University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

(USC Thesis Other)

Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content BETWEEN GOOD GIRLS AND VILE FIENDS:
FEMININITY , ALTERITY AND FEMALE HOMOSOCIALITY IN THE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH GOTHIC NOVEL
by
Milena Gueorguieva
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
August 2010
Copyright 2010

Milena Gueorguieva
Table of Contents
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Beauty, the Beast and the Moor: Female Virtue and
Empire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: or the Moor
34
Chapter 2: 'Smoke and Mirrors': Femininity as Phantasmagoria in
Charlotte Brontë's Villette.
107
Chapter 3: What Lies Between: Balkan Alterity and Gender in Bram
Stoker's Dracula
169
Conclusion 241
Bibliography 249
Abstract
This dissertation examines a selection of nineteenth-century Gothic
novels and analyzes the types of gender, sexuality, and alterity discourses that
these novels participate in and at the same time engender. The three main texts
that I explore in this project -- Zofloya: Or, the Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre,
Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker -- center
on the question of female virtue as it pertains to sexual desire and autonomy but
also as a nodal point in articulations of Englishness in nineteenth-century Britain.
The figurations of alterity in these novels are essential to articulations of
femininity. More importantly, the deployment of the desires, bodies and images
of the Other to articulate virtuous English femininity points to the imbrication of
discourses on gender and national identity, and the centrality of both to the project
of Empire.
Even though this is mostly a project in the field of literary studies and
gender is its main concern, the complex discursive nature of gender mandates a
cross-sectional analysis of gender figurations in terms of alterity-- mostly ethnic
and racial but in terms of class as well. While it is not post-colonial in its
ambition and methodology, this project attempts to enrich our understanding of
the role of popular literature as a cultural artefact: it studies the Gothic novel as it
iv
participates in multiple discourses of alterity and nationality in the articulation of
normative femininity in nineteenth-century Britain. My interpretation of the
multiple intersections of discourses on femininity and alterity attempts to
complicate readings of the Gothic novel as preoccupied mostly with cultural
ideologies of domesticity and the role of woman in the domestic field as a social
domain separate from the project of Empire. Such articulations are not simply
external to an already existing monolithic and stable femininity but intrinsic to its
very coherence in the discursive field. In other words, this project does not study
images of the Other as figurations of difference that are contrasted to a virtuous
middle-class female body but rather attempts to show how these images of
otherness are themselves fundamental to the very coherence of both Englishness
and femininity.
Methodologically speaking, this study is most indebted to Foucault’s
conceptualization of the discursive nature of power and the engendering of the
subject in discourse but also augmented and enriched in important ways by
Butler’s revisions of Foucauldian theory in relation to the performative nature of
gender; Sedgwick’s concept of homosociality; and work by Said, Bhabha and
Žižek, among others, that has influenced my thinking about questions of alterity
in the structuration of gender.
v
The analysis occasionally but necessarily ventures beyond the literary text
to engage other contemporary discourses in British culture in the late eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries: painting, medicine, anatomy, conduct books and
travel literature. They all form, in various groupings at different times, a complex
grid of interconnected discourses and thus participate, together with the literary
text proper, in the “great surface network” of the Foucauldian power/knowledge
system.
vi
Introduction
Between Good Girls and Vile Fiends explores structurations of
normative femininiy at the intersection of discourses on female homosociality
and alterity in a selection of nineteenth-century Gothic novels. Even though
this is mostly a project in the field of literary studies and gender is its main
concern, the complex discursive nature of gender mandates a cross-sectional
analysis of gender figurations in terms of alterity-- both ethnic and racial.
While it is not post-colonial in its ambition and methodology, this study aims
to complicate interpretations of the Gothic novel as preoccupied mostly with
cultural ideologies of domesticity and the role of woman in the domestic field.
It explores cultural deployments of figurations of alterity that are not simply
external to a monolithic and stable femininity but intrinsic to its very
coherence in the discursive field. These issues I propose to study in the
context of female homosociality -- the relationships, environments and social
interactions between women -- which, I argue, is a factor in the articulation of
discourses on femininity. Methodologically speaking, my project is most
indebted to Foucault’s conceptualization of the discursive nature of power and
the engendering of the subject in discourse but also augmented and enriched
in important ways by Butler’s revisions of Foucauldian theory in relation to
the performative nature of gender; and work by Said, Bhabha and Žižek,
1
among others, in relation to questions of alterity in the structuration of
gender.
1
All three texts studied here -- Zofloya: Or, the Moor (1806) by
Charlotte Dacre, Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë and Dracula (1897) by
Bram Stoker -- center on the question of female virtue as it pertains to sexual
desire and autonomy but also as a nodal point in articulations of Englishness
in nineteenth-century Britain. The figurations of alterity in these novels are
essential to articulations of femininity. More importantly, the deployment of
the desires, bodies and images of the Other to articulate virtuous English
femininity points to the imbrication of discourses on gender and national
identity, and the centrality of both to the project of Empire. The Gothic as
genre hinges on two tropes that are particularly relevant to the goal of this
project. The first is the notion of the monstrous as an articulation of
difference, which the primary texts that I have chosen employ in relation to
ethnicity and race. The second is the centrality of gender in the Gothic tale.
While most of the critical attention that the Gothic has received centers either
on gender or on alterity, my goal in this project is to show how these two
discourses are interdependent.
2
1
More specific elaboration of methodology will follow further in this introduction and in the
respective chapters of this dissertation.
My study will occasionally but necessarily venture beyond the literary
text to engage other contemporary discourses, what Sander Gilman aptly
named the “parallel fictions” (Difference and Pathology 27-28)
2
of British
culture in the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century: painting,
medicine, anatomy, conduct books and travel literature. They all form, in
various groupings at different times, a complex grid and thus participate,
together with the literary text proper, in the “great surface network” of the
Foucauldian power/knowledge system (History of Sexuality 106).
The literary and cultural phenomena addressed by this dissertation
span a hundred years and thus pose certain methodological and conceptual
issues. The most important among them seems to be: how is one to
conceptualize discourses on femininity and alterity in cultural and literary
environments as profoundly varied as the Romantic era and the Victorian
age? My approach to this concern is twofold. First, this project does not
represent a historical trajectory of the Gothic novel, nor is it intended to be a
history of discourses on femininity and alterity. It is designed to provide
synchronic analysis of cultural articulations of gender and alterity manifested
in specific literary works at particular points in the nineteenth century in
3
2
The set of “parallel fictions” that I engage differs from that of Gilman who is more
interested in scientific discourses like anthropology, biology, while I am applying his term
more loosely to the arts and non-fiction texts.
order to demonstrate the complex workings of gender in the formation and
function of the English middle class in relation to empire. Second, having
adopted this “case study” approach, I have attempted to be particularly
attentive to questions of cultural and historical specificity that had emerged in
my work. For instance, even though attitudes of race at the beginning and the
end of the century seem to be equally easily subsumed under the category of
the supremacy of the ideologically established supremacy of the English race,
they differ in their imaginings and articulations. Early nineteenth-century
representations are still redolent of the Enlightenment idealization of the Other
as a “noble savage,” while fin-de-siècle discourses tend to construct the Other
as a degenerate, or a being occupying a lower step on the evolutionary
ladder.
This project focuses on the Gothic and not on the realist novel of the
nineteenth century because the Gothic novel seems to thematize best the
discontinuities and interconnections between gender and alterity in the
domestic realm. This is not at all to say that the realist domestic fiction of the
nineteenth century does not engage questions of the cultural and material
presence of the colonial Other in the domestic sphere. The examples are
plentiful: in Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram owes his magnificent
estate to his possessions in Antigua, and David Copperfield's Mr. Micawber
4
achieves success in Australia. Kashmir shawls are mentioned in Gaskell’s
North and South and Indian textiles are used as a metaphor to define the
moral development of Molly Gibson in another one of her novels, Wives and
Daughters.
3
It seems that in many domestic novels in the realist tradition, the
colonial is present as a facet of metropolitan life. Nineteenth-century Gothic
novels, on the other hand, seem to not only thematize the presence of empire
in metropolitan culture, but to do so by presenting the domestic and the home
as a contested site of turmoil, a discursive field in which both gender and
nationhood are constructed in the relationship with the colonial Other. In this
respect, it is quite telling that in a study by Timothy L. Carens entitled
Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel three out of the
six primary texts can be in fact identified as Gothic: Jane Eyre, Wuthering
Heights, and The Moonstone. Even though Carens places the emphasis in his
study on the domestic, the overlap with the Gothic reverberates with my
attempt to read home and femininity through alterity.
4

5
3
Suzanne Daly mentions both of these examples in her work on the cultural appropriations of
colonial commodities wherein the objects serve “at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as
markers of proper Englishness” (238). See “Kashmir Shawls in Mid-Victorian Novels” and
“Spinning Cotton: Domestic and Industrial Novels”.
4
There is yet another group of Victorian novels that deal with empire: the “Imperial Gothic”,
as Patrick Brantlinger called them; these are the works of Haggard, Kipling and Stevenson.
Although they are concerned with questions of national identity and colonialism, these works
do not foreground gender and sexuality in relation to domesticity. See Patrick Brantlinger,
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
In their intense preoccupation with articulations of social
constructions of femininity and desire, Gothic novels have attracted a great
deal of critical attention over the last several decades. Alongside issues of
form, convention and readerly pleasure (the production of horror and the role
of excess, both representational and exegetical), students of the Gothic have
concerned themselves with the social and political implications of this
popular, and perceivably frivolous, genre. Critics have explored Gothic
romances as articulating issues of class, gender and sexuality; they have
studied the production and consumption of Gothic as part of a broader social
debate in which female virtue was present as a focal point of discussion on
nationalism, the family and the consolidation of middle-class values. While
the above list comprises the concerns of Gothic romance scholars
collectively, most of the individual works that engage Gothic novels seem to
focus on one or the other: either gender or alterity.
The legacy and the meaning of Gothic romances have been a major
point of contention among Gothic scholars. Study of the “classical” Gothic
romance -- the novels produced between the 1760s and 1820s is poised
between an affirmation of their radical potential to articulate female
6
autonomy and a critique their conservative ideological functions
5
. In her study
of women’s literature, Literary Women, Ellen Moers championed the
subversive potential of Gothic, claiming that the genre defied the controlled
and limited sphere of female domesticity by presenting women with a fantasy
world of adventures and “distant journeys without offending the proprieties”;
a world in which the villain is no more than a necessary vehicle for the
characters to “do what they can never do alone” (167). Less celebratory, but
still insisting on the radical potential of Gothic, is Margaret Ann Doody’s
analysis of the form whose major tenet is that through figuring the actual
female nightmare of oppression and enclosure the genre is a form of social
protest. Similarly, Kate Ferguson Ellis’s The Contested Castle illustrates how
Gothic participates in the social legitimation of middle class values.
Ferguson argues that it establishes virtue as residing with the tortured heroine,
as it simultaneously reveals the house as a prison and consequently makes
problematic the safety of the domestic sphere under capitalism.
The above approaches indicate the cultural importance of female virtue
as it exceeds the realm of the domestic to include the formation of middle-
class subjectivity itself. In his study of late eighteenth-century women’s
7
5
Gothic writers themselves, such as Charlotte Smith in The Old Manor House (1793) and
Wollstonecraft in The wrongs of Woman (1798) made fiction writing an overt vehicle of social
critique.
writing, Women Writing and Revolution, Garry Kelly establishes the centrality
of female subjectivity and domesticity in relation to ideas of community,
region, and nation, and argues that women writers “initiated the feminization
of culture and civil society in the cultural revolution and the Revolution
debate” ( 32). By “cultural revolution” Kelly means the shift in technologies
of subjectivity and modes of knowledge production and dissemination that
assisted the middle class in wresting power away from the court and the
gentry and serving their professional and economic interests. In her study of
female social desirability, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of
the Novel, Nancy Armstrong similarly argues for the primacy of gender in the
symbolic structures of culture that shape not only the domestic but the public
and the political as well
6
. Armstrong asserts that “the modern individual is
first and foremost a female” (66). My only addition to this argument would be
that in the context of imperial culture, the modern subject is the woman that
emerges in the contested relationship with the Other.
8
6
Kelly and Armstrong are primarily interested in the ideological genesis of the middle class
around the kernel of normative femininity, a process that peaked in the end of the eighteenth
century. Others have engaged similar questions about the workings of gender in the Victorian
era. Mary Poovey, more specifically, identifies ideals of femininity as the formative force
behind the ideological formation of the middle class. Cf. Uneven Developments: The
Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Elizabeth Langland, on the other
hand, establishes women's centrality in the circulation of cultural capital. See Nobody’ s
Angels; Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture.
Female virtue, as defined in the doctrine of sensibility and later modified
to accommodate shifting notions of propriety and femininity in the Victorian
era, thus presents a complex ideologeme and is controversially interpreted by
scholars as limiting or liberating. In her study of Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelly,
and Jane Austen, Mary Poovey articulates women writers’ struggle with the
restraints of a cultural feminine ideal, ‘the proper lady”, that promotes the
spiritual over the physical (and the sensual) and that privileges selflessness
and passivity over self-assertion and ambition. Albeit a cultural stereotype, the
all-pervasive presence of the ideal of the ‘proper lady’ commanded women
writers to respond to it. Ranging from inhibition of creativity, to
accommodation, to subversion, the creative responses Poovey traces point to
the impossibility for a writer “to flee the Proper Lady’s shadows” (The Proper
Lady and the Woman Writer vii). The same seemingly stifling feminine ideal,
however, is taken up by Diane Hoeveler and interpreted as a liberating gender
performance. In Gothic Feminism, Hoeveler discusses Gothic figurations of
female propriety as participating in a process of gender miming, establishing
what she calls a “professional femininity -- a cultivated pose, a masquerade of
docility, passivity, wise passiveness, and tightly controlled emotions” that can
render women “covertly powerful [while] maintaining the trappings or at least
the illusion of the heroine’s original identity as a complaisant and
9
malleable” (1995, xv, xvi). Hoeveler’s analysis moves beyond questions of
psychological interiority to explore a series of ideologies constructed by
Gothic writers that allow female characters, and readers, to gain fictitious
mastery over a gender-oppressive political system.
Some of these spaces of mastery in the Gothic that feminist scholars
have claimed for women, however, are only possible through the cultural
appropriation of the other. This can be a a black body onto which to transpose
desire and thus gain access to the equivocal position of professional
femininity outlined by Hoeveler, which is the case of Lucy, the demure
narrator of Charlotte Brontë’ s Villette. Alternatively, it could be the eroticized
body of the Oriental Other that can provide a fantasmatic space for the
articulation of female desire as represented in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: Or,
the Moor. Or it could be the vampiric body in Dracula, interpreted as as an
embodiment of abstract sexual deviance, without taking into account the
prominent foreignness of the character -- an approach many critics have
taken
7
-- that allows for the allocation of potentially subversive spaces that
can accommodate female sexual deviance. Thus, my argument is wary of
celebrating female agency when the route leading to it goes through cultural
appropriations of the Other. Consequently, an important goal, or rather
10
7
For an overview of the critical approaches to Bram Stoker;’s novel see the opening section
of chapter 3 in this dissertation.
motivation, in this project is to avoid replicating on the level of analysis the
process of production of alterity already in place in the primary texts by
shifting perspective and critically examining questions of female agency in
relation to empire.
Much of the critical discussion on female autonomy has revolved around
social and sexual transgression, whose outcome is primarily seen as
containment and erasure of female desire in the Gothic. As Carol Ann Howells
has suggested in Love, Mystery, and Misery villainesses are no exceptional
phenomenon in the Gothic tradition but the genre usually condemns sexually
and socially transgressive women to fast demise (Howells refers to Victoria
from Zofloya to support her general claim about the role of the villainess in
Gothic romances), thus containing desire within a normalizing narrative that
functions, this argument goes, as a cautionary tale. I would like to depart
from a reading of Gothic as ultimately normalizing female social and sexual
deviance and reexamine figurations of female subject positions in relation to
dominant discourses. The figurations of female conformity or deviance need
not be contained in the dichotomy of subversion and normalization. They can
also present a complex negotiation of gender and alterity that can weave
together subversive and normalizing elements. Brontë’s Lucy, for example, is
able to carve out a niche for herself as an independent woman in a
11
heteronormative world that is founded on marriage, but she is only able to do
so by actually first masquerading as the epitome of a domestic woman.
Most of the representations of gender deviance or conformity in the
novels under scrutiny here emerge in the context of female homosocilaity. My
project will analyze female homosociality as a discursive space for negotiating
sexual and homosocial desires “between women”. Sedgwick’s notion of
homosocial desire is especially useful since it brings to the foreground the
erotic and social underpinnings of relationships between women. It combines
the Freudian understanding of drive (a conceptualization that goes beyond
the singularity of emotion or the monadic entity of an affective state to
emphasize a relational function) with the socio-historical concept of social
cohesion -- “the social force… the glue that shapes an important
relationship” (Sedgwick 2) -- to articulate homosocial desire as a dynamic
structure subject to social permutations.
In her study of male homosociality in nineteenth-century British
literature and culture, Sedgwick claims that “ [I]n any male dominated society,
there is a relationship between male homosocial ( including homosexual)
desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal
power” (Between Men 25). As a result, even though my critical attempt
seems to be inspired by Sedgwick’s work on male homosociality, power and
12
literary representation, her theoretical framework, developed specifically to
theorize the centrality of male homosociality to gender power asymmetries,
has serious limitations when applied to female homosociality.
Sedgwick argues that unlike its male counterpart, female homosociality
is marginal to existing power structures. It is commonplace in Feminist
thought to critique Sedgwick’s understanding of a seamless female
homosocial continuum which the author contrasts to the disruptions and
fragmentation present in its male counterpart. Sedgwick implicitly privileges
the position of the oppressed woman as one that necessarily opens the
possibility for relationships of solidarity and harmony with other women.
Sedgwick makes the important assertion that “in a society where women and
men differ in their access to power, there will be important gender differences
in the structure and constitution of sexuality” (2)). Yet Sedgwick also assumes
that because of their limited access to power, women necessarily form a
continuum of nurturing and supportive relationships: “the bond of mother and
daughter […] of sister and sister, “women’s friendship, ‘networking’ and the
active struggles of feminism” (2) all form a continuum, a community within
which “women who love women, women who teach, study, nurture, suckle,
write about, march for, vote for, give jobs to, or otherwise promote the
interests of other women, are pursuing congruent and closely related
13
activities” (3)
8
. Nevertheless, the possibility of a female homosocial
continuum of nurturance is not central to this project. In fact, my analysis will
actually focus on the complicity of female homosociality with certain
patriarchal structures that determine not just gender asymmetries but those of
class and race as well.
Granted that female homosociality is not central to Sedgwick’s analysis,
her articulation of the parameters of male homosociality nevertheless opens
the possibility to explore homosocial relationships between women – ranging
from family bonds, to romantic rivalries, to homicidal violence – as an arena
of active negotiation of the value and valences of particular cultural and social
practices and ideologies (such as courtship, marriage and romantic love) that
codify female sexual desire. Without idealizing the subversive potential of
female homosociality, as occupying the fringes of a dominant culture, I will
employ Sedgwick’s concept of homosocial desire to articulate the
accommodations, revisions and responses that relationships between women
presented to dominant heteronormative practices.
It will be my contention in this project that female homosociality serves
in fact as a discursive field within which both gender deviance and conformity
14
8
These same bonds Adrienne Rich describes as a “lesbian continuum” in her essay
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”.
are constructed. It will be crucial for my project to analyze the culturally
specific forms that the articulations of desire and virtue took in nineteenth-
century Britain and the cultural ideologies that informed them. The period of
one hundred years between the 1750s and the 1850s was marked by profound
changes in the realms of economy, ideology that secured the dominant
position of the middle class in the social hierarchical structure. The political
and economical agenda of the middling ranks necessarily contained a cultural
component since, as members of a revolutionary class, they had also to
“challenge and oust [the aristocracy and gentry] in the realm of religion,
philosophy, art, morality, language and manners” (Gramsci Prison Notebooks
452-453).
The doctrine of sensibility, the highly esteemed notion of “sentimental
virtues” operating as an innate moral faculty at work in each individual,
formed the core of middle-class ideology that will later congeal in the ideal of
woman as the guarantor of virtue and the manifestation of virtuous
Englishness in the Victorian era. By effectively reconciling individual appetite
and the pursuit of pleasure with the notion of collective well-being,
sentimental ideology allowed the rising class to “ennoble and justify almost
all facets of [its] behavior: aesthetic, ethical, economic and political” (Poovey,
Ideology 307). An important aspect of the ideological struggle to secure
15
cultural hegemony to the middle class was the gendering of middle-class
virtue as feminine – a process of ideological change in the late eighteenth
century that Garry Kelly has aptly called the “feminization of culture and civil
society” (32). Women’s role as educators and mothers was deemed central to
the regeneration and preservation of social virtue and thus surpassing their
parenting functions to extend to a perfection of the “opposite sex” and society
in general.
The late eighteenth-century cultural ideal of the woman of sensibility
mandated that the cultivation of moral virtue should be founded on the
rigorous discipline of woman’s pursuit of pleasure. The idea of sensibility,
when applied to women, necessarily evoked the notion of delicacy: a code
word for sexual purity and innocence of the female mind in matters sexual.
For a woman to possess delicacy, she had carefully to monitor her indulgence
in sensual pleasures. Numerous conduct manuals advised women to practice
temperance in all aspects of their lives. Women’s talk, posture, dress, eating,
theater going and novel reading were strictly controlled and regulated through
carefully and minutely articulated proscriptions
9
. The rhetoric of these
manuals operated on the contradictory “nerve theory” premise claiming that
16
9
The use and discipline of pleasure are discussed by Mary Poovey in The Proper Lady, and a
number of articles published in The Ideology of Conduct (1987) edited by Nancy Armstrong
and Leonard Tannenhouse.
while women’s finer, more delicate nerve constitution made them less capable
than men of “running into the … Indiscretions or Excess of Sensual
pleasures” (Cheyne qtd. in Barker-Benfield 24), it also rendered them more
easily emotionally and sexually excitable which in turn could compromise
their socially beneficial roles as mothers, sisters, and daughters. It became
clear that the redefined function of women in society instead of empowering
women, required them to discipline their feelings and pursuit of pleasure. In
the words of Barker-Benfield, "sensibility was a positive female characteristic
when it was combined with mind and will, albeit will for self-
governance" (361).
Given the circumscribed lives women led, it was the life of domesticity
that could serve as the site of moral education and the perfection of the human
kind. Even though the distinction between the public world and the private
arena resulted from gradual social, political and technological change whose
consequences for women cannot be uniformly subsumed under the category of
gender oppression
10
, it still served to demarcate a boundary between
homosocial and heterosocial interactions and relationships. While men had
17
10
Linda Colley argues that “those who argue that the period witnessed an actual contraction in
women’s public role in Britain as elsewhere and an unprecedented confinement of women to
the private sphere confuse … angry polemic and symbolic gestures with what was happening
in fact” and continues to state that in late eighteenth-century Great Britain the “boundaries
supposedly separating men and women were in fact unstable and becoming more
so” (Britons: The Forging of a Nation, 252).
more mobility and moved more freely between the two sectors, they also
enjoyed exclusively homosocial spaces such as the club, the coffee house, the
hunting group, or the political gathering.
11
For women the public realm could
only offer recreational spaces that were exclusively heterosocial– parks, balls,
and pumping rooms –and as such had no equivalent to the “daily, public,
institutional, homosociality of men” (Barker-Benfield 54).
Female homosociality was thus confined mostly to the private realm
12

and articulated in familial terms. Women were mothers, daughters, and sisters.
Unlike men, who were rarely educated at home after the age of six, they spent
significantly longer time under the strong influence of their female kin, both
in their childhood and youth as well as in their adult years. [“Except for a
possible year or two of boarding school and visits to relatives, a daughter
could expect to remain living with her mother until (and if) she
married” (Davidoff and Hall 341)]. Additionally, a high number of children in
18
11
On homosociality and the middle-class formation of the club, see “Pleasures Engendered by
Gender: Homosociality and the Club” by Marie Mulvey Roberts (Pleasure in the Eighteenth
Century, 1996). Even though the author sets out to discuss homosociality as it pertains to the
clubs of both genders, it is important to acknowledge that women’s clubs comprised an
insignificant number to the numerous and various men’s clubs she discusses.
12
I am not arguing for the impermeability of the domestic arena as exclusively female
homosocial space; quite the opposite: the rise of British capitalism and the emergence of a
culture of consumerism actually softened the home enough for men to be drawn back to it
and forgo some of the pleasures of the public and the coffee houses (Barker-Benfield 131). In
terms of social interaction, a major ideological preoccupation of the late eighteenth century
and during the Victorian era was the ability of a good wife and mother to draw her husband
back into the morally elevated realm of the family and away from the material greed of the
market place.
the middle-class family, born over a long period of time (thus resulting in vast
age differences), and combined with high mortality and morbidity rates
among parents (Davidoff and Hall 395), necessitated that single women act as
surrogate mothers to younger siblings or related children of the female sex
13
.
Even female friendships were often cast in familial terms, as in the case of a
young woman who wrote to her older friend to express her respect for her
calling it “childlike reverence” (qtd. in Davidoff and Hall 403).
Having stated the heightened ideological importance of the family as a
site for regeneration and preservation of middle-class virtues, we can see how
female homosociality, based to a large extent on women’s roles as educators
and caregivers, stood in direct relationship to the establishment of a code of
middle-class ethics that posited virtue as simultaneously residing with the
“faire sex” and still in need of rigorous cultivation. On the one hand, women
were posited as inherently morally superior to men, possessing “the most
amiable tendencies and affections implanted in human nature, of modesty, of
delicacy, of sympathizing sensibility, of prompt active benevolence, of
warmth and tenderness of attachment” (qtd. in Poovey, Ideology 309). On the
19
13
The demographics of the middle-class family affected male homosocial relationships as
well, but they still operated in the public realm involving social and political patronage on the
part of well-established men who were assisting younger male kin in their entry into the
professional and the political worlds. See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 380-405.
other hand, however, women as mothers had to ensure the cultural
transmission of the middle class values to their daughters or to the younger
women within their homosocial circle.
As a result, while male homosocial relationships involved various
political and social privileges ensured by “friendship, mentorship, and
entitlement” (Between Men Sedgwick 1), the social codification of female
homosociality constructed as the idealized and romanticized nurturing
relationships between women within the bourgeois family could actually
perpetuate the social and sexual subjugation of women. On the other hand,
such homosocial spaces could offer the possibility for subject positions that
offered a certain level of personal and financial autonomy to women. The
female principal of a girls boarding school, for example, is one such position
and Lucy Snowe manages to achieve it. Or, the exclusively female
homosocial spaces could indeed have the potential for subversion and
therefore be subjected to rigorous discipline: Mina in Dracula has to
relinquish both her friendship with Lucy Westenra and her career as teacher in
order to be enthroned as the virtuous woman of the Victorian family in the end
of the novel.
At the same time, my discussion of domestic virtue and its figurations
in the Gothic novels of nineteenth-century Britain will attempt to show that
20
the discursive formation of the domestic more broadly and of middle-class
virtue more specifically were an integral part of the project of Empire. Even
though conduct books and moralist writing constructed the home as a safe
haven away from the dangers and the demands of the world, the domestic is
not only permeable but open to the world without. Bhabha articulates the
troubling relationship between the two as follows:
In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic
space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In
that displacement, the border between home and world
becomes confused; and uncannily, the private and the public
become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as
divided as it is disorienting ( “The World and the Home” 445).
Bhabha continues to clarify the threat of this fusion as a manifestation of the
Freudian unhomely: “the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the-
home-in-the-world” (445). This quotation resonates with a number of themes
in the Gothic: the role of home, the tenuous nature of cultural and
psychological boundaries and, most importantly, the disquieting feeling, the
chilling fear really, that the domestic space is invaded by an alien presence: a
ghost? The world? The other?
It is possible that in this case horror, which is often seen as the hallmark
of the Gothic novel, ensues partially from the invasion of “the world” into the
domestic space and that the home is not hermetically sealed but always
21
necessarily a “world-in-the-home [and] home-in-the-world” (445). The
premium importance of female domestic virtue within the middle-class
cultural ideology shows that the domestic field is both implicated in public
discourses and generated by them so that, in Bhabha’s words, “the private and
the public become a part of each other” (445) in the most intimate “recesses”
of the domestic (445) . The figuration of the domestic space is also a ‘world in
the home”; in other words, the intimate is shaped by the tensions between
home and world. Thus my discussion of gender and sexuality will explore the
complex ways in which these discourses are informed by questions of alterity.
I am inspired here by Ann Laura Stoler’s claim that nineteenth-century
bourgeois sexuality “emerged and was situated on an imperial landscape
where the cultural accouterments of bourgeois distinction were partially
shaped thorough contrasts forged in the politics of the language of race” (Race
and the Education of Desire 5). Thus, the Other is not marginal to the
workings of power in the metropole, rather, as Stoler points out, “bourgeois
identities in both metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded
by race” (7). An analysis of the role of alterity in the very process of
discursive formation of femininity more particularly, but by extension of the
middle-class subject as well, can bring to the foreground the role of
colonialism in the formation of the middle class. Ann Laura Stoler articulates
22
this same concern when she argues that “[c]olonialism was not a secure
bourgeois project. It was not only about the importation of middle-class
sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making [Stoler’s emphasis] of
them” (Race and the Education of Desire 99).
In the light of the discussion of race and bourgeois identity outlined
above, I would like to revisit Armstrong’s claim that “the modern individual is
first and foremost a female” (Desire and Domestic Fiction 66).
Understandably, as a rigorous scholar invested in questions of materiality,
Nancy Armstrong carefully grounds her argument in a discussion of literary
and moralist discourses in the end of the eighteenth century and contextualizes
her claim in the context of a shift in the focus of these discourses from the
aristocratic male as a guarantor of social order to the middle-class female
presiding over the domestic space. Thus, concludes Armstrong, “the domestic
ideal did not so much speak to middle-class interests as we now understand
them ... [as it] helped generate the belief that there was such a thing as a
middle class with clearly established affiliations before it actually
existed” (66). With regard to the idea of the ‘unfinished project’ of middle-
class genesis, Stoler and Armstrong seem to converge. Armstrong’s claim that
the ideal of the domestic woman serves as a kernel for discursive formation of
the middle class, rather than a political allegory that represents a pre-existing
23
identity, presupposes that culturally speaking there are no ‘completed’
middle-class sensibilities ready for export to the colonies.
At the same time, the role and position of this first “ female modern
individual” in bourgeois ideology is quite complicated. When interpellated
14

as a woman of domesticity, the modern female individual envisioned by
Armstrong is necessarily required to take up the position of an imperial
subject -- her homemaking skills, reproductive ability and mothering
competence are all central to articulations of Englishness and by extension are
seen as a manifestation of aptitude for imperial rule. As Spivak poignantly put
it, the female subject is engaged in the project of Empire “in two registers:
childbearing and soul making. The first is domestic-society- through-sexual-
reproduction cathected as "companionate love"; the second is the imperialist
project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission” (244).
In both of these registers -- “the childbearing and soul making” (244) of
empire -- she is not only an actor in ideological structurations of class and
femininity but also a participant in colonial discourse characterized,
according to Bhabha, by mimicry and repetition:
24
14
I am using Althusser’s notion of interpellation to emphasize the importance of the process
of subjectivization itself. Even though Althusser’s conceptualization of ideology is sometimes
seen as antithetical to Foucault’s power/knowledge framework, I believe that ALthusser’s
focus on the process of producing the subject in the act of interpellation is quite useful for
engaging questions of historical and cultural specificity. See Luis Althusser, “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”.
[C]olonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not
quite [Bhabha’s emphasis throughout ]. Which is to say that the
discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in
order to be effective , mimicry must continually produce its
slippage, its excess, its difference... [Its] authority ... is
therefore stricken by indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the
representation of difference that is itself a process of
disavowal. (Location of Culture 122).
The Other as the “almost the same but not quite” (122) is all pervasive in the
Post-Enlightenment English colonial imagination. It will suffice to take for
example the myriad of discourses -- visual, verbal, medical -- that
transmogrified Saartjie Baartman (a young Khoikoi woman exhibited as a
‘curiosity’ in the early nineteenth century in France and England) into the
‘Hottentot Venus’. The proliferation of discourses -- the caricatures, the
playbills, the aquatint posters but also the anatomical preparations produced of
her remains, most notably of her sexual organs, the wax figure of her
‘monstrously different’ body etc.
15
-- speaks to the compulsion of colonial
discourse to produce difference. At the same time, however, the difference is
disavowed in its insistence on sameness: she is a ‘Hottentot’ and a ‘Venus’ at
the same time. The very moniker, ‘Hottentot Venus,’ reveals the ambivalence
that propels colonial discourse: the desire for a malleable, pliable Other that
25
15
For further elaboration see the solid, although unorthodox, account of these discourses by
Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully.
can fulfill the role of the “same but not quite” (129). By casting her as a
‘Venus’, i.e. insisting on sameness, the Europeans can also freely construct
her non-caucasian body as monstrous. After all, in all of these representations,
Saartjie is portrayed as nothing more than a failed Venus with monstrously
huge buttocks. The consistency, not to say compulsion, with which all these
images portray her as nothing else but the monstrously oversized Venus is
indicative of the organizational principle of colonial discourse: it repetitively
has to produce “its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Location of Culture
122).
What Bhabha sees as the formative characteristic of colonial discourse,
however, seems also to be the marker of femininity in the novels I discuss in
this project. The articulations of normative femininity seem to be founded on
similar ambivalence: the threat that the virtuous domestic woman, the angel
in the house, will slip into its obverse; the suspicion that woman might not
coincide with her socially proscribed role; that she is walking the thin line
between “the same” and “the not quite” ( Bhabha Location of Culture 122).
It is this ambivalence that makes it possible in the culture of nineteenth-
century England to construct woman as both passionless and oversexed. This
is the nagging feeling that virgins might copulate with vampires (Dracula), or
that demure faithful women like Lucy Snowe who patiently wait for three
26
years for their fiance to return might not really want to marry him after all
(Villette). On a different level, “the sameness but not quite” of woman
divulges her problematic relationship to bourgeois subjectivity in a
patriarchal world, for, after all, as Spivak writes in passim (alluding to
Bhabha’s notion of mimicry), the English female subject herself is “not-quite/
not-male” ( 245). Thus I propose to study the processes of cultural negotiation
of discourses that allow or disallow certain subject positions for middle-class
women in the British Gothic novels of the nineteenth century, processes
through which femininity and its “not-quite/not-male[ness]” is implicated in
and generated by discourses of alterity.
* * *
The first chapter explores figurations of female violence and sexual
desire as they pertain to discourses on race and normative femininity in
Britain on the cusp of the nineteenth century. My analysis of Charlotte Dacre’s
Zofloya: Or, the Moor necessarily grapples with questions of female agency
and cultural ideology. On one level, Dacre’s novel might be interpreted as
part of a cultural debate about the role and place of women. Thus, it is
possible to read this tale of sexually motivated violent destruction as a
counterpoint, however controversial, to the prevailing feminine ideology

of
writers like Wollstonecraft and Austen who privilege rational domesticity as
27
the path to female agency and autonomy. It is possible to interpret Dacre’s
account of woman-on-woman violence as symbolic inversion of a cultural
paradigm whose only provision for women’s power was the power to exert
control over their own bodies and appetites. I will therefore show how
Zofloya constructs a discourse of female rage and uncontrollable passion

