both novels (like Bienville's treatise) simultaneously and ambiguously instruct readers how to reach such depths of depravity. Thus, not only are such disturbing examples of female behaviour allowed to flourish temporarily, but Dacre's novels celebrate the powers of the poisonous texts they claim to warn against. The prohibitions against novel reading, especially of Rousseau, in Dacre's own novels make transparent, or demystify, how normative sexuality and the normal female body are constructed through the exclusion of negative examples. Dacre's dire warnings against Rousseau, that “sentimental luxurious libertine,” are ultimately as prescriptive as they are prohibitive,³⁰ for Dacre rewrites Rousseau's text in even more lascivious terms, focusing in minute detail on Appollonia's decidedly lascivious pleasure in destroying the virtuous Julia, as well as on Julia's and her lover's adulterous desires. For example, the anti-heroine Appollonia celebrates her sexual corruption of the virtuous Julia through the “sovereign poison” of books in such a way that Dacre's implicit warning against such novels, occurring in precisely such a voluptuous novel, amounts to an endorsement. The warning ensures that readers will, if they haven't already done so, immediately seek out a copy of Rousseau's novel:

I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books … there is not in my estimation a more dangerous work extant, or one better calculated for the purposes of seduction [than La Nouvelle Héloïse]: for I defy the female, however pure in her heart, however chaste in her ideas she may be, before reading this book, to remain wholly unaffected, and unimpressed by its perusal. I aver that it is utterly impossible so many highly-coloured and voluptuous images as are there depicted, can be permitted to take their passage through the mind, and leave no stain behind.

(The Passions, 1: 207, 209-210)

One might argue that in deploying this familiar argument against women reading sentimental novels, Dacre perpetuates a misogynist concept of women's sexuality as dangerous, much as Bienville had done when he repeatedly warned against the “venomous” power of novels to unleash nymphomania in women: “The perusal of a novel, a voluptuous picture … soon excite those emotions, of which but the moment before, she seemed herself the mistress” (76).³¹ Yet because Dacre, unlike Bienville, is precisely the sort of novelist she warns us against, her narratives of sexually transgressive women who destroy properly asexual women, and are themselves punished, are in fact sophisticated accounts of the discursive construction of both natural and unnatural women and their sexuality. In Dacre's novels the asexual feminine ideal is produced only by isolating the young woman from corrupting social influences such as novels and fashionable society, yet Dacre, like Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe before her, insists that such an “ideal” woman is artificial, vulnerable, and destined for destruction precisely because of her isolation in the domestic sphere.

Dacre's model of subjectivity as struggle parallels (without resolving) the larger cultural struggle over the term “woman,” and raises to a more disturbing, even pornographic, level the parody Barker-Benfield (like Brissenden) locates in Austen's Sense and Sensibility:

The alternatives offered to women in the 1790s—the approved vision of mindless sensibility or the outlawing bogey of the strong-minded Amazon—can be seen as a parody of the conflict represented by Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. As Wollstonecraft recognized, the conflict existed both within women, and between women and the surrounding male and female authorities, telling them what it was to be female.

(Barker-Benfield, 382)

The unique value of Dacre's doubles lies in their process of degeneration, in the way they experience increasingly perverse gradations of pleasure and pain as they reach the parodic extreme. This process of degeneration they undergo is not indicative of an unstable, fluid female subject, characteristic of “feminine Romanticism” and its use of feminist psychoanalytical models that emphasize women's “permeable ego boundaries.” Dacre's emphasis on emotional and physical violence is significantly different, because it does not allow for the peaceful harmony between woman and woman, or woman and nature, which such models of subjectivity privilege.

