The ‘Voluptuous’ Language of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

Claudia Stumpf

There is no getting around the fact that Zofloya is a very strange work. The plot is comprised of seemingly endless and strangely unrelated incidents, the main character is both viciously violent and strangely appealing, and the writing is either intriguingly florid or frustratingly over the top. While critics only began to pay significant attention to Zofloya ten years ago, since then critical energy has been primarily focused on trying to make sense of Dacre’s social “project.”  The conversation about this novel, which centers around the relationship between a violent female protagonist and a Moor who turns out to be the devil, has focused on whether or not Dacre is racist or feminist, conservative or progressive, or something in between. This critical response is not simply a product of a particular critical moment, or our critical desire to identify female writers as either feminist or not.  Rather, it is a reflection or a product of elements of the text itself. The excess that is present in the language and structure of the novel points to the pleasure and danger of an excess that allows for the simultaneous presence of opposites rather than a binary opposition.

      While Dacre is uninterested in working outside of the terms of the social and cultural debates of her time (or is perhaps unable to escape them), she is interested in refusing to choose one side of any of the binary oppositions within which she is working. In this paper I explore this refusal to accept an either/or scenario in terms of gender and in terms of moral culpability, but I believe that similar claims could be made in terms of the racial and national politics of this work, which have provoked equal difficulty among critics who try to find a clear ideology within Zofloya. While Dacre’s work is certainly not apolitical in its engagement with gender, sexuality, race, and aesthetics, it resists, at every turn, our desire to identify it as taking a firm stance pro or con any of the debates that it raises, forcing us to question our own categories of critical and political analysis.