that
works to produce multiple articulations of relationships, identities and
positionalities at a major Foucauldean node of power production in the sex/
gender system: the family governed by the disciplining role of female
nurturance. My reading will implicitly augment Sedgwick’s model of male
homosociality and its centrality in the formation of normative femininity (as
well as other regulatory discourses such as domesticity, heteronormativity,
etc.) by establishing the role of female homosociality in the structuration of
discourses on sexuality and femininity.
At the same time, my analysis treats the novel as a point of
convergence for a number of discourses -- medical, moralist and visual -- in
relation to figurations of alterity, which are central to the novel. It
demonstrates the central place of race in the solidification of normative
middle-class femininity: the relentless pursuit of pleasure of the protagonist
Victoria and her insatiable sexual appetite code her as “black” or Other, and
thus transpose the desire onto the black body. My reading demonstrates the
28
complex ways in which “the Moor” -- as a composite of sexualized and
eroticized otherness in the British cultural imagination on the cusp of the
nineteenth century -- is employed to articulate, by way of negation, sexual
purity in the middle-class woman. Thus, the text of Zofloya seems to represent
a pivotal cultural moment in the process of gender and racial discourses: the
interconnection between the nascent, and still in the process of articulation,
discourse of female passionlessness and the solidification of a racialist
discourse of blackness that posits the black as sexually deformed and
monstrous.
The second chapter explores further the interconnection between
alterity and femininity by focusing more narrowly on the notion of feminine
display and its relation to subjectivity in the visual field. My analysis of
Charlotte Brontë's Villette explores an important cultural construct and
relation in mid-nineteenth-century British culture: that between surface and
essence, perception and the empirical world, artifice and authenticity. In that
sense, Lucy’s role as an observer and unreliable narrator thematizes both the
centrality of the gaze in the discourse on femininity and the technologies of
self available to her as a middle-class subject. Lucy’s constructions of women
as objects of display reveal an economy of social desirability where women’s
bodies, actions and wardrobe are all on display as a visible sign of either
29
virtue or material possessions. Lucy’s quiet resistance, her avoidance of
display thus mark her as a social deviant. As a result, she has to negotiate
several competing feminine ideals in the novel in order to be able to establish
her autonomy as an independent professional woman and an agent, rather than
an object, of the gaze.
To access this subject position, however, the exile Lucy, whose
relationship to Englishness is quite vexed, has to first establish herself as an
Englishwoman and then construct this position as the priveleged site of
authentic womanhood. In Villette virtuous femininity is thus not only tied to
Englishness but to empire building as well. The novel invokes a number of
ethnic others -- both European and colonial -- to inscribe them in the discourse
of Lucy’s subjectivization.
This discursive process is produced in the visual field through a
complex negotiation of subject positions in relation to the gaze. My analysis
demonstrates how female consumption of images of exoticized otherness is
established early in the novel and is central to female subjectivization. It
reveals the role of the domestic woman, the angel in the house, as produced
through female collusion with the mostly male-controlled project of Empire.
Even though Lucy does not choose the life of domesticity for herself, her
subject position as a woman of independent means is nevertheless determined
30
by her participation in colonial discourse. She establishes herself as a virtuous
woman and then as a subject of the gaze through the consumption of the
image of the Other. In her detailed description and contemplation of an
Orientalist paining entitled “Cleopatra”, Lucy constructs the black body as a
site for male voyeuristic enjoyment that is safely, for the Englishwoman,
transposed onto the foreign oversexed body. In turn, Lucy is able to evacuate
the position of woman as an object of the gaze whose representation functions
as a site for male voyeuristic pleasure and claim instead the position of a
viewing subject.
It is precisely the role of the Other in articulations of both femininity
and Englishness that is the main focus of my final chapter. The racial others
discussed in the first two chapters so far -- the Moor in Zofloya and the
Cleopatra in the painting in Villette -- seem to have been incorporated
seamlessly in discourses on normative femininity that posit the Other’s
sexual deviance as safely isolated from the notion of woman as a symbol of
the regeneration of Englishness. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, however, the
irreversibility of vampiric contamination complicates the conceptual divisions
between normative and deviant, self and Other, masculine and feminine,
English and alien. The third chapter demonstrates that Dracula represents a
specific form of alien monstrosity: the articulation of a Balkan other in the
31
English cultural imagination. I discuss the vampire in Stoker’s novel as a
technology of Balkan difference understood as the process of cultural
negotiation of nationhood and gender that divulges the fundamentally
ambiguous relationship that the English at the height of the British empire had
to the cultures and peoples of the Balkans. If Zofloya and Villette discursively
presented femininity (be that virtuous or demonic) as more or less stable
category -- a subject position clearly defined through establishing boundaries
between an imperial self and a dark debased other -- my analysis of Dracula
ultimately reveals the precarious nature of such devisions (in relation to both
femininity and masculinity) and the potential of both feminine virtue and
valorized nationhood to slip into their obverse, the perverse and the alien.
Furthermore, I explore these slippages on two different planes -- plot
and narrativization. The motor of the novel is the desire to detect, fix and
discipline the Other in the detective plot of Dracula. But there is another,
opposite to the first, force: the discursive interventions that the character of
Dracula represents (he bans the Western traveller Jonathan, from writing
letters home, for example). Thus it is the presence of the Other that incites and
produces discourses, rather than simply being an object of the discourses
produced by the imperial self. Dracula’s resistance to detection I read through
Bhabha’s idea of the Other as fetish. The fetishistic fantasy in which the Other
32
is figured activates a series of fetishistic substitutions necessary for the
discursive affirmation of a Western, civilized English self . In each one of
them, the English self needs to be repeatedly reaffirmed through the
reiteration and consequent disavowal of Balkan difference.
Crucial to this process of signification is the role of the virtuous
woman as a preserver of both Englishness and a manifestation of the
superiority of the English race. Dracula thematizes both the role -- it is the
paragon of virtue Mina that needs to be saved in the novel -- and its cultural
value in the coherence of both femininity and Englishness. Employing
Žižek’s notion of ideological quilting, I will demonstrate that it is Balkan
difference that serves as the “surplus value X” (Sublime object 109), the
nodal point around which the discourse of virtuous English femininity
congeals.
33
The Beauty, the Beast and the Moor: Female Virtue
and Empire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: or the Moor
Violent women in the Gothic novels are figured as the monstrous,
diseased and the deviant against whom the normal and socially acceptable can
be known. They take the role of a spectral presence. From the bleeding nun in
Lewis's The Monk to Jane Eyre’ s Bertha Mason, these are the women pushed
underground or up in the locked-up attic, so that the virtuous heroine can be
safely re-inscribed in the familial space at the end of the romance plot. The
eerie presence of the monstrous women quite literally haunts these texts to
ultimately make visible the social mechanism of presenting, creating and
policing bodies and desires in order to to construct the ideal of the pure and
virtuous woman.
Part and parcel of what has come to be labeled “the Gothic Deluge” –
the, mostly female, mass production and avid consumption of romance novels
between 1780s and 1820s – Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: Or, the Moor (1806) is
replete with stock characters and clichéd narrative devices: murder,
incarceration, illicit sexuality and the satanic supernatural. The novel unfolds
the story of the ambitious, desirous and cruel Victoria who progresses from a
haughty and spoiled girl to a manipulative liar to a heartless sadistic
34
murderess. The young Victoria poisons her husband, seduces her fianced
brother-in-law Henriquez and proceeds to persecute and imprison his innocent
and virtuous child-bride Lilla and finally stabs her to death at the culmination
of the novel. Throughout the novel, the protagonist is alternatively enamored
with, enticed and ultimately enslaved by Satan himself who has taken the
shape of the exotic, handsome and seductive Moorish slave Zofloya. The
character of the Moor is complexly, albeit contradictorily, developed in the
novel. Zofloya enters the narrative as the eroticized Orientalist figment of
Victoria’s imagination (he is conjured up in her lustful dreams); he then
morphs into the prototypical “noble-savage” figure familiar from eighteenth-
century literature and dramatic production. Later on , we learn that the
righteous slave has died, and Satan himself has invaded the empty shell of
his body to entice Victoria and lead her down the path of physical and spiritual
destruction.
At the time of its publication Zofloya received very few positive
reviews, and those mostly emphasized its derivative nature: “[this is a] novel
after the manner of [Mathew Lewis’] The Monk
16
– the same lust, the same
infernal agents, the same voluptuous language. What need we say
35
16
The inter-textual connections between Dacre’s novel and Lewis’ notorious and
tremendously popular text are not accidental: she indeed set out to rewrite Lewis' story of
sexual transgression and bloodthirsty ambition from a woman’s point of view.
more?” (Anon. Qtd in Craciun 372). What we might want to add, however, is
that the murders, torture, and persecution usually attributed to the Gothic
male villain are in this case meted out by a young woman; that the voluptuous
language in question articulates vehement female passion in a social climate
that ideologically posited women as asexual, while at the same time harboring
deep fears about the unruly nature of female sexuality. More importantly, the
text of Zofloya points to the uneasy connection between colonial ideology and
middle-class female virtue. The eponymous Moor is more than a token
character and signifier of racial prejudice. The coupling between the violent
woman and the satanic racial Other brings to the forefront the foreign bodies,
desires and Others that negatively defined sexual purity in the middle class
woman. Yet, to Dacre’s somewhat tepid supporter, these modifications of the
convention and ideological reworking of the genre are immaterial. Articulated
from a clearly masculinist position, the emphatic rhetorical question that the
reviewer asks -- “What need we say more?”-- implies genre and gender
hierarchies that place poetry and male authors at the top, romance novels and
women writers at the bottom. As a result, this statement violently erases the
feminine perspective prominent in Dacre’s novel. The sarcastic rhetorical
question performs what Theresa De Lauretis has aptly termed “violence of
rhetoric” – in its seemingly objective assessment, the review asserts the
36
culturally hegemonic position, which De Lauretis argues is “that of the male
or male-sexed subject” (242). For it is only those in the position of power who
can presume to speak from a universal, objective, or “ungendered” position
17
.
Subsuming differently gendered and socially positioned subjects under the
ubiquitous “we”, the reviewer implies that if Dacre is to be at all considered
as a writer – and many were not sure that romance writers qualified as such –
she was to be relegated to the ungendered, and yet inferior, position of an
imitator, and that, we are told, exhausts the discussion: “What need we say
more?” (Anon. Qtd in Craciun 372).
A good number of reviewers, however, had to say a lot more about the
novel. At the time of its publication, the Zofloya: or the Moor was the center
of quite the controversy. The novel was widely popular among readers and
unanimously condemned by critics for its explicit, to the point of being
pornographic, depictions of unbridled female passion and violence. It is the
detailed descriptions of Victoria’s sexually motivated crimes and her relentless
and unapologetically expressed pursuit of sexual pleasure that shocked
Dacre’s critics:
37
17
Using works by Foucault and Derrida as her case studies, De Lauretis introduces the
concept of “violence of rhetoric” in her eponymous essay to critique theoretical
paradigms, which regardless of their political bent, can constitute a form of violence in so
far as they assume a universalist subject position. I am using her concept here to discuss
cultural hegemony and gender construction.
[t] here is a voluptuousness of language and illusion, pervading
these volumes, which we should have hoped, that the delicacy of a
female pen would have refused to trace; and there is an exhibition
of wantonness and harlotry, which we would have hoped, that the
delicacy of the female mind, would have been shocked to imagine
(Qtd. in Craciun 10)
The reviewer in this case is well too aware of the gender of the author and her
failure to conform to the standards of hegemonic femininity. The passage
posits Dacre’s text as an aberration, a monstrous creation that defies both
writing standards and gender ideals: the plaintive “we should have hoped”
expresses the astonishment at such a transgression. Thus, Dacre is figured as
not quite a writer and to an even lesser degree as a woman. To this reviewer,
Dacre’s creation (much like her murderous and manipulative villainesses)
fulfills the cultural function of the monster. The novel both articulates and
threatens the impermeability of social boundaries between male and female,
good and evil, English and foreign, virtuous and perverse. I would like to
suggest that the cultural value of Dacre’s Zofloya lies precisely in the
symbolic destabilization of boundaries along the gender divide: the monster
text of her novel evokes and articulates clearly identifiable social, racial and
38
gender roles only to have them obscured in the problematic coupling between
Victoria and the Moor.
Monstrosity in this case – and in an early nineteenth-century sense, I
am using the word to encompass the combined excess of desire, thought, and
action – brings to the foreground and makes visible the insidious workings of
the Foucauldean power network of discourses that produce and, in this
particular novel, engender the subject. Foucault has compellingly shown that
the very existence of power relations depends on a complex network of
discourses that provide a “multiplicity of points of resistance … present
everywhere” (History of Sexuality 94), while at the same time power and
resistance operate concurrently. They both traverse and spread across various
cultural institutions and social formations. In the process, forms of knowledge
and forms of subjectivity are produced; thus, Foucault teaches us, no bodies or
pleasures can lie outside and beyond the power network. This is so because
sexuality is a “great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse are all linked to one
another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and
power” ( Ibid 106). Building onto the Foucauldean idea of the power/
knowledge grid, Judith Halberstam conceptualizes monstrosity in nineteenth-
century Gothic as a “technology of subjectivity, one which produces the
39
deviant subjectivity's opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure
can be known” (Skin Shows 2). In Dacre’s Zofloya, however, the divide
between the healthy and the deviant, the pure and the evil is not clear: it is
thrown into disarray by Victoria’s relentless violence.
To claim that monstrosity, desire and violence in Zofloya: Or, the Moor
comprise a critique of the very power institutions that generate and
concentrate the discourse of hegemonic femininity means to face the vexed
question of subversion and reification of dominant cultural codes. In other
words, is the villainess a liberating symbol in this case, or is the character
simply a new incarnation of the tired stereotype of the over-sexed woman of
the restoration, for example? To tackle this question, we need to remember
that villainesses are indeed no exceptional phenomenon in the Gothic
tradition, but, unlike Zofloya, the novels usually condemn the sexually
transgressive women to a fast demise. Their illicit desires cast them as the
dark double of the heroine, who, safely purged of her libidinal impulses, can
emerge triumphant at the end of the novel and be securely re-inscribed within
the realm of domesticity, after promptly marrying the hero. The demise of the
villainess, as Carol Ann Howells has suggested, inscribes female sexual desire
within normalizing fictions that serve as a cautionary tale (93). In the same
vein, Ann H. Jones (226) has argued that Dacre’s personal conservative
40
politics and her attack against the arch-feminist Wollstonecraft preclude
interpretation of her novels as narratives that seek to question normative forms
of domestic femininity: once conservative always a conservative, this
argument seems to go. Yet, Dacre’s disagreement with Wollstonecraft
18
does
not necessarily indicate that she is anti-feminist; rather, it points to a complex
political and social context in which class and political differences within the
category of woman mattered more than the unifying category of gender itself
– a situation all too relevant to twenty century feminism(s). I would like to
suggest that Charlotte Dacre’s narrative of sexually motivated violent
destruction presents an interesting, albeit controversial, alternative to the
prevailing feminine ideology

of writers like Wollstonecraft and Austen who
privilege rational domesticity as the path to female agency and autonomy, a
stand in the spirit of the Bluestockings’ eschewal of sexual desire for
intellectual prowess.
My reading of Zofloya aims to complicate a commonly made argument
in the field of Gothic studies which claims that in dooming her over-sexed and
violent protagonists to perdition, Charlotte Dacre seeks to condemn female
41
18
Dacre’s epistolary novel The Passions (1811) abounds in passages attacking the route to
female autonomy that Wollstonecraft envisions in both The Vindication of the Rights of
Women and her novels. Dacre here aligns with the much maligned Rousseau and his
privileging of sentiment and sensuality over the rational; Wollstonecraft, on the other hand,
sees the cultural ideal of Rousseauesque femininity as the main culprit in female subjugation.
sexual desire as destructive to social order. This critical approach interprets
the cultural value of Zofloya as part and parcel of the middle-class “civilizing
project” – the effort, shared by Austen, Dacre and Shelley, of “defining
appropriate behavior in women” (Hoeveler Gothic Feminism 125). Hoeveler’s
argument does justice to the complexity of a transitional historical period. In
the decades before and after the French Revolution, female virtue and
domesticity, indeed the production of the middle-class female subject itself,
was invested with immense ideological value: it was to assist the middle class
in wresting power away from the gentry and the court and serve their
professional and economic interest
19
. Dacre does indeed, at least ostensibly,
present her evil libidinous woman as a corrupt aristocrat and thus her text
nominally participates in the ideological work the novel as a genre is supposed
to perform. However, the pleasure Victoria takes in destroying the middle-
class ideal of feminine virtue (in the character of Lilla) and the pleasure Dacre
in turn takes in delineating the career of the corrupt woman questions the
intentionality of didacticism in the novel.
20

42
19
Garry Kelly acknowledges the central role of female virtue and women’s writing in the
rise of the middle class by coining the term “the feminization of British culture and civil
society”(32).

20
In that regard, Dacre indeed is more akin to Sade than she is to Austen or Mary Shelley.
For a discussion of this parallel, see Adriana Craciun’s chapter on Dacre in Fatal Women
of Romanticism.
Rather than focusing on the narrative outcomes of the novel -- the
eventual physical as well as spiritual destruction of the libidinous woman -- I
suggest to explore the possibility for female violence to articulate the
symbolic destruction of the cultural institutions that engender the virtuous
feminine subject. Instead of presenting a courtship/marriage plot, typical for
what has been traditionally termed “female Gothic”, Zofloya tells numerous
stories of women’s rivalries, enmities and betrayals. The intense antagonisms
between the idealized virtuous woman Lilla and her sex-crazed counterpart
Victoria reduce the man to an object of desire with the main rivalry residing
in the irresolvable conflict between sexual desire and socially sanctioned
forms of femininity.
Through their highly valorized roles of mothers, sisters and primary
caregivers to children, women were socially responsible for the transmission
of cultural values. Such a role ensured the place of woman as preserver of
virtue and at the same time occluded the possibility for the expression of
sexual desire and agency. To identify cultural space for the articulation of
female desire, Charlotte Dacre imagines violence between women that not
only undoes the stifling cultural ideal of domesticated femininity, but also
offers an implicit critique of the culture of female nurturance that made that
ideal possible in the first place. Inverting a cultural paradigm whose only
43
provision for women’s power was the power to exert control over their own
bodies and appetites, Dacre constructs a counter discourse of female rage and
uncontrollable passion
21
that works to produce multiple articulations of
relationships, identities and positionalities at a major Foucauldean node of
power production in the sex/gender system: the family governed by the
disciplining function of female nurturance.
James Dunn has interpreted the novel in a similar vein claiming that
Dacre stages the relentless and sadistic violence of Victoria as symbolic
resistance to culturally valorized forms of feminine insignificance (314). He
reads the sadistic scene of Lilla’s murder as a “symbolic intent to destroy [the
above] false feminine ideal” (314)
22
. If we read the novel as a “one woman’s
war” against “false feminine ideal[s],” however, we also presume the
possibility of texts and discourses in general to articulate truths, or , in the
very least, to represent more congruent, “truer” forms of female identity that
have been displaced by normative femininity. To adopt such an approach,
however, would mean to fallaciously subscribe to what Foucault has termed
44
21
It seems that the novel explores mostly sexual passion, yet it is clear that the term is used
more broadly in the text and its contemporary culture to encompass a whole range of
connotations of strong or excessive feeling, such as sexual love but also grief, anger,
enthusiasm, etc. Cf. Jordanova, 60 .
22
James Dunn convincingly argues that Sharlotte Dacre is unique among women writers of
the Romantic era in her exploration of the potential of imagined violence to conflate and thus
subvert clear gender boundaries predicated on irreducible difference between ‘feminine” and
“masculine’ (311)
“the repressive hypothesis” -- the notion that a kernel of desires or truths
prohibited or silenced by dominant discourses can be recuperated or brought
to light by alternative texts or readings. Such a theorization fails to
acknowledge the complex and multivalent workings of power that
incorporate “refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and
intensification” ( History of Sexuality 11). Here Foucault does not refute the
idea that repression is one of the mechanisms for the production of sexuality
-- social and cultural taboos are obviously the evidence for its workings -- he
does, nevertheless, emphatically renounce repression as the sole organizing
principle of the discourses on sexuality: repression works alongside
“incitement”, “intensification” (11) and the proliferation of desires. Such a
model of the power/knowledge paradigm allows us to investigate the
“productive effects of power” that ‘traverses and produces things, it induces
pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourses” ( Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews 119). An important implication of the above theorization
is that no subjectivity can exist outside or in opposition to power relations:
power can produce subjectivities and desire as much as it can repress and
disavow them. So, while we can definitely trace Victoria’s violence back to a
frustration with the limitations of normative gender, we can also see how the
novel, diagetically as well as symbolically, doesn’t allow for an articulation of
45
a “more authentic” or liberating femininity. What Zofloya allows for is the
phantasmatic space of rage: even though limited and inscribed in a narrative
framework of crime and punishment, in it female desire is given full reign.
The novel foregrounds the dissolution of the family as a site of
transmission of patriarchal power. Zofloya opens with the seduction of
Laurina de Loredani by the vicious Count Ardolph. What the arch villain is
after, however, is not Laurina’s irresistible beauty but her virtue as the
foundation of her husband’s status as a respectable paterfamilias. “it was his
honour and his happiness that [Ardolph] sought to destroy and to disgrace
[Dacre’s emphasis]” (44). Thus, in the very beginning of the novel, we see a
regime of cultural production wherein woman is only important as an
instrument to determine or undermine a man’s social status. The trappings of
romantic love Ardolph will use to compromise the social standing of a
powerful man. Later on, the novel will devote more narrative space to the
attempts of Laurina’s husband and son to kill Ardolph than it does to the
adulterous love of the two characters themselves. Thus the relationship
between Laurina and Ardolph is fundamentally one “between men”, to use
Sedgwick’s apt term; the cultural value of Laurina’s virtue is the object of that
exchange that works to establish and maintain a continuum of male
homosociality:
46
[I]n any male dominated society, there is a special relationship
between male homosocial ( including homosexual) desire and the
structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a
relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural
congruence. For historical reasons, this special relationship may take
the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or
some highly conflicted but intensely structured combination of the
two. (Between Men 25).
Building onto Rubin and Irigaray’s revisions of Levi-Strauss’ anthropological
work, Sedgwick clearly posits the symbolic exchange value of woman as
crucial to the “active structural congruence” that exists between male
homosociality and patriarchal power. This relationship is shaped by a series of
mechanisms for cultural power transmission such as courtship practices,
romantic love ideologies, and the structuration of the heterosexual marriage.
Triangulated social and sexual desires, in which women serve as a measure
and an instrument for men to establish or negotiate power relationships
between themselves, will provide the matrix for love relationships in the
novel. The relationship between Lilla and Henriquez, for example, is rerouted
through the figure of the unyielding and authoritative father of the woman.
Thus, the idealized “pure” love between the man of sensibility Henriquez and
his impeccably virtuous beloved Lilla will be figured not as the much praised
manifestation of companionate love, but as an issue of entitlement and
inheritance. Henriquez does not have to “win” Lilla; rather, his initial
47
tribulations involve the struggle against her tyrannical father, the powerful
male controlling the circulation of both wealth and happiness. This order of
things, however, is disturbed by the machinations of the evil desiring woman
whose violence literally, as well as symbolically, restructures the triangles to
foreground female sexual agency. Although the novel seems to emphasize “
the basic paradigm of male traffic in women” (Sedgwick 16), which is at the
center of male homosocial networks, the intense rivalries and negotiations of
power and desire between women destabilize the role of woman as a
commodity in exchanges between men; if the “active structural congruence”
that exists between male homosociality and patriarchal power (Sedgwick 25)
is indeed predicated on the symbolic exchange value of woman, then it is the
destruction of the virtuous heroine in the novel that disturbs the economy of
both male homosociality and male-centered cultural transmission.
The importance of the exchange value of woman in a complex
economy based on the circulation of virtue and desire is evident in cultural
rituals and practices such as courtship conventions, romantic love ideologies,
and the structuration of the heterosexual marriage, all of which are prominent
in Zofloya. Yet it is the obverse of the cultural ideals that is highlighted in the
novel. In fact, Victoria’s propensity for vice (that would ultimately lead her
to spiritual and physical perdition) is explained with her mother’s failure as a
48
woman and a guardian of virtue: vain and superficial, the fickle beauty
Laurina has neglected the moral education of her children. The failed mother
as the main cause for the ruin of the heroine is indeed a prominent topos in the
Gothic tradition, but what is of interest in this case is that the mother-daughter
relationship in the novel is couched in the terms of competition and zealous
emulation. The young Victoria decides to find herself a lover, prompted by her
mother’s infidelity. As a result, Laurina’s character acquires the ominous
overtones of the sexual procuress, the debased “fallen” woman initiating the
innocent social ingenue into the life of sexual debauchery; an image familiar
from the prints of Hoggart
23
, Cleland’s Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure), or the medical and conduct literature of the period
24
. Granted that
sexual desire in such figurations is of course circumscribed within the broader
framework of patriarchal exchange; it is obvious that the “fallen” woman and
the prostitute were excluded from the socially sanctioned category of a
“proper lady”. It is also clear that such figurations are on one level
misogynistic -- sexually debased women can and do pollute their pure
49
23
See for example (one among many others, admittedly) “The Inspection,” Marriage A-la-
Mode, Plate 3 (1745). The masculine, literally larger-than-life body of the bawd dominates
the engraving, while the childlike fragile body of the fallen woman takes the corner of the
plate.
24
In Bienville’s treatise Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus
(translated and first published in English in 1775), for example, this is the working-class
woman who initiates young middle-class women into the abominable practice of
masturbation.
counterparts. At the same time, however, it is important to consider how such
literary, scientific, and visual figurations provided the language, the imagery
and the content for a discourse of female sexual desire that assumes the
existence of female agency outside the strictures for rigorous control of a
woman’s sexual urges. In the case of Laurina, the social and sexual
transgression of the mother provides the daughter, and the readers of Dacre’s
novel, with a model for articulation of sexual desire.
While both mother and daughter fail to exert the socially prescribed
control over their illicit desires, but they do so with very different outcomes.
Laurina desires to be desired; her fallibility is attributed to a misguided urge
for the approval and validation of men – it is her “vanity [and] too great a
thirst for admiration” (39) that will lead to her subjugation by the vicious
Count Ardolph. Contrastingly, Victoria’s main hubris is her tremendous will
to self-fulfillment, of which sexual desire seems to be but one facet. It is
noteworthy that Laurina’s failure as a mother does not immediately result in a
lustful and vain daughter; rather, it is the (traditionally seen as masculine)
driven nature of the young girl that the narrator emphasizes as shocking. In
the very beginning of the novel, Victoria is described as “proud, haughty and
self-sufficient -- of a wild, ardent and irrepressible spirit”; she possesses “an
implacable, revengeful and cruel nature; [she is] bent upon gaining
50
ascendancy in whatever she engaged” (40). The young protagonist is not
portrayed as the naive ingenue who will be seduced by an older libertine, even
though this is the narrative move that the novel will allude to and then
reverse. Rather than representing the ‘fallen’ or prone to indiscretion young
woman, the text accentuates a more serious gender transgression -- Victoria is
more than a fickle girl; she is in the true Polwhelean, sense “unsex’d”
25
,
“degendered,” a monstrous freak of failed femininity. If her mother is
excessively feminine and dependent, Victoria is her (equally problematic)
counter part: the strong willed and unrelenting “unsex’d female” (Polwhele).
The opening chapters of Zofloya present two contrasting models of
female sexual desire: the illicit, yet operating within the doctrine of romantic
love, desire of the mother Laurina and the narcissistic, self-centered and
therefore monstrous, objectless desire of the daughter Victoria. Unlike her
mother, the young girl is not presented as the passive receptacle of male
desire; quite the opposite, enticed by her mother’s example, the protagonist
longs for the illicit pleasures of sexual love that her mother, she believes,
enjoys; Victoria is filled with “envy and of an ardent consuming desire ... to be
51
25
Richard Polwhele’s satirical poem, published in 1798, had a more specific political meaning
than the one I am emphasizing here since it targeted, what the author percevied to be, the
Jacobin female writers and poets of the time; the sentiment in the word “unsex’d”, however,
speaks to the rigidity of gender regulation: the slippery slope from one social faux pas to the
state of being “unsex’d” is etxtremely steep.
like the unhappy mother -- like her, to receive the attentions, listen to the
tenderness, and sink beneath the glances of a lover” (69-60). Thus Dacre
figures Victoria’s desire as a pure lust for pleasure and bodily satisfaction,
divorced from an attachment to a specific object. When finally a suitor,
Berenza, proclaims his love for her, Victoria is thrilled by “novel and seducing
sensations [in anticipation] of future pleasure” (60). Her feelings are not
attached to Berenza as an object of her desire; rather, they are floating in a
self-centered, almost autoerotic fashion which draws libidinal investment back
from its object and concentrates it on the self. Furthermore, the desire was
engendered, quite literally planted, in Victoria by her mother’s example and as
a result the rivalry between the two woman articulates desire in circulation
between the two women, with the man taking second place in the process,
“Berenza loved [her], Victoria was only roused and flattered” (60).
Victoria’s narcissistic libido is clearly mapped on a body resisting safe
incorporation in a romantic love paradigm that posits the beloved as the
epitome of virginal passivity. The love-stricken Berenza is uneasy with her
beauty: “no, hers was not the countenance of a Madonna – it was not of an
angelic mould; yet, though there was fierceness in it, it was certainly not a
repelling but beautiful fierceness” (96). The physical harshness of Victoria’s
beautiful features shows the tell-tale signs of unbridled desire and to name it
52
Dacre later uses the French word fierte (lit. “pride”, with overtones of
boldness and haughtiness) but expands it to mean both relentless will and
voracious desire. More importantly, this passage construes sexual desire as a
source of violence
26
, the threat of an unruly body governed, indeed “molded,”
by desires resisting discipline. It is Victoria’s fierceness that Berenza sets out
to correct, in a Rousseauist attempt to perfect female sexual frailty
27
: “her
wild and imperious character he would have essayed to render noble, firm and
dignified; her fierte he would have softened and her boldness checked” (59).
Dacre overtly reveals the violence inherent in this process: Berenza believes
that he can marry her and “[model] her afterwards so as to perfectly assimilate
[her] to his wishes” (59). The verb “assimilate” implies complete dissolution
of Victoria’s individuality; the annihilation of her desirous self in service of
Berenza’s vision of familial happiness. Furthermore, this passage interestingly
thematizes cultural anxiety about female sexuality: women are “naturally”
virtuous and innocent, yet they have to be molded into the sweet innocent
woman that is the sole worthy object of romantic love. At the same time, this
53
26
I don’t mean violence against the subject’s self-possession and stability, a meaning widely
used in the Romantic era ( see Raymond Williams Keywords, 1976)
27
I am referring here to Book V of Emile, or On Education (1762), in which Rousseau
focuses on the education of girls and argues that unlike boys, girls are subject to
immoderate desires – desires which are likely to promote social disintegration.
quotation highlights the dangerous malleability of the signifiers of normative
gender: if a woman can be taught to be “proper, “ if she can indeed be molded
into the perfect manifestation of virtuous femininity, then she can also don the
mask of perfect femininity when it suits her interest.
This is exactly the revision that the novel provides when Victoria
successfully masquerades as a quiet, submissive and loving woman and, as a
result, manages to coerce Berenza into loving her: “her eyes, no longer full of
a wild and beautiful admiration, were taught to languish, or to fix for hours
with musing air upon the ground; her gait, no longer firm and elevated,
became hesitating and despondent “ (98) . This passage strongly suggests that
bodies are supple and malleable; that they can be manipulated and taught how
to perform. At the same time, the the evocation of “Victoria’s eyes [which
are] no longer full of wild and beautiful admiration” (98) does not necessarily
negate her passionate body; on the contrary, the phrase brings back the
desirous body and presents the apparent change as a mere masquerade.
Victoria has not changed: she merely “taught” her body to display the signs of
virtuous femininity. It is quite interesting that the language of this scene
syntactically echoes the construction of the previous quotation in which
Berenza imagines the possibility to transform the proud and haughty girl into
a paragon of virtue, “her fierte he would have softened, and her boldness
54
checked” (58). In a perverse twist, it seems, Berenza’s wishes have been
indeed granted, since “[Victoria’s] eyes were taught (emphasis mine) to
languish,” yet the subject of the action here is not the Pygmalion-like Berenza
‘assimilating” Victoria to his wishes” (59), but the devious Victoria herself,
who stages a tableaux of perfect and perfectly vulnerable femininity in order
to deceive Berenza.
Having feigned desolate “gloom and oppression of spirits” (98),
Victoria throws herself on a sofa when Berenza enters the room and “imagine
[s] she slept ” (98). To Berenza, she is not only supine on the sofa, she is
asleep. The beloved here quite literally participates in a male fantasy: a
situation that grants Berenza control and access to voyeuristic pleasure; it also
gives him the power (quite literally of imagination) to see her as the woman
he desires her to be. Paradoxically, what follows is a reversal of the culturally
sanctioned positions of the two lovers: Victoria is the one in control; she is
not a passive object of desire as she is aware of her role as a prop in Berenza’s
fantasy and simply plays along to act out several cliched gestures. She calls
out his name in her feigned dream, laments her unrequited love, “covers her
face and turns in shame” (98) and, as a result, convinces Berenza that “he
possess[es] the first pure and genuine affections of an innocent and lovely
girl” (99). Curiously, it is not Victoria’s actions that convince Berenza of her
55
“pure affections”; it is rather the stretched, languid body, the pose of sheer
vulnerability and passivity that convince him of Victoria’s pure love. We can
thus see how the novel symbolically questions gender structuration along the
polarized axis of male control and female passivity, it rather posits gender as
the nodal point of multiple technologies of the self that shape bodies and
desires to formulate the discourse on virtuous female sexuality.
As tempting as it is to see Victoria’s devious performance of virtuous
femininity in this scene as potentially subversive of the strictures of normative
femininity, we need to remind ourselves that the repertoire of possible
performances is always already determined by what Butler, and before her
Foucault, have called “regulatory discourses”. Borrowing the term from
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Butler discusses and elaborates on the
disciplinary techniques that naturalize the possible permutations of bodies
and desires that can then be performed to construct not only gender but sex
itself; in the final analysis, Butler argues, “gender is not to culture as sex is to
nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature”
or “natural sex” is produced and established as prediscursive” (Gender
56
Trouble 7).
28
What makes this social and cultural structuration possible is a
complex process of coporeal signification wherein:
[a]cts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or
substance, but produce this on the surface (Butler’s emphasis
throughout the quotation) of the body, through the play of the
signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing
principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments,
generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or
identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications
manufactured and sustained through coporeal signs and other
discursive means (136).
These performative acts, then, can be said to constitute a gendered body which
does not really exist outside the mosaic of its enactments; if it is possible to
anchor gender, or subjectivity for that matter, in the body, it is, according to
Butler, “an illusion of an interior and organizing core,” (136) which is both an
effect of and a major factor in the workings of the regulatory discourse.
Butler’s conceptualization of gender performativity -- with its
undercurrent of critical tension between a body that seems to be all surface,
with no essence, and an illusory interiority maintained to enforce a social
discourse -- complicates productively my reading of performative femininity
in Zofloya. The libidinous and strong-willed Victoria successfully stages a
57
28
For a more detailed elaboration of the theory of gender performativity, consult pages pp.
170-190; for the complex processes of the naturalization of gender as the natural given of
“sex” , see pp. 135-141. For a further discussion of the discursive nature of sex (as opposed
to gender; an articulation similar to the one in the quotation above), see Bodies that Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” 1993.
tableau of submissive femininity, and yet the social structuration of both sex
and gender precludes the possibility to effectively manipulate gender
conventions. The libidinous woman and her virtuous counterpart
29
are both
cultural fabrications that originate in and support the same gender/sex system.
Consequently, neither one of them can be located outside the workings of
such discourse. This is of course true when we conceptualize cultural
figurations of femininity as also producing coherent subjects. At the same
time, however, Victoria’s reenactment of virtuous femininity disavows the
notion of subjectivity, or an “inner core”, by drawing attention to the
constructedeness of the body itself. The strong, tall, masculine desiring body
of Victoria transmogrifies into the ultimately vulnerable, prostrate body of the
sleeping bashful beloved
30
. Neither of these bodies, however, tells “the true
story” of gender and desire, they are both props in complex discourses that
articulate normative femininity. Like the drag queen of Butlerean
performativity, Victoria can not escape or radically intervene in the regulatory
discourse of normative gender: her “passing” as a virtuous woman is itself a
58
29
Given the purportedly moralistic tone of the novel -- it is after all a tale of the physical and
spiritual destruction of the desirous woman -- and its ostensible lamentation of the lack of
positive role models, it is quite interesting that the first time ‘virtuous femininity” does appear
in the book, it is in the form of Victoria’s campy performance; later on in the plot will Victoria
meet her rival, the virtuous Lilla
30
This scene foreshadows a later moment in the novel when Victoria actually impersonates
not a “generic cultural ideal” but a real woman, her rival Lilla, to seduce another object of
desire, Henriquez. In this case, the narrator describes her as possessing the ‘grace of a
sylph” (216) , an epithet consistently used to describe the svelte diminutive body of Lilla.
testament to the relentless workings of the regulatory discourse. Similarly to
the drag queen, however, Victoria is able to perform a series of contradictory
enactments. Molding the strong body into the shape of prostrate fragility and
displaying herself as the source of scopic pleasure while at the same time
manipulating Berenza’s gaze directed at her are both acts that refute the
notion that gender expresses psychic interiority. As a result, she is able to
“displace the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of
truth and falsity” (Gender Trouble 137).
The manipulation of gender models by Victoria in this case is only
partially responsible for the failure of Berenza’s Pygmalionic project. His
position as the mentor-lover is compromised by his inscription in a libidinal
economy of exchange between two women: the young Victoria and Berenza’s
former lover, the homicidal socialite Megalena Strozzi. Megalena’s furious
jealousy – she has hired no one else but Victoria’s brother Leonardo to kill
Berenza – unwittingly assists Victoria in winning the count as her husband. He
proposes marriage after she, literally single-handedly, stops the assassin in his
tracks and saves his life. The stock Gothic scene of midnight murder --
complete with “gentle rustling” (100) and a dark figure sliding toward the bed
-- opens with Victoria occupying the position of a Gothic heroine, the
spectator of what initially appears to be gruesome male violence: “drawing a
59
dagger from his bosom, [the assassin] waved it to and fro near the closed eyes
of the unconscious Berenza; then gently uncovering his bosom, approached
the point of the dagger towards it” (101). It turns out, however, that the source
of this violence is female: the mid-night assassin is hired by Megalena. The
scene is crucial in breaking the male homosocial triangle that Sedgwick sees
as central to the transmission of patriarchal power: here, both men participate
in a symbolic exchange of desires between women in which the man is simply
instrumental. Megalena’s hatred has propelled the hand of Leonardo to
Berenza’s heart with the ultimate goal of destroying Victoria. “If a look could
kill,” writes Megalena to the miraculously saved Berenza, “mine should have
blasted her to the earth [Dacre’s emphasis]” (103). Consequently, it is
symbolically important that Victoria takes the blow of the dagger intended
for Berenza. In a curious reversal of male codes and practices of honor
founded in female chastity, Megalena is staging a perversion of a duel. In this
exchange “between women,” Victoria is able to eliminate a rival -- Megalena
leaves town, exactly as Victoria’s father has done, defeated at a duel by
Ardolph-- and to secure marriage for herself. Female violence in this scene
serves as a discursive space which facilitates the articulation of a range of
subversive female desires. Seething hatred, relentless ambition and perfidious
aspirations all serve to redefine the Gothic woman. From a passive, timid and
60
powerless victim she is transformed into an agent of desire. While these
desires ultimately lead to the demise of the character, the powerful scene of
female violence here construes a fantasy of female agency in which violence
relocates positions and destabilizes the place of woman as an object of
patriarchal exchange.
The destabilization of the male-centered homosocial triangle is also
reflected in the plot of Zofloya: the culmination of the book presents us with a
woman-on-woman violence, it stages a grandiose conflict between women,
where the man is a mere token of symbolic exchange. Victoria's growingly
uncontrollable desires finally lead her to kidnap and brutally murder Lilla, the
virtuous heroine of the novel and Victoria’s rival for the love of Henriquez. In
this particular triangulation, Henriquez, overtly the object of Victoria’s
incestuous passion (he is Berenza’s brother), is displaced as an object of desire
by Lilla for whom Victoria harbors intense hatred.
Victoria develops an obsession with Lilla that parodically inverts the
traditional discourse on romantic love, founded on the dichotomy of a passive
female object of desire and an active male desiring subject. Even though Lilla
is routinely described as “fair” and “sylph-like”, most of the more detailed
physical descriptions are focalized through Victoria’s obsessed gaze. The first
time the reader encounters Lilla, her description is tellingly framed by
61
Victoria’s fixation on her and not by the love-stricken gaze of Henriquez, “for
the young Lilla she cherished the most unprovoked and the bitterest
hate,” (143) writes Dacre and then proceeds to describe the “delicate,
symmetrical, and fairy-like beauty” (144) of Victoria’s rival. In contrast to the
cultural paradigm of romantic love, where the male lover relishes the beauty
of the beloved, the controlling gaze here is not that of the man but of the
desirous woman. Victoria's hatred for Lilla is cast in the stock language of
romantic love, employed by the Gothic novels to unfold the mandatory
subplot of love and redemption. The language of romantic love usually
figures the embrace of the lovers as an expression of the union of two souls, a
major trope of the age of sensibility. In Zofloya, however, it is not the hero
Henriquez, but the deceitful Victoria who is shown in this position: pretending
to accept Lilla as a friend, Victoria “return[s] her caresses with a gloomy
eagerness, as the murderer might be tempted to fondle the beauty of the babe,
whose life he intended to take” (151). The embrace is present as a perversion
of female friendship, a horrific, rape-like clutch infused with sadistic pleasure.
It also subverts the ideal of the maternal and the domestic: while women were
seen as keepers and sources of virtue and social harmony, Victoria here is
figured as a “murderer”, the destructor of life and virtue always coded male.
62
In another pivotal scene, when she first contemplates murdering the
young Lilla, Victoria watches her from a distance, as she approaches, “an
innocent girl ... [moving] through the gloom, seeming like an aerial spirit,
seen by the dubious light, scarcely appearing in its delicate movements to
touch the ground” (173). The focus is on Victoria’s gaze which, like the gaze
of the romantic lover, produces this picture. The passage abounds in verbs
denoting visual perception and the possessive properties of the gaze: Victoria
“behold[s]” Lilla, Lilla’s figure is “seen” in the light; it then “appears” (173)
to glide in the air. Lilla here is literally disembodied, her fragile diminutive
body reduced to a wisp of flickering light. She is represented as truly angelic,
a mere cypher, the genuine “spirit” -- or rather, the empty shell -- of idealized
femininity. Significantly, throughout the novel, Lilla has no purpose, no
drive or agency: she is the “woman to be seen, not heard”, only present in the
narrative as seen by others, always under the tutelage of powerful men -- her
father, Berenza and Henriquez. In this scene, Victoria disdainfully conjures up
the spectre of Lilla’s innocent beauty (the “innocent girl floating through the
gloom”) and indignantly revolts against the idealization of passive female
insignificance: “the rage of her bosom changed into laughing
contempt” (173). The complex triangulation of desire between Henriquez,
Lilla and Victoria reveals the workings of gender discourses in the novel. The
63
defiant desirous Victoria displaces Henriquez as the source of the controlling
gaze, and thus reveals the patriarchal middle-class hegemonies operational in
this process. Victoria’s disdain for the vacuous innocence of Lilla reveals the
disavowal of female desire (sexual included) that makes the ideal of
disembodied female virtue culturally viable.
31

