Zofloya; Or, The Moor - Charlotte Dacre
This week’s reading for the Gothic module I’m studying was Zofloya; Or, The Moor, by Charlotte Dacre. I’d never heard of Dacre before so wasn’t really sure what to expect of her writing at all. I suppose that if anything, the pre-conceptive opinion of this novel I had was one of subdued dread and foreboding. I was expecting of Dacre something similar to the likes of Ann Radcliffe - passage upon passage of sublime description padded out with a flimsy plot, vaguely unlikeable villains and precocious, ever-swooning heroines. It always pleases me to be wrong about a book, and I knew that my sense of foreboding was misplaced as soon as I read the blurb. Adriana Craciun, who edited this particular edition of Zofloya, writes in the blurb of the novel that
“The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s best-known novel, Zofloya; Or, The Moor is unique in women’s Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of Sade or M.G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith or Jane Austen.”
And thus I was prepared for something scandalous! Dacre did not disappoint. The plot is concise and gripping and completely lacks all the elaborate description of Radcliffe-ian Gothic without entirely losing the sense of the sublime and the fantastic. Instead of rationalising her ghosts and mortalising everything, Zofloya appears increasingly supernatural as the novel goes on and eventually reveals himself as Satan, a narrative device which pays more homage to Lewis and the “male” Gothic than it does its female counterpart. The novel addresses several subjects that would have been completely scandalous and shocking to Dacre’s contemporaries: female sexuality, masculine women, murder, and race.
Zofloya’s portrayal not only as Satan but also as a Moor, “clad in a habit of white and gold”, wearing turbans and endowed with emeralds and other jewels identifies him clearly as foreign, introducing the theme of xenophobia by posing the supposed ‘foreigner’ in a role presumed threatening, which it eventually transpires to be. That there should then be allusions to sexual attraction between Victoria and Zofloya, then, is entirely unthinkable to an audience reading this in 1806. The ease with which he managed to persuade Victoria in his favour shows how much easier it is to give in to temptation than it is to preserve a virtuous existence, a sentiment uncommonly expressed more or less until Oscar Wilde stated that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” in The Picture of Dorian Gray. What kind of impression does it make on the reader to be told that remaining virtuous is a challenge? Would one not then be instantly more compelled to indulge one’s passions? The only vindication for Zofloya is that he is of noble birth, as if that somehow makes everything alright. If Matthew Lewis’s The Monk caused scandal by presenting a woman who, after concealing herself in a monastery, leads the most pious of monks down a path of destruction before revealing herself as the devil, then Zofloya probably caused as much if not more scandal. I imagine that portraying the corruption of religious institution was on a par with a woman who describes the Moor as “irresistable” and all but literally hops into bed with the devil.
The only downside to this novel is the almost stifling overbearingness of the moral. From the onset Dacre frames the novel as a “history” (suggesting some element of truth in the story that unfolds) and states:
“The historian who would wish his lessons to sink deep into the heart, thereby essaying to render mankind virtuous and more happy, must not content himself with simply detailing a series of events - he must ascertain causes, and follow progressively their effects; he must draw deductions from incidents as they arise, and ever revert to the actuating principle.”
Throughout Zofloya, much is made of the impact of Laurina’s immoral desertion of her family for the homewrecking Ardolph and the lack of proper education her children received either from herself or from the Marchese. Time and time again, the notion that the protagonist, Victoria, could be rendered ‘proper’ with a little of the right sort of education, and her succumbing to temptation and gradual demise into vice and the hands of Satan, is enforced, and throughout the novel, whenever either Victoria or Leonardo (who is based on a real man, apparently) feel themselves hard done to, they curse their mother and blame her indiscretion for their misfortunes. The reader isn’t likely to forget what Laurina did, so it seems a little preachy that the reminder comes back again and again and, yes, again.
Overall I found Zofloya to be a thoroughly enjoyable read as well as providing an enormous amount of material that could potentially be of use when essay time rolls around. The “fiendish Victoria” was an exciting protagonist who would have been just as at home in the role of the femme fatale of a more modern novel and the exotic Zofloya was an evil who could more than likely tempt the most virtuous of society’s women down a path of destruction without anyone being surprised. After all, if Lewis’s Matilda could tempt the oh so pious Ambrosio, who else could possibly stand a chance against the devil?
Dacre, Charlotte [1806] Zofloya; Or, The Moor (2006) London: Broadview Press
Wilde, Oscar [1892] The Picture of Dorian Gray (2003) London: Penguin Classics
