ABSTRACT
On the heels of the Enlightenment, Charlotte Dacre's novel Zofloya, or The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, explores the Gothic fascination with the unknown, responding to the limits of reason. This chapter argues that Dacre's Victoria di Loredani is a proto-trans figure and the novel Zofloya, straddling the Enlightenment and Romantic Gothic, transgresses limits of desire, but more importantly, offers new potentials for gender spectrums and identities. Distinctly, Zofloya depicts polymorphous, transformative body and gender association. It underscores femininity as performance and the transitioning body and gender variance as powerful and supernatural. Critics such as Adriana Craciun and Susan Wolfson have suggested that Romantic "masculine" and "feminine" ideologies were already permeable and entangled categories. The fragmented form of Gothic narrative represents the breakdown of social order and status quo, Gothic bodies also disrupt stable notions of the gender binary.
