Sorrows Of Satan Research Articles

Comedy, Christianity and Melodramatic Affect: The Sorrows of Satan at the Shaftesbury Theatre

This article examines Paul M. Berton and Herbert Woodgate’s 1897 melodrama, The Sorrows of Satan, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. The play was adapted from Marie Corelli’s bestselling novel of the same name (1895). In this article, I show how the stage production injected comedy into Corelli’s story, while maintaining and perhaps even amplifying its didactic Christianity. In exploring the techniques of the Berton and Woodgate play, and tracking the production’s critical reception, we can see that late-Victorian religious melodrama was both affectively and visually powerful, as well as capable of considerable nuance.

The International Circulation and Impact of Invasion Fiction

A key text of the pre-First World War invasion fiction genre, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906) is often assumed to have sold in vast quantities and provoked major controversy. This article investigates the circulation and social impact of this divisive, polemical work before and during the war to provide a more accurate account of its reception. Using Marie Corelli’s proven bestseller The Sorrows of Satan (1895) as a comparator, the article shows sales of The Invasion of 1910 were similar to other bestselling novels, though not comparable to Corelli’s phenomenal sales. Le Queux’s text, however, punched above the weight of the typical bestseller in terms of its social influence, receiving parliamentary censure, extensive newspaper coverage, wide satire and polarised reader responses. Overall, this analysis provides insight into the workings of the popular fiction industry and the nature and extent of invasion fears in the early twentieth century.

Literary cum Philoso-Religious Periscope on the Nature of Man

The self-evident truth that man is a mystery to himself generates justifiable intellectual curiosity. Giving expression to such curiosity would help to further unravel the mysterious nature of man by means of philoso-religious investigations into the personality of some purposively selected major characters in the literary works of prominent African and non-African writers. Consequently, this study undertakes to investigate some creative works of world-acclaimed fame. Purposively selected for the study in this regard include Profs. Chinua Achebe and Isidore Okpewho’s fictions, Prof. Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are not to Blame, George Orwell’s narratives, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Marie Correli’s The Sorrows of Satan and Cheik Hamidou Kane’s The Ambiguous Adventure. These classics are selected, because besides being philoso-religiously oriented, their geographical settings cut across the world to validate the findings of the study. The objective of the investigation focused on the selected works is to help man understand himself now more than previously ever, especially in relation to the will of God, his creator. This objective is pursuant to the expectation that achieving it would significantly improve the quality of life on earth, and by extension, man’s eternal destiny. The theoretical premise which drives the investigation of man and his nature in the novels used for the study conceptualises man in relation to ethics and the metaphysical world. It, therefore, provides appreciable insights into man’s identity profile which distinguishes between the created man as an enemy of God and the redeemed man as a friend of God. Relying on some scientific basis, the theoretical framework establishes that God is an undeniable reality, concluding, therefore, that it translates to stark ignorance or gross senselessness not to know Him. The analysis done as part of the study confirms its hypothesis, namely, that literature is a mirror of life which is largely a reflection of the natures of the created man rather than those of the redeemed man. The confirmation of this hypothesis proves that humanity is farther away from God than she is close to Him. In other words, the final destiny of mankind, hereafter, is largely threatened. The pragmatics of this worrisome major finding is that the near-countable redeemed people of God in this generation, especially the clergy, should and must commit themselves to intensified effective creative evangelisation to forestall evil from overtaking the world. Positive response to this clarion call by the redeemed people of God found in all authentic religious sects is imperative, else, evil will eventually overtake the world and provoke God’s devastating wrath on humanity.

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness:The Sorrows of Satan, Popular Fiction, and theFin-de-SiècleCanon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kin...

NICHOLAS FREEMAN, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain.

