Throughout the novel, strong female characters make their entry into the narrative who present a different image than that of the stereotypical female role within the Gothic novel. These characters manipulate others, behave violently, and are sexually aggressive, which previously had been predominantly male characteristics in Gothic fiction. [4]

Most critical works have focused on Victoria and Zofloya's miscegenistic and transgressive desire. These include Diane Long Hoeveler, 'Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: A Case Study in Miscegenation as Sexual and Racial Nausea', European Romantic Review, 8.2 (1997), 185-99; Ann Mellor, 'Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya1, European Romantic Review, 13.2 (2002), 169-73; George Haggerty, 'Female Gothic: Demonic Love', in Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 171-78; and David Sigler, 'Masochism and Psychoanalysis in Zofloya, or the Moor\ in Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanlaysis, 1753-1835 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), pp. 151-80. Not to be missed - I'd never heard of this book before the course but would definitely recommend it for any one who is interested in Gothic or 19th Century literature. That could add a boost to Zofloya: When in doubt, kill Henry Winkler. (Or have him appear in your music video as Say Anything did). ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Dacre] is precisely the sort of woman author unlikely to have appealed to Victorian critics—one tarred both by Romanticism and by reaction; one who wrote both 'sundry novels in the style of the first edition of The Monk' and political ballads for the popular press. Moreover, in neither her associations nor her novels was she likely to win friends among those twentieth-century scholars seeking to exhume the worthy works of forgotten women writers. Dacre is not quite early enough to be forgiven her lapses in emotional taste; her political commitments are not easily assimilated into later twentieth-century norms; she is conventionally associated with male Gothic; her novels are populated by sexually predatory, physically violent, mother-hating women of whom the narrations appear to approve. In sum, Dacre is precisely the sort of writer whom canons, both established and revisionist, are designed to exclude, an exclusion this edition hopes, in part, to rectify. (xiv) Zofloya has no pretension to rank as a moral work". [3] Challenging feminine roles of the early 19th century [ edit ] 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. The novel focuses on the heightened sexuality of the Moor Zofloya, while pairing this sexuality with the impotency of the other Caucasian male characters.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 45 (21 April 1711) [accessed 2 May 2020].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. 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 (Satan) The Moor: servant of Henriquez. First appears in Victoria's dreams. He claims he can help Victoria fulfill her every wish and desire. He gives her poisons to destroy the lives of those around her. In the end, he reveals his true self; he is Satan. 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.

The group also discussed the role of the Devil in the novel. We debated whether Victoria could be considered evil, or whether she was merely enticed to evil by the Devil. The group was divided on this issue. Some felt that Victoria was already set on a destructive course before the involvement of the Devil. Others felt that she was manipulated by Zofloya to commit evil acts. To this extent, the novel ties into wider cultural debates in the late-Enlightenment which focused on the nature of free choice or free will. See Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. by Jacqueline Howard (London, England: Penguin, 2001) and Romance of the Forest, ed. by Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Anne Mellor, ‘Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, European Romantic Review, Vol. 13, No.2, June 2002, pp.169-173, p.173.In this scene, Victoria consumes the sexualised, raced body but is also an object of the male gaze - not only Berenza's, who estimates her value by her sacrificial maternity, but also Zofloya's. When persuading Victoria to reveal her dark desire to murder her husband, Zofloya exclaims, '"[d]oes the Signora believe, then, that the Moor Zofloya hath a heart dark as his countenance? Ah! Signora, judge ye not by appearances! but, if you desire relief, make me at once the depositary of your soul's conflicts"' (p. 151). Unlike Berenza, he values her less for her feminine and more for her spiritual worth, as he attempts to enslave her soul. Zofloya is an object of the gaze but also an author of its dismantling, for his supernatural powers expose the dysfunctionality of the home and empire.

Craciun's introduction, entitled "Charlotte Dacre and the 'vivisection of virtue,'" is longer than Michasiw's, and provides a similar breadth of detail and engrossing panorama of Dacre's life and the ideas that inform her writing. As its title suggests, however, this essay is as much an article as a general introduction, and as a critical essay constitutes a persuasive and important reading of Dacre's fiction. Craciun's main interests lie in Zofloya's similarity to the novels of Sade and in the multiple ways in which its heroine Victoria challenges established arguments about gothicism, Romanticism, and gender. She also spends considerable time in her commentary on Dacre's final novel, The Passions (1811)—compellingly enough that one hopes Broadview will soon authorize an edition of this novel as well. Associating Ann Mellor's concept of "feminine Romanticism" with its female gothic counterpart, Craciun argues that such "gender complementary models . . . to a large extent depend on an author's biography and their sex, and therefore in a sense re-produce a circular argument as to what constitutes a woman's text" (13). Had Zofloya been published anonymously or under a male pseudonym, she maintains, its readers "would have assumed the author to be male" (13); Dacre's decision to publicize her gender, then, explains at least in part why the novel was received in such vitriolic terms, since reviewers were "distressed by the dissonance between the sexual content of Dacre's novel and Dacre's sex" (13). In Craciun's account, Zofloya's value extends outside of its genre and historical period, since it challenges foundational assumptions concerning what constitutes a "feminist" or a "woman's" text. Its contemporary reception and subsequent neglect by literary historians, furthermore, embody the critical and canonical consequences of transgressing against such assumptions. 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.” 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)

Henriquez: brother of Berenza. His heart belongs to Lilla. Victoria's love for him leads to many treacherous events. He despises Victoria.