Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Per Faxneld (review)

The title of Per Faxneld's Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century Culture is, appropriately enough, wickedly double. On the one hand, Faxneld's monograph traces how the figure of Satan and the associated rhetoric of Satanic worship was deployed by creators who wished to explore alternatives for women outside of contemporary constraints. On the other, Faxneld shows that anti-feminist commentators themselves turned Satan against nascent women's liberation movements, decrying feminism as [End Page e-6] an idea spawned from Hell that threatened to send society crumbling into the Ninth Circle. As Faxneld admits early on, Satanic feminism existed almost entirely independently of any actual Satanism (2–3), making this study's approach notably different from other studies of how feminism and nineteenth-century religion intersect, such as Ann Braude's Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (2001), Lisa Severine Nolland's A Victorian Feminist Christian: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes, and God (2004), or Laura Schwartz's Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion, and Women's Emancipation in England, 1830-1914 (2013). (The only full-blown Satanist to appear in the study is Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who Faxneld argues inverts misogynist traditions about demonic women and witchcraft in order to hint at more powerful cultural roles for women.) While Satanic feminism, pro and contra, drew on beliefs about Satan and witchcraft inherited from the early modern period, it was far more likely to be a performative pose—quite literally, in the case of silent film star Theda Bara—than a system of religious practice.

Satanic Feminism is a truly comparative study, covering the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, Finland, and Germany. It is equally wide-ranging in its objects of study: novels, pseudo-scholarship, occult writings, political journalism and propaganda, poetry, drama, early cinema, painting, sculpture, and even jewelry. And it also ranges far beyond its subheading's announced chronological limitations, stretching back to the Bible and forward to the mid-1920s. Despite the prominent part played by literature in the argument, Faxneld is a historian specializing in esotericism, and he primarily develops large-scale arguments in their various contexts (biographical, political, cultural, and religious) instead of more nuanced close readings. He is particularly interested in "disruptive and dissident modes of reading scripture" (11) or "counter-reading" (12), which take Biblical tropes and narratives and subvert them, whether by denying them altogether, ironically reworking them, or inverting them. Faxneld points us to the centrality of Genesis 3 in counter-readings; thus, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other contributors to The Woman's Bible (1895–1898) produced "a counter-myth where Eve is a heroine and Satan a charitable philosophical instructor of woman" (137). (In some cases, as with H. P. Blavatsky and the Theosophists, positive interpretations of Satan emerge, charitably speaking, from extensive philosophical and theological confusion.) At the same time, Faxneld critiques what he calls "scholarly Satanic feminism" (21), an approach he traces back to Susan Gilbert's and Sandra M. Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which he believes has a habit of "blur[ring] the line between their own [End Page e-7] feminist sympathies for the Devil" (21) and what is actually represented in the texts. Such approaches, including more recent and deliberately "perverse" (21) interpretive strategies, run the risk of turning scholarship into merely "new source material" (22). (One might cavil that all scholarly works are doomed to turn into source material, including Faxneld's avowedly apolitical project.)

For Faxneld, the rhetoric of Satanic feminism crosses languages and cultures, thanks not only to a shared Christian heritage, but also to internationalist political and esthetic movements (socialism, Decadence) that spread courtesy of postindustrial communications, travel, and publication technologies. He begins by laying out the universal sources for Satanic feminist discourse. After concisely introducing the reader to the history of Christian attitudes to Satan and "Satanism" (which, he argues, existed only...