Charlotte Dacre Research Articles

“Tremble Secure on the Hazardous Line”: A Ghostly Materialism of Prosody in the Graveyard Century

This essay argues that the spirit of Charlotte Dacre’s Romantic lyric might be seen as in flight from the rigid early eighteenth-century technical prosodies that seek to embody it. Prosody’s own flight from petrifaction at the hands of the early eighteenth century’s dominant model, Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702), toward the formal liberty endorsed by late-century prosodists underwrites transformations in lyric poetry’s self-image as a spirit or specter. The gap between the eighteenth century’s pious Graveyard School ghosts and the darker spectrality of Romantics like Charlotte Dacre marks a movement away from material order toward late-century prosody’s ghostly materiality. The ghost that is merely a petrified “grizly spectre” in Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) becomes, in Dacre’s understudied poetry of the spectral lover, a liminal presence trembling on the poem’s “hazardous line” between both poetry and prosody and life and death.

“The Slave of Your Wishes”: Re-Reading Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806)

abstract: This essay re-reads Charlotte Dacre’s depiction of the Gothic villain Zofloya in terms specific to the European racialization of Moorish identity in 1806. Contrary to existing critical accounts, this essay suggests that Dacre’s construction of Zofloya’s non-whiteness should not be conflated with the “blackness” of the enslaved as it was being constructed in either abolitionist or anti-abolitionist texts.

Analogues of Eve: Imagining a Sublime Gothic Heroine in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor

In Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), Charlotte Dacre subverts gothic traditions by representing her heroine, Victoria, as the first sublime gothic heroine: a female protagonist who embodies and uses the sublime to empower herself without sacrificing her female identity or sexuality. Dacre challenges the gendered roles of the satanic seduction narrative which, by the nineteenth-century, had become commonplace in the Gothic and had been influenced by the version of the Fall portrayed in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). Although Victoria becomes victim to Satan, Dacre radically reimagines the Fall. Victoria does not Fall as a result of being overwhelmed by masculine tyranny, but because she is exposed to a more powerful sublimity than her own. Through comparison of the female characters in the novel – who each represent the existing options for characterising women in the Gothic – Dacre's critique of gothic gender roles is apparent, as she presents sublimity as the only means of achieving independence.

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Feminist Disability Studies Goes Goth: The Hyperability of Female Monstrosity in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

This paper discusses Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 text Zofloya, and I argue that the lead character’s monstrosity stems from being constructed as mentally ill and then physically inferior in the text. However, I argue that Victoria’s monstrosity is not a disability, but rather a hyperability in that her strength becomes a threat to patriarchal power. Using a bridge between Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous feminine and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s intersectional feminist disability theory, I argue that female monstrosity can also be understood as a hyperability. While the heroine, Victoria, may appear to be an able-bodied woman to the reader, the confinement of her body at her aunt’s, her openness about her own sexual desire, and the descriptions of her lover as “inferior” construct Victoria’s body as disabled and sexually deviant by her society. However, I read her later monstrosity—the murders of her lovers and of the servant, Lilla—as an empowering tale of a perceived disabled woman who shows the instability of British social mores and normalcy by subverting them using her perceived monstrosity. Her various acts of rebellion ultimately show that Victoria’s perceived disability is also the source of her empowerment. They show that her perceived disability is a strength she uses as a weapon for destruction.

From Exhalation to Transformation: The Female Body in the Orientalist Romance

This article explores sexual desire, exhalation and the transformation of female bodies in the Orientalist romance novel, comparing two works written by female authors: Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) and E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919). Dacre’s heroine, Victoria, is seduced and controlled by the Devil, who is disguised as a young Moor. He encourages her to commit multiple crimes before killing her. Before her death, Victoria’s body becomes larger and darker, like Zofloya’s. Hull’s heroine, Diana, is abducted and raped by a Sheik, but both eventually fall in love and have a happy ending. Diana’s behaviour, initially boyish, deflates and softens. These transitions of conventional masculine and feminine traits parallel the characters’ increased outtake of breath in various forms: from sigh, speech and exclamation. This change could be interpreted as either destructive or liberating for the heroines. Despite being written a century apart (with different geographical and historical settings), both novels present the figure of a non-Western and non-white man as violent and attractive. The conclusion reveals that the Oriental fantasy is a complex search for sexual options; exhalation representing the departure of a culturally constructed mind.

