Transgression, Desire and Victimization: An Analysis of Two Female Gothic Novels

Submitted by Jenny Vaporetti As part of a Tutorial in English November 28, 2005

Chatham College Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter

1. Ann Radcliffe and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)...... 5

2. Charlotte Dacre and Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) ...... 14

Conclusion ...... 40

Works Cited ...... 44

Bibliography ...... 46

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Introduction

The early Gothic novel embodies a fascinatingly subversive and culturally significant period in early novel-writing history. Forty years of feminist, post-colonial and psychoanalytic research have redeemed its once scorned and scoffed at position so that it now resides in the established literary canon. Born in the 18th century with Horace

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it was, at its male dominated infancy, an

expression of political and philosophical dissent.

I [Horace Walpole] have not written the book for the present age, which will endure nothing but cold common sense…this is the only one of my books with which I am myself pleased; I have given reins to my imagination till I became on fire with those visions and feelings which it excited. I have composed it in defiance of rules, of critics, and of philosophers. (Kilgour 17)

Disillusionment with Locke, Kant and Voltaire’s rigid empiricism thought to govern truth at the exclusion of human passion, spirit and experience, is only half of the gothic equation, as women in the 1790’s came to dominate and officially popularize the sub- genre in a unique and unprecedented way.

The female gothic novel1 is a by-product of shifting social and political views affecting the mid to late eighteenth-century middle class English woman. As technology, industrialization, and colonial expansion progressed, the middle class woman’s role in the domestic economy acquired a near-saintly status in that her perceived delicacy and refined virtue came to represent the perfection (supremacy) of Euro-civilization.

1 While female gothic is a term coined by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976), the distinction between male and female gothic goes back to the 1790’s after the shocking and ultimately banned publication of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk followed Ann Radcliffe’s tremendously popular The Mysteries of Udolpho. Critics have long qualified the male/female distinction within the “Radcliffean school of terror” versus the “Lewis school of horror” debate.

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Woman’s reinforced position inside the home afforded more leisure time than ever

before, contributing to a dramatic rise in female literacy and authorship such that women

became the primary patrons of the circulating library. As for the female gothic novel, all

the fearful, repressed, subversive and exploratory elements of female desire constitute its

heart and soul. Its darkly romantic and terrifying “expose of domesticity and the family”

testify that “the home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy of ominous patriarchal authorities” (Kilgour 9). Familiar conventions include a foreboding castle

(usually in a foreign land and typically in medieval Italy), subterraneous passageways, mysterious manuscripts, family secrets (incest and clandestine affairs), veiled objects, ghostly apparitions, and most sensationally, a dark and brooding (Byronic) villain who relentlessly pursues and/or captures a virtuous and orphaned heroine prone to fainting and fits of terror.

Initiating my interest in the psycho-sexual dynamics and social implications of female gothic desire are two dramatically different texts: Ann Radcliffe’s, The Mysteries

of Udolpho (1794) and Charlotte Dacre’s, Zofloya: or The Moor (1806). Historically referred to as The Great Enchantress, Ann Radcliffe unquestionably popularized2 the genre ultimately setting the standard for female gothic convention otherwise referred to as the Radcliffean gothic model. The Mysteries of Udolpho provides a fitting backdrop to Zofloya because it highlights Dacre’s audacious inversion of the Radcliffean gothic

model of male power and female victimization such that all things violent and licentious

are products of unchecked female desire. By positioning her heroine as a violent and

2 By all accounts, The Mysteries of Udolpho was a best-seller and maintained its popularity well into the late nineteenth century. Such popularity spawned numerous editions including a chapbook version and also a theatrical production as an opera of gothic romance. Most significantly, its first publication earned Radcliffe an unprecedented sum of ₤500 –more than many of her male gothic peers and predecessors.

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promiscuous predator of comparatively powerless and weak-willed men, Dacre defies

gender expectations of literary expression.

It is crucial to note that Radcliffe’s popularity was not without its contemporary

critics and that Dacre’s obscurity (past and present) is largely a consequence of Zofloya’s harsh critical reception. Shortly after Zofloya’s 1806 publication, some male critics dismissed Dacre as a Radcliffean-induced imitator of Matthew Lewis while others venomously denounced her as an abomination or insult to the “fairer sex.”

Abounding with caverns, groans, shrieks, murders, hobgoblins, and all the wretched mummery of the Radcliffean school … [with the exception of Matthew G. Lewis, Radcliffe and Dacre show that] the grossest and most immoral novelists of the present day, are women. (Norton 160)

We are sorry to remark, that “the Monk” seems to have been made the model, as well of the style, as of the story. There 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 should have hoped, that the delicacy of a female mind, would have been shocked to imagine. (Miall)

Well within the context of attempting to control sex by way of controlling the language

about sex, such criticism speaks to post-enlightenment/pre-Victorian anxiety about

female authorship as it pertains to desire and sexuality (Focault 17). Dacre’s leap from

the embattlements of prescribed femininity to write a female subject rather than object of

violence and sexual desire is, in and of itself, a revolutionary endeavor meriting this

Tutorial’s focus.

Zofloya and The Mysteries of Udolpho combine and reveal two transgressive modes of expressing early female gothic desire: Mimicry and masochism. Mimicry within this particular context refers to “one [who assumes] the feminine role deliberately” yet unreliably so as to “convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to 6

begin to thwart it” (Burke 67). Radcliffe’s Emily dawns a masochistic robe of prescribed

femininity and in so doing, covertly manipulates and exacts power over the sexual and

economic tyranny of patriarchy. Radcliffean mimicry can do for desire what parents can

do for a child; affirm, protect, mediate, and nurture. Radcliffean desire is adaptive and fluid, able to negotiate its way through the masculine economy without compromising its pursuit for pleasure (romantic and economic success). Extra-textually, reading The

Mysteries of Udolpho is a pensive and lyrical journey, as it sings a song of empowerment worthy of the label, gothic feminism.3

Zofloya, however, is a gothic conduct manual pulsating with fire and brimstone

morality; it reads like a train barreling down a two-way track as the novel’s heroine,

Victoria, never falters in her role as the hell-bound, morally monstrous woman. Victoria

dies a foreseeable, violent and well deserved death at the hands of Satan, disguised

throughout the novel as her lover/Moorish Servant. While Dacre succeeds in using

empire and Christianity as vehicles for repressed desire to surface, she fails in her

association of female desire with death and produces no positive or liberating abstraction

through which her readers can address, mitigate or resolve anxiety over female desire and

sexuality. Dacrean desire is stagnant yet implosive, primarily carnal yet rooted in

Christian ideology. The masochism attached to Dacrean desire is a convention of horror

rather than a strategic, Radcliffean masquerade in search of truth and identity.

3 I am borrowing the term, Gothic feminism, from Diane Long Hoeveler’s fascinating 1998 publication entitled Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender From Charlotte Smith To The Brontes. In it she defines gothic feminism as a new mode of women’s writing of the female masquerade “born when women realized that they had a formidable external enemy –the raving, lustful, greedy patriarch –in addition to their own worst internal enemy, their consciousness of their own sexual difference perceived as a weakness rather than a strength…the gothic feminist is a deeply conflicted subject who fends off the blows and manages to” succeed and survive (10, 14). 7

Chapter One

Set in the year 1584, The Mysteries of Udolpho begins with the St. Aubert family living in pastoral bliss just north of the Great Pyrenees. Emily St. Aubert’s young life is serene until her father’s death follows that of her mother. After spending some time at a convent where she is able to mourn, Emily lives with her father’s sister, Madame

Cherone. To Emily’s heart-wrenching dismay, her aunt forbids her to see Valancourt, her

“elevated and thoughtful” suitor, simply because he has not the wealth or prestigious connections to impress her aunt (Radcliffe 49). Forbidden also to take her cherished solitary walks and forced to defend her virtue to the suspicious, vain and embarrassingly loquacious Madame Cherone whose “petty tyranny” knows no bounds, Emily discovers a bittersweet refuge in melancholy (113, 120). The situation only gets worse when

Madame Cherone hastily marries Count Montoni and suffers Emily to live in his Italian castle.

Intensifying Emily’s initial and unexplained fear of Montoni, who is a “silent,

reserved and somewhat haughty” man exuding a Byronic “severity” of temper and

“gloominess” of pride, is the imposing appearance of their new home, the Castle of

Udolpho (Radcliffe 143).

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object…it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign…it was vast, ancient and dreary… the walls of the ramparts extended to other towers, overlooking the precipice, whose shattered outline, appearing on a gleam, that lingered in the west, told of the ravages of war. –Beyond these all was lost in the obscurity of the evening…Emily’s heart sunk, and she seemed; 8

as if she was going into her prison; the gloomy court, into which she passed, served to confirm the idea…the second court, grass-grown, and more wild than the first, where, as she surveyed through the twilight its desolation –its lofty walls, overtopt with briony, moss and nightshade, and the embattled towers that rose above, -long-suffering and murder came to her thoughts. One of those instantaneous and unaccountable convictions, which sometimes conquer even strong minds, impressed her with its horror. (227-228)

Emily’s response to the appearance of Udolpho contains the primary female gothic convention: the home as a prison. Her fears turn out to be well-founded, as it is not long before Montoni imprisons Emily and her aunt in the east turret for refusing to sign over the St. Aubert estates.