In The Passions Dacre isolates two contemporary models of female subjectivity at their most extreme and shows how easily (and violently) one “natural” type can degenerate into the other, thereby undermining the possibility for fixed identity. The narrative of The Passions is set in motion by the Countess Appollonia Zulmer's desire for vengeance against the man who rejected her, Count Weimar, and this vengeance is directed at the object of his love, his new bride Julia. Weimar presents Appollonia as the ancien régime model of femininity that is actively sexual, aggressive, and intelligent:

The Countess Zulmer … does not endeavour gently to steal into the heart, but attacks it by storm, as able generals strive to carry all by a coup de main. Sensible of her power in conversation, whatever the topic, she takes a part, and enters freely; she obtains admiration, astonishment—but not love … fearless, regardless of prejudice, an ardent spirit and daring intellect, she discusses opinions, combats errors, exposes systems, detects folly; in each and all she appears great; in every act of her character, full of power. Her fierce and penetrating eyes seem to look into the heart, with a glance so quick, so piercing, that other eyes are unable to meet them, and are cast down, as with a feeling of conscious guilt. Soaring, and eccentric in her flights, she leaves her wondering sex far behind. …

(1: 27-28)

Embodying both Wollstonecraftian feminism and ancien régime flamboyance, Appollonia is a fascinating contradiction, possessing a bold and articulate intellect, and exercising this intellect, along with considerable seductive powers, in the public sphere. Like Milton's Satan (and unlike Shelley's Prometheus), she is trapped in a cycle of destruction which leaves the question of free will (or of feminist subversion as autonomy) out of reach: “I [will] now … sell myself to destruction to destroy him. … Toppled from my high eminence, I will not singly fall, others shall be dragged down, and struggle with me in the depths of my despair” (1: 282-3).

Appollonia, like Victoria, is a Satanic heroine, one who consciously identifies herself with Lucifer's rebellion and accursedness, a criminal artist figure who repeatedly refers to her machinations as an art of enchantment and destruction. Appollonia destroys the domestic tranquillity of Weimar and Julia by awakening Julia's sexuality in the same terms Milton's Lucifer seduced Eve:

I will initiate you! I will shew [sic] you the extent of your dominion, and how infinitely you are sovereign over the fate of him you obey. … The secret of your slavery must be unfolded to you. You must taste of the tree of knowledge.

(1: 173)

It is thus Appollonia's own sadistic pleasure in causing the suffering and death of all those close to Weimar that generates the narrative of The Passions; as Appollonia rightly claims, it was “I, who seduced her heart from [Weimar]! … I bade her give the reins to loose illicit love and pleasure!” (4: 85, original emphasis).

The political Satanic subtext of The Passions can be read as either an endorsement of the masculine Romantic model of autonomous heroic subjectivity, or as a literal demonization of Wollstonecraftian feminism, since Wollstonecraft was popularly associated with sexual corruption of young women;³² yet I think the most productive reading rejects both pure subversion (Appollonia as autonomous hero) and pure normalization (Appollonia as demonized and defeated feminist). Instead, like Milton's Satan and Zofloya's Victoria, Appollonia embodies the conflicted status of a subject who is necessarily, by definition, subjected.

The suggestions of Appollonia's lesbianism, since she does indeed “seduce” Julia, are clearly lesbophobic, as they were in attacks on Wollstonecraft's influence on young women. Like Zofloya, The Passions illustrates that the female homosocial continuum, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's formulation, was neither stable nor unproblematic in the early nineteenth century, as Emma Donoghue has demonstrated in Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993). It is Appollonia's sexual effect on other women that particularly disturbs the men in Dacre's novel:

such a woman as Appollonia Zulmer is calculated to do more mischief to her sex than the most abandoned libertine of ours, the most avowed profligate of her own. She is an enchantress—a Circe; and her arts enable her to conceal her deformity under the mask of the most seducing beauty.