Playing the Feminine: Politics of Gendered Performances in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

Playing the Feminine: Politics of Gendered Performances in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

“He bears no rival near the throne”: Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre

For many critics, Charlotte Dacre is an essentially conservative author, whose female villains ventriloquize and thereby discredit early feminist thought. This essay disputes such readings by exploring her under-acknowledged criticisms of patriarchy. Dacre’s male characters are self-important narcissists, who disdain female education for the agency it gives women. If a woman is well-educated, she is less likely to submit, less likely to serve as an extension of her husband’s will alone. Patriarchy also encourages women to turn on one another, Dacre argues; her female villains uniformly value advancement among men over sisterhood, and they willingly destroy other women to attain their own ends. Dacre thus takes a pessimistic approach to women’s options at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her female characters do not enjoy happy endings, regardless of marital status, level of education, or morality, because patriarchal systems are designed to crush women no matter how they behave. Far from mocking early feminism, then, Dacre criticizes it for being insufficiently radical in addressing problems with male behaviour.

Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835 by David Sigler

David Sigler. Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753-1835. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. Pp. 279. $110.cloth/34.95 paper. Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism has as its central thesis the idea that nineteenth-century writers such as Jane Austen, Joanna Southcott, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Dacre, and Percy Bysshe Shelley recognized the determining role that erotic played in the formation of gender roles and sexuality. Bracingly novel, Sexual Enjoyment yields important insights about what sexual difference meant in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and engages somewhat marginalized strand of Romanticist scholarship that interrogates the literature of the period in gay-positive ways. David Sigler is certainly not the first writer to point out that, in 1805, Coleridge coined the term psycho-analytical, but he is the first to use strictly Lacanian analytic to interpret prose works (especially Pride and Prejudice) that are only rarely read in relation to desire, jouissance, and the unconscious. Given its subtitle (Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753-1835), Sexual Enjoyment pursues the prehistory of psychoanalysis in the age of Romanticism for reasons: first, this was the historical period in which the two-sex regime--what Sigler calls a two-sex system for gender--was rapidly rigidifying and, second, matters of sexual difference and one's access, especially woman's access, to erotic posed significant problem for an array of British writers (156). For the purpose of his study, Sigler has dramatically simplified the meaning of jouissance, which he takes to mean enjoyment but admits is notorious sticking point for translators (10). Truth be told, it's an even thornier matter for Lacanian thinkers who dispute the meaning of the word and, as Richard C. Sha has indicated elsewhere, question whether it is truly a cause or an effect, and merely sensuous or cognitive or some combination of the two (41). Regardless, the premise of Sigler's first chapter is not that eighteenth-century writers like Matthew Lewis and William Kenrick are forerunners of Freud and Lacan, but rather that the concept of an elusive part of the human mind unavoidably arose in texts interested in the ungovernable, or what Sigler terms subjective phenomena outside of anyone's deliberate control, such as dreams, desire, and the sublime, all freshly fascinating to writers and the (25). Thus the gender debates of the 1790s in England cannot be disjoined from growing interest in the unconscious as repository for those repressed desires unrealizable in the public sphere. Kenrick's The Whole Duty of Woman: or Guide to the Female Sex (published in 1753 and reprinted sixteen times by 1831) cast long shadow over ideological contestations of what it meant to be lady in the eighteenth century. Being woman, for Kenrick, demanded the renunciation of sexual in the interests of social respectability. The notebooks of William Blake, and the oxymoronic nature of phrase like gratified desire therein, also bear traces of this anxiety about female agency. More surprising than Blake is the inclusion of Jane Austen since Austen was, by no stretch of the imagination, an erotic writer. Sigler's praise for Percy Shelley as arguably the nineteenth century's most daring literary thinker of sexuality can hardly be applied to the author of Pride and Prejudice, and yet Sigler's original approach to the Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy romance is the book's standout essay (183). His interpretation turns on the role of the unaccountable: Elizabeth's demand that Darcy account for his attraction to her, her bafflement that Bingley unaccountably has lost interest in her sister Jane, and her disappointment in her friend Charlotte Lucas's pragmatism in the marriage market. The unaccountable, however, represents deeper division, splitting of the subject and the cause of marital strife, traceable to Milton's first usage of the word unaccountable in his The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce of 1643. …

