[In the following essay, Dunn includes all of Dacre's novels in his discussion of how Dacre's texts' erotic imagination and Machiavellian violence are concomitantly liberating and tragic, a duality that explains her works' potential for dramatic irony.]

Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives … hasn't accused herself of being a monster?

—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Charlotte Dacre occupies a peculiar and largely unexamined place in the ideology of the Gothic novel and of early-nineteenth-century Britain in general. She explores through her heroines the violence of female sexual desire, and she articulates their full range of doubts, regrets, justifications, and indulgences, in a way that conforms neither to the usual masculine Romantic images of women (as evanescent temptresses or omnipresent mothers) nor to what Anne K. Mellor describes as the prevailing counter-ideology of feminine Romanticism (emphasizing the rationality of women and the values of domesticity and common sense).¹ Dacre's imagination is unabashedly libidinous, setting her far apart from a Wollstonecraft or an Austen, yet the charge through her novels completely reverses the gender stereotypes so rampant in traditional Gothic formulas. She pays homage to “Monk” Lewis in a number of ways, but in perhaps the most important way she declares her independence from him—let us have our sex and violence, she seems to say, but let us see what it looks like beyond the stock feminine props of persecution and victimization; let us make women the subject rather than the object of a toxic erotic agony.²

Feminine eros in Dacre's logic is an accelerator, energizing particles of desire and focusing them upon a male target. That Dacre's men are generally unequal to the assault is a source of comedy in these otherwise melodramatic fictions. Sometimes erotic longing explodes into a chaos of violence (especially in the case of Victoria in Zofloya), rather than purposefully focusing on a single victim (the mode, for example, of Appollonia Zulmer in The Passions [1811]). Either way, for Dacre eros is always agonized because it is always characterized by the movement of desire into violence. This model of feminine eroticism provides a significant contrast to those of other women writers of the period, some of whom see the importance of giving voice to the erotic tensions and even agonies of their women characters but do not insist upon the proximity of feminine desire and violent agency.

A generation or so after Dacre, for example, Elizabeth Letitia Landon (L. E. L.) wrote numerous lyrics on the agony of love, registered on and through the consciousness of sensitive and intelligent women (usually distinct characters in narrative poems but sometimes first-person poetic voices as well).³ But Landon's erotic agony is much more static than Dacre's dynamic form: her women turn in upon themselves, wait, and keep their beauty intact by suffering silently.⁴ Calypso is the “type of all” (“Calypso Watching the Ocean” [1836]), who, long after the departure of Odysseus, “Weepeth on eternally” but does so in perfect statis, “Like a marble statue placed, / Looking o'er the watery waste.”⁵ Landon's interpretation of female gazing, moreover, has little in common with the motivation of forcible possession so widely presumed to be the raison d'être of male gazing. The yearning in “Different Thoughts; Suggested by a Picture by G. S. Newton, No. 16, in the British Gallery, and representing a Girl looking at her Lover's Miniature” (1823), for example, is contemplative and fully self-conscious (“I must turn from this idol”).⁶ Here desire does not issue into violence so much as provide the occasion for rational differentiation—an almost precisely opposite outcome.

Dacre's erotic imagination is perhaps more closely allied to Mary Tighe's, a contemporary whose most important work, Psyche, was privately printed in 1805 and published posthumously in 1811 (the exact span of Dacre's most productive period). Tighe seems similarly to acknowledge the destabilizing effects of sexual attraction, as when, for example, in the first canto Cupid descends upon Psyche like an incubus.⁷ At this point in the poem Cupid is merely carrying out the orders of Venus, who is jealous of Psyche's unintentional erotic power over men. In a kind of metaphorical displacement, then, Cupid substitutes for Venus and enacts a sexualized anxiety and violence that in fact has feminine origins (albeit divine, not mortal). But Psyche herself is so often subject to abduction, delusion, and loss of consciousness that it is problematic to compare her to any of Dacre's heroines, even to a relatively mild one such as Cazire in Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer. One recent critic may be correct in claiming that “as Tighe's narrative progresses, Psyche becomes increasingly committed to a public life of independent action,”⁸ but such empowerment does not come about through any particularly revisionist gendering of erotic perception. Indeed, in Psyche, from first canto to last, it is not difficult to find the language of passivity surrounding the heroine; in this allegorical travelogue Psyche's slow responsiveness to the dangerous designs of others bespeaks a kind of tabula rasa in her character.

In Landon, then, erotic desires are not intrinsically connected to violence, while in Tighe they only glance at violence and do not compulsively demand a central place in the narrative. In contrast, Dacre's obsessive layering of the erotic, the violent, and the feminine appears to be unique and requires further explanation. In theoretical terms, I think Dacre uses the concept of violence to conflate the presumptive binary opposition of “masculine” and “feminine”; unlike a postmodern writer such as Hélène Cixous, however, who reads feminine libidinous power in terms of comic freedom, Dacre is very much a Romantic in reading this phenomenon dialectically, its liberating potential never fully able to pull away from tragic consequences.⁹ The hermeneutics of violence in Dacre's fiction often splits along these lines: it is coded positively in relation to sexual justice, as the murderous rages of her anti-heroines are lent no small degree of credence and legitimacy in the context of a larger gender injustice; and it is coded negatively in relation to the value of love, for Dacre's violent women always end tragically alone, cast out, spiteful, and often dead.

