I read the Oxford World’s Classics edition. As another reviewer has pointed out, the blurb of the book contains a massive spoiler so watch out for that, if that’s something you want to avoid. I’d recommend holding off on the introduction until after reading the book, for the same reason. Berenza's assumption of women's feminine traits further allows Victoria to exploit the male gaze against itself. Upon witnessing what he interprets as Victoria's sacrifice when he believes she has risked her life to save his own, '[s]o complete and powerful a dominion had the act of Victoria obtained over his mind, that his proud and dignified attachment, softened into a doating and idolatrous love. He was no longer the refined, the calculating philosopher, but the yielding and devoted lover! Devoted to the excess of his passion' (p. 125). Berenza's transformation from 'calculating philosopher' to 'doating and idolatrous love[r]' is figured as a self-indulgent 'passion'; he is overcome by an 'infatuat[ion]' (p. 171) with Victoria's apparent maternal femininity (p. 171). This role reversal and subversion of controlled masculinity, as Berenza succumbs to irrational indulgence and effeminacy, prefigures the introduction of the 'foreign' in the text, as enfeebled masculinity makes the domestic space vulnerable to foreign invasion/rebellion. In the same chapter, the narrative glosses over five years, to introduce Henriquez and his noble servant Zofloya. Zofloya initiates a Faustian contract with Victoria and procures a poison for her to administer to her credulous husband, in exchange for her soul. Against the voice of reason - for Henriquez begs Berenza to see a doctor - Berenza consumes her deathly cure (p. 169). Zofloya concocts a poison that makes Berenza ill and its gradual administration permits Victoria to don the image of a devoted wife, in masking the poison as a drink of domestic nourishment or 'lemonade' (p. 169). Essentially, Victoria performs the role of a nurturing mother-figure excessively devoted to alleviating her child/husband's illness. Berenza is enfeebled and transformed from a rational figure with patriarchal authority to a dependent, 'doating' child.

Not to be missed - I'd never heard of this book before the course but would definitely recommend it for any one who is interested in Gothic or 19th Century literature. 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 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 this novel, that “there is certainly a pleasure … in the infliction of prolonged torment.” I wish I was joking, but I slept about 9 or 10 hours last night because I was trying in vain to finish this book for my class. Her plan arranged she entered upon it gradually: her eyes, no longer full of a wild and beautiful animation, were taught to languish or to fix for hours with a musing air upon the ground…she no longer engrossed the conversation; she became silent, apparently silent and plunged in thought". (78)Joe Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel: Burney to Austen (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 8. Catau: servant of Signora di Modena that tends to Victoria while she is held captive. She helps Victoria escape and switches clothes with her to help her disguise herself. Anne Mellor, ‘Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, European Romantic Review, Vol. 13, No.2, June 2002, pp.169-173, p.173. Well--spoiler alert--this fairly good Gothic romance suffers a bit, in modern eyes certainly, for being mostly a rewrite of Matthew Lewis's Gothic masterpiece, The Monk. What salvages it, and makes Zofloya quite interesting, despite the plot givaway for those who've already read Lewis's romance, is the gender reversal. Here we have a female protagonist (well, I guess an anti-heroine) falling headfirst into Satan's trap, rather than the proud and guileless monk Ambrosio. It's well worth a read for that, and its second half is filled with nonstop Gothic action, nastiness, and horror.

The gothic novel is a "safe" place to experiment with interactions between dark-skinned men and fair-skinned women. The genre of the Gothic has long enabled both its practitioners and its readers to explore subjective desires and identities that are otherwise repressed, denied or forbidden by the culture at large. [10] Zofloya and interracial/cross-gender relationships [ edit ] Dunn, 'Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53.3 (1998), 307-27 (p. 308). Craciun's introduction, entitled "Charlotte Dacre and the 'vivisection of virtue,'" is longer than Michasiw's, and provides a similar breadth of detail and engrossing panorama of Dacre's life and the ideas that inform her writing. As its title suggests, however, this essay is as much an article as a general introduction, and as a critical essay constitutes a persuasive and important reading of Dacre's fiction. Craciun's main interests lie in Zofloya's similarity to the novels of Sade and in the multiple ways in which its heroine Victoria challenges established arguments about gothicism, Romanticism, and gender. She also spends considerable time in her commentary on Dacre's final novel, The Passions (1811)—compellingly enough that one hopes Broadview will soon authorize an edition of this novel as well. Associating Ann Mellor's concept of "feminine Romanticism" with its female gothic counterpart, Craciun argues that such "gender complementary models . . . 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" (13). Had Zofloya been published anonymously or under a male pseudonym, she maintains, its readers "would have assumed the author to be male" (13); Dacre's decision to publicize her gender, then, explains at least in part why the novel was received in such vitriolic terms, since reviewers were "distressed by the dissonance between the sexual content of Dacre's novel and Dacre's sex" (13). In Craciun's account, Zofloya's value extends outside of its genre and historical period, since it challenges foundational assumptions concerning what constitutes a "feminist" or a "woman's" text. Its contemporary reception and subsequent neglect by literary historians, furthermore, embody the critical and canonical consequences of transgressing against such assumptions.