Urban Gothic in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya

Charlotte Dacre's novel Zofloya marks a turning point in Gothic literature. Although Dacre draws on both the Radcliffe and Lewis modes of Gothic novel, Zofloya insists on the importance of Venice as the center of the action, distinguishing it as an urban Gothic text. Various characters' identities are closely linked with Venice in ways that question the boundaries between self and city. Pride, violence, and revenge may typify the novel's depiction of Venetians, but Zofloya's central action depends on a break in urban identity, when the central character fails to act like a Venetian. In keeping with the Gothic convention of displacing contemporary concerns to earlier times in foreign places, Zofloya's exploration of the relationship between personal identity and constructed urban space addresses early nineteenth-century anxieties regarding London's rapid development.

The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

This essay argues that Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) presents an interracial sublime in the form of the dissolution of the European home/family. Dacre, I suggest, traces this dissolution to the European woman’s assertion of agency by stepping outside spatial, familial, racial and sexual boundaries. In the first section it examines the crisis of European domesticity where the family and the parent/s fail in their responsibilities toward the children. In section two I suggest that within the dissolving home/family we see the European woman, Victoria, subverting further the dissolution. The arrival of the Moor within the house compounds the blurring of hierarchies and ordering. In the final section I trace the features of the interracial sublime. I conclude by proposing that Dacre’s interracial sublime serves the purpose of demonstrating the permeability of European borders - a permeability that wreaks disaster. Dacre’s tale therefore ultimately functions as a caution against the woman’s emancipated and agential actions.

Monstrous Philosophy: Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor and John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya, or the Moor: A Romance of the 15th Century (1806) scandalized its contemporary reviewers, offended not only by its many references to erotic activity, often adulterous, or its extended scenes of violence, but also by its representation of the title character as an avatar of Satan. Critics of Gothic literature have offered varied interpretations of the moral issues presented in the novel, and the narrator makes numerous contradictory statements about morality, reason, and temptation. Dacre’s narrator often warns her readers (and her characters) to adhere to conventional moral principles in order to avoid evil for themselves and others, but her repeated references to Paradise Lost are similar to other Romantic era re-visions that reveal much more interest in representations of rebellion against – rather than submission to – moralistic authority. In the novel, renaissance Venice becomes a type of anti-Eden as Zofloya and Victoria debate the meaning of ‘right reason’ in alternate versions of the philosophy of Paradise Lost as they rationalize their sensual desires and crimes of power.

