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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 2 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 3 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. 4 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. 5 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).

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