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The novel also evokes sentiments of race and power between dark-skinned men and fair-skinned women regarding the power relationship formed between two of the main characters, Zofloya and Victoria. Victoria and Zofloya forge a power relationship throughout the course of the novel which seems to upset the dominant fair-skinned, subservient dark-skinned hierarchy. This power relationship is characterised by the Moorish character Zofloya's superiority over the fair-skinned female character Victoria. Dacre was accused of "murdering the English language" due to her tendency of "applying extravagant language to common things". [14] See also Jennifer L. Airey, '"He Bears No Rival Near the Throne": Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 30.2 (2018), 223-41. This is one of the few texts that briefly analyses Berenza's position as narcissistic patriarchal critic.

Count Ardolph: a friend of a friend of the Marchese who is shown great hospitality by the Loredani family. He has a reputation for breaking up happy marriages and introducing lust and temptation into happy relationships. After feeling attracted to Laurina, he does exactly this to her family. His seduction of Laurina tears apart their family to set off the plot of the novel. Zofloya (Satan) The Moor: servant of Henriquez. First appears in Victoria's dreams. He claims he can help Victoria fulfill her every wish and desire. He gives her poisons to destroy the lives of those around her. In the end, he reveals his true self; he is Satan. In this scene, Victoria consumes the sexualised, raced body but is also an object of the male gaze - not only Berenza's, who estimates her value by her sacrificial maternity, but also Zofloya's. When persuading Victoria to reveal her dark desire to murder her husband, Zofloya exclaims, '"[d]oes the Signora believe, then, that the Moor Zofloya hath a heart dark as his countenance? Ah! Signora, judge ye not by appearances! but, if you desire relief, make me at once the depositary of your soul's conflicts"' (p. 151). Unlike Berenza, he values her less for her feminine and more for her spiritual worth, as he attempts to enslave her soul. Zofloya is an object of the gaze but also an author of its dismantling, for his supernatural powers expose the dysfunctionality of the home and empire. Victoria decides the only way to win his love is to eliminate Lilla. Zofloya and Victoria capture Lilla and tie her up in a cave. Henriquez is deeply upset when he discovers his lover is missing. Victoria confesses her love again, but Henriquez still refuses to reciprocate her emotion. Victoria runs to Zofloya, upset that he has not helped her attain her desires. He tells her she can have Henriquez if she appears to be Lilla. He gives her a potion to administer to Henriquez, which will make the first woman he sees when he awakens appear as the woman of his dreams. Zofloya fails to mention that the illusion will only last until Henriquez falls asleep again. We have to present to the class the structure of the Gothic novel, and I am doing the significance of the Devil and his role in a lot of Gothic books.

As for the horror, this was the second time that a gothic horror actually made me shivery (the first beind Dracula). The horror of manipulative relationships is on point in this one. Dacre also brings challenges to the conventional familial structure that most literature, Gothic included, often presented. At the very beginning of the novel, the father-figure is immediately removed from the family portrait as a result of an action taken by the female head of house, or Laurina. Again, it was a rare occurrence for a novel to sport a woman with enough agency to literally and figuratively remove the power of the male head of house. [7] The novel continues, giving even more power to the mother figure, for Dacre describes that, "brilliant examples of virtue and decorum...[would have] counteracted the evils engendered by the want of steady attention to the propensities of children". [8] making note that it is the mother's character, and not the father's, that has true influence over the development of the child, and that without a good mother figure, the children will grow up without moral guidance or structure. Aroused by the white male, white female sexual desire in this novel is repeatedly frustrated by that white male, who proves increasingly impotent as the novel unfolds. Count de Loredani cannot satisfy his wife, who elopes. Count Berenza, the vitiated libertine, cannot arouse or gratify his wife, and visibly wastes away before our eyes, poisoned by the lemonade he so adoringly drinks from his wife's cup. Henriquez is besotted by the pale Lilla, but is unable to consummate his sexual desire for her, impaling himself instead on his own dagger. In the figural discourse of this text, white male bodies literally become smaller, weaker, less potent". [10] Although my focus here is on abolitionist verse, many of the same characteristics feature in other abolitionist genres, including, or especially, the parliamentary oration. Lord Grenville’s speech to the House of Lords on 24 June 1806 is a remarkably extensive tour through abolitionism’s narrative and affective commonplaces. See Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London: John Hatchard, 1806) pp. 88–110. The analogous but more metered terms of abolitionist argument in the works of the movement’s key spokespeople, Thomas Clarkson and Anthony Benezet, and discussed by Peter J. Kitson, ‘“Bales of Living Anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH 67 (2000), 515–37.