SOURCE: Miles, Robert. “Avatars of Matthew Lewis's The Monk: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Charlotte Dacre's Zafloya: Or, The Moor.” In Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy, pp. 160-88. London: Routledge, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Miles investigates the feminist perspective operating in Zofloya, and claims that Dacre's examination of the stereotypes of gender and feminine desire make her the most interesting of the minor female Gothic writers.]

ZOFLOYA: OR, THE MOOR

Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: Or, The Moor (1806), is in two respects a female version of Lewis's The Monk: a woman, Victoria di Loredani, now occupies Ambrosio's role, while the sexual politics of the Gothic are viewed from a ‘feminist’ perspective.¹ In his review of The Monk, Coleridge distinguishes between Radcliffe's physical miracles, of which he approves, and the ‘moral miracle’ of Ambrosio's transformation (from austere father to libidinous monk) of which he does not. Transgression of nature's physical laws induces harmless wonder; but the transgression of her moral ones ‘disgusts and awakens us’. The first is ‘preternatural’, the second, ‘contrary to nature’ (Raysor 1936: 373). As Coleridge's pained comments on Antonio in Measure for Measure, and his notebooks together attest, Coleridge has an emotional investment in the unitary and consistent self; the preternatural concerns the trivial disruptions of the surface, whereas The Monk's ‘moral miracle’ scandalously dwells on profound discontinuities of the self. Zofloya also tracks a ‘moral miracle’, one inflected by issues of gender, more rifts in the self's structure. In The Monk, Ambrosio is unpleasantly surprised by

the sudden change in Matilda's character. But a few days had past, since She had appeared the mildest and softest of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as to a superior Being. Now She assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners and discourse.

(Lewis 1973: 231)

Victoria experiences a similar change; or rather, lascivious from the beginning, she is figured in ever more masculine terms as her desire jumps its cultural trammels. Victoria's sentimental, libertine lover, Berenza, looks vainly for signs of ‘innocent tenderness’ in her countenance.

No, her's was not the countenance of a Madona … was not of angelic mould; yet, though there was a fierceness in it, it was not certainly a repelling, but a beautiful fierceness—dark, noble, strongly expressive, every lineament bespoke the mind which animated it.

(Dacre 1806, I: 219)

As she advances in her libidinous career, we hear of her ‘masculine spirit’ (Dacre 1806, II: 275), and her ‘bold masculine features’ (Dacre 1806, III: 65).

Zofloya successfully holds Victoria's ‘transformation’ before us as a problem. As much as any other Gothic novel of this period Zofloya evinces the form's carnivalesque qualities, its ‘dialogic’ tendency to place discourses, rather than voices, in edgy opposition. In varying degrees this is true of all of Dacre's novels, and makes her, in my view, the most interesting of the minor female Gothicists crowding in Radcliffe's shadow.

The novel's themes unfold directly from Zofloya's concern with the origins of Victoria's problematic sexuality. The narrative begins with Victoria's mother's affair with Ardolph, a notorious libertine. Laurina's husband is the epitome of sentimental benevolence and care; but Laurina is too weak to resist seduction. Ardolph kills Loredani in a duel; and even though Loredani dies in a scene of tearful reconciliation, with his wife's and children's welfare uppermost in his mind (Victoria has a brother, Leonardo) Laurina immediately forgets all her repentant vows, and elopes with Ardolph, desire's stings proving stronger than nurture's dictates. Deeply envious of her mother's pleasure, Victoria escapes from the cottage where the erring couple have abandoned her, and makes for Venice and her lover, Berenza. They eventually retire to Berenza's country estate where they are visited by Berenza's brother, Henriquez, and Lilla, his fiancée. Like the eponymous ‘heroine’ of the Bleeding Nun's tale, Victoria is immediately smitten with Henriquez, but unlike the brother-in-law in Lewis's version, Henriquez does not respond. Increasingly desperate with lust, Victoria is befriended by Henriquez's mysterious servant, the giant Moor, Zofloya, who helps her to poison Berenza, kidnap Lilla, and seduce Henriquez (through the use of a hallucinatory aphrodisiac). But when the potion wears off, the image of Victoria next to him blasts Henriquez's sight (Dacre 1806, III: 89); without thinking, he falls on his sword. The enraged Victoria murders Lilla, and is once again helped by Zofloya, this time to escape the encroaching forces of justice. Victoria and Zofloya take refuge with banditti (led by Leonardo) who have just unwittingly captured Laurina and Ardolph. There then follows a recognition scene in which Leonardo stabs Ardolph, as the father of his ills, before comforting a now dying Laurina. The banditti are caught and executed with the exception of Victoria, who in the manner of The Monk is whisked away at the last moment by Zofloya, only for the Moor to disclose his satanic identity before dropping her body into the abyss.