Most of the scenes involving Lilla underscore her outworldly,
incorporeal presence: emphasized are her “fairy like beauty” (144) and “the
seraphic serenity of her soul” (144). The conventional descriptions here evade
the physicality of the body to highlight Lilla’s role as a cypher: she represents
indeed “every (virtuous) woman” and “the best of women”, an unachievable
ideal of angelic femininity. Unlike other novels by Dacre – such as The
Passions or The Libertine – which thematize the destruction of the cultural
ideal of asexual femininity through manipulation and machinations, in Zofloya
Victoria’s brutal stabbing of the “sylphic” Lilla foregrounds the body as a site
of cultural negotiation and gender organization. At the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth century, a period that saw the solidification of
64
31
Dacre’s novel is an interesting exception to the slew of Gothic and domestic novels written
in the eighteenth and in nineteenth-century England. As Nancy Armstrong has shown, the
domestic novel originated as an attempt to “redefine desire” (5-6); it reflected a cultural
“struggle to say what made a woman desirable [as an object] suitable for courtship and
marriage” (6). Desire and Domestic Fiction (1989); the same could be argued for Gothic
novels, which posit the virtuous heroine as the ultimately desirable woman. In contrast,
Zofloya, or the Moor thematizes the cultural erasure of female sexual desire proper in favor
of “virtuous desirability”.
gender inequality as a result of ideologically posited indelible biological
differences, women’s bodies were supposed to bear witness to their virtue or
to serve as a sign of their fallibility. Throughout the novel, the two female
characters are contrasted as the far extremes of virtue and sin in their bodily
manifestations.
The body becomes the medium that articulates cultural boundaries.
Lilla’s virtue is written all over her virginal white body, easily identifiable in
her diminutive frame and long golden tresses. Similarly, the body of Victoria
also becomes a symptom of her vice and marks her as a freak. In her
introduction to the 1997 Broadview edition of the novel, Adriana Craciun
notes that Victoria’s body is growing more and more masculine, as the novel
progresses (20). It is notable, however, that her body is portrayed as
masculine only in comparison to Lilla’s “baby face” (198) and doll-like
presence. In the rest of the descriptions, Dacre emphasizes Victoria’s “graceful
and elegant figure” (96). It is next to Lilla that Victoria's body seems deficient
and deformed, leading her to exclaim “would that this unwieldy form could be
compressed into the fairly delicacy of [Lilla’s], these bold masculine features
assume the likeness of her baby face” (198). Traditionally and stereotypically
color-coded, Victoria’s black tresses and Lilla’s white forehead demarcate a
social boundary -- the difference between virtue and sin, innocence and desire.
65
In her murderous attack on Lilla, Victoria attempts to annihilate the difference
and destroy the virtuous body as a symbol of idealized femininity.
Ironically, it is in the stabbing scene that Lilla’s body regains its
corporeal dimensions. In a quite detailed and prolonged description, Dacre
presents Lilla’s murder as a ritualistic dismemberment: Victoria’s dagger
glides” down her uplifted hand… and across her alabaster shoulder, [with ]
the blood tinging her flaxen tresses with brilliant red” (220) and later she hits
her “in the bosom, in the shoulder, and other parts” and “cover[s] her body
with innumerable wounds [before] dash[ing] her over the edge of the
steep” (221). Paradoxically, Victoria’s sadistic cruelty annihilates the spectral
presence of Lilla to foreground the materiality of the female body; the
villainess's dagger draws its dimensions and limits. In this graphic and
horrifying scene, Lilla’s blood works symbolically to destroy the virginal
whiteness of the virtuous body: villainess and victim alike are marred with the
“brilliant red” of desire. As a result, the function of the Gothic monster in
Dacre -- unlike that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as interpreted by Halberstam
(99)
32
-- is not to demarcate a boundary, but rather to destabilize it; to open a
66
32
Dracula is eerily fertile; he contaminates the virginal body with desire and turns it into a
devouring and sexual one (Lucy); yet, the newly transformed vampires are easily
distinguishable, they are markedly different from the virtuous woman, Mina; in Dacre’s
stabbing scene, however, the language evokes both bodies as equally desirous and thus
negates the function of the body as a clear indicator of virtue.
space of indeterminacy that can accommodate female sexual desire and at the
same time expose the social mechanisms of gender production: the Lillas of
the nineteenth century are culturally only possible when the Victorias are
properly punished; the Jane Eyres can triumph only when the Berthas are
safely, both culturally and narratively, disposed of.
Like Bertha, the creole madwoman in Jane Eyre, the moor Zofloya,
who is the embodiment of the racial and exotic Other of Dacre’s eponymous
novel, complicates a theorization of female violence as an avenue of
articulation of female desire. It is Zofloya who, like Lewis’s Matilda, tempts
the heroine and leads her down the path of vice and destruction and who is to
be ultimately revealed as Satan himself in the (quite literally infernal) grand
finale of the novel. The notion that the foreign Other embodied by the Moor
Zofloya is implicated in articulations of vice and virtue in the novel presents a
counterpoint to the rhetoric of essentialist insularity typical of conduct books
67
and moralist writing
33
of the period that codify female behavior
34
. Even
though female conduct books of the second half of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century mostly address middle-class English
women, their authors usually evoke a generalized yet unspecified audience of
“young women”, “daughters” or “our sisters”. Numerous titles refer to the
commonality of values, traditions and expectations that are to be shared by he
members of the ‘fair sex’. Titles like The Young Ladies Companion or,
Beauty’ s Looking-Glass, and The Complete Housewife or Accomplished
Gentlewoman’ s Companion (Armstrong and Tannenhouse 105) rhetorically
establish a certain universality of gendered codes for appropriate behavior.
The exalted virtues and deplored foibles in these conduct manuals are thus
also posited as the universal predicament of a contested female humanity.
At the same time, however, these books very consciously construe
middle-class values and middle-class virtuous femininity as tightly related to
68
33
For more elaborate discussion of the role and place of conduct books in the formation of
middle-class female virtue, see Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds The
Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality.
34
It is important to discuss conduct books here since they seem to complement the discourse
of female virtue and sexuality put forth by the novel in general, and Gothic romances in
particular -- throughout the eighteenth century and the Romantic era. It is telling in this regard
that as the number of conduct books aimed at women waned towards the end of the 18th
century, the proliferation of Gothics seemed to pick up (leading to what has been termed ‘The
Gothic Deluge”). One can see how the ideals espoused by the conduct books are worked
within the discourse on femininity in Gothic novels. Thus it is only logical to examine how
these two discourses illuminate and respond to each other. For a more detailed discussion see
Armstrong and Tennenhouse (pp. 98-103)
ideas of raising nationalism and national identity. For example, advice
pertaining to frugality in the running of a household exceeds its economic and
pecuniary dimensions to morph into a national standard; a frugally planned
and prepared meal thus becomes “suitable to English constitutions and
English palates, wholesome, toothsome, all practical and easy to be
performed” (qtd. in Armstrong and Tannenhouse 105). The character of the
black slave Zofloya, however, points to an important juncture of social
construction of English femininity. What the conduct manuals construct as an
intrinsically British and universally feminine virtue is a result of the complex
workings of the knowledge-power network that incorporates not only white,
English, and middle-class bodies and desires but also the discursive or
physical presence of the racialized Other.
More broadly and theoretically speaking, the racialized and
(sometimes) racist figurations of bodies and desires in Zofloya and their
participation in a discourse on feminine virtue compel us to broaden the
Foucauldean framework of the production of desire and sexuality to
accommodate questions of gender and race.
35
Foucault has compellingly
69
35
This is not at all to say that Foucault’s work has not already become seminal in the fields of
anthropology and postcolonial studies, quite the opposite: the influence of Foucault is too
prominent to even need further elaboration here. My intention is to look at structurations of
female virtue that are usually seen as “intrinsically English” -- or as mostly informed by
intra-cultural processes of regulation -- and account for the colonial underpinnings of social
regulation of female virtue and desire
argued that nineteenth-century Western sexuality was not some inherently
essentialist “stubborn drive” to be repressed or overcome, or
unproblematically subjected to the workings of power, but that it is rather
both the result and the instrument of that power (History of Sexuality 152).
Such conception of sexuality compels us to study both the uses to which
middle-class female (and necessarily white) sexuality has been put, and the
ways in which it emerges in the complex figuration of the racial others of
colonial discourse. I am inspired by Ann Laura Stoler’s insightful and
compelling expansion and revision of the Foucaldean power/knowledge
network to study how nineteenth-century sexuality “emerged and was
situated on an imperial landscape where the cultural accouterments of
bourgeois distinction were partially shaped thorough contrasts forged in the
politics of the language of race” (Race and the Education of Desire 5).
36

In her analysis of the colonial underpinnings of Foucauldean theory
Stoler poignantly argues that race is an integral part of the formation of
Western sexuality. Thus, the fundamental foursome that is engendered by, as it
simultaneously delineates, power/knowledge regimes -- the masturbating
70
36
The work of Anne McClintock is also crucial here. In Imperial Leather she called for a
conceptualization of the colonial era that transcends a simplistic integration of race, gender
as “simply yoked together retrospectively like the armatures of Lego” (5). In her study she
shows how “they came into existence in and through (Emphasis McClintock’s) relation ti
each other (5).
child, the Malthusean couple, the hysterical woman and the perverse adult --
needs to be augmented by “the racially erotic counterpoint ... of the savage,
the primitive, the colonized” (Stoler 6-7). I would like to suggest that the
racial Other is not only a counterpoint to a normative Western sexuality and
the monstrous alien against which the self can be articulated; rather, through
its very irreducible difference the Other forms the very core of dominant
discourses on white middle-class femininity. Thus, the other is not marginal
to the workings of power in the metropole, rather, as Stoler has pointed out,
“bourgeois identities in both metropole and colony emerge tacitly and
emphatically coded by race” (7). Keeping these complex processes in mind, I
would like to examine the role and place of the Other in Zofloya in relation to
the solidification of normative middle-class femininity.
An underlying similarity that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century discourses of race and gender seem to share is the insistence on
irreducible physical differences as the foundation for social regulation. Both
of these discourses cohered into well-defined disciplinary regimes around the
same time. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, both race and gender
were seen in Great Britain as more fluid and more complexly defined than
the biological determinism inherent in cultural regimes in the nineteenth
century. While this complex articulation does not at all mean that the
71
discursive practices of the previous century were in any way conducive to
racial or gender equality, they still construed women and racial others together
with white men as belonging to one and the same continuum of “human
nature”. Skin color, for example, was a significantly unstable racial identifier.
Felicity A. Nussbaum argues that “like character and “blood”, [skin color]
could be interpreted as reflecting an intrinsic moral caliber, as restricting the
range of human ability, or paradoxically, as a chance variation of nature with
only incidental meaning” (The Limits of the Human 139). Figurations of
otherness were contradictory and incoherent : the (quite literally) noble, proud
and altruistic savage, the enslaved prince from Aphra Behn’s eponymous
novella Oronooko, was competing with the paradigmatically seductive and
violent figure of Othello as the ‘paradigmatic Other’ of the eighteenth century
cultural imagination. These competing discourses seem to have prevented the
eighteenth century from “launching of a stable identity for English people
versus non-English” (Nussbaum 139). Yet, towards its end, racial and national
identity discourses cohered together and shaped against each other to
simultaneously form a core of Englishness that Cannon Shmitt has aptly
called “alien nation” (Alien Nation 2).
The structuration of a coherent discourse of normative middle-class
femininity seems to have traveled a similar trajectory. “Sometime in the
72
eighteenth century,” Thomas Laqueur writes, “sex as we know it was
invented” (Making Sex 149). By this Laqueur means that an earlier Galenic
model of sexual difference, which conceptualized the male and female bodies
as isomorphically equal, was supplanted by what he terms a “biology of
incommensurability” (154) wherein the “two sexes ... were invented as a new
foundation of gender” (150). Under the older Galenic model, more
specifically, male and female bodies and reproductive organs were seen as
complementary and analogical. The word “purse”, for example, designated
both scrotum and uterus (64) in Renaissance England. The womb
37
was seen
as an inverted penis pointing inside the body, and both sexes were thought
able to produce semen (140-152). By the end of the eighteenth century,
however, organs, structures and bodily systems previously seen as identical in
men and women were now studied meticulously and differentiated to
correspond to and fit within culturally constructed frameworks of male and
female bodies. Laqueuer emphatically states that the cultural shift from the
Galenic “one sex” model to the “two sex” one was not caused by scientific
discovery; it was rather the result of social construction; a process that was at
the same time the cause, the effect and the moral justification of the social
status of women. An interesting cultural and discursive phenomenon, the
73
37
I am consciously avoiding the present-day anatomical term ,“uterus”, because its very
invention is a result of the “two sex” model that Laqueur describes.
supposed passionlessness of women, is clearly one of the ramifications of the
“two sex” model.
Like the two-sex model of gender outlined by Laqueur, post-
eighteenth century discourses on racial difference seem to construe a
biological foundation for social arrangements. Laqueur acknowledges the
important parallels between the two contemporaneously occurring discourses
of sexual and racial difference (208, 243, 282); moreover, he sees his study of
sexual difference as a “part of what would be a more comprehensive history
of exclusive biological categories in relation to culture” (155). My analysis of
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya so far has attempted to demonstrate how the ideal of
the virtuous woman emerged as a result of a regulatory discourse that sought
to dematerialize the body and posit sexual purity as an essentially female
characteristic. My interpretation of Victoria’s career as a murderous and
violent woman aimed to show how the novel revealed the cultural
constructedness of the virtuous middle-class female body. An important aspect
of gender and desire figurations in the novel, however, is the element of race,
and more generally of the racialized Other. In the following section, I will
show how the discourses on racial and sexual differences are intertwined in
the novel: Victoria’s relentless pursuit of pleasure and her insatiable sexual
74
appetite code her as “black” or Other, and thus transpose the desire onto the
black body.
The role of the racial Other is prominent in the title of the novel,
Zofloya: Or, the Moor
38
. Yet, at first glance, it is quite paradoxical that a
novel whose protagonist is, at least ostensibly, an aristocratic Italian woman is
entitled after a secondary character, the Moorish slave Zofloya who, we learn
at the denouement of the novel, is Satan incarnate. The title suggests a
centrality that the Moor Zofloya does not occupy, narratively speaking. The
character only appears in the second half of the novel and makes its debut as
a vision in one of Victoria’s vivid and lustful dreams (145) and then continues
to serve as Victoria’s minion in her evil machinations. Such trajectory
contradicts the truly horrific presence of the diabolic supernatural promised by
the title and enforced by the basic premise of the plot. The limited scope of the
character and its ostensible function as simply another topos of the Gothic
convention, that of the mandatory supernatural, has led contemporaries and
twentieth century scholars alike to interpret the character mostly as a figment
of Victoria’s imagination, emphasizing the superfluous nature of the demonic
75
38
Historical usage of the term “Moor” differs from the present-day denotation of the term in
the English language. An ostensibly ethnic designation, the word “Moor” has been mostly
used to designate black people, a usage prominent in the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England
and up to the Seventeenth century but documented well into the 20th century. Such conflation
between African and black is evident in coinages like “White Moors” which alluded to
lighter skinned North Africans. (Oxford English Dictionary moor n2 )
in the novel. In the words of an anonymous reviewer for the Monthly Literary
Recreations, “The supernatural agent is totally useless, as the mind of
Victoria, whom Satan, under the form of Zofloya, comes to tempt, is
sufficiently black and depraved naturally, to need no temptation to commit the
horrid crimes she perpetrates” (Qtd. in Craciun 261). Similarly, in an overview
of Zofloya in her 1986 survey of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
popular literature, Anne H. Jones interprets the text as an allegory providing
an insight into the human psyche and thus interprets the character of Zofloya
“not as a supernatural being at all but as an embodiment of the evil in Victoria
herself” (Ideas and Innovations 236).
The contemporary reviewer and the twentieth century critic of
Zofloya: or the Moor both insist on an interpretation that the title of the novel
boldly defies: it emphasizes the centrality of otherness in the tale of desire
and destruction
39
. It most glaringly evokes the “Other” Moor of Venice,
Othello
40
, but unlike The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, Dacre’s
Zofloya or the Moor, does not tell the story or articulate the tragic fate of the
76
39
It is not at all rare that Gothic novels are given titles based on the main villain: Anne
Radcliffe The Italian is prominent example among many others; Lewis’s The Monk is another;
however, in Zofloya, it is not the Moor, nor Satan, who are central to the plot, yet the title
foregrounds this particular aspect of the novel.
40
Venice is the setting for both Shakespeare’s play and Dacre’s novel. Also, for an excellent
overview of the cultural appropriations of blackness, and the role of blackface on the
eighteenth-century British stage, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, esp. pp.
189-257.
Moor Zofloya. Rather it appropriates “the Moor” as a composite of
sexualized and eroticized otherness in the British cultural imagination on the
cusp of the nineteenth century to reveal the complex processes of codification
of normative bourgeois middle-class femininity. The character of Zofloya
seems to be shifty and indeterminate; he does indeed first appear in the text,
brought to life by the powerful and unruly imagination of the wayward
Victoria (145); yet, only 4-5 pages later, the readers learn that the slave
Zofloya has disappeared (148) and has probably been killed, only to return
later in the novel as miraculously saved and be ultimately revealed as Satan
himself. While such shifts seem to be part and parcel of the the Gothic
convention, it is important to interpret the character’s indeterminacy as it
plays out in the pairing between Victoria and Zofloya.
Rather than reading the character of Zofloya as a manifestation of the
supernatural
41
, or, as Jones has suggested, a figment of Victoria’s
imagination, we can explore another possibility of the coupling between
Victoria and Zofloya: in their ‘evilness’ and, as I will show, shared
77
41
A very strong argument for which builds Susan Chaplin in Law, Sensibility and the Sublime
in Eighteenth Century Women’ s Fiction: Speaking of Dread. 126-144. In her otherwise very
provocative reading, however, Chaplin does, to some extent, undermine her own claim that
the text emphasizes a “feminine sublime power which provokes a submissive masculine
response” (139) by focusing on “the mental and physical annihilation of ... Victoria at the
hands of the demonic Zofloya” (138). While Satan, as Zofloya, does indeed hurl Victoria
down the abyss, the scene is more reminiscent to a Deus Ex Machina solution, than it is a
narratively motivated necessity in the novel.
‘blackness’, they gradually merge symbolically together in an admittedly
racist and exoticizing articulation of the negative image of ideal femininity.
Through the coupling between the vicious libidinous woman and the Satanic
Moor Zofloya, the novel thematizes the social structuration of middle-class
femininity whereby sexual desire is transposed onto the black body, which
becomes a cypher for illicit desire.
When Zofloya is first introduced in the novel, as a vision in Victoria’s
dream, his image is gleaming with the sensual opulence of an Orientalist
fantasy. Dacre lists his adornments and clothes but does not really describe his
physical appearance. The narrator nominally mentions his “noble and majestic
form” , to swiftly focus on the signifiers of Oriental
42
luxury. Zofloya is
bedecked with jewels, pearls and gold, and wearing a “white turban, which
sparkled with emeralds ... surmounted by a waving feather of green” (145).
When the narrator mentions his body, it is to emphasize it more as a vehicle
for the adornments, rather than a human form: “his arms and legs, which were
bare, were encircled with the finest oriental pearl; he wore a collar of gold
round his throat, and his ears were decorated with gold rings of an enormous
size” (145). The shape, length or strength of his limbs is immaterial: they are
78
42
For a general overview of Romantic Orientalism see Marylin Butler, “Orientalism”. More
specifically on the interconnection between imperialist and racialist discourses in the
Romantic era, see Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial
Culture, 1780-1834.
only evoked as props in the Orientalist vision, which obscures the physicality
of the body itself.
Two surprising aspects are prominent in this otherwise commonplace
description: skin color and the body as a mirror of the character’s personality
and moral fiber are conspicuously absent in this scene. These absences are all
the more striking since the description of the bejeweled Zofloya appears in a
novel that, on the one hand, overtly thematizes the body as the visible
manifestation and proof of moral character, while focusing on skin color as
the visible marker of virtue or sin. Still, the passage introducing Zofloya
contains not even one description of his skin or his body as a whole. Here
Dacre leaves the body out and replaces it with the stock description of
Oriental splendor to foreshadow the appropriations, cultural and, more
specifically, narrative to which the Moorish body will be subjected in the
novel. Narrative-wise, this is the body that Satan will inhabit (after the “real”
slave Zofloya dies) -- it is appropriately emptied of significance as to the
character’s moral fiber. Furthermore, the decorative insignificance of the body
here further reveals the process of European figurations of the Other:
Zofloya is neither light or dark, tall or short; he is a mosaic of representational
cliches; his body is then appropriately portrayed as an empty shell, a place
holder, a cypher of generic otherness, ready to be occupied by the regulatory
79
meanings of a cultural discourse. It is not skin color that marks the Moor as
Other in the passage: it is rather the paraphernalia of Orientalism that
relegates him to this category. It is not his complexion but the befeathered
turban that mark him as Other.
Cultural conventions in gender and racial representation complicate
the initial description of the Moor Zofloya even further. His heavily adorned
and half-exposed body is presented as gender-neutral, if not explicitly
emasculated. The emphasis on jewels, pearls and feathers, however, further
mark his body as ambiguous in terms of gender and definitely racialized. The
description seems to evoke the cartouches of eighteenth-century world maps,
which often featured allegorical representation of the continents as women
adorned by what the Europeans deemed to be the most representative fruit of
their respective land and accompanied by its emblematic animals.
Moreover, the image of Zofloya’s naked limbs adorned with gold and
pearls obfuscates his position as a disenfranchised slave and is thus redolent
of the swift and facile idealization of another representation of the black body,
that of the “Sable Venus” (1794) by Thomas Stothand
43
. Stothand’s engraving
appeared as an illustration in The History, Civil and Commercial of the British
80
43
A copy of the engraving is located in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture / Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, a division of the New York Public
Library; it can also be accessed online at: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/
dgkeysearchresult.cfm?parent_id=209807&word=
Colonies in the West Indies: In Two Volumes (1794) and bore the caption
“The V oyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies”. In a clear
imitation of the vertical triangular composition of Boticelli’s “The Birth of
Venus”, Stothand’s Sable Venus is presented as a reigning goddess
effortlessly skimming the oceans in her triton-drawn shell-carriage. Practically
nude, she is adorned with pearls and gold like Zofloya. The richly allegorical
and somewhat pornographic imagery, however, obfuscates a very simple fact:
the only journey the “sable people” were ever taking from Angola to the
West-Indies was crowded in the bowel of a ship. Like the Sable Venus
44
,
whose naked body is frontally displayed for the viewer’s voyeuristic pleasure,
the body of Zofloya is accessible to and controlled by the gaze of Victoria.
The complex indeterminacies of gender and race in the description of the
Moor render the image of the exoticized Zofloya, contained within the
fantasy of Oriental opulence, an aggregate of cultural inscriptions that
facilitate the novel’s complex figurations of gender and virtue. Zofloya is not
a prince, nor is he a slave; he is neither black nor European; neither man nor
81
44
Felicity Nussbaum offers a different interpretation of the “Sable Venus” as a parodic play,
claiming that the image represents “at core a classical white goddess who playfully switches
color and adopts a dark complexion merely to tease and test her lover.” (The Limits of the
Human 152). Her argument is supported by the poem accompanying the plate: ” Then, playful
Goddess! Cease to Change,// Nor in new beauties vainly range;” (152) My reading, however,
emphasizes the structural similarities between the image and the description to highlight the
cultural mechanisms at play in the novel. For a more detailed discussion of the print, see
Wood, M. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America,
1780-1865.
woman
45
. The indeterminacy of the character allows for multiple
configurations of desires and racial and gender configurations that can
accommodate both the process of social structuration of femininity in the
novel and the the interventions of the libidinous woman.
Like the Moor Zofloya, Victoria is portrayed in ambiguous gender
terms, but in contrast to him, she is not simply presented as a masculine
woman -- she seems to have fully forfeited her position as a woman. In
parallel with the dematerialization of the Moorish body, it is not her body that
is marked masculine. On the contrary, she is portrayed with the stock
vocabulary of physical perfection: “Her smile was fascination herself”(96),
“Her figure, though above the middle height, was symmetry itself” (96). It is
her strong will and propensity for violence and cruelty that compromise her
position as woman. In a futile attempt to preserve her virtue, her mother sends
Victoria away from the city to live in confinement at the home of a relative,
Signora Di Modena. As a result, Victoria is possessed by “desire of revenge,
[so] deep and implacable [that] gave to her character an additional shade of
harshness and ferocity: thus she became like the untamable hyaena, that
82
45
Said has amply demonstrated that the symbolic feminization of the Oriental other is integral
to the project of Orientalism, wherein the Western self is situated at “a peculiarly suited
vantage point [to observe] the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine
East” (Orientalism 138). In this novel, however, the Orientalist figuration of the Moor also
works to add a gender fluidity to the Moorish body and not necessarily to emasculate it.
confinement renders only more fierce” (75). This quotation speaks to the
cultural imperative that women must be educated into properly feminine
behavior and demeanor, but, more importantly, emphasizes Victoria’s wild and
ferocious nature: her anger has rendered her “untamable”.
Since in the eighteenth century popular imagination the hyena was
seen as hermaphroditic, the metamorphosis of the young woman does more
than to simply compromise her femininity, it hurls her beyond the boundaries
of “womanhood” as such. Her violence marks her, quite literally, as a gender
freak. To use the lingo of the time, Victoria is not simply a “disgrace to her
sex,” she is an “unsex’d female” (Polwhele) who can not be influenced into
correcting her vice: “the confinement renders [the hyena] all the more fierce”.
The image of Victoria as a hyena is also quite significant in that it transposes
the moral or personal characteristic -- ferociousness -- onto the body that is
now marked as hermaphroditic and thus monstrous.
The hyena simile is only one of a series of animalistic images used to
describe Victoria. After she manages to escape from her confinement, for
example, Victoria is compared to a bird: “she darted like a wild bird newly
escaped from its wiry tenement, into the beautiful and romantic wood” (81).
What follows this scene is Victoria’s journey back to Venice: she roams the
woods, “determined to avoid the habitations of man ...[and] passed the night
83
in common with the race of animal nature, beneath no other canopy than the
star-sprinkled heavens” (84). It is notable how Dacre’s figurative language
shifts from a simile to a metaphor. The similes -- “like a hyena” and “like a
bird”
46
-- emphasize the make-believe nature of literary discourse and,
consequently, create a distance between the reader and the image. However,
the metaphor of “pass[ing] the night in common with the race of animal
nature” works in the opposite way. It annihilates the distance to posit Victoria
as indeed one of the “race of animal nature” and at home in the wilderness,
away from the domestic space.
Victoria’s alienation from the domestic will become a consistent
spatial theme in the novel. Dacre often shows her heroine walking at night, in
the remote parts of huge estate parks; she depicts Victoria retreating not to her
room, but leaving for a walk; she will, as the novel develops, conduct her
secret rendezvous with Zofloya in secluded shady groves
47
, at twilight or
early dawn. Obviously all these characteristics convey the idea of secrecy and
infernal designs. More importantly though, Victoria's nocturnal habits, the
animalistic imagery used the describe her, and her affinity with the “race of
84
46
At another point, Victoria is compared to an antelope, “she was as the tall and graceful
antelope (96).
47
It is quite interesting to note that even though the character is often portrayed amid a natural
landscape, her relationship to her surroundings is not that of appreciation of the picturesque --
a concept crucial to the cult of sensibility and integral to the idea of female delicacy. Victoria
does not “appreciate” the beauty of nature; rather she is figured as a part of it.
animal nature” hyperbolically mark her as an outsider to the middle-class
bourgeois world, over which the virtuous woman is supposed to preside. Thus
it seems logical that her major allie, the Moorish slave Zofloya, is also an
outsider. Like Victoria, who is seen in the novel roaming the woods and parks,
Zofloya also occupies the liminal cultural spaces of night, wilderness and
nature.
The affinity between Zofloya and Victoria, I would like to suggest,
goes beyond the obvious demonic aspect of the pair. Even though the author
ostensibly modeled her novel on Lewis’s The Monk, Dacre’s Moor cum Satan
is less infernal and more perfunctory than Lewis’s Satan disguised as a
beautiful seductive woman. In Dacre’s novel, Zofloya functions more as
Victoria’s servant, rather than being the source of all temptation. Victoria is
all too aware of her passions, vice, and illicit desires to need the Devil as a
catalyst. First materialized in her dream, he is more akin to an “eastern tale”
genie and his extraordinary abilities -- mostly in the realm of music and
poison-making
48
-- are more easily attributable to some vaguely identifiable
Moorish sorcery than to the infernal machinations of the Devil himself.
Zofloya as the Oriental Other is thus a lot more prominent in the novel. The
85
48
Stephanie Burley identifies the horror in the novel as stemming from the use and command
of powerful knowledge -- in this case sorcery and poison making -- on the part of the
Moorish slave, who is clearly a racial and a social inferior. Cf. “The Death of Zofloya, or the
Moor as Epistemological Limit”
affinity between the racial Other and the epitome of failed femininity,
Victoria, is central to the treatment of normative gender and its connection to
the discourse of race in the novel. The pairing between Victoria and the Moor
Zofloya, has been interpreted by Diane Hoeveler and Anne K. Mellor as an
expression of cultural prohibitions against interracial desire
49
. Mellor
emphasizes the subversive potential of Dacre’s novel to actually legitimize
interracial desire for women, a representation that provides “a wider range of
sexual options [for women], a more aggressive libidinal subjectivity, than in
other writings of her day” (“Interracial Sexual Desire” 173). Hoeveler, on the
other hand, emphasizes “miscegenation as sexual and racial
nausea” (“Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya” 185), in which “the black and of a lower
class ... foreign [male] is literally empowered by functioning in league, as
one, with a corrupt aristocratic and foreign woman” (189).
The above interpretations offer valuable insights in the cultural
underpinnings of race in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. My
analysis, however, aims to show how the black body here is integral to the
cultural process of gender articulation itself; and how the cultural ideal of
86
49
While Victoria is indeed shown as lusting after the Moor, and later on their relationship will
take the shape and conform to the cultural conventions of romantic love, the romantic aspect
of their relationship is not central to the figurations of femininity and otherness in the text.
The figuration is more of a Gothic convention than a conscious authorial decision; the
interracial aspect, however, is more prominent in Zofloya, despite of Dacre’s emulation of
Lewis.
middle-class, and necessarily white, femininity, is impossible without the
debasement of the desirous black body. The characters of Zofloya and Victoria
form more than an ‘alter-ego’ or a romantic couple configuration in the novel.
They are symbolically welded together as the “dark underbelly” of normative
femininity. More importantly, however, the coupling between the violent
libidinous woman Victoria and the racial Other Zofloya is indicative of a late
eighteenth-century cultural obsession with blackness as a sign and symptom
of sexual concupiscence and illicit sex in general. Charlotte Dacre’s novel
Zofloya seems to represent a pivotal cultural moment in the structuration of
gender and racial discourses: the interconnection between the nascent, and in
the process of articulation, discourse of female passionlessness and the
solidification of a racialist discourse of blackness that posits the black as
sexually deformed and monstrous.
Ostensibly, Zofloya and Victoria could not possibly be any more
different: the Moor is a “debased” slave, and the haughty young woman is a
spoilt aristocrat, used to gain her way in everything. Interestingly, however,
the two characters share a number of structural characteristics. They are both
described in gender ambiguous terms; and they are both figured as outsiders.
Victoria is foreign to the domestic space of female virtue and the slave
Zofloya is quite literally alien -- ethnically, racially, and nationally speaking.
87
In addition, they are described with similar epithets connoting awe and
alluding to their dark appearance and passionate nature. Victoria’s step is
“firm and majestic” (96) , and Zofloya possesses “grace and majesty” (153);
Victoria’s eyes shine “with incomparable radiance”, while Zofloya’s eyes
“brilliant and large, sparkle with inexpressible fire” (153). These are only two
examples out of the many in the book. Gradually, the sparkle in Victoria's
eye will become progressively more ominous as she plots the destruction of
anybody and everybody standing in her way to sexual indulgence. After she
decides to poison her husband, “the high blush of animation flushed her cheek
with more than usual fire; her eyes sparkled, but it was with a fiend-like
exultation” (165)
50
. Granted, some of this imagery is simply cliched -- such
as the insistence on the characters’ “majestic” stature, or the connection
between dark complexion and “dark passion”. Nevertheless, the consistency
of the parallels and the structural congruence between the two characters
allows for a symbolic unity in which the characters merge in their alienation
and transgression.
More importantly, Victoria and Zofloya are more than allies; the two
characters fuse symbolically into one: the threat of predatory sexuality. Not
88
50
The theme of the fiery eye or the uncanny ruddy hue of Victoria’s cheek is sustained
throughout the novel to emphasize her essential monstrosity and destructive potentiality . Her
joyful anticipation of gaining Henriquez love, for example is compared to “the brilliant glare
of the terrible volcano, pregnant even in its beauty with destruction!” (151)
only is Victoria assisted in her infernal machinations by the knowledge and
magic of the Moor, but in the last several chapters of the novel, she is herself
depicted as horrifyingly dark. The narrator emphasizes the darkness of her
skin and hair: “those black fringed eyelids, reposing upon a cheek of dark
and animated hue -- those raven tresses hanging unconfined -- oh, sad! oh,
damning proofs!” (217). This description is focalized through the character of
Henriquez, the idealized man of sensibility, who, under the spell of magic
assisted by a potion, consummates his passion for the angelical Lilla with the
infernal Victoria. Thus, Victoria’s ‘raven tresses” are a “damning proof” that
the diabolically racialized femininity has invaded and polluted the domain of
the virtuous woman. In the description of Victoria, Dacre ironically subverts a
topos in the cultural language of the time. The pink or rosy hue on the cheek
of the white woman was supposed to signify modesty and delicacy, a bodily
symptom that seems to be emphatically absent from figurations of the black
body during the period
51
. The pious and virtuous Lilla is indeed described
precisely in such manner: ”sweet, expressing a seraphic serenity of soul,
seemed her angelic countenance, slightly suffused with the palest hue of the
virgin rose” (144). The “dark and animated hue” of VIctoria’s cheek, however,
89
51
For a discussion of the connection between whiteness, sexuality, and slavery in visual
representations in late eighteenth century Britain , see Kay Dian Kriz “Marketing Mulattresses
in the Paintings and Prints of Agostino Brunias” in The Global Eighteenth Century Edited by
Felicity Nussbaum.
obscenely mimics the blush to present the obverse of angelic innocence -- the
ruddy hue here is the post-coital glow of sexual pleasure.
Dacre’s figuration of such complex representational grammar of body,
race and, quite literally, color uncannily resembles the interconnection
between representations of race and normative femininity in a rare late
eighteenth-century painting that portraits a white and a black woman together.
This is the portrait of the interracial illegitimate daughter of Sir John
Lindsay, Dido Elizabeth Belle, with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray
52
.
Despite the primacy of Dido’s name in the title of the painting, it is lady
Elizabeth who is in the center of the composition. Her calm, pensive face is
contrasted with the animated smiling face of Dido. Adorned with a wreath of
flowers, a common symbol of virginity
53
, her gaze averted sideways from the
viewer, and her hand holding a book, Elizabeth’s snow-white cheeks are
tinted with a slight shade of pink. Her dress replicates the color of her face in
layered white translucent lace and gauze infused with the pastel peachy pink
of smooth velvet to form the perfect image of virginal bashfulness. Dido, on
the other hand, is wearing a befeathered turban and a floaty, shimmering,
90
52
Johan Zoffany, “Dido Elizabeth Belle, later Davinier, and Lady Elizabeth Murray, later
Finch Hatton”, c. 1780; the painting is in a private collection, owned by The Earl of
Mansfield, Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland.
53
Felicity Nussbaum explicitly identifies the flowers as “English” to call attention to the
nationalistic overtones of the image. See The Limits of the Human, pp. 163-164.
vaguely ‘Oriental’ dress and carrying a platter of fruit. Unlike Lady Elizabeth,
she is actually gazing straight into the viewer, and is shown playfully
pushing forward, as if poised to run or walk briskly, and pointing with a
smile to her own dark cheek, as if to emphasize the irreducible difference
between the two.
For, even though the interracial Dido is also portrayed as slightly
flushed, her cheeks are ruddy at best, lacking the gentle tint on the white
complexion of her cousin. The composition, with Lady Elizabeth standing
more center and front and Dido seemingly floating behind, also emphasizes
the difference in status between the two young women. Furthermore, the
outstretched arm of Lady Elizabeth seems to be ambiguously placed, holding
Dido’s elbow. Is she pushing her away, eager to resume her reading, or is she
pulling Dido down, inviting her to sit with her at the bench? The composition
of this ostensibly family portrait is suffused with the air of affectionate
camaraderie. Nevertheless, the two figures are separated in space by the
outstretched arm of Elizabeth; contrasted in pose (one seated, the other
moving), class and race; and ultimately divided in their allegorical
representation of female virtue: the virginal blush and ruddy hue form the
opposite poles in the regulatory discourse of femininity. The preservation of
the virginal body is dependent on its symbolic insulation and distance from
91
the black exoticized body. Although Dido’s image is not overtly sexualized, it
is undeniably exoticized and her gesture -- her finger pointed to her own dark
cheek -- serves to enact visually the process of cultural appropriation of the
black body; the virginal whiteness of Elizabeth’s cheek is made possible by
the accentuated ruddiness of Dido’s face.
The cultural appropriations of the black body in Zofloya, however, are
more complex than the one suggested by Zoffany’s painting. The bodies of the
black, male at that, slave and of the white woman are not divided by the
necessary social hierarchies: they are welded together into the desirous and
monstrously hermaphroditic body that is passionately destroying the domestic
world of the virtuous woman. A lot of the horror in the novel stems from this
coupling, but so does a significant portion of the titillation inherent in the
text. Although in a different context -- that of the visual arts -- Kay Dian Kriz
argues that representations of female racial ambiguity can be interpreted as a
“fantasy of possessing a body that both is and is not white, bearing the marks
of refined whiteness and the promise of savage sexual pleasure so closely
associated with blackness”(204)
54
. Kriz suggests that this interpretation is
accessible to women not only through fantasies of subjection (mastering the
92
54
Kriz’s analysis concerns the work of Agustino Brunias, a series of paintings, mostly
portraits, which ostensibly represented women of mixed race in Jamaica, while avoiding
images that could be securely identified as white creole or European.
black body) but also through processes of identification . Thus they could
invite the gaze of white women -- besides the white heterosexual men, for
whom the images were most probably created -- “who might fantasize
about “possessing” (in either sense) a body understood to offer “dark” sexual
pleasures” (204).
Similar representational possiblities are at work in the monstrous
coupling between Victoria and Zofloya. Due to the gender reversals of both
violence and desire inherent in the novel -- Victoria’s masculinization in body
and spirit points to her occupying a cultural space conventionally coded male
-- the text thematizes the possibility, for white female readers, to reverse
gender positions and “possess” a black body in the sense of domination and
control, usually reserved for the white heterosexual viewer of the works
discussed by Kriz. Because Dacre initially portrays the relationship between
Victoria and the Moor in the guise of a romantic pursuit, the fantasy of
possession and control over the male Black body is quite prominent. The
Moor is , after all, first evoked in Victoria's consciousness as a figment of her
imagination and an object of desire in a dream. In the following chapters,
Dacre explicitly portrays a woman who lusts after the racial Other, this time
in her waking hours, and in the company of others : “In one of those hasty
glances, which pride alone would permit her to steal it occurred to her that the
93
figure of the Moor possessed a grace and majesty which she had never before
remarked; his face too seemed animated with charms till now unnoticed, and
his very dress to have acquired a more splendid, tasteful and elegant
appearance” (153). Of course, the language of this passage, which
romanticizes the dress of the Moor and exoticizes his physical appearance,
points to the complicity of such (ostensibly subversive) female fantasies with
the Oriental project. Most of the time the descriptions of the Moor are
focalized through the character of Victoria. The whole trajectory of the
character in the novel -- from fantasy to sexualized slave to an empty shell to
be taken up by Satan himself -- is paradigmatically Orientalist.
Edward Said has established the epistemological and ethical
impossibility for the colonial or imperial subject to relate to the Orient on a
purely human level, outside the power/knowledge systems that produce
regulatory discourses. Said writes, “for a European or American studying the
Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his [or her]
actuality: that he[or she] comes up against the Orient as a European or
American first, as an individual second” (Orientalism 11). Thus, it is almost
impossible to claim that a fantasy of female possession of the male black body
can be experienced truly as a matter of psychological interiority, in isolation
from its social and discursive regulation. In Zofloya, more specifically, the
94
decorative, ornate and exposed body of the Moor is figured as sufficiently
emasculated and thus safe, culturally speaking, for white female
consumption. If in fact the figuration of Zofloya’s body in the novel represents
a fantasy, it is not the potentially subversive fantasy of female possession of
the black body. On the contrary, due to the Moor’s emasculation, it is still the
fantasy of the white man’s control over the black female body, a fantasy that
ultimately reinstates the binarisms of the heterosexual matrix.
In this respect, it is quite significant -- and somewhat unfortunate --
that two of the three present-day editions of Zofloya; Or the Moor still
available in print feature Orientalist images of women on their covers. A
Victorian era photograph of a supine, languid female body with an exposed
breast, entitled a “Reclining Odalisque” ( 1858), by Roger Fenton adorns the
Broadview edition of the novel from 1997 and a fragment of “Women of the
Ouled Nayls” (1867) by French painter Eugene Fromentin (1820-1876)
visualizes the “Moorish” aspect of the novel for the Oxford World Classics
edition of 1999. In both cases, the choices seem really odd, since the images
represent ‘Oriental women’, while the Moor of Dacre’s eponymous novel is
clearly and obviously male. Upon closer inspection, however, these choices
for cover art seem to represent the symbolical and ideological impasse that
the novel thematizes: if a woman is to symbolically access, as Anne Mellor
95
put it “ a wider range of sexual options, [and] a more aggressive libidinal
subjectivity, than in other writings of her day” she can only do so within the
regulatory discourses of male desire and possession that are already culturally
available and to which she herself is subjected.
The very same feminization of the Moor that results from European
cultural appropriations of the oriental body, allows, structurally speaking, for
the symbolic fusion of the black male and the white female body in the
monstrous body of the violent, coded as black, woman. Victoria, however,
does not possess a black body that can invite reader identification and
partaking in its “dark sexual pleasures” (Kriz 204). The character is figured as
black to signify her vice; her blackness becomes a code for obscenity and
lewdness. The “black Victoria” becomes the paradigmatic “negro” from the
prints of Hogarth, where the black figure, usually female, absorbs and
intensifies the bawd meaning of the representation, it becomes, quite literally,
the embodiment of illicit sex.
55

