Haunted Spaces and Powerful Places: Reconfiguring the Doppelganger in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (Critical Essay‪)‬

'The Moor smile--'Your fate, your fortune, fair Signora, will be of your own making: I am but the humble tool, the slave of your wishes; your co-operation with me alone can render me powerful." (Zofloya 168) Charlotte Dacre's novel Zofloya, first published in 1806, received wide acclaim and harsh criticism for its astounding depiction of female violence and sexuality. Very little is known of Charlotte Dacre's life including the actual date of her birth. However, what scholarship exists on her novels indicates her placement outside typical female authors of the gothic. Nowhere is this better represented than in Zofloya through the novel's protagonist, Victoria de Loredani. Adriana Craciun's introduction to the 1997 edition offers substantial insight into the motive behind Victoria's lustful murder spree, acknowledging Dacre's non-conventional use of the gothic to locate passion and destruction as pleasurable female experiences. While I agree with Craciun, as well as other scholars, who argue that female passivity is punished in the novel, I don't necessarily believe that female monstrosity is condemned as well. Rather, it is female rebellion that actually triumphs by novel's end--a daring move for the female gothic novelist at the turn of the nineteenth century.