Zofloya, Horror or Gothic?

Is Zofloya ‘horror’ (or ‘male’) Gothic, or a mixture of the horror and terror Gothic traditions?

Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya does not fit into a standard categorisation of horror or terror gothic. Dacre incorporates a mixture of both male and female Gothic traditions which argue traditional boundaries concerning women of the fifteenth century. Zofloya deviates from standard Gothic novels by having a woman writer displaying sexual impulses, and transcends from the sublime terror to the graphic realism of what is considered to be horror.

Zofloya goes beyond the perceived idea of female gothic which ‘often aims to socialize and educate its female readers and is usually morally conservative.’[1] The graphic descriptions of murder and violence throughout the novel condemn the criticism that ‘Female Gothic works usually include a female protagonist who is pursued and persecuted by a villainous patriarchal figure in unfamiliar settings and terrifying landscape.’(TFG) It can be argued that Victoria is a protagonist in the fact that she is the leading character within the novel; however, she is in fact the persecutor and the villain. The Female Gothic usually eschews the more overt and graphic scenes of violence and sexual perversion found in the literature of horror, often opting for the "explained supernatural" instead of the real thing. Although Zofloya does contain elements of the “explained supernatural”, for example, Henriquez believes he is sleeping with Lilla, when really it is Victoria personifying her. This can be explained that the ‘potion’ was in fact a drug that caused Henriquez to hallucinate. Dacre also pushes the traditional boundaries of The Female Gothic by expressing graphic scenes of violence, for example, ‘Victoria pursued her blows—she covered her fair body with innumerable wounds, then dashed her headlong over the edge of the steep.’[2] A distinction between horror and terror Gothic has since been defined by Ann Radcliffe in her essay ‘On the...