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

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