This bifurcation within Dacre's own hermeneutics, together with her significant complication of the Gothic female stereotype, explains why there is such rich potential for irony in her work.¹⁰ Indeed, her vision is at its most vital when it is most ironic, suggesting that her closest literary kinship may be with Byron. It is tempting to interpret the ironic beats in Dacre's narratives with the aid of biography, for what little scholarship we have on her is suggestive of intriguing fissures: Dacre was a Jew in London society whose father was a great financial success but was considered notorious for a number of reasons, and her marriage to Nicholas Byrne, the editor of The Morning Post, took place several years after the birth of their three children.¹¹ The degree to which Dacre allows scenes of violence to overwrite the conventional moral markers that she is also careful to construct implies a kind of dual subjectivity, both inside and outside the normative rules of polite society, more deeply experienced than can be explained merely by the generic expectations of the Gothic.

If in her personal life she was both insider and outsider, then the same may be said of her literary reception. Byron and Percy Shelley took notice of Dacre's works—Shelley was even enthusiastic about her for a time, and two of his early romances, Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1810), are indebted to Zofloya. That novel in particular enjoyed great popular success, and Dacre's other novels were popular to a lesser degree, but in general few of her contemporaries took her work seriously.¹² The relative neglect of Dacre has continued to the present: even with the Arno Press reprintings, critical appraisal of Dacre is sparse. Adriana Craciun's recent scholarship is a rare exception;¹³ more typically, Dacre will be briefly noted as a minor figure in a book-length treatment of other Gothic writers and themes. Sandra Knight-Roth's unpublished thesis remains the only expansive analysis of Dacre, and it is her comment in the foreword to the Arno Press edition of The Passions that I think touches most directly on the unique contribution of Dacre to the literature of the period:

Cast in a different mould than those of her precursors, her heroines do not exhibit any elegance or artificiality of diction, nor coy daintiness of mien, nor any inveterate ingenuousness of character. … Miss Dacre's women are not one-dimensional beings concerned with propriety or taste. They think, feel and reason.¹⁴

I would expand this point to recognize that Dacre's heroines desire, lust, and machinate, often in full awareness of the social codes that attempt to restrict them from doing so. They also commit gruesome acts of violence.

The most protracted description of gore in Dacre's novels occurs in Zofloya,¹⁵ but it is not given over to the (male) satanic Moor's ultimate destruction of the central female character, Victoria. In my view, their relationship is fascinating prior to that violent climax, but it becomes flat and conventional as Dacre hastens to her generic concluding scenes.¹⁶ Rather, Dacre's most expansive scene of violence occurs as Victoria stalks, attacks, and murders Lilla, who is hardly more than a child, an unformed wisp of girlish virtue: the novel generally treats her as seen but not heard. The most evident rationale for this attack is that Victoria desires to eliminate everyone blocking her erotic pursuit of Henriquez, a forbidden object, the brother of her husband; Henriquez adores Lilla, and thus Lilla is Victoria's sexual rival. But there is something more at work in this scene: Victoria, who had been described at the beginning of the novel in conventional terms of feminine beauty, becomes increasingly masculine as the novel progresses.¹⁷ The standard becomes relational as Lilla enters the narrative—Victoria is larger than Lilla, with harder facial features. Lilla is the picture of placid passivity compared with Victoria's expressions of boundless rage and desire. It is significant, however, that this comparative regendering is not the occasion of some jealous catfight—with Victoria envious of Lilla's favored femininity—but rather produces Victoria's disgust and loathing of Lilla's feminine insignificance. The girl is nothing more than an empty vessel; Victoria's rage is less at Lilla herself than at Henriquez for prizing feminine emptiness.

Hence the scene of attack resonates with a symbolic intent to destroy this false feminine ideal. Victoria here ritually enacts male penetration by stabbing Lilla repeatedly; the remains of the lifeless corpse may be disposed of at will, tossed into the abyss. In a mythic sense, the scene clearly reveals the destiny of feminine passivity in the scheme of masculine eroticism; indeed later in the novel, in a more conventional Gothic confrontation, it is Victoria who is tossed into the abyss by Zofloya. Yet through the medium of Victoria, Dacre seems uninterested in lamenting feminine victimization, indicating rather that such should be the destiny of feminine passivity. It is Victoria's capacity to leap to the “other side” of gender behaviors that signals alternative destinies available to women. With remarkable semantic dexterity, Dacre deploys Victoria as a sign simultaneously enacting and criticizing the gender inequities she scorns.