‘FIVE hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes’, sing the cast of the musical Rent, ‘How do you measure, measure a year?’ For Nicholas Freeman, in his eminently readable and engaging 1895, it is measured in novels published, plays performed, police reports of crime and scandal, trials, labour actions, political developments, weather patterns, athletic events, cultural debates, and more. The primary interest of the book is certainly writers and, to a lesser extent, other artists, but given a year that saw the publication or first performance of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, Henry James’s Guy Domville, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, four issues of The Yellow Book, the English translation of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, and many more major works, that interest hardly seems unjustified. Producing what is in effect a biography of a year rather than of any individual does produce some fascinating juxtapositions (one of Freeman’s key terms): Freeman is definitely onto something when he points out that ‘The implication that cricket represented a [morally] regenerating force was strengthened by the Star’s front page juxtaposition of Wilde’s conviction with a report on the Surrey batsman W. W. Reed’s Testimonial Match at Kennington Oval’ (154). And noting offhand that while some football clubs ‘allowed women to watch games for free, believing their presence curbed the excesses of male supporters … this practice was disappearing by 1894–95 for the simple reason that too many women were watching football and revenue was being lost’ (43) opens up another compelling context for the New Woman writing and social advocacy that Freeman elsewhere details. Other juxtapositions are less effective: why does it matter that ‘Wilde’s action against Queensberry opened on 3 April, the day England’s morally-upright cricketers finally left the Antipodes after trouncing South Australia by ten wickets’ (98)? Or that ‘Back on terra firma, Rosebery attended the Derby on 29 May, the day Heinemann published Wells’ The Time Machine: An Invention’ (135)? It’s occasionally disconcerting to come across odd, unassimilated facts in the middle of a paragraph about something else; interrupting an account of Wilde’s falling reputation in mid-April of the year is a sudden mention of a referee at a football match who ‘was hit by mud thrown by the crowd and abandoned the game after only fifteen minutes’ and then, immediately following, a description of ‘Albert Hartwell, an elephant trainer in a Burnley circus’, who ‘kicked his charge’s trunk and was promptly trampled to death’ (113). The first is justified by the figural term ‘mud-slinging’, the second by the fact that it represents ‘the motif of the noble beast at bay’, both which have some potential relevance to Wilde, but the principle of juxtaposition here threatens to devolve into arbitrariness.

<em>Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing</em>, by Kevin Mills

Reviewed by: Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing James Williams (bio) Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing, by Kevin Mills; pp. 228. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007, $49.50, £43.50. Kevin Mills's Approaching Apocalypse is a long overdue general study of an important subject: the widespread significance of biblical apocalyptic thought to Victorian literature. It is focused most importantly, of course, on Revelation. In his introduction, Mills wisely distances himself from the approach of simply listing and identifying scriptural allusions, instead preferring to explore texts that exemplify "a kind of affinity with the genre," and tracing how some of the concepts and themes that order apocalyptic literature play out across a range of materials (14). His chapters consider, respectively, the hazy border between the human and non-human; the trope of the desert as contrasted with (but paradoxically encountered within) the city; the idea of veiling and unveiling; the apocalyptic conception of time; and what Mills calls the "central margin" of apocalyptic, its self-identification and preoccupation with liminal spaces and states of being (20). The result is eclectic and exciting. Mills states at the outset, a touch apologetically, that the pursuit of deeper, less evidently elective affinities has led him "to produce detailed readings of texts whose relative unfamiliarity may appear to render their selection either arbitrary or even downright contrary" (31). This is in fact one of his study's strengths, with works such as James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night (1847), Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (1852), and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) receiving fruitful attention. Having said this, some of Mills's most persuasive and suggestive readings are of texts that would fall within almost any account of the Victorian canon, such as Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Jane Eyre (1847). So convincingly, in fact, does Mills make the case for the instrumental presence of Revelation in Charlotte Brontë's novel that he somewhat undermines his claim to eschew direct allusions in favor of less obvious apocalyptic "images and tendencies" (21). In fact, the risk in Mills's approach is not so much that he loses sight of what is central in Victorian literature as that he periodically loses sight of his own theme altogether. Chapter 1, for instance, purports to be about the apocalyptic blurring of the human and non-human (think here of the "living creatures" of Revelation 5:7; of Christ as variously man, lion, and lamb; of the beast of Revelation 13:1; and so on), a trope which Mills sees as inescapably bound up, for the Victorians, with Charles Darwin's re-imagining of natural history. So central, however, is Darwin to Mills's understanding of this theme that much of the chapter is given over to a discussion of the epistemological problems suggested by evolutionary theory and an extended meditation on the "tree of life" metaphor in On the Origin of Species (1859), leading ultimately to some remarks on the nature of metaphor itself and its relation to the analogical methodology of natural science (48). These are related issues, certainly, but for pages at a time the ostensible theme falls into the background. Similarly, much of chapter 2, on the trope of "the desert at the heart of the city" (18), is taken up discussing the literary uses of insomnia in The City of Dreadful Night and the possible literary and scriptural ramifications of sleep. This is not to say that these digressions are failures. On the contrary, they can be read with pleasure and profit: Mills's writing is often at its most lucid, searching, and forthright as he pursues these sidelines, and it is when we feel him pulling himself back to the framework of his argument that he can feel labored. While chapters 3 through 5 stay [End Page 338] much more resolutely on topic, these early divagations are more than merely incidental, pointing to a fundamental aspect of Mills's understanding of Victorian apocalypticism: its rangy connectivity and protean capacity for multiple significations. A phrase in his reading of Christina Rossetti is suggestive in this respect: "the rhetoric of depths appears subject to the kind...