96
55
Sander L Gilman discusses one of the most prominent figurations of the black female as an
allegorical representation of lurid sexuality is in plate III of “The rakes Progress: The Orgy”
where the black servant’s head is squished in the background, visually reduced to its
disproportionately big mouth and luridly round eyes. A similar representation is evident in
another work by Hogatrth, “A Harlot's Progress” (1731) where the black child’s symbolic
function is augmented by the difference of another racial outsider, the Jew. For more on the
role of the racial Other see Sander L Gilman “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward and
Iconography of Female Sexuality” In Pathology and Difference: Stereotypes of Sexuality,
Race and Madness (1985). Gilman discusses how the black body becomes an allegory of
concupiscence in the visual arts of the eighteenth century. In Zofloya, however, the black and
the desirous body are fused into one, they are not presented side by side in an allegorical
configuration.
Victoria’s symbolic blackness, intertwined with her rapacious
sexuality, intensifies the pornographic properties of this scandalous novel by
literalizing the bawdy meanings of the word “black”, as in the collocation
“black joke” a phrase , which, in the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries referred to the female sexual organ. The origin of this
particular usage can be tracked back to an anonymous ribald song, best
known from its 1730s single sheet edition, entitled “The Original Coal Black
Joke” (Roberts 137). The song closely resembles Dacre’s text in its
hyperbolic depictions, in this case of a Gargantuan female sexual organ. The
beginning of the poem elaborates on the pleasures to be gained,
In working a Joak that will lather like Soap,
And ye Hair of her Joak will draw more than a Roap,
And her black Joak and Belly so white.
after which, each stanza alternates with a refrain:
Of that Coal-black Joak yt will make a Man roar
And the H-rs of her Joak will draw Ship to ye Shoar,
With her Black Joak and Belly so white.(Qtd in Roberts 137)
The refrains contained some modified lines, as we see here, but the common
part is repeated multiple times, “her Black Joak and Belly so white” (137).
Several structural parallels exist between the trajectory of the character of the
homicidal desirous woman in Dacre’s novel and the monstrous potentialities
of the “Black Joke” in the song. Dacre compares, for example, Victoria’s
97
mirth to “the brilliant glare of the terrible volcano, pregnant even in its beauty
with destruction!” (151). Similarly, the gigantic “black joke” can draw a ship
to the shore. The euphemistic metaphors for sexual acts notwithstanding, the
figurative language here grotesquely presents the female sexual organ as both
extremely powerful and monstrously huge. If it can “draw [a] ship to ye
Shoar” (Qtd in Roberts 137), the “black joak” can easily crash said ship
against the shore.
A great deal of the humor in the song depends on the juxtaposition of
the monstrously huge “black joke” with the vulnerability and fetishistic
eroticism of the “belly so white”. The refrain locates a “black” part to be
contrasted with the “so white” female body. The two seem to be disconnected,
not exactly forming the unity of synecdochical description of the female
body , but constituting some sort of a figurative dismemberment, where the
female body falls apart into its two constitutive parts: “the black joke and the
belly so white”. The split in the late eighteenth-century popular song and in
the phrase ‘black joke’ is indicative of the gender/sex system of the era,
wherein the virtuous white female body had to be defined as irreparably
marred by the presence of the racial Other: the monstrous “black joke”
hidden beneath “a belly so white”. Thus, the “black joke” seems to be the
perfect label for the workings of gender regulation at the turn of the
98
nineteenth century, a process that ultimately led to the coherence of the
doctrine of female passionlessness. It depended on the gradual purging of
libidinous energies from the white middle-class female body and their
concentration into the imagined monstrous body of the black woman.
Similarly, the notion of monstrous hypertrophy of female sexuality
permeates the pages of Dacre’s novel. As in the “Black Joke” song, the notion
of female sexuality as pathological is closely related to the presence of the
black body, this time of Victoria herself. A great deal of the obscenity in the
song depends on a cultural convention of representing the female genitalia as
monstrous, or even diseased, because they are hidden.
56
The intersection
between pathology and female sexual desire is indeed the core of the narrative
in Zofloya. Not only does Victoria become a criminal -- she leaves a string of
tortured dead bodies in the wake of her incontrollable passion -- she quite
literally becomes what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew as a
“Nymphomaniac”: a woman believed to be mentally deranged and physically
diseased as a result of her unchecked sexual urges. In its diction, imagery and
vocabulary, Dacre’s book quite clearly and consistently references a popular
99
56
For a more detailed discussion about iconic representation of the body, in conjunction with
race, in medical and visual discourses, see Sander L Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated history
1989.
medical treatise, Bienville’s Nymphomania or the Furor Uterinus,
57
the text
most responsible for the popularization of the sensational disease
58
.
Borrowing images and syntactically emulating full sentences in Bienville’s
treatise, Charlotte Dacre figures Victoria’s passion for Henriquez in the terms
of psychosomatic pathology. The young woman “dwell[s] with unrestrained
delight upon the attractions of the object (Henriquez) that had presented itself
to her fickle and ill-regulated mind” (143). Her jealousy of Lilla, “make[s]
her wild with the furor of conflicting passions” (144).
Beyond the overt references, however, Dacre models the
transformation of the character itself on the down-spiral trajectory of
Bienville’s Nymphomaniac. Victoria’s violent criminality marks her as one of
“these monsters in human shape [who]abandon themselves to an excess of
fury” (Bienville 37). Dacre’s consistent use of fire imagery to portray not only
the character's appearance but also her passions are reminiscent of another
symptom of the nymphomaniac: she is literally on fire, aflame with desire.
Bienville writes that “a violent burning, and aridity in the [sexual] parts” (74)
leads to “the tunics of the matrix being dried up” (74) and thus is a
100
57
Bienville M.D.T. Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation concerning the Furor Uterinus. Trans.
Edward Sloane Wilmot. London 1775. Published with Onanism by S.A. Tissot in Onanism/
Nymphomania. New York; Garland 1985.
58
Adrian Craciun’s footnotes to the 1997 Broadview edition of the novel trace the references
quite comprehensively. She argues that Dacre was probably familiar with the medical text and
thus her references are not simply a result of the popularization of medical ideas in her time.
prominent symptom of nymphomania. The consistent and multiple references
in the text to Victoria’s large frame, her growingly masculine shape , her
strong limbs and monstrous body
59
-- often contrasted to the diminutive shape
of the idealized Lilla -- allude to the hypertrophy of her sexual organs. It is
precisely this deformation that Bienville posited as an inescapable result of
nymphomania: “the clitoris is usually swelled, and larger than in discreet
women” (74), the ovaries are enlarged and ridden with tumors (Ibid 74).
Such pathology, Bienville states, “has also been frequently observed at the
dissection of bodies” (74). Bienville here evokes the authority of scientific
observation. Bienville’s meticulous isolation of altered tissues, organs, and
body parts, listed in Nymphomania as exhibiting the degeneration of disease,
is part of a larger discourse that medicalizes and pathologizes female
sexuality at the end of the eighteenth century. Given the overt moralistic tone
of Bienville's treatise, he alludes to the field of medicine to evoke an
authority. Medicine as a discourse can produce the evidence for female
passionlessness; it can procure and display the diseased bodies and the body
parts of the infected to demonstrate the pathology -- the “unnaturalness” of
101
59
The hidden deformity that the narrative persistently alludes to, and that Adriana Craciun has
compellingly analyzed in her introduction to the novel (Craciun 20) is consistent with the
notion that Victoria’s rage is the pathological derangement of the nymphomaniac.
female passion. The very display of this pathological monstrosity is to
safeguard the healthy and the pure ones.
Renowned anatomist William Hunter
60
, for example, produced,
commissioned and collected specimens and wax casts of human genitalia
with the explicit purpose to exhibit them in a “teaching museum” for the
advancement of medical training. Significantly, these casts differ from the
engravings in the obstetrical atlas -- Anatomia uteri umani gravidi [The
anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774) -- for which
Hunter is best known. In the exceptionally naturalistically drawn
representations of the atlas, the organs, tissues, and the various textures of the
body form a coherent unity. The depictions show how "the mother's body
framed and moulded the fetus, the two lives being portrayed as a single
interconnected system” (Jordanova 407). The casts, however, isolate the
genitalia by detaching them from the context of the body, and displaying
them, one could imagine, alongside other specimen illustrating human
anatomy and pathology. It is noteworthy that most of the sex-neutral or male
organs carry general labels like “The arteries and cavernous tissues of the
102
60
For a more detailed discussion of Hunter’s casts and their role in the iconography of the
body see Gilman, Sexuality; An Illustrated History.
penis in a wax cast” (Gilman 178)
61
, with no reference the body as a whole or
the role of the organ within its context. When it came to preparations or casts
of female body parts, however, they more often evoked the context of the
female body as a whole only to emphasize the detachment of the preparation,
its isolation in the glass jar .
A preparation of the pubic symphysis (which is the midline
cartilaginous joint connecting the tips of the left and right pubic bones), for
example, was labeled “the symphysis pubis from a maid”
62
. The label
predictably emphasizes sexual difference, as “inescapable biology”, as
Laqueur put it; but more importantly, it articulates the separation and
isolation of the body part as a “specimen”: it is not simply a “female pubic
symphysis” that the viewer is facing, it is one that is detached from the
female body, a free floating artefact that emphasizes pathology
63
grounded in
difference: the language of the label emphatically implies that it is possible
that the body of origin of this preparation can determine its properties, that
103
61
For more examples, consult the picture gallery of the The University of Glasgow’s
Hunterian Museum website.
62
The image is part of the Hunterian Museum Online Photo Library (http://
www.hopl.gla.ac.uk/display.aspx?id=NTM0Ng%3d%3d-ibKcS55KulA%3d)
63
It is not clear form the inscription itself whether Hunter referred to an unmarried woman in
general (a common use of the word “maid” in the 18th and 19th c.) or to a working class
woman servant. If it is the latter, his designation, “ the symphysis pubis from a maid” further
emphasizes the pathology of the working-class body as well.
coming “from a maid” this joint is somehow different than others. Given that
Hunter’s preparations of specifically female organs and body parts numbered
over 600 (Teacher 7), it is not surprising that a good deal of them dealt with
pathology
64
. Within the context of such pathological monstrosity, it is not
surprising that Hunter’s collection contained a wax cast of the genitalia of a
black woman which -- with its labia stretched apart and splayed labia minora
symbolized the monstrous capacity of female sexuality in general. Such
articulation of the black female as monstrous is doubly more significant in the
context of the, quite literally, pedagogical goals of the collection -- Hunter
started it for teaching purposes, but more broadly its pedagogical implications
were, as Gilman claimed, “to prove the difference between the normal and
abnormal, the acceptable and the deviant” (179).
One can speculate that if writers like Bienville provided the language
and symbolic grammar to discuss female sexual pathology, the work of
anatomists like Hunter supplied the visuals -- the deformed genitalia of the
black female -- that provide unity to the regulatory discourse of middle-class
virtuous femininity. It is noteworthy that the coherence of two discourses --
104
64
We can safely assume that Hunter’s collection included a great deal of preparations
demonstrating female sexual pathology since Teacher, who catalogued the collection, felt that
the obstetrical and gynecological section “can hardly be improved” (7), while he made very
specific suggestions for the acquisition of new preparations in most other sections of the
anatomical collection.
the doctrine of female sexual passionlessness and the obsessive figuration of
the black female body as diseased, deformed and monstrous occurred
simultaneously
65
and, one might surmise, that they were equally important to
the solidification of both racial and gender hierarchies at the turn of the
nineteenth century. For these hierarchies, however, to be culturally viable it
was important that the boundaries between black and white, healthy and
diseased, pure and defiled are kept intact and clearly demarcated. Zofloya:Or
the Moor, however, seems to be doing the opposite: the novel symbolically
blurs the boundaries between male and female, normal and deviant, pure and
defiled by fusing together the white and the black bodies of the Moor Zofloya
and the libidinous Victoria. Even though exegetically the two are supposed to
simply present the embodiment of sheer unadulterated evil, Dacre’s
celebratory language and her decision to turn the villainess into the central
focal point of the narrative subvert not simply the genre conventions of the
Gothic novel, but also the centrality of the ideal of the virtuous woman. In
its celebration of female passion and, one might add, glorification of female
sexually motivated violence, Dacre’s Zofloya reveals the discursive nature of
105
65
It is true that sexualized and exoticizing depictions of the black body, often emphasizing its
perceived monstrosity, have been in circulation in Europe since the middle ages (see Gilman
pp. 100-108 and 170-176 and 287-304). However, I would like to draw attention more
specifically to the medical discourse and the work done on cadavers, which (as with the
solidification of gender discourses) established difference founded in the body as both
justification of and the foundation of social relations.
sex and a symbolic confusion of the dichotomies crucial to gender and racial
hierarchies. These properties of the text do not exonerate the racism and
exoticism inherent in Dacre’s novel. It seems that Dacre symbolically
appropriates the black body to imagine a more sexually autonomous female
subject. Nonetheless, her manipulation of regulatory discourses is quite
remarkable within the tradition of Gothic novels in that it reveals the
intersection between medical and racial discourses on the body in the
formation of the ideal of middle-class virtuous femininity.
106
'Smoke and Mirrors': Femininity as
Phantasmagoria in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Observation is Lucy’s modus operandi, as she looks at the world from
the peculiar vantage point of seeming crushing isolation. Lucy Snowe, the
first-person narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, a dark and brooding, and
yet unexpectedly life-affirming, tale of a single Victorian woman of no
exceptional virtue or beauty, of no independent financial means and even
worse marriage prospects, has perfected the art of observation and the craft of
meticulous description. Like the protagonist of the eponymous and best
known among Brontë’s novels, Jane Eyre, Lucy lacks any of the exceptional
qualities, be those external or internal, that would make her the worthy
heroine of a Gothic romance or the protagonist of domestic novel. Lucy is
not beautiful, impressionable, emotionally expressive or particularly
memorable in any other way; on the contrary: she is a quiet, cool and
collected woman of no exceptional virtue or beauty.
Unlike Jane Eyre, however, whose triumphant “Reader, I married
him” ( Jane Eyre 543) normalizes female passion thorough its inscription into
the field of domesticity, Lucy Snow’s tale of passion, suffering and, I would
like to argue, unlikely triumph eludes the life of domesticity. The novel’s
107
vague and somewhat rushed ending leaves Lucy content to inhabit the
convincingly constructed, although utopian, world of female homosociality --
the boarding school in the imaginary European town of Villette. Like Jane
Eyre, Lucy seems to avoid attention and seek hiding places, but if Jane’s
purpose seems to be to hide from the world in a safe haven, Lucy’s is quite the
opposite: she constructs a whole new world, from without, looking onto it
from the shadows.
Equally important is yet another similarity between Jane Eyre and
Villette -- an aspect not sufficiently explored in Villette by students of the
Victorian novel -- and that is the role of Empire in the structuration of the
female subject. The two novels are not simply set during the age of Empire;
the specifically feminine spaces -- domesticity in Jane Eyre and professional
and financial independence in Villette -- that the protagonists manage to
carve out for themselves are equally dependent on the symbolic appropriation
of a colonial Other. In Jane Eyre, as Gayatri Spivak has brilliantly
demonstrated, the character of the creole woman Bertha Mason is not simply a
subplot, a detail in the story of Jane’s path to domestic happiness. Quite the
opposite: domestic happiness itself hinges on the dehumanization and
annihilation of the colonial Other; it is necessary “so that Jane Eyre can
become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” ( Three Women’ s
108
Texts 251). Such a deployment of the Other, argues Spivak, represents “an
allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of
a self-immolating
66
colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission
of the colonizer” (251).
Arguably, the colonial Other is not a major component of the plot in
Villette. The novel is set in a fictitious European country, named Labassecour
to denote a francophone nation, and no significant events in the plot involve a
colonial context. At the same time, I would like to suggest, the world of
Villette is replete with images of and references to Empire -- from children’s
pictorial books of exotic far-away lands inhabited by “wild men” (37) to
Kashmir shawls to the supine voluptuous “Cleopatra”, the most prized
acquisition of the art museum in Villette. I will demonstrate that given the
prominent role of the visual in the novel, these images (both verbally and
visually constructed) are central to the figurations of femininity and to the
formation of Lucy’s identity itself. More importantly, the colonial is not
simply a context in Villette: in the final analysis, the ending of the novel
suggests that Lucy’s life as an independent professional woman is made
109
66
Spivak here refers to the death of the deranged Bertha, but also to Antoinette from Rhys’s
1960’s revision (or sequel), Wide Sargasso Sea. About Antoinette, who says, “I know why I
was brought here and what I have to do,” (Rhys qtd in Spivak 251) Spivak writes that she
must “play out her role, act out the transformation of her “self” into that fictive Other” (251)
to make Jane's triumph possible.
possible by colonial exploitation. The building for her boarding school has
been bought with M. Paul's money,
67
whose family has considerable
possessions in Guadeloupe, where he sails to spend two years managing the
estate.
It is consequently all the more surprising that the colonial figurations
in the novel have attracted so little critical attention. If scholars have engaged
questions of alterity, they have mostly done so in relation to questions of
English identity and Continental religious and ethnic differences. Anne
Longmuir, more specifically, argues that English identity emerged in the
triangulation between representations of the English, the Continental and the
colonial and as such Muir posits the European-English relation as central to
the novel (“Reader, Perhaps” 163)
68
. Others have emphasized a more
generalized depiction of otherness, privileging the psychological aspects in the
portrayal of Lucy. Terry Eagleton treats the foreign locale as a “blank slate
onto which private fantasies can be projected" (Myths of Power 67), while
Sally Shuttleworth sees in Labassecour "an alien culture" (226).
110
67
Of course, the fact that it is her fiancé's money which enables her to do so also questions the
plausibility of financial independence for women in Victorian England; this issue, however, is
beyond the scope of my dissertation.
68
Longmuir develops a similar argument in “Emigrant SPinsters and the Construction of
Englishness in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette”. Nineteenth-Century gender Studies 4, no. 3 (2009
Winter); p 22 paragraphs. In the same vein, Rosemary Clark-Beattie focuses on religious
ideology in “ Fables of Rebellion: anti-Catholicism and the Structure of Villette” English
Literary History, V ol. 53, No 4 (Winter 1986), pp. 821-847
Notable exceptions to this trend are Rita S. Kranidis and Suzanne
Daly who have tackled the complex issues of Empire building in the novel
and connected the structuration of the colonial and the domestic as
simultaneous and mutually dependent processes. Daly studies the role of
colonial commodities -- such as kashmir shawls -- as signifiers of class and
social mobility, while Kranidis reads Lucy’s exile to Labassecour as a
metaphor for colonial immigration of single British women. Kranidis
interprets Lucy’s struggle as symptomatic to a larger paradox in Victorian
culture, the strive to redefine “middle-class women from cherished and
sheltered subjects to ones representing a particular kind of cultural
excess" (The Victorian Spinster 17-18). Even though Kranidis study of the
connection between colonial immigration and the mid-nineteenth-century
problem of “redundant women” is really compelling, her choice of Villette
for one of her textual case studies can be problematic because of its
somewhat utopian setting that is clearly not colonial. While I do think that
the colonial undercurrents are really central to the representation of
femininity in the novel, I will not focus on the setting of the novel but rather
explore the colonial as one yet central facet of the novel’s complex
representation of femininity in the visual field. I believe that it is all the more
important to address Villette as a colonial text, precisely because the novel
111
seems to offer an alluring promise of female financial and emotional
independence, which is nevertheless only open to Lucy as an imperial subject.
* * *
The visual -- the play of light, perspective and position -- is a very
prominent aspect of the novel. It is most clearly symbolized in the story of the
apparitional nun - a young woman rumored to have been buried in the grounds
of the boarding school where Lucy lives and teaches. Lucy encounters the
apparition of the nun for the first time in “the deep, black, cold garret” (246),
with its “worm- eaten door” (246) and a dusty floor speckled with dead
beetles (147). She has come to the room to savor in private a letter from Dr
John. Lucy’s thoughts are brimming with delightfully torturesome
anticipation. This letter from Dr John
69
-- who is oblivious to Lucy’s intense
attraction to him -- she cherishes: she puts it away, locked up in a hidden box
to prolong the pleasure, and then carefully seeks the secluded space of the
garret to read it. His letter is, Lucy admits, but an ephemeral bubble, and yet
this is “a sweet bubble--of real honey-dew” (237). The passage meticulously
relates the circumstances of the sighting: having read her letter, Lucy writes, “
112
69
This character appears under two different names in the novel, Dr John and Graham
Bretton, because Lucy, as an unreliable narrator, withholds information in a narrative that
relies heavily on the motif of he ‘long-lost’ loved one; the same is true for Paulina De
Bassompierre, another central character in Lucy’s story, who also appears as Polly Home.
Throughout this chapter I will refer to them, consistently with Lucy’s narrative because the
characters in their two respective personas work differently in the text.
I turned: my light was dim; the room was long-- but as I live! I saw in the
middle of that ghostly chamber a figure all black and white; the skirts straight,
narrow, black; the head bandaged, veiled, white” (247). Desperately the
frazzled narrator adds “Say what you will, reader--tell me I was nervous or
mad; affirm that I was unsettled by the excitement of that letter; declare that I
dreamed; this I vow--I saw there--in that room--on that night--an image like--
a NUN” (247).
Lucy’s first encounter with the ghost of the Nun brings into focus
several of the central thematic concerns of this multi-layered novel.
Predictably, the ghost of the nun seems to serve as a cypher for Lucy’s
transgressive sexual desire, a meaning the apparition as a topos owes to its
legacy of Gothic Romanticism. Indeed, in both Radcliffe’s romances and
Lewis’ horrific tale, The Monk, women who have breached norms of sexual
decorum are condemned to roam the earth after their death. In Brontë's novel,
however, the appearances of the nun serve not that much as an admonition to
Lucy as they signal her hidden from others yet intensely passionate sexual
113
self
70
. As a result, expectedly and somewhat obviously the apparition
constitutes a parodic gesture of reviving the Gothic narrative machinery -- of
which the apparitional nun is a central element -- to ultimately reveal it as
nothing more than a lover’s ruse to gain access to his beloved. Towards the
novel’s end, we learn that the gruesome wounded and bandaged nun is no one
else but the young Alfred de Hamal, who uses the disguise to penetrate the
guarded space of the boarding school and meet with his lover, Ginevra
Fanshawe.
At the same time, the parodic resurrection of the obsolete narrative
device of the ghastly nun emphasizes the markedly gendered position of
Lucy as a narrator. The narrator’s clearly defensive tone as she addresses the
reader -- “tell me I was nervous or mad; affirm that I was unsettled by the
excitement of that letter” (247) -- implies that if by the mid-nineteenth century
the apparitional nuns are a thing of the literary past, the notion that a woman’s
overwrought ‘nerves’ can cause her to “see things” is very much alive. On yet
another level, however, the apparitional nun and the overall convent-like
114
70
Kate Millett credited Brontë as the first British author to openly celebrate female sexual
desire and to represent women’s sexual attraction to men directly, and not equivocally, as
female appreciation of male physical beauty (See Sexual Politics pp. 140-142). Thus it is
important to note that when and to whom the nun appears is quite significant in the novel:
Lucy’s object of unrequited love, Dr John, can not see the Nun, much in the same way he can
not see the strong passion Lucy feels for him; all he can do is ridicule -- “Lucy, was she a
pretty nun? Had she a pretty face?” (254), Dr John teases her. M. Paul, however, with whom
Lucy feels a deep connection and who will later become her lover, admits to having seen the
apparition himself.
atmosphere of the boarding school of Madame Beck, where Lucy teaches and
lives, signify an exclusively female homosocial space where Lucy’s sui
generis bildungsroman unfolds: she faces various disciplinary regimes of
competitive forms of femininiy that she has to negotiate and respond to in
order to arrive at her sense of self.
Finally, it seems that the ghost sightings are just one group of many
key scenes in Villette that emphasize the importance of visual imagination in
the novel in particular and Victorian culture in general. Because it recounts the
sighting of a ghost in an era that decidedly did not believe in ghosts, the above
scene understandably stages Lucy’s experience as a case of false perception:
the readers are invited, along with the narrator Lucy, to examine the
circumstances that allowed for it. The passage emphasizes the size of the
space (“the room was long” (247)) and the scarcity of light (“my light was
dim” (247)) that contrived to bring about the sensory perception that Lucy so
reluctantly, tentatively and yet carefully details. She is cautious to mention
that it is “an image-- like a NUN” she saw, and not necessarily a nun herself
that appeared before her. The image of the Nun, with its graphic sharpness and
the contrast between her black narrow skirts and white veiled head seems to
allude to a ghost in a magic lantern show. Lucy resolutely claims that her
115
perception is correct and yet she is not sure it accurately reflects what really
is.
The disjuncture between perception and the empirical world seems to
lie at the heart of the Victorian fascination with optical illusion. In their
overview of scientific developments in Victorian Britain, Christ and Jordan
explain how advancements in the science of physiology and optics led to a
better understanding of both the structure of the eye and the process of vision,
while technological inventions allowed for the development of numerous
devices that could produce an illusion of moving images. In other words, “[o]
nce empirical science had demonstrated how easily the eye could be tricked,
an explosion of optical gadgetry and optical toys were inevitable” (Christ and
Jordan Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, 3). The
commercialization of these devices -- their wide availability in ubiquitous
magic lantern shows or their presence in middle-class homes in the form of
zoetropes and phenakistoscopes
71
(Christ and Jordan 13) -- compels us to
consider the effect these apparatuses must have had on practices of viewing
and seeing. As Christian Metz has noted in his Lacanian study of cinema,
culturally speaking the cinematographic apparatus necessarily includes not
116
71
The phenakistoscope contained a disk with figures on it representing various stages of
motion; once whirled rapidly, it created the illusion of an actual motion; the zoetrope was a
later development of the phenakistoscope. For a more detailed discussion on optical toys and
gadgetry in the Victorian era see Christ and Jordan (pp. 1-26)
simply the equipment itself and those who sell it or use it to create
entertainment product but also “the mental machinery [...] which spectators
‘accustomed to’ [it] have internalized historically and which has adapted them
to the consumption” of the images produced (The Imaginary Signifier 7).
Thus the magic lantern and the various related gadgetry brought about
not only a form of entertainment but an acute awareness of the possible
disjuncture between seeing and believing (Christ and Jordan 12-13). One can
speculate that it is precisely the widely spread notion of the fallibility of the
human eye that gives De Hamal and Ginevra the confidence to disguise de
Hamal as the ghost of the Nun, parade him in front to Lucy and M Paul, and
not fear repercussions. The ghost sighting scenes in Villette -- among many
others in the novel -- are an integral part of a consistent theme in the novel:
not only in this passage but throughout the text, the narrator Lucy highlights
the centrality of the visual field. Lucy is intently mindful of the workings of
the sensory apparatus, of the play of light and darkness, and the positions of
subjects and objects of of vision that allows her or not to see certain things.
The difference between the ghost in Villette and the ones the Victorians
must have enjoyed in the magic lantern shows lies in Lucy’s dual function as
spectator and creator of the spectacle. As she turns around and flickers her
candle light in the long garret, Lucy both observes and projects, it seems, the
117
image of the nun. This is not to say that the nun is a product of Lucy’s
overwrought imagination, that it is a "spectral illusion [...] resulting from a
long-continued mental conflict” (253), as Dr John put it. This conflict --
Lucy’s struggle to find security and happiness -- has been read by feminist
scholars as an indignant critique of a society that dooms its single women to a
life of wistful languishing. Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar call Villette
“Brontë's most despairingly feminist novel” (399) and describe it as the “most
moving and terrifying account of female deprivation ever written” (The Mad
Woman in the Attic 400). Likewise, Kate Millett wrote, “ Villette reads like
one long meditation on a prison break” (146). In the same vein, Hoeveler and
Jadwin, argue that the apparitional Nun is "a nightmare vision that confirms
Lucy's worst fears about herself: that she is poor, plain, doomed to a life of
renunciation and unfulfilled desire" (Charlotte Brontë 118). Yet, given the
comic denouement of subplot involving the apparitional nun, it is difficult to
interpret the nun as a manifestation of Lucy’s inner turmoil. While the novel
certainly communicates the feeling of desperation that its protagonist
experiences, Lucy is not of the Gothic heroine hue. On the contrary, she does
not so much ‘see things,’ as she stages spectacles of femininity throughout the
novel. It has become a critical commonplace to discuss the various ploys Lucy
uses to manipulate the narrative, build suspense or simply withhold
118
information. All of this artifice of the unreliable narrator also works to
construct phantasmagoric presentations that expand beyond the simply
spectral (the ghost of the nun) to include many of the central characters in the
novel. Lucy carefully constructs descriptions and scenes that present the
characters -- with the exception of Dr John and M. Paul, all women -- as
mutable presences that will disappear to return in a different shape.
72

In some cases, the narrative splits the characters into two parts (in Dr
John’s case even three) by employing the device of the “long-lost loved one ”
to achieve the effect of their sudden departure and reappearance. The
diminutive doll-child Missy Home rides away with her father to emerge again,
eight years later, as the beautifully accomplished, well read and still perfectly
domestic Paulina de Bassompierre. Dr John, it turns out, is no one else but
Graham Bretton, Lucy’s childhood friend and the son of her beloved
grandmother, who, we learn retrospectively, is also the “young, distinguished,
and handsome man” (65) who helps Lucy the first night she arrives at Villette.
To accentuate the split even further, Brontë gives the characters different
names. In her discussion of Villette in Sexual Politics, Kate Millett refers to
119
72
M. Paul is an exception to this trend. Presumably because he represents the stable and
profound reciprocated love of Lucy’s life, he is not part of the visual constructions of Lucy.
And yet, the novel defies M Paul as a symbol of constancy in Lucy’s life since he also
disappears in a sea storm. Admittedly, the role of M Paul in the novel lis a lot more
complicated than that -- his death is often interpreted as an expression of Brontë's own
ambivalent feelings towards heteronormativity and marriage.
similar figurations in the novel when she argues that Brontë “breaks people
into two parts, so we can see their divided and conflicting emotions” (140).
Millett interprets Missy Home and Lucy, as they appear in the beginning of
the novel, as the “two halves” of the female child eclipsed in a household
enthralled by the accomplishments and endeavors of the male child, Graham.
The splitting in question here, though, does not represent a whole new person
as a composite image of two characters. It is quite the opposite: the
unreliable narrator Lucy withholds information and thus splits the images and
the presence of various characters into two, much like the flickering image of
a moving figure in a slide projected by a magic lantern -- the viewer sees two
distinct pictures and the illusion of the moving image alternates between the
two. Because the the unreliable narrator presents us with sequences of
depictions of the characters (at least two for each of them) and articulates
these figurations in starkly visual terms, the novel as a whole thematizes the
cultural misgiving about the relation between surfaces and essences;
perceptions and the empirical world, artifice and authenticity.
It would be far fetched to claim that the splitting of characters in
Villette alludes to visual practices in the Victorian era, were it not for the
insistent presence of the visual as a theme in the text. Lucy does not simply
tell a story, she narrates the circumstances of her observations: she describes
120
her own position, the light, position and the movement of her objects that
allows or disallows observation. Describing the young Polly’s precocious
penchant for homemaking, for example, as the child carries a cup of tea from
the breakfast room to the library where Graham studies, she writes, “[a]s the
study was opposite the breakfast-room, the doors facing across the passage,
my eye followed her” (26). Lucy does not simply describe the character’s
actions, persistently throughout the text she describes herself seeing others
perform actions or reflecting on her observations for prolonged periods of
time.
The instances are too numerous to recount here. Of the verb ‘to see’
alone ( used in its literal sense) as a part of the syntactic pattern ‘to see
someone do something’ or ‘see something done’ there exist over 45 examples
in the novel. If we add its synonyms -- such as ‘observe’ and ‘watch’ -- the
count will be significantly higher. As a result, the narrative of Villette as a
whole is constructed as a spectacle
73
in which, at points, seeing itself is a
main actor:
I--watching calmly from the window-- saw [Polly], in in her
black frock and tiny braided apron (to pinafores she had an
121
73
In thematically more concrete terms, Joseph Litvak interprets Lucy’s obsession with the
visual as a manifestation of theatricality. He argues that "Villette, unlike Jane Eyre, makes no
secret of its obsession with the theater and theatricality. This obsession becomes most obvious
in the numerous episodes of acting and theatergoing that punctuate the narrative and that
constitute so many flamboyant, though not exactly extraneous, 'set pieces'" (82).
antipathy), dart half the length of the street; and, as I was on
the point of turning, and quietly announcing to Mrs. Bretton
that the child was run out mad, and ought instantly to be
pursued, I saw her caught up, and rapt at once from my cool
observation, and from the wondering stare of the passengers
(13).
Not only is Lucy observing “calmly from the window” as the story unfolds --
the child runs out, a man whisks her off the street -- but her watching is the
story itself and the action of the man, its interruption, since the the object of
observation -- for both Lucy and the passersby -- is hidden as he picks her up.
The female child is the subject of the story and the object of the look for both
Lucy and the passengers.
By this point in the narrative, the character of the young child Polly is
established as a diminutive picture of self-effacing femininity and perfect
domesticity. She is described as always busy catering to others. “She must be
busy about something,” writes Lucy, “look after somebody” (24). In amused
and somewhat scathing fashion, Lucy describes Polly perched on a high stool
laboring away lining a handkerchief as a present to her beloved father,
“pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute
red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon--swerving from her
control--inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, diligent, absorbed,
womanly” (16). Lucy calls the young Polly ‘womanly” not only because she
122
is unfailingly industrious but also because she is perfectly and stoically self-
sacrificing, not even wincing as the huge needle -- which Lucy likens to a
“skewer” (16) in Polly’s tiny hand -- pricks her finger. More importantly, by
parodically portraying a small child as the perfect embodiment of idealized
womanhood, the narrative brings into sharp relief the role of visual
representation in the figuration of gender. What makes a perfect little woman
out of Polly is not an innate essence or inborn propensity -- the narrator never
dwells on the motivations and feelings of the little girl -- but the display of
industriousness in the service of others. This mediation of the narrative -- the
rerouting of the plot through the visual field -- gives a certain ‘meta-visual’
quality to the text. In other words, the engagement of the visual in Villette
represents more than a literary allusion to pervasive entertainment practices
in the Victorian imagination; it brings to the foreground the role of the visual
in the structuration of gender itself.
Undoubtedly, it is by now a commonly accepted tenet that
representation -- in both fiction and the visual arts -- is underlined by the
complex power dynamics of the gaze
74
and that the positions of observer and
observed are an integral part of it. First wave feminism explored the role of
123
74
Here and throughout this text by ‘gaze’ I mean the dynamics of looking mostly related to
mechanisms of power and gender structuration, and not the look in processes of psychic and
intrapsychic order, such as exhibitionism and voyeurism; in other words, my analysis will
operate more within the framework of Foucault than that of Freud via Lacan.
woman as cynosure of the male gaze in patriarchal culture. The pioneering
work in that regard has been done mostly in the area of film studies and the
visual arts -- although it has been decidedly influential in literary and cultural
studies as well -- with Laura Mulvey (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema”) and Mary Anne Doane (“Woman’s Stake: Filming the female
Body”) initiating the feminist inquiries into the formative role of the male
gaze as it shapes female representation. John Berger probably articulated this
line of argument most succinctly when he wrote that in the visual field “men
watch women while women watch themselves being watched” (Berger 45).
Such representations reduce women to mere spectacle and a vehicle to propel
the male centered plot.
Laura Mulvey’s approach is, understandably, far more nuanced than
the general summary provided here but also too well-known to warrant
special introduction. In brief, Mulvey’s analysis of classical Hollywood
cinema is based on psychoanalytical interpretation of ‘scopophilia’, the
pleasure of looking, that is stimulated by the conventions of the mainstream
film which “portrays a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically,
indifferent to the presence of the audience” (135). Consequently, Mulvey
argues, “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive female” (137). Such a split
124
presents issues for viewer identification for, if the male viewer can identify
with the (usually male) protagonist and the female characters are as a result
the object of their desiring gaze, female viewers are denied such access to
pleasure, since, as Berger put it, they have to “watch themselves being
watched” (45)
75
. In a subsequent revision of this argument, Mulvey clarifies
the gendered positions of the viewer and the object of the gaze explaining that
‘At the time, I was interested in the relationship between the image of woman
on the screen and the ‘masculinization of the spectator position, regardless of
of the actual sexual sex (or possible deviance) of any real life movie-
goer” ( “Afterthoughts” 12)
76

