“Open House”: Hospitality and Decentered Subjects in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806)

If John Locke established the self-enclosed, paternal household as the basis of a new liberal state that fosters self-governing individuals, this Enlightenment model of family unit is disrupted in gothic fiction that posits claustrophobic homes as the primary locus of terror. Yet in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), the terrifying household is curiously absent. Instead, Zofloya opens up the home, inviting nonmembers to enter and prompting family members to disseminate. It is precisely this openness, its capacity to spread and multiply into pseudo-households, that engenders terror in Zofloya. I argue that Dacre, by presenting an “open house,” dismantles the fiction of the Enlightenment household and the self-enclosed modern subject. Zofloya illustrates how the home breeds porous subjects who in turn are displaced by strangers attempting to “play host”; as such, the open household in Zofloya anticipates the slippage between host and guest delineated in Derrida's ethics of hospitality. By attending to moments of entering and passing, I will explore how Dacre's gothic imagination transforms the household into a space where the Enlightenment discourse on membership, household, and subjectivity collapses.