Zofloya; or, The Moor was written by Charlotte Dacre. Charlotte Dacre, née Charlotte King (c. 1772-1825), was a British poet and author of various Gothic fictions. She was (in)famous in her day for her novels, which she wrote under the pseudonym of “Rose Matilda.” Dacre chose this pseudonym as a reference to Rosario/Matilda from Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, a novel Dacre admired. Zofloya is a deliberate rewriting of The Monk but with a female protagonist.

Victoria de Loredani is a beautiful teenager in Venice during the fifteenth century. On the night of her birthday Victoria’s parents welcome the cruel nobleman Count Ardolph into the Palazzo Loredani as a guest. Ardolph repays their hospitality by seducing Victoria’s mother, the Marchesa Laurina de Loredani, and later persuading her to elope with him and to kill the Marchese, her husband. Victoria’s brother Leonardo flees from the house in shame. Count Ardolph and the Marchesa imprison Victoria in the Palazzo. She responds by attempting to seduce the Count Berenza, another Venetian nobleman. Ardolph and Laurina send Victoria to the mountains, but she returns to Venice and succeeds in seducing Count Berenza in a scene reminiscent of Ambrosio and Matilda’s first lovemaking in The Monk. One of Berenza’s former mistresses, Megalina Strozzi, attempts to kill Berenza, but Victoria stops the blow and is slightly injured in doing so. Berenza is so moved by this that he marries Victoria. Megalina, meanwhile, takes up with Victoria’s brother Leonardo.

Five years later Victoria and Berenza are visited by Henriquez, Berenza’s brother, his wife, Lilla, and their servant Zofloya, an immense, handsome, and dignified Moor. Henriquez is young and handsome and Victoria is gripped with a compulsion to have him. But in her dreams she is haunted by Zofloya, who Victoria is also attracted to, and after several meetings Zofloya agrees to help Victoria kill Berenza and get Henriquez. Zofloya supplies Victoria with a slow poison which she gives to Berenza. But Henriquez spurns Victoria’s advances. The now infuriated Victoria poisons Lilla, then stabs her death, and gets from Zofloya a drug which drives Henriquez temporarily insane. In his dementia Henriquez believes that Victoria is Lilla and has sex with her. When he recovers from the drug and sees what he has done, Henriquez kills himself. The Inquisition’s arrival is imminent, so Victoria pledges herself to Zofloya, who then magically conveys the pair to the distant Alps. They encounter a group of bandits and join them. Zofloya and Victoria have several adventures with the bandits, and Victoria is visited by an angel who asks her to make amends for her crimes so that her soul can be saved. Victoria, who is in love with Zofloya, refuses to make amends even after the angel shows her what Zofloya really is. The bandits are betrayed by a traitor and are surrounded by soldiers. Zofloya promises to protect Victoria and spirits her away to another mountain top, but then he demands that she give herself completely, body and soul, to him. She agrees, and he reveals himself as “the sworn enemy of all created nature, by men called SATAN!” and “whirls her headlong down the dreadful abyss!”¹

In the years following its publication Zofloya became infamous. Its portrayal of female sexuality, its “voluptuousness of language,” and its “exhibition of wantonness of harlotry”² appalled reviewers, especially because its author was a woman. Percy Shelley read Zofloya while young and was influenced by it, as can be seen in his early Gothics Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811). Even today Zofloya carries a faint odor of scandal. But while only slightly better written than most Gothics Zofloya is far more interesting than most Gothic novels because of its deliberate transgression of gender conventions and because of Victoria de Loredani.

Gothic novels have traditionally been separated into “male” and “female” categories. The female Gothic, which is traditionally held to have been established by Ann Radcliffe (see: The Mysteries of Udolpho), is essentially a coming-of-age story for a female protagonist. The male Gothic, which can be extended back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto but is usually said to begin with Lewis’ The Monk, is about a male protagonist’s transgression about society and his attempt to master his world rather than be controlled by it. Female Gothics were most often written by women and male Gothics were written by men. But some women wrote male Gothics, including Ann Radcliffe herself, with The Italian. Zofloya is a male Gothic written by a woman, but unusually the protagonist is a woman rather than a man.

The inversion of gender conventions goes beyond the protagonist being a woman. Victoria is sexually aggressive, pursuing rather than being pursued and taking partners at will based solely on her desire for them. Her desires are primarily sexual rather than romantic, and even her attraction to Zofloya is based on physical and sexual attraction rather than emotional or romantic attraction. Victoria refuses to act in a subservient manner to either her parents or to her husband, and she murders her husband rather than do without the object of her desires. Megalina Strozzi is similarly portrayed. She is sexually aggressive, first toward Count Berenza and later toward Leonardo, and rather than be crushed by Berenza’s rejection responds by plotting his murder. Conversely, Leonardo becomes feminized and passive. Although this aggressive woman/passive male pattern appears in Dacre’s other novels, particularly The Libertine (1807), it is most pronounced in Zofloya.