To bring the discussion back to Brontë’s Villette and acknowledge the
complexity of the dynamic involved in looking, the relevant question would
be: if the narrative is focalized through Lucy and looking is such an important
part of the novel, is Lucy, then, really the bearer of the gaze in the novel or is
she just seeing the women she describes with such visual richness as the
objects of the male gaze? And, related to the previous question, if the narrator
125
75
Mulvey and Doane’s approaches have been substantively revised and expanded upon over
the last several decades, with the revisions and approaches being too numerous to engage here
at any satisfactory depth. I chose to engage Mulvey’s original article because of its resonance
outside the field of film studies as it articulates the dynamics of the gaze that is particularly
relevant here.
76
Mulvey revised, clarified and expanded her argument originally published as “Visual
Pleasure in Narrative CInema” in two later pieces: "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and the
Narrative Cinema, ' Inspired by Duel in the Sun," Framework 15-17 (1981), pp. 12-15 and
"Changes," Discourse 7 (1985), pp. 11-30.
is the subject of the gaze, then does she by default necessarily occupy the
male position? Or is it possible that there is another subject position available
to woman in relation to the gaze? The line of inquiry these questions suggest
might be deemed problematic as they presuppose that the narrator Lucy Snow
shifts positions between viewer and producer of images. Such an approach is
vulnerable to criticism for its potential conflation of practices of production
(of writing or the visual) and consumption, such as reading and viewing.
Within the narrative world of Villette, however, this is precisely Lucy’s role:
she observes numerous displays of femininity but also carefully orchestrates,
stages really, her depictions of both men and women as spectacle and these
two kinds of depictions differ in their dynamic and function.
There are several depictions of Dr. John, for example, that present the
man as an object of display and so they open the possibility for women to
engage in the scopophilia of consuming the image of the male body, rather
than simply serve to reflect the desire of the male gaze. Lucy’s descriptions
emphasize the gaze as the nodal point of representation:
Somehow I could not avoid returning once more in the
direction of the corridor to get another glimpse of Dr. John; but
I met him on the garden-steps, standing where the light from a
window fell broad. His well-proportioned figure was not to be
mistaken, for I doubt whether there was another in that
assemblage his equal. He carried his hat in his hand; his
uncovered head, his face and fine brow were most handsome
126
and manly. His [Brontë's emphasis] features were not delicate,
not slight like those of a woman, nor were they cold, frivolous,
and feeble; though well cut, they were not so chiselled, so
frittered away, as to lose in expression or significance what
they gained in unmeaning symmetry (164).
I opted to include such a long quotation in order to demonstrate how the look
of the narrator structures the image of the man as an object of desire. Lucy
even openly admits that the urge to seek him out was irresistible. In her
signature reserved tone, she matter-of-factly mentions that she “could not
avoid returning” only to add in the same breath “to get another
glimpse” (164) of him. She sets up the scene of the encounter by
emphasizing that the light was favorable for her goal -- to consume his form
visually. She takes pleasure in describing his physique as her look lingers over
his body and face as the bright light assists her in revealing his shape and
chiseled face. The lengthy description and the abundance of detail (the hat in
his hand, the bright light, etc. ) speak to the intensity of her desire but also
emphasize the prolonged look she gives him, a look on the verge of public
decorum. Lucy, in her inscrutability and unobtrusive presence
77
, is to some
extent figured as a cypher in the novel and thus facilities reader identification
with the narrator and her position as a maker of images. Because one of the
127
77
This aspect of Lucy’s character -- her near invisibility -- and its relation to the figuration of
the visual in the novel I will explore in greater detail further in this chapter.
major themes of Villette is the female quest for fulfillment and passion, the
position of the reader as viewer in this case is poignantly female and not male.
The portrayals of women, however, work quite differently. Lucy’s
detailed physical descriptions of women ostensibly originate from the
position of the male subject. She describes the grace and allure of the female
body through the lens of male desire and male-centered standards of beauty:
Ginevra's dress of deep crimson relieved well her light curls,
and harmonized with her rose-like bloom. Paulina's attire--in
fashion close, though faultlessly neat, but in texture clear and
white--made the eye grateful for the delicate life of her
complexion, for the soft animation of her countenance, for the
tender depth of her eyes, for the brown shadow and bounteous
flow of her hair--darker than that of her Saxon cousin, as were
also her eyebrows, her eyelashes, her full irids, and large
mobile pupils. Nature having traced all these details slightly,
and with a careless hand, in Miss Fanshawe's case; and in Miss
de Bassompierre's, wrought them to a high and delicate finish
(317).
It seems that the two women -- the vacuous self-centered beauty Ginevra and
the idealized, now all grown, Polly (Paulina De Bassompierre) -- represent
two generic types of beauty: the milky rosy-cheeked blonde Ginevra and the
darker chiseled beauty of the brunette Paulina. Nevertheless, the description
does not provide a visual image but mere comparison between the attributes
of the two women. The stock yet vague language-- “light curls”, “rose-like
bloom” (317), etc. -- does not detail the visual presence of the women’s
128
beauty and thus does not provide for scopophilic pleasure. Quite the opposite:
the generalized language surreptitiously shifts the physical description of the
two women to a discussion of the inner beauty of Paulina, whose intellect,
education and intellectual aspiration Lucy implicitly contrasts to the vapid
beauty of Ginevra.
Thus, what begins as a physical description of female beauty quickly
turns into an inventory of idealized disembodied femininity. “[T]he delicate
life” and “animation” of her face, and “the tender depth of her eyes” (317)
construct Paulina as the epitome of angelic middle-class femininity. In the apt
words of Beth Newman, the middle-class woman as an object of desire is
“characterized by “depths” - such as moral uprightness, thrift, heightened
sensibility, and emotional intensity -- rather than “surface”, such as the
aristocratic manners and sartorial finery by which upper-class women
displayed the wealth and status of the family” (Subjects of Display 13)
78
.
Newman juxtaposes the notions of depth and surface by tying the latter to the
129
78
In this quotation, Newman actually summarizes the major tenets from the work of Mary
Poovey and Nancy Armstrong, historically oriented feminist scholars who have studied the
conduct books and the novelistic production of the 18th and 19th centuries to explore the
relationship between femininity and the ideological entrenchment of the middle class. Since
Newman’s approach is informed strongly by psychoanalysis, her study actually complicates
the arguments of Poovey and Armstrong by suggesting that women are not simply objects of
display; that they might , in fact, be subjects of the spectacle; in other words, she redefines
woman as spectacle by introducing the idea of female exhibitionism, an expression of the
scopophilic drive directed inward. In the case of Villette, however, the sense of agency that
Lucy has does not come from display but, as I will show in the following sections, its
opposite: life in the shadows.
visual field and the notion of display and implying that depth was not part of
it. The “depth” privileged in the Victorian cultural imagination, however, is
not only present in the field of the visual but crucially dependent upon it for
its cultural functioning.
79
In Villette, Paulina’s “inner beauty” has to be legible
on the surface of her body. Her white dress, allegorically representing
Paulina’s purity and virtue, “ma[kes] the eye grateful,” as it accentuates the
goodness of her face and thus conflates depth and surface. Lucy’s depiction
emphasizes precisely the visual nature, the display, if not of opulence or flesh,
certainly of virtue, as available to the gaze. It seems, then, that in the visual
field, in the structuration of femininity as the object of the gaze, the contrast
between the two beauties Lucy describes is no contrast at all: they are both
objects of display each in their own right.
But if this outcome is to be expected, the role of Lucy in these scenes,
her intent gaze and her depictions of women divulge a more complex
relationship of woman to the complexity of the gaze. The novel contains many
descriptions of Ginevra, a student in the the boarding school who seeks out
130
79
An extreme and somewhat eerie manifestation of this cultural trend is evident in what
Bram Djikstra has called the “cult of [female] invalidism” -- the cultural obsession and
eroticization of the dying woman. Such visions of delicate and frail femininity, quite
prominent in paintings of the Victorian era, seemed to literalize the notion of disembodied
virtue or angelic femininity by portraying women as withering bed-ridden and death-bound
beauties. For further discussion, see Bram Djikstra, Idols of Perversity.
Lucy’s company. In this case, Lucy’s gaze is not the look heavy with desire
80
.
Which does not necessarily mean that Lucy’s ambiguous yet intense
relationship with Ginevra is completely free of sexual desire. Provocative
studies of Villette have put forth strong arguments for Lucy’s sexual
deviance. Sharon Marcus, for instance, argues rather insightfully that Lucy’s
attraction to Ginevra is disguised as a heterosexual rivalry between the two
women. Quite significantly, however, while Marcus claims that Lucy “finds
[Ginevra] pleasant to look at and enjoys her unquenchable need to solicit
Lucy’s attention” (103), her otherwise perceptive analysis does not hinge on
the gaze or the visual field as a central venue for articulation of lesbian desire,
as she does not actually study textual evidence in that respect. In fact, Marcus
acknowledges the culturally and historically specific manifestations of lesbian
desire when she calls Lucy’s sexual desire for women “distinctly Victorian”
in that it “inheres in an anomalous distaste for other women’s amity, not in a
transgressive preference for women’s love” (102)
81
It is possible, then, that
131
80
Some critics have argued that Lucy’s sexual desire is repressed but strong nevertheless. See
for instance Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe” in The Mad Woman in the
Attic (399-440) and Mary Jacobus’ “The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in
Villette,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom
Helm, 1979), 43-54. John Kucich has argued that repression itself was eroticized in Victorian
culture -- see Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Charles
Dickens.
81
Ann Weinstone, on the other hand, argues that the Lucy’s sexual passion is deviant --
“anti-straight” (283) in Marcus’ words -- but not necessarily lesbian.
Lucy’s gaze, in this case, does not participate in a figuration of lesbian
desire but has instead a ‘meta-visual’ function so to speak: it shows how
various forms of femininity are structured in the visual field and ranks them
in terms of social desirability. In this regard, it is notable that critics often
discuss the name of the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, as an oxymoron that
caputres the contradictory nature of her desires. The name Lucy is thus read
as cognate to ‘fire’ (the name “Lucy” and its derivatives originate form the
Latin for ‘light’) to connote her strong passions, while the sound of her last
name, Snowe, alludes to her cold and frozen exterior. I , however, would like
to suggest that the protagonist’s name, Lucy, could be literally read as ‘light’
to symbolize Lucy’s role in the field of the visual, as she “sheds light,” as it
were, on the workings of gender.
The protagonist’s own relationship to Ginevra and Paulina respectively
is quite vexed. On the one hand, Lucy seems to be in competition with these
women, who, at different points in the novel are invested in a relationship
with Graham Bretton, the object of Lucy’s first love in the novel. At the same
time, Lucy is portrayed as a recluse, a person who prefers her role as an
observer rather than the observed, which is the place both Ginevra and Lucy
occupy. Thus, while it occasionally seems that Lucy longs to participate in
the world of Ginevra and Paulina, she ultimately chooses not to be a part of it
132
because it means that she has to take the place of woman as cynosure. In the
following section I will show that in Villette Lucy’s intentional focus on
visual representations of women is not really a manifestation of lesbian desire
but it is rather an expression of Lucy’s social -- although not necessarily
sexual -- deviance in a heteronormative society in which the cultural
figurations of women’s bodies, actions and wardrobe are all on display as a
visible sign of their, to use Armstrong’s term, “desirability,”
82
understood not
in Freudian or strictly sexual sense, but rather as signifying their social appeal
as potential marriage partners. And although Villette does not end with
nuptials for its protagonist, marriage is still central to the novel. Much of its
plot and even its end -- although negatively, through the implied death of
Lucy’s fiance, M. Paul, who drowns at sea
83
-- revolve around marriage. In
the middle-class consciousness, Paulina and Ginevra are both marriagable,
even though the former is marriageable to a larger degree than the latter, while
Lucy is not at all, and her position as an outsider is highlighted in the novel.
133
82
In what Nancy Armstrong calls a study in the “political history of the novel”, Desire and
Domestic Fiction (New York; Oxford University Press 1990) , the author studies novelistic
representations of normative femininity and thus defines desire more along the lines of social
sanction than in terms of libidinal dynamics.
83
Charlotte Brontë actually allows her heroine to experience love twice (after she relinquishes
her passion for Graham Bretton she is free to move and love again, this time M Paul) without
damaging her heroine’s reputation of a virtuous woman - quite the feat in Victorian culture.
Questions of class, marriage and the domestic ideology of the
Victorian era are too complex to be engaged only briefly here. Nevertheless,
it is important to note that while middle-class ideology posited the home as a
hermetically sealed safe haven from the demands of the market place and
political life, the Victorian family home itself was a place of complex inter-
class relations no different than the power dynamics outside of it. In her
insightful study of Victorian cultural ideology, Nobody’ s Angels, Elizabeth
Langland explores these complex relations when she argues that the middle-
class woman was far from being a passive and quiet victim in her home. In
middle- and upper-middle-class households Langland delineates sharp
devisions between the domestic woman as such (the mistress of the house, or
the wife) and the paid labor
84
in the home (the domestic servants, governesses,
etc.); devisions that, continues Langland, were the very markers of middle-
class standing. Thus, despite her education and, we can assume, genteel
upbringing, Lucy can not claim a middle-class standing. Quite the opposite,
Lucy’s status a teacher in the boarding school simply serves as a sign of
Ginevra’s membership in the middle class. It is thus clear why Ginevra, who
134
84
For a more detailed discussion on the class standing of the governess, see “The Victorian
Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society” by M. Jeanne Peterson, Suffer and Be
Still: Women in the Victorian Age, Ed. Martha Vicinus.
claims that Lucy is her friend and confidante, also demands that Lucy mend
her clothing and hosiery.
As a result, it is evident that when understood in terms of immediate
visibility, Lucy’s “value on the marriage market” (Armstrong Desire and
Domestic Fiction 37) is quite low. As Kate Millett put it, Lucy lacks the
“face, respectable social connections and parents to place her” (Sexual Politics
145). When Madame Beck asks Lucy a question in the presence of Dr. John,
in whom she has fallen in love, he “follow[ed] her movement with a slow
glance which seemed to express languid surprise at reference being made to a
quarter so insignificant (105). Lucy seems to be invisible to him, she is
merging with the background. His look dehumanizes her by failing to
acknowledge her presence, by lingering over her, as if she were mere empty
space. Lucy is upset and bitter at his behavior and yet she writes with
defiance, “ He, I believe, never remembered that I had eyes in my head, much
less a brain behind them” (105). Her acerbic remark represents an interesting
commentary about the structuration of female desirability. Although Lucy is
no less accomplished intellectually and educationally -- in comparison to
Paulina whom Dr John chooses over her and marries -- she is nevertheless
absent from his field of vision. Regardless of the seeming valorization of
“depth” (or, substance) over the display of material possessions or physical
135
charm, the proper markers of class have to be displayed first for the woman’s
‘inner beauty’ to shine through.
The visual and sexual politics in Villette dovetail interestingly in one
of the novel’s subplots: the mystery of the woman in the “robe grise,”
85
a
woman who, Lucy suspects, is the secret object of Dr John’s desire. After
Lucy accidentally intercepts a love letter in the boarding school, she finds out
that it is enigmatically superscribed “Pour la robe grise”
86
. As the story
unfolds, the mystery deepens for it becomes less and less clear who the
addressee might be. Despite its breathless cadence, the billet-doux is overall
bland and generic. It contains no specific descriptions, besides the cherished
by its author “gleam of your straw-hat, and the waving of your grey
dress” (112). Frustrated, Lucy caustically remarks that these are no clues at all
since a straw hat is common to at least another twenty women in the
boarding school, and as for the grey dress, “Madame Beck herself ordinarily
wore a grey dress just now; another teacher, and three of the pensionnaires,
had had grey dresses purchased of the same shade and fabric as mine” (113).
Whoever the ‘robe grise’ is, it seems that she is safe from Lucy’s inquisitive
look. As a result, the novel seemingly thematizes the joys of visual obscurity:
136
85
French for ‘grey dress.’
86
French, literally, “To the grey dress”
like Lucy, all of these women, teachers and students alike, “les robes grises,”
can potentially move undetected, disguised in their grey dresses.
On a different level, however, the multitude of ‘les robes grises’ is
figured less as a fantasy of liberating female anonymity than an allegory of the
marriage market in Victorian England. Despite their sameness in color and
quality of fabric -- Lucy emphatically specifies that they are “of the same
shade and fabric as mine” (112) -- the grey dresses, and metonymically the
women who wear them, are not equal at all. For the penniless Lucy, the grey
dress is one of the very few items in her wardrobe; for Madame Beck, it is a
fashion whim -- she chooses to wear one a lot “right now” (112); and the
female students, daughters of families of means, seem to be following a trend
-- they are having theirs made exactly like Lucy’s. The equalizing factor of
the grey dress notwithstanding, these women have very different value on the
marriage market which Lucy’s narrative overtly thematizes by discussing the
marital dreams and prospects of the inhabitants of the school. She does not
see any possibility for herself -- “suitor or admirer my very thoughts had not
conceived” (111) and scathingly proceeds to declare a fellow teacher’s
dreams of love or marriage sheer lunacy “ All the teachers had dreams of
some lover; one (but she was naturally of a credulous turn) believed in a
future husband” (111). At the same time, their students, due to their class
137
status and connections, “knew of some prospective bridegroom” (111). Thus,
in the context of the romantic idealization in the trite love letter, the grey
dress is supposed to signify the worthy inner beauty of the beloved but in fact
reveals the cultural untenability of the idea of substance or depth ( inner
beauty) in the reality of the marriage market.
Brontë develops the symbolism of the grey dress by overtly
referencing the archetypal grey dress of the working class woman -- the one
worn by Rosine, the portress of the school and the only ‘grisette’ among their
lot. As a middle-class woman who has to work for her living, Lucy is
painfully aware of her own lower status within her class and consequently
she is severely watchful of class boundaries and concerned with social
mobility. She interprets Rosine, with her bubbly personality and prim
wardrobe, as the threat of the upwardly mobile woman on the marriage
market. When she contemplates the potential for Dr John to be involved with
Rosine, she discards the idea on class grounds, yet the language Lucy uses
indicates apprehension and jealousy when she calls Rosine “an unprincipled
though pretty little French grisette, airy, fickle, dressy, vain, and
mercenary” (105). Ultimately, Lucy recognizes that the allure for the young
doctor of the ‘real grisette’ Rosine or the ‘demi-grisette’ (375) that she sees
herself as -- an “alone, unguarded, and in simple attire, a dependent
138
worker” (375) can be all but fleeting. A lot later in the novel, looking at the
highly accomplished and extremely wealthy Paulina de Bassompierre, Lucy
will understand that Dr John is going to choose, as he does, a woman of class
and stature highly esteemed in society. Not only would he look for a wife of
this standing, he would want her to participate in a display of the breeding and
class he values: “[i]n his victrix he required all that was here visible -- imprint
of high cultivation, the consecration of a careful and authoritative protection,
the adjuncts that Fashion decrees, Wealth purchases, and Taste adjusts” (375).
Of course, the reasons for Lucy’s low marriageability complexly
intertwine demographic and class issues. While mid-century Victorian
hegemonic culture had already determined the proper role and place of
woman to be the domestic space, her role as the “angel of the house,” the
lived experiences of a great number of women diverged from that ideal. By
the 1850s, nearly twenty per cent of British women had to depend on their
own resources as the female population exceeded the male by half a million
(Vicinus Independent Work). One has to take into account the peculiar place
of single middle-class women of no independent means, combined with the
scarcity of jobs available to them (they could only be teachers and
governesses), to fully understand the predicament of Brontë's penniless and
139
orphaned character
87
. At the same time, Lucy Snowe is no victim, she does
not simply reconcile herself to the position of an onlooker into the life of
others; she reinvents herself as a student of human character and a detective.
The very invisibility that seems to be the source of Lucy’s social
isolation she embraces and employs to penetrate people’s secrets, to see
beyond the social persona and literally “make sense of her world”. Rather than
seek ways to gain visibility, or to defy the regulation of her environment, Lucy
seems to embrace her position in it. Her unremarkable exterior Lucy uses as a
camouflage to disappear in the domestic field. At a celebration, Lucy uses
her dun-colored dress to “ withdraw[w] to a quiet nook whence unobserved I
could observe--the ball, its splendours and its pleasures, passed before me as a
spectacle” (143). Likewise, in the same scene where she laments her
invisibility to Dr. John, she continues by writing:
He laid himself open to my observation, according to my
presence in the room just that degree of notice and
consequence a person of my exterior habitually expects: that is
to say, about what is given to unobtrusive articles of furniture,
chairs of ordinary joiner's work, and carpets of no striking
pattern. Often, while waiting for Madame, he would muse,
140
87
A good overview of the predicament of single women of no independent means is available
in Andrea Herrera, “Imagining a Self Between a Husband and a Wall”, The Foreign Woman in
British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders. Eds. Marylin Button and Toni Reed
(Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1999).66-78. For a more detailed historical account
see Martha Vicinus, Independent Work, Women and Community for Single Women,
1850-1920.
smile, watch, or listen like a man who thinks himself alone. I,
meantime, was free to puzzle over his countenance and
movements [...]. (100)
Ironically, it is because Lucy does not attract Graham's gaze as an object of his
desire -- which is understandably a source of pain for her -- she is able to
“puzzle over” (100) his face and motives freely. He is a pliable object of
observation. She is now free to scrutinize every shift in expression, every
gesture, every ripple of emotion. It is noteworthy that while the narrator draws
attention to her mimicry -- she outlines Graham’s perception (or lack of such
thereof) in the detailed simile of the mundane furniture -- she does not overtly
discuss the outcome of her scrutiny in this scene. And yet, Graham recedes in
the distance of Lucy’s narrative -- in the last third of the novel he is barely
mentioned but in relation to Paulina -- which proves that he has lost his
appeal to Lucy. After Lucy ritually buries his letters under a tree in the
school’s garden, she is free to relinquish her love for him and love again.
Even though Lucy is definitely an outsider in the feminine world of
the boarding school that defines happiness and prosperity as solely based on
marriage, she seems to be more of an agent of her destiny than a passive
victim. My argument here diverges from readings of Villette which attribute
Lucy’s suffering to her interiorization of the ideal of Victorian “true
141
womanhood”
88
. Lucy Snowe very well knows who she is, and this is not a
domestic woman. My interpretation of the novel resonates more closely with
Robyn R. Warhol’s claim that “Victorian women novelists like the Brontës
are not so much unconsciously "written by" gender codes as they are actively
engaged in rewriting them” (“Double Gender, Double Genre” 858) Lucy’s
constructions of women of display and her conscious departure from that
realm speak to Warhol’s idea of gender revisions that the novel offers. Lucy’s
intent observation seems to be a tool in her own quest to carve out a space for
herself. Her spying on Graham and her emotional investment in him lead to
disillusionment: under the veneer of culture, taste, benevolence and
industriousness, Graham Bretton proves to be a vapid, insensitive and
calculating man. The more dramatic change, but one that develops very
gradually in the novel, is Lucy’s opinion of Madame Beck, the principal and
owner of the boarding school -- a shift that leads to Lucy’s newly gained sense
of purpose and ambition. Not only is Lucy looking at the world, she is also
looking for a space, a subject position that will allow her to live life on her
own terms, and from her inability or unwillingness to participate in a feminine
142
88
See, for example, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera. “Imagining a Self between a Husband or a
Wall; CHarlotte Brontë's Villette”. The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens,
and Outsiders. Eds. Marylin Button and Toni Reed.
culture of display, it is evident that the life of domesticity is not the answer to
her quest.
In the beginning of her stay in the school, Lucy is tormented and
shocked at Madam Beck’s surveillance methods. She compares the boarding
school to a monastery. The dorms, writes Lucy, “had once been nuns’
cells” (70). This impression is further strengthened by the rigid rules
governing the girls’ boarding school (the students are not allowed male
visitors) and their day is extremely regimented into three parts -- study, prayer
and rest. Madame Beck herself resembles the evil Mother Superior figures of
the earlier Gothic romances in her ruthless surveillance and complex
intriguing. Like Lucy, she has perfected the art of “observ[ing]
unobserved” (101). Madame Beck spies on her teachers and students,
conducts routine searches of their belongings and would employ any means at
all to achieve her goals. Lucy deems her unscrupulous and cruel, “ woe be to
that man or woman,” she writes, “who relied on her one inch beyond the
point where it was her interest to be trustworthy: interest was the master-key
of Madame's nature--the mainspring of her motives-- the alpha and omega of
her life” (76).
Madame Beck’s aura of a Gothic villainess is further augmented by
her ghost-like quiet movement that allows her to approach stealthily the object
143
of her espionage. She glides along, “on her “souliers de silence,”
89
[...] ghost-
like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through
every keyhole, listening behind every door” (75). The descriptions of
Madame Beck as a ghost form a consistent theme in the novel: Lucy recounts
how she appears suddenly without anybody hearing “neither her entrance nor
approach” (67) or approaches her from behind “as quick, as noiseless and
unexpected, as some wandering zephyr” (86). These figurations are quite
different from the representations of female ghosts in the works of Gothic
Romanticism which seemed to treat the ghost as an either punishment for
female social or sexual transgression or as a symbol of female victimization.
90
Villette, however, refers to Gothic topoi, such as the ghost, and reworks
them parodically. The above examples do not describe the appearance of
Madame Beck as similar to that of a ghost; quite the opposite, they emphasize
her invisibility: she is able to move unheard and unseen. As the eye of
surveillance, she seems to occupy a position outside the scene of feminine
display on the marriage market place. As a widow and a professional woman
of independent means, marriage is not a vital necessity for her and thus she
144
89
Fr. “shoes of silence”, a recurring motif in the descriptions Lucy provides of Madame Beck
90
Mathew Lewis’ The Monk seems to curiously combine both: the homicidal and libidinal
woman is manifest in the ghost of the Bleeding Nun, while Agnes, the young nun who has
borne a child out of wedlock is imprisoned in the monastery and her ‘live burial’ alludes to
both female victimization and sexual transgression.
seems to be exempt from the social mandate of either forms of display (of
opulence or virtue) that comprise desirability.
Thus, it seems that Lucy has to negotiate the legacy of various forms
of competing femininities, embodied in the novel in not just one but three
nuns. The first is the apparitional nun of transgressive desire discussed in the
beginning of the chapter; the second is the “evil Mother Superior” nun that
Madame Beck represents with her “iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove” approach to
the management of her school. There is yet another nun in the novel, with
whose story Lucy has to grapple: the angelic Justine Marie who has become a
nun because she was not allowed to marry M. Paul and died soon after. And
there is still yet another nun-like recluse woman, the wealthy Miss
Marchmont (who appears briefly in the beginning of the noel) , the “spinster,”
who spends her life grieving the death of her fiance and dies in Lucy’s hands.
Interestingly, all of them but “the evil” Madame Beck symbolize a form of
life burial. If the apparitional nun is rumored to have been literally buried in
the garden, Justine Marie and Miss Marchmont doom themselves to a self-
effacing existence of suffering and anguish. Lucy’s self-composed level-
headedness and somewhat cynical attitude make her an unlikely martyr in the
name of heterosexual love. The only reference to the age of the narrator
shows that she writes her story retroactively, now an old woman with hair
145
“white under a white cap, like snow beneath snow” (47) and thus shows that
she is no Miss Marchmont -- she seems to be content with her life and holds
no regrets.
As Lucy’s story unfolds, she feels closer and closer affinity to Madame
Beck and even sees her as an unlikely mentor. Madame Beck has encouraged
Lucy to become a teacher (rather than continue as a governess to her
children) and respects Lucy for her hard work, intellect, and independent
spirit. When faced with the opportunity of becoming the affluent Paulina’s
lady companion, for triple the pay she earns at Madame Beck’s, Lucy refuses
proudly: “ I was no bright lady's shadow--not Miss de Bassompierre's” (303).
Unexpectedly, Madame Beck treats her like an equal, gives Lucy her much
cherished freedom “ Madame Beck and I, without assimilating, understood
each other well. I was not her companion [emphasis Brontë's], nor her
children's governess; she left me free: she tied me to nothing--not to herself--
not even to her interests” (303). Predictably, Lucy desires for herself the
position of independence that madame Beck has and dreams about opening he
own boarding school. Thus the relationship between the two women, marked
in the beginning by animosity and suspicion and Lucy’s apparent subjugation
is transformed into one of mentorship and support.
146
While the novel does end with the happy ending the character desires
-- Lucy has her own school which she has just expanded to offer boarding as
well -- it also contains a rushed reference to the death of M Paul, the man
who helps her start the school and has promised to marry her after he sails
back from the Caribbean. This way, Lucy is only nominally financially
independent -- while it is her entrepreneurial spirit, it is assumed, that has
helped her expand it, the school would not have been possible without M.
Paul’s generous present. What is more interesting is the character of M Paul
on its own right: while initially Lucy’s sees him as an arrogant, abusive,
tyrannical male
91
, she later manages to gain his love and do so on her own
terms -- by being acknowledged and respected as an equal. And yet, his death
seems to signify the utopian nature of such a transformation. If in Jane Eyre,
Rochester, it has been widely argued, has to be symbolically castrated by
being maimed in the fire to make him a suitable husband for Jane, M. Paul, it
seems, has to literally disappear off the face of the earth after Lucy has
“tamed the patriarchal beast” in him. It is possible that M Paul’s death hints at
the impossibility to reconcile heteronormative sexual desire and female
147
91
The scenes are too numerous to analyze fully here. But the first time he meets her, he “reads
her skull” without even acknowledging her as a human being, and when he finally officially
meets her several months later, he forces her to perform in the school theater production. He
later forces her to write an essay on demand in the presence of his learned friends professors
at the university, so that he can use her as his show pet -- to prove to his learned fellow men
that a woman could write so well.
autonomy in Victorian culture -- a reconciliation the novel definitely attempts
by thematizing Lucy’s quest for love as well as independence. And it is love
Lucy seeks: for all her cynicism and distant scrutiny of the world that
surrounds her, she longs for love and truly cherishes it when she finds it in M
paul, “I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another
degree: he is more my own” (502).
Even if we bracket the ambivalent figurations of heterosexual love in
the novel, the question of autonomy in relation to the demands of hegemonic
culture remains. Lucy has sought to escape a cultural space in which feminine
display of material possessions or virtue are the sole purpose of a middle-
class woman’s existence and she has found a safe haven in the homosocial
space of a boarding school. At the same time, the social function of her
boarding school is to perpetuate the role of women as objects of display by
teaching students proper behavior and ultimately turning them into
marriagable young women. Such a concern, however, might belong more to
the ethos of a twenty-first century gender scholar than be an issue in the world
of Villette. As Foucault shows compellingly, the cultural manifestations and
material presence of power do not work through intentionality. In an
interview, Foucault clarifies his goal in The History of Sexuality as the
explanation of
148
how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth,
without depending even on the mediation of the subject's own
representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn't
through having first to be interiorized in people’s
consciousness. There is a network or circuit of biopower, or
somatopower, which acts as the formative matrix of sexuality
itself” (Power/Knowledge 186).
Power thus works as a complex grid -- across institutions (universities,
schools, factories, etc. ) and in a multiplicity of ways or points of impact - so
that it is ultimately impossible to reduce it to the subjective intentionality in
the inter-subject relation. In other words, Lucy’s or Madame Beck’s
surveillance per se are no more or less important in the deployment of the
desires and the bodies of their students by the power network than the food
they consume, for example, or the advice they receive from the family doctor,
etc. At the same time, in the first volume of the History of Sexuality,
Foucault is careful to specify that the negation of intentionality in the
workings of “biopower” does not mean that power is not relational, quite the
opposite, “relations of power are not in a position of exteriorly with respect to
other types of relationships (... knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but
are imminent in the latter” and, more importantly, they are formative of them
(94). Moreover, power is also productive, rather than repressive, so one could
argue that Lucy’s response to social demands for feminine display -- that is
to serve as an object to the male gaze -- is to establish herself as a subject of
149
the gaze of surveillance. Lucy’s self-fashioning as a sui generis detective --
and at the end of the novel, a principal of a boarding school -- give her access
to a particular subject position -- that of the financially independent woman.
* * *
Lucy Snowe’s position as an independent professional woman and her
participation in a discourse of surveillance, however, depends on her first
accessing the subject position of an English woman and then constructing this
position as the priveleged site of an authentic womanhood. To achieve that
the text of Villette invokes a number of ethnic others -- both European and
colonial -- to inscribe them in the discourse of Lucy’s subjectivization. This
discursive process is produced in the visual field through a complex
negotiation of subject positions in relation to the gaze.
Operating simultaneously with the Foucauldean concepts of ‘subject
position’ and ‘gaze’, one is compelled to address the question of their relation
to regimes of discipline. While I have been discussing the deployment of
bodies and desires in the structuration of a discourse in the visual field and I
am attentive to the attendant issues of discipline and the productive effects
such a deployment might have, I am consciously refraining from employing
the specular model of power that Foucault articulates in Discipline and
150
Punish. The reasons for this choice concern both methodology and historical
specificity in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
In his discussion of Bentham’s panopticon, Foucault emphasizes its
function as a development in the social history of discipline and does not
necessarily establish the watch tower in Bentham’s proposal as a theoretical
model for the workings of power in general. Moreover, surveillance in Villette
and in Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon work quite differently,
structurally speaking. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault places premium
importance on the effects that surveillance has on its objects and is less
concerned with the subjects of surveillance per se. He focuses more on the
effects, rather than the process, when he writes that the goal of the Panopticon
is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power” (Discipline and Punish 155).
Such a conceptualization of power -- as a complex machine architecturally
manifested in the central tower of the panopticon -- can “ disindividualiz[e]
power” (158) and present it as a principle of discursive distribution.
In contrast, Villette thematizes precisely acts of surveillance as
practiced by particular subjects (Madame Beck, but also Lucy and even M.
Paul) and the pleasures to be gained in the process. Furthermore, the
surveillance in the panopticon is carried out in plain view -- it has in fact to be
151
announced, made structurally visible, whether carried out or not -- for the
watch tower to be effective. In Villette, surveillance is not centralized but
rather dispersed and carried out in secret; its figurations in the novel concern
mostly the subjectivization of the agents of surveillance and not the discipline
of its objects. My interpretation of the gaze in Villette is nevertheless indebted
to Foucault, although this time this is the Foucault of History of Sexuality and
not the one of Discipline and Punish.
92
In an interview he gave in 1977, in
which he discussed the productive effects of power, articulated in the History
of Sexuality, he mentioned that he wanted to outline how the ”different
instances and stages in the transmission of power were caught up in the very
pleasure of their exercise ...or more accurately in the gaze of those involved in
the act of surveillance of pleasure “ (Power/Knowledge 186). The pleasures of
surveillance
93
outlined in The History of Sexuality present quite different
152
92
Which does not mean that the notion of the Panopticon can not be useful for exploring the
pervasive atmosphere of surveillance in Villette. Joseph Boone provides a truly compelling
reading of the novel as a complex economy of surveillance. See ‘Repression, Transgression,
and the Erotics of “Heretic Narrative” in “Victorian” FIction: Charlotte Brontë, Villette”.
Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago; University of Chicago.
pp. 32-62
93
Beth Newman’s overview of Foucault’s theorization of surveillance prompted me to
explore the differences between the modes outlined in the Discipline and Punish and of The
History of Sexuality further. But while Newman insists that Villette does not deal with
surveillance at all, as it rather constructs an economy of the scopic drive manifested as female
exhibitionism, I argue that surveillance is a necessary component in the subjectivization of
Lucy Snowe. See Beth Newman Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation,
and Victorian Femininity.
picture of the workings of power: one that is relational and focused on the
individual “involved in the act of surveillance” (Knowledge/Power 186).
So far in this chapter I have explored the importance of the gaze in the
structuration of gender in the visual field and have shown that Lucy’s response
to social demands for feminine display has been to evacuate this position and
establish herself as a subject of the gaze. Lucy’s trajectory to this subject
position is marked by a series of exchanges in which seeing and being seen
are central to a formation of both national and gender identity.
The relationship Lucy has to Englishness is quite vexed, as evidenced
by her sense of displacement in the beginning of the novel. Lucy is a penniless
orphan, living in some one else’s home in a town that is obviously foreign to
her. Later on, when her employer, Miss Marchmont, dies, Lucy decides to
leave for Europe. Her profound sense of uprootedness is evident when she
sadly remarks, “If I died far away from—home, I was going to say, but I had
no home—from England, then, who would weep?” (110) Thus Lucy’s
homelessness and sense of displacement amount to a sense of alienation from
England. No one in England will mourn Lucy’s hypothetical death for another
set of reasons as well: as a single woman she is also seen as socially redundant
because she is not inscribed in the familial economy, the proper site for
social and demographic regeneration of Englishness, and by extension of
153
Empire building itself.
94
Lucy’s tenuous position in relation to Englishness is
emphasized by the insistent use word of the French word “Anglaise” in
relation to Lucy. As an English teacher in the boarding school in Villette, she
is often referred to as the “Anglaise”. It seems that even though Lucy has
never really been an “Englishwoman” while still in England, she is definitely
“L’Anglaise” in Labassecour.
The vaguely constructed, imaginary and yet comfortably European
foreignness of the fictitious Labassecour
95
allows Lucy to restore her status as
an Englishwoman. To Madame Beck, the foreign woman, Lucy provides --
exports so to speak -- precisely the domestic graces, the child rearing skills
and the proper education that are supposed to be the domain and the hallmark
of proper British femininity. Madame Beck, writes Lucy, “ had a respect for
"Angleterre;" and as to "les Anglaises," she would have the women of no
other country about her own children, if she could help it ”(75). Lucy’s role as
a prized governess to Madam Beck’s children restores her status not only as
an Englishwoman but as a proper woman in general. For there existed in
Victorian England a lingering suspicion of the social and sexual indecency of
154
94
For further elaboration of the role and place of women in the project of empire see Deidre
David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
95
Brontë based Labassecour on Belgium.
the governess. Such attitudes were part and parcel of Victorian domestic
ideology. Mary Poovey argues that because she was paid to provide services
that were supposed to be the ‘natural domain’ of women and provided freely
within the family, the figure of the governess became akin to that of the
prostitute (Uneven Developments 75).
As a narrator, Lucy emphasizes her own excellence as a caregiver,
her ability and skill in tender and loving care and contrasts her child rearing
aptness and emotional warmth to the sound yet detached and cold mothering
of Madame Beck. Lucy describes her as “solicitous about her family, vigilant
for their interests and physical well- being” (94) yet distant and unloving in
their presence. When her toddler daughter will run to her “all eager and
laughing and panting to clasp her knee,” (95) writes Lucy, “Madame would
just calmly put out one hand, so as to prevent inconvenient concussion from
the child's sudden onset [...] patiently permit it to stand near her a few
moments, and then, without smile or kiss, or endearing syllable, rise and lead
it back to [her governess]” (95). Lucy, on the other hand, is the one to comfort
and soothe a child who has broken her limb and spend days by her bedside to
keep her company. In this contrast, the British spinster governess emerges as a
superior mother to Madame Beck, the foreign widowed mother, who,
insinuates Lucy, treats child rearing like a business endeavor -- with the same
155
planning and care but no emotional investment. Thus, by establishing "les
Anglaises" as a group as superior mothers and educators, Lucy is able to
refashion herself from a displaced woman of paid labor into a a proper
woman of maternal domesticity.
It seems that for all her sense of being a social outcast -- because she
fails to confirm to to hegemonic ideas of femininity -- Lucy herself employs
certain social prohibitions that support normative domestic femininity in order
to establish her own propriety and gain social status. One such prohibition in
nineteenth-century British culture is the valorized separation of the world of
the home form that of commerce. Thus, Madame Beck’s main hubris is that
she participates in both: being the owner and principal of her boarding school
as well as a mother, she straddles both worlds and thus injects the domestic
sphere with the cold calculation of the business world. “[P]ossessed [of] high
administrative powers,” writes Lucy, “she ruled all [her hundred and twenty
students], together with four teachers, eight masters, six servants, and three
children, managing at the same time to perfection the pupils' parents and
friends; and that without apparent effort” (105). The figuration of Madame
Beck as the failed foreign mother and her rhetorical replacement with Lucy,
the virtuous English mother, is a particular technology of self that Lucy
employs to access to the subject position of the English virtuous woman.
156
In Villette virtuous femininity is not only tied to Englishness but to
empire building as well. This relationship is explicitly established when Lucy
starts teaching in the boarding school, after her short career as a governess to
Madame Beck’s children. The text describes her role in the classroom in the
terms of missionary work in the colonies. Her very first day in class she is
greeted by, what she calls a “mutiny” (85) of the students, as she enters the
room to be confronted by a “row of eyes and brows that threatened stormy
weather--eyes full of an insolent light, and brows hard and unblushing as
marble. The continental "female" is quite a different being to the insular
"female" of the same age and class: I never saw such eyes and brows in
England” (85) The colonial references continue as Lucy describes the
“aboriginal Labassecouriennes” (84) and their penchant for lying, their
chronic laziness and resistance to authority.
Lucy describes these initial weeks of teaching as as struggle to devise
a plan to civilize them: “Many hours of the night I used to lie awake, thinking
what plan I had best adopt to get a reliable hold on these mutineers, to bring
this stiff-necked tribe under permanent influence” (84-85). As the novel
unfolds, it becomes clear that Lucy succeeds in the endeavor and provides the
students with what she sees as much needed rigorous instruction. This way,
having outdone the mothers and the teachers of Labassecour in providing the
157
care, instruction and the social graces that are the domain of the English
woman, Lucy rhetorically regains her home away from home, i.e. she
establishes herself as authentic Englishwoman. From that position, of the
virtuous English woman, Lucy can actually negotiate the gaze as an agent,
rather than an object of the look. This negotiation, however, is made possibly
in the act of Lucy’s visual consumption of the image of the Other.
The role of the visual and of the consumption of images of otherness
in female subjectivization is established early in the text, when Lucy
describes the diminutive child Polly, who is portrayed as the epitome of
perfect domestic femininity, engulfed in a picture book as she is rocking her
doll to sleep. The description mentions Graham several times because here, as
well as in the rest of the book, the narrator emphasizes Polly’s enthrallment
with the young Graham (whom she will finally marry after they meet again
eight years later). Polly is careful no not to “wake” her baby, as she is
breathlessly telling Polly about “the wonderful book given to [her] by
Graham” (34). Her doll is called Candace, “christened by Graham; for,
indeed, its begrimed complexion gave it much of an Ethiopian aspect” (31)
96
.
The pictures in the book, says Polly, show “distant countries”:
158
96
The Penguin Classics edition of Villette provides the following footnote: “Candace is the
inherited name of the early Ethiopian queens [in the Bible] See Acts 8:27. ( 553)
Wild men live in these countries, Miss Snowe, who wear
clothes different from ours: indeed, some of them wear
scarcely any clothes, for the sake of being cool, you know; for
they have very hot weather. Here is a picture of thousands
gathered in a desolate place--a plain, spread with sand--round a
man in black,--a good, good [Brontë’s emphasis] Englishman--
a missionary, who is preaching to them under a palm-tree".
(She showed a little coloured cut to that effect.) "And here are
pictures" (she went on) "more stranger" ... than that. There is
the wonderful Great Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady, with
a foot littler than mine. There is a wild horse of Tartary... (32).
It seems that despite the long list of excitingly exotic objects depicted in the
book, Polly excitedly points to only one picture as an example of a “strange
thing” in a far-away land: the illustration of the English missionary.
Paradoxically, missionary work itself is presented as a part of the ambiance
(34) -- the missionary planted under the palm tree is now part of the exoticism
of the scene.
The descriptions in the above quotation are too straightforward to
need explicit analysis in relation to questions of mechanisms for representing
alterity and colonial discourse. What I would like to foreground here are the
gendered positions of Polly and Graham and the symbolic relationships that
emerge in this scene. The whole passage quoted above centers on the image
of the missionary -- Polly fervently emphasizes his excellent character: he is
“a good, good Englishman” (34). This image foreshadows a later description
159
of the now adult Graham as he administers to the poor in Villette: “from him
[Brontë’s emphasis throughout] broke no irritability which startled calm and
quenched mirth; his lips let fall no caustic that burned to the bone; his eye
shot no morose shafts that went cold, and rusty, and venomed through your
heart: beside him was rest and refuge--around him, fostering sunshine” (225).
The man in both cases is thus established as central to the world in which he
functions, not simply as a position but also as a driving energy, the motor of
its movement: he is its “fostering sunshine” (224). Furthermore, the beatific
altruism of Graham and the charismatic goodness of the of the missionary
comprise the two major facets of the imperial character: it is the enlightened
goodness and the altruism of the English that demonstrates the aptitude to
rule and civilize the other: the missionary has and always be a “good, good
Englishman” (34).
The light and jocular tone of the narrator notwithstanding, little Polly’s
account of her favorite book points to the female consumption of colonial
imagery as a collusion with the male-run colonial project. The child’s
fascination with the picture book is punctuated with the excitement of
partaking in something that is important to Graham -- it is a book Graham
chose for her, in the same way he gave a name to her “Ethiopian” doll. As
she talks about the book, she keeps referring to all the wonderful things she
160
has learned from Graham -- “I can tell you [all that], because Graham told
me” (34), says Polly-- and intersperses her description with excursions into
what “Graham thinks” (34) about the various curious depictions. Thus, her
fascination with ‘faraway lands’ becomes less of an unmediated consumption
of images and grows the connotations of dissemination of knowledge within
a colonial paradigm. Symbolically, Polly establishes herself as Graham’s
companion and participant in the colonial project. It is not surprising then,
that when asked if she herself would like to travel, Polly emphatically says,
“when I am a grown woman, with Graham” (34). Because the novel devotes
considerable amount of space to this ‘budding romance’ in its beginning , this
scene metaphorically establishes the role and place of woman through the
mediation of colonial discourse. The rightful place of the self-effacing angel
of domesticity, that Polly represents in the beginning of the novel, is rightfully
established by the side of the “good Englishman/Graham”.
Even though Lucy does not choose the life of domesticity for herself,
her subject position as a woman of independent means is nevertheless
determined by her participation in colonial discourse. The picture book scene
analyzed above echoes another scene in which Lucy establishes herself as a
virtuous woman and then as a subject of the gaze through the consumption of
the image of the Other. When Lucy visits an art gallery in Villette, she
161
spends considerably long time viewing and discussing a painting she calls
“the queen of the collection” (205). The narrator withholds the title of the
painting till the very end of the description, which is itself permeated by
scathing sarcasm. The painting is huge, representing larger than life woman
whose “affluence of flesh” Lucy mentions but does not describe. She focuses
instead on the diet the lady must have kept to sustain this “breadth and height,
that wealth of muscle” (205). Lucy proceeds to describe it in great detail: “she
was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat--to say nothing of
bread, vegetables, and liquids” (205). Lucy continues with the position of the
body:
She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to
say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty
health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she
could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing,
or at least sitting bolt upright. She, had no business to lounge
away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn
decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not
the case: out of abundance of material--seven-and-twenty
yards, I should say, of drapery--she managed to make
inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness
surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans--
perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets--were rolled here and
there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was
mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of
curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the
floor. On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable
production bore the name "Cleopatra" (205-206).
162
It is interesting that Lucy’s description evokes and relies for its meaning upon
the indolence and languorous supineness of the Eastern woman in Orientalist
painting
97
without the need to provide much detail: the reader is supposed to
know exactly the type of supine figure Lucy briefly mentions when she writes
that Cleopatra “lay half-reclined on a couch” (205), “ loung[ing] away the
noon on a sofa” (205). The acerbic humor of the passage depends fully on the
easily recognizable image of the Odalisque as it constructs Cleopatra as a
lazy woman who can not keep a proper house.
Lucy’s unflattering description of the painting raises important
questions about the gendered employment and consumption of commodified
otherness. It has been commonly accepted that the subject of the Orient has
been traditionally constructed as feminine, a woman, whose story was told for
her, her desires imputed to her and whose image is constructed as a site for
voyeuristic pleasure. It seems that most of the elements listed above should
be activated by a viewer of Orientalist art of either gender. Lucy does inscribe
the figure in a narrative, and yet it is not the story of enticing sexual
availability, but rather the comical invocation of self-righteous narrative of
superior British femininity, based on domestic proficiency. The jocular tone of
the description, which positions this “Cleopatra” amidst strewn pots and pans,
163
97
For a more detailed discussion of British Orientalist Painting see Nicholas Tromans, ed.
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting.
does not necessarily subvert the Victorian domestic ideology, by parodying its
valuation of domestic competence that even an ancient queen is supposed to
possess. Neither does it imply that that Brontë's narrator has embraced the life
of domesticity (or that she will do so). The glorified ideal of the domestic
woman works simply as a cultural trope: it provides a discursive position from
which to establish the female viewer as a subject of the gaze. Cleopatra’s
messy palace does seem to mock the men who are enthralled by the painting
(more on this to follow) but more importantly it portrays the body of the
foreign woman as monstrously oversized and hypertrophied in its abundance
of flesh -- abundance which the narrator nevertheless refuses to describe.
Lucy’s description of the giant sprawl of Cleopatra’s body is redolent
of nineteenth-century visual and medical representations of the black woman
as oversexed and monstrous
98
. Even though she does not describe the
physical features of the Cleopatra in the painting, Lucy’s insistence on her
darkness -- she calls her alternatively a “gipsy-queen” (206) and
“mulatto” (207) subsumes all otherness under the category of blackness.
Cleopatra’s enormous stature seems to allude to the persistent discourse on
black sexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain that presents the
164
98
See Sander L Gilman “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward and Iconography of
Female Sexuality” (In Pathology and Difference: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and
Madness , esp. pp. 88- 91 Gilman discusses the notion of the supposed physical hypertrophy
of the Hottentot’s genital organs as particularly expressive of this ideologeme.
black woman as a cypher for female concupiscence in general
99
. In her
account of the composition of the painting, Lucy clearly establishes two
cultural functions of femininity: one is the realm of domesticity (present by
way of negation but clearly figured as the domain of the British woman) and
the other, the role of woman as spectacle, as a site for male voyeuristic
enjoyment that is safely, for the Englishwoman, transposed onto the foreign
oversexed body. By looking at Cleopatra and not seeing the sexual
suggestiveness of her flesh, the narrator manages to produce a split between
the domestic and the erotic and thus claim a subject position for herself where
she can be a subject, rather than an object of the gaze.
Once she has clearly established the utter alterity of the “indolent
gipsy-giantess” (206), Lucy becomes the spectator in another spectacle. In a
very “Las Meninas”- style composition, the novel presents Lucy, seated in a
corner of the gallery room, observing the men as they marvel at the charms of
“The Cleopatra”. The three male characters in the novel -- Graham , M Paul
and De Hamal, who are, significantly, the three men to marry or propose
marriage in the novel -- all appear in a veritable gallery of portraits before
Lucy’s eyes. Graham is mentioned briefly, “gazing at the Cleopatra” (207), M
Paul serves as the guardian of the proper gendered spaces of the gaze and De
165
99
See Sander L Gilman “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward and Iconography of
Female Sexuality”.
Hamal is given most attention as the man partaking in the voyeuristic pleasure
that the painting offers.
M. Paul, at his tyrannical male best, scolds Lucy for the indecency --
"sangfroid" (208), he calls it -- of actually looking at the painting of Cleopatra
and sends her to the corner of the room to contemplate a didactic dreary
triptych appropriately named, “La vie d’une femme”
100
(208) . After that, he
continues looking at the painting as he intermittently checks that Lucy does
not do the same. To enhance the comic effect even further, Lucy treats the
space she has been banished to as a vantage point and asks him to move a
little, as he is blocking her view of the room. To his indignant question, “You
are not recognising an acquaintance amongst that group of jeunes gens?
101
",
Lucy answers in the affirmative and continues to give a highly comic
description of the second male in the gallery, de Hamal:
In fact, I had caught a glimpse of a head too pretty to belong to
any other than the redoubted Colonel de Hamal. What a very
finished, highly polished little pate it was! What a figure, so
trim and natty! What womanish feet and hands! How daintily
he held a glass to one of his optics! with what admiration he
gazed upon the Cleopatra! and then, how engagingly he tittered
and whispered a friend at his elbow! Oh, the man of sense! Oh,
the refined gentleman of superior taste and tact! I observed him
166
100
Fr. “Life of a Woman”.
101
Fr. “young men”
for about ten minutes, and perceived that he was exceedingly
taken with this dusk and portly Venus of the Nile (208)
Interestingly, this long description Lucy does not address to M Paul. Quite the
opposite, she establishes the scene as a secret-telling session (one presumes
with the reader) which ends with M Paul’s disappearance, due to his possible
“shock by [Lucy’s] present abstraction” (209) in observing men and comically
presenting them as objects of erotic titillation. She humorously reduces the
man to a leery eye, but then proceeds to emulate comically the male gaze
taking an inventory of De Hamal’s supposedly irresistible charms: his
“finished, highly polished little [head]”, his “figure, so trim and natty!”, “his
womanish feet and hands” (208). De Hamal’s role as an object of both her
gaze and her story allows Lucy to displace him from the masculine position of
a subject of the gaze by emasculating him in her description.
This emasculation symbolically averts the gaze from her. The act of
viewing -- or rather of writing the woman as a subject of the gaze directed at
the man -- makes it possible for Lucy to evacuate the position of woman as
an object of the gaze whose representation functions as a site for male
voyeuristic pleasure. The access to this subject position though is only
available to Lucy as an imperial subject. It is contingent upon the rhetorical
and specular gesture of othering: Lucy has to construct the black woman as
167
the monstrous “Venus of the Nile” (208) in order to position herself as a
subject of the gaze.
168
What Lies Between:
Balkan Alterity and Gender in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Attempts to consume Dracula and vampirism
within one interpretative model inevitably
produce vampirism.
Judith Halberstam

