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Abstract
The eponymous hero of Charlotte Dacre's 1806 novel, Zofloya, is a dark-skinned Moor who at first encounter personifies the noble royal slave. Soon Zofloya reveals himself as a literally diabolic Gothic villain. This essay discusses Zofloya in the context of literary precedents that narrate the outrage and violence of black slaves. At a time of significant slave uprisings and parliamentary debate on abolition, Dacre asks us to consider the relationship of slavery to revolt and revenge. The text simultaneously echoes abolitionists' warnings about the potential for violence inherent in the West Indies and plays to racist stereotypes about the blacks' alleged propensity to violence.
The Gothic novel is a site of dungeons and daemons, of frightening vaults and suffocating tombs. In the Gothic novel, the strange, the unknown, and the supernatural are every-moment occurrences. This is a genre of darkness and danger; it is also a genre of racism and phobia. In the case of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, the Gothic is infused with contemporary concerns about violent uprisings, most notably in the West Indies. The novel evokes a specter more terrifying than fiction, the clear and present risk of slave revolt.
Charlotte Dacre (1806/1997) modeled Zofloya on a seminal Gothic novel, Matthew Lewis's (1796/2003) The Monk. In The Monk, a she-devil, Matilda, first seduces and then perverts a susceptible monk, who degenerates into a rapist and murderer under Matilda's evil genius. In Zofloya, a handsome Moor aids and abets unspeakable crimes committed by a lustful young woman, Victoria, who has wearied of her husband and covets her brother in law. The diabolical pact culminates in Victoria's vicious murder and quasi-rape of Lilla, the innocent young girl whom her brother in law loves. Not only does Dacre (1806/1997) reverse the genders of the principal characters from The Monk, but she also changes the race of the arch-villain, insisting on the darkness of Zofloya's skin.
Why did Dacre (1806/1997) "blacken Matilda" and pair the Moor with a white woman? One answer, explored by Anne Mellor (2002), is that Zofloya reflects contemporary obsession about intercourse between black men and white women. A second answer, provided by Diane Hoeveler (1998), is that "in an age that was anxiously confronting foreignness as a threat, blackness was the ultimate...