ABSTRACT
So speaks Lucio Rimânez, the diabolical anti-hero of Marie Corelli’s phenomenally successful spiritual romance The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Arguably the best-selling novel in nineteenth-century Britain,1 its recordbreaking sales testify to the ravenous late Victorian taste for tales of fantasy, exotic adventure, illicit eroticism, and spiritual comfort. Satan, in the guise of a sardonic ad hoc literary agent, settles in London to tempt the aspiring young author Geoffrey Tempest with literary notoriety (a quality that Corelli was careful to distinguish from the more noble and enduring literary fame she imagined herself to have won), cash, and the hand of the beautiful yet spiritually dead aristocrat Lady Sibyl Elton. Despite the otherworldly provenance of Corelli’s antagonist, his derisive characterizations of Britain’s contemporary high society bears what late Victorian readers would have recognized as a distinctly recognizable tone. The extent of modern Britain’s moral bankruptcy is described through a metaphor of linguistic devolution; the island’s inhabitants are no longer rational, articulate, and upright citizens but an atavistic brood of squabbling primates whose dehumanization is nowhere more evident than in the reduction of their language into meaningless jabber. The moral pathology of modern life pushes language back to its zero point, miring it again in the simian imitation and meaningless repetition from which it originated. Yet The Sorrows of Satan is no stock literary jeremiad of the type with which readers, both in the late nineteenth century and now, have become wearyingly familiar. As uncommon in its diagnosis of literary corruption as it was in its success, the novel mitigates the sting of Rimânez’s dyslogistic equation of linguistic primitivism with anarchy by presenting the popular romance as a privileged forum for the restitution of a spiritual Ur-language still alive, although fearfully
diminished, in the mind and soul of the common reader. Corelli’s fi ctional negotiation of the stigma of linguistic primitivism that attached to popular fi ction in the period of what Andreas Huyssen has termed ‘the Great Divide’ between high brow and mass culture makes her a fascinating and particularly useful fi gure for new mappings of the dynamic relationship between modernism, the popular romance, and anthropology.