Victoria is not the only woman in the Dacrean oeuvre to “man” herself or to bely dominant cultural myths of gender behavior. Gabrielle, the lead female character in The Libertine (1807), masculinizes her identity as literally as possible, appearing through a large portion of the novel as a young man named Eugene. The novel might be said to contain a sexual uncertainty principle, illustrated by multiple and “cross-pollinating” attractions: Gabrielle desires Angelo, who has seduced and abandoned her only to find himself profoundly drawn to “Eugene”; and another of Angelo's lovers, Orianna, desires “Eugene” in preference to Angelo and especially to her “macho,” tyrant lover, Fiorenza. The dramatic irony with which Dacre laces this narrative sequence—Gabrielle/Eugene and readers know of the identity change while other characters do not—foregrounds the extent to which gender is socially constructed and romantic love enacted through convention. Even the maternal instinct is called into question here, for an integral part of Gabrielle's transformation effectively reproduces the motif of masculine abandonment. Just as Angelo had abandoned her, Gabrielle abandons her child when she decides to travel, in the garb of a man, in search of Angelo.¹⁸

Dacre pursues the duality of gender in Gabrielle/Eugene by suggesting the psychological aspects of gender roles as well. As Gabrielle plans a lengthy and arduous voyage for the purpose of finding and confronting Angelo, she seems to vacillate between masculine assertiveness and feminine passivity:

Determined to dare the worst in the prosecution of her duty, undismayed she considered every obstacle that might arise, and, undismayed, planned how to surmount them.

… for the first time since her undertaking, her firm soul shrunk at what she might have to encounter. Almost in the same instant, however, she became ashamed of this emotion, higher thoughts pervaded her mind.

(I, 177-78)

The narrator reinforces this ambiguity by the use of pronouns in descriptive passages, sometimes referring to Gabrielle/Eugene as “she,” sometimes as “he.” Because Gabrielle is not, however, as central to The Libertine as Victoria is to Zofloya—indeed Gabrielle is reduced to the role of suffering saint after she sheds her masculine mask, and Angelo becomes the focal point of the narrative—Dacre does not significantly develop the idea of gender revision beyond this kind of playful confusion.

The titular character of Dacre's first novel, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, is never a particularly masculine heroine, but the narrative does express related metaphors for Cazire's feminine empowerment. One of Dacre's favorite concepts is what I would call “identity mapping,” whereby a disciple maps his or her character, for better or for worse, on the basis of the teachings or behaviors of a mentor. This mentor's beliefs are frequently inculcated through books carefully selected for the disciple; from her first novel to her last, Dacre repeatedly implicates reading as a formative agent in moral life, virtually equal to or sometimes overlapping the formative power of parental example for young children. Dacre would presumably have no difficulty subscribing to René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, in which the motive for any given human pursuit is not so much the intrinsic value of the object pursued as the imitation of a model.¹⁹

What is important about Dacre is that her women cannot or will not map themselves onto men's expectations of them, and they consistently seek female models as the course to a more authentic subjectivity.²⁰ In Confessions Cazire has been reading adventures and romances given to her by a well-meaning girlfriend; these books give pleasure to Cazire. When the refined St. Elmer tries to reform her reading habits, however, by introducing her to serious books of reason and moral philosophy, she resists. Though the older Cazire who narrates the tale repents of this resistance, Dacre provides the reader with a glimpse at a decidedly independent female resisting male morality and the male shaping of her character—or what we now might call the “symbolic order.” Here masculinity represents not so much the tyranny of violence as the (related) tyranny of rule.

The relationship of taboo and transgression, about which Georges Bataille is so concerned,²¹ forms the central theme of the novel. Cazire describes herself in the following terms, notably congenial to Bataille's later understanding of the erotic sensibility: “variable and inconstant being that I was, the creature of passion and the moment, continually aware of what virtue required, tremblingly alive to its slightest deviations, yet without fortitude to abide by its decisions, without even firmness at all times to desire it.”²² This is not a very enviable state of guilty self-awareness in which to find oneself, and, once again, Dacre does not provide us with an untroubled feminine liberation. Yet, at the same time, the reader cannot fully share the older Cazire's utter condemnation of her youthful exuberance and independent will.²³ In breaking the taboo on extramarital passion, Cazire finds herself in a position of power over her husband, if not over herself. She describes herself as a “pitying executioner, weeping while I struck the blow” (Confessions, II, 147), adumbrating a favorite Dacrean metaphor that passionate love is human sacrifice, a residual violence inevitably enacted through the fatal incongruity of romantic affiliation. Cazire's foray into prohibited desire involves her in a primordial narrative far more violent than the narrative of domestic femininity. She is aware of this violence even if she is appalled by her own participation in it.

While Cazire may be a “weeping executioner,” many of Dacre's later Machiavellian lovers have dried their tears. Megalina Strozzi in Zofloya uses a new lover to attempt to murder a former lover (Berenza, now Victoria's husband); the attempt is botched, but later Megalina's very rival, Victoria, completes the job by poisoning Berenza. In a classic Dacrean irony, the two rivals unconsciously cooperate in their violent object. The Libertine presents the reader with a triad of disciples in sexual predation in Oriana, Paulina, and Milborough. Dacre depicts their successive affairs with Angelo as increasingly calculated to destroy the marriage of Gabrielle and Angelo; illicit courtship is here nothing more than a game with high stakes, and Angelo the libertine is addicted to gambling (literally and figuratively). Indeed, in Dacre's novels both gaming and seduction are metaphors for socially sanctioned cruelty. She could be speaking of her triad of women when in The Libertine she describes the participants in upscale gambling: “that class of beings, who not only remorselessly strip each other of all they possess, but attempt neither to hide their exultation nor speak a word of consolation, however vain, to the wretch they have driven to ruin and desperation” (III, 106-7).