Marie Corelli's Barabbas, The Sorrows of Satan and Generic Transition

This essay examines aspects of Marie Corelli's experimentation in two novels, Barabbas (1893) and The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli takes poetic license with elements from the Bible and folklore, which combine well with the Gothic tradition as it had filtered down into the 1890s. Corelli deftly brings this formula to bear on contemporary cultural and social issues. Notably, the fragmented sensibility in characters such as Barabbas, Judas, Judith, Tempest and Sibyl also anticipates similar character instability prevalent in both Modernist narrative and romance fiction. Such artistic strategies in Corelli's works invite various overdue aesthetic revaluations.

Moral Uncertainty and the Afterlife: Explaining the Popularity of Marie Corelli's Early Novels

Marie Corelli's early popular success as a novelist took place within a culture anxious about the meaning and experience of death. Generally, Corelli is considered to be a writer of romantic fiction, but this essay considers the heterogeneous appeal that she was able to generate through her engagement with the contemporary cultural and emotional fascination with mortality and the destruction of the corporeal form. Through a consideration of theories about the role of popular fiction in cultural debate, it is possible to reconsider rather than dismiss Corelli's success as aberrant, the common twentieth century practice. She devises specific narrative constructs that allow readers to engage in social debates about the body and contemplate alternative religious beliefs. This essay analyses death scenes in five of Corelli's early best-sellers—Ardath (1895), Thelma (1897), The Soul of Lilith (1892), The Sorrows of Satan (1895), and The Murder of Delicia (1896). These death scenes are distinct rather than formulaic and, by considering their cultural context, it is possible to understand the way Corelli's fiction negotiates different subject positions and responds to varied rather than specific cultural perspectives. Best-selling fiction requires a writer to effect ambiguity rather than clear cultural alignment in order to achieve resonance with differentiated audiences. This essay proposes that the example of the varied and nuanced appeal Corelli offered her contemporary audiences necessitates a revaluation of the place of popular fiction in literary and cultural histories.

The Genius in Ardath: The Story of A Dead Self

This essay explores how Marie Corelli shapes her emerging authorial persona in her second novel Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self. Corelli's concern to define authentic creativity and to emphasize ascetic selflessness leads her to redefine the standard Romantic notion of inspired genius. Departing from the image that she created in her first novel of an inspired genius who mindlessly channels the music of angels, Corelli experiments with a new idea that inspiration is a memory of poetry composed in the author's past life. This new definition of self-inspired genius, which enables an author to be both original and transcendent, holds a unique position in late nineteenth century debates about the link between genius and insanity, and is influenced by established fin-de-siècle concerns about the role of women writers in the marketplace. After exploring the effects of Corelli's asceticism and quest for authenticity on her style and characterization, this essay concludes that Corelli's concerns about reconciling her fame with her spiritual persona affect every aspect of her writing. In this lifelong enterprise she wrestled with the benefits and disadvantages of distancing the self from the world. The reconciliation of fame and spirituality is fully realized in The Sorrows of Satan in the character of Mavis Clare, a female author whose powerful yet indirect influence, selflessness, purity, and independence signal that she is an authentic, yet lonely, genius.

Pigsties and Sunsets: L. M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web, and a Modernism of Her Own

Pigsties and Sunsets: L.M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web, and a Modernism of Her Own Benjamin Lefebvre University of Winnipeg "My sales have been slipping a bit of late years," L.M. Montgomery noted in her journal in 1928, commenting on a semi-annual report she had received from her American publisher. "Well, I suppose I have had my day and must make way for newer favorites. For twenty years I have been in the van and that is considered a long time for the fickle public to be faithful" (Selected Journals III [1 October 1928] 378–79). By 1928, two decades after her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), thrust her permanently into the public eye, Montgomery had published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories (one unauthorized), a collection of poems, and numerous periodical pieces. While her comment of resignation may have been realistic for a popular writer in mid-career, Montgomery immediately contradicted that expectation: "Yet my publishers tell me there is another reason—and a rather flattering one. It seems the sales of my old books are keeping up too well and they cut the market from my new ones to a large extent" (379). While Montgomery could afford to be smug about her continued high sales, there were some changes about which she could not feel so self-assured during this time period. After rereading Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan (1895) during a night of insomnia in 1930, she reflected, "What a [End Page 123] commotion that book made when it came out over thirty years ago. And now I suppose nobody under thirty has ever heard of it. It was about as wild and absurd as any book could be—but Marie could tell a story. After all, I prefer the Satanic sorrows to the modern sex putridity" (Selected Journals IV [30 August 1930] 65; see also After Green Gables [26 April 1931] 187). An avid reader who mixed recent popular fiction interchangeably with rereadings of favourite texts by canonical writers of the nineteenth century and whose choice of reading materials does not seem to have been affected by her public role as the wife of a Presbyterian minister, Montgomery was nonetheless not completely indiscriminate when it came to modern taste in fiction, given that she had difficulty adjusting to some of the latest literary trends. After reading a scene in Valentine Dobrée's Your Cuckoo Sings by Kind (1927) that included "the most hideous, loathsome bestial incident—the vilest thing I ever read in any book," something so obscene she refused to describe it, her reaction was so violent that "It turned me sick": I think what hurt me worst was that it was so unjustifiable. There was no need for it—it didn't belong to the book…. I am no prude. I have read a great many books where sex played a prominent part—great books which I enjoyed. But I have no use for the filth that is being spewed out by the presses of the world today. It is not sex—it is plain dirt. This was worse than dirt—it was verminous. (Selected Journals III [17 November 1927] 359; see also After Green Gables [7 April 1929] 162–63)1 As Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston note in their Introduction to the fourth volume of Montgomery's Selected Journals (1998), which includes entries from 1929 to 1935, literary trends that evolved gradually after World War I gave a new set of tastes and offerings to Montgomery's "fickle public," which would cause sales of her books to decline steadily throughout the 1930s. "Fragmentation, angst, and disillusionment were [End Page 124] the vogue, and Montgomery's novels, set in pre-war Prince Edward Island, appeared to be works of nostalgia and sentimentalism to the Modernist critical eye," they write. Moreover, her books "were about domestic women at a time when the heroes...