Taking my cue from Halberstam’s rich and multi-layered study of the
over-determined symbolism of the Gothic monster in Stoker’s vampiric tale, I
would like to examine the complex relationship between figurations of
otherness and the construction of normative femininity in Stoker’s horror
Gothic and the articulation of English
102
identity at the fin de siècle. In Skin
Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam
demonstrates that if a study of alterity -- be that of sexuality, race, or gender
-- is limited to only one axis in the multi-dimensional network of a power/
knowledge system, then it unavoidably essentializes difference in relation to
the privileged terms of a regulatory discourse. She points out that if the
critical focus is solely on the vampire’s alien sexuality, for example, it will
169
102
Both his personal politics and his position as an Anglo-Irish complicate the question of
identification on part of the author with English culture and hegemony. At the same time, as
vexed as they are, these questions are not really pertinent to the scope of this chapter which
focuses on the discursive articulations of Englishness and gender in the literary and cultural
realms and does not concern authorial intent as a factor in discourse formation.
“obscure the construction of the native sexuality” (89). Thus to approach only
one facet of difference in the vampire would be tantamount to methodological
vampirism, in that it will perpetuate uncritically the fixity of the image of the
vampire as an embodiment of difference without examining the processes of
its cultural production.
Instead, proposes Halberstam, we can study the complexity of
monstrosity in the novel as “never unitary but always an aggregate of race,
class, and gender” (88). In her study of Dracula, and her work on the Gothic
monster in general, Halberstam has shown that the monster is not simply an
imaginary Other that is deployed to solidify dominant discourses. It is rather a
crucial node in the power/knowledge network envisioned by Foucault and
thus represents a complex intersection of dominant discourses. As such, the
vampire is not simply a monster; it represents a “technology of monstrosity
[itself]” (Halberstam 90).
The vampire in Dracula is indeed a monstrous intersection of multiple
axes of alterity. His ambiguity in relation to normative discourses on gender,
nationhood and sexuality, among others, highlight the monster as a figure of
abnormality and perversity; they define the vampire as the the “deviant and
the criminal against whom the marriageable and heterosexual can be
known” (Halberstam 89). It is initially difficult, however, to define the
170
character of Dracula in the novel or to understand his motivations. The text
carefully sets up the aura of secrecy and ominous foreboding typical for the
Gothic and unambiguously stages the monstrosity of the Count as threatening
to the metropolis.
Jonathan, the narrator of the introductory section of the novel,
presents us with a mysterious speech by Dracula, in which he declares his
intent: “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be
in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share [its] life, its change, its
death, and all that makes it what it is” (26). His eerie words, “to share in its
life, its change, its death” suspensefully foreshadow the process of vampiric
conversion. In his vampiric feasts, the count partakes in the life of the human
being, changes it and brings about its physical and spiritual death, by
transforming the human into a vampire. The notion of “changing” is later on
echoed in the descriptions of Mina and Lucy, who are both said to “have
changed” (89, 174). Thus, the count ominously declares that he is determined
to take part in “[London’s] change” (26). Still more disturbingly, the Dracula
continues to say that he longs “ to share in [...] all that makes [London] what
it is” (26) On some level, the Count will become a part of “all that makes
[London] what it is” because he will penetrate the city unheard and unknown,
as Jonathan and the rest of the characters fear, and become part of it. This is
171
the ultimate threat of the vampire-- the infiltration of the monster in the very
fabric of metropolitan society; he will indeed insert himself into its very
essence, making it impossible to know the virtuous from the “deviant and the
criminal” ( Halberstam 89)
103
. Hence, the driving force of the narrative is the
detection and persecution of the villain; as a hybrid between a horror gothic
and a detective, the novel predictably ends with the destruction of its arch-
villain, the vampiric Count Dracula, and the restoration of peace in the
English bourgeois world.
The embodiment of the victory over the vampire is young Quincy, the
son of Mina and Jonathan, who is named after all the brave men that have
fought to save his mother (D 401). The conferral of all these names links the
men in a quasi-paternal relationship to the progeny of the virtuous couple and
thus ensures the regeneration of Englishness; in other words, the perverse
procreation of the vampire through exchange of blood has been supplanted by
the notion of regeneration based on a social contract. At the same time,
however, their victory seems incomplete, since the contamination by blood
has not stopped. Because Mina has sucked Dracula’s blood, her son’s lineage
172
103
Even though I am indebted to Halberstam’s work for its interdisciplinary approach and
useful methodology, our interpretations differ. While Halberstam sees the primary cultural
function of the monster as a marker of boundaries in the articulation of normative sexuality
and gender, I focus on the ways in which the articulation of foreignness of the monster
disrupts the discourse of clearly delineated boundaries through which normative gender,
sexuality and English identity itself are built.
goes back to Dracula himself and as such negates the idea of perpetuation of
pure Englishness. As a result, Stoker’s narrative seems to negate the clear
division between the normal (or normative) and the perverse by emphasizing
the insidious residual presence of the monster that has been ostensibly purged
from the realm of virtuous Englishness.
It is this insidious presence of the monstrous and the attendant
irreversibility of contamination that complicate the conceptual divisions
between normative and deviant, self and Other, masculine and feminine,
English and alien. It seems, then, that the vampire in Dracula is not the easily
identifiable Other, the ultimate embodiment of monstrosity against whom the
pure and the native can be known. Such ambiguity is not only evident in the
ending of the novel but persists throughout the text as well; the virtuous
women that Dracula preys upon are often represented as willing participants,
rather than virginal innocents attacked by the blood-sucking monster; the
count is alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously, portrayed as ultimately
repulsive and intensely irresistible; his sexuality marks him as feminine, yet
his exorbitant strength and supernatural powers connote tyrannical
masculinity. As such, the vampire troubles the culturally necessary
boundaries between self and Other, native and alien, masculine and feminine.
173
More importantly, however, the vampiric count is not simply an
embodiment of a generalized liminal monster, a vague symbol for devious
sexuality or alien danger, or an abstract supernatural other. Despite all the
contradictions inherent in the character, and the overdetermination typical for
the Gothic villain, I will demonstrate that Dracula represents a specific form
of alien monstrosity: the articulation of a Balkan
104
Other in the English
cultural imagination. It will not be, however, the aim of this project to reclaim
an essential “Balkanness”
105
outside the discourse of the novel or the more
general discourse on the Balkans put forth by travel and fiction writing of the
late Victorian era. At the same time, I am less interested in parallels between
the figurations of the Balkan in travel narratives
106
and those in the novel
than I am interested in the role of both of these figurations in the complex
174
104
Even though authorial intention is not an object of study in this project, it is evident that
Stoker very consciously and meticulously researched the region: he read travel accounts,
ethnographic studies on the Eastern European and Balkan vampire, geographies and history
books, maps, etc. He also consulted train schedules so that he can time the events in the story
more precisely. Thus, the Balkan affiliation of his monster is more than a simple gesture of
Gothic exoticism; Stoker’s novel participates in a well-defined discourse on the region.
105
Even though the Balkan peninsula includes parts of Turkey (which in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries were known as ‘Turkey in Europe”), I will not discuss figurations of
Turkey and the Turks for two major reasons: the novel itself juxtaposes the subjugated
populations of the peninsula (of which, strictly speaking Dracula would be a part; he is proud
of having fought the Ottoman armies) and the “cruel Turk” (the Ottoman Empire). Secondly,
many of the depictions of Turkey of the Ottoman period in British travel and fiction writing
are informed by a different set of political and cultural attitudes than those that have generated
the Balkanist discourse of interest to me here. Those often included imperial rivalries
included but an alignment with the Ottoman upper classes as well.
106
Some of this work has been already done by Todorova, Hammond and Bracewell, among
others.
network of discourses defining both Englishness and femininity in fin de
siècle Britain.
In other words, borrowing from and expanding upon Halberstam’s
notion of the “technology of monstrosity,” this chapter will focus on the
vampire in Stoker’s novel as a technology of Balkan difference
107
understood
as the process of cultural negotiation of nationhood and gender that divulges
the fundamentally ambiguous relationship that the English at the height of the
British empire had to the cultures and peoples of the Balkans, an area that had
relatively recently entered the British geographical imagination
108
. Granted,
Stoker’s novel has been extensively and productively studied both in relation
175
107
It is beyond the scope of this project, however, to engage in a discussion of what particular
images of Balkanness have been construed by the English; rather I will show how the text of
Dracula construes the vampire as a generator and intensifier of the discourse on Balkanness,
gender and Englishness
108
Andrew Hammond locates the point in time even more specifically at the cusp of the
twentieth century, claiming that by that time a well defined discourse on the Balkans as a
“peripheral zone of barbarism and conflict” has cohered out of the free-floating figurations of
earlier times in the context of intense British political involvement in the region (The Uses of
Balkanism 603).
to sexuality and gender
109
on the one hand and to figurations of the Balkan
110

on the other. As fruitful and productive as they have been though, these
critical approaches have focused on just one (sexuality) or the other (Balkan
alien presence) of these two intertwined and mutually dependent discourses.
There is much to be gained by examining the intersection of these two
discourses and their role in the articulation of Balkanness, femininity and
Englishness. An understanding of how these discourses work speaks to the
productive potentialities of discursive regulation: not only does the image of
176
109
A number of critics have interpreted the novel mostly as a negotiation of difference within
the arena of gender and sexuality. Elaine Showalter examines the role of the novel in
normalizing the New Woman brought about by the vampiric intervention.(Sexual Anarchy
178-183). Carol Senf, on the other hand, argues that the novel does not necessarily condemn
the New Woman, but it rather attempts to reconcile independence and intellect in women with
the socially prescribed passive sexuality and maternity. (48-50) On vampiric sexuality more
specifically, see Demetrakopoulos and Roth.
110
The figure of Dracula in these approaches has been generally interpreted as a generalized
metaphor for British anxieties surrounding the role and place of the Balkan peoples in the so
called ‘Eastern Question” -- the rivalries and antagonisms between Europe’s superpowers in
their struggle to gain control of the Balkan region in the wake of the political disintegration of
the Ottoman empire. Stephen Arata, for example, attributes the horror of the novel to a fear of
“reverse colonization” (623) in which Dracula mirrors the assimilationist and orientalist
practices of British imperialism; and further ties it to the perception of the newly emerging
Balkan states as a threat to British interests in the area. Eleni Koundouriotis analyzes the
novel as an embodiment of the Ottoman heritage of the region, which is in turn seen as
incompatible with Western discourses of scientific and social progress and thus ultimately
perceived as threatening to a monolithic European identity. In a similar vein, Jason Dittmer
interprets the character as representing “all of Eastern Europe” (234) which is contrasted to
an idea of an enlightened and advanced West.
the Balkan other
111
limits or prohibits, by representing a perverse agent of
alien monstrosity that negatively defines domestic virtue, but it also registers
and produces the Other as unavoidable presence, a factor in the formation of
both normative femininity and Englishness. Thus, the novel ultimately
destabilizes the boundaries between self and Other , virtuous and perverse and
speaks to the potential of both feminine virtue and valorized nationhood to
slip into their obverse, the perverse and the alien.
* * *
Gothic overdetermination of the symbolism and the function of the
monster as a whole and of the vampire more particularly have allowed for a
sleuth of varied and really productive approaches to Stoker’s novel. The
character of Dracula has been successfully interpreted as a metaphor for the
reverse colonization of the metropole or, alternatively, as a product of a sui
generis imperial cultural exploitation, a form of imaginary colonialism, ( by
Stephen Arata and Vesna Goldsworthy respectively) and as a symptom of
cultural fears about miscegenation and cultural entropy (Hughes); as a
177
111
The umbrella term “Balkan” that I use throughout this chapter does not impute monolithic
identity to the peoples that inhabit the peninsula. What is more, “Balkan” here does not refer
in the least to some form of a regional identity or as a label of self-designation. On the
contrary, it simply reflects the groupings and imaginings evident in the text of Dracula (and
more broadly in the identifiable discourse on the Balkans). Maria Todorova expressed this
idea most poignantly when she wrote “ there never was a Balkan identity. At best, there was a
sometimes romantic and other times unwilling recognition of cultural similarities which had
amassed with the passing of the centuries and which on occasion took the form of a common
defensive reaction to an identity that was ascribed from outside” (Imagining the Balkans 230).
manifestation of British xenophobia, and even anti-Semitism, in the light of
late nineteenth century influx of Jews who fled the pogroms and
discriminatory legislation in Russia (Zanger and Halberstam). Many of the
above mentioned approaches fruitfully operate on the legitimate assumption
that the imperial self emerges as a phantasmatic construct in the ideologically
established contrast to an Other that is at once mysterious, unknown and
always already available to the Western eye. In other words, they interpret the
character of Dracula as a cypher: the menacing presence of indeterminate,
vague, and therefore even more menacing Other.
I would like, however, to focus on the marked and very specific
foreignness of the Count in the novel, namely his embodiment of the dark
Balkan other, as both a force and destabilizing factor in the formation of
Englishness in relation to the British imperial project. Stoker’s meticulous
research and preparatory work for Dracula, the narrative formats that the
novel employs and references (most notably of the travel account) and the
prominent role of place, the Balkan locale of the text, all speak to the novel’s
participation in a well defined discourse comprised by both travel and
imaginative literature that defines and articulates the Balkans as an area of
Europe that is distinctly different yet problematically enmeshed in
articulations of English identity.
178
It is no coincidence that the alien vampire preys upon the finest
examples of Victorian womanhood. Extrapolating from Nancy Armstrong
and Canon Schmitt’s work on the structuration of nationalism and the genre
of the novel, we can see how the text of Dracula builds bourgeois subjectivity
as female and in turn how it ultimately equates proper female subjectivity to
proper English subjectivity. Maternal nurturance and self-effacing female
virtue (often cast as sexual purity) form the symbolic crux of both familial and
nationalist values as they are distinctly and sharply contrasted to, but also
constituted by, the articulation of difference
112
captured in the world of a
morally, physically and politically deficient Other. We are reminded here of
the orgiastic, violent and oppressive relationships that the count maintains
with his brides/children in Castle Dracula that seem to be the stark obverse of
the idealized affections and nurturance of the bourgeois family.
At the same time, however, the count is not quite figured as “the
Other” of British imperial narratives. As Stephen Arata has pointed out,
Dracula is arguably the only “Other” -- who does not in any way collaborate
with the colonial regime -- allowed to pass in the metropole. Given his easily
179
112
I am really indebted to Cannon Schmitt's work here who sees the coalescence of a national
identity as a process of incorporation of fantasmatic structurations of otherness. His approach
seems to be the opposite of that of Benedict Anderson who conceptualizes national identity as
cohering around an internal core based on intra-communal relations, rather than being
shaped by external contrast.
perceived difference, it is noteworthy that the count is perfectly able to
operate in London; he hires an attorney, buys real estate; he even manages to
navigate issues of conflict of interest. Ironically, shielded by the crowds, he is
able to freely roam the megapolis: “in his place so central, so quiet [...] he can
come and go by the front or the back door at all hours, when in the vast of
traffic there is none to notice” (311). Pointy ears, ruby lips and protruding
canine teeth notwithstanding, the voracious count is able to be yet another
gentleman out in the city. The important question to ask here is, does the
count’s monstrosity, coupled with his ‘West-saviness’, make him an alter ego,
the dark double of an English self? Or, on the contrary, is his passing at the
heart of empire part and parcel of the Other’s devious ways?
On some level, to ask this question means also to contemplate the
relevance of post-colonial approaches to the discussion of the ideological
underpinnings of the image of the Balkan in the English cultural imagination
of the fin de siècle. Maria Todorova’s answer to this question is resoundingly
180
negative.
113
In Imagining the Balkans, a meticulous study of the origins,
development and the political impact of a discourse on the region, Todorova
points out that a post-colonial approach would be anachronistic and misplaced
since strictly speaking the Balkans have never been under British political
control. More importantly, Todorova contends that since much of colonial
ideology hinges on racialist and religious discourses of difference, it would be
even less appropriate to adopt a post-colonial approach to studying the
discourse on the Balkans since in Western European representations, the
Balkan people are not seen as essentially racially or religiously different; on
181
113
Another opponent to postcolonial approaches, this time to Dracula more specifically, is
William Hughes who claims that Dracula, as the Other who launches an invasion of the
metropolis (a focal point for interpretations by Arata, Zanger, Brantlinger, and Christopher
Fowler) is nowhere to be found in the text itself,; it is rather a creation of the “twentieth
century critical idiom [which] has anachronistically created him in order to preserve its own
identity or to express a perception of its own post-colonial guilt” (“A singular Invasion” 92).
There are two underlying assumptions in this statement that can considerably undermine its
critical value. The first is that any post-colonial reading of Dracula has to center on the
narrative theme of invasion into the metropolis -- the sleuth of productive approaches to the
text shows that this is not necessarily so. The second one is the occlusion of work on the novel
done by scholars like Koundouriotis, Longinovic and Goldsworthy, among others, who hail
from the the Balkans themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, but “postcolonial guilt” or
“the preservation of a [threatened] identity” (92) can hardly explain their motivations.
both accounts, argues Todorova
114
, the Balkans fall on this side of the West-
East divide
115
(17-19).
Taking these cultural and historical specifics of the discourse on the
Balkans into account, Todorova coins the term “Balkanism” to distinguish it
from the discourse of Orientalism under which figurations of the Balkans have
often been subsumed (13-16). In her definition of Balkanism, Todorova draws
attention to the the liminal and marginal space that the Balkan region has
occupied in the British cultural imagination but nevertheless discusses it as a
discursive space of sameness and not one of otherness: “[The Balkans] are
constructed not as an other but as an incomplete self” (18). It is logical then
that Todorova questions the usefulness of post-colonial theory in a critique of
Western-European imaginings of the Balkans since within her framework “the
Balkans are Europe, are part of Europe” (18).
182
114
Similarly, Fleming argues that a new approach, separate from Orientalism, is needed to
study the discourse on the Balkans, by drawing attention again to the “non-imperial
circumstances of the Balkans” See K.F. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan
Historiography," American Historical Review 105.4 (October 2000): 1218-1233, 1223. Other
scholars, however, are more comfortable adopting and adjusting the Saidean framework of
Orientalism to discuss the political deployment of figurations of the Balkans, See, among
others Larry Wolff, who coins the term “demi-orientalism” or Ivan Bielic, who discusses
Balkan self-perception as a mirroring of an orientalist discourse and names it “self-
Orientalism”.
115
It is important to note that, as Larry Wolff has argued, the West/East division within
Europe, and in European consciousness in relation to the rest of the globe, is a relatively new
invention that came to supplant an older pre-modern division between a “ civilized”
European South and a “primitive” North. Wolff studies the history, origins and discursive
history of the East-West division and sees it as a part and parcel of the Enlightenment project
itself.
It is important to be particularly attentive to questions of historical
specificity, and the nuanced approach Todorova takes in her study of
Balkanist discourses must be appreciated for its commitment to establishing
fine distinctions between phenomena -- such as British imperialism and
Britain’s struggle to increase its political influence in the region -- that are,
according to Todorova, similar yet categorically different. At the same time,
Todorova’s analysis of the origins, manifestations and impact of the Balkanist
discourse reveals that while the methods might be different, the figurations of
Balkanness in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British travel and fiction
writing exhibit structural and functional similarities with the imperial
ideological endeavor. They represent an image of the Balkans as a a suitable
object of Britain’s civilizing mission: an area populated by child-like peoples
incapable of independent governance whose rural, pre-industrial modes of
production squarely position them in some frozen state of medieval
primitivity. Such figurations facilitate the ideological deployment of
Balkanness for the advancement of British imperial interest
116
.
The incontestable historical fact remains that the Balkans have never
been an object of concerted imperial effort on the part of Britain. This does
183
116
In this, regard my stance is similar to the position of Andrew Hammond who coins the
phrase “Imagined Colonialism” in order to describe how the imperial discourse of the
Victorian period solidified a construction of the Balkans as a threat to the European
civilization.
not mean, however, that political influence in and control of the area have not
been of paramount importance to protecting British imperial interests in
general. Todorova herself details compellingly the shifts in attitude and
figurations of the Balkans in British travel literature based on changes in the
various political alliances
117
between the rest of the “great powers” in Europe
that alternatively threatened or protected British interest. So, while the
Balkans have never been a direct object of British colonial expansion, they
have been used, politically and diplomatically, as an instrument for the
protection or the expansion of the British empire at the end of the nineteenth
century.
British travel and fiction writing on the Balkans, then, can not be
studied productively separately from questions of Empire. On the contrary,
much of it is informed by ideological structurations that are typical for
colonial discourse in general. The liminal, marginal inhabitants of the
European periphery are seen as barbarous and primitive, their whiteness and
christianity notwithstanding. As a result, the Balkan is constructed as
184
117
For instance, Todorova makes a very compelling argument that Turkophile sentiment
alternated with compassion for the subjugated populations based on developments in the
complex relationship Britain had with the Russian and the Ottoman empires in the context of
the struggle for control over the Middle East (91-120). Similarly, in the British context, class
differences contributed to sometimes contrasting perceptions of the Balkans where class
affiliation superseded Christian affinity: as in the case of aristocratic writers who easily
identified with the Ottoman rulers of the Balkans and were appalled by the perceived
savagery of the subjugated populations; Middle-class writers in contrast emphasized the
feudal backwardness of the Ottoman turks and highlighted the need for social reform and
amelioration of the condition of the Balkan populations in the context of a civilizing mission..
European but not quite. In relation to English identity at the fin de siècle, the
Balkan occupies a place similar to that of the working class poor or the
Irish
118
: their alterity serves to both destabilize and define the category of a
coherent English identity. On the one hand, their poverty, violence and
backwardness all question the trajectory of a Western narrative of progress
and civilization as predicated on whiteness and christianity. At the same time,
however, the newly emerging discourse of degeneracy
119
is called forth to
explain the anomaly that these groups represent and thus ultimately to solidify
the notion of white middle-class English identity manifested in the contested
body of the virtuous woman. Such figurations present the Balkan less as “an
incomplete self”, as Todorova argued; they rather resemble an “incomplete
other” (Ibid).
In the final analysis, the differences between the British Imperial
project and the discourses that made it ideologically possible on the one hand
and the expansionist interest of the British Empire (which led to its intense
185
118
It is not surprising then that critics have interpreted the monstrosity of Dracula, the horror
he wreaks and the final destruction of the vampire as a symbolic reworking of fears
surrounding the rise of Irish nationalism at the end of the nineteenth-century (Canon Shmitt)
and the danger of contagion the working class in the East End of London represented
(Nichols Rance). It seems that the East End of the metropolis and the southeastern tip of
Europe were both constructed as a source of contagion and danger -- a figuration all the more
telling, given that at the end of the century the east End was swarming with tens of thousands
newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe (Zanger).
119
Renewed interest in Malthusian population theory, together with racialist discourses of
social Darwinist hue, constructed social , cultural and physical difference as a manifestation
of degeneration of the human species wherein the “less adaptable” are doomed to perdition.
involvement in Balkan politics in the second half of the nineteenth century)
and its related discourses on the other are a matter of degree and not type.
Thus, much post-colonial theory that emerged as a critique of the British
imperial project can offer useful tools for cultural analyses of the role Stoker’s
novel played in relation to a coherent discourse on the Balkans. That Dracula
represents some form of cultural or political threat seems to be the consensus
among the numerous students of this text and of fin de siècle British culture in
general. That he represents the specific threat of Balkan barbarism that can
insidiously contaminate the body, both physical and political, and thus
destabilize normative notions of femininity and English identity is going to be
the main contention of this chapter.
The text of Dracula, especially because it employs the techniques of
travel writing, establishes a structural and functional congruity between the
character of Dracula and the Balkanist discourse available in travel accounts
of the region. At the same time, Stoker’s text problematizes the fixity of the
Balkan other and of the region as an entry point to the Orient. If we have to
interpret symbolically the “threatening vagueness” (Kane 12) of the count, we
could say that the repulsiveness of the vampire stands for the place the
Balkans occupy in the cultural imagination of Europe in general and of
England more specifically: the place of in-betweenness that threatens to
186
explode the neat categories of self and other with its incoherent and thus
unintelligible nature. It seems that as such Dracula participates is both a
manifestation and a revision of the discourse of Balkanism.
Even though the count is represented as markedly different, his
figuration falls outside the perimeter of exoticizing Orientalism. To take one
example, unlike the Moor Zofloya in Charlotte Dacre’s eponymous novel,
who is the Other, racial this time, discussed in my first chapter, Dracula is
not presented as exotic in appearance or alluringly attractive in his physical
presence
120
. If anything, the count is faintly repulsive with his cadaver-like
scrawny body and ice-cold hands. More importantly , unlike Zofloya’s body --
which is fixed under the power of the voyeuristic, albeit female, gaze as a
sumptuous display of Eastern sensuality
121
-- Dracula’s body is protean and
shape-shifting. Whether he appears as a sliver of silvery fog, a wolf or a pack
of rats, his body defies observation in that it is more of a camouflage than an
187
120
Stoker's vampire is attractive in his own way, but his seductive powers do not rest in the
physical attributes of his body.
121
The descriptions of the slave’s exposed body in Dacre’s novel, published in 1807, are not
technically speaking Orientalist because Orientalism as such did not cohere as a discourse
until later in the century, with the advent of academic Orientalism.. Yet, Dacre’s figurations
of the Moorish body are definitely part and parcel of series of imaginings that Said called
“free-floating Orient ” : the fascination with a vaguely constructed Oriental other as a figure
of “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, [and] intense energy” (Orientalism
119) Interestingly enough, many of those are the general themes that define the Gothic tale as
such.
intelligible material presence that can be fixed by the gaze or captured in
discourse, be that Orientalist or Balkanist.
Cognitive indeterminacy is indeed what distinguishes the count from
the very beginning of the novel. When Jonathan -- cast as the Western
traveller to the Balkans who diligently records all the minutiae of his journey
-- first meets the count, he can not shed the nagging feeling that the old man
clad in black and the supernaturally strong and awe-inducing coach driver are
one and the same person. At the same time, he can never be certain either: his
uncertain address to his host, “Count Dracula?” (23), seems to launch one of
the major plot threads of the narrative: the drive to discover who Dracula is
and use this knowledge to destroy him. Dracula, however, eludes description
and easy classification. Repeatedly in the novel the characters who seek to
destroy him stumble to describe or define him and resort to vague words such
as ‘it”, ‘the thing” etc. More than the expressed objectification of the other,
which undoubtedly these terms divulge, they denote the utter confusion about
the identity or the properties of that other which the discourse woven by the
characters purports to define.
At the same time, the complex narrative of the novel, with its
references to travel writing, activates a number of tropes that define both
Dracula and the scope of the Balkanist discourse. Ambiguity is one such trope.
188
As Maria Todorova has noted “while Orientalism is a discourse about an
imputed opposition, Balkanism is a discourse about an imputed
ambiguity” (17). Indeterminacy is indeed a main feature of Dracula’s
monstrosity: he is ambiguous in terms of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity,
even body. His foreignness is figured as a vague, discomforting alien presence
-- for all the quasi-historical references in the beginning of the novel, the
reader is left with the vague recollection of Transylvanian nobility, whose
ancestors claim ancient lineage of somewhat muddled origin. As one critic
aptly articulated the issue, “Dracula is vaguely threatening, and he is
threatening, precisely because his foreignness is vague” (Kane 11). Thus the
monstrosity of the vampire is articulated as a particularly Balkan (and
discursively speaking Balkanist) ambiguity.
The vagueness of Dracula’s ancestry echoes a frequent topos in travel
accounts: the discomfort of English travelers when faced with the ethnic
diversity of the Balkans, that are usually figured as a vortex of cultural and
ethnic intermingling. To mention but one instance, landscape artist Edward
Lear admired the wild beauty of the landscape in rural Albania and Greece but
actually detested “the mongrel appearance of every person and thing ( Qtd. in
Todorova 97). The people who inhabit Dracula’s land seem to be of equally
vague yet varied ethnicity. Jonathan mentions variation in costume which
189
denotes ethnic diversity -- “groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all
sorts of attire” (9) -- but fails to provide descriptions other than to mention
that “some of them were just like the peasants at home [...] but others were
very picturesque” (9). It is interesting to note that just prior tot this passage,
Jonathan has written up a summary of the information he found in the British
Museum, in which he describes the various ethnicities of the region (Saxons,
Wallachs, Magyars and Szekelys [sic]) and their distribution in the area. Yet,
when he does see the groups of local people, he, like any English traveller, can
only see a vague mass and resorts to the general mentioning of “all sorts of
attire” (9).
This passage is indicative of the slippage between participation and
revision of Balkanist discourses that the novel presents. On the one hand, the
narrator in this passage makes rhetorical attempts to domesticate the foreign:
the peasants are either conveniently familiar (”just like the peasants at home”)
or conventionally picturesque, the picturesque being another instrument for
the normalization of the foreign. One thing Jonathan does not do is to fix the
Other epistemologically in the discourse of a quasi-anthropological
observation by applying pervious knowledge (his findings in the British
museum) to provide a definition of Balkan essence. Such approach, Said
argues, is central to the project of Orientalism, and by extension any discourse
190
that hinges on construction of the Other as a suitable object for a civilizing
mission. Said calls it the hardening of attitudes” (Orientalism xv) , which is
the process of solidifying of a “doctrine and meaning, imparted by "science,"
into "truth"” (Ibid 254). This is precisely the ambition of the rest of the
characters when they set out to find the truth about the vampire and to do that
they employ various forms of knowledge, concentrated mostly in the character
of Van Helsing. In contrast, Jonathan’s inability to apply a coherent doctrine
of prior knowledge to the Balkan other marks him as incompetent in the
discursive project of defining the Other that the novel undertakes.
* * *
Ambiguity becomes an attribute of Stoker’s text itself. On the one
hand, the novel does emphasize the ambiguity of the vampire (racial, sexual,
ethnic); it defines the Balkan through its indeterminacy and thus participates
in a Balkanist discourse, which it then destabilizes through the intervention of
the vampire. Another common Balkanist trope that the novel first evokes and
then subverts is that of the crossroads, usually used to construe the Balkans
as suspended between past and present, the exotic and the mundane, the
savage and the civilized, East and West. In these imaginings, East and West
are seen usually as monolithic categories, as well defined, hermetically sealed
worlds. Many travelers employ the metaphor of the bridge or emphasize their
191
crossing of an imaginary yet sharply defined border to mark the passage from
one world into the other
122
. More interestingly, when no such demarcations
are easily available, culturally speaking, the travelers invent other liminal
and transitional spaces that are portable, so to speak: in other words, they can
be placed at whatever junction or place of encounters with the Other the
traveler constructs. This invention of borderlands is evident in a cliche like
“the gateway to the Orient”, a common descriptor of Balkan and Eastern
European cities, that can punctuate the imaginary map of Europe with entry
points to the Orient: from Istanbul to Bucharest to Belgrade and as far
northwest as Budapest
123
.
Nevertheless, the Balkan in Dracula, or rather, the vampire Dracula as
a specifically Balkan monster of ambiguity -- the insidious presence that
penetrates into and contaminates the metropole from within -- complicates a
192
122
See Larry Wolff for the prevalence of the image of crossing a border and its foundational
role in what Wolff has termed “the invention of Eastern Europe (17-18) Also, see Todorova
(more specifically pp. 17-34 and 91-113) for an overview of dominant patterns of perception
and figurations of the Balkans in European travel and fiction writing in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Also, for a more detailed study of Victorian travel writing on the
Balkans, consult Hammond’s “Imagined Colonialism”.
123
The history of the trope of the Balkans as borderland is extensive and goes back at least to
the early eighteenth century. To mention but one instance, Lady Mary Montagu writes from
Belgrade espousing the need to learn Arabic, “if I were to stay here for several months” (89).
The decision, motivated by the desire to peruse the extensive library of her host -- a high
ranking Ottoman official -- and discuss ‘Oriental tales”, also implies that the locals do not
have much to offer. Interestingly, this image of the Balkans as a place encountered en route,
rather than visited on purpose, can be found in late twentieth-century travel writing as well: a
travelogue by American journalist, Robert Kaplan bears the the title Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and Tartary (2000).
construction of the Balkans as a space that can be traversed unproblematically
on the way to or back from the Orient. Dracula’s domain is located in an
unnamed region, which is mentioned to Jonathan, but never revealed to the
reader. “This district [Dracula] named,” (7) writes Jonathan, is mysteriously
located “just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and
Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and
least known parts of Europe” (8). The language in this passage is suggestive
of the supernatural powers of the count and his domain: his land is not
actually in Transylvania, even though it is Transylvania that Jonathan has
meticulously researched. Furthermore, Jonathan’s peculiar syntactical
structure -- note that he does not use the more common turn of phrase “to
border on three states” -- implies that the domain of the Balkan vampire is
suspended in-between the three states, in an imaginary zone that consists
solely of borders and no land. It is then symbolically important that once on
the loose, outside the Balkans, Dracula is centrally positioned in the heart of
London, in his Carfax estate. The novel highlights the centrality of Dracula’s
dwelling in Jonathan’s explanation that “[t]he estate is called Carfax, no doubt
a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four sided, agreeing with
the cardinal points of the compass” (56). The explicit mentioning of the
orientation of the house resonates with the fear of invasion: rather than being
193
contained in a clearly defined foreign space, the count is now strategically
positioned, aligned “with the cardinal points of the compass”, to attack
London and ”batten on the helpless” (59).
It seems that Dracula is thus the monster that lies between, in the
indeterminate never-space of map divisions and demarcations. It is not
surprising, then, that Jonathan can not find maps that locate Castle Dracula.
As an English traveller, Jonathan has left for the Balkans equipped with the
knowledge about the region accumulated by other travelers, “[I] had visited
the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the
library regarding Transylvania” (7). In a hurried supremacist gesture, the
character rationalizes the situation as Balkan backwardness -- “no maps of
this country [can] compare to our Ordnance Survey Maps” (8). And yet, it
seems that no books or maps could ever prepare him for what awaits him in
Castle Dracula.
In all of the above behaviors and narrative gestures Jonathan is figured
as the English traveler, with one notable exception: he cannot freely return to
the “West”. The facile trope of entering through gates or crossing borders and
bridges and the centralized, epistemologically privileged position of the
westerner before whom the picture of the visited land unfolds implies that he
or she is able to move freely back and forth, between West and East. It is the
194
facility of traversing back into the “West” that is denied Jonathan when he
undertakes his journey to Castle Dracula. The text of Dracula construes
Jonathan’s entry into this twilight zone relatively far from the Balkans proper,
in Budapest:
The Impression I had was that we were leaving the West and
entering the East; the most Western of the splendid bridges
over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took
us among the traditions of Turkish rule (7).
Through the repetition of the word “West”, the passage implies that the hero is
leaving the West oxymoronically through the “most Western” of all the
bridges; he leaves the West instantaneously, abruptly, crossing into the topsy-
turvy world of Dracula. In this initial scene, the crossing is indeed
instantaneous: having crossed, the character is now “among the traditions of
Turkish rule”. The journey back, however, is not that instantaneous: it takes
Jonathan months, and he is not able to move past Budapest, the gateway to
Dracula land, a city perched on the cusp of “Turkish Rule”, where he had to
be saved by Mina, the Victorian paragon of virtue.
Jonathan's captivity in Castle Dracula, in the in-between space that is
the liar of the Balkan monster, problematize the construction of the Balkan
other even further. It speaks to the permeability of the borders and boundaries
that English travelers so insistently construes. More importantly, Jonathan’s
195
protracted journey back speaks to the vast cultural space of ill-defined “no
man’s” land -- the territory of Balkan indeterminacy that is threatening in its
fluidity and defies the idea of the West and the East as monolithic hermetically
sealed opposite entities. In a sense, Jonathan’s captivity in Castle Dracula is a
metaphor for the impossibility to construct the sharp contour of an East-West
divide, a safe border that delineates the Western world and defines, as it
defends it, against the dangers that the Balkan Other poses. Another metaphor
for this impossibility is Dracula, who is a monstrous patchwork of cultural
rituals. He is the vampire who is neither alive, nor dead; his victims become
lovers, children and food, all at the same time; for him, violence and sex
merge to provide both sustenance and procreation.
Discussions of Dracula’s threatening sexuality and violence frequently
seem to focus on his predatory and devious seduction of virtuous Victorian
women and the subsequent persecution and destruction of the monster. Such
readings also emphasize the role of Jonathan Harker as one of the brave men
who vanquish the vampire in the end of the novel. The character of Jonathan,
however, is developed differently than the rest of the participants in Van
Helzing’s “little band of men” (324). Jonathan only joins the group relatively
late in the novel, after he has spent several months abroad: some of that time
is spent in Dracula’s captivity in Transylvania and some of it bedridden in a
196
monastery near Budapest. By the time Jonathan returns to England, the
vampire has seduced Lucy and Van Helzing’s men have already orgiastically
staked her. This is also the point just before they venture into the London
dwelling of the vampire. Jonathan's usefulness to the team is limited by his
physical feebleness, which Mina registers meticulously in her letters and
journal. Quite tellingly, his participation in the grand finale of the tale is
reduced to a mere synecdoche, when we learn matter-of-factly that “the
sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife” (324) severs Dracula’s head
124
. It
seems that Jonathan has to recuperate his status as a hero by being the one to
decapitate the vampire in a phallic gesture and thus regain acceptance to the
circle of enlightened men that comprise Van Helzing’s slayer team.
What such approaches omit is usually Jonathan’s role as a participant
in an imperial travel discourse: his journal is important for the detection of
the vampire and ( as discussed in the previous section) it clearly is figured as
a travelog recording his journey to the Balkans. His failure, however, to
discursively discipline the Other leads to Jonathan’s imprisonment. As a
result, Jonathan's extended period of captivity in Castle Dracula and the
subsequent “brain fever” (167) he develops align him more closely with Mina
197
124
It is true that the participation of Quincy Morris is also rendered through a synecdoche
(“Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart” (324)), but Quincy's heroic death grants
him the status of a courageous self-sacrificing hero, which Jonathan does not achieve.
and Lucy -- the group of women in need of policing and protection -- and not
with the men who are constructed as their protectors and saviors.
These realignments in the text speak to specific cultural anxieties
surrounding masculinity at the end of the nineteenth century . Elaine
Showalter coined the term “sexual anarchy” to emphasize that the heated
debate about the role and place of women in the 1890’s -- most often labeled
“the new woman question” -- did not exist in social vacuum. The perceived
“crisis of femininity” was compounded by anxiety about the social
significance and the content of masculinity, especially in the light of the
Oscar Wilde trials and the perceived as effete masculine ideal propounded by
the decadents. The New Women and the decadents were both
125
violating
social and gender hierarchies by challenging the value of marriage as a social
institution and heteronormativity as the bulwark of harmonious social
relations. They were both idealizing, albeit for different reasons, a form of
androgyny that was perceived as a serious danger to the social order
(Showalter 169-172). Even more significantly, the strive to redraw or
reinstate the sharp contours of the borders defining sexual difference was
paralleled by growing anxieties about demarcations of race and ethnicity in
198
125
The similarities outlined here do not at all presuppose political affinity between the two
groups; Showalter and others have pointed out that the “New Women” and the Decadents
really did not have a common social or political agenda and were, if anything, overtly hostile
to each other at times.
the context of colonial rebellions and the attendant fears of miscegenation,
crossbreeding and intermarriage.
All of the complex facets of the fin-de-siècle malaise that Showalter
describes
126
converge in the complicated relationship between Jonathan
Harker -- the exemplary hardworking good Victorian man -- and Dracula, the
eerily androgynous yet powerfully masculine Transylvanian count. It is not
surprising that the character of Dracula has been so often, and so productively,
interpreted as a manifestation of a number of late Victorian obsessions
regarding sexual deviance, procreation and normative masculinity. In respect
to gender regulation and its intersection with figurations of the Other, more
specifically, it is of particular importance to focus on the peculiarly virile, yet
androgynous, masculinity that the Count exudes. On the one hand, he can be
portrayed as distinctly feminine: he looks frail and venerable in his old age
127