Dacre’s novel constitutes a strategically crafted and singular work of complex Female Gothic that speaks to its time by challenging various established views regarding women’s nature and roles alongside the potentially explosive nature of the British colonial enterprise. Its most cunningly manipulated device is an equivocating narrator who manages, despite the rigid race and gender prescriptions in her culture, to advance a progressive, feminist agenda that challenges the roles of both women and blacks as they have been typed in the cultural imaginary. Dacre’s astutely reconfigured narrative, it can even be argued, serves as a bridge between two principal Female Gothic ‘types’: Radcliffe’s eighteenth-century psychological Female Gothic with its absent mothers and threatening-yet-distant Gothic hero-villains, on the one hand, and the more visceral Female Gothic of the late twentieth century that features powerfully present and even homicidal mothers and hero-villains, on the other.³

Zofloya takes an equally transgressive approach to marriage. Victoria refuses to adhere to the early nineteenth century concept of the wife as obedient and subservient. Victoria is willful, disobedient, and pursues sexual relationships outside the marriage. When Victoria submits to Zofloya, giving up her autonomy, Dacre describes the event as a marriage and shows Victoria becoming Zofloya’s servant and then being sent to Hell. Victoria’s downfall comes about not because of her evil acts but because she submits to a man in a symbolic marriage. This is never directly addressed in the contemporary, horrified reviews of Zofloya, but the reviewers’ abhorrence of this subtext is implicit in their reviews. What further appalled reviewers was that Dacre does not assume a condemnatory stance toward Victoria in Zofloya and does not make the novel didactic or moral, as was customary for Gothics and novels written by women during the Romantic era. Zofloya is remarkably free of moralizing about Victoria’s acts.

The theme of miscegenation, in the form of the potential pairing of Victoria and Zofloya, was radical and, to the critics, quite unwelcome. It is true that Zofloya is shown to be Satan at the story’s end and that Victoria is punished only when she yields to Zofloya, so that story’s structure condemns the pairing of black men with white women. But simply presenting a white woman desiring a black man and submitting willingly to him was a violation of accepted norms. The reverse was of course not the case; by 1806 the tradition of white Englishmen having sex with non-white women at British plantations overseas was long-established. The European plantations in the Caribbean were seen throughout the eighteenth century as a wonderful sexual playground for white European men, to whom taking advantage of non-white slave women was not just an accepted fact of life but one of the perquisites of Empire. Frontier trading posts in Canada, Africa, and China frequently saw sexual relationships between Englishmen and native women, most of whom came from cultures in which sexual morality was nowhere near as repressive as in eighteenth century middle-class England, and the relationships between Englishmen and native women in India were widespread and customary in the eighteenth century. Although it took the nineteenth century expansion of the Empire to create the conditions which led one modern writer to describe the British Empire as “one big brothel,” another modern writer to describe the British conception of the colonies as “sexually loose…frequently excessive,”⁴ and for a third anonymous writer in the Pall Mall Gazette to claim in 1887 that empire could not be reconciled with sexual morality, the eighteenth century was little better when it came to white Englishmen sleeping with native women. Although this was usually not acknowledged by the British press, it formed a recurring, if covert, theme in British life. A reaction to this was a portrayal of miscegenation as a perversion to be abhorred by the morally correct. Dacre’s creation of Zofloya as a tempter who is a Moor, and of Victoria as a sexually aggressive woman who gives in to her desire for a Moor, was symbolically powerful but not pleasant or welcome to the contemporary English reader. In its way Zofloya is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello, with the Moor becoming Iago and Desdemona, in the person of Victoria, becoming as wanton as Othello believes her to be. If Zofloya exoticises Zofloya and renders him “unsympathetic and unsentimental,”⁵ resulting in exoticised racism, the end result remains a white woman lusting after a black man, problematic though that act often is.

The issue of class in Zofloya cannot be overlooked. Zofloya is not only a Moor but also a slave, and his relationship with Victoria crosses class boundaries as well as racial ones. Dacre deepens the class transgression by having Victoria subordinate herself to Zofloya, so that the slave becomes the master.

Zofloya is perhaps the outstanding example of the female-written male Gothic, and is usually involving reading.

Print: Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or the Moor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Adriana Craciun, “Introduction,” in Zofloya, or the Moor. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003.

¹ Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya; or, The Moor, volume 3 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), 233.

² The Annual Review, 1806, qtd. in Adriana Craciun, “Introduction,” Zofloya (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), 10.

³ Carol Margaret Davidson, “Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’ in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (May 2009): 35.

⁴ Kristine Swenson, “Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,” in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 135.

⁵ Craciun, “Introduction,” 17.