(1: 149-50)

Appollonia's monstrousness, like Victoria's, is increasingly emphasized as the novel progresses, her vaguely phallic “deformity” (which also suggests lesbianism and nymphomania, which Bienville claimed were accompanied by a large clitoris), and her masculine associations (Apollo, Apollyon, Lucifer, Prometheus) all contribute to the indistinctness of her sexual identity, to the indistinctness of the truth of her sex. Both Victoria and Appollonia are outside their proper sex, they both betray a hidden “deformity” suggestive of lesbianism, particularly in Victoria's rape-like, sadistic murder of Lilla, which reveals the author's and the age's awareness that women's sexual desires and activities went well beyond the prescriptions of the “natural” they were urged to embrace.

The value of Dacre's Victoria and Appollonia is ultimately not as subversive models of female subjectivity, however, for they are as much products of normative discourses on femininity as their tamer complements. The value of her femmes fatales lies in the dialectical relationship they have with their “innocent” victims, Julia and Lilla, for Dacre ultimately makes these asexual martyrs as repugnant and inhuman as their destroyers. Angela Carter's insights into Sade's Justine and Juliette apply just as well to Dacre's novels: “Justine is the thesis, Juliette is the antithesis; both are without hope and neither pays any heed to a future in which might lie the synthesis of their modes of being” (79).³³ The true subversive potential of Dacre's female characters lies thus in their mutual annihilation, and in the pleasure Appollonia and Victoria find in this destruction. Destruction, and its accompanying violent sublime which Dacre's heroines revel in, have historically been neglected by scholars of women's literature in favour of creation, nurture, and the “female” sublime, yet as Patricia Yaeger has argued, the “female sublime of violence … needs, again and again, to be rewritten” (211).

Dacre's femmes fatales belong in a Sadean world but remain in and are limited by the English Gothic and sentimental traditions; yet even in their self-destructive, melodramatic outbursts we see a radical critique of the subject which is remarkably similar to Sade's:

Oh! for ten thousand scourges, applied at once—for the stings of knotted scorpions—for any species of corporeal suffering, that for a single instant might divert to it the superior and unspeakable agony of my soul—that for a single instant one might be swallowed up in the other.—But, no, it may not be; I am sadly free from physical pain—all, all is soul, the nerve of mind.

(The Passions, 1: 41-2)

In this remarkable passage Appollonia comes close to articulating Sade's (and Foucault's) desire that the self be swallowed up in the body, and that the body no longer be subjected to the self. Appollonia here echoes Olivia's speech in Radcliffe's The Italian (1797),³⁴ but Dacre transforms the “generous purpose” of Olivia's desire for self-denying martyrdom into a highly questionable desire for a literal annihilation of the self (not suicide) and the annihilation of others. Like the nymphomaniac and Victoria, Appollonia “sinks into a state of perfect reconciliation with the powers of her body” (Bienville 70). When the self is swallowed up by, or is “reconciled” with, the body, its destruction is both violent and suggestive of violence to others. Such female characters belong in a virtually unexplored tradition of women's femmes fatales, and demand that we go beyond the familiar reduction of femmes fatales to a “symptom of male fears about feminism,” to use Mary Ann Doane's formulation (2-3). Dacre's works, like Sade's, are potential examples of “pornography in the service of women” (Carter 37). Her femme fatale heroines are unacknowledged precursors to those of Victorian sensation novelists such as Mary Braddon and decadent writers such as Vernon Lee (and Swinburne), and we could begin to reconstruct from these femme fatale heroines a neglected counter-tradition in nineteenth-century British women's writing, a tradition which for too long has been dominated by the realist novel and its heroines. Simultaneously, however, we need to consider how Dacre's strong Sadean affinities and decidedly pornographic subject and style challenge this notion of a “woman's tradition,” and of gender-complementary readings of the Gothic and Romanticism in particular.

Notes

1. Algernon Charles Swinburne, letter to H. B. Forman, November 22, 1886. 174-75.

2. Rev. of Zofloya, The Annual Review 5 (1806) 542.

3. In addition, The Morning Post of June 28, 1806, announced that a dramatic piece from Zofloya was expected in the following season (see D. Varma's introduction to the Arno edition of Zofloya, p. xxvi). Zofloya was translated into French in 1812 by Mme. de Viterne (Paris, Barba).

