Zofloya or The Moor (Oxford World's Classics)

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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. See also Jennifer L. Airey, '"He Bears No Rival Near the Throne": Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 30.2 (2018), 223-41. This is one of the few texts that briefly analyses Berenza's position as narcissistic patriarchal critic.

I came across this book when researching a reading challenge task to read a book published during the lifetime of Jane Austen. This was published in 1806 and caused quite a stir by all accounts, especially as it was written by a woman, and the female protagonist is lustful and violent. A less Jane Austen-y heroine is hard to imagine! One hundred and ninety-one years after its first publication, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor finally has received not one new edition but two. 1 The respective editors of the Broadview and Oxford editions, Adriana Craciun and Kim Ian Michasiw, take similar editorial approaches with Dacre's romance, basing their own texts on the first edition of 1806, keeping nearly all spelling and punctuation irregularities, and only correcting obvious inconsistencies and errors (such as the multiple spellings of the name of Zofloya's femme fatale Magalena Strozzi). Given the relatively simple editorial history of their text, such an approach is a blessing because it retains Zofloya's linguistic excesses and allows readers, therefore, to intuit the relation between Zofloya's language and its preoccupation with representing sexual, emotional, and physical violence.Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, often shortened to Zofloya, is an 1806 English Gothic novel by Charlotte Dacre under the nom de plume Rosa Matilda. It was her second novel. Zofloya was published in three parts, and later collected into a single volume. At the time of publication, the novel was heavily criticised for its provocative subject matter, especially its religious and racial themes. The influential English critic and politician Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution. He sought to differentiate Britain from France in cautioning citizens to uphold and preserve the nation's roots and identity rather than demolish longstanding class structures. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. by L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 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.

Victoria realises she is in Zofloya's thrall, and he seduces her with his words. He leads her to the banditti, led by her brother Leonardo. Zofloya and Victoria live among savages, and Zofloya shows his possessive evil side when he exclaims "thou wilt be mine, to all eternity" (244); Zofloya begins showing a different side to himself, including an ability to read Victoria's thoughts. As a common characteristic of Gothic novels, Dacre employs the use of characters that fit into a hierarchy chart; there are both characters of high-ranking status and characters of low status. Some critics suggest that Dacre's novel Zofloya acts as an inversion of this social, patriarchal hierarchy where the characters of lower status hold the dominant power in the novel. The reversals of the servant/ master role eventually lead to the high ranked character's demise. "Subordinates, who are assumed to be totally transparent to their beneficent keepers, are actually the location of disguised and threatening knowledge; in Zofloya, this leads to one transgression after another as social and familiar underlying use the mask of harmless, familiar submission to disguise their insurrectionary aims." [11] Knowledge, power, and sexuality [ edit ] Victoria decides the only way to win his love is to eliminate Lilla. Zofloya and Victoria capture Lilla and tie her up in a cave. Henriquez is deeply upset when he discovers his lover is missing. Victoria confesses her love again, but Henriquez still refuses to reciprocate her emotion. Victoria runs to Zofloya, upset that he has not helped her attain her desires. He tells her she can have Henriquez if she appears to be Lilla. He gives her a potion to administer to Henriquez, which will make the first woman he sees when he awakens appear as the woman of his dreams. Zofloya fails to mention that the illusion will only last until Henriquez falls asleep again. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb. Berenza's insistence on only receiving care from his wife complements and gives free rein to the femme fatale's sadistic will. However, she achieves her end by enacting the role of sacrificial wife-mother, a vision of purity that Berenza consumes, like Lewis's monk's consumption of the portrait of Madonna. Maternal femininity is, moreover, here subject to the male gaze, as Berenza pleads, "'[o]h my love, whether have you been? I have been wishing for my tender nurse to make me a glass of lemonade'" (p. 169). Though his body diminishes from illness caused by Zofloya's poison, the more nurturing attention Victoria provides, the more 'his appetite [...] increase[s] even to ravenousness' (p. 171). Berenza's consumption of maternal femininity manifests a role reversal in which he becomes a victim of Victoria and Zofloya's agenda, degenerating from a rational figure to an enfeebled idolater.Nina: an older woman that Leonardo comes upon after he leaves the Zappi household. She has just lost her son and is very sad. Leonardo offers to help her out and keep her company. Nina agrees, but shortly thereafter she dies, forcing Leonardo to continue on.