Beautiful but merciless women are of course nothing new in the literature of eros, and most of Dacre's femmes fatales meet violent and ignominious ends. But, then again, so do her “virtuous” characters. Vice may not be crowned with happiness here, but neither is virtue. The point is rather the frequency with which Dacre recurs to images of explosive desire in women, of intense dissatisfaction with the humble proscriptions placed upon “the sex”; herein lies the difference between the hermeneutics of Dacrean fiction and, say, the hermeneutics of Renaissance courtly love sonnets. It is, very simply, the difference in perspective achieved by placing the femme fatale in the position of subject rather than object. In fact, the very term femme fatale is no longer adequate in Dacre's world: some of her women are fundamentally “good” and some fundamentally “evil,” but beyond good and evil her women are all what might be called “desiring subjects.” Foremost in Dacre's imagination is their experience of desiring; her women remain ferociously true to their desires, even as these desires sometimes fatally conflict with conscience. Desire personalizes and deepens her most important female characters.

Dacre's male characters, in contrast, tend to desire only what is thoroughly mediated by cultural norms, particularly regarding feminine attractiveness and virtue. Many of them are ineffectual Platonists whose impossibly high standards for wifely purity leave them either perennial bachelors or deluded cuckolds. There is a flatness to Dacre's men; they are merely the reflecting surfaces of early-nineteenth-century Britain's beliefs about ideal femininity. Dacre's women have a depth to them precisely because they strain against this confining mold. Thus in Dacre's works the choices incumbent upon true agency generally fall to women, while men are the objects upon which play the desire, cunning, pity, and love of women. Indeed, in a delightful inversion of the later anthropological observation that the crucial cultural problem is the unequal distribution of women, here the narrative action is often a function of the unequal distribution of men. In general, the play in Dacre's fiction between male flatness and female depth is a source of comedy, all the more striking in that the author's predominant mode is tragedy.²⁴

.....

The meaning of a “feminized” violence is dramatized with the most sophistication in the last of Dacre's novels, The Passions. This epistolary work gives us the character of Appollonia Zulmer, the most articulate voice of feminine rage in Dacre's oeuvre, a less bloody but far more intelligent “hunter” than Victoria in Zofloya. Indeed, where Zofloya represents the apex of Dacre's Gothicism, and The Libertine calls forth her best achievement in narrative coherence, it is The Passions that best expresses what is for me the fundamental Dacrean vision—tragic irony, as perceived through the double lens of love and violence.

The Passions narrates in epistolary fashion the events, ideas, feelings, and opinions of six central characters—two married couples and two single “outsiders” or observers of the conjugal relations. Count Wiemar has married Julia, whom he meets while traipsing about in the sublime solitudes of the Swiss alps. He had fled to Switzerland from Vienna, where he was involved in a romantic misunderstanding with a society woman named Appollonia Zulmer. Unbeknownst to Wiemar, Appollonia never forgives him for the pain of her unrequited love, and later she befriends his wife, Julia, for duplicitous and vengeful purposes. Wiemar, now returned from Switzerland with Julia, introduces her to his bosom friends, Baron Rozendorf and Count Darlowitz. Wiemar and Julia form an ideal community with Darlowitz and his wife, Amelia. The four adults reside together with their children in relative seclusion from the rest of the world; they educate their children at home and theorize about proper pedagogy. Clearly, Dacre means to establish this arrangement as a kind of domestic utopia, although its harmonious existence is short-lived.

The cause of the dissolution of this domestic order is a point of some contention. Darlowitz expresses in a correspondence with Rozendorf an enthusiasm for Julia far beyond the sort of brotherly affection that one might expect from him on meeting his beloved friend's wife; Rozendorf immediately perceives that an illicit passion has been stirred, and he warns Darlowitz to chasten and subdue it (see II, 32-51). For her part, Julia reciprocates Darlowitz's passion but is as ardent to extinguish this guilty love as Darlowitz is to indulge it. Julia confesses her predicament to her newfound “friend,” Appollonia, and the two exchange several letters on the moral admissability of extramarital relations, or even flirtations. Julia takes the hardline intentionalist stance, arguing that it is just as mortal a sin secretly to cherish the image of another, without acting on that desire, as it is to carry through the infidelity in act as well as desire. Appollonia, who even prior to this crisis had been attempting to relax Julia's rigid morality through a program of “dangerous reading,” hopes to persuade Julia that such passionate attractions are fated, that personal responsibility and will are misplaced notions here, and that in any case mere thoughts and feelings of infidelity are not sinful in themselves. Appollonia counters Julia's idealism with a worldly pragmatism, designed to increase Julia's receptiveness to Darlowitz's fervent advances and thereby to ruin Wiemar's illusions of happiness.

Julia never consummates her passion for Darlowitz, but neither does she renounce him until it is too late. Amelia early on, and Wiemar finally, discover the true desires of their respective partners. Amelia dies of grief, Darlowitz commits suicide, Julia exiles herself to the punishment of the elements, and Wiemar is left to be the sole parent of both families' children. Rozendorf retrieves Julia and sets her up in a village near to Wiemar and the children, but she is mentally crippled at this point, and Wiemar is torn between the pity and love he still feels for her and the wounded pride he nurses on his own behalf. The novel concludes with Julia's intuitive discovery of her old abode, as she fatally crawls to the very doorstep of Wiemar early one morning. He finds her lifeless body there not long after she has expired, and he offers up his forgiveness for her sin—which, Dacre suggests, allows Julia's soul, lingering on the scene, finally to depart in peace.