4. Dacre's influence on P. B. Shelley has attracted some critical attention, examples of which are Stephen Behrendt's Introduction to Shelley's Zastrozzi and Irvyne (1986), and A. M. D. Hughes' early essay, “Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne.” Walter Edwin Peck, in vol. 2 of his Shelley: His Life and Work, includes an Appendix (A) which outlines Shelley's Zastrozzi's debts to Dacre's Zofloya.

5. The best examples of gender-complementary models of Romanticism remain Marlon Ross' The Contours of Masculine Desire (1989) and Anne Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (1993). Both scholars, 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).

6. Charlotte Dacre (original emphasis), “The Skeleton Priest; or, The Marriage of Death,” Hours of Solitude (1805) 71.

7. Charlotte Byrne died in 1825 at the age of fifty three, thus placing her birth in 1771 or 1772, ten years earlier than her own prefatory remarks indicated in the 1805 Hours of Solitude when she gave her age as twenty three. Most of the biographical information on Dacre in the modern introductions to her works (e.g., by Summers, Reiman, Varma, Knight-Roth) contain significant inaccuracies; the information presented here is based largely on Ann Jones' account in Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers in Jane Austen's Age (1986), 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. 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 Summers), this version of Dacre's biography is substantiated by the reappearance of Charlotte King's poems in Charlotte Dacre's Hours of Solitude (1805). Dacre's obituary in The Times stated that she died in London on 7 November 1825, “after a long and painful illness.” Garland's Encyclopedia of British Women Writers (2nd. ed., eds. Paul and Jane Schlueter) and The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (eds. Blain et al. [, 1990]) also contain helpful brief accounts of Dacre's life and works, as do other such reference volumes.

8. Dacre's poem on Pitt appeared in The Morning Post, Jan 27, 1806 (Pitt had died earlier that month). “Mr. F[o]x” is part of a series of poems Dacre published in The Morning Post in 1806 satirizing prominent contemporaries, called “The Dream; or, Living Portraits.” (Knight-Roth's dissertation reprints the series in part, from which these quotations are taken. (See her Appendix I.)

9. Harold Herd tells the story of Nicholas Byrne without any reference to Charlotte Dacre in his “The Strange Case of the Murdered Editor,” Seven Editors (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955). Herd suggests that Byrne's murder, closely following the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill, may have been politically motivated (because he opposed reform), and for that reason remained unreported, hence a “strange case.”

10. (See Appendix B.) Rev. of Zofloya. New Annual Register 27 (1806) 372-3. The Oxford Review's review of Dacre's The Libertine confirmed that all of Dacre's productions, her “worse than wild nonsense,” were suited for a male author (and presumably a male readership): “we might have hoped, for the honour of that sex whose brightest ornament is modesty, that the author of such flights as the Nun of St, Omer's, Zofloya, and the present florid rhapsody could not be a female” (Oxford Review, or Literary Censor 2, August 1807) 190.

11. In his excellent Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade [1974], Brissenden demonstrates a strong continuity between the critiques of sensibility found in Richardson, Sade and Austen (see esp. Part I, chaps. 1 & 5). Sade was a great admirer of Richardson, and his La Nouvelle Justine ruthlessly attacks Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, as does Dacre's The Passions. Brissenden notes many similarities between the doubled female figures in Sense and Sensibility and Justine and Juliette; Dacre's doubled female characters in Zofloya and The Passions demonstrate a similar critique of Rousseauesque sensibility, in particular his construction of the virtuous, submissive woman.

12. Dacre (as Charlotte King) had published an earlier volume of poetry with her sister Sophia King (later Fortnum) titled Trifles of Helicon (1798), dedicated to their father John King. All of Charlotte's poems from that volume reappeared in Hours of Solitude, and some were also reprinted in periodicals.