and a perverted maternity is the core of his sexuality, since he suckles, as well
as sucks blood from, his victims. And yet, Dracula is threateningly masculine
199
126
Showalter emphasizes the cultural importance of the gender controversy -- and of
femininity more specifically --in the intellectual climate of the 1890’s when she writes, “[w]
hile the “lower races” were safely distant in Africa and India, and the poor usually well out of
sight, men could not hide the same way from the threat of a revolution by women” (6). There
was one exception, though, to the impermeability of the bourgeois white world that
Showalter describes and this is the threat of the Balkan other.
127
Francis Ford Coppola’s film -- Bram Stoker’ s Dracula (1992) -- emphasized this
characteristic of the novel even further, by portraying the “old Dracula” as a very frail-looking
man. With his thin, clasped lips, non-existent brows, long, floating, night-gown-like coat, and
white long hair pulled up in an eerie waist-length braid, he uncannily resembles a repulsive
old woman.
at the same time. His non-penetrative
128
sexual preferences notwithstanding,
he, like a “true patriarch”, is the initiator of his own blood line of “vampiric
children”. The vampire race seems to be clearly patrilineal, since the vampire
women do not reproduce in the novel. Even though the images of Dracula’s
disturbing fecundity evoke the reproductive capacity of women, he is still
figured as a commanding, not to say tyrannic, male presence. The novel
insistently mentions his extraordinary height and physical strength, together
with his dreadful superpowers. In some sense, rather than symbolizing a
somewhat feminized presence, Dracula represents the opposite -- an
exaggerated version of authoritative masculinity.
On one level the tyrannical masculinity of Dracula works in the novel
as an index for Dracula’s pre-modern, indeed feudal, ways. Dracula’s
aristocratic vice and his aura of a medieval monster, however, differ from
those of a Montoni or a Shedoni, for example. Written at the very end of the
eighteenth century, Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic tales constructed the foreignness
of these tyrannical and cruel aristocrats as a mere cypher, code for
monstrosity, that allowed the novels, in their triumphant for the middle-class
happy endings, to establish the middle class as the site of regeneration of
social virtue. This is not the case in the cultural climate of 1890s England, a
200
128
Halberstam and Schmitt most convincingly argue that Dracula defies heteronormative
regulation.
time dominated by concerns about the potential for “degeneration” not only
of individuals, but of British culture and society as a whole; fears that
“civilization itself” can come crumbling down under the attack of foreign and
domestic others. Thus, the motif of Dracula’s feudal masculinity is not a mere
metaphor for the “twilight” of Western civilization. On the contrary, within the
context of the novel’s travel narrative frame, the motif of Dracula as a feudal
relic and an archaic tyrannical patriarch reflects the pervasive British
constructions of Balkan backwardness and barbarism, combined with
gruesome depictions of violent masculinity.
129
As Maria Todorova has pointed out, such depictions of the Balkans as
“singularly male” are in sharp contrast to the Orientalist discourse which
“resorts to metaphors of its object of study as female” (15). This contrast is
all the more surprising, given that many of the features of these two parallel
imperial discourses are similar
130
. Both areas are depicted as backward,
uncivilized, and frozen in time (Todorova 88-113, Said 136-208), a sui generis
museum of historical oddity that can be examined, classified and studied. At
the same time, while the Orient is characterized by “its feminine penetrability
201
129
For a more detailed discussion of representations of masculinity and of the Balkan as
metaphorically male see Todorova (especially ch 4, ‘Patterns of Perception until 1900) ; for a
more specific discussion of travel literature and figuration of masculinity, see Wendy
Bracewell, “new Men, Old Europe”
130
Not all features are shared, understandably. Imputed opulence, exotic beauty, and
‘millennia worth of wisdom” were never characteristics of Balkanism.
[and] its supine malleability” (Said 206), the Balkans are characteristically
and emphatically seen as masculine, a land where “physical toughness and
violence, sexual conquest and the subordination of women; guns, strong drink
and mustaches feature heavily” (Bracewell 88). Nerval could wander through
Egypt, penetrating a particularly feminine and, Said argues, maternal space --
" ‘that center, at once mysterious and accessible,’ from which all wisdom
derives” (Qtd in Said 182). The Balkan traveler, in contrast, constructs a
picture of animalistic impenetrability:
[The Bulgarians are] strongly but heavily built, with broad
shoulders and round back, walk like that of a bear, coarse and
blunted features, a heavy moustache covering the sensual lips,
a beard shaven once a week, and little twinkling eyes, which,
whilst always avoiding to meet your own, give a general
appearance of animal cunning to the face. (St Clair and Brophy
qtd in Todorova 101)
The Balkan can not be the soft space of maternal suppleness that Nerval
envisions because it is not “mysterious and accessible” . On the contrary, the
Balkan is constructed as stubbornly unavailable for interpretation; he
(because it is always a “he” that is constructed) is brutish yet deviously
cunning and therefore portrayed as potentially violent. One can sense the
danger oozing from the strong bear-like body and hiding in the “twinkling
eyes” of the Balkan.
202
In some sense, Stoker’s novel condenses and symbolically reworks
some of the major preoccupations of Balkanist discourse. The stunning
resemblance between the above description and Dracula’s appearance --
down to the “heavy moustache covering the sensual lips” and his penetrating
cunning eyes -- points to a symbolic parallel between the danger posed by the
“impenetrable” Balkan male and the horror wreaked by the vampire in
Stoker’s novel. Like the brutish yet cunning Balkan, whose potential for
violence
131
is seen as immense because it is unknown, Dracula is secretively
destroying the fabric of British society through vampiric contamination. The
vampire is mysterious and impenetrable like the Balkan of the travel accounts
and, at the same time, his secrets can be revealed as the detective narrative
scheme in the novel demonstrates. The detective discoveries of the Van
Helzing’s team lead to the symbolic penetration of his land -- as the “little
band of men” chase Dracula back to the Balkans -- and to the literal
penetration of the vampiric body -- when they stake him in the heart in order
to destroy him.
Similarly, the unyielding imputed masculinity of the region present in
travel narratives is refashioned in Dracula’s relatively feminized image, with
203
131
The trope for Balkan violence in these earlier (eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts)
is singularly interesting, since more often than not, the Balkan peoples -- I mean here the
populations incorporated within territory of the Ottoman EMpire -- were often the objects,
not the agents of violence.
his non-penetrative sexuality, apparent physical frailty and maternal persona.
At the same time, Dracula is shockingly and brutally violent. It is his violence
that transforms his frailty into mere camouflage and incorporates the maternal
into a complex hybrid ritual that incorporates sex, food and procreation to
ultimately reaffirm the character as powerfully and dangerously masculine.
The perverse maternal sexuality of the vampire in Dracula, then, bears the
trace of the failure of the Balkanist discourse in the novel to discipline the
Other by bringing it within the realm of a non-threatening feminine space.
It is evident, then, that the antagonism between Jonathan and Dracula
is acted out in an identifiably discursive field. Jonathan arrives in Castle
Dracula armed with the maps and imperial knowledge accumulated in the
library of the British museum. Dracula has, on his own right, collected the
type of knowledge that would allow him to infiltrate the metropole: books on
“history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law, all [of
them] relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There
were even such books of reference as the London Directory, the "Red" and
204
"Blue" books, Whitaker's Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists” (26)
132
.
Furthermore, the Count, who “speak[s] English thoroughly!” (27), is not
simply an object of Jonathan’s writing, he interferes in the discourse that
Jonathan participates in and manipulates it to his own advantage.
The novel foregrounds the importance of writing as a form of
detection by figuring Dracula’s deviousness as discursive intervention. The
count literally stops the stream of letters that Jonathan sends back home by
forcing him to write brief notes claiming he has left Castle Dracula and that
he is on his way back to England. And thus Dracula effectively incarcerates
him, with no hope for outside help. In the detective scheme of the novel, the
first clue that the characters back in England receive that all is not well is not
a mentioning of Dracula’s vampiric ways or his arrival on English soil: it is
rather the silence of Jonathan. Similarly, the first palpable clue Jonathan
himself sees -- besides the general creepiness of the Gothic castle, the
forbidding beauty of the Carpathian precipices, and the mandatory eeriness of
the count’s appearance -- is the Count’s manipulation of his correspondence.
205
132
In his discussion of Dracula’s library, Stephen Arata coined the term “Occidentalism” to
describe Dracula’s effort to collect and classify knowledge on England, and ,consequently,
discusses Dracula’s invasion of the metropolis as a “reverse colonization”. As tempting as the
label is, it occludes a discussion of power and subjugation. Far from being a simple
accumulation of knowledge, Orientalism was part and parcel of Imperialism, it was “the
systematic accumulation of human beings and territories” (Said 123). I see Dracula not as
systematic ‘Occidentalist” but as a discursive and cognitive rupture in Balkanism -- the
project of defining and articulating the Balkans as the “dark underbelly” of European
civilization and thus a suitable object for England’s civilizing mission.
At this point, Dracula disrupts the Balkanist discourse whose agent Jonathan
is. While critics often mention that Dracula has no voice in the novel, since his
words are imputed to him by the English
133
narrators (Jonathan and Dr
Seward), it is important to emphasize the control that the count exerts in this
case: he is not a creator of discourse, but he is still participant in it due to the
disruption he causes. Granted, this intervention has only temporary results
and ultimately Dracula is a story of the detection and destruction of the
vampire, but the vampiric intervention at this point of the narrative is
important because it changes the narrative mode of the novel itself: having
ostensibly started as a travel account
134
, it is transformed into a Gothic tale
proper, with its attendant horrors, midnight sightings and near-death
experiences. As a result, Jonathan Harker’s traveler journal is transformed
into a diary, a genre that has a perceptibly feminine aura in the novel
135
.
206
133
Tellingly, the Western foreigners who seem to be instrumental to the pursuit and ultimate
destruction of the vampire, Quincy and Van Helsing are not among the narrators either. There
is no writing attributed to Quincy; Van Helsing’s several short notes and letters are
transcribed by the English characters to be included in the text of the novel.
134
This is not at all to say that elements of travel narratives are absent from Gothic romances.
Quite the opposite, since many of them are set in “exotic locales” (usually in the South of
Europe) the writers often engage the conventions of travel literature, more specifically in their
employment of the doctrine of the picturesque. Often, however, these narrative elements are
only sporadically employed and frequently lack the ethnographic and historical slant
present in Harker’s account.
135
The distinction between a travel journal and a diary will be discussed later in this chapter
in relation to questions of normative femininity.
Consequently, Jonathan’s writing during his captivity marks him as
feminine as it grows progressively more agitated the longer he stays in the
castle. For him, it becomes a crutch to preserve his sanity (32). He
rhetorically attempts to recuperate a masculine ideal by referencing Hamlet
and drawing a parallel between his own plight and his attempt to survive
through writing, and the struggle of the Danish prince, “Up to now I never
quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say, "My
tablets! //Quick, my tablets! 'tis meet that I put it down" (36). Thus, Jonathan
casts himself as Hamlet, who also seems to be losing his mind, but is
nevertheless the grand hero fighting larger than life evil. It seems, however,
that Jonathan slips into madness ineffectually, failing to make a difference in
the purported fight with evil that the novel represents. Ultimately, his “brain
fever”, which further symbolizes his emasculation, prevents him form
writing, so his diary is broken off with one frantic “Good bye all. Mina!” (61)
The events of Jonathan’s return to England are narrated through Mina’s
letters. The latter do not focus on the travel aspect at all, as they are distinctly
personal and dwell on the marital and the domestic. Thus the power and the
violence of the vampire seep into the narrative structure of the novel as
Dracula terminates the Balkanist musings of Jonathan’s journal. Quite
tellingly, the travel account discourse is never resumed in the novel, even
207
though all of Van Helsing's men chase Dracula back to his homeland, and , on
another occasion, Mina and Harker revisit Transylvania. All of these accounts
fall strictly in the category of horror Gothic -- as they describe the chase and
the murdering of Dracula and his vampiric children (the three sisters) and thus
offer no commentary on the area itself.
Thus, before it is figured as physical, Dracula’s violence is
discursive; nevertheless, it leads to the emasculation of the narrator -- from
being the traveller who can create knowledge and draw borders and thus
command the territory that unfolds in front of him, Jonathan is now reduced to
occupying the position of the helpless heroine in the classic Gothic tale
136
. If
the traveler Jonathan described the nature and the ethnical make up of the
region and discussed the punctuality, or lack of such thereof, of trains, the
incarcerated Jonathan writes now of drapery, furniture and shattered nerves.
He records the comings and goings of Dracula, as the Count scales the
ramparts walls, “in a lizard fashion” (46) and provides detailed descriptions of
the sounds and the sights in Castle Dracula. “Here I am, seated at a little oak
table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much though
and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary [...]” (29).
208
136
There is variation, of course, even in the narrative patterns of a very formulaic genre,
such as the Gothic. Here I am referring to a plot scheme involving the incarceration or
captivity of a young virginal and virtuous woman in the home or castle of a powerful
tyrannical (more often than not aristocratic) male.
Jonathan literally sees himself in an identical position, albeit writing not a
letter but the story of his captivity
137
.
Prescott and Giorgio interpret this scene quite differently: they argue
that in describing the imaginary love-forlorn lady, Jonathan “indulges in a
wish fulfillment of his own chivalric ideal” (489). This fantasy, however, does
to “correct” the disempowered position he finds himself in. Indeed, while it
does paint a picture of docile femininity, it does not offer the image of heroic
masculinity that can complete the vision. If anything, this is a fantasy of
identification with the passive woman and not a retributive fantasy that
involves her figuration as a damsel in distress or otherwise inscribes her
within a “chivalric ideal”. On the contrary, it is Jonathan who needs to be
saved from the clutch of Dracula, and the “fearful hold” (43) the count has
upon him. Because Jonathan is figured as the ultimate paragon of Victorian
manhood: loyal, hardworking, “full of energy and talent” (26), Dracula’s
claim upon him -- “this man belongs to me” (49) -- divulges the precarious
position of Victorian masculinity itself: once the narrator is placed outside the
central priveleged position of the English traveler, he is effectively
emasculated and fully in the power of the vampire. The antagonism between
209
137
These parts of Dracula are indeed similar to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century captivity
narratives -- which, interestingly are mostly written by women, even though the majority of
the captives were men. For an overview, see the introductory part of Linda Colley’s "The
Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex, and Power."
Dracula and Harker as well as its outcome suggest the imbrication of imperial
discourse in articulations of English masculinity, articulations that are
delineated and negotiated as a fixation on the role and place of women.
The inversion of gender positions has farther reaching consequences
than the mere emasculation of the hero. It compromises the centrality of the
male subject in the articulation of difference. The fact that the monster has
effectively swapped positions with the hero, by claiming the masculine
position for himself in his subjugation of Jonathan, decenters the structuration
of the self as a source of knowledge and a master of signification.
Extrapolating from the structure of myth, Teresa De Lauretis claims that the
concept of narrativity itself depends on a “specific assumption about sexual
difference” (113) wherein:
The hero must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-
image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is
morphologically female...The hero, the mythical subject, is
constructed as human being and as male; he is the active
principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of
differences. Female is what is not susceptible to
transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-
space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter (Alice Doesn’t
118-119)
In the dyad of hero and monster we clearly see the division between agent
and object of discourse, since the male is the “active principle of culture, the
establisher of distinctions” (118) and the monster is fixed in discourse -- “it
210
is not susceptible to transformation” (118). Dracula, however, manipulates
discourses and transforms the elements of the story; he is not a mere prop, an
obstacle for the hero to overcome in the process of his inauguration as the
agent of signification. Thus the effective feminization of Jonathan produces a
rupture in the story that can only be filled by a process of multiplication of
heros -- Jonathan has to be supplanted in fact, by not just one other hero but a
band of exemplary heroic men who will in the end be able to redraw the
borderlines and reinstate the differences that position man as the operative
principle of culture.
Thus, two conflicting narrative trends are present in the novel. One is
the narrative attempt to define, fix and discipline the other in the detective plot
of Dracula. The other, opposite to the first, consists in the discursive
interventions that the character of Dracula represents: it is the presence of the
Other that incites and produces discourses, rather than simply being an object
of the discourses produced by the imperial self. It is precisely this productive
potency of discourse (of both colonizer and colonized) that Bhabha seeks to
restore, when he critiques Said’s use of Foucault’s concepts of power,
knowledge and discourse in Orientalism (The Location of Culture 102-107).
Said, writes Bhabha, defines the workings of the discourse of Orientalism as
a binary between
211
“the content [emphasis Bhabha’s throughout] of Orientalism
as the unconscious repository of fantasy, imaginative writings
and essential ideas; and the form of manifest Orientalism as
the historically and discursively determined, diachronic
aspect . This division/correlation between structure of
manifest and latent Orientalism leads to the effectivity of the
concept of discourse being undermined by what could be
called the polarities of intentionality. (The Location of Culture
102-103)
Such binary poses problems since the intentionality implicit in it (the latent
content that needs to be expressed) precludes the possibility for power to have
not simply repressive but productive effects as well. Foucault’s very idea of
power/knowledge rests on the negation of binarisms such as outside/inside,
essence/appearance. etc. To account for the complex workings of power
through discourse, then, it is important to forgo the notion of the content and
form of Orientalism as clearly identified monads and instead view both as a
product of discourse . For, argues Bhabha, it “is difficult to conceive of the
project of subjectification as a placing within Orientalist or colonial discourse
for the dominated subject without the dominant being placed within in it
too” (103). Bhabha’s interpretation of discourse, with its attentiveness to
questions of representation and the constructedness of both ‘the historical and
fantasy (as the scene of desire)” (103) allows us to discuss the productive
212
effects of power, not only its function to suppress or block, but its role in
inciting discourse as well (Foucault History of Sexuality 23-24).
To posit colonialism as productive, and not simply repressive, form of
knowledge, Bhabha proposes that the articulation of the both the colonized
and the colonizer happens in the representation of the stereotype as fetish.
Both stereotype and fetish operate through the disavowal of difference as lack
to establish a fantasy of wholeness. In the discourse of colonialism, argues
Bhabha, “ the fetish or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is
predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense,
for [the fetish as stereotype] is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in
its recognition of difference and disavowal of it” (107).
Dracula as fetish then allows for the formation of the fantasy of a
Western, civilized English self that is multiply reaffirmed through the
reiteration and consequent disavowal of Balkan difference. Because, as
Halberstam has noted, Dracula is not simply an embodiment of one axis of
difference -- either race, or sexuality, or ethnicity -- but a patchwork of
multiple facets of alterity, it is a multilayered discourse that engenders the
subject. In Dracula the desire for pure unadulterated Englishness is not only
threatened by the differences of ethnicity, culture, gender, that the vampire
213
represents; Englishness can only be articulated as a multi-nodal fantasy of
articulation and disavowal of these differences.
Thus the Balkan stereotype in Dracula does not work as simply one
fetish, but rather as a complex mosaic of fetishes: the semi-oriental, the
degenerate, the medieval, the primitive, the violent, the ultra-masculine and
the devious are all kernels of different fetishistic scenes. In each of them, a
primal fantasy must be reactivated and repeated: the civilized nature of the
English must be reasserted; the refined, the progressive, industrialized etc,
must be upheld, one after the other, to form the core of a self. This fantasmatic
self of pure origins, however, will be nevertheless besieged by the threat of its
split or, rather, its slipping into its obverse. Thus the identity that the Balkan
vampire makes possible is indeed a product of discourse predicated on
opposing drives. On the one hand we have the “mastery and
pleasure” ( Bhabha 107) from the upholding of the ideal of civilized
Englishness. The slaying of the vampire, the birth of Mina and Harker’s child
and the epilogue in which all the young British men of Van Helzing’s band
are happily married and ready to propagate virtuous Englishness are clearly
part of this affirmation. At the same time, the ending of the novel manifests
214
the “anxiety and defense” (107) inherent in the formation of imperial
138

