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Marie Corelli's Best-selling Electric Creed

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09699080500527428

1747-5848

Robyn Hallim,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Had scientific rationality replaced spiritual explanations of the purpose of human existence? And could morality be based on humanism rather than religious principles? These were issues that people in Britain confronted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical work on how this emerging scientific world view is reflected in the canonical literature of the period is plentiful but representations of science in the works of more popular writers—such as Marie Corelli—have rarely been critically assessed. This essay is intended to help redress the balance. Beginning by briefly examining how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious beliefs but also prompted a search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion, the essay moves on to a summary of Corelli's conflicting attitudes toward science and technology. While she regarded scientific materialism and humanism as a threat to spirituality, she also believed that scientific progress offered a means of attaining a higher evolutionary state. Finally, this essay offers critical readings of A Romance of Two Worlds (1887 edition) and The Life Everlasting (1911), which feature the nucleus of Corelli's personal theology known as “the Electric Creed”. These works uniquely engage with the New Testament, occultism, science, and spiritualism. Corelli's ambivalent attitude towards science as she expresses it in one of her later novels, The Secret Power (1921), is also critically explored.