Defiance is more a characteristic of Emily than it is of Udolpho. Appearing meek, mild-mannered, and susceptible to terror, she stands resolute against Montoni throughout the novel. Running parallel to the anxiety of powerlessness when she need only pick up a book to “sooth her mind into gentle melancholy” are those bespeaking an antithetical femininity (Radcliffe 416). Consider this climactic moment when Emily stands in defiance to Montoni’s order that she marry his crony, Count Morano:

She opposed his turbulence and indignation only by the mild dignity of a superior mind; but the gentle firmness of her conduct served to exasperate still more his resentment, since it compelled him to feel his own inferiority… ‘Alas!’ said she, ‘I do indeed perceive how much more valuable is the strength of fortitude than the grace of sensibility, and I will also endeavor…to endure with firmness, the oppression I cannot elude… her mind almost involuntarily dwelt on the most probable means of prevailing. (214-15)

Emily’s use of terms such as mild and gentle constitute a psychological device used to cloak her confrontational (manly) resolution with feminine catchwords.4 Like the

unsheathing of a sword in battle, however, Emily wields her mental fortitude with the

4 Many female writers during the 18th and 19th centuries employed this or a similar device to avoid social backlash and thus protect, maintain or further their fragile writing careers. 9

skilled determination of a soldier. Despite her position as a captive, her “firmness” of

mind and conduct (body) generate an inversion of power such that it is Montoni who feels helpless, “inferior,” and painfully emasculated.

One of the most riveting examples of Emily’s defiance occurs after her dying aunt reveals to her the location of legal papers concerning the St. Aubert estate; Emily is to protect them from Montoni at all costs (Radcliffe 372). Montoni, revealed to be the leader of a violent band of Condottieri, is determined –now more than ever- to command ownership of the St. Aubert estate. Assuming she will be compliant, Montoni confronts

Emily only to end up speechless at her resolve.

Emily calmly said, ‘I am not so ignorant, Signor, of the laws on this subject, as to be misled…The law, in the present instance, gives me the estates in question, and my own hand shall never betray my right… Montoni looked at her with vexation, and seemed considering what to say… ‘You speak like a heroine,’ said Montoni, contemptuously; ‘we shall see whether you can suffer like one’…For the first time, she felt the full extent of her own superiority to Montoni, and despised the authority, which, till now, she had only feared. (Radcliffe 381-82)

Emily’s authoritative knowledge and interpretation of the law is as inconceivable to

Montoni as it is a marker of Radcliffean feminism. Montoni’s snide reference to the gothic heroine as a woman who willingly or unwillingly suffers is a play on traditional representations of women in literature. Emily is willing to endure Montoni’s wrath not because she is inherently masochistic but because her economic future and general well- being as an orphaned young woman is at stake. Without financial security, she faces a number of indignities and hardships such as marriage without the benefit of love as its foundation or a self-negating life as a servant, cloistered nun, or governess.

Desire in Udolpho is romantic, economic and epistemic. Emily seeks to marry the man of her choice (the docile Valancourt), protect her rightful inheritance, and 10

acquire the knowledge of family/maternal history denied her by the father. Hidden

beneath the floor boards in her father’s study is a manuscript and miniature portrait of a

mysterious woman. Emily frequently discovers St. Aubert hunched over its pages and looking up only to gaze at the minature with a melancholy look of longing. The woman in the miniature is not Emily’s mother yet she bears an unsettling resemblance to Emily.

Naturally, Emily’s desire to know who this woman is –if she is her father’s secret lover and/or her birth mother- becomes a motivational force in her journey toward selfhood and freedom from patriarchal oppression (Udolpho).

To know the content of his manuscript and who this woman is is to know something about her own history and identity. When Emily’s dying father requests that she retrieve the manuscript after his death, she can hardly contain the thrill of anticipation. “These papers you must burn –and, solemnly I command you, without examining them” (Radcliffe 78). Emily vows to obey but when the time arrives to do so, she falters at such a profound conflict of interest.

Her eyes involuntarily settled on the writing of some loose sheets, which lay open; and she was unconscious, that she was transgressing her father’s strict injunction, till a sentence of dreadful import awakened her attention and her memory together. She hastily put the papers from her; but the words, which had roused equally her curiosity and terror, she could not dismiss from her thoughts. So powerfully had they affected her, that she even could not resolve to destroy the papers immediately…Urged by the most forcible, and apparently the most necessary, curiosity to enquire farther, concerning the terrible and mysterious subject, to which she had seen an allusion, she began to lament her promise to destroy the papers. For a moment, she even doubted, whether it could justly be obeyed, in contradiction to such reasons as there appeared to be for further information. (Radcliffe 103)

As a way to maintain the appearance of propriety, Emily declares her transgression a matter of involuntary or “unconscious” reflex. This is but another moment illustrating 11

Emily’s defiance of patriarchy and by extension, Radcliffe’s gothic feminism. In the name of “integrity,” she ultimately and begrudgingly “consigns the papers to the flames” but not without sparing the photo (103). Emily “thought herself justified in preserving it” because her father gave “no [specific] directions concerning” its fate (104). Her semantics are a clever way to balance filial duty with self-interest so that one does not negate the other. The reader is never privy to the “dreadful import” of words that come to haunt Emily throughout the novel, and Radcliffe waits until the very end to unravel the mystery woman’s identity. For the Gothic feminist, not knowing is “the primary source of Gothic terror” (Delamotte 48).

There are moments in the text where Emily’s defiance is a distant relative to

Irigarayan mimetics in that she performs her prescribed femininity such that the role is deliberately assumed yet unreliable in its “playful repetition” (Burke 66). It is Emily’s father who educates her, who endeavors “to strengthen her mind” and “to enure her to habits of self-command” by teaching her “to reject the first impulse of her feelings and to look, with cool examination, upon the disappointments” of life (Radcliffe 5-6). On his deathbed, St. Aubert forbids Emily to cry after his passing. After he dies, however,

Emily cries and indulges her sorrow for days on end and without the slightest regret. In public, Emily is “soothed by the consciousness of performing a part of St. Aubert’s last request” and remembers to check her tears (Radcliffe 214). That she repeatedly refers to her own containment of emotion as a conscious (deliberate) performance is not accidental. While not rising to the level of ecriture feminine where there is a subversive

“operation of the feminine in language” without a “universal subject,” Emily’s 12

consciousness of femininity as a masquerade –as a construct of the father -is

revolutionary nonetheless (Burke 64, 66).

By mid-novel, Emily’s vulnerability to sexual attack intensifies when hoards of

Montoni’s drunken men start roaming the castle corridors. “Their loud shouts and strains

of exultation [are] like the orgies of furies over some horrid sacrifice” (Radcliffe 357).

The chaotic in-fighting and vulgar use of prostitutes among Montoni’s men seems to

initiate a barrage of fluttering drapes, groaning apparitions, mysterious blood trails, and

veiled wax figures springing to life from their palls. Daily survival becomes a

phallocentric nightmare5 in which Emily needs to sleep fully clothed and on guard due to her bedchamber door that locks only from the outside. Because the door is a constant and terrifying reminder that she is “liable to the intrusion of any person [rapist],” she begins to rely on Montoni to “protect her from insult” (260, 271, and 441). Her confidence in his protection is short lived, as he begins to unravel at the psychological seams with frequent hallucinations and paranoid tirades in which he accuses everyone including Emily of trying to poison him. Emily’s survival now takes precedence over the preservation of her property rights.

She saw herself in a castle, inhabited by vice and violence, seated beyond the reach of law or justice, and in the power of a man, whose perseverance was equal to every occasion, and in whom passions, of which revenge was not the weakest, entirely supplied the place of principles. She was compelled, once more to acknowledge, that it would be folly, and not fortitude, any longer to dare his power; and, resigning all hopes of future happiness with Valancourt, she determined, that, on the following morning, she would compromise with Montoni, and give up her estates, on condition, that he would permit her immediate return to France. (435)

5 In Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks defines phallocentrism as “a sexually defined masculine ideal rooted in physical domination and sexual possession of women” (94). I am using the term phallocentric nightmare to emphasize the sexual/bodily nature of Emily’s fear and vulnerability. 13

Predictably, Montoni reneges on the deal after she signs over her estates. Persevering

through “long fits of abstraction” and an intermittent longing for death, Emily’s only

mitigating comfort is the companionship of her faithful servant, Annette, and her fellow

servant/husband, Ludovico; both have an intimate knowledge of the castle’s intricacies

and play an instrumental role in the plot for Emily’s daring and successful escape (239,

417).