subjectivity: Dracula is destroyed, but his blood runs in the veins of the young
Quincy; he is purged from the metropolis, but his numerous gigantic boxes
full of dirt are left strewn around London, strategically placed by the count
(202). Thus the notion of Englishness, articulated through the Balkan as fetish,
is precariously dependent on the sustained repetition of the moment of
recognition and disavowal.
At the same time, Bhabha’s attentiveness to questions of representation
and discursive structuration, and his insistence, together with that of Foucault,
that power works through discourse, compel us to consider the function of
representation itself in the structuration of the Balkan other in the novel. On
the one hand, Dracula presents the Balkan vampire as a mosaic of difference
and as the ultimate monster that needs to be conquered in the novel. Such
215
138
Bhabha emphatically posits the fantasmatic origin of identity (located in the scene of
fetishism) for both colonizer and colonized. In this project, however, I am focusing on the
fantastic structuration of English identity and not of the Balkan one. Yet, there are examples
of similar processes for the Balkan that turn on fetishistic recognition and disavowal. A
prominent one that comes to mind is the common usage of the value-laden term “European”
in a number of Balkan languages (most notably Greek and Bulgarian) to designate the non-
Balkan parts of Europe. it acknowledges -- as it disavows -- ethnic and cultural differences by
constructing an image of ‘Europe” as an epitome of industrialization, technological
advancement and perfectly functioning democracy. In the Bulgarian language, more
specifically, circulates the very popular self-designator “we are Europeans but not quite!” that
even more poignantly captures the anxiety and defense that Bhabha posits as an important
node in the formation of identity. This dictum, coined in the 1890s by the prominent
Bulgarian writer Aleko Konstantinov (see Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern
Bulgarian), really exemplifies the productive potentiality of power and discourse. In this case,
it is in effect a result of discursive ‘othering’ emanating not from some center of cultural
imperialism, but reverberating within Bulgarian culture itself.
figuration of the Balkan other is part and parcel of the colonial discourse as it
depends the notion of fixity: the presence, according to Bhabha, of “cultural/
historical/racial difference ...[as] a paradoxical mode of representation: it
connotes rigidity and unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and
demonic repetition” (Location of Culture 94). On the other hand, the
vertiginous multiplication of discursive modes in the text (the shifts and jolts
in the movement of the plot, the oscillation between gendered positions,
narrative forms and voices) speaks to the limitations of representation
itself
139
.
While it could be argued that such proliferation is instrumental to the
cycle of “demonic repetition” inherent in the fixity of colonial discourse, I
would like to suggest that in Dracula this proliferation of demonic imaginings
leads not to reification of difference as an object of disavowal, but to a
blockage in representation itself. In this discursive proliferation, Dracula, and
by extension the Balkan other, is both feminized and potently masculine; he
is the primitive anachronistic lord of the clearly identifiable “wildest and least
known parts of Europe” (8) and figured at the same time as a construct of the
English cultural imagination -- the master of a neverland, that can not be
216
139
It would be legitimate to consider the formal properties of the text - the lack of an
omniscient narrator, the collage etc, as a proto-modernist concern with or an aesthetic of the
fragment and fragmentary nature of human experience, but these concerns are beyond the
scope of this project.
located on a British map, “locked between the borders of three states” (7);
because he intervenes in Jonathan’s story, the character is figured as both an
object of discourse and its agent.
The numerous contradictions of the figuration of the vampire -- the
oscillation between his representation as a figment of Western imagination
(the Balkan as fetish) and his role as a an agent of discourse -- mark a
symbolic and narrative impasse that is most clearly articulated in the image,
leitmotif really, of soil. Thematically, this is the the dirt that protects the
vampire’s body during the day, but also the implicitly present symbol of
British soil, the soil onto which the vampire alights to start his assault on
England. The interplay between these two images -- one implied and one
overtly and persistently articulated in the text -- is quite indicative of the
function of the vampire in the novel. Dracula contaminates not only the
bodies of Londoners, but the body politic itself, since he is contaminating the
space, literal and symbolic, of the state figured as homeland and captured in
the symbolic aura of phrases like “native soil”, or “British soil”. Onto this soil
he has brought with him his own native soil and thus manages to alter the
‘British soil’. The nebulous pronouncement that Dracula makes in the opening
of the novel, his stated desire to come to London and “to share its life, its
change, its death, and all that makes it what it is’ (26) is fulfilled in his
217
contamination of Englishness and, synecdochically, of English soil. Sleeping
on top of the piles of his “native soil” in the boxes placed around London, the
vampire is literally and symbolically at home, on his home turf. He does
become a part of what makes London (and by extension England) “all that
makes it what it is” (26) by not simply polluting it with his native soil but
rather annihilating its rich positive symbolic aura.
Dracula’s fifty boxes -- alternatively called coffins in the novel -- filled
with ‘newly dug” (78) earth are deeply disturbing in their reversal of the
function and symbolism of earth. The spatial reversal between coffin and soil
indicates the advent of chaos and the collapse between boundaries. What
should be outside is now inside (earth inside the coffin). What is usually the
container (the soil) is now the content of the coffin. What should be dead is
eternally alive (the vampire). Finally, what should safely be incorporated into
a cycle of life and death as a source for growth and sustenance (the
decomposing body turning into fertile soil) has become the horrifying symbol
of violence and depletion (the parasitic existence of the undead).
Consequently, rather than symbolizing the nurturing, fertile and
productive potentiality of the motherland -- a meaning quite evident in a
phrase like “native soil” -- the soil onto which rests the body of the undead is
a site of decay, decomposition and putrefaction. The nausea and sheer horror
218
that such reversals provoke is quite evident in the persistent theme of
Dracula’s odor which haunts Jonathan from their first meeting and during his
stay at the castle to culminate in the encounter with the Count in Carfax.
When Jonathan explores Castle Dracula and approaches the counts secret
abode, he can sense the “deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly
turned. As I went through the passage the smell grew closer and heavier” (41).
Later in the novel, when Mina interviews Mr Swales (who is the one to
foreshadow Dracula’s arrival at Whitby, a port town near London), smell
again is used synecdochically to describe him “‘There's something in that
wind and in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells
like death’” (67). Technically, it seems that what the characters are smelling is
nothing more than the scent of soil, or probably the decomposition of organic
matter that makes up its top layer. And yet, they are all faced with the
indescribable, unimaginable, foul sent of the unnamable, an unknown “it”.
The nauseating descriptions pick up in tempo to reach a crescendo and
abruptly come to a screeching halt in Jonathan’s description of the odor when
Van Helzing’s men break into Carfax, Dracula’s home in London:
As we were opening the door a faint, malodorous air seemed
to exhale through the gaps, but none of us ever expected such
an odour as we encountered. None of the others had met the
Count at all at close quarters, and when I had seen him he was
either in the fasting stage of his existence in his rooms or,
when he was bloated with fresh blood, in a ruined building
219
open to the air, but here the place was small and close, and the
long disuse had made the air stagnant and foul. There was an
earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the
fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It
was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality
and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as
though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! It sickens
me to think of it (265).
Harker references his encounters with the Count as a trajectory to define him,
to give a name to his indescribable stench. This passage really dwells on the
specifics of the encounters, the locales and what has enabled Harker to
actually avoid facing the sheer horror of Dracula’s otherness. It also references
the detective plot of the novel: once Dracula is properly named, once the
“thing” , ‘it” , “something”: is appropriately ascribed a form of monstrosity,
the vampire can be vanquished. Here, Harker lays layer upon layer of meaning
to render the horrific presence of the count: the sickening odor is seeping
through the cracks into the already foul air and thus foregrounds the
evocation of earth, but this time as something indescribable. It is quite telling
that Dracula is not there, it is just the smell of the earth he has brought with
him that fills the house. What defies representation through language is
Dracula’s native soil. Both a sign and source of disorder, it symbolizes the
crumbling down of boundaries between self and other, reveals the
220
impossibility to know the ‘good earth’ from “dry miasma” (265)
140
. Struggling
to define the “earthy smell”, Harker helplessly evokes language in its phatic
function, cum language, asking “how shall I describe it?” (265). Right after
that, however, the ability of language to signify is exhausted: Jonathan resorts
to the tautological “corruption had itself become corrupt’ to finally just
surrender in the interjection ‘Faugh!” (265). The collapse of representation
here is indicative of the precarious origins of national identity: how is the
good, fertile, nourishing English soil to be known from the amorphous,
unnamed and unnamable foreign mass?
In this scene, the novel clearly reaches a representational impasse, it
seems to collide in the wall of that which defies representation or
signification through language
141
-- what Lacan calls the Real. Thus the
blockage of representation and the inability of language to articulate otherness
in clear opposition to a national identity (Englishness), the novel also breaks
221
140
The reaction of horror and disgust at the breakdown of boundaries between self and other ,
subject and object Kristeva calls “the abject”. In her essay The Powers of Horror, she defines
the abject as radically excluded from the symbolic order as it “draws [the subject] toward the
place where meaning collapses” (2).
141
It could be argued that the difficulty with naming Dracula’s otherness -- because this is
what the struggle to describe the smell is -- is no more than a purely rhetorical gesture: it is
such an awful stench, is there anything else to say? The consistency of this theme, however,
together with the dual role of the character of the vampire, who is at once conveniently frozen
in the figuration of the Balkan stereotype and presented as an actor in the creation of
discourse, of writing the story, point to the tension between the fixity (to use Bhabha’s term)
of the Balkan discourse and the limits of its discursive effects.
the demonic repetition of Balkanist discourse; it, temporarily at least, blocks
the cycle of endless fetishistic staging in which the British identity has to be
repeatedly imagined in the foundational fantasy of recognition and disavowal
of difference. The fetishistic fantasy of colonial discourse forbids “access to
the recognition of difference” (Bhabha 108). The difference Bhabha evokes
here, and that he sees as central to breaking the fixity of colonial discourse, is
not the nominal recognition of a lack that is swiftly neutralized in the
disavowal of fetishistic play. Such operation would only perpetuate the
colonial discourse by fixing difference in the image of lack. “For the
stereotype impedes the articulation and circulation of the signifier of ‘race’ as
anything other than racism” (108). After all, writes Bhabha, “we always
already know that the blacks are licentious, Asiatics duplicitous etc...” (108).
The representational impasse
142
in Dracula does not necessarily give
access to the type of recognition of difference that Bhabha hopes can break
the fixity of colonial discourse: in the final analysis, the vampire is safely
articulated as a monstrous Other who can be destroyed for the preservation of
the self. What this scene -- and the novel as a whole -- seem to indicate,
however, is that the process of signification itself, in its endless attempts to
222
142
The scene analyzed here is not an isolated case of the representational tensions in the novel
in figurations of self and other; on the contrary, this is, as we have showed in the previous
chapter a consistent theme. Other moments include Dracula’s “passing” in London; or his
manipulation of discourse.
define Dracula, repeatedly frustrates both acts -- fantasmatic recognition and
consequent disavowal of difference -- that comprise the fantasy of colonial
discourse.
143
From Freud we know that the fetish starts with an affirmation of
wholeness (“All men have penises”), accompanied by the anxiety in the face
of difference (“Some do not have penises”). Even the anxiety is still
articulated as a reversal of the marker of wholeness (the phallus). In the case
of Dracula, the affirmation of wholeness disintegrates in the collapse of
language -- Jonathan seems to know not “good native soil” from putrid dirt.
Thus, the “demonic repetition” of the Balkanist discourse seems to be
temporarily suspended, since the Other can not be constructed as fetish. Faced
with the Real, that indeterminate, indescribable “earthiness” that binds
together the English and the foreign, the subject fails to articulate the other as
an object and constitute difference as lack.
* * *
Just as the articulation of Otherness discussed above depends on a
complex process of signification, the figuration of femininity in Bram Stoker's
text is similarly a product of a number of intersecting discourses. The novel
223
143
Students of Balkanist discourse, like Vesna Goldsworthy, have read the collapse of self and
other in the process of signification purely metaphorically, as a thematic property of
Balkanist discourse in general and of Dracula more particularly, that simply connotes
monstrous otherness that needs to be destroyed with a vengeance (Godlsworthy Inventing
Ruritania 84). It was my goal, however, to study this collapse not thematically but as an issue
of representation and discourse.
posits Mina as the epitome of virtuous femininity and, by extension, as an
allegory for idealized Englishness. In keeping with the hegemonic gender
ideals of the Victorian era, Mina’s ostensible virtue makes her the guardian
angel of domestic space. Her moral superiority is only rivaled by her
capacity for self-effacing support and sacrifice. She provides encouragement
and maternal care to the men who fight to protect her from the vampire and is
an exemplary wife to Jonathan. “We women,” declares Mina in her journal,
“rise above smaller matters when the mother spirit is invoked” (289).
Culturally and ideologically speaking, then, the the role of “angel in the
house” had farther reaching influence than the bliss of the domestic.
The sanctified role of women as embodiment of pure femininity cum
maternity is most clearly exemplified in the image of Victoria herself “as the
great Britannic mother, ruling with maternal severity and sympathy her own
eminently respectable family, her own British subjects and her own
subjugated natives” (Deidre David Rule Britannia 5). The cult to pure
maternal femininity is thus clearly implicated in the project of Empire: the
virtuous woman embodies not only the virtues that can ensure the happiness
of home but also demonstrates the racial fitness to rule over and civilize the
natives. The presence of women in the colonies (more notably India but
elsewhere as well) established them as “guardians of ‘civilized standards’ of
224
morality and family life” (Canny The Origins of Empire 15) by exemplifying
an ideal of maternal benevolence that defines British rule along familial lines.
In addition, the imputed moral superiority of women helped articulate British
rule as wise and kind governance of the colonized. It also ensured the
perpetuation of British mores and way of life amid the sea of “primitive
cultures”. Quite telling in this regard is the increasing number of British
women who relocated to India in the first half of the nineteenth century and
the virtual ban on local mistresses -- both of these ensured the proper
separation of the locals from the governing English class.
Stoker’s Dracula references both colonial discourse and practice by
presenting Jonathan’s experiences in the castle as fraught with the danger of
cultural assimilation. He is both frightened and thrilled by the presence of the
three vampiric sisters; he is overwhelmed by “burning desire that they would
kiss [him] with those red lips” (39) while disgusted by their vampiric ways. It
is the reversal of the maternal that is most terrifying in the novel: the three
sisters, and later Lucy, feed on innocent children, smothering them in their
clutch rather than pressing them to a nurturing breast. Jonathan's diary from
his stay of the castle, however, is punctured with equivocal references to
them: he calls them “devils of the pit’’ (51), but also describes their laughter as
“sweet” (71) and dwells on their lips: “without [ were] the three terrible
225
women licking their lips” (72) His horror is only matched by the intensity of
his desire, for these lips were the same that had brought him the “languorous
ecstasy” (30) of passive anticipation in his encounter with the sisters -- a
memory he evokes by the references to their lips. Although there is only one
scene in the novel that involves the interaction of the character with the
female vampires, these references to the presence of the vampiric sisters hint
on the forbidden pleasure of miscegenation: Jonathan has “gone native,” so
to speak, living in the castle with the three sisters. The conflict between the
intense pleasures and even more intense horrors of the castle induce his “brain
fever” which symbolically represents the dangers of immersion in foreign
worlds as a disease that needs to be treated; the fever should help him purge
the foreign “out of his system”. Yet his cure can only be Mina, who is
dispatched to save the bed-ridden Jonathan after he barely makes it out of the
castle and into a monastery close to Budapest. Having received a letter from a
nun in the monastery, Mina is summoned “to nurse him if necessary, and to
bring him home. Mr. Hawkins says it would not be a bad thing if we were to
be married out there” (91) It is the paragon of virtue that can sanitize the
traveller before he returns home. Thus their hurried marriage is staged as
therapeutic: it symbolically reinscribes Jonathan within the realm of virtuous
Englishness.
226
Given the central role of virtuous femininity in the project of Empire,
it is not surprising, then, that Dracula feasts upon the finest specimen of
English femininity. The only line that the count is allowed to speak on British
soil, at the climax of the novel, caputres precisely this threat: “Your girls that
you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be
mine, my creatures, to do my bidding” (204). The novel thematizes the assault
on the virtuous body of the Victorian woman as an attack on the hegemonic
masculinity and, by extension, Empire itself. Critics often assume that that the
women in the novel - the virtuous Mina and the frivolous but pure Lucy are
simply unwitting victims of the vampiric count. The overarching story line is
exactly that: women have to be protected or destroyed (in the case of Lucy)
for the good of Empire. But as with the interventions of Dracula -- who
manages to transform Jonathan's travel journal into the diary of a Gothic
heroine and thus displace the hero as the “active principle of culture” and
creator of meaning (De Lauretis 114) -- the writings of the female narrators
and the writing of the male narrators about them all point to the complex web
of signification of gender at work in the novel and the potential complicity
between woman and vampire. The latter is not some form of solidarity but
rather the disturbing potentiality of idealized Victorian virtue to slip into its
obverse, for the “angel in the house” to become the devil of the pit” (43)
227
Stoker’s text is a complex mosaic of different genres -- a travel
account, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and phonograph transcriptions
written, read, typed up or transcribed from shorthand by multiple narrators to
form the body of the novel. Due to the multiplicity of voices the novel does
not provide a central interpretative framework and thus presents sometimes
competing versions of the stories and even of the characters in the sections
narrated by different narrators.
If Harker’s account frames the events that transpire abroad, the
epistolary exchange between Mina and Lucy draws the curtain on the
vampire’s arrival to England and the beginning of the vampiric contamination
that Jonathan Harker has anticipated with such immense horror in his travel
journal. The novel thus seems to have two beginnings in two different locales:
one foreign and male-centered and the other domestic and marked feminine.
Accordingly, one would expect that if Jonathan’s journal is painting a broad
panoramic canvas of the world outside the home --- which is also the world
of work, commerce and, in Jonathan's case, of foreign travel, then Mina and
Lucy’s exchanges would provide a picture of the quiet and sheltered existence
that the two prospective ‘angels in the house” are expected to live. Expectedly,
their diaries and the letters that Mina and Lucy write to each other portray a
world of youthful and excited anticipation of sexual passion and married life,
228
but, more interestingly, they focus on the passionate friendship the two
women share. Most of their exchanges concern the dreams and trepidations of
finding a husband (in the case of Lucy) or marrying the fiance (in that of
Mina), and as such are not overtly homoerotic. Yet, their intense emotional
investment in each other is evident. While Mina is more equivocal in her
letters, Lucy’s attachment for her friend and mentor is clearly present; she
ends her letters with “millions of kisses” and “sea[s] of love”. Their
correspondence with each other constitutes homosocial space that they have
carved from themselves
144
located outside the heteronormative space of
idealized family life.
If not necessarily as sexual, their friendship is clearly figured as a
serious gender transgression. The space of the female friendship, and literally
the locale of Whitby as a symbol of their time together separate from the
world of men is where the vampire first strikes: it is after all, when they are
alone at the sea-shore house that Dracula first attacks Lucy. For Mina to be
readmitted to the realm of the familial, she has to let go of Lucy -- she has to
229
144
Drawing on the work on ‘raves’ (intensely romanticized intimate friendships between
women in Victorian England) done by Martha Vicinus, Prescott and Giorgio argue that the
two are related. They claim that sharing intimate ideas, thoughts and conversations actually
helped young women to maintain intensely invested relationships with other women while
still presenting themselves as respectable Victorian paragons of virtue; sharing secrets with
the friend, argue Prescott and Giorgio “creates a safe imaginary space that displaces the
homoerotic potential of this intimacy” (496) Prescott and Giorgio provide a very insightful
analysis of their friendship as a complex negotiation of same-sex desire as safely sublimated
in the sphere of effusive same-sex friendship.
leave the ailing (and, we learn retroactively, dying) friend as she rushes to
Budapest to nurse Jonathan back to health. So rather than presenting the two
women as Dracula’s innocent pray, the novel actually presents them as
separated from the space of familial and motherly duty and thus complicit
with the foreign violence of Dracula.
The epistolary exchange between the two young women articulate
their hubris: Lucy is presented as the promiscuous one, who jokingly resents
societal norms by exclaiming “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as
many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (69) Mina, on the other hand,
performs the hubris of self-fulfillment and separation from the familial : like
the much dreaded “New Woman” of the Victorian fin de siècle, she is
extremely dedicated to her job and happily works long hours at it. Thus,
Mina’s story is not that much the story of the threatened by alien and then
triumphant epitome of English virtue as it is the story of its cultural
production in discourse: the forceful inscription of woman within the realm of
the domestic and the maternal after her removal from the homosocial spaces
of work
145
and friendship. While operating within this space, woman is as
destructive to the imperial project as the invasive alien himself: it is not
230
145
Mina is an assistant headmistress in a boarding school, so we can assume -- given the
gender segregation in the schools of nineteenth-century Great Britain -- that her work is also a
homosocial feminine space.
surprising then that even the virtuous Mina falls under the spell of the
vampire: “I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder
him,” (217) she says about surrendering to the vampire.
Mina’s trajectory in the book -- from a career woman whose life
centers around friendships to a victim of the vampire to the angelic madam
Mina of the triumphant finale -- suggests the very rigid gender structuration
of Victorian society. At the same time, there is a certain thematic undercurrent
in the novel that allows gender rhetorical refashioning in the realm of writing
itself. Mina is very aware of the limitations of her position as gendered subject
when she writes to Lucy about her plan to keep a diary:
“[Jonathan] is keeping a stenographic journal of his travels
abroad. When I am with you I shall keep a diary in the same
way. I don't mean one of those two-pages-to-the-week-with-
Sunday-squeezed- in-a-corner diaries, but a sort of journal
which I can write in whenever I feel inclined... [I]t is really an
exercise book” (53).
She emphasizes the gender division between frivolous wiring about trifles
(marked feminine) and recording of important events in a travel narrative
(marked masculine). Mina then proceeds to define the journal she wants to
write as a tool for journalistic information gathering, “interviewing and
writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations” (54). Thus Mina
redefines this genre of writing from a “lady’s” hobby to a professional tool,
231
something “lady journalists do” (54). She sees it as a tool for self-
improvement (an exercise book).
Of course, Mina’s journalistic diary -- started as an expression of her
desire for self-improvement and personal expression -- is soon co-opted by
the project to detect and destroy the foreign vampire, and by extension, to
restore docile virtuous femininity. Not only does Mina transcribe Jonathan's
journal but she also keeps an extremely detailed account of her own that
enables the detection and the ultimate destruction of Dracula. Presumably, the
“two-pages-to-the-week-with-Sunday-squeezed- in-a-corner diaries” (53) that
Mina sarcastically alludes to would be useless in policing and tracking a
vampire. On the contrary, such sketchy sparse writing can protect the writer’s
privacy and conceal her vice, which turns out to be the case with Lucy’s
journal. It is quite telling that the detail and accuracy of Mina’s Journal are
contrasted with the brief vagueness of Lucy’s diary, which Van Helsing asks
Mina to interpret and elaborate upon (134). Her detailed journal, Mina says,
allows her “to tell [Van Helsing] everything about it” (134). Here the non-
feminine writing style of Mina -- Van Helsing is surprised by her “good
memory for facts, for details. It is not always so with young ladies” (135) --
allows her to untangle the secret of both Lucy and the vampire and earns her
Van Helzing’s praise for having “man’s brain”. To establish herself as the
232
virtuous woman and keeper of English virtue, Mina has to give up Lucy once
more, this time after her death, by betraying her confidence and interpreting
her journal in a way that makes Lucy’s complicity with the monstrous alien
evident.
Once Mina is purged of her erring ways she can rightfully take her
place as the embodiment of virtuous femininity as the organizing principle of
late Victorian Englishness. Dracula’s attack of Mina then constitutes an assault
on its values and ideals. The scene in which MIna drinks from the open vain
on the vampire's breast represents a horrifying inversion of a number of
intersecting regulatory discourses, and in doing so the vampire makes visible
the process of structuration of hegemonic values. More specifically, if a good
Malthusian couple like Mina and Jonathan were only supposed to engage in
sex for the needs of propagation (here more specifically of the English race),
then the sexually orchestrated scene is really disturbing in its reductio ad
absurdum imagery: not only does the vampire procreate as a result of the
sexual act; he procreates in it, since the vampiric kiss equals instant birth.
Arguably one of the more disturbing scenes in the novel, the attempted
vampiric conversion of Mina involves Dracula force-feeding his blood to
Mina on her marriage bed, with Jonathan lying next to her “as though in a
stupor” :
233
With his left hand [Dracula] held both of Mrs Harker’s hands,
keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand
gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on
his bosom” (301).
The scene evokes the notion of wholesome marital sexuality -- Mina is
kneeling on her marital bed, clad in white -- only to subvert it in the violence
of the vampiric attack. His inhuman strength (with one hand he transfixes
Mina onto his bosom, while pushing her hands away with the other) is
juxtaposed to the feminine and maternal images of the vampire permeating
the description: “a thin stream trickled down the bare breast showing out of
his torn-open dress”. This scene, in which the androgynous, maternal yet
overpoweringly masculine other violates the Victorian home harkens back to
Dracula’s early remark, in the beginning of the novel , when he claims
Jonathan as his, “This man belongs to me’ (46). The prostrate and
emasculated Jonathan is truly in the power of the count, because the vampire
has managed to transmit his blood down the patriarchal line -- Mina and
Jonathan’s son claims symbolically the glorious lineage of the men who
fought the count, “the men who loved his mother, so that they dared much for
her sake”, yet the text seems to question the happy ending: the vampire can
not be fully expelled, the process of contamination can not be stopped. Thus
the Balkan vampire seems to work as a litmus that makes visible the workings
234
of power/knowledge systems that establish national and racial superiority:
since the female body inscribed in the familial constitutes the site of
regeneration of Victorian virtue, the vampiric invasion in Stoker’s novel
explicitly thematizes their ideological structuration by revealing the
impossibility of purity, be that sexual, racial, of woman or blood.
* * *
After Dracula has set off for England, Jonathan, who is still confined
in the castle, writes with tribulation, “I am alone in the castle with those
horrible women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common.
They are devils of the Pit!” (43) Notably, by this point in the narrative,
Harker has not written about Mina much, except to mention a recipe he wants
to get her, evoke her name as a recipient of his letters, and guiltily refers to
her in his description of the encounter with the vampiric sisters -- “ I should
not note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her
pain, but it is the truth” (49). Thus the narrative posits Mina as the guardian
angel of Englishness from the very beginning of the novel, well before any
merits of the character herself are outlined in the narrative. The first definition
of her femininity in the text works by way of negation: we learn what Mina is
not: she is not at all like them, “ the devils of the Pit” (43).
235
Because Jonathan has described in great detail his encounter with the
three sisters: the ruby lips, the shiny teeth and the flapping tongues; their
“deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive” (39) and
their monstrous feasts on babies, it is clear that his terse sentence
instantaneously paints the picture of perfect femininity as a simple inversion
of the alien monstrosity of these women. Jonathan’s statement produces
virtuous femininity performatively, in the act of its enunciation (what Austin
would call an ‘illocutionary act’), circumventing languages constative
function
146
. More importantly, in doing so, the novel overtly refers to its own
imagery, the heap of signifiers (wanton voluptuousness, sexualized lips and
inverted maternal instinct) that characterize the three sisters with no attempt at
denotation -- Mina’s femininity is presented as a play of signifiers rather than
as a process of signification referring to an identifiable object (or a set of
objects). Rather, Mina is defined as a woman not like the three sisters, who are
women but not like her.
The tautology that defines femininity in this passage, and in the novel
as a whole, is not accidental but rather foundational in that it ensures the
proper function of cultural ideology. Idealized femininity is named as such not
to denote some pre-existent essence but because it can be retroactively
236
146
See J.L Austin’s How to do Things with Words.
recognized as such in the interplay with other signifiers -- in this case in
contrast with the structuration of alien femininity. In other words, rather than
contrasting two separate entities (English femininity and alien monstrosity),
the performative statement “ Mina is a woman, and there is nought in
common. They are devils of the Pit!” fixes meaning as a play between
signifiers and thus constitutes normative British femininity. This particular
point of discourse and ideology formation, the moment in which meaning is
constructed as a play of difference between other discursive elements and in
which the referential (or constative, if we are to use Ausitn) function of
language is suspended, Žižek called the ‘nodal point” of an ideological field,
or the ”Lacanian master-signifier, the 'signifier without signified'” (Sublime
Object 103).
While manifested in language and present as a cluster of meanings, a
master-signifier is not necessarily “simply the richest word in which is
condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it ‘quilts’” (Žižek 105) but
the one that “as a word (emphasis Žižek’s) on the level of the signifier itself,
unifies a given field, constitutes its identity; it is , so to speak, the word to
which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity”.
(Sublime Object 105-106). The free-floating term “woman” in this case is
such master-signifier as it only means/signifies by concentrating other
237
signifiers onto itself. It is not the case that the word expresses a group of
meanings that can define woman. The statement “Mina is a woman” can only
mean through reiteration and retroactive referencing of other signifiers.
Žižek further complicates the process of ideological quilting by
introducing the factor of cultural and ideological subject production. He
argues that, “the effect of quilting occurs only when certain inversion takes
place” (The Sublime Object 105), a process in which connotation displaces
denotation. In other words, inversion occurs when the meanings accumulated
by means of association replace the referent of the linguistic sign -- “the
thing” it denotes or names. In our case, the statement could also be inverted as
‘Woman is Mina” because the character accrues the allegorical meaning of
virtuous femininity itself. The ideological and psychological investment in
such a reversal produces the “surplus-X” of the operation of quilting, “the
object-cause of desire” (The Sublime Object 107).
It has to be noted that for Žižek the master-signifier concentrates
signifiers within one discursive plane -- that of anti-semitism, for example; or
of ‘mass-produced’ Americana - the case of Coca Cola advertisement
(102-108). Contrastingly, in our case, the enunciation of normative
femininity -- in both Dracula and late nineteenth-century British culture --
works across at least two discursive planes: one is gender and the other,
238
alterity. The sole reason why we can read the deceivingly descriptive sentence,
“Mina is a woman,” as Jonathan’s performative enunciation of Mina’s
unerring virtue lies in the surplus value of the quilting in the Balkanist
discourse. It is the surplus value of vampiric otherness, the excess of meaning
created in the negation “MIna is a woman and they have naught in common”
that constitutes the core of virtuous femininity. The emphatic negation “they
have naught in common” is not descriptive, it refers once more to what Žižek
calls “that unattainable X” (107); the indescribable difference of the sisters. It
is the surplus of the process of signification that produces difference in the
ideological field. Žižek claims that, ideologically speaking, it is the
unattainable surplus value X that makes a Jew Jew, for example. To find out
“what’s in Jew more than Jew” was precisely the goal of Nazism which tried
“desperately to seize, measure, change into a positive property [the
unattainable surplus value] enabling us to identify Jews in an objective-
scientific way” (Sublime Object 107). Similarly, the Balkanist discourse --
manifest in both travel literature and fiction writing -- attempts a similar
project -- to capture the excess of Balkanness and give it a name in order to
separate the Balkan form the European, or in this case, from the English. We
clearly see this drive in Dracula with the chase and subsequent destruction of
the vampire.
239
We can, then, inspired by Žižek (and Lacan), pose the question,
‘What’s in woman more than woman?’ In other words, what exactly is the
surplus value produced in the signification processes of the production of
English femininity in Stoker’s novel? Žižek would tell us that this question is
impossible to answer, since even though “rigid designators” (109), as Žižek
calls them, like “Balkan” or “woman” would aim at articulating the surplus X
-- what Žižek calls the “impossible-real kernel,” they can not articulate it but
only participate in a metonymic play of signifier substitution. At the same
time, while we can not know the content of the surplus of meaning - because it
can not be articulated in the realm of the Symbolic -- we can know and seek
to analyze the process of its articulation. Thus, because normative femininity
in Dracula is produced by the activation of the Balkan, which is in turn an
ideological field on its own right, the nodal point around which the discourse
of virtuous femininity congeals is really the Balkan as master-signifier. Balkan
here is “the element which holds it together [...] this self-referential,
tautological, performative operation” (Žižek Sublime Object 109) that brings
to life the “angel in the house”.
240
Conclusion
The main goal of this project was to study a selection of nineteenth-
century Gothic novels and analyze the types of gender, sexuality, and alterity
discourses that these novels participate in and at the same time engender. My
analysis of Zofloya: Or, the Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre, Villette (1853)
by Charlotte Brontë and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker attempted to enrich
our understanding of the role of popular literature as a cultural artefact: its
participation in multiple discourses of alterity and nationality in the
articulation of normative femininity in nineteenth-century Britain. My
interpretation of the multiple intersection of discourses on femininity and
alterity aimed to complicate readings of the Gothic novel as preoccupied
mostly with cultural ideologies of domesticity and the role of woman in the
domestic field as a social domain separate from the project of Empire. I have
strived to explore deployments of alterity in order to show that such
articulations are not simply external to an already existing monolithic and
stable femininity but intrinsic to its very coherence in the discursive field. In
other words, my discussion of “other” bodies and desires, the figurations of
blackness or Oriental sensuality evident in these Gothic novels, were not
meant to present otherness in contrast to a virtuous middle-class female body
241
or virtue but rather to show how the images of the various others are
fundamental to the very coherence of these ideals, of both Englishness and
femininity.
One aspect of the project that could have been developed further and
analyzed in greater detail is the relationship between domesticity and empire
as articulated in the literary production of the nineteenth century more
generally and in the novels of interest in this dissertation more specifically. I
have emphasized characteristics such as sexual purity and self-effacing
sacrifice as the hallmarks of the ideal of bourgeois femininity, but other
discursive features exist that are also central to the articulation of middle-class
identity as central to the project of Empire. In Imperial Leather, a study of the
intersection of race, gender and sexuality in articulations of English identity,
Anne McClintock identifies “monogamy, thrift, order, and
accumulation” (168) as the presiding domestic values, the crux around which
a middle-class identity could form that unites a large group of people of
possibly diverse values. Questions of gender are thus central to the articulation
of colonial ideology and clearly demonstrate that, as Stoler argues in Race
and the Education of Desire, it is in “the domestic domain, not the public
sphere, where essential dispositions of manliness, bourgeois morality, and
racial tribute could be dangerously undone and securely made” (108).
242
Consequently, a more direct connection could have been established
between figuration of domesticity and the undertakings of empire in my
analysis of domesticity in nineteenth-century Gothic novels. For instance, the
pairing between the violent libidinous woman and the Moor cum Satan in
Dacre’s Zofloya represents more than the threat that unruly sexual desire
presents to the middle-class project of legitimation of bourgeois identity.
Victoria’s brutal murder of the virtuous woman Lilla thus concerns more than
sexual purity itself. In the stark opposition between the aristocratic female
villain and the racial Other on the one hand and the virtuous but helpless
paragon of middle-class virtue on the other, the novel could be interpreted as a
thematization of the origin of the ideal of virtuous femininity itself. The ideal
of virtuous middle-class woman, it could be argued, is borne in the
overlapping ideological and political tensions between the middle class and
the aristocracy on the one hand and an idealized middle class as an epitome of
Englishness and a racialized foreignness on the other.
A related and equally central issue is the intersection between class
and race that I have only cursorily mentioned in my analysis of femininity and
alterity. More specifically, the sexuality of the working class woman in both
Zofloya and Villette is figured as identical to the primitive, dangerous and
devious sexuality of the racial Other. In Zofloya, the connection is most
243
evident in the affinity between the fallen aristocrat Victoria and the working-
class girl Catau, who assists her in her escape from the home of the Signora di
Modena and thus helps launch Victoria’s career as a homicidal
nymphomaniac. Although short-lived, this affinity points to the ideological
workings of the solidification of middle-class femininity. The aristocrat,
Victoria, and the working-class woman, Catau, are figured as deformed and
lacking: Victoria, due to her hypertrophied willpower and excessive desire;
Catau, because she is generally uncouth, “indelicate” and somewhat of a
brute. She is described as “short and thick in her person, hard favored, of rude
and vacant features, ignorant and inured to labour” (76). Thus, the over-
refined and the excessively primitive are equally distant from the ideal of
“female delicacy” and virtue. It is noteworthy that the Moor in this novel is
not portrayed as sexually voracious or excessive sexually but this is so
because, as I have demonstrated in my analysis, it is Victoria who has
symbolically taken the role of the embodiment of black sexual excess.
Similarly, in Villette, it is the sexuality of Rosine, the portress at
Madame Beck’s boarding school, that is described as both dangerously
foreign and devious in her appropriation of middle-class dress. She can vie
for the attention of the eligible bachelor Dr John precisely because she can
“pass” as a middle-class woman, being as she is “airy, fickle, dressy, vain,
244
and mercenary” (105). The long and elaborate episode of the mysterious
multiplication of gray dresses, the wearers of which could all have been the
object of Dr John’s infatuation, clearly shows the instability of class
boundaries, which Lucy, the narrator, is very much concerned about. It is not
surprising that throughout the novel Rosine is described as lazy and improper:
she transgresses multiple boundaries in her choice of dress and her
impertinent demeanor, which seems to be code for sexual promiscuity. The
parallels between Rosine and the giant Cleopatra in the painting that Lucy
observes and comments on in such detail are striking. They are both sexually
improper: Rosine’s ease of communication with Dr John implicitly parallels
the sprawled semi-clad body of Cleopatra, while Rosine’s laziness is
metonymically represented in the decor of Cleopatra’s luxurious yet untidy
room. The above examples were meant to demonstrate that discourses on
class and alterity are not only intertwined but possibly mutually dependent for
their imagery and tropes of otherness. Thus, it is of paramount importance to
explore further the interconnection between the domestic and the imperial, a
phenomenon Anne McClintock called the “racialization of domestic
space” ( Imperial Leather 204).
Methodologically speaking, this project could have addressed issues of
gender more broadly than its focus on femininity. My work on Stoker's
245
Dracula led me to a more deeper appreciation of the role of masculinity in
figurations of both Englishness and alterity. It is after all the endangered
imperial masculinity of the traveler Jonathan that is central in a significantly
large portion of the novel. Yet, the plot line of the “clash of civilizations,” a
narrative device that Dracula seems to borrow directly from the fin-de-siècle
adventure novel, shifts the focus to a celebratory assertion of imperial
masculinity. The hunting down and the destruction of the primitive and
ancient vampire by Van Helzing’s team of post-enlightenment rational men --
which is prominent in the last third of the narrative -- seems to elide the theme
of the besieged imperial masculinity that Jonathan most certainly represents.
Moreover, Jonathan's, inclusion among Van Helzing’s men is contingent upon
the capacity of the virtuous woman Mina to extract him from the depth of
Dracula land. Thus, even though it seems that femininity is ideologically
posited as central to the project of legitimation of the middle class, a more
thorough analysis of discourses on masculinity might productively
complicate my reading of femininity as crucial to articulations of Englishness
and alterity. By ‘masculinity’ here I do not simply mean hegemonic discourses
of the hard working heterosexual bourgeois male, but also other figurations of
masculinity, like queer metropolitan masculinities, for example, for example,
which, argues McClintock, are often figured in nineteenth-century Britain in
246
terms of racial difference while the colonized as a group are represented in
terms of sexual deviance (Imperial Leather 43-44).
At the same time, the cultural and political functions of hegemonic
masculinity and femininity, especially in relation to issues of subjectivization,
seem to be quite different. Even though this project operates within a
Foucauldean framework and is thus not concerned with questions of
authenticity and subjecthood, it is safe to argue that hegemonic masculinity
still provides more unmediated subject positions to English heterosexual
middle-class men, in comparison to the subject positions available to
heterosexual middle-class women. This is so because, in some sense, the
English subject is always already male. Subjectivization seems to work
differently in terms of normative femininity, however, due to the precarious
position of women in relation to the position of a middle-class subject. On the
one hand, ‘woman’, as the angel in the house, seems to be the guarantor of the
regeneration of bourgeois virtue, but on the other, she can never fully coincide
with this position or fulfill its role. In every day language, we would say that
‘she can never live up to the ideal’ of the virtuous woman. Or, as Spivak
articulates the problem via Bhabha’s notion of mimicry: a woman has to
negotiate her “not-quite/not-male[ness]” (“Three Women’s Texts” 244) before
she can articulate herself in a “shifting relationship to what is at stake” (245)
247
in the imperial project. While this dissertation has attempted to be particularly
attentive to the “shifting relationship” female subject positions have and might
develop in articulations of alterity, the intersection between femininity,
alterity and masculinity can be particularly pertinent in a further elaboration of
this project.
248
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards
an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2006.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.
Anolik, Ruth Bienstock (ed. and introd.), and Douglas L. (ed ). Howard, eds.
The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary
Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. x, 2004.
Arata, Stephen D. "The Occidental Tourist: "Dracula" and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization." Victorian Studies 33.4 (1990): 621-45. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/3827794. 03/24/2009.
Armstrong, Nancy (ed )., and Leonard (ed ). Tennenhouse, eds. The Ideology
of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. New
York: Methuen, 1987.
Armstrong, Nancy. "Desire and Domestic Fiction." The Novel: An Anthology
of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000. Ed. Dorothy J. (ed and introd ).
Hale. Malden, MA: Blackwell, xiv, 2006. 621.
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. Amanda Claybaugh. New York: Barnes &
Nobel Books, 2004.
Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1975.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1990.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge,
1994.
249
---. "The World and the Home." Dangerous Liaisons: Gender Nation and
Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and
Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Bienville, D. T. Nymphomaqnia, Or, a Dissertation Concerning the Furor
Uterinus. Tran. Edward Sloane Wilmot. London: Bew, 1775.
Bjelic, Dusan I. "The Balkans: Europe's Cesspool." Cultural Critique 62
(2006): 33-66. MLA International Bibliography.
Bouce, Paul-Gabriel (ed )., ed. Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
Manchester; Totowa: Manchester UP Barnes & Noble, 1982. xii, 1982.
Bracewell, Wendy. "New Men, Old Europe: Being a Man in Balkan Travel
Writing." Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel
Writing 6, no. 1-2 (2005): 88-115. MLA International Bibliography.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imerialism:
1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Brissenden, Robert F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment
from Richardson to Sade. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the
Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. xvii, 1992. .
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed.
Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton, 1987.
---. Villette. London: Penguin, 2004.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2002.
Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in
Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Burley, Stephanie. "The Death of Zofloya; Or, the Moor as Epistemological
Limit." The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the
Literary Imagination. Eds. Ruth Bienstock (ed and introd ). Anolik and
Douglas L. Howard. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, x, 2004. 197-211.
250
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge 1993.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990. xiv, 1990.
Butler, Marylin. "Orientalism." The Romantic Period. Ed. David Pirie. V ol 5
of the Penguin History of Literature V ol. London: Penguin, 1994.
395-449. Canny, Nicholas, and Low Alaine. The Origins of Empire.
Oxford UP, 1998.
Carens, Timothy L. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic
Novel. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x, 2005.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
---. The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Chaplin, Sue. Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth Century
Women’ s Fiction: Speaking of Dread. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004.
Christ, Carol T., and John O. Jordan, eds. Victorian Literature and the
Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995.
Clark-Beattie, Rosemary. "Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and the
Structure of Villette." English Literary History 53.4 (1986): 821-47.
MLA International Bibliography.
Cleland, John. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. 1st. edition ed.
Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2001.
Colley, Linda. Britons: The Forging of a Nation. Ithaca: Yale UP, 2005.
---. "The Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex, and Power." The Global
Eighteenth Century. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum. Baltimore and London:
The John Hopkins University Press, 2003. 139-150.
251
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. London: Penguin Classics, 1998.
Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dir. Coppola, Francis Ford. Prod. Michael Apted and
Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Anonymous American Zoetrope, 1992.
Coundouriotis, Eleni. "Dracula and the Idea of Europe." Connotations: A
Journal for Critical Debate 9.2 (1999): 43-59. MLA International
Bibliography.
Craciun, Adriana. "Introduction: Charlotte Dacre and the ‘Vivisection of
Virtue’." Zofloya; Or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century.
Ed. Adriana (ed and introd ). Craciun. Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
1997.
---. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2003,
2003.
---. "'I Hasten to be Disembodied': Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and
Representations of the Body." European Romantic Review 6.1 (1995):
75-97. MLA International Bibliography.
Craft, Christopher. "'Kiss Me with those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in
Bram Stoker's Dracula." Speaking of Gender. Ed. Elaine Showalter.
New York: Routledge, 1989.
Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus; A
Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.
Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya; Or, the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century.
Ed. Adriana (ed and introd ). Craciun. Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
1997.
Daly, Suzanne. "Kashmir Shawls in Mid-Victorian Novels." Victorian
Literature and Culture 30.1 (2002): 237-56. MLA International
Bibliography.
---. "Spinning Cotton: Domestic and Industrial Novels." Victorian Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies 50.2
(2008): 272-8. MLA International Bibliography.
252
David, Deidre. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1995.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of
the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1987.
De Lamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-
Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
De Lauretis, Teresa. "Desire in Narrative." Alice Doesn't : Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c.1984.
98-120.
---. "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and
Gender." The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of
Violence. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. London:
Routledge, 1989. 239-257.
Demetrakopoloulos, Stephanie. "Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other
Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Frontiers: A Journal
od Women's Studies 3 (1977): 104-13.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Penguin Classics,
1996.
Dittmer, Jason. "Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe."
Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 12, no. 2-3 (2002): 233-48.
MLA International Bibliography.
Djikstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-
Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Doody Margaret, Anne. "Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams
in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel." The Eighteenth-
Century English Novel. Ed. Harold (ed and introd ). Bloom.
Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, vii, 2004. 71-111.
Dunn, James A. "Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence."
Nineteenth-Century Literature 53.3 (1998): 307-27. MLA International
Bibliography.
253
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. Basingstoke,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xxix, 2005.
Edwards, Bryan. "The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies
in the West Indies: In Two V olumes (1794)." London: Printed for J.
Stockdale, 1794.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology.
Urbana Champaigne: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Engar Ann, W. "The Minerva Press." The British Literary Book Trade,
1700-1820. Eds. James (ed and introd ). Bracken and Joel (ed and
introd ). Silver. Detroit, MI: Gale, xii, 1995. 191-197.
Fleming, K. E. "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography." The
American Historical Review 105.4 (2000): 1218-33. http://
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28200010%29105%3A4%
3C1218%3AOTBABH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1. 03/12/2008.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Vintage, 1995.
---. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Tran. Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1980.
---. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews. Tran. Gordon C. New York:
Pantheon, 1980.
Fowler, Christopher. "Dracula's Library." Critical Quarterly 40.2 (1998):
48-58. MLA International Bibliography.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.
---. Wives and Daughters. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
254
Gilman, Sander. "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward and Iconography
of Female Sexuality." Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of
Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985.
76-109.
---. Sexuality: An Illustrated History. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 1989.
Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of Imagination.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison. Tran. Raymond Rosenthal. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992.
Greenfield, Susan C. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family
Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP,
2002.
Groneman, Carol. "Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female
Sexuality." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol.19,
Issue 2, p.337 19.2 (1994): 337. CSA Worldwide Political Science
Abstracts.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monstrosity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Halberstam, Judith. "Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representations of
Rage and Resistance." Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies.
Eds. Martha (ed and introd ). McCaughey and Neal (ed and introd ).
King. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, ix, 2001. 244-266.
Hammond, Andrew. "Frontier Myths: Travel Writing on Europe's Eastern
Border." Myths of Europe. Eds. Richard (ed and introd ). Littlejohns and
Sara (ed and introd ). Soncini. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2007.
197-211.
---. "Imagined Colonialism: Victorian Travellers in South-East Europe."
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28.2 (2006): 87-104. MLA International
Bibliography.
255
Herrera Andrea, O'Reilly. "Imagining a Self between a Husband Or a Wall:
Charlotte Bronte's Villette." The Foreign Woman in British Literature:
Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders. Eds. Marilyn Demarest (ed and introd ).
Button and Toni Reed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 67-78.
Hoeveler Diane, Long. "Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: The Gothic Demonization
of the Jew." The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion,
Culture. Ed. Sheila A. (ed and introd ). Spector. New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, xiv, 2005. 165-178.
Hoeveler, Diane, and Lisa Jadwin. Charlotte Brontë. Twayne Pub, 1997.
Hoeveler, Diane. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from
Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
UP, 1998.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. "Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: A Case Study in
Miscegenation as Sexual and Racial Nausea." European Romantic
Review 8.2 (1997): 185-99. MLA International Bibliography.
Holland Norman, N., and F. Sherman Leona. "Gothic Possibilities." Gender
and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Eds. Elizabeth A.
Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
xxx, 1986. 215-233.
Howells Carol Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction.
London: Athlone, 1978.
Hughes, William. "A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of
Bram Stoker's Dracula." Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre.
Eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003. 88-103.
Hunt, Lynn. The Invention of Pornography. New York: Zone Books, 1993.
256
Hunter, William. Anatomia Uteri Umani Gravidi [the Anatomy of the Human
Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures]. Birmingham UK: John
Baskerville, 1774. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/
historicalanatomies/hunterw_home.html. 05/11/2010.
Irigaray, Luce. "When the Goods Get Together." New French Feminisms: An
Anthology. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U
of Massachusetts P, 1980. 107-124.
Jacobus, Mary. "The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette."
Women Writing and Writing about Women. Ed. Mary Jacobus. London;
New York: Croom Helm with Oxford Univ. Women's Studies
Committee; Barnes & Noble, 1979. 42-60.
Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in
the 1790’ s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: University of
Chicago Press, 1995.
Jones, Ann H. "Charlotte Dacre." Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane
Austen’ s Age. New York: AMS Press, 1986. 224-249.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and
Medicine between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Centuries.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Kane, Michael. "Insiders/Outsiders: Conrad's the Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and
Bram Stoker's Dracula." The Modern Language Review 92.1 (1997):
1-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/374681. 04/15/2010.
Kaplan, Robert. Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East
and Tartary. New York: Random House, 2000.
Kelly, Gary. "(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and
Female Sexuality." Women’ s Writing 14.2 (1997): 143-54.
---. English Fiction of the Romantic Period. London and New York: Longman,
1989.
---. Women Writing Revolution, 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
257
Konstantinov, Aleko. Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.
Kranidis, Rita S. The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested
Subjects. New York: St. Martin's press, 1999.
Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. (tr ). Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Kriz, Kay Dian. "Marketing Mulattresses in the Paintings and Prints of
Agostino Brunias." The Global Eighteenth Century. Ed. Felicity
Nussbaum. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2005. 195-211.
Kucich, John. Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George
Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. vii,
1987.
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic
Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995. x, 1995.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008.
Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century
English Novel. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992. xvii, 1992.
Longinović, Tomislav Z. "Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and “the
Serbs”." Ed. Dušan I. Bjelić, Obrad Savić. Cambridge MA: MIT
Press39-61.
Longmuir, Anne. "‘Reader, perhaps You were Never in Belgium?’:
Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë’s the Professor and
Villette." Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.2 (2009): 163-188.
---. "Emigrant Spinsters and the Construction of Englishness in Charlotte
Brontë's Villette." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.3 (2008): 22
paragraphs. MLA International Bibliography.
258
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in
Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. ix, 2007.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.
Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
---. "Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya." European
Romantic Review 13.2 (2002): 169-73. MLA International Bibliography.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Pcychoanalysis and the Cinema.
Trans. Celia Britton, et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1977.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. 4th ed. First Illinois Paperback, 2000.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday (Anchor), 1977.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters. London: Little,
Brown Book Group;, 1994.
Mudge, Bradford K. "Women Writers, Gothic Novels, Romantic Poets." The
Whore’ s Story: Women, Pornography and the Novel, 1684-1830., 2000.
89-121.
Mulvey, Laura. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)." Feminist Film
Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue (ed and introd ). Thornham. New York, NY:
New York UP, vi, 1999. 122-130.
---. "Changes." Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and
Culture 7 (1985): 11-30. MLA International Bibliography.
---. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Audience Studies Reader.
Eds. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn. London, England: Routledge,
xv, 2003. 133-142.
Newman, Beth. Subjects of Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation and
Victorian Feminity. Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2004.
259
Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race,
and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge UP, 2003. xii, 2003.
Paulson, Ronald. "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution." Elh 48.3
(1981): 532-54. MLA International Bibliography.
Peace, Mary. "The Economy of Nymphomania: Luxury, Virtue, Sentiment and
Desire in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Medical Discourse." Eds. Erica
Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Wiseman Susan. London: Macmillan, 1999.
239-259.
Polwhele, Richard. "The Unsex'd Females: A Poem." (1798)
Poovey, Mary. "Ideology and the Mysteries of Udolpho." Criticism: A
Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 21 (1979): 307-30.
Poovey, Mary, and Catherine R. (fwd ). Stimpson. Uneven Developments: The
Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1988. xi, 1988.
Porter, Roy, and Lesley Hall, eds. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Medical
Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Prescott, Charles E., and Giorgio Grace A. "Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker
and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Victorian
Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 487-515.
Rance, Nicholas. "'Jonathan's Great Knife': Dracula Meets Jack the Ripper."
Victorian Literature and Culture 30.2 (2002): 439-53. MLA
International Bibliography.
Reed, Toni. Demon Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980)."
Journal of Women's History 15.3 (2003): 11-48. MLA International
Bibliography.
260
Richardson, Alan, and Sonia Hofkosh, eds. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial
Culture, 1780-1834. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Roberts, Edgar V . "An Unrecorded Meaning of 'Joke' (Or 'Joak') in England."
American Speech 37 (1962) http://www.jstor.org/stable/453150.
11/18/2008.
Roberts, Marie Mulvey, and Roy Porter, eds. Pleasure in the Eighteenth
Century. New York: New York UP, 1996.
Roth Phyllis, A. "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula." The
Taboo. Eds. Harold (ed and introd ). Bloom and Blake Hobby. New
York, NY: Bloom's Literary Criticism, xvi, 2010. 23-36.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, Or, on Education. Hanover NH: Darmouth
College Press, 2009.
Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of
Sex." Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1975. 247-264.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and
English Nationality. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia, 1997.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosovski. Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
---. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1980.
Senf, Carol A. "Dracula: Stoker's Response to the New Woman." Victorian
Studies 26.1 (1982): 33-49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827492.
02/26/2010.
Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge UP, 1996. xiii, 1996.
Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the Gothic: The
Politics of Genre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
261
Spivak Gayatri, Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism." The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory,
1900-2000. Ed. Dorothy J. (ed and introd ). Hale. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, xiv, 2006. 674-690.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 1993.
Stoller, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP
---. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’ s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Stone Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. New
York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Stothand, Thomas. Sable Venus. 1794. Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture / Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division in the
New York Public Library, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/
dgkeysearchresult.cfm?parent_id=209807&word=.
Teacher, John H. Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Preparations
of Dr. William Hunter. 1 V ol. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons,
1900.
Tromans, Nicholas, Rana Kabbani, and Fatema Mernissi, eds. The Lure of the
East: British Orientalist Painting. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.
Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British
Working Class Culture. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974.
---. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. Chicago, IL: U
of Chicago P, 2004. xxxii, 2004.
Warhol, Robyn R. "Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette."
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36.4 (1996): 857-75. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/450979. 05/29/2010.
Weinstone, Ann. "The Queerness of Lucy Snow." Niniteenth-Century contexts
18.4 (1995): 368.
262
Williams, Raymond. Keywords. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of the Civilization on the
Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Wood, M. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and
America, 1780-1865. New York: Routledge., 2000.
Zanger, Jules. "A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews." English
Literature in Transition 34 (1991): 45-58.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.
Zoffany, Johan. Dido Elizabeth Belle, Later Davinier, and Lady Elizabeth
Murray, Later Finch Hatton”, c. 1780. private collection, owned by The
Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland.
263

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

PDF

Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

PDF

Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

PDF

Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

PDF

The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

PDF

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

PDF

The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

PDF

Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

PDF

Dress and deception: women's dress and the eighteenth-century British novel

PDF

Infectious feelings: disease, sympathy, and the nineteenth-century novel

PDF

Text with a view: turn of the century literature and the invention of the postcard

PDF

The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

Asset Metadata

Creator Gueorguieva, Milena (author)

Core Title Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/03/2010

Defense Date 06/18/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alterity,Balkan,empire,gender,gothic,nineteenth-century British novel,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexuality,social construction

Place Name Great Britain (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Pinkus, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email mgueorgu@usc.edu,mgueorguieva@bentley.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3177

Unique identifier UC1183490

Identifier etd-Gueorguieva-2199 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-365865 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3177 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Gueorguieva-2199.pdf

Dmrecord 365865

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Gueorguieva, Milena

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu