The Muslim monster embodied repressed female sexual desire in Gothic fiction
Evidence
Zofloya tells the story of the spoiled, malicious, and vengeful Victoria, who is led by a dark-skinned Moor named Zofloya to commit numerous crimes. As in many Gothic tales, the subconscious plays a central role in this text. Dreams are moments of revelation that “influence one’s waking life and reveal an inner psychical or spiritual awakening.” Victoria’s sexual desire for the Moor, who at the story’s conclusion reveals his true identity as Satan, is one of the secrets hidden in the subconscious. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 492
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The psychological projection mechanism — the Muslim monster as container for forbidden desire — is the reader’s core ‘fear without object’ thesis.
Related
- The Gothic Moor conflates sexual desire with diabolical horror (similarity 0.90)
- Gothic Muslim monsters are sexualized figures carrying displaced Western anxieties (similarity 0.87)
- Gothic Muslim monsters are imagined as uncontrollably sexual and perverse. (similarity 0.87)
- Muslim monsters are marked by toxic hyper-masculinity or sexually toxic femininity. (similarity 0.82)
- Gothic horror monsters functioned as vessels for anxieties about women (similarity 0.82)
- Muslim monsters are repositories of Western desires as much as fears (similarity 0.81)
- Gothic literature expanded Romantic villainy into full-blown Muslim monsters (similarity 0.81)
- The Muslim female’s imagined allure helped shape the Arab male villain (similarity 0.80)
- Gothic Muslim monsters were stockpiled with telepathy and inherited black magic (similarity 0.80)
- Muslim males in Gothic horror are framed as essentially evil, deviant, and child-murdering (similarity 0.79)
- Gothic horror expanded Romantic vilification of Muslims into monstrousness as an anti-Enlightenment reaction. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Gothic Muslim villains transferred feminine evil onto their female victims
#expands(0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 497 - Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy
#complicates(0.50) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 362 - Queerness itself was treated as monstrous in the Gothic era
#qualifies(0.50) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 509 - Gendered Islamophobia assigns opposite tropes to Muslim women and men
#expands(0.40) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1244