At several points in the novel, characters attribute the whole calamity to Appollonia's nefarious influence; Rozendorf in particular is keen to discredit her, and Appollonia herself proudly announces to a correspondent that she is the author of the destruction of Wiemar's marriage to Julia. Yet Julia is never wholly convinced by the arguments offered by Appollonia, and the latter of course has little or no control over the behavior of Darlowitz. Darlowitz might well have heeded Rozendorf's advice to subdue his passions for Julia, or he might simply have grown disenchanted with her in time, leaving the marital order shaken but fundamentally sound. In fact, the earliest review of the novel, in The Critical Review in September 1811, observes the inconsistency of causation in the narrative.²⁵ Yet if on the level of narrative plausibility Dacre errs in attributing so much to Appollonia, then this very flaw suggests some level on which she wants to invest Appollonia with power. Plot becomes subordinate to character in this case. I believe that Appollonia carries a symbolic weight in the novel worthy of more extensive critical attention.

Appollonia and Rozendorf, the two unattached observers of the conjugal four, are neatly antithetical forces. In the chemistry of human relations, Appollonia is a stimulant and Rozendorf is a depressant. Appollonia influences by positive suggestion: she opens possibilities and potential activity, especially in Julia. Rozendorf influences by negative admonishment: he devotes his energy to thwarting changes that threaten the status quo of domestic tranquility. Appollonia is passionate and impulsive, deeply desiring romantic attachment and envious not of the domestic security of the married couples but of the intimate affirmation that Julia has gained of Wiemar. Rozendorf is a dispassionate and cautious bachelor, satisfied with his state and protective of what he conceives to be the best interests of his married friends. These two have a mutual and instinctive loathing of one another—a relationship analogous in many ways to Keats's later pairing of Lamia and Apollonius. Indeed, Appollonia, like Lamia, fears the penetrating gaze and cold scrutiny of her adversary; and Rozendorf accuses Appollonia of vanity from the outset, saying that she is “a stranger to controul” (I, 23).

But as “a stranger to controul” Appollonia stands as a substantial critique of the feminine standard of docility that Julia seems to embody. Without endorsing Appollonia, Dacre gives over to her a number of impassioned passages expressing the grievous limitations of meek femininity. Moreover, Appollonia's analysis of Wiemar's fundamental sexism proves uncannily accurate, as Wiemar himself echoes some of the attitudes that Appollonia ascribes to him. When Wiemar returns to Vienna from Switzerland he avoids as much as possible an embarrassing encounter with Appollonia; but when they inevitably meet, at the party of a mutual friend, Appollonia does her best to put Wiemar at ease so that she might better win the confidence of Julia. Gradually she comes to be in almost daily contact with the couple, observing minutely (though probably not objectively) the behavior of the wife toward her husband. She is keen to know why Julia, a simple if forthright rustic, should be preferred to herself, the wittiest and most sought-after woman of her social set. She writes to her close friend and mentor, Madame de Hautville:

Wiemar, I am now certain, could never tolerate greatness in a woman; no extraordinary powers,—no boldness of mind—greatness with him would be an unpardonable crime. He must have gentle softness! blandness—sweet imbecility! acknowledged dependance. Degrading characteristics!—contemptible graces! and contemptible those who can be attracted by them. … [Countess Wiemar] was born, not to lead, but to be led, and tamely to yield to the destiny which marks woman for the slave of man! … Why this endless despotism? why this alarm? this unceasing watchfulness over the female mind, to arrest it in its first, least step towards knowledge if it is not from a servile dread, that their eyes should become opened!

(I, 168-70)

Appollonia's rhetorical strategy here is to conflate the particulars of the marriage she detests with larger claims about gender warfare and injustice.

Dacre knows that readers will recognize that Wiemar is hardly this tyrannical, and, even more important, they will feel that romantic preference in general is beyond analysis—Wiemar loves whom he loves and should not have to apologize for it. Yet, at the same time, Dacre has Wiemar acknowledge, in terms more favorable to himself, Appollonia's insight about his preferences in women:

Nothing, in my mind, is so detestable in a woman, as obtrusive qualities. Men can never be compelled into admiration; they must be charmed—enticed into it.

(I, 245)

Appollonia has diagnosed his prejudices accurately—for Wiemar, charming women are essentially passive, not only refraining from pushing themselves into the center of the relationship but also skilled in inviting the male partner to occupy that position. “Obtrusive” women here are undoubtedly women like Appollonia, full of their own ideas, arguments, and needs for attention. Wiemar does, indeed, betray a certain anxiety as Appollonia begins to feed Julia's mind with books and philosophical conversation—which divides, ever so slightly, Julia's attention from her husband's needs. Thus while Wiemar is no “master” and Julia no “slave,” Dacre pointedly allows some resonance to the master/slave discourse that Appollonia introduces.

