The Massachusetts Medievalist on Satan, Suffrage, and Milton
The Massachusetts Medievalists loves a good collision among her varied interests, none so much as that between classic epic literature and women's rights apparent in this anti-Victoria Woodhull cartoon:
My very good friend whom I've never met, @DailySuffragist, posted the cartoon as part of an excellent women's history thread about Woodhull. Woodhull, who couldn't vote herself, ran for president in 1872 on a platform of "a kind of socialist paradise" and earned little more than vitriol, including the Thomas Nast cartoon showing her as "Mrs. Satan," rejected even by a woman bearing the burden of her children and her drunken husband.
Aside from the amazing image - I now think I might dress up as Victoria-Woodhull-Satan for Halloween - I was struck by Nast's obvious rip-off of Gustave Dore's 1866 illustration for the end of Paradise Lost, book four:
At this moment in Milton's epic poem, Satan has already whispered in Eve's ear as she lies asleep; too late, Gabriel and the other angels band together to drive him out of Paradise. Among other crucial details, note the backward glances of the Satans, the claws on their bat-like wings, the sloped ridgelines of the rocky outcroppings, the staffs of the overburdened mother and the background angels, and the hilarious echo of the shape of the angel and the shape of the drunken husband. I also love the way that Woodhull's devil horns take the shape of a Victorian coiffure.
Remember, however, William Blake's claim that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it" -- an idea championed by many of the Romantics who followed him as they read Milton's Satan as a heroic and seductive leader for freedom and passion. I imagine that Woodhull, with her advocacy for women's rights, free love, and economic equality, would have agreed with Satan that she brought to the conversation:
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n….
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
(PL book one 232-234, 263)
So I think Thomas Nast inadvertently added some fuel to Blake's fire - almost 150 years later, his cartoon actually increased my admiration for both Woodhull and Satan. I dream that the overburdened mother dumps her drunken husband over the edge of the ravine and starts a childcare collective with Woodhull and her feminist friends.
Thanks to @DailySuffragist (Rachel Tiven) and Anthony Apesos for assists on this post! Images from Library of Congress (Nast cartoon) and SUNY Buffalo Library (Dore illustration).