Marie Corelli’s Handling of Two Victorian Gender Stereotypes and Its Implications

Abstract

Marie Corelli, in her portrayal of the ‘Fallen Woman’, creates a new sub-type of ‘the Married Fallen Woman’ in Nina Romani (Vendetta), Lady Clara Winsleigh (Thelma), and Lady Sibyl Elton (The Sorrows of Satan). Violet Vere, both married and conventionally ‘Fallen’, is contrasted with the married and not yet officially ‘Fallen’ Lady Clara. La Marina in The Murder of Delicia is unmarried and ‘Fallen’, but plans to rise up from her ‘Fallen’ state through marriage. Corelli is at times unwittingly supportive of or even admiring towards the conventionally ‘Fallen’!

The other gender stereotype that Corelli treats – and subverts – is that of the Old Maid in The Young Diana (1918).Faking her own death, the thirty-plus Diana eventually undergoes rejuvenation in Geneva under an occult scientist. Not only does she regain her youthfulness, beauty, and sexual attraction, but transcends all that eventually to reject the very social construct of ‘woman’.

The paper attempts to trace the implications behind Corelli’s portrayals in a repudiation of the view that her thought-processes remained static from her first novel in 1886 to her death in 1924.