Lady Susan: Jane Austen’s Machiavellian Moment

JAMES MULVIHILL Lady Susan:Jane Austen’s Machiavellian Moment “Sooth, flatter, and alarm.” —William Gerard Hamilton, Parliamentary Logic (1808) S FEMALE PROTAGONISTS GO, VICTORIA DE LOREDANI OF CHARLOTTE Dacre’s over-the-top gothic thriller Zofloya (1806) must be among the most outrageously reprehensible. Virtually no boundary is left uncrossed by her: kidnapping, torture, murder—nothing is off limits. So horrible, in­ deed, is “the horrible Victoria” that in the introduction to her recent Broadview edition of Dacre’s novel Adriana Craciun remarks that “No heroine ofRadcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in Zofloya, that ‘there is certainly a pleasure ... in the infliction of prolonged torment.’”1 None perhaps but Lady Susan, titular heroine of a remarkable little episto­ lary novella Jane Austen wrote probably sometime during the mid 1790s and then left unpublished. In a letter written to her friend Mrs. Alicia Johnson, Lady Susan has this to say about prospective husband Reginald De Courcy: “There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person pre-determined to dislike, acknowledge one’s superior­ ity.”2 To be sure, Lady Susan’s actions never cross the line into criminality, though she wistfully hopes for the deaths (by natural causes) of two elderly male characters.3 Yet she is an unsettling figure nonetheless, not only trans­ gressing social mores but doing so with shocking aplomb. She has no shame! By the novel’s end, even after all she has wrought, she can still greet her hostess at Churchill, Mrs. Vernon, “with such an easy and cheerful af­ fection as made her almost turn from her with horror” (101). Where does this moral equanimity originate? Does it proceed from amorality or from an immorality so refined as to resemble amorality in its t. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya; or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Adriana Craciun (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997), 248, 249. 2. Jane Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), 52. Subsequent citations to Lady Susan appear parenthetically in the text. 3. Namely, Mrs. Johnson’s older, wealthy husband and Reginald De Courcy’s father Sir Reginald. SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 619 620 JAMES MULVIHILL utter insouciance? Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani, after all, is a bit of a beast, more often than not unable to contain her bottomless rage and wreaking violence on all and sundry. If Lady Susan is a beast, she is a beast of an­ other stripe. Her monstrousness derives in no small part from her very attractiveness—her social grace, her wit, even the disarming candor with which she confides her treacherous designs to her confidant (and enabler) Mrs. Johnson. This is the rub for all those encountering her, including the horrified and bemused Mrs. Vernon, her most formidable adversary. Need­ less to say, critical opinion has also fallen prey to Lady Susan’s undeniable fascination even while attempting to contain the dissonant qualities of this fascination in sources, analogues, archetypes, even psychiatric profiles.4 She is, in Marilyn Butler’s words, “a cruising shark in her social goldfish pond.”5 Barbara Horwitz describes her as an “anti-heroine” and the work in which she appears an “anti-conduct book.”6 She is a psychopath or at least a sociopath, according to Beatrice Anderson, “Self-seeking, selfindulging , without a speck of compassion for others, and no hint of a con­ science.”7 All true perhaps, but what of the intrepid nature underlying all this? Readers tend to relate to Lady Susan on as many levels as there are charac­ ters in the narrative—which is to say, those characters to whom she writes letters or in whose letters she is descnbed, for better or worse. Not only do we overhear stratagems being plotted and see these stratagems put into ac­ tion, but we witness their ultimate failure and the exposure of their cun­ ning agent. What may surprise us, however, is the equanimity with which Lady Susan accepts her undoing at the end. “I never was more at ease, or better satisfied with myself and everything about me, than at the present hour,” she tells Mrs. Johnson (98). Here, surely, is an...

