The Beauty Myth as the Root of Feminine Evil in Marie Belloc Lowndes’ What Really Happened
In: Illuminating the Dark Side: Evil, Women and the FeminineSearch for other papers by Elyssa Warkentin in
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Journalist, novelist, playwright and memoirist Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) obsessively returned to the subject of evil throughout her writing career, and focused nearly exclusively on the motives for female criminality. Although she is best (and often solely) remembered for her popular fictionalization of the Jack the Ripper case, The Lodger (1913), her later, academically-unknown novel What Really Happened (1926) offers a much more nuanced and sophisticated consideration of the intersection of criminal behavior and social gender roles. Based on the unsolved Charles Bravo murder case of 1876, the novel describes the poisoning death of Birtley Raydon through the prism of the relationship between two women: his beautiful wife Eva, and her plain, impoverished ‘lady housekeeper’ Adelaide Strain. Presciently, Lowndes’ novel demonstrates the inherent dangers in what Naomi Wolf would come to call the ‘beauty myth,’ which forces women into false competition with each other for the resources controlled by men. Eva and Adelaide are damaged in different ways by the beauty myth, but by the end of the novel, each woman has committed acts they, or others within the novel, call ‘evil.’ What Really Happened suggests a solution to the unsolved Bravo case, but it also makes a larger point about the nature of feminine evil. Lowndes posits that the root of feminine evil is the beauty myth that circumscribes feminine power, forcing desperate women to take desperate measures.