Zofloya or The Moor (Oxford World's Classics)

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a b c d Mellor, Anne K. (2002). "Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya". European Romantic Review. Abingdon, England: Routledge. 13 (2): 169–173. doi: 10.1080/10509580212756. S2CID 145512375. Henriquez: brother of Berenza. His heart belongs to Lilla. Victoria's love for him leads to many treacherous events. He despises Victoria. The novel also evokes sentiments of race and power between dark-skinned men and fair-skinned women regarding the power relationship formed between two of the main characters, Zofloya and Victoria. Victoria and Zofloya forge a power relationship throughout the course of the novel which seems to upset the dominant fair-skinned, subservient dark-skinned hierarchy. This power relationship is characterised by the Moorish character Zofloya's superiority over the fair-skinned female character Victoria. Some literary critics were in favour of Dacre's characterisation of women. The Passions wrote: "Cast in a different mould than those of her precursors, her heroines do not exhibit any elegance or artificiality of diction, nor coy daintiness of mien, nor any inveterate ingenuousness of character…Miss Dacre's women are not one-dimensional beings concerned with propriety or taste. They think, feel and reason." [17]

The perpetrator of domestic ruin can therefore either be Victoria or Berenza. There has been critical contention about the patriarchal undertones of the text, and more specifically, whether Berenza fits the portrait of an oppressive patriarchal figure. Adrianna Craciun argues that Dacre deviates from the female-gothic tradition in representing the 'central institution of marriage' as a 'nightmare' and 'compact with the devil'.24 Conversely, Carol Margaret Davison views marriage in the novel as an 'equal opportunity enslaver' and Berenza as a victim of Victoria's cruelty.25 Though Berenza does not fit the portrait of the Radcliffian patriarchal villain, as he does not imprison or attempt to rape Victoria, he does not represent an image of mild and benevolent masculinity either. 26 On the contrary, he adopts the position of a domineering male figure whose willingness to relinquish status, in marriage to a woman of compromised sexual worth, remains dependent on her corresponding willingness to forgo autonomy. Berenza's acceptance of Victoria remains conditional on her ability to conform to a normative gender role, an identity that requires her to become docile, maternal, and sacrificial. The one other ‘serious’ use of anapestic meter in Hours of Solitude occurs in the highly ambiguous elegy ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’. Robinson, of course, was something of the ‘poster-girl’ for critiques of the debased status of women through the 17905. Robinson had also some not entirely savoury connection with Dacre’s father, the usurer and gangster John King. See Anne K. Mellor, ‘“Making an Exhibition of Her Self”: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts for Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000), 271–304. Count Ardolph: a friend of a friend of the Marchese who is shown great hospitality by the Loredani family. He has a reputation for breaking up happy marriages and introducing lust and temptation into happy relationships. After feeling attracted to Laurina, he does exactly this to her family. His seduction of Laurina tears apart their family to set off the plot of the novel. Zofloya” is a gloriously melodramatic gothic story of lust, revenge and violence, beginning with an adulterous liaison and family scandal and ending with multiple murders. It is a deliciously over the top tale with passions running high and people plunging daggers into breasts left, right and centre! Great stuff :-)

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Anne Mellor, ‘Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, European Romantic Review, Vol. 13, No.2, June 2002, pp.169-173, p.173.

While unconsciously he thus reposed, a female chance to wander near the spot. She had quitted her house for the purpose of enjoying more freely the fresco of the evening, and to stroll along the banks of the lake; the young Leonardo, however, arrested her attention and she softly approached to contemplate him- his hands were clasped over his head and on is cheeks, where the hand of health had planted its brown red nose, the pearly gems of his tears still hung- his auburn hair sported in curls about his forehead and temples, agitated by the passing breeze-his vermeil lips were help open and disclosed his polished teeth-his bosom, which he uncovered to admit the refreshing air, remained disclosed and contrasted by its snowy whiteness thee animated hue of his complexion."(103) On which see Seymour Drescher, ‘The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism’, in his From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 275–311.Leonardo di Loredani: son of Laurina and the Marchese, a year older than his sister Victoria, he is "unable to resist, in any shape, the temptations of his heart". He runs away from home when his mother leaves the family, and eventually is lost entirely to the power of his mistress Megalena. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox, with commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 149. The story itself is not too complex, somewhat like a telenovela, has a lot of drama, sex and violence. My only problem in this departmen Berenza's death makes Henriquez suspicious. He begins to despise Victoria. In a moment of panic, Victoria confesses her love to Henriquez. He is harsh and cruel to her, but then realises that she was the wife of his brother, and he should contain his hatred for her. Margaret Garner, ‘The Anapestic Lyrical Ballads: New Sympathies,’ Wordsworth Circle XIII, 4 (Autumn 1982), 183–8.

