Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

Abstract

This essay proposes a reassessment of nineteenth-century British women's poetry, challenging prevailing teleological models of literary history in order to resist the illusion of feminist progress from the Romantic to the Victorian period. Although overshadowed in current critical accounts that focus largely on the Corinne/Sappho/Eve models of the fallen (distinctly sexualized) woman artist, Milton's Satan offered an equally important (and stubbornly unrