ABSTRACT
As popular literary forms gain greater scholarly standing, critics have begun to recognize the cultural importance of fin-de-siècle novelist Marie Corelli. Routinely outstripping the sales of contemporaries like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle by tens of thousands of yearly book sales, her magnum opus, a novel called The Sorrows of Satan, broke all previous English records during its initial sale in 1895 (Federico 6). As Annette R. Federico puts it, “It was the first modern bestseller, and it was read by everyone, from noblemen to scullery maids” (7). Critics have focused on this novel not only because of its massive popular success but because the narrative’s preoccupation with the politics of the literary marketplace shows us so much about being a female author in a male-dominated field. 1 Many of these same scholars have seen the novel’s authoress character, Mavis Clare, as Corelli’s narcissistic mouthpiece, her tool for lambasting her critics and setting herself up as the high priestess of morally upright art. I contend, however, that Corelli actually appropriates the suffering male archetype of Satan as her avatar in the novel in order to interrogate the interrelated problems of Christianity and patriarchy. As a direct portrayal of female authorship, Mavis Clare is too hemmed in by gender and literary market constrictions to make the kind of existential critique Corelli wanted to voice at this point in her career as a bestseller loved by the public yet rejected by the literati. Corelli’s revision of the figure of Satan, however, reveals the double-voice with which she operated, articulating through refracted and complex circuits the pain of an outcast soothsayer.
