Woman Hate, Disgust, and National Happiness in the 1890s: Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan

This chapter explores Marie Corelli’s sensational 1895 bestseller The Sorrows of Satan to ask new questions about the history of emotions. The phenomenal popularity of this often anti-feminist novel, at a time when a large body of explicitly feminist writing was being published—including works by New Women writers—demonstrates the sheer diversity of women’s authorship and the extent of public debates about gender politics and emotions during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Corelli’s fiction critiques the impact that the modern British woman could have on a changing moral, emotional, and physical environment. Her blueprint for happiness—like her fallen archangel’s—is gendered. Society’s only chance of securing happiness is through men and women embodying the emotional virtues appropriate for their sex. Specifically, women leading men and other women to perform to the correct gendered emotional standards can guarantee happiness. But her vitriolic and vehement passages about one specific form of hatred—woman hate—present a view of the pressures placed on women to maintain traditional concepts of femininity within wider late nineteenth-century developments, feminist, and otherwise. The inference is that if a nation is considered morally and spiritually bankrupt, its women are to blame.