Marketing British Modernism: The Egoist and Counter-Public Spheres

In pre-WWI London, mass-circulation publications like Alfred Harmsworth's Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, and best-selling novels like Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan, epitomized a commercial culture that arose alongside a huge increase in availability of consumer products, and a concomitant expansion of advertising industry to create markets for new goods.(1) Though Habermas implicates commercialization of press in decline of liberal public sphere, Edwardian oppositional groups discovered ways to deploy some of same tactics that made Harmsworth a millionaire in order to unite large publics and support widespread social and political change. Suffragists and radical political groups created discursive spaces outside of dominant public sphere - what I will call spheres[2] - but burgeoning commercial mass culture made these counter-public spheres viable. Commodity ads funded suffrage papers; public spectacles and popular advertising campaigns helped package, publicize, and sell causes like the vote to thousands of women (see Tickner). Anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists also turned to mass-publication strategies to create an alternative press and to reach new followers. As Andreas Huyssen suggests, many early modernist writers and artists responded to aspects of this expanding commodity, culture with antipathy (Huyssen, pt. 1). The Egoist (E) and its predecessors, The Freewoman (FW) and New Freewoman (NFW), would seem to exemplify, type of coterie publication that turned its back on mass audiences and published either for posterity or for what Ezra Pound would call party of intelligence (E2/1/17, 21).(3) These little magazines were arenas for radical political and economic theories, egoistic philosophy affirmed by Dora Marsden, and early work of modernist authors like Pound, Richard Aldington, H. D., F. S. Flint, and T. S. Eliot - all of whom generally appear to affirm high-culture side of Huyssen's great divide.(4) But Huyssen's argument overlooks an important phase of early modernism, one that blurs separation of modernists from avant-gardists by their stances toward mass culture? I wish to explore close, if brief, contact between modern commodity-advertising tactics and modernists who in many ways most upheld a notion of high culture against mass-culture contamination. The counter-public spheres that I will discuss - those of suffragism and of anticapitalist and antistatist political movements - showed these modernists how to adapt mass-advertising tactics to further political and social, rather than explicitly economic, goals. I will argue that writers and editors for The Freewoman/New Freewoman/Egoist were attracted to proliferating types of publicity of an energetic advertising industry, and that they also attempted to adopt mass-advertising tactics - not directly from commercial enterprises of mass-market magazines, but rather via suffrage and anarchist movements - in order to seek out large audiences within prewar London masses. These attempts mark a surprising optimism among modernists about possibility of forming broad-based counter-public spheres in opposition to bourgeois social norms, liberal and statist politics, and, above all for modernist authors, conventional literary taste. I will give an overview of developments in commercial advertising, and how those developments were deployed by suffragists and other political radicals in prewar London. These oppositional movements provided an institutional context for little magazine that began as The Freewoman - a feminist paper - and ended as The Egoist - a primary vehicle for modernist authors. I will then discuss these authors' attempts to forge ties to oppositional movements and to market modernism via institutions and material practices of commercial culture. Avant guerre oppositional groups, like women's suffrage organizations and socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist political movements, were intricately related to mass-advertising and mass-publication techniques, which were enjoying unprecedented success. …

The Goblin Market, or, the Sorrows of Satan

The Goblin Market, or, the Sorrows of Satan