“This heart knows not to shrink”: a dessexualização de Victoria di Loredani em Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), de Charlotte Dacre

Abstract

This dissertation is devoted to introducing the constitution, the basic themes and elements of the Gothic Poetics that, in dealing with issues considered taboo and immoral, enables the representation of lives and experiences alternative to the norms that govern the concept of subject forged during modernity. To demonstrate one of these alterities this work recovers the author Charlotte Dacre from literary oblivion and, more specifically, her Gothic novel Zofloya, or the Moor: a romance of the fifteenth-century (1806). With focus on the protagonist of the narrative, Victoria di Loredani, this research intends to note how she, in refusing the limits to her sex and gender, is part of a process of dessexualization that, in turn, culminates in the liberation of her self. Once without sex, Victoria becomes monstrous – that is, she incorporates her obscure face –, opens herself to vulnerability and, thus, regenerates the wholeness of the human.