Zofloya, or the Moor

Charlotte Dacre’s gothic novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is another rich Romantic text to trace the internal civilizing mission, or Occidentalism. The novel explicitly exhibits the West/East opposition; however, this kind of representation can be looked at as not the writer’s reinforcement of the West’s superiority over the East, or the East inferiority when compared to the West. The novel, as one reading suggests, was mainly preoccupied with the construction of the ‘Self’, the British society. This reading explicates that the encounter between the West and the East in this novel and other Romantic works such as Lord Byron’s “The Giaour” (1813) was a beneficial historical moment in which the Romantic writer sought to traffic oriental knowledge and norms to his country in the process of making the British society.