Female desire in Udolpho is not monolithic despite some critics like Eugenia

Delamotte who posit Radcliffean desire as sexual, latent, and only expressed or accessible through projection. “The dangerous sexuality of the banditti is itself a projection” of Emily’s desire and as a result, she is torn “between the demands of…a chaste lover and a demon lover” (Delamotte 155). The threat posed by Montoni and his men is the threat of rape which is the “principle agent” of female fear throughout history

(Brownmiller 14). Delamotte also theorizes that Emily’s wanderings from her bedchamber while conscious of sexual danger is indicative of an unconscious rape fantasy (156). Only without context can this theory be valid. Emily leaves her bedchamber for specific reasons. Montoni locks Emily’s aunt away in a secret location and when servants inform Emily that her aunt is ill and possibly dying, filial duty dictates she find her. Furthermore, her bedchamber door locks only from the outside and so sitting there amidst the chaos renders her even more vulnerable. If someone enters, she is cornered and less likely to escape an attack; if someone locks the door from the outside, she is unlikely to find her aunt or escape Udolpho. There is more evidence supporting the theory that Emily’s refusal to stay in her room is a refusal of the paralysis of fear and dependence -of being a hostage to the threat of male sexual violence. 14

There is a landscape to Radcliffean desire in which romantic love subsumes the

sexual and becomes a backdrop for economic desire to dominate. Her romantic desire for

Valancourt is secondary to the desire for knowledge, property rights and selfhood. After

Emily escapes Udolpho, she runs not into the eager arms of her pining suitor but to the

convent where nuns help Emily retrieve her estate and solve the mystery surrounding the

identity of her mother. Diane Hoeveler defines “proto-feminism” in the female gothic

novel as a heroine who manipulates patriarchy without its knowledge, and who is

unwilling to trust her fate and fortune to “the goodwill of men” (33). From this

perspective, there is a feminist quality to Udolpho. Emily always ends up getting what it is she wants. When she finds her aunt sick and dying, her “divinity of pity” manipulates

Montoni into releasing her aunt from the east turret (Radcliffe 366). St. Aubert is unable

to make Emily burn his secret papers without reading them and Montoni, unable to

follow through with his numerous threats, cannot force Emily into an unwanted marriage.

Emily takes the initiative to know the law, secure her property rights, and solve mysteries

without seeking male guidance or approval. Radcliffe’s gothic feminism is thus an

unspoken attitude of defiance and survival rather than a twentieth-century consciousness

of personal and political activism.

In the process of evaluating a novel for its social, political, psychological, and

theoretical implications, the issue of reader-impact is a valid inquiry. If women were the

primary readers of the female gothic novel, of Radcliffe’s Udolpho and Dacre’s Zofloya, what is the likely impact of these novels on their own understanding of female desire?

What kinds of reading experience do these novels encourage or prohibit? A contemporary reader of Udolpho writes, Radcliffe’s readers “are the virtual heroes and 15

heroines of her story as they read” (Kilgour 6). Walter Scott equates the reading of

Udolpho to the ingestion of a “drug” that alleviates those human “moments of pain and of

languor, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart is sick” (Moers 91). Reading

Udolpho is, indeed, comparable to a journey and/or an escape; it offers the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth-century middle class English woman a lyrical, hypnotic, analgesic

deliverance from social pretense, idle time, and domestic monotony.

There is a surreal palpability to Udolpho and its representation of female desire in that we identify with Emily whose struggle for freedom, knowledge, and resolution, becomes our own. Cathartically speaking, female readers can resolve their fears and anxieties vicariously. Enhancing Udolpho’s gothic feminism (empowering and cathartic qualities) is its progressive structure, its extraordinary length, non-linear plot revelations, sudden ruptures of narrative with poetry, and overall ability to keep readers in suspense from beginning to end. Unable to locate commentary from contemporary readers of

Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, speculation based on plot, theme, character and context, must

suffice. While Zofloya enables the nineteenth-century female reader to travel elsewhere

(if only on the wings of imagination), the overall experience is anything but empowering or conducive to gothic feminism.

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Chapter 2

_____Let me not let pass Occasion which now smiles, beho’d alone The woman, opportune to all attempts -Milton

Female desire is a curse in Zofloya, a dangerously caged animal in need of constant taming and supervision. It is also contagious within the mother/daughter relationship such that a daughter, infected by her mother’s lust, has little chance of social and moral recovery. If indulged, female desire threatens to destroy the most revered institution of patriarchy: Marriage/the family unit. The novel begins with the wayward desire of Laurina di Loredani, mother to Victoria –the novel’s heroine. Laurina elopes at the age of 15 to marry Marchese di Loredani in the “delirium of passion” (Dacre 4).

She bears two “indulged” children of opposite sex (considered an unusually small family at that time), and revels in the intensely “ardent love” of her husband whom she considers

“the god of his sex” (Dacre 3-9). Clearly, the picture painted of the Loredani family is one of orgiastic dysfunction and as is the case throughout the novel, the narrator interjects with didacticism and a proverbial moral evaluation of passion and desire.

The best of human beings was the Marchese, admired by all, yet living alone for her whom his boyish heart had worshiped: his unsuspicious and generous nature gloried in the attractions of his wife –to see her followed and admired yielded to his heart a pleasure exquisite and refined –to hers a sentiment less noble, because it centered in self-gratification, and considerations of self ever debase the heart. (5)

Laurina’s crime is the vanity of libertine desire. As a woman, she is not to enjoy her beauty or find pleasure in its power to command attention. The narrator, always reluctant to hold male characters accountable for their desire and/or destruction, makes a ludicrous distinction in which the “exquisite and refined” pleasure of the Marchese is somehow 17

absent a “consideration of self.” To the contrary, Laurina’s beauty is an articulation of

his wealth and status within the aristocracy. It is not his wife’s beauty –on its own- that

gives him pleasure but rather, the social recognition her beauty generates.

Foreshadowing Laurina’s adulterous fall is the idea of there having been “no

temptations [to cross] her path [requiring] effort to be virtuous” (Dacre 4). Implicit in

such an ideology is the notion of female virtue (chastity) being a conscientious endeavor

dutifully sustained. Because Laurina is a wife lacking moral vigilance, her husband’s

deceitful friend Ardolph, a professional home wrecker burning “to disfigure the beautiful

fabric of a family’s happiness,” seduces Laurina (9). Illustrating the conflicted and burdensome nature of Dacrean desire is the following scene in which Ardolph reveals his lust and Laurina, her tortured dismay.

No longer master of his violent emotions, he threw himself at her feet, and acknowledged, in hurried accents, the passion with which she had filled up his heart. Confounded, bewildered, and overcome, the trembling Laurina knew not how to fly; yet to remain an instant after an avowal so base, would, she felt, be infamous, and participating in its guilt…But in admitting to her thoughts, even for an instant any other man than her husband –in listening for an instant to an acknowledgement of the passion with which she had inspired him, the unhappy Laurina had advanced one step in the path of vice…There, sunk in shame, and absorbed in retrospection, she dared not analyze the feelings excited in her bosom…Oh! self-love! -dangerous and resistless flatterer! –thou immolatest at thy shrine more victims than all the artifices of man…Earnestly did Laurina desire to be virtuous….[but the] secret and powerful ties of early habit, taught her to adore her husband [while] the insidious Ardolph daily led her senses wandering, and corrupted the purity of her heart…like a keen blood-hound [Ardolph] hunted the wretched victim of his pursuit [and] in his company she became thoughtful and embarrassed; in his absence, restless and unhappy…she was far beyond the reach of preservation. (10-11)

The stark exigency and angst-ridden core of Dacrean desire reveals itself simply by a glossing through of the language in no particular order: passion, purity, guilt, 18 acknowledgement, shame, secret, feelings, thoughts, preservation, confounded, unhappy, bewildered, overcome, infamous, dangerous, excited, base and embarrassed. Language paints a picture wherein an acute combination of desire, repression, and religion, cast shadows of inner-turmoil and socio-cultural accusation.

Radcliffe’s representation of the adulteress, of unmitigated female desire, is far more progressive and significant for its positive resolution. After Emily’s escape from

Udolpho, she returns to the convent she once considered a potential home. She meets the reclusive and emotionally fractured sister Agnes who reveals her true identity to Emily as

Montoni’s ill-reputed mistress in hiding, the Signora Laurentini (note the similarity to

Dacre’s Loredani). Emily discovers the infamous Signora, long believed by villagers and servants to have committed suicide and rightly so, to have been living at the convent all along. Acting as a by-woman-for-woman refuge, the convent provides safety from phallocentric distributions of power (represented by Montoni/banditti) and the reputation preceding and ostracizing her.

The story of Signora Laurentini echoes the distempered passion of Dacre’s

Laurina and Victoria. Described as having “a weakness of her principles and the strength of her passions,” the Signora robs Montoni of his money and flees the castle only to end up pursuing a married man whose wife reluctantly married him out of “obedience” to her father (Radcliffe 656, 658). The Signora convinces the already worried husband that his wife is having an affair with the man she would have rather married. In a jealous rage, he poisons his wife and marries the Signora Laurentini. Ultimately, he discovers the

Signora’s deceit and (taking no responsibility for his own actions) leaves her at the convent’s doorstep where she evolves into Agnes. 19

Unlike Laurina, who lives out her miserable days in guilt and under Ardolph’s

control, and unlike Victoria, whose self-indulgent desire gets her killed by the devil

himself, the Signora Laurentini finds redemption and sanctuary among women. Most

critically, however, is Agnes’ luminary role within the novel. She bequeaths Emily a

fortune rendering her wealthy, and demystifies the identity of Emily’s mother and the secretive past of her father. The murdered wife (Laurentini’s victim) turns out to be St.

Aubert’s beloved sister, whom he secretly pines for throughout the novel like a lover.6

Without the licentious Signora Laurentini, there would be no Agnes; no successful conclusion, no redemption, no exposure of the hidden, of herstory, of female desire as multiplicitious and beneficial even when disastrously indulged. Existentially speaking,

Signora Laurentini/Agnes represents the burden of choice specific to being woman. Her life symbolizes the difficulty in choosing how to confront, express and/or placate female desire without making a patriarchal hell out of heaven.

