Satanic Scarabs, Death Defiance, and Orientalist Art: Gothicised Egypt in the Novels of Marie Corelli and her Contemporaries, Richard Marsh and Guy Boothby

Satanic scarabs, defiance of death, and Orientalist art are manifestations of ancient Egypt written into Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897). This article foregrounds the twin motifs of scarabs – emblematic of pagan resurrection – and what it terms ‘Gallery Gothic’ – the darker undertones of painted visual representations, in this case associated with ancient Egypt. It teases out how Corelli's handling of them compares with two thematically linked, contemporaneous Gothic novels by authors similarly riding the wave of fin-de-siècle Egyptomania. In an approach that fuses post-colonially inflected Literary Studies with late-nineteenth-century Ancient Egyptian Reception Studies, it compares Corelli's texts with Richard Marsh's The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and Guy Boothby's Pharos the Egyptian (1899), contrasting how the respective authors transpose Egyptology, material culture, and museum culture into their popular fiction. This article exposes how Marsh's and Boothby's Egyptianising tropes preclude sympathetic alignment with foreign protagonists whereas Corelli, in what is part Egyptianised Gothic and part Egyptosophical Romance, delivers a closer engagement with Egypt past and present without any loss of supernatural thrills.