13. Rev. of The Libertine, by Charlotte Dacre. Monthly Magazine suppl. v. 23 (30 July 1807) 645. The Libertine was translated into French in 1816: Angelo, comte d'Albini, ou les Dangers du vice, par Charlotte Dacre Byrne connue sous le nom de Rosa Matilda, traduit de l'anglais par Mme. Élisabeth de B∗∗∗. Paris: A. Bertrand, 1816. 3 vols.

14. For an excellent discussion of Byron's debt to Dacre, and of the relationship of Della Cruscan poetry to canonical Romanticism, see Jerome McGann's “‘My Brain is Feminine’: Byron and the Poetry of Deception.” [In Byron: Augustan and Romantic. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. New York: St. Martins, 1990. 26-51.]

15. “An Essay, whether the present age can, or cannot be reckoned among the ages of poetical excellence,” Monthly Literary Recreations, no. xv (September 1807) 172.

16. See Lonsdale's Introduction to Eighteenth Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale [, 1989], and Jerome McGann, “Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly] 56 (1995).

17. See in particular Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction and his Introduction to Herculine Barbin.

18. See Appendix B.

19. Max Milner makes this important point regarding the novel's original use of the demon lover motif in Le Diable dans la littérature française ([1972,] 290); Milner praises the novel in positive terms rarely seen since Swinburne: “Comment ce roman plein d'originalité et de sombre poésie ne rencontra-t-il qu'indifférance en ce temps où les plus médiocres productions du genre noir étaient assurées du succès?” (288).

20. Picquenard's Zoflora is set before and during Haiti's rebellion following the French Revolution of 1789, and features a noble and selfless Creole slave, Zoflora, the epitome of virtue in distress, who is persecuted and nearly raped by sadistic (white and black) fathers and would-be lovers. Zoflora eventually falls in love with a “good white man” (as she refers to him), the novel's hero, for whose love she twice offers to sacrifice her life. In some respects, Zoflora's imprisonment in a gruesome cave and her persecution by a Sadean father loosely parallels Lilla's torture and captivity by Victoria, but both these conventions are also present in The Monk.

21. (See Appendix B.) General Review of British and Foreign Literature v. 1 (London: D. Shury, 1806) 590-3.

22. (See Appendix B.) The Literary Journal ns. v. 1 (June 1806) 632.

23. Michel Foucault, ed. Introduction to Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Trans. Richard McDougall (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980).

24. 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.

25. 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.”

26. (See Appendix A.) Rev. of Zofloya, Monthly Literary Recreations 1 (1806) 80.

27. 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 degeneration/transformation. Foucault discussed Bienville's Nymphomania in Madness and Civilization [, 1965], pp. 97-8.

28. For a fuller discussion of the complex meanings of “violence,” which went beyond physical assault, see Raymond Williams' discussion of “Violence” in his Keywords [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985].

29. The authorship of this chapbook remains unknown; the first page gives the author as “A Lady.” Thomas Tegg, the publisher, was an innovative chapbook publisher from Cheapside, who sold “one-shilling coloured” prints as well as chapbooks, often illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. The illustrator for The Dæmon of Venice is unknown and is probably not Rowlandson, though Rowlandson had illustrated another chapbook published by Tegg, The School for Friends, whose author was “Miss Dacre.” Because Dacre's name was associated with this other chapbook by Tegg (though her authorship is not confirmed), it is possible, though I think unlikely, that she was the author of the Dæmon of Venice as well. On Rowlandson's work for Tegg, see Edward Wolf's Rowlandson and His Illustrations of Eighteenth Century Literature (1945).

30. Lewis had similarly manipulated the terms of this debate over the dangers of novel reading by naming the Bible as the most sexually suggestive and dangerous text, a gesture deemed blasphemous and censored after the first edition of The Monk.