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 parental and class responsibility. Typically, these explanations are left in a contradictory and irresolute condition. For example, the customary, concluding moral, noting that the ‘progress of vice is gradual and imperceptible’, advises mortals to keep a strong curb on their ‘passions and their weaknesses’. We must not doubt that the arch enemy's

seductions may prevail. … 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 them (as appears more consonant with reason) to the suggestions of infernal influence.

(Dacre 1806, III: 235-6)

But immediately prior to this Zofloya tells Victoria that he appeared in her dreams (where her crimes are first meditated) to lure her into the completion of her wildest wishes, but found her ‘of most exquisite willingness’ (Dacre 1806, III: 235). In other words, Victoria's desires pre-exist devilish intervention. Equally, the narrator insists that Laurina's bad example corrupts the children. As the children themselves repeatedly complain, their miseries ensue from their mother's remiss education. But against this we must set Victoria's character, ‘by nature more prone to evil, than to good, and requiring at once the strong curb of wisdom and example to regulate it’ (Dacre 1806, I: 75). Laurina's remiss education, or Victoria's ‘prone’ nature? The question is left ambiguously open. Victoria ends by mentally exclaiming against her mother ‘why dids't thou imprudently bring before my eyes scenes to inflame my soul, and set my senses madding?’ (Dacre 1806, III: 167). The narrator endeavours to exculpate Laurina by arguing that she was seduced whereas Victoria actively willed her destiny; but Victoria's plea places her on a level with the other characters. Under the influence of the aphrodisiac, Henriquez's fancy is haunted by ‘blissful but deceptive visions’ of Lilla (Dacre 1806, III: 78). These visions are ‘deceptive’ because they are chemically induced rather than arising from Henriquez's ‘rational’ desiring self, but this is true of all ‘blissful visions’ in the novel: they come from ‘outside’, and take possession. The potion is merely a figure for the ‘demonic’ quality of vision itself, Laurina's imprudent example serving as Victoria's visual aphrodisiac. When Victoria escapes from the cottage a ‘beautiful and romantic wood … presented itself to her ravished view’ (Dacre 1806, I: 159). In the characteristic fashion of the Gothic, nature itself becomes a scene of desire, an eroticized garden.

Victoria revises a series of proleptic dreams according to her desires, correctly interpreting her seduction of Henriquez but repressing the disastrous consequences. Zofloya also figures prominently in them: ‘why he should be connected with her dreams, who never entered her mind when waking, she could not divine’ (Dacre 1806, II: 114). Zofloya promises that if she will consent to be his, all she desires will come to pass. He means a demonic pact, which is how Victoria appears to understand him, but sexual tension increasingly characterizes their relationship. A gap develops between Victoria's understanding and her unconscious motivation, between the moral glosses we are given and the glimpses we have of psychological processes, so here, too, the pat discourses on the genealogy of ‘evil’ find themselves contradicted. Victoria, as much as Henriquez, is a victim of an invasive agent. In the context of the universal failure of the will, Zofloya's croaking delight in the ‘natural’ primacy of the self takes on a demonic plausibility.

Zofloya examines stereotypes of gender and desire in the interstices of these irresolute discourses. Like The Monk the novel echoes Viola's ‘worm in the bud’ speech: ‘in the gloomy solitude of her own perturbed bosom, had she till now preserved [the secret of her love for Henriquez], where, like a poisonous worm, it had continued to corrode’ (Dacre 1806, II: 150). The primacy of desire in the self's economy, together with its sexual equality, dominates Zafloya's examination. The subplot, tracking Leonardo's career, is particularly eloquent on this score. Disgusted at his mother's behaviour Leonardo wanders into the country where he is ‘adopted’ by Signor Zappi, a man of sensibility and extreme benevolence. Leonardo falls in love with Zappi's angelic daughter, and in a reprise of Raymond de las Cisternas's contretemps with Agnes's aunt, finds himself at disastrous cross-purposes with his benefactor's wife. Signora Zappi, believing herself the object of Leonardo's unrequited love, grovels devotedly at his knees before accusing Leonardo of attempting rape on discovering herself spurned. Expelled, Leonardo becomes a contented ploughman as the devoted ‘son’ of Nina, an old peasant woman. Both ‘adoptions’, Zappi's and Nina's, are versions of pastoral, but the contrast between them underlines the irrepressible nature of female sexuality; crudely, that for an attractive young man in Leonardo's position, the only safe ‘mother’ figure is one definitively detached through class and age. The sexuality of the mother is a pervasive problem in Zofloya. Absence of the nurturing mother usually throws the emphasis on the father's austere education. Here mothers are present, the absence of nurturing instincts bringing what is latent in the mother's Gothic representation, desire, to the fore.

