The Evil of Victoria in Zofloya - Essay Example

The Evil of Victoria in Zofloya Introduction In an article in a periodical contemporary with the writing of the novel Zofloya it was written that “there is a voluptuousness of language and allusion, pervading these volumes, which we should have hoped, that the delicacy of the female pen would have refused to trace” (Dacre and Craciun 10). The scandalous nature of the novel was such that it was difficult for it to be understood within the patriarchal society from which it came as having been written by a woman. The novel explores sex and sin, criminality and pure wickedness all while framing it from the experiences of a female character. The society in which the work was created had very clear cut ideas of the way in which the female character was explored, but the book Zofloya challenged much of these preconceived ideas, even though it was a classic gothic terror novel. The character of Victoria is the primary example of how this novel challenged the patriarchal society and explored the female character in ways that were unusual for the time. While the book used many of the elements that would signal the gothic romance, the explicit sexuality of Victoria was one way in which Dacre was exploring the female through more than a superficial understanding of the female experience. Although framed within supernatural influences, the psychology of the characters is as important as their influences, Victoria representing sociopathic type as she is spoiled which turns to experiences that are driven without the tempering of empathy. As well, the female character in the gothic romance is often elegant and tragic, but for Dacre the female is a complexity of experiences, which often include murderous intent and sexuality that is connected to violence. The character of Victoria is a complexity of psychological formation which includes her sociopathic tendencies towards getting what she thinks is her desire in all things. Through giving into the many temptations that come her way, Victoria displays her evil which is affirmed at the end when Satan shows himself and all of those things that he had laid before her to allow her to choose evil. The Gothic Female In understanding the motivations and catalysts for the behaviors that Victoria displays, one can first look at the state of the mother in the gothic romance novel. Anolik discusses the absence of the mother in gothic writing in regard to one of the central catalysts to the ill fates that many of the female lead categories experience. Most often, the mother is dead; her absence part of the tragic elements of the female leads her to a life in which she must shoulder the burden that the empty space leaves. In other stories, she is left vulnerable by the absence of her mother, raised under the hand of her father which is either a positive or negative experience, but through which she finds her strength. In Zofloya, the mother is not dead, but is deviant and evil, thus her survival is a part of the burden that Victoria must bear and her vulnerability can be focused on the abandonment as much as any of the other elements in the story (Beinstock 26). The absence of the mother is a tool of the narrative within the gothic novel. With a presence of a mother there is the potential for a moral overriding tone in which the actions of the female lead would be censored or criticized. Anolik states that there is a necessity of the mother’s absence for the “narratable deviance” to occur upon which the gothic plot is driven. In Zofloya, the mother is the primary cause of all that befalls her family, her act in running off creating the downward spiral that includes the prophetic quote of her father when he is killed. He states “on thy example with the life of thy daughter now be formed” (Anolik 28). The mother’s actions, as she is absent as a mother and returns only for evil intent, is the basis upon which the evil that Victoria commits is built. In the gothic narrative, the mother can only be present if she is evil, her morality absent even if she is not absent from the work. In many ways, the evil that is done by Victoria is given other focuses as far as blame is concerned. The character of Zofloya, from which the title of the is based, turns out to be a supernatural element as he is revealed as the devil having tempted Victoria in to the many actions that she did that can be interpreted as evil. According to Rudwin, the presence of the supernatural in gothic romance novels provides a resource of terror. Through influences that are outside the mortal realm the reader can place a separation between themselves and the evil of the characters, even as they also relate to the psychology of the evil that is portrayed. As Dacre has written a morality tale which also explores a great many psychological profiles, her use of the supernatural provides moral context for how the evil manifested within the lives of her characters. The body of Victoria is representative of her deeds, growing larger and more masculine as her wicked deeds grow in number. According to Dacre and Craciun, “it is the text’s unusual evocations of the female body and feminine subject that are most valuable in the context of the history of sexuality and the body” (10). The female form has been a part of the objectification of women as they are good or bad, virtuous or whore which is almost always represented by the physical appearance (Anolik 30). The changing appearance of Victoria is symbolic of her growing evil, the changes that she sees in her body creating