31. Bienville also considers the possibility that a young woman may come across his own volume, but assures us that after reading Nymphomania, a woman “would feel the fragility of her nature; she would respect, and even cherish the principles which could certainly preserve her from that impending wreck to which the sex are, by reason of their imbecility, exposed” (vii). Though Dacre also focuses on the “impending wreck” facing sexually transgressive women, her dramatization of this wreck is a critique of the impossible double bind sexually active women are placed in, not a meditation on women's “imbecility.”

32. After the publication of Godwin's memoir of Wollstonecraft's life in 1798, her feminist politics were intimately and unfortunately connected with the sexual “scandals” in her own life, as critics such as Richard Polwhele made clear (see Polwhele's poem The Unsex'd Female, London, 1798). One unfortunate incident of which Godwin reminded readers involved the Kingsborough family for which Wollstonecraft was governess, the daughter of which eloped with her married uncle, who was himself murdered by her family. After the shocking trial, “the European Magazine explained it as a result of Wollstonecraft's ‘system of education’” (Barker-Benfield 369). Bienville's Berton in Nymphomania [1775] has a similar function of initiating young middle class women into sexual immorality with hints of lesbianism, though Bienville is unable to give his readers any insight as to why she would want to do this, whereas Dacre gives us many good reasons (e.g., power, pleasure, revenge) which we aren't necessarily intended to reject as unattractive.

33. Angela Carter's illuminating The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978) is an early and important work that explores “pornography in the service of women,” and specifically the feminist uses of Sade. Some of the most dynamic Sade scholarship in the last twenty years has been produced by feminists. See for example Alice Laborde's “The Problem of Sexual Equality in Sadean Prose” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment., ed. Samia Spencer [1984] and Lynn Hunt's Introduction to The Invention of Pornography [, 1993].

34. “I think I could endure any punishment with more fortitude than the sickening anguish of beholding such suffering as I have witnessed. What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind! Heaven knows I can support my own afflictions, but not the view of those of others when they are excessive. The instruments of torture I believe I could endure, if my spirit was invigorated with the consciousness of a generous purpose; but pity touches upon a nerve that vibrates instantly to the heart, and subdues resistance” (Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, [1797,] 127).

Bibliography

Works by Charlotte Dacre

Dacre's four known novels have been reprinted in Arno Press's Gothic Novels series, and her volume of poetry by Garland; these should be available in most university and research libraries, and each contains an introduction, not always biographically accurate. Trifles of Helicon, written with her sister Sophia King, is available through The Eighteenth Century microfilm series. Frederick S. Frank's The First Gothics (1987) contains brief plot synopses of each of Dacre's novels. The Libertine went into three editions in 1807, and Confessions into three editions by 1807. The advertisement for the third edition of the Confessions promised a “Portrait and Memoirs of the Fair Author,” but I have been unable to locate a copy of the third edition in order to confirm this.

Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer: London: D. N. Shury for J. F Hughes, 1805. 3 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

George the Fourth. London: Hatchard, 1822.

Hours of Solitude. A Collection of Original Poems, now first published. 1805. 2 vols. in 1. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978.

The Libertine. London: Cadell & Davies, 1807. 4 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

The Passions. London: Cadell & Davies, 1811. 4 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

[Charlotte King and Sophia King]. Trifles of Helicon. London: James Ridgway, 1798.

Zofloya; or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806. 3 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Works in Translation

[The Libertine] Angelo, comte d'Albini, ou les Dangers du vice, par Charlotte Dacre Byrne connue sous le nom de Rosa Matilda, traduit de l'anglais par Mme. Élisabeth de B∗∗∗. 3 vols. Paris: A. Bertrand, 1816.

Zofloya, ou le Maure, historie du XVeme siècle, traduite de l'anglais par Mme. de Viterne. 4 vols. Paris: Barba, 1812.

Authorship in Question

The Dæmon of Venice. An Original Romance. Tegg's Edition. London: Thomas Tegg, 1810. [The title on the first page reads: “The Demon of Venice, A Romance. By a Lady.”]