Upon Nina's death Leonardo is again ‘adopted’ (ensnared) by the young, beautiful, sexually predatory Megalena Strozzi, who chances upon Leonardo as he sleeps by the wayside. Desire for the ‘beautiful and fascinating’ youth transfixes Megalena (Dacre 1806, II: 14). The order of the politics of modesty is strikingly reversed. A male finds himself the unwitting object of a female gaze:

his hands were clasped over his head, and on his cheek, where the hand of health had planted her brown-red rose, the pearly gems of his tears still hung—his auburn hair sported in graceful curls about his forehead and temples, agitated by the passing breeze—his vermeil lips were half open, and disclosed his polished teeth—his bosom, which he had uncovered to admit the refreshing air, remained disclosed, and contrasted by its snowy whiteness the animated hue of his complexion.

(Dacre 1806, II: 14)

The iconography of the modest female is present, above, and in the description of Leonardo when questioned: ‘His cheeks became suffused with deepening blushes, and his eyes, with which he longed to gaze upon her, were cast bashfully towards the earth’ (Dacre 1806, II: 16). More astute than Signora Zappi, Megalena uses coyness to enthrall Leonardo. Just as her estranged lover Berenza displays Victoria to his friends, so Megalena exhibits Leonardo. Megalena uses her dominion over Leonardo to avenge her sexual jealousy, first against Berenza for having jilted her for Victoria (Leonardo accidentally stabs his sister instead) and then against a sexual rival, Theresa.

The sexual politics of modesty, further explored through Berenza's relationship with Victoria, are once again left in suggestive contradiction. The libertarian discourse of nature/nurture finds its focus in Berenza, philosophical sentimentalist and moral scientist. Attracted by Laurina and Ardolph, he wished to discover

whether the mischief they had caused, and the conduct they pursued, arose from a selfish depravity of heart, or was induced by the force of inevitable circumstance: he came to investigate character, and to increase his knowledge of the human heart.

But concluding that the adulterous pair had ‘voluntarily rushed into evil’, and that they had time to withdraw from the ‘dangerous vortex’ (Dacre 1806, I: 72), he loses interest, evincing at once his credentials as a sentimentalist and his obtuseness as a moral philosopher. However, Victoria's ‘wild and imperious character’ (Dacre 1806, I: 73) attracts him. Only qualms over her suspect background prevent him from proposing marriage: he ‘relied upon the power he believed himself to possess over the human mind for modelling her afterwards, so as perfectly to assimilate to his wishes’ (Dacre 1806, I: 73). Berenza believes himself beyond vulgar prejudice, rising above gender stereotypes. ‘She whom Berenza can love must tower above her sex; she must have nothing of the tittering coquet, the fastidious prude, or the affected idiot: she must abound in the graces of mind as well as of body’ (Dacre 1806, I: 215). Contradiction is not far off: ‘My mistress, too, must be mine exclusively, heart and soul: others may gaze and sigh for her, but must not dare approach. … If she forfeit for a moment her self-possession, I cast her forever from my bosom’ (Dacre 1806, I: 73). Her self-possession, of course, equates to possession by him, and this sets off the worrying, modern resonances of his desire to mould her, undercutting his paean to sexual equality. The text directly courts this reading. Berenza confidently tells himself, in an inward address to Victoria, that she is ‘a stranger to the turnings and windings of thine own heart’ (Dacre 1806, I: 217). But the same is said of Berenza: he ‘knew not, so unconscious is the heart of man of the springs of its own movements, that it was the graceful elegant form, and animated countenance of Victoria’ (Dacre 1806, I: 74), her body, not her mind, that induces his belief in her as an ideal soul-mate. He, as much as Victoria, is a prisoner of surfaces, his rational discourse shut out from inner motives. Disaffected from him, Victoria now regards her former lover as ‘a philosophic sensualist … whose conduct towards her had been solely actuated by selfish motives’ (Dacre 1806, II: 107), a view echoed by Zofloya, who encourages her to put her desires first: ‘he had no hesitation in sacrificing to himself your young and beautiful person, for his gratification’ (Dacre 1806, II: 171). These assessments of Berenza are in the main true. From Zofloya's Sadean perspective, self is the law of nature, and justifies everything (including, here, murderous revenge), an attitude the moral voice of the narrator identifies as demonic: ‘self-love! … thou immolatest at thy shrine more victims than all the artifices of man!’ (Dacre 1806, I: 25). A double perspective thus troubles our reading. Both Berenza's sentimental philosophy and Zofloya's cynical one are undercut, but in mutually destabilizing ways: Berenza's is revealed as inadequate before the complexities of the self, but Zofloya's, more acute in its cynicism, is urged as hideously immoral. And yet Zofloya's and Victoria's utterances contain an inescapable truth: even in his sentimental idealism, Berenza cannot escape the cultural misogyny that shapes his view of women: ‘mind’ in women is merely a decorative adjunct, something to be possessed and moulded.