Lisa M. Wilson, ‘Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic “Age of Personality”: the Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre’, European Romantic Review 9, 3 (Summer 1998), 393–420. Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge: London, 1996), pp. 1-13. I wish I was joking, but I slept about 9 or 10 hours last night because I was trying in vain to finish this book for my class.The gothic novel is a "safe" place to experiment with interactions between dark-skinned men and fair-skinned women. The genre of the Gothic has long enabled both its practitioners and its readers to explore subjective desires and identities that are otherwise repressed, denied or forbidden by the culture at large. [10] Zofloya and interracial/cross-gender relationships [ edit ]

Both Zofloya and The Monk were criticised in their time for employing scenes of sexual transgression seen as offensive in the late 18th and early 19th century; However, Zofloya was received with greater criticism because its author was female. "When Lewis wrote The Monk it was not welcomed, but it was conceivable that a man could write this sort of infernal thing; however Dacre's crime was greater because it was inconceivable that a woman could even imagine such horrors and use such voluptuous language," Moreno wrote. [5] Critical reception [ edit ] The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women’s Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of Sade or M.G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith or Jane Austen. No heroine of Radcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in this novel, that “there is certainly a pleasure … in the infliction of prolonged torment.” Marriage and motherhood are conventions that Dacre's text explores as coterminous products of domestic ideology. As I argue in this article, Zofloya subverts the marriage plot presented in Samuel Richsardson's novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), a popular eighteenth-century text. Pamela became a media event, attracting both positive and negative attention, and prompting parodies and spinoffs, like Henry Fielding's Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). In Richardson's novel, virtue and sexual restraint provide the heroine with cultural capital, emblematising the rise of a middle class that attempts to distinguish itself from the 'vulgar' classes below it and the 'depraved' classes above it.20 Pamela wins the heart of the aristocrat Mr. B-, who she also tames and civilises. Her efforts to appeal to Mr. B-'s heart and reform him reiterate the points made in the pedagogical literature of the period. Men were required to learn the language and nature of the world, while women learned the language and nature of men's desires.21 In Zofloya, Dacre inverts this gender code by demonstrating a failed reading of female desire, which leads to an unhappy marriage. Both gothic and domestic novels end with marriages, to signal a 'happy ending'. Novels by Walpole, Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen often conclude with such marriages. However, Zofloya does not progress toward an ending in which narrative events lead to marriage after a series of moral tests and trials. Rather, Victoria murders her husband after five unsatisfying years of marriage without children. In transgressing the moral rubric of the eighteenth-century novel, the text constructs a space for interrogating domestic and normative gender codes, for Victoria does not care to win Berenza's heart nor does she wish to make a home with him. Robert Knox, Races of Men: a Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (London: Renshaw, 1850), p. 456. Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 111; E.J. Clery, Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, (Devon: Northcote House), (2000) 2004, p. 107;.uncommon sensations filled her bosom, as she observed her proximity to the Moor. The dim twilight increasing to darkness, which now began to spread its sombre shadows around, threw a deeper tint over his figure, and his countenance was more strongly contrasted by the snow white turban which encircled his brows, and by the large bracelets of pearl upon his arms and legs. (p. 150) Signora Zappi: wife of signor Zappi, part of the first household that Leonardo runs away to. She falls in love with Leonardo, even though he loves her daughter. When she realises her love will never be returned, she frames Leonardo for rape.