The ideology of feminine independence in which Appollonia wishes to inculcate Julia had itself been handed down to Appollonia from her elder mentor, Madame de Hautville.²⁶ The notion of character modeling and female discipleship is strong in this novel: another—and rather different—matrilineal line is revealed as Amelia expresses gratitude to her mother for providing her with a model for raising her girl children in particular.²⁷ Madame de Hautville preaches against romantic love and in favor of shrewd financial pragmatics for women, that they might enjoy through advantageous marriage the freedom of independent life. Love and freedom are incompatible in her philosophy, and thus the wisest course for women is essentially to be indifferent to men, to rise above the sexual fray of courtship and seduction. It is ironic that Appollonia's mentor articulates a code of conduct that, in the last analysis, resembles that of Rozendorf, Appollonia's sharpest adversary.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the disciple ultimately breaks with the master: Appollonia transmutes the stoic detachment of Madame de Hautville into a passionate war-cry. She reinvests her ambitions in gender relations, not in the expectation of love but in the drive to combat and conquer. She imagines herself as committing physical violence upon Wiemar, as her scheme of revenge is figured in terms of sacrifice:

But because he comes, like the devoted lamb, he comes for sacrifice! he stoops his head, wreathed with the flowers of love and joy, for my revenge! Let me stay my uplifted arm, while faithful memory nerves and collects into it all the strength of my soul.

(I, 152)²⁸

Appollonia's symbolic identification with pagan violence becomes even more explicit with her frantic invocation of Medusa:

Snaky haired Nemesis! Goddess of my adoration! grateful for the aid thou hast afforded me, thee will I ever worship, and immolate my victims on thy shrine! … Infuse thy rankest venom into my heart, that no soft feeling may have power to live there, so shall I accomplish my destined purpose.

(II, 209)

Proudly reclaiming the origins of her matrilineal dynasty—one recalls Cixous's titular metaphor in “The Laugh of the Medusa”²⁹—Appollonia recasts gender relations to reflect a far different power structure: “Oh! men; ye lordly despots, what mere machines are you in the hands of those ye affect to govern; on what do ye ground your pretensions! for are ye not in reality our tools?” (I, 55).

Dacre has an intuition that this revolutionary feminine violence ought somehow to be reflected linguistically. An exclamatory urgency ripples through Appollonia's letters to Madame de Hautville (where she is able to express her intentions and feelings most honestly), in marked contrast to the graceful facility of her prose in her letters to Julia (where she self-consciously adopts a more moderate pose of friendship). At one point in a letter to Madame de Hautville, Appollonia catches herself using the wrong kind of language:

For total oblivion of the past, and one year of the peace of virtue, would I resign the whole of my future existence. What do I say! … Is this the language for Appollonia! … Like a malignant fiend—the knowledge that I am myself the uttermost boundary of evil, that there is none beyond me, renders me outrageous and confirms my malice.

(II, 228-29)

Yet the straining absolutism of her language—“total oblivion,” “the whole of my future existence,” “the uttermost boundary of evil”—is present both before and after her awareness of the language she employs. Indeed, most of Dacre's major characters speak in exclamatory extremes; the “What do I say!” formula is a favorite with her. There is some attempt at dialect and educational differentiation in The Libertine, for example in Milborough or the servants of Angelo. But Dacre is no Joyce, and she generally fails at supplementing her ideological fictions with a consistent linguistic depth.

Although the hermeneutics of Appollonia's rage cannot be mapped onto a narrative of language, it can, I think, be understood in terms of a master trope of irony at work in the novel. Appollonia is driven by an essential incongruity that generates nearly all of the activity of the story: love meets contempt. Her vast energies are devoted to arranging her own form of congruity with the contempt she has met, an “order” based on hatred, vengeance, and violence. By encouraging the infidelity of Julia, Appollonia effectively reproduces in Wiemar her own shattering experience of romantic incongruity. In a letter to Wiemar she writes:

When transports of extacy meet with repulse, what is the flash of horror which darts through the brain? … This living hell has been mine, it is now yours.

(IV, 86)

Dacre layers the ironic possibilities here: the romantic ideal of mutuality in love and marriage is undercut, but the resulting vision of isolated subjective experience is subverted as well, for the failure of love is a shared fate. Appollonia forces Wiemar into a relationship of reciprocity through the very vehicle of tragic incongruity. This is, quite literally, a “rage for order”: what cannot be effected through love will be obtained through violence. The failure of mutuality in love provides the tragic structure of the novel, across which flows the ironic revelation that mutuality in devastation is possible. Yet the communion of souls wrought through violence is a very different thing for Dacre than the communion hoped for in love. And this difference is the final Dacrean irony here: after the complete success of her “sacrifice” of Wiemar, Appollonia is more isolated than ever. Her increasingly bad reputation forces her to leave Vienna; not long after her departure she is plundered and murdered by one of her own henchmen.

Thus, for Dacre, the idea of “feminizing” violence hardly produces comforting visions of sexual equality. Typical of the Gothic genre in fiction, Dacre's novels fail to imagine ways of negotiating extremes: on the one hand, there is a real ideological liberation achieved as Dacre sets her women free from the destiny of passive suffering so widely represented and accepted by Gothic conventions; on the other hand, her women shed their “feminine” destinies in search of some form of sexual justice only to find themselves disastrously “masculinized,” selfishly lusty and aggressive. Still, Appollonia must be considered the very central nervous system of The Passions. Dacre condemns her overtly, but covertly she links her to the noble Swiss chamois hunter whose story is related in the first few pages of the novel (see I, 4-12). This anecdote makes it clear that the hunter and the hunted instinctively respect an adversarial principle of life and enact reciprocal violence on a kind of mythic plane. Wiemar relates this story and has difficulty comprehending it, though he recognizes something admirable about both the hunter and the chamois. To be sure, Appollonia Zulmer is not as noble a hunter as the Swiss chamois hunter—but the fact that Dacre plays with the imagery of female hunting, the fact that she creates a fiction in which feminine aggression is at least partially justified, makes The Passions an important work in the larger Romantic project of interpreting violence.