Zofloya further explores gender and desire through the sublime. Enraged by Henriquez's unresponsiveness, Victoria exclaims enviously of Lilla ‘“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!”’ (Dacre 1806, III: 65). As with Antonia in The Monk, Lilla is figured as a diminutive ‘Medicean Venus’ (Dacre 1806, III: 94).

Pure, innocent, free even from the smallest taint of a corrupt thought, was her mind; delicate, symmetrical, and of fairy-like beauty, her person so small, yet of so just proportion; sweet, expressing a seraphic serenity of soul, seemed her angelic countenance, slightly suffused with the palest hue of the virgin rose. Long flaxen hair floated over her shoulders.

(Dacre 1806, II: 104)

Lilla's iconography, one of conventional modesty, is linked to absent or repressed desire, whereas Victoria's masculine features mark, not just desire's presence, but the absence of curbs upon it. In a jealous rage Victoria calls her a ‘puppet’ (Dacre 1806, III: 95), a term summing up the feminist case against Lilla. Victoria visits the fate of Gothic heroines upon her, burying Lilla alive in a sublime, mountain fastness, then revenging herself on her body upon Henriquez's death. She pursues Lilla with a knife, catching her by her ‘streaming tresses’ (Dacre 1806, III: 103-4). Repeatedly foregrounded, Lilla's hair serves as a madding metonym for her conventional femininity.

With her poignard she stabbed her in the bosom, in the shoulder, and other parts:—the expiring Lilla sank upon her knees.—Victoria pursued her blows—she covered her fair body with innumerable wounds, then dashed her headlong over the edge of the steep.—Her fairy form bounded as it fell against the projecting crags of the mountain, diminishing to the sight of her cruel enemy, who followed it far as the eye could reach.

(Dacre 1806, III: 104)

The thudding sound of Lilla's body finally reaches Victoria's ‘rapt’ ear. She hastens away, far from exulting, ‘possessed rather with the madness and confusion of hell’ (Dacre 1806, III: 104).

Zofloya gives us one of the clearest expressions of the Gothic sublime. The Moor whisks Victoria away from closing justice; she awakes among ‘Immense mountains’ seeming ‘to include within their inaccessible bosoms the whole of the universe. Beyond their towering walls, (capped only by the misty clouds,) the imagination, suddenly thrown back and staggered at its own conceptions, could not presume to penetrate’ (Dacre 1806, III: 124-5). Victoria's hellish madness and confusion leads to a Gothic bafflement of the ‘imagination’, Radcliffe's noumenal landscapes having become a demonic, impenetrable blank.

The iconography of Lilla's murder offers a critique of the female Gothic sublime. The stabbed breast and bloodied tresses put Victoria in the role of Gothic ravisher, but in the context of questioned gender and a problematic ‘modesty’, many suggestions arise. What motivates Victoria? Sexual jealousy? Rage at the gender stereotype Lilla represents? Through projection, the desire to mutilate her own, despised sexuality, a misogyny divisively internalized? All these hover in the gaps of the description of Lilla's murder, encouraged by the novel's themes. Read intertextually, the scene presents itself as a literalization of the masochistic iconography of the female Gothic sublime, as if one of Radcliffe's female subjects, passive, waiting to be penetrated, had her wish literally visited upon her by an avenging member of her own sex, her plummeting body becoming a stimulus of the Gothic sublime for her righteous—but damned—murderer.

