Date of Award
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Chair/Advisor
Dr. McGrath
Committee Member
Dr. Manganelli
Committee Member
Dr. Mullaney
Abstract
Focusing on Victoria, the protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor, this paper seeks to reclaim and recontextualize her. I embrace the troubling nature of Victoria by focusing on how “evil”, as well as other negative labels, function in the text in reference to her. Resisting a morality centered reading, this paper then explores Victoria's evil expressed through her body in conversation with conventions of monstrousness. I then explore Victoria’s relationship with her mother as a complication to both her arc and the novel’s treatment of female characters overall. Victoria offers not only new ways of approaching similar Gothic female characters but troubling female figures as a whole.
Recommended Citation
Woods, Katherine, "By the Devil’s Grace: Zofloya’s Victoria and the Recontextualizing of a Protagonist" (2024). All Theses. 4277.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/4277