Notes

1. Mellor's case is made convincingly in Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993). It is notable, however, that Mellor makes no reference to Dacre in her study—Dacre would indeed make an awkward fit into Mellor's central thesis.

2. Dacre's first novel, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), is dedicated to Lewis, and clearly Zofloya (1806) is influenced by The Monk (1796). Montague Summers's view, however, that Zofloya is an “incessant and unashamed imitation of The Monk” (“Byron's ‘Lovely Rosa,’” in his Essays in Petto [1928; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967], p. 65), has been strongly countered by more recent criticism. A balanced and substantially more intricate reading of the points of similarity and difference between Lewis's and Dacre's tales can be found in Mireille Magnier, “Zefloya et Le Moine,” in Autour de l'Idée de Nature; Histoire des Idées et Civilisation; Pédagogie et Divers: Actes du Congrès de Saint-Etienne (1975) (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1975), pp. 227-31. And Ann H. Jones's chapter on Dacre in her Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 224-49, takes issue with any critical inclination to read Zofloya as a “mere copy” of The Monk, citing five major points of narrative technique that distinguish the two (see pp. 238-40).

3. Dacre's major works—four novels and a two-volume collection of poems—were all published between 1805 and 1811. Another work, George the Fourth, was published in 1822; and an early novel, Trifles of Helicon, published in 1798, can very likely be attributed to Dacre and her sister. Landon's publishing career, of course, began in earnest in the 1820s.

4. Mellor reads Landon in terms of Burke's category of the beautiful: “Landon created the verbal equivalent of Burke's visual beauty. … Inspired by Burke, Landon's writings construct the interior life or subjectivity of the beautiful woman as one defined by love, fidelity, sensitivity—and melancholy” (Romanticism and Gender, p. 112). While I find this analysis fundamentally accurate, and indeed I argue here that Landon's erotic themes are far more static and passive (and melancholy) than Dacre's, it is worth noting that Landon will occasionally depict powerful and hostile female characters. “Revenge,” for instance, is a succinct lyrical echo of the strong narrative presence of Appollonia Zulmer in Dacre's The Passions (1811), and “A Supper of Madame de Brinvilliers” portrays the sinister exploitation and murder of a young man by an older woman.

5. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “Calypso Watching the Ocean,” in Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “L. E. L.”: A Facsimile Reproduction of the 1873 Edition, ed. F. J. Sypher (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1990), p. 379; ll. 8, 21-22.

6. L. E. L., “Different Thoughts; Suggested by a Picture by G. S. Newton, No. 16, in the British Gallery, and representing a Girl looking at her Lover's Miniature,” The Literary Gazette, no. 322 (22 March 1823), 189; l. 72.

7. See Mary Tighe, Psyche, or The Legend of Love, in her Psyche, with Other Poems, 5th ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), pp. 21-23; Canto I, stanzas 25-28, ll. 217-52. Cupid finds Psyche asleep in her chamber; she is partly naked (“scarce the lucid folds her polished limbs concealed”). Cupid pours “fatal drops” into the open mouth of his unconscious victim, then somewhat sadistically decides to redouble his efforts—“Nor yet content”—by wounding “her all-exposed heart” with one of his darts (manually, not aerially). Before he can pierce her, however, he becomes overwhelmed by desire (“his hand now trembling”), and he accidently punctures himself. The resulting effluent he proceeds to “shed in haste … / O'er all the silky ringlets of her hair.”

8. Greg Kucich, “Gender Crossings: Keats and Tighe,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 44 (1995), 37. Kucich allows that Tighe “remains ambivalent about female independence,” but he regards Psyche overall as an inversion of “the typical masculine gendering of Romantic quest narratives” (p. 38).

9. Perhaps the model of literary evolution fits here. Cixous is able to imagine what Dacre could not—a happy ending for the liberated female libido. Adriana Craciun has recently noted the importance of another kind of dialectical structure in Dacre (see her introduction to Zofloya, ed. Craciun [Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997], pp. 9-32). Craciun describes a dialectic of characterization between the femmes fatales of Dacre's fiction and their meeker, more traditionally feminine doubles (p. 28).

10. Dacrean irony can be obscured by her narrative style and rhetoric, which are often both sentimental and bombastic. Her contemporaries occasionally criticized Dacre for rhetorical excess (cf., for example, Devendra P. Varma's summary of early critical remarks on The Passions in his introduction to the Arno Press edition of the novel [The Passions, 4 vols. (1811; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974), I, ix-xvi; further references are to this edition and appear in the text]). But I argue here on behalf of a crucial ironic structure informing most of Dacre's novels, and I encourage further scholarship—biographical, cultural, and literary—on the nature and description of that irony.