a manifestation of the evil deeds that she does within the story. Through understanding her position within the novel through her body, she is placed not only in context with her nature as it changes and develops, but in context with the historical time period and the power of the patriarchal society and the view of women. The body becomes the site on which this point of view is experienced. Sexual content is defined by the manifestations of the body, the explorations of female sexuality so feared that it could only be accompanied by making the female character masculine as her sexual desires become ripened with experience. The novel Zofloya was considered pornographic, the development of a primary character that is violent and through whom sexuality is explored something that was considered obscene. Victoria represents all that is dark within the female nature, her sexuality and violence a resource from which the development of her character is driven is in high contrast to the more common female lead character. Her character is far more similar to the secondary characters of other books that drive the heroine towards her rewarded destiny. The tragedy of Victoria is that she holds none of the virtue that can be observed in other novels of the period. The type of character that she portrays is more often the obstacle through which the heroine must go to get to the end of her journey. In this case, it is her journey that is at the core of the novel (Dacre and Craciun 11). Victoria as the Anti-Heroine Dacre equated the sexuality of Victoria and her violence. Most gothic romance novels emphasized what is known as the ‘counter-ideology’ of the female, the notion that women approached things from a domestic, but more rational version of understanding the world. This is not, however, how Dacre frames Victoria. She is does not confine herself to a domesticated way of seeing the world. She takes the temptations that come to her and revels in them. Dunn calls Dacre’s treatment of the female by saying “let us make women the subject rather than the object of toxic erotic agony” (308). She does connect the erotic desires of Victoria to a sense of violence, the emergence of desire coinciding with violent tendencies. In examining Victoria’s psychological tendencies, it is clear that she is all impulse and pleasure seeking, her central desire based upon the idea that what she wants, she expects and she expects it to come to her as she desires it. She is spoiled, willful and when things are no longer handed to her, she takes them without a care for the costs. Dacre links sex and violence in such a way as to frame the experiences through a dialogue of feminine and masculine. Her violence is “coded positively in relation to sexual justice, as the murderous rages of her anti-heroines are lent no small decree of credence and legitimacy in the context of a larger gender injustice and it is coded negatively in relation to the context of love, for Dacre’s violent women always end tragically alone, cast out, spiteful, and often dead” (311). This creates a sense of irony within her work, the plight of the female connected to her moral compass. This is the case for Victoria as her end is created by the nature of her experiences, her life filled with crossroads in which she could have made alternate choices that would have reframed her experience entirely differently. For Dacre, however, it is more interesting to have her choose the darker course and to look at her life from a self centered point of view that allows for every decision to be given for her own indulgences. Dacre’s anti-heroine is decidedly distinct for the rebellious heroines of other romantic novels of the time. The rebellious hero is exiled from the domestic sphere and is in search of a way to master his world. Victoria is exiled and seeks a mastery over her world, but is “decidedly sadistic, tormenting and murdering for the pleasure of exerting her world and those in it; she is neither within the female or male gothic traditions but is somewhere in between” (Dacre and Craciun 11). The character of Victoria is unusual and Dacre has created her to express aspects of the female and the male. The one way in which she relates Victoria to the genre in which she was published is that “patriarchy and its central institution, marriage, are literally nightmares and nightmares are real and fatally so” (Dacre and Craciun 11). The discussion that is undertaken by Dacre is that women have complex motivations and can represent evil intent just as men can, their lives often dedicated to flying in the face of the domesticity with which the patriarchal society would have them believe. Victoria and Evil In many ways, the evil of Victoria is celebrated. The novel “celebrates Victoria’s capacity for sexual desire and pleasure; her desire for Zofloya is itself transgressive, not because it is blasphemous…but in part because it grows as the novel progresses and Zofloya grows more demonic” (Cranium 148). The nature of the evil is complex and has a contradiction of terms under which it is committed. Dacre and Craniun suggest that there are four origins of evil, as related by reviewer Robert Miles: religious concepts of fallen nature, nature versus nurture discussions, a conflict of paternal and class distinctions, and a belief in its instinctual concept (16). The narration of the book suggests repeatedly that it is the evil of her mother that influenced the love for evil that Victoria seems to embrace. However, the many causes that exist within the work that seem to be