<i>Queer Gothic</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Gothic Scarlet Bowen Queer Gothic. By George Haggerty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 248. $65.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). George Haggerty's Queer Gothic is remarkable in its scope, taking us on a fascinating tour of the first British gothic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe all the way to present-day vampire fictions by Anne Rice. By conducting such a sweeping historical survey punctuated with insightful close readings, Haggerty succeeds in illustrating the argument that gothic fiction is not just queer in an uncanny sense but that gothic fiction's queerness has always been and continues to be concerned with manifestations of nonnormative sexual and romantic desires. As Haggerty shows, from its very inception the gothic novel emerged in the late eighteenth century in Great Britain as a counterdiscourse to a host of novels, conduct books, and tracts about sexuality that increasingly promoted the organization of sexuality along heteronormative lines. [End Page 578] What is most daring and therefore sometimes less successful, however, is Haggerty's methodological aim of showing how gothic fiction "anticipates the history of sexuality and gives that history its most basic materials" (5). What Haggerty refers to by this incredibly broad concept varies throughout the book, and thus it may be helpful to tease out some of the specific meanings he assigns to "the history of sexuality." On the one hand, "the history of sexuality" refers to theories of sexuality produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe. Thus Haggerty aims to show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British gothic texts both anticipate and deviate from later theories articulated by Freud, sexologists, Judith Butler, and Foucault, to name a few. His investment in how early works are in conversation with these later theories exists in tension with another endeavor, which is to articulate how representations of sexuality reflect and produce historically and culturally specific attitudes toward sexuality and sexual identity. These two aims and meanings of "the history of sexuality" are not irreconcilable, and Haggerty in several parts of the book uses both approaches fruitfully, but one often feels that in his attempt "to look forward from the eighteenth century to understand how gothic fiction gave sexuality a history in the first place" (5) he neglects to examine the ways gothic texts speak to their own historical moment. One of the principal challenges that historians of sexuality face is to divest ourselves of modern preconceptions and definitions of sexuality in order to be attentive to different formations of desire in the past or in cultures different from our own. Haggerty innovatively answers this challenge in part by foregrounding Western society's inherited ideas of sexuality and looking to early gothic fictions for signs of their alterity. This approach succeeds not only in revealing the historical situatedness of certain universalizing theories of sexuality but also in expanding our sense of the many ways there are to organize and theorize desire. In chapter 2 Haggerty shows how productive this approach can be by looking at how Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) depict alternative configurations of Freud's "family romance." Walpole's gothic novel, instead of abiding by the logics of an Oedipal narrative, portrays a father who wishes to supplant his son and marry his son's fiancée. Reversing Freud's conception of normative female development, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe predicate the heroine's transition to adult heterosexuality on a reunion with the maternal: "The maternal figure in 'female gothic' holds out the possibility of love, of self-realization, and of escape from the confines of patriarchal culture" (15). Haggerty also draws out the erotic associations of Ellena's attraction to her mother, in effect queering the heterosexual romance in the novel. Haggerty convincingly shows that Vivaldi has to compete with Ellena's love for her mother before he can marry her and that he is rendered attractive only insofar as he resembles the [End Page 579] attributes of Ellena's mother (35). This approach results in similar findings in his analysis of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806), but in this instance the protagonist, Victoria, is negatively...

Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’ in Charlotte Dacre'sZofloya

Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’ in Charlotte Dacre's<i>Zofloya</i>

GOTHIC EXCESS AND AESTHETIC AMBIGUITY IN CHARLOTTE DACRE'S ZOFLOYA

Gothic writing has been defined as a writing of excess exploring transgressions and anxieties over cultural limits and boundaries. Within this context authors such as Lewis and Ann Radcliffe opened the way to a double approach of dealing with the gothic and its concerns, namely, the male and the female gothic. My aim throughout this essay will be to analyse Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806) within this critical controversy in order to prove how such a work does not fit an easy categorization and to show the implications of its challenging unsuitability. I will also examine how Charlotte Dacre challenges traditional boundaries concerning female authorship (behaving herself badly) and how her work opens new paths to explore issues on femininity and empowered women, apart from many other interesting concerns on class and racial conflicts.

The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, and: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue (review)

