Zofloya or The Moor (Oxford World's Classics)

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a b c d Nicholson, William (1806). "ART. IX.-Zofloya; or, the Moor: a Romance of the Fifteenth Century, in 3 Vols. by Charlotte Dacre, better known as Rosa Matilda; Author of the Nun of St. Omer's, Hours of Solitude, & c.". General Review of British and Foreign Literature. 1 (6): 590–593. Il Conte Berenza: lover and later husband of Victoria. He is wary of her character, but gives in to his love for her. He loses her love to his own brother, Henriquez. Zofloya was considered pornographic by contemporary critics. The July 1806 issue of Monthly Literary Recreations said that Zofloya was "a romance so void of merit, so destitute of delicacy, displaying such depravity of morals, as the present." [13] Despite such criticisms, the novel sold well and was translated into French and German. According to Carol Margaret Davison, Zofloya "received little scholarly attention" although it has gained consideration in the past two decades for its gender dynamics.

Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). Berenza's death makes Henriquez suspicious. He begins to despise Victoria. In a moment of panic, Victoria confesses her love to Henriquez. He is harsh and cruel to her, but then realises that she was the wife of his brother, and he should contain his hatred for her. Although my focus here is on abolitionist verse, many of the same characteristics feature in other abolitionist genres, including, or especially, the parliamentary oration. Lord Grenville’s speech to the House of Lords on 24 June 1806 is a remarkably extensive tour through abolitionism’s narrative and affective commonplaces. See Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London: John Hatchard, 1806) pp. 88–110. The analogous but more metered terms of abolitionist argument in the works of the movement’s key spokespeople, Thomas Clarkson and Anthony Benezet, and discussed by Peter J. Kitson, ‘“Bales of Living Anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH 67 (2000), 515–37.Lilla: the love interest of Henriquez (Berenza's brother.) As the recipient of Henriquez' affections, she stands in the way of Victoria's happiness. While critics have focused on Zofloya and on his erotic relationship with Victoria, they have not explored the ways in which Dacre interweaves the subversive desires of Victoria, Zofloya, and her husband, Berenza, characters whose identities are interwoven and exaggerated by gender and racial categories.7 This essay therefore examines how Zofloya destabilises cultural categories and gender codes by employing the masquerade aesthetic of role reversal in its depiction of these relationships. It furthermore engages sexual politics, feminine virtue, and transgressive modes of desire within the context of patriarchal imperialist attitudes. The text displays female consumption of the sexualised, raced body alongside male consumption of the maternal, religiously coded body, portraying the collision and collusion of patriarchal and colonial structures. It further interrogates the cultural ideal of the pure maternal body, simultaneously destabilising the Madonna/whore dichotomy and patriarchal imperialist notions of motherhood as bearer of home and empire. Victoria not only kills her husband by aligning with the devil, but her hypersexuality, as postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha claims of the colonised figure, 'problematizes the sign of racial and cultural priority'.8 Essentially, the notion of the female body as bearer of culture and race collapses when mothers and their daughters sacrifice maternal and domestic virtues to gratify their sexual desires. Julie Ellison, in ‘Cato’s Tears’, ELH 63 (1996), 571–601, suggests that the preIberian Moors of Addison’s Cato and James Thomson’s Sophonsiba have an entirely different ideological function in which certain Moors may be seen as heirs of the true Rome. Dacre also brings challenges to the conventional familial structure that most literature, Gothic included, often presented. At the very beginning of the novel, the father-figure is immediately removed from the family portrait as a result of an action taken by the female head of house, or Laurina. Again, it was a rare occurrence for a novel to sport a woman with enough agency to literally and figuratively remove the power of the male head of house. [7] The novel continues, giving even more power to the mother figure, for Dacre describes that, "brilliant examples of virtue and decorum...[would have] counteracted the evils engendered by the want of steady attention to the propensities of children". [8] making note that it is the mother's character, and not the father's, that has true influence over the development of the child, and that without a good mother figure, the children will grow up without moral guidance or structure.

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). a b c Chaplin, Sue (2004). Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women's Fiction. Burlington, Virginia: Ashgate Publishing Company. p.142. uncommon sensations filled her bosom, as she observed her proximity to the Moor. The dim twilight increasing to darkness, which now began to spread its sombre shadows around, threw a deeper tint over his figure, and his countenance was more strongly contrasted by the snow white turban which encircled his brows, and by the large bracelets of pearl upon his arms and legs. (p. 150) This is a fantastic story. Zofloya, or the devil made flesh, is undeniably sexy as Dacre renders him and there is no denying the attraction which Victoria feels for him, almost simultaneously with the fear he invokes within her. His supernatural nature is subtly rendered for the reader - filling Victoria's chamber with silvery mist just before he materialises at the end of her bed and all those mysterious appearances and disappearances, just when he is wanted most.Signora di Modena: a distant relative of Laurina. She is a scary woman with a long yellow face and grey eyes; her appearance is repulsive. She is the cruel tyrannical ruler of Victoria when she is captive in her household.