Zofloya, or the Moor
Charlotte Dacre’s, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), is a Gothic story heavily inspired by Lewis’ The Monk with a similar plot. However, Dacre presents the salacious pact-with-the-devil narrative through the perspective of a female lead. Dacre’s novel centres around Victoria, who defies female social norms of the Romantic period, and like Ambrosio, sells her soul to the Devil. Like Ambrosio, Victoria also murders, rapes, and deceives others to get what she desires. However, unlike Lewis, Dacre places her transgressive heroine in the centre of the narrative while casting the persecuted, virtuous heroine to the side. Dacre presents her female characters as three-dimensional beings with a sexual appetite to depict a realistic representation of women, rather than an imaginative fantasy that serves the patriarchal gaze.
Dacre presents Lilla as the typical virtuous heroine who resembles the heroines depicted in early Gothic literature. Lilla is described as, “Pure, innocent, free even from the smallest taint of a corrupt thought, was her mind; delicate symmetrical, and of fairy-like beauty, her person so small, yet of so just proportion; sweet, expressing a seraphic serenity of soul, seemed her angelic countenance, slightly suffused with the palest hue of the virgin rose” (Dacre 133). Like Antonia in The Monk, Lilla also represents the ideal woman of the Romantic era. However, Lilla is not the female lead of the text but instead a side character who Victoria ultimately kills. Victoria murders Lilla because the man she desires, Henriquez, is in love with Lilla; therefore, driven by jealousy, Victoria murders Lilla.
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By murdering Lilla, “Dacre wants to be rid of her just as she stands: the perfect ideal” (Viegas-Monchamp 78). Victoria destroys the patriarchal, stereotypical fantasy of the feminine ideal to suggest that women in real life are not all pure, virtuous, and innocent. Instead, they are complex beings who possess ranging emotions, desires, and sexual urges. Dacre depicts this argument by replacing the virtuous female lead with one that is, “[...] proud, haughty, [...] of a wild, ardent, and irrepressible spirit, [...] of [...] revengeful, and cruel nature” (Dacre 4). I would argue that Dacre takes Matilda from Lewis’ tale and presents a heroine similar to her unconventional and progressive nature to invite “the reader to experience the world through the eyes of women who are not asexual or passive, even asking the reader to understand and sympathize with their feelings” (Viegas-Monchamp 6). Dacre’s heroine is more realistic than previous Gothic heroines because she is shaped into the woman she is by her experience as a woman who lacks education, parental presence, and guidance. Victoria’s actions can also be understood as a woman trying to gain control in her life in the Romantic period, when women were not permitted to have autonomy over their bodies and lives.
Lastly, the fate of four female characters in The Monk and Zofloya, or the Moor suggests that a woman’s character does not matter in a patriarchal world because none of them can survive whether they are innocent or transgressive in a world that is designed for men by men. Lewis punishes all of his female characters, virtuous or not. Antonia is the chaste figure of the text, yet she faces the worst outcome of all characters. She is drugged, raped, and finally murdered. Perhaps by killing Antonia, Lewis suggests that “virtue is not the ideal” (Viegas-Monchamp 72). Yet, even the non-virtuous character, Matilda, is not represented as the ideal feminine figure. Lewis does not kill Matilda, but he reveals her as a demon, suggesting that women should not follow her example. Therefore, perhaps “Lewis cannot imagine any positive female figure at all” (Viegas-Monchamp 72). Hence, Lewis’ representations of women accurately reflect the feminine ideals of nineteenth-century Britain. Virtuous women were the ideal that all women should aspire to; however, no matter how righteous they were, they could not escape the cruelties of patriarchy. On the contrary, sexually positive women were demonized or thought to have not existed at all.
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On the other hand, even though Dacre’s text advocates for a more accurate representation of women in literature, she also kills her female characters. Dacre kills Lilla to represent the death of the imaginary feminine ideal, yet the death of Victoria perhaps suggests that transgressive women are punished for their problematic behaviour. However, I argue that by both of these characters’ deaths, Dacre displays that neither of these versions of women can succeed or survive in a patriarchal world because it is not designed to serve women. As in Lewis’ text, Dacre’s text also shows that whether women are innocent or experienced, they both face a similar fate of destruction by the patriarchy. Nonetheless, Dacre’s text challenges stereotypes of femininity and “the reader – especially the male reader – is confronted with issues that transgress established values of domesticity and flirt with new models of femininity” (Moreno 419).
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Despite Lewis and Dacre’s punishment of sexually transgressive female characters, their willingness to write about such progressive women showcases the step in the right direction to alter the representation of women in Gothic literature and Romantic literature to a more realistic model. Matilda and Victoria are not the archetypical heroines in distress who need saving from the noble male hero; instead, they are the sources of horror that the men need saving from. The authors’ choices reflect the change and re-evaluation of women’s roles in British society at the time that began with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which urged social change for the betterment of the lives of women.