Reviewed by: The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, and: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue Roger Luckhurst (bio) Piya Pal-Lapinski , The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), xx + 156 pages, paperback, $24.95 (ISBN 1 58465 429 5). Christine Ferguson , Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) x + 192 pages,hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 7546 5082 0). Both volumes, although from very different areas of cultural inquiry and method, attempt to describe the flickering ambiguity of a marginal figure in Victorian society. Pal-Lapinski examines the odalisque, the exotic woman, a being without racial or geographic fixity, who flits through Southern Europe, Arabia and India unnerving colonial commentary wherever she appears. Ferguson focuses on the articulate brute or savage, another shifting marker with distinctly contradictory roles in Victorian philology, anthropology, biology and the late Victorian romance. Both critics also tend to regard popular forms as the primary vehicle for the cultural articulation of their ambiguous figures. Otherness is therefore redoubled: marginal figures in marginal texts. Pal-Lapinski's slim but dense volume owes much of its theoretical armature to post-colonial criticism. The exotic woman, the woman of the harem or zenana, was the locus of repulsion/attraction in travel narratives, paintings and novels. Due to the different patterns of colonial engagement, the French tended to be obsessed with the Arabian or North African figure, the English with the women of the Indian sub-continent. In fact, she convincingly suggests we should extend this feminine trope into Europe (the exoticism of the Southern Italian or Spanish woman) and also use it to read the dense and contradictory [End Page 142] investments of French and English writers in Egypt: 'the exotic female body has always been inscribed by a kind of métissage, a racial elusiveness' (xv). Pal-Lapinski suggests that much criticism has regarded the figure of the odalisque as a figure of oppression or domination.In what is now a familiar move, suitably deferential to Edward Said's foundational Orientalism but seeking to move beyond it, the book proposes a refinement that suggests that nineteenth-century discourses of exoticism 'produce the body of the odalisque via a dissident textuality that resists closure and implodes the imperatives of ethnography, threatening the coherence of "whiteness" as a racial category' (xvi). The exotic woman may well be the mark of racial subjugation, but also of defiance, evasion or subversion, and these disturbances can be traced in colonial texts. In her opening contextual chapter, Pal-Lapinski usefully situates the interplay of travel narratives (Julia Pardoe's Cityof the Sultan), painting (Ingres' Turkish Bath or Frederick Lewis' The Hareem), sensational colonial exposés (Taylor's Confessions of a Thug) and Gothic novels (Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or the Moor) in the production of the figure of the exotic woman. Chapter two explores the fearful figure of the female poisoner in Wilkie Collins' Armadale and Legacy of Cain. Chapter three looks at exotic woman as vector of disease in colonial settings, moving beyond familiar discussions about the racializing of successive epidemics of Asiatic cholera to consider the Anglo-Indian novels of Flora Steel. Chapter four unearths the medical concerns about the effect of the tropics on the reproductive capacities of white settler women, linking the fear of 'tropical ovaries' or 'deranged menstruation' with the fevered fantasy of Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm. Chapter five also works hard to link together the Orientalized jewellery of René Lalique (worn by Sarah Bernhardt and associated not just with daring actresses but also the exoticized demi-monde of bejewelled courtesans) and Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars. Here the female mummy's infiltration of a strapping young English lass is a 'hybrid vampire odalisque-queen that not only signified the fragility of narratives of progress but also transforms imperial history into nightmare' (107). The book ends with a chapter on the figure of the Italian opera diva, looking at the supernatural fictions of Bulwer-Lytton...

Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.

The Children Will Be “Subject to the Infamy of Their Deluded and Unfortunate Mother”

This article discusses an example of the mutual influence of law, culture and politics, within the modes of the gothic and the sublime. In the context of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English laws of adultery and of child custody, suppression of the woman’s interest was technically justified by the existence of certain formal requirements, or certain presumptions; the resulting environment corresponded to a key trope of the “gothic” novel. That suggests the closeness of the link between such laws, some of which really originated in gothic law, and the development of the literary gothic, generically fascinated by ancestry and fraught with anxiety about the family, sexuality, and power. The core of the argument is an analysis of two texts which relate to a specific example, the rhetoric of the “criminal conversation” adultery action. Charlotte Dacre’s notorious novel of 1806, Zofloya, or the Moor, can be read as a reaction, which takes its rhetoric of social damage to a catastrophic extreme. The public letter of crim con “victim” Caroline Norton on the Infant and Child Custody Bill of 1839 attempts the opposite, to reconcile the law’s atavism with enlightened ethics and to imagine a sublime resolution without catastrophe.