These suggestions are invoked in the broad margins of the text. After her mysterious rescue Victoria awakes among sublime mountains. ‘Amidst these awful horrors’ she sees the figure of Zofloya: ‘Common objects seemed to shrink in his presence, the earth to tremble at the firmness of his step; now alone his native grandeur shone in its full glory’ (Dacre 1806, III: 125). The conventional, eighteenth-century sublime becomes Gothic when the sacred (noumenal) desire inhering within it turns profane: Zofloya here figures as its genius. The sublime scene continues: the ‘conviction of her subjection’ to the Moor oppresses her. Lightning ‘fearfully gleamed in long and tremulous flashes,—Victoria's firm bosom felt appalled. … She drew closer to the proud unshrinking figure of the Moor’ (Dacre 1806, III: 129). She ‘tremblingly’ reposes upon Zofloya, drawn by ‘powerful fascination’; ‘ashamed’ and ‘blushing’ at her feelings, she recalls that Zofloya was ‘but a menial slave’ (Dacre 1806, III: 130). Victoria's desire crosses class and racial taboos. In the context of ‘sensibility’, of Lilla or the sentimental Berenza, she is rebelliously in command; but before these deep taboos, traditional patterns of desire and gender reassert themselves: the ambient world is tremulous, while she trembles, blushing.

For the first time, Victoria weeps from feeling, expressing her devoted subjugation, while the Moor's ascendancy is figured through his eyes: gently piercing her, they dissolve her heart in ‘willing pleasing delusion’ (Dacre 1806, III: 158) but she also watches them with ‘secret dread’ (Dacre 1806, III: 166). Just as Ambrosio's will, his self's integrity, is broken by his susceptibility to sexual stereotyping taken advantage of by demonic agency (through the stimulus of Matilda as Madonna), so, too, Victoria's erstwhile masculine character. Cultural stereotypes of desire are shown to shape the self in the deepest way—at once stifling the self and forming its chief weakness—and it is this, finally, which Zofloya locates as ‘demonic’ and Gothic.

In glancing back over the three texts reviewed in this chapter two points in particular ought to be clear. The first is that the three texts provide widely differing views of the self. Second, these differing views constitute a debate on the nature of subjectivity and power. The Monk's motifs (themselves ‘plagiarized’) are not simply re-cycled in either of the commonly assumed ways, as ‘formula’ fiction or as culturally driven fantasy. To take an obvious example, Victoria's career is a rewriting of the story of the Bleeding Nun. But the addition of gender politics through the trope of Victoria's masculinity helps lift Victoria's representation into the realm of critique.

Notes

1. A. H. Jones (1986: 224-49) remains the only recent, serious consideration of Dacre's work. Otherwise, see M. Summers (1928a: v-xxvii) and (1928b: 57-73); S. Knight-Roth (1974). Although both Jones and Knight-Roth believe that Dacre was unusual in the psychological and sexual depth she gave her heroines, neither describe her as ‘feminist’, while Jones explicitly believes that despite her unconventionality, Dacre was ‘conservative’ (1986: 225). Dacre's novels make their bows towards conventional morality, but her complexly furnished heroines do not fit into these conventional boxes; issues of ‘gender politics’, rather, are left open, and it is in this qualified sense that I term her ‘feminist’.

Bibliography

In order for the reader to maintain a sense of the publishing history of the texts referred to I have employed the following system. Where the pagination of a reprint replicates its original I use the date of first publication as the lead entry followed by a note of the reprint date. Where a modern edition differs in pagination from the original I use the modern date followed by a note of the date of the work's first edition. In this case the date will be the same as that cited paranthetically in the text as an indication of when a work was first published.

Dacre, C. (1806) Zofloya: Or, The Moore: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme.

Jones, A. H. (1986) Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age, New York: AMS Press.

Knight-Roth, S. (1974) Foreword to The Passions, by C. Dacre, New York: Arno Press.

Lewis, M. G. (1973) The Monk; A Romance, ed. Howard Anderson. Rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Originally published in 1796.

Summers, M. (1928a) Introduction to Zofloya: Or, The Moor, London: Fortune Press.

——— (1928b) Essays in Petto, London: Fortune Press.