Locating Wollstonecraftian Femininity in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

9/15/09

Sydney Boyd

David Sigler

Background

            In the fall semester of 2008, I studied Charlotte Dacre’s gothic novel Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) through a feminist perspective in a term paper entitled “Dacre’s Victoria: A Pursuit for Equality.” The protagonist of the novel, Victoria, boldly pursues the object of her passions regardless the cost—from committing murder to unwittingly selling her soul to the devil. In contrast to the current critical consensus on the novel, I argued that Victoria, despite her violence and cunning, nevertheless embodies (in distorted form) the ideals of Mary Wollstonecraft.  In my view, this novel does this not to discredit Wollstonecraft’s ideas but rather to indicate an extreme but viable new mode of femininity.

I developed the paper further in the following semester, presenting it at The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VI conference, hosted by Idaho State University.  Because of time and space constraints, there (and in my term paper) I only addressed two of the critical arguments relating to the novel. I have since become much more immersed in the current literary discussion surrounding Dacre.  Still, relatively little research has been published on Dacre—Zofloya was out of print until 1997, and it is only since then that Dacre has garnered the interest of literary critics. Many of these critics have seen Victoria, or even Dacre, as an antifeminist or, at the very least, as someone committed to undoing any femininity recognizable as such. My project offers a corrective to this argument, suggesting the ways that Zofloya coincides almost exactly with what Wollstonecraft advocated for women in 1790.

Current Project

            In the coming weeks, I will broaden my knowledge of Mary Wollstonecraft and her historical contexts, rereading closely A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and critical accounts of that work. Next, I will revisit Zofloya with the intention of making connections between Wollstonecraft’s ideals and the gender obstacles presented in the novel.  In doing wider research on both Wollstonecraft and Dacre, I will increase my credibility as a scholar on the topic. There is the issue of feminist violence I will have to defend and confront by showing direct instances of Victoria’s gruesome acts in the novel correlate with an extreme desire for equality, and thus, what Wollstonecraft advocates. In order for my paper to be persuasive, my current argument will have to be much more tightly connected to Wollstonecraft’s treatise, to a fuller spectrum of contemporary feminisms, and must be able to account for the varying forms of femininity embodied within Dacre’s text. If I can do this, I believe that I will have arrived at a fresh and original reading of the novel.  In the end, my work will be expanded from its current eight pages (from the conference) to approximately 20, and will accordingly feature a broader and more ambitious argument.  Much of this new material will consider the nature of violence within British Romanticism and the gothic; much more will represent careful engagement with Wollstonecraft on a tighter, point-for-point basis.

            I intend to show that while Wollstonecraft advocated extreme social change, she neglected to mention the possible repercussions such changes might incur. At a historically rich violent time of the French Revolution, the Irish Rebellion, and the American Revolution, it is logical that Dacre would have pulled on the current times to show what gore radical social change requires. I will contrast the passive, pale, and angelic character of Lilla with that of the passionate, dark Victoria and compare their final outcomes to show how Dacre is mocking the traditional Victorian view of femininity. Perhaps most importantly, I will explore Victoria’s burgeoning relationship with Zofloya, who is actually Satan. This is a difficult aspect to explore while defending Victoria as a revolutionary feminist character, but it can be accomplished when Victoria’s desire for equality and respect is recognized and proved. In this novel, her quest for equality is expressed through sexual desire, but I will show how this is simply an example of a feminist revolution where women everywhere might pursue their aspirations freely.

Plan for the next two months

I will begin by carefully re-reading Wollstonecraft, then Dacre.  Then I will begin work in sorting through  I would like to have a draft finished soon, perhaps by the beginning of October, so I have time to polish it appropriately. My end goal for this project is to use it as a writing sample for Ph.D. program applications and also, possibly and eventually, to publish it. It will be an appropriate writing sample as it combines three of my interests: feminist literary criticism, British Romanticism, and literary representations of Africans, as suggested by Dacre’s villainous Moor.

Ideas about how to present this work

I plan to present the work as an article-length essay, approximately 20 pages, with ideas for appropriate amendments given writing sample page length limits. I will also develop a visual powerpoint presentation to accompany my project as I present my ideas to my peers in the course.

Tentative Bibliography

Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Beauvais, Jennifer. “Domesticity and the Female Demon in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” Romanticism on the Net 44 (2006): 22 pars. 30 Apr. 2008. http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2006/v/n44/013999ar.html.

Chaplin, Susan. Law, sensibility, and the sublime in eighteenth-century women’s fiction: speaking of dread. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Craciun, Adriana. “‘I hasten to be disembodied’: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body.” European Romantic Review 6:1 (1995): 75-97.

Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya, or The Moor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Dunn, James A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53:3 (1998): 307-327.

Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Heiland, Donna. Gothic and gender: an introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Knights, Ben. Mascunlinities in text and teaching. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Mellor, Anne K. “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 169-73.

Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge, 1993.

Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Townshend, Dale. The Orders of Gothic. New York: AMS Press, 2007.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.