Women's Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley , and: The History of Gothic Fiction (review)

REVIEWS307 EJ. Clery. Women's Gothicfrom Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House, 2000. viii + 168pp. £9.99. ISBN 0-7463-0872-8. Markman Ellis. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. ix + 261pp. US$22. ISBN 0-7486-1195-9. EJ. Clery's Women's Gothicfrom Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley and Markman Ellis's TheHistory ofGothicFiction exemplify some recent trends in the study of the Gothic: an historical rather than psychoanalytic approach, an interrogation of the kind of feminist criticism that focuses on patriarchal oppression and on the supposed difference ofwomen's writing, an exploration of the interplay between high and popular culture, and the rejection of a simplistic opposition between the Enlightenment and the Gothic. Clery's book has the clearer and stronger argument; Ellis's reveals the more extensive research and is especially enjoyable to read. Clery begins by focusing on Sarah Siddons in the role of Lady Macbeth. What women Gothicists take from the actor and her signature role is "the Siddonian ideal"—that of "a character elevated beyond the limitations of her sex" (p. 110), in part by exemplifying "the key passion of the modern commercial state"—economic self-interest (p. 19). While Clery sometimes seems overly insistent in bringing in every possible connection to Siddons, overall she is successful in showing that seemingly incidental contact between Gothic writers and Siddons had a crucial impact on their work. Clery, who examines notjust the novel but the whole "variety of Gothic modes" (p. 99), is concerned with the late eighteenth-century resurgence of tragedy and with what she terms "the novelization of tragedy" (p. 41). Ellis begins his book with a discussion of three examples: the London surgeon John Sheldon's coldly scientific mummification of his beloved in 1799, the mystery ofthe black veil from Radcliffe's TheMysteries ofUdolpho, and the conjunction between folklore and science in Fuseli's The Nightmare. Unfortunately, the second example does not inspire reader confidence: Ellis mistakenly cites the passage when Emily St Aubert actually sees a corpse instead ofwhen she mistakes a waxen effigy for a corpse. He more successfully analyses the interplay between public Enlightenment science and hermetic alchemy in Frankenstein's creation ofhis monster, and between enlightened antiquarian research and folk culture in the case of vampire tales. The opposition between folklore and science, moreover, recapitulates the opposition between romance and novel. Ellis argues that die Gothic novel reconciles the two fictional forms, since it "approaches the supernatural as if it can be described or observed in the mode of formal realism" (p. 22). The Gothic functions historically for Ellis by presenting a "contest between rival forms of thought" or by transgressing the boundaries between them (pp. 227, 228). 308 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:2 Clery distinguishes "women's Gothic" from "Female Gothic," the latter term referring to the purported preference ofwomen writers for the novel of terror over the novel of horror. Charlotte Dacre is important for Clery's argument, since recent critics have found in Zojloya a rejection ofdie Female Gothic. The concept of "women's Gothic" focuses on "the author's claim to imagination, genius, originality, and on her aim to represent and transmit powerful emotion in a way which . . . responds to the demands and opportunities of the marketplace" (p. 126). Clery, whose favourite word in this book is "affect," claims that what "most crucially characterizes" Gothic literature is the investigation ofthe passions (p. 117). While Markman Ellis retains the category "Female Gothic," he appears to agree that an exploration of the passions is a defining characteristic of the mode. He defines the Gothic as an experimental "tone or mood" deriving from the "culture ofsentimentalism " (pp. 8, 9) and as an unsettling "almost hallucinatory tone" (p. 217), which may residt in "epistemological insecurity" (p. 128). Ellis believes that Matthew Lewis understood the feverish tone of Radcliffe's fiction "as a discourse on the passions" (p. 84). One wonders if it is necessary to de-emphasize didacticism to the extent Clery does in order to focus on the passions. She appears to think that the best way "to help create a market for early women's writing" (p. 24) is...