in conflict with this idea and provide a deeper set of meanings for the reasons that Victoria falls to the temptation of evil. The character of Zofloya is representative of the ‘other’. Although he is first represented through a distinction of class, Victoria’s dismissive behavior towards the servant class creating a divide between herself and the character of Zofloya, it is his ‘blackness’ that begins to become the representation of the ‘other’ which also begins to unite him closer to Victoria. Victoria has exotic looks, dark raven hair and her face reflecting that of the Venetian background from which she comes. Her looks help to place her at the center of ‘other’ in the novel, along with the way in which she is not similar to the classic gothic heroine, but she is drawn closer to the Moor as the darkness of her deeds and his physical representation begin to become associated through the words and phrases that Dacre uses. Dacres represents her desires as “the dark and ferocious passions of her soul” which is equated with “the dark abettor of her crimes” referring to Zofloya (Anolik and Howard 23). Through literary devices, the two become more and more intrinsically connected, even as they both become more defined by their position as ‘other’. After having served her in the domestic sphere, Zofloya then demands service from her. Zofloya demands of her that she is to “unequivocally give thyself to me, heart, and body and soul” (Cracium 147). The ultimate evil is then done to Victoria as she is consigned to serve Zofloya and to be ‘married’ to him so that she is confined in the state of matrimony to the sphere that he will design for her to remain. Cracium writes that “Victoria is destroyed through her submission to another, a husband who ends her existence as mistress of her own will by gaining her wifely submission through the false promise of protection” (147). The beauty of Zofloya is emphasized throughout the book, his beauty in his body and his face not rejected because he is a Moor, but embraced, much of it based upon how he appeared to her. While there is obvious racism within the book, her desire for the Moor is used as a tool of that racist quality as the attraction that she has to this man is equated to the attraction to the exotic, the eroticism found within his differences. Within the society that this novel was released, this would have been considered an extension of her evil, her impurity manifested in her desires and attractions to a representation of ‘other’. According to Cracium, Dacre exploited that which she could use to create the a sense of the inappropriate, “exploit(ing) both negative and sentimentalized images of black male sexuality and subjectivity” (149). Victoria becomes anti-moral as she indulges her whims and desires, some of which involve the demonic character of Zofloya. Victoria is convinced by her tempter, who turns out to be the devil, to create deeper and more heinous acts from which her evil nature is revealed. According to Punter and Byron, “Victoria murders her husband, drugs and rapes his brother when he rejects her, and tortures, kills, and cuts up his fiancee” (107). Her escalating horrors is all intended to be subject to her whims, eventually coming to a state in which she has defined herself as ruined. When Zofloya comes to her to reveal himself, she is morally undone and lost in the violent passions in which she has indulged her whims. She has gone well past the point of redemption, losing herself into the temptation that is Zofloya. In the end, that which she has fought against claims her and makes her his submitted bride. Conclusion The novel Zofloya is both reflective of the genre of the gothic romance and a diversion from its normal structures. Because of the evil that is portrayed within Victoria, her sexuality and aggressions, she is both framed in the size of the masculine and the novel was determined to be pornographic. The society that judged the pages of the novel were shocked by its lurid displays of sexual need as it was tied to violence. The character of Victoria is the anti-heroine, her journey fraught with the joy of her eroticism and interest in violence. She is presented as a spoiled young woman whose life is shattered when her mother runs away, but it is also suggested that the evil within her was recognizable to Zofloya meaning that her mother’s actions did not instigate the eventual acts she would commit. Even though her father suggests that her mother is the cause of her evil, it is clear that Zofloya recognized the potential and came to exploit it. The evil in Victoria was waiting for an outlet, rather than in response to her circumstances. Zofloya came to seduce her and found a willing participant in the evil he would see done, and in the end the freedom that she fought for was taken away as she was lost to matrimony to Zofloya. Works Cited Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode”. Modern Language Studies. 33.1/2 (Spring-Autumn 2003): 24-43. Anolik, Ruth B, and Douglas L. Howard. The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2004. Print Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Dacre, Charlotte, and Adriana Craciun. Zofloya; Or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 1997. Print. Dunn, James A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence”. Nineteenth-Century Literature. 53.3 (December 1998): 307-327. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print. Rudwin, Maximilian. “Balzac and the Fantastic”. The Sewanee Review. 33.1 (January 1925): 2- 24. Read More