1 130067391

OPTION 2: A Bornsteinian Consideration of Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris

(1890)

Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (1890) contains elements associated with ‘highbrow’ art, such as

decadent themes and poetic prose, and popular elements, such as romantic, melodramatic plot

lines. Victoria Stewart describes Corelli as a middlebrow ‘proto-best seller’ novelist, associated

with neither ‘high modernism [n]or genre fiction’.1 Wormwood’s popularity may be attributed

to its ambiguous status between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Methuen’s 1921 publication of the novel

establishes the text as ‘middlebrow’ by reflecting this popularity, presenting it as disposable

and emphasising its best seller status, whilst also including ‘highbrow’ elements. Contrastingly,

Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse include text from Wormwood in their industrial

music album Absinthe – La Folie Verte (2002), transforming it into an obscure musical form.

These representations of Wormwood reflect the contexts they were created in, because the

Methuen novel emphasises the contemporary fin-de-siècle popularity of the text, while Blood

Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse reinvent Corelli as a great decadent poet, using her text to

create specialist, collectable art within the industrial music genre, borne of the digital age. In

the different contexts Wormwood is transformed from popular versions into transgressive

material to be appreciated by an elite.

Methuen’s 1921 edition of Wormwood is a generic version of a popular text geared

towards a ‘middlebrow’ audience. It is a 23rd edition, reflecting the longstanding popularity of

the text, because it has been republished many times since its original publication. It has been

printed cheaply, on thin paper which is roughly cut (Figure 1), reflecting the disposable quality

of the edition. It bears the standardised series cover (Figures 2 and 3) for ‘Methuen’s Two-

1 Stewart, Victoria, ‘The Woman Writer in Mid-Twentieth Century Middlebrow Fiction:

Conceptualizing Creativity’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.35:1 (October 2011), pp.

21-36, p. 22.

2 130067391

Shilling Library: Cheap Editions of many of the most Popular Novels of the day’ (Figure 4), a

series that included other writers typically considered ‘middlebrow’, such as H.G. Wells

(Figure 5), emphasising the generic nature of the edition, not warranting its own specialised

cover. This grounds the text as accessible in terms of cost and content; it is not a precious article

which would mark the reader out as cultured. The inside page lists ‘Marie Corelli’s Romances’

(Figure 6) establishing Wormwood as a romance novel, foregrounding the popular adventure,

fantasy, and sensational plots over the decadent endorsement of absinthe. While ‘middlebrow’

art often contains popular elements, another characteristic is attempts at ‘highbrow’ art. The

second page bears an epigraph in French (Figure 7) assuming a bi/multi-lingual reader.

However, it foregrounds the tragedy of the absinthe plot patriotically, labelling absintheurs as

‘braggarts of vice which are the shame and despair of their country’, rather than glamorising it

like decadent poetry. The next page bears a quote from Revelation about wormwood (Figure

8), and a translation into French. The biblical reference highlights the popular, moralistic

meaning, framing the text within a Christian understanding of value, and the archaic font is an

excessive attempt to ground the text in historic importance. This edition of Wormwood is

represented in its generic, popular form, foregrounding the popular aspects of the text which

gained it its best seller status.

3 130067391

Figure 1: Cheap, thin paper which is not cut neatly/properly.

Figure 2: Three examples of Corelli texts published as part of Methuen’s Two-Shilling

Library with a standardised cover: The Sorrows of Satan (1920), God’s Good Man: A Simple

Love Story (1922) and Thelma: A Norwegian Princess (1921).

4 130067391

Figure 3: Wormwood (1921) as part of Methuen’s Two-Shilling Library with a standardised

cover.

Figure 4: Corelli in Methuen’s Two-Shilling Library.

5 130067391

Figure 5: Corelli appearing in Methuen’s Two-Shilling Novels series with other

‘middlebrow’ authors, such as H. G. Wells.

Figure 6: List of ‘Marie Corelli’s Romances’ in the front page of the book.

6 130067391

Figure 7: Epigraph in French.

Figure 8: Quote from Revelations about wormwood, with a translation into French, in

Gothic/medieval font.

7 130067391

Contrastingly, Absinthe - La Folie Verte uses Wormwood’s ‘highbrow’ elements,

recreating the text within the intentionally obscure form of industrial music. Industrial music

is a subcultural genre, consisting of marginal aspects, such as transgressive lyrics and white

noise, making it inaccessible to the masses and creating a specialist audience. The song

‘Symphonie verte’, for example, consists entirely of white noise and synthesised organ music,

with no lyrics or melody. In the age of digitisation, during an acute overall sense of modernity,

as the rise of inventions such as the internet irreversibly change the way people interact with

the world, industrial music uses technology to reject traditional musical conventions, setting

apart an elite audience who understand its subversive significance. S. Alexander Reed explains

that the main function of industrial music is ‘affirming or suggesting identity traits […] to

listeners […] like “cool”, “misunderstood”, “cultured”’.2 Absinthe - La Folie Verte is a

collaborative project between Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse. Justin Massa

discusses Blood Axis as part of the racist skinhead subcultural movement, explaining how they

use their music to ‘push the cultural envelope, using the cultural trappings of hatred’, creating

‘“experimental” or “noise”’ music, existing in a marginal space in the music scene.3 Les

Joyaux De La Princesse are a little known band, whose music is usually released in small

numbers, alongside physical, intricate album art – itself becoming rarer in the digital age – as

collector's items to its intentionally elite audience. The record label which released Absinthe -

La Folie Verte, Athanor, reemphasises the niche market of the album, being a small

independent label mainly releasing music with dark, anti-Christian themes, contrasting against

Methuen’s conventional Christian framework. Both bands create intentionally enigmatic

2 S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2013), p. 14. 3Justin Massa, ‘Turning Down the Sounds of HATE: Young People Stand up Against White

Power Music’, in Fellowship, Volume 67 (Apr 30, 2001), p 14.

8 130067391

music, attracting small audiences, and elevate Wormwood in their use of its text to an elitist

form.

Absinthe - La Folie Verte places Corelli alongside Ernest Dowson and Charles Gros

(Figure 9), recreating her as a decadent poet, rather than a ‘middlebrow’ romantic fiction writer.

Blood Axis frequently use ‘highbrow’ modernist literature in their music, contributing to their

exclusionary audience attraction, assuming their listeners have knowledge of modernist literary

forms; for example, they use a recording of Ezra Pound reading from his Cantos in their song

‘The Voyage (Canto I)’ (1996). Their adoption of Corelli elevates her to a higher literary status

as Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse make no distinction between her and other

‘highbrow’ poets. Transforming Corelli’s text into lyrics brings it closer to poetry, as an oral

performance, with the ability to use tempo, emphasis and sound, rather than simple narrative.

The bands select sections of the novel which concentrate on decadent themes, omitting any

popular elements, such as romantic, melodramatic plot lines. For example, in the song ‘Venus

& Cupid’, they use text from the artist Gessonex’s speech to Gaston in Chapter 12, before

Gaston tastes absinthe for the first time. The adaptation of the decadent artist’s speech, into a

monologue accompanied by music, emphasises the ‘highbrow’ artistic elements of the text.

The first 70 seconds of the song consist of a man repeatedly singing the same line of opera

music, overlaid by a repeated riff of tinkling bells. The monologue starts simultaneously with

synthesised organ music, devoid of melody, obscuring the words so that they are barely audible.

The last 100 seconds of the song consist of white noise, intermittently overlaid by accordion

music. Selecting a speech performed by Wormwood’s figure of the artist, presenting it

independently from its original narrative function, and framing it amongst disorientating,

unconventional music, shapes the text for a more obscure, exclusive audience.

9 130067391

Figure 9: Text from Corelli’s Wormwood placed amongst decadent poetry in the liner notes

of the album.

The endorsement of absinthe was a suitable theme for Corelli’s contemporary decadent

poets, as a transgressive, anti-religion, and therefore ‘highbrow’, topic. Industrial music’s

similar aims make decadent pro-absinthe poetry an attractive form, and the inclusion of text

from Wormwood, amongst the glamorising album artwork, reimagines popular Corelli as a

‘highbrow’ decadent. The album artwork foregrounds Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la

Princesse’s project as a homage to absinthe, combining various absinthe related materials, such

as advertisements and anti-absinthe propaganda. This use of ‘lowbrow’ art is a common

10 130067391

‘highbrow’ technique, creating the everyday as unique and collectable.4 Furthermore, the use

of ‘lowbrow’ material which is now archival, lends a stylish, postmodern quality that elevates

the album’s cultural status. The intricate artwork, and unique amalgamation of historical

materials, makes the physical album attractive to collectors. This aesthetic appeal is intensified

as the album had limited release, making it rare. The front of the digipack (Figure 10) – itself

a rare, frail and therefore precious, form of CD packaging – depicts a decadently dressed

woman enjoying a glass of absinthe. The woman is depicted as sexually attractive, sitting in a

provocative position, with her back arched and face turned upwards, in exaggerated colours

with bright orange hair, and pale white skin. This image of pleasure and beauty is framed by a

golden border, creating it as a piece of art and spectacle. Therefore, the physical embodiment

of the music foregrounds decadent endorsement of absinthe, highlighting Wormwood’s

‘highbrow’ characteristics.

4 This relationship between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, as a rejection of the ‘middlebrow’, is

set up by Virginia Woolf in her writing on the ‘middlebrow’ – Virginia Woolf,

‘Middlebrow’, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). We can

assume, from Blood Axis’s knowledge of other modernists, such as Ezra Pound, that they

may have been aware of such critical prescription when creating their ‘highbrow’ art.

11 130067391

Figure 10: The front of the digipack.

Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse take a historically popular text and recreate

it for their industrial, elitist purposes. They appeal to a small audience, giving their work

specialist status by elevating the ‘highbrow’ characteristics of Wormwood to promote absinthe,

and anti-Christian messages, in contrast to Methuen’s biblical reference which highlights the

text’s didacticism. While Methuen’s 1921 edition of the text emphasises its popularity, as an

accessible and disposable novel to be enjoyed by the masses, Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la

Princesse targets, and validates their audience as “cool”, “misunderstood” and “cultured”.

Word count: 1571

12 130067391

I hereby certify that this submission is wholly my own work, and that all quotations from

primary or secondary sources have been acknowledged. I have read the section on Plagiarism

in the School Style Guide / my Stage & Degree Manual and understand that plagiarism and

other unacknowledged debts will be penalised and may lead to failure in the whole examination

or degree.

Bibliography

Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse, Absinthe – La Folie Verte (France, Athanor, 2002)

Corelli, Marie, Wormwood (London: Methuen, 1921)

Massa, Justin, ‘Turning Down the Sounds of HATE: Young People Stand up Against White

Power Music’, in Fellowship, Volume 67 (Apr 30, 2001)

Reed, S. Alexander, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2013)

Stewart, Victoria, ‘The Woman Writer in Mid-Twentieth Century Middlebrow Fiction:

Conceptualizing Creativity’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.35:1 (October 2011), 21-36

Woolf, Virginia, ‘Middlebrow’, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press,

1966)