11. No full-length biography of Dacre exists, and much of the information in Summers's early writings on her has proven unreliable. Jones, for example, significantly revises earlier speculation on Dacre's dates of birth and death (see Ideas and Innovations, pp. 226-27). Craciun endorses Jones's view and provides a good summary of Dacre's family connections (see “‘I hasten to be disembodied’: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body,” European Romantic Review, 6 [1995], 75-97). See also Craciun's brief chronology and introductory remarks in her edition of Zofloya.

12. Varma provides some contemporary critical reviews in his introductions to the Arno Press editions. See also Jones's chapter; and Craciun's introduction to Zofloya.

13. Craciun makes one of Dacre's poems the focal point of her article “‘I hasten to be disembodied,’” and she returns to the theme of “the fluidity of corporeal identity” in her introduction to Zofloya (p. 20). In both pieces Craciun draws interesting comparisons between Dacre's texts and D. T. de Bienville's Nymphomania (1775).

14. Sandra Knight-Roth, foreword to The Passions, I, vii-viii. See also her “Charlotte Dacre and the Gothic Tradition” (unpublished thesis, Dalhousie Univ., 1972).

15. See Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols. (1806; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974), III, 91-105. Further references are to this edition.

16. Dacre dwells throughout upon Zofloya's dashing appearance, stature, and charm, and the fact that Victoria breaks free from three powerful cultural forces (father, church, and husband) to be with the Moor suggests the importance of miscegenation in Dacre's imagination. Dacre idealizes miscegenation as an escape from conventional hegemonies, yet she turns the motif back upon itself as Victoria is eventually enslaved, not freed, by Zofloya.

17. This particular observation is also made by Robert Miles in Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 180: “she is figured in ever more masculine terms as her desire jumps its cultural trammels.” Carol Ann Howells suggests that Dacre joins with conventional Gothicism in repudiating such gender bending: “Tough passionate women with overt sexual appetites are vigorously condemned, like … Victoria in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya” (Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction [London: Athlone Press, 1978], p. 12). But, in my view, Dacre's condemnations of Victoria should not be taken at face value; rather, Dacre is capable of complex mixtures in her characterizations.

18. See Charlotte Dacre, The Libertine, 4 vols. (1807; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974), I, 158-59. Gabrielle leaves the child under the care of Madame Bertrand, and she intends to reunite with her daughter, but never does. Madame Bertrand proves to be a good surrogate mother, suggesting that the maternal bond, too, may have more to do with social role playing than with foundational nature.

19. For Girard's theory of mimetic desire, see his Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977); Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Athlone Press, 1987); and “Generative Scapegoating,” in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 73-105.

20. Recognizing of course that mimetic desire significantly complicates the idea of “authentic subjectivity.”

21. See Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: J. Calder, 1962).

22. Charlotte Dacre, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer: A Tale, 2 vols. (1805; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1972), I, 227.

23. In Gothic Writing Miles provides an insightful summary of the interpretive complexities informing Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer: “The novel's many absorbing complexities arise from the ambiguous situation of Cazire's family, the opposition between an older preceptor she cannot love (St Elmer) and the young libertines she cannot resist, and from the intricacies of the arguments she has with them together with a retrospective narrative balancing the ‘mature’ wisdom of the ‘present’ against the irrepressible energies of Cazire's youth. … Indeed, as a whole the novel succeeds in finding numerous odd angles on the conventional” (p. 101). Jones, too, emphasizes the unconventionality of the portrayal of Cazire: “Miss Dacre's heroine was in one respect very different indeed from the usual run of seduced heroines. Conventionally she weeps, faints, trembles, and composes extempore verse. But very untypically she bears witness to the strong sexual passion of which some women can be capable—and which was to be a characteristic common to all of this writer's otherwise quite differentiated heroines. Cazire is not so much the maiden seduced as the woman unable to withstand the drive of her own sexuality” (Ideas and Innovations, p. 228).

24. For example, Victoria's manipulation of Berenza in Zofloya is highly comic (see I, 227-29). Berenza will not ask Victoria to marry him unless he somehow acquires proof of the purity of her love for him; Victoria utters the professions of true love that she knows he wants to hear as she feigns to be asleep in his presence, then “awakes” and pretends to be flustered at his having heard her in this unguarded moment. Berenza plays right into her hands. At this point in the novel such game playing is lighthearted, though it turns much darker later on. And Milborough's sexual outwitting of Angelo in The Libertine is even more darkly comic.

25. Review of The Passions, Critical Review, 24, 3d series (1811), 51-57. Varma cites the review in his introduction to the Arno Press edition of the novel (I, ix). The reviewer also objected to the obstinacy of Wiemar's pride in the final volume of the book, claiming that Dacre's depiction is overdone (see Varma's introduction, I, xii).

26. Rozendorf remarks critically on the influence of women on other women: “I am of opinion the corruption of woman is chiefly attributable to woman; if man sometimes avails himself of it, woman lays the first seed” (I, 145).

27. Amelia writes: “My girls are … all that the fondest, the most zealous parent could wish, for I formed them, my mother, on your model” (I, 261).

28. Appollonia's first reference to sacrifice is linked to hunting: “I have set my mark on him; he is destined for the sacrifice …” (I, 54).

29. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1 (1976), 875-93 (rpt. in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991], pp. 334-49).