In his essay, “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence,” James Dunn

defines Dacrean desire as a “counter-ideology of feminine Romanticism” that in its

protestation of woman-as-meek, articulates the “full range” of qualities specific to female

desire (307). Narrowing in on Victoria’s violent acts and particularly on the murder of

Lilla (Victoria’s chaste and pious romantic rival), he proclaims Dacre to be an

“unabashedly libidinous” author exploring a “movement of desire into violence” which

stands as a “model of feminine eroticism” in delightful “contrast” to “stock feminine

props of persecution and victimization” (307-8). Dunn’s interpretation of Zofloya is more literal than critical, and like many of Dacre’s contemporary critics, he reads with a paternal and reactionary eye, seeing only her provocative language and plot-imagery.

6 Emily discovers that her aunt is really her mother. 20

Dacre’s “movement” of Victoria’s desire “into violence” is phallic in both origin

and expression. When an intruder (later revealed to be Victoria’s brother, Leonardo)

breaks into Victoria’s home attempting to murder her lover, Berenza, she physically

overpowers him “just as the dagger was decending” (Dacre 82). Wounded and bleeding

yet experiencing a surge of “triumph” and “contempt [for] pain,” she addresses her

terrified lover like a Spenserian knight.

‘Ah, do not weep, Berenza!’ faintly ejaculated Victoria. ‘I would suffer ten thousand times more to prove my love to thee –nay, I rejoice to prove it!’… she felt that the wound obtained in defence of her lover’s life…would bind him inseperably to her…[beholding] his violent anguish, more than repaid her for the pain she felt. She essayed to take his hand, and press it to her bosom [but] she fainted from loss of blood. (83)

The inversion is clear and transgressive: Victoria is his savior, his protector and valiant

suitor, wooing his hand in marriage through physical (phallic) combat/prowess.

Ironically, Victoria’s desire is to be desired by men, to achieve social status and

validation through marriage not unlike the women of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

While this renders Zofloya an unprecedented and worthy addition to the recently

recognized canon of female gothic literature, such an inversion complicates desire in that

there can be no revolutionary “model of feminine eroticism” when the eroticism (desire)

in question cannot be verified as female or at the very least, detached from negative

moral evaluations.

Take for example Victoria’s obsession with the dagger in all its phallic symbolism

and representational imagery. She carries it on her body thereby conflating its use as a

weapon with that of the penis and male power. Consider the following scene where, after

her marriage to Berenza, she slowly poisons him for reminding her of her reputation and 21

rendering their marriage passionless and without “the charms and fascinations of the

mistress” (Dacre 129).

From this eventful period, Victoria omitted no opportunity of administering insidious death to the unsuspicious Berenza. Sometimes, with the point of a small fruit knife, which she retained about her for the purpose, she introduced the baleful poison within the fruit, while offering it to him on the point of her knife; thus remorselessly rendering him to himself the dealer of his own death. (159)

The scene reads like a gothic version of Adam and Eve. The image of Berenza eating

poisoned fruit from “the point of her knife” is a crude metaphor for fellatio, for the

essence of male power within sex and violence. Berenza is “the dealer of his own death” because he withholds sexual intimacy from Victoria who, longing to be like her mother, looks forward to the forbidden pleasures of having a lover (Dacre 28). Lured by the promise of passion, she marries Berenza only to feel disappointed and duped. With her sexual “energies…enslaved” and her “powers fettered, by the hated name of wife,” she decides to murder Berenza and turn to his brother, Henriquez, who provides another opportunity for pleasure (146). Marriage enslaves and depletes desire, but so too does

Victoria’s incessant need for a man to validate her sense of self.

Hoping to “modify the strong features of her character,” Berenza marries not

Victoria but the idea of Victoria as modifiable (Dacre 69). Unable to soften or manipulate “her pride, her stubbornness, her violence, her fierte,” he questions her love for him and vows to “be [only] her friend, and not her lover” (69, 70). He positions her previous role as mistress, the purveyor of sexual pleasure, as incompatible with her newly acquired role as wife –the dutiful, meek and pliant archetype he implicitly longs not to find on its own as an existing entity, but to create. Within a passive-aggressive attempt to avoid sexual intimacy, he convinces Victoria that she is in need of rest and should retire, 22

alone. It is at this point in the text that the power of desire allows “itself [to] be invaded

by the pleasure it is pursuing” (Focault 45).

No sooner had Victoria reached her apartment than she requested her attendants to withdraw, for she was desirous of indulging alone the influx of her ideas; delight and pleasure had such complete possession of her, that scarce could her trembling hands perform the office of disrobing herself. Long too after she had entered her elegant bed (which rose in the form of a dome, bordered with deep gold fringe) did her buoyant spirits drive sleep from her pillow. (Dacre 69)

The elaborate description of the bed as sensuously decorated, as an elevated dome into

which she enters (penetrates) the inside of desire, becomes, theoretically speaking, a

penetrating of the penetration; woman entering herself as she is entered by man.

Most significantly, the pleasure in bed scene is a defining moment of

autoeroticism. The latter 18th century was a time when science and medicine, infused with superstition, merged with Enlightenment rationalism such that “the new disease of reverie” (caused by reading fiction, indulging fantasy and masturbation in particular), became correlated with “self-abuse” and even the demonic (Castle 183-86). Reading for pleasure and indulging idle thoughts or emotions was but a form of masturbation understood as dangerous both physically and psychologically.

The masturbatory scene in which Victoria seeks to indulge the pleasure of her

thoughts and desires positions Dacre on the crossroads of transgression and complicit

ventriloquy. On the one hand, her writing such a provocative scene within the realm of

fiction is audacious and against the patriarchal grain of what is morally acceptable and

healthy. From this perspective, even if Dacre intended Victoria to be a warning and

Zofloya a conduct manual, the purpose is defeated by having set pen to paper on the

taboo subject thereby placing herself and readers alike, at risk. On the other hand, it is a 23 gothic topos illuminating Victoria’s immoral spiral into hysteria and ultimate death and damnation. Victoria’s willingness to indulge and derive pleasure on her own only enhances her masochistic recklessness and overall monstrosity.

Aside from the relationship Victoria engages in with Zofloya, the Moorish servant of supernatural deceit, her relationship to and with Lilla, the archetype of feminine piety and self-restraint, exposes an intense and problematic layering of desire. Lilla is the thirteen year old orphaned-love object of Berenza’s brother, Henriquez. Forbidden by a

“tyrannical” father who on his deathbed demands she wait to be courted for marriage until one year after his burial, Lilla obeys and refuses to marry Henriquez or meet with him unaccompanied (Dacre 131). To alleviate his brother’s pining angst, Berenza offers to have Henriquez stay with him and Victoria so as to offer Lilla an appropriate place to visit –appropriate meaning the home of a married couple. Lilla’s transgressive consent to bypass her father’s wishes while keeping the appearance of dutiful propriety is a subtle foreshadowing of trouble and tragedy on its way.

On the surface, Lilla is the antithesis of Victoria, a foil to her dark hair, strong

(masculine) features and authoritative demeanor. “Educated in sentiments of the severest piety,” Lilla is “the personification of childhood innocence,” a “blooming fairy” who is pure, delicate, symmetrical, angelic, seraphic and “fair with flaxen hair” (Dacre 130-158).

Victoria despises Lilla on sight “because she was dear, because she was beloved by

Henriquez, and Henriquez had appeared charming in her eyes” (132). Henriquez, on the other hand, feels an immediate “tincture of dislike” for Victoria, visualizing “with instinctive horror” Lilla’s presence alongside that of Victoria’s as “the snowy dove fondled by the ravenous vulture” (138, 194). Such a metaphor reads like an eighteenth- 24

century English travel narrative in which the Other becomes an overly sensual, hyper-

sexual threat to colonial women. The racialization of Victoria is by proxy, the

racialization of female sexual desire itself. Victoria’s sexual desire is comparable to miscegenation in that it threatens to contaminate the whiteness and purity of Lilla.

As a figurehead for the submissive self-abnegation required for chastity and social approval, Lilla is as detestable to Victoria as she is enviable. Lilla is so virtuous and pure that she becomes an inhuman ball of light, a caricature of the ideal feminine.

She wavered, whether the powder she retained in her bosom should not be destined to Lilla rather than Berenza…She beheld the innocent [Lilla] bounding towards them through the gloom, seeming like an aerial spirit, seen by the dubious light, scarcely appearing in the delicate movements to touch the ground. Instantly the rage of her bosom changed into laughing contempt: She felt her least power could at any time annihilate this, the most fragile of nature’s productions, and disdained herself, that she had even cast a thought upon an atom so insignificant…[she finds Berenza] stretched at length upon a sopha, which being of crimson colour, added a more deadly tinge to the paleness of his complexion…The allotted week had not expired, ere change sufficient was visible in the unfortunate Berenza, to satisfy even the soul of Victoria, thirsting as it was for his innocent blood. (Dacre 168-70)

Lilla’s presence intensifies Victoria’s hunger for power and marital (sexual) liberation.

The pairing of Lilla and Victoria as rival opposites speaks to the either/or status women have to choose from; self-denial or self-indulgence, insignificance or infamy. There is, however, another layer to this passage as it is the first scene in which images of blood accompany an implicit reference to female vampirism.

A similar yet distinct scene of expressed female vampirism occurs after Berenza’s

death, when Victoria tries in vain to seduce Henriquez. Faced with the agony of rejection, she narrows in on Lilla.

25

She cursed herself; the hour that gave her being, and the mother that had borne her; outraged pride swelled her heart to bursting, and its insatiable fury called aloud for vengeance, for blood, and the blood of the innocent Lilla. (Dacre 198)

Some critics posit the nineteenth-century woman-authored female vampire as a

“metaphor of female liberation” from Victorian patriarchy and its constraints on female sexuality (Gladwell 14). This does not adequately reveal the extent to which Dacrean vampirism operates as a symbol of sexual transgression, as “the most persistent threat to

the institution of heterosexuality… [Coming] from the female vampire who preys on

other women” (Hoogland 106). Consequently, the “snowy dove fondled by the ravenous

vulture” metaphor owns a duality of signification as the racialization of indulged female

desire intersects with the perceived monstrosity of lesbian desire.

Zofloya is a ventriloquy of Christianized patriarchy, incorporating four basic doctrines of Christianity: The fall, free will/determinism, redemption and hell. The novel begins with the adultery of Laurina whose sin causes the death of her husband and the moral decay of her children. With the Marchese mortally wounded by his wife’s lover, his five page death scene reveals paternal judgment as an extension of God’s judgment. With a “heavenly and celestial expression,” he speaks in a “manner which impelled obedience,” commanding the attention of Victoria and “his guilty wife”

(Dacre 19). The father becomes the Father and the scene itself, an expression of the most fundamental of Christian hierarchies: God is the God of man while man is the God of woman. The mantra of mother-blaming begins with the Marchese and his condemnation of Laurina.

The maternal as monstrous, as the predominant devouring force of children and

Colonial/Euro-Christian civilization itself, is a central theme in Zofloya while “paternal 26 judgment becomes a narrative trope on the wages of maternal sin” (Haggerty 166). It is at this point necessary to give a brief historical sketch of imperial England as it pertains to shifting ideologies regarding motherhood and sexuality. Generally, the interim between 1763 and 1815 is considered a period of social, political, and domestic change; it was the interim between the loss of many English colonies and the transition into a more regulated, expansive and commodified empire (Nussbaum 15). As Englishmen were off at war or colonial missions abroad, the role of mother/wife entered an intensified realm of signification. “Domesticity [was] associated with the national destiny” and marriage with the stability of European civilization, both being a mark of differentiation from the dreaded savage depicted in English/colonial travel narratives as socially and sexually vulgar (Nussbaum 24, 42).

Motherhood is a duty and a virtue, a matter of instinct and the primary defining characteristic of womanhood. Ideologically speaking, the maternal was “in contention with the sexual” such that female sexual pleasure was deemed unnecessary to reproduction, and the “separation between the erotic” and motherhood “set women as rivals against each other” thereby shifting the focus of women’s writing to notions of the

“proper lady” (Nussbaum 25). The virgin competes with the whore, the saintly mother with the profligate wife. Dacre incorporates this ideology in her pairing of Lilla and

Victoria, Nina and Laurina. Nina is the selfless widow and grieving mother who, having lost her only son eagerly becomes a surrogate mother to Leonardo Loredani. While appreciating Nina’s generosity and motherly compassion, Leonardo bitterly curses his real mother (Laurina) for having marred the Loredani name. The narrator interjects, “Let other mothers tremble at this reflection, and pause on mediated guilt” (Dacre 97-98). 27

Laurina’s adultery is an Eve-like transgression, destroying the matrimonial

Garden of Eden the family enjoyed. The seriousness of Laurina’s crime demands the

father to live long enough for paternal judgment to be lengthy and memorable. After

directing Laurina to gather her children and move far from Venice (from Eden), he

declares:

Endeavour to expiate, by a life of penitence, the great crimes thou hast been guilty of; for, dreadfully as thou hast marred the happiness and the honour of thy children, perhaps it is not destroyed. Retire, then, to where thou art unknown…But, oh, Laurina! tremble, if thou returnest to guilt and imfamy! –eternal destruction then betides both thee and them! --There is no redemption! ----Never will the impression of this night fade from the mind of Victoria, if thou wilt yet have courage and resolution to abandon thy guilty career, and to instill into her mind, by the future example, principles of virtue and honour. ------Laurina, unfortunate and once-loved wife! thou wilt make thyself answerable, by thy conduct, not only for the life and future actions of thy daughter, but for the fiat which will go forth respecting her, when she renders up her great account…on thy example will the life and conduct of thy daughter now be formed… now swear to protect and cherish thy daughter, to preserve her from evil, and from the contamination of bad example….swear! murmured the Marchese [to Victoria], that thou wilt forget the errors, and imitate the future virtues and example of thy mother! (Dacre 20)

While redemption is possible, it is pervasively conditional. Laurina is not to simply regret what she has done but willingly live out “a [masochistic lifetime] of penitence.”

The Italicization and repetition of words such as “example” and “Contamination” in reference to maternal influence speaks to the “[idealization of] women’s socializing and educational role over their children” (Nussbaum 24). The notion of infectious desire and moral contamination, while extending to children of both sexes, is primarily a shroud over Victoria’s fate, determined by the “fiat” (the arbitrary social laws of patriarchy) and caused by maternal sin. On numerous occasions, when referring to the crimes of Berenza and Leonardo, the narrator comments, “Such is the nature of man.” There is clearly a 28

higher moral standard for women as beings more susceptible to temptation and more

likely to destroy social order.

The role of Victoria’s brother, Leonardo, provides further evidence of the novel’s

alignment with Christianized patriarchy. Despite being the masked leader of a

particularly vicious and violent gang of banditti, he becomes the Christ-like moral hero

with whom the reader prefers to identify. With his identity obscured, Leonardo

reluctantly permits Zofloya and Victoria (suspected of murder and on the run) to hide in

the cavern he and his gang call home. Soon after Victoria’s arrival, Some of Leonardo’s

men return with a severely beaten woman and her combative male abuser; it is none other

than Laurina and Ardolph. With “a Venetian’s outraged honor,” he reveals his identity, brutally murders Ardolph and cries, “Heaven has listened to me. --Father!—my injured father!—thy wrongs are avenged” (Dacre 252-53).

As Leonardo becomes more Christ-like, Victoria becomes more evil and repulsive

to the reader. Overwhelmed with emotion, Leonardo turns to his mother with an “air of

pity,” dressing her wounds and making her a comfortable bed while Victoria “seemed to

exult in the awful fate that had overtaken her deeply punished mother” (Dacre 253-54).

Laurina begs for the forgiveness of God and both her children, but it is only “the superior

soul’d Leonardo” who can do so (257). A single act of paternal forgiveness combines

with one murder in the name of male honor to absolve Leonardo of his thieving and

murderous past. Moved by Leonardo’s compassion toward his wretched mother is his

lover, Megalena Strozzi, “the bland seductress” whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to the biblical prostitute, Mary Magdalene (109). Even Leonardo’s men,

hardened by a life of violent crime, stand silent and emotionally jarred when Leonardo 29

cradles his dying mother like a child (109). Suddenly, Victoria is the only evil, the only

sinner in a room full of saints.

Happy that Laurina suffered and now lies dead, Victoria ridicules Leonardo for

forgiving their mother. She reminds him that their mother’s example “opened wide the

flood gates of passion” in their souls, condemning them to an immoral and unhappy life

(Dacre 259). Leonardo’s venomous response is as follows:

‘Infamous, abandoned girl!’ exclaimed Leonardo, ‘palsied be thy tongue! –can’st thou, wretch! without one compunctious pang, strew with sharp thorns the dying pillow of thy mother? –kneel, monster of barbarity! kneel and solicit heaven and her for pardon.’ The fierce countenance of Victoria relaxed into a smile of contempt, and she remained immoveable…‘Base obdurate hearted wretch!’ replied Leonardo, with dignity, ‘the vile chief of a band of robbers can lament at once over the errors, and over the miserable fate of a misguided mother -deeply, too deeply, by the death bed thou has given her, independent of the punishment her errors have received…Nor wholly on her, abandoned girl, dare to affix thy guilt and crimes –far, far beyond what her example ever taught thee. No, Victoria, thy base mind was naturally evil; --a mother’s example might have checked thy depravity, but could never have rendered thee virtuous!’ (258-59)

This is a pivotal moment in the text for several reasons. Leonardo calls Victoria the

“monster of barbarity” with resounding authority and in so doing, reveals and seals her fate (monsters must die). Consequently, the reader is at pains to identify with Victoria and celebrate her agency. Dacre uses Leonardo to voice the moral of her story:

Maternal influence matters, but it is powerless in the face of natural, born evil. Dacre redeems Leonardo, giving him the righteous role of patriarch because only a patriarch can give the message credibility as a moral imperative –which is the novel’s main purpose and effect. Given the novel’s shocking use of language and its provocative scenes of lust, murder and interracial desire, why surrender to tradition at this point if not seeking to appease male critics or pander to patriarchy? Dacre’s use of Leonardo as the messenger, 30

her transformation of him into the novel’s sole heroic character, compromises the novel’s

transgressive qualities and most certainly disqualifies it as progressive.

As a gothic conduct manual, Zofloya seeks to resolve the debate on nature versus nurture, determinism versus free-will, and maternal influence versus personal responsibility. In the last paragraph of Zofloya, the narrator regains authority and offers a

corrective to Leonardo’s position that Victoria is born evil and beyond the reach of a

virtuous example.

Reader –consider not this as a romance merely. –Over their passions and their weaknesses, mortals cannot keep a curb too strong. The progress of vice is gradual and imperceptible, and the arch enemy ever waits to take advantage of the failings of mankind, whose destruction is his glory! That his seductions may prevail, we dare not doubt; for can we otherwise account for those crimes, dreadful and repugnant to nature, which human beings are sometimes tempted to commit? 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 268)

The battle is between good and evil, virtue and female desire. This didactic link between evil and female desire is as problematic as Leonardo being the only heroic character who undergoes positive change and development. The narrator dismisses the theory of natural/born evil by placing the onus of responsibility on the “suggestions” of evil itself.

Is this view any better? Does the shifting of blame from a mother’s example to nature

(biological sex), and from nature to the devil, make a difference in terms of female desire

and agency? No. Both Leonardo and the narrator position woman as weak or inherently

susceptible, and both present female desire as a slippery slope to social/familial anarchy

and spiritual damnation. Moral vigilance and the “refined virtue” of self-denial are the

only available precautions for woman to take (Dacre 132). 31

Victoria’s agency in her behavior and ultimate fate is as ambiguous as that within

the novel’s moral message. The narrator constantly reminds us that Victoria’s fate is a consequence of her mother’s corruption. Victoria’s depravity is a result of both maternal influence and innate proclivity; we are made evil and born evil. At novel’s end, however, the narrator disputes we are born evil and resolves to place responsibility solely upon Victoria’s weakness to resist “the suggestions of infernal influence” (Dacre 268).

The message is in limbo between determinism and free-will; the latter having little

confidence or clarity in its expression, as the angel revealing Zofloya as Satan appears in

a dream which Victoria mistakes for a nightmare. Despite her willingness to endure the

consequences of her actions, she ends up shocked and shrieking when Zofloya reveals

himself as Satan and ultimately tosses “her headlong down the dreadful abyss” (267).

Had she but known Zofloya’s identity as Satan, and chosen death and damnation, her

character would be a Byronic emblem of agency and selfhood.

Elements of empire are subtle in Udolpho but permeate Zofloya. Emily’s fear of gypsies and lawless condottieri is largely concentrated in the first half of Udolpho when she is most vulnerable and at the beginning of her journey towards romantic and economic agency; the terrifying otherness of a foreign land and its foreign people represent her alterity as female Other who, in the beginning, is a stranger even unto herself. In Zofloya, however, the Moor as a fitting symbol of female desire in excess is

due to colonial-Christian anxiety. History reveals England to have had a love-hate

relationship with the Turks and Moors initiated by conflicts regarding piracy and trade

relations during the renaissance; a time when “there were more English than Moorish

captives” and out of those, a large number of British women “sold in North Africa” as 32 slaves (Matar 29, 41). The military might of the Ottoman Empire, the difficulty Christian missionaries had in converting Muslims, and the narratives of the “Muslim master and

[his] Christian slave [sharing] in the pleasures of illicit sex with Muslim women,” all combine to qualify the Moor as “sexually overdriven…emotionally uncontrollable, vengeful, and religiously superstitious” (Matar 13). Empire is so central to Dacre’s novel that its title bears the name of Zofloya and his status as a Moor.

Using the dark and sensuously decorated body of a Moor to facilitate Victoria’s moral decline and, ultimately, to represent Satan, is yet another gothic convention employed by Dacre to horrify contemporary readers with religious, class and racial taboo.

She beheld advancing a Moor, of a noble and majestic form. He was clad in a habit of white and gold; on his head he wore a white turban, which sparkled with emeralds, and was surmounted by a waving feather of green; his arms and legs, which were bare, were encircled with the finest oriental pearl; he wore a collar of gold round his throat, and his ears were decorated with gold rings of an enormous size. Victoria contemplated this figure with an inexplicable awe…Her heart dilated with an unaccountable delight…Zofloya possessed a secret charm to facilitate her wishes…Scarcely had her head reclined upon her pillow, ere the image of Zofloya swam in her sight…His eyes, brilliant and large, sparkled with inexpressible fire…[When in his presence] she took pleasure in knowing that he gazed upon her...now on the point of betraying her inmost thoughts, her dearest wishes, her dark repinings, and hopeless desires; of betraying them, too, to an inferior and infidel! The idea was scarcely endurable….but, in the next instant, she cast her eyes upon [him and] he appeared not only the superior of his race, but a superior order of beings. Her struggles died away, and, in hurried accents [she confides in Zofloya and he offers to assist her in the killing of Berenza and the wooing of Henriquez]….Oh, Flattery, like heavenly dew upon the earth, gratefully dost thou descend upon the ear of woman! Indescribable pleasure dilated the bosom of Victoria, as she listened to the honied accents of the delicate Moor. She put forth her hand towards him, and, when he softly seized and pressed it to his lips, the haughty Venetian was not offended. (136-157)

Zofloya’s status as an “inferior and infidel” renders Victoria’s vanity more vulgar and her desire to touch, trust and confide in him all the more base. As their relationship develops, 33

Victoria becomes more wreckless and insatiable in terms of desire and gratification.

Their secret and sexually charged meetings in a “pathless forest” ultimately place her will

“in his power, and, in the abjectness of her guilt,” she trembles with unprecedented submission (166, 181). Victoria is so immoral that it takes a Moor and ultimately, Satan, to frighten and tame her. While Dacre’s writing of interracial desire merits applause for breaking the literary boundaries of what a nineteenth-century woman can or cannot write about, her use of it to provoke horror and disgust remains a ventriloquy of colonial-

Christian patriarchy.

As Karen Lynch argues, the female gothic novel is a masochistic mimicry of a larger cultural narrative in which “women are frozen in the role of victims of men”

(Lynch 41). From this perspective, it is Dacre and not Radcliffe who inverts and problematizes the male/victimizer-female/victim binary. Adding to this transgression is

Dacre’s conflation of sadism and masochism through Victoria’s embodiment of both.

The demons of evil raged with such fury in her bosom, that every consideration was lost in their overpowering influence…she gave way to the chain of thought that came pressing on her mind, her heart was anarchy and lust of crime…[she calls out for Zofloya and] as she concluded these words, she struck her forhead violently with her hand, and threw herself with her face upon the earth. Of a sudden the sweetest sounds stole upon her ear…Still the soft tones continued, and kept her on the rack between pain and pleasure. (177-78)

Victoria is, quite literally and self-imposingly, both beater and beaten. Paradoxically, it

is her sadism which renders her masochistic; her violent and sexual aggression amounts to a submission unto sin/Satan and by extension, unto the punishment of God the father.

The collapse is superficial and impotent as woman is still weak, still a victim in Zofloya, but most critically, a victim of her own abnormal, unfeminine and spiritually lethal sadomasochistic desire. It is Victoria’s embodiment of what is masculine -including 34 sadism -that gets her killed and condemned to hell. Ironically, this positions Victoria as the ultimate masochist.

The revelation of Zofloya as Satan does not occur until an angel appears in a dream to warn and offer Victoria a chance to repent (her refusal to take heed a sketchy employment of the free-will doctrine). Before that moment, Zofloya is just a Moor and menial servant, touched by the supernatural only by way of manifest Orientalism. His skill at producing hypnotic music and the deadliest of poisons combines with his awe inspiring sensuality to reflect the West’s “libidinization” of the dark/Eastern Other who in his percieved “feminine penetrability and supine malleability” becomes synonymous with the weak and conquerable female Other (Sered 1-2). The coupling of Zofloya and

Victoria is as much a metaphor of empire as it is of Christianity.

The abduction, captivity, and bondage of Lilla is a canvas upon which this layered metaphor can spring to life, blurring –if only for a sporadic series of moments - the line between master and slave, human and non-human, horror and beauty, Zofloya’s desire and Victoria’s desire.

‘The orphan Lilla must not die, Signora…but she shall be at your disposal, and you may inflict on her such misery, that’ –‘Such torments!’ interrupted Victoria, with demoniac sparkling eyes… Hanging lifeless over [Zofloya’s] shoulder, encircled by his nervous arms, he bore the once blooming Lilla…paler than the white rose teint… her fragile form lay nerveless, her snow-white arms, bare nearly to the shoulder (for a thin nightdress alone covered her,) hung down over the back of the Moor; her feet and legs resembling sculptured alabaster, were likewise bare, her languid head drooped insensible, while the long flaxen tresses; escaping from the net which had enveloped them, now partly shaded her ashy cheek, and now streamed in dishevelled luxuriance… [Victoria’s] fierce and jealous eyes wandered over the betrayed graces of her spotless victim. (199, 203)

35

As readers, we see at once the horror and beauty of Lilla’s whiteness and eroticized

incapacitation. Reified into “sculptured alabaster,” Lilla becomes the ideal feminine,

exposed, mute and immobile. It is not Zofloya as Satan who seeks to imprison and keep

Lilla alive, but Zofloya as Moor and servant. Like a “nervous” slave, Zofloya absconds with the master’s trophy (Lilla’s body) while Victoria, recognizing that “there is certainly a pleasure…in the infliction of prolonged torment,” gives her authoritative approval

without which Zofloya the Moor and Zofloya the devil incarnate could not proceed (206).

The ebb and flow of power and powerlessness makes it difficult to determine who

is under whose control or influence. With Lilla “stretched upon the flinty ground” of a

remote cavern, Zofloya picks up a “massy chain” and declares, “with this ring at the

extremity…while the girl is still insensible, I will fasten it round her wrist…though

wholly unnecessary” as she cannot “trace out a path” for escape having been unconscious

the entire time (205). Victoria, “desiring nothing less than [Lilla’s] death,” hesitates only

to demand he use the chains not as a precaution to escape but “as a punishment” (204-

05). Zofloya seeks “to obey the desire of” Victoria but it is less her desire than it is

Zofloya’s in operation (205). With the chain in one hand and Lilla’s wrist in the other,

Zofloya asks “in a jeering accent: Think you, Victoria, that Consiglio di Dieci7 hath ever confined any of its victims in a spot so remote as this cavern?” (205). The idea of placing Lilla in bondage with an iron slave ring provokes Zofloya to think of il Conciglio di Deici, “the governing body of Republican Venice,” widely known as the overseer of

“Terror during the French Revolution” (Dacre 272). Dominating the scene is Zofloya’s desire to mock state power and the institution of slavery it sustains.

7 In the 1997 Oxford edition of Zofloya, the explanatory notes describe II Consiglio di Dieci as “A preferred figure in English Gothic for shadowy, amoral state power recalling, perhaps, Robespierre’s ten- member Committee of Public Safety that oversaw the Terror during the French Revolution” (272). 36

United in their Otherness, Victoria and Zofloya use Lilla’s bondage to engage in

role-play but only Zofloya transcends the traditional concept of sadism in which there is

only a desire to inflict pain. Within the context of empire, Sadomasochism “is a theater

of transformation” wherein “public punishment [is] converted to private pleasure” using

such “paraphernalia of state power” as the uniform, dungeon and chains (McKlintock

143). The cavern in which they place the “Innocent, naked, chained and solitary” Lilla

becomes a Zofloyan theatre in much the same way (Dacre 208). “The Moor Zofloya

attended [Lilla] with undeviating punctuality, furnished her provisions, and a mantle of

leopard-skin” for “bed and covering” (206, 209). Zofloya exoticizes Lilla by giving her

the uniform of a proverbial savage. By keeping her in chains as a pet or curious delight, he subverts imperial logic and the colonial order by exposing it as similarly “unnatural, scripted and invented” (McClintock 143). Annoyed that her desire to starve and torture

Lilla goes unrealized, Victoria “angrily” charges Zofloya with being “tender of the upstart” to which he submissively replies, “it is not my intention” (206). As Zofloya returns to powerlessness, his previous role seems all the more progressive and Victoria’s all the more stagnant. At this point, we are compelled to view their relationship as another gothic convention highlighting Victoria’s moral depravity as it is she who corrupts Zofloya, the Moor.

Despite Zofloya’s connection to Victoria as Other, he is, after all, the “monstrous and deformed” Satan who “under semblance of the Moorish slave” lures and deceives an already sinful (Catholic) Victoria who for the love of a man would “forfeit” her “hopes of heaven” (Dacre 149, 247, and 267). That Zofloya is published a year before the abolishment of slavery is significant to the Moor’s identity as Satan. Far from a critique 37

on the evils of slavery, Zofloya is an anti-Catholic tract on the spiritual evils of miscegenation –a likely topic of concern within the social debate leading up to Great

Britain’s 1807 anti-slavery legislation. While Zofloya hands Victoria a rose, a thorn cuts

“deep into one of her fingers” (147). Zofloya tears from his bosom a swatch of linen and

“with trembling eagerness” applies it to the bleeding wound after which he keeps her

“precious blood” as if it were a “sacred relic” (147). Struck by his own audacity, he hangs his head only to hear Victoria exclaim, “Be not ashamed” (147). With the rose as a

symbol of passion, and blood the symbolic essence of the human soul, the scene is but a

double entendre in which the selling of one’s soul to the devil underscores the

demonization of interracial sex. From this perspective, Dacre is a ventriloquist for

colonial-Christian dissent and Zofloya’s only transgression becomes the author’s sex or

rather, the indelicacy of the female pen.

Is Victoria’s willingness to endure pain and accept the social and spiritual

consequences of her ill-driven desires a mark of “selfhood on a grand scale” (Dacre xxx)?

Precluding this determination is the presentation of Victoria as overtaken by reverie and

“without power” to resist (Dacre 191). Selfhood is not a product of imposition, stagnancy or the accidental; it requires agency and a certain level of progress in its development. First and foremost, Victoria is not comfortable with her alterity and remains self-conscious throughout the novel of her “unwieldy form” and “bold masculine features” that she attempts to obscure by assuming “the likeness of [Lilla’s] baby face”

(214). Furthermore, Victoria never becomes her own woman. She starts out emulating her mother and ends up a tool for the devil’s destruction of “frail humanity” (267). She is in charge yet not in charge, bold and willing yet helpless and “led along” (267). 38

After Lilla goes missing, Victoria drugs Henriquez with a Zofloyan love potion.

Henriquez wakes up to find himself in bed with Victoria and in horror, commits suicide.

Without a male object of desire, Victoria hones in on Lilla and their relationship becomes

a dark mimicry of that between a sadistic mother/lover and her masochistic child/love-

object. Illustrating this strange shift is the scene in which Victoria physically carries the

weak and weeping Lilla to a precipice over which she is to be thrown.

‘Now, look down,’ [Victoria] cried. –A bottomless abyss yawned at the mountain’s base; and from the opposite side the tumbling torrent rushed furious over immense projections, till finding the receptacle of the abyss, it dashed down its rugged sides into the cavity below. ‘See’st thou?’ cried Victoria again. –‘Now then, stand firm, beautiful, unconquerable Lilla….for now I push thee headlong’…’Oh, mercy! Mercy!’ shrieked, in accents of agony, the terrified Lilla, clinging, with the strength of horror, round the body of Victoria. –‘Oh! sweet Victoria, remember we have been friends.-- I loved thee! nay, even now I love thee, and believe that thou art mad! ---Oh, think! think we have been companions, bedfellows! –Sweet and gentle Victoria, murder not, then, the friendless Lilla, who for worlds would not injure thee.’ (Dacre 224)

This moment is the first to reveal a relationship between the two beyond that of a

voyeuristic wife and her objectified house guest. Despite the commonality of two women

sleeping in the same bed, there is a faint echo of forbidden desire. While Lilla’s

passionate confession of affection for Victoria is a spontaneous attempt to save her life, it

also operates to highlight Victoria’s depravity (toxic infectiousness) and in doing so,

opens the door for Lilla’s role as a pious heterosexual to collapse.

If looking into the abyss –the void- is looking into the self, then, Victoria demands Lilla to see not so much her impending death but the desire within herself to confess and submit. There is an element of the contractual in the relationship between

Lilla and Victoria that is inherently masochistic. As the older married woman who (on 39 the surface) welcomes Lilla into her home, Victoria agrees to provide maternal and moral protection to the friendless and orphaned Lilla, an unspoken contract in correlation to that of the male/female -master/slave.

The function of the [masochistic] contract is taken to be fundamentally bound up with patriarchal societies: it is made to express and justify the notion that there is something non-material, spiritual or instituted in the relations of authority and association…When a woman enters into a contract, it is by “coming amongst” men, acknowledging in the process her situation of dependence at the heart of patriarchal society. (Deleuze 126)

More shocked at the betrayal of trust, at the shattering of the master/slave contract in which the pleasures of safety and respect are derived from the pain of obedience, self- denial (virtue) and social dependency, the fear of physical death is secondary. Lilla clings to the powerful body of her captor and pleads for mercy like a child or jilted lover, layering the contractual, the masochistic, with elements of maternal loss and repressed lesbian desire.

The actual death of Lilla is anything but dignified or sublime; it is vicious, brutal and fueled by a sexually charged explosion of rage. The following scene prompts us to question why it is Berenza is poisoned and Henriquez commits suicide while “Lilla alone receives the full force of Victoria’s sadistic anger” (Haggerty 169).

Victoria, no longer mistress of her actions, nor desiring to be so, seized by her streaming tresses the fragile Lilla, and held her back. –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 her eye could reach. (226)

Long flowing hair is a literary symbol of budding female sexuality captured most vividly in paintings of the biblical Lillith and Eve. The instinctive seizure of Lilla’s hair is an 40

expression of Victoria’s desire for male power as it pertains to sexual dominance and

humiliation. To grab her hair is to control, demean, and possess her sexuality –a tactic

familiar to the sadist or rapist. Once the annihilation of Lilla (of coveted yet despised

purity/virginal sexuality) begins, wound location is privileged by the narrator’s

intentionally vague reference to the vagina as “other parts.” Female sexuality is so

frightening and repressed that its physical point of reference cannot be named or spoken

aloud. Commingled with the “innumerable” wounds, the murder of Lilla speaks to a

misogynistic rage directed at the self, at the maternal (as pervasive and dangerous), at

woman’s desirability (as feminine, weak and powerless).

If Dacre’s intent is to leave her readers horrified and discontented, she does so

with spectacular success. The ending of a novel is its ultimate signification but “it is the dead female body that carries…its ultimate decipherment” (Lynch 42). Victoria’s death, the possession of her soul by the devil with whom she fornicated, and the implication of

Victoria writhing in hell, all challenge the reader to feel she got what she deserved. Most critically, Victoria’s fate prompts readers to conduct their own moral inventory. Bound by the Christianized precepts of patriarchy, the defining essence of Dacrean desire is carnal, repressed, contagious and self-destructive; its resolution is inextricably linked to punishment and damnation, Empire and Christianity. The narrator demands we forgo any pleasure we discover in the novel’s dark romanticism for its moral and educational value, but can we or should we?

Violence and sexual desire are so expressively raw, so indulgently written and

free-flowing in Zofloya that to say it was not a pleasure for the author to write borders on

the delusional. Both narrator and reader oscillate between subject and object, prosecutor 41

and defendant, voyeur and participant –if only in fantasy or the subconscious. Victoria

provides Dacre and her readers the perfect, vicarious vehicle through which they can

experience the forbidden. Because Zofloya represents at once the impulsive

manifestation of desire and the locus of its taming, there is a vindication of vicarious pleasure. The pleasures of writing and reading Zofloya, however vicarious and

mitigated by dogmatic moral evaluations, are masochistic and oddly aligned with the

orgasmic in its correlation to religious ecstasy.

Nineteenth-century female followers [of Christianity] seize upon the masochistic aspects of their religion as the discourse through which they express their private guilts and desires…[The] longing for intimacy more particularly produced a longing for a divine ‘heroic sadist,’ a figure who demonstrates his love in a heroic willingness to hurt her…self-abasement functions as a metonym for the ecstasy of religious fusion. (Noble 49-52)

Dacre needs to write Victoria and the narrator needs to watch and justify her punishment

as though it were their own. Zofloya demonstrates how extreme moral vigilance leading to guilt leads to self-abasement; taken as a whole, it is a titillating metaphor of ecstatic self-flagellation. With God as the “heroic sadist,” the pleasure of enduring or enjoying another’s pain (suffering and punishment) is justified in its sublimation. From this perspective, masochism is only acceptable as an aspect of female desire when converted into a spiritual endeavor.

42

Conclusion

The impact of Zofloya on the gothic genre is impossible to overstate as Charlotte

Dacre defies the male/horror-female/terror distinction so many critics cling to as if the female gothic horror novel is an oxymoron. Dacre’s use of gothic horror is a unique way to promote a particular moral philosophy of human life in which there is only cause and effect, action and consequence. At a practical level, Zofloya is a gothic conduct manual

for women as it focuses on the maternal role in child-rearing and the moral

responsibilities of mother and daughter. Zofloya also deserves to be recognized as an ingeniously transgressive way to express and indulge forbidden desire, as it utilizes

(mimes) the most ancient and powerful institution of patriarchy –religion- to do so.

Inarguably, Charlotte Dacre is a true pioneer as worthy of academic study and critical celebration as Ann Radcliffe. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental freedom and feminist quality to desire in The Mysteries of Udolpho that is painfully absent in Zofloya.

Because there is a need for caution when applying 20th century theory to 18th and

19th century texts, my position that Zofloya does not provide a feminist representation of

female gothic desire needs qualification. Gothic feminism is an attitudinal expression of

survival or way of being in a patriarchal world. This differs from the heightened

awareness of individual and collective movements toward political activism found in

20th century feminist consciousness. To label Ann Radcliffe a gothic feminist is to say

her re/presentation of female desire is, in attitude and impact, form and content, a

positive, progressive, and inspiring feat. 43

The object, nature and context of desire are what distinguish one novel from the

other. For Radcliffe, desire is economic, romantic and strategically masochistic. Emily

St. Aubert’s primary focus is to obtain the knowledge denied by her father as well as

retrieve and maintain her property rights –this is why she stays to endure the threat of

violence. Marriage is not only secondary but also predicated on her suitor’s effeminacy

outlined by his physical wounds, selfless generosity with money, soft disposition, and

poetic expressions of love and fidelity. Informed by Romanticism and Enlightenment

thought, desire in Udolpho is mysterious and terrifying yet normalized by resolution and ultimate liberation.

The mystery and terror surrounding locked doors, secret papers, ghostly music, dead bodies and apparitions all have explanations and are symbolic of introspection and self-discovery. So powerful are these revelations that Emily is compelled to question her own adherence to one of patriarchy’s most fundamental constructs of femininity -virtue.

Near the end of the novel, Emily regrets being concerned with propriety and not escaping from Udolpho with Valancourt when she could have. “Alas...and what have I gained by the fortitude I then practiced? –am I happy now?” (Radcliffe 548). The message is revolutionary and twofold: Personal happiness trumps social expectations, and virtue goes profoundly unrewarded when self-denial precludes the pleasures of selfhood and actualized desire.

Emily’s ability to stand back and question the personal cost of virtue speaks to a progressive development of character wholly absent in Dacre’s Victoria whose need for immediate gratification never rises to the level of introspection and growth. Some would argue that Lilla’s death in Zofloya also signifies virtue unrewarded, but that could only be 44

the case if analyzed in a vacuum. The death of Lilla (of virtue) signifies a grave injustice

and works only to amplify the monstrous threat Victoria (the non-virtuous woman) poses

to society.

Furthermore, Radcliffe’s use of mimicry and overall narrative structure contains a

small but fascinating resemblance to ecriture feminine which is generally understood as a

writing of the body (of woman) so that “language does not contain, it carries; it does not

hold back, it makes possible” an/other world (Gilbert 364). Alongside the strategic

essentialism of Emily’s mimicry that manipulates patriarchy, creates a detour, and allows

her to arrive safely in a guilt-free feminized world, plot revelations in Udolpho have no orderly sequence and Emily’s spontaneous poetry ruptures the narrative (some as lengthy as 25 stanzas). This alters the linearity of time and place such that the effect is lyrical for the predominantly female reading audience at that time. Reading Udolpho is, in and of itself, a journey. Radcliffe’s “long-windedness…her ability to remain breathless for surprisingly long stretches of narrative” renders much of her novel “impossible to paraphrase” (Delamotte 30). Radcliffe writes Udolpho to carry her readers away much like Emily writes to carry herself away –which is another glaring and progressive departure from Victoria whose only talent is vanity and self-indulgence. Because

Zofloya is so linear and in negative alignment with empire and Christianity, oppression

and repression, sadism and masochism, desire cannot breathe, take flight, progress or

embrace its alterity.

Interestingly, Zofloya is Dacre’s first publication without using the pseudonym,

Rosa Matilda. Given Zofloya’s ventriloquism of empire and Christianity, the use of her

real name suggests a marked level of confidence that Zofloya’s publication would garner 45

a positive reception. She does not anticipate the paternal and reactionary eye of male

critics who, blinded by rigid expectations of gender, consider only her transgressive use

of horror, language, sex, race, and class. The didacticism of Zofloya, of Victoria’s life and death, upholds the status quo by promoting female desire as something to be feared for its inherent danger or lethality. Most disturbingly, Zofloya creates a mirror into which the female reader looks and trembles at her own desire.

As readers of The Mysteries of Udolpho, we identify, sympathize, fear and cheer for Emily at every riveting turn of the page; her struggle becomes the reader’s struggle and when she triumphs at the end, we are challenged to feel her liberation as though it were our own. This is not the case with Zofloya. We gasp, cringe, and differentiate

ourselves from Victoria while her fate becomes that of the savage, hideous Other:

Predictable and necessary. This is not to say that the aesthetic pleasures of horror, of evil

confirmed and destroyed, do not have cognitive or spiritual value as a source of curiosity.

Without a connection to Victoria, however, the reader’s journey is short lived and feeble

as a source of empowerment Both novels have a traditional ending in which there is a

return to patriarchy through marriage or death, but the feminized Radcliffean marriage is

still a more profound and pleasurable outcome than Dacrean death and its suffocative

allegiance to colonial-Christian patriarchy. Female agency by inherent weakness or

wreckless compulsion is no substitute for purposeful action leading to victory.

46

Works Cited

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Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

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Burke, Carolyn. Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford. Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought: Engaging With Irigaray. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture And The Invention Of The Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Delamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. “From Sacher-Masoch To Masochism.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9.1 (2004): 125-33.

Dunn, James A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53.3 (1998): 307-27.

Foucault, Michel. The History Of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Gilbert, Sandra, et al. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Gladwell, Adele Olivia. Blood and Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature. New York: Creation Books, 1992.

Haggerty, George E. “Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and the Erotics of Loss.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (2004): 157-72. 47

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender From Charlotte Smith To The Brontes. Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.

Hoogland, Renee C. Lesbian Configurations. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge, 1985.

Lynch, Karen. “The ‘Heterosexualization’ of Sadism and Masochism.” Hecate 29.1 (2003): 34-46.

Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors & Englishmen In The Age Of Discovery. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Miall, David S. “Reviews of Zofloya.” www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Gothic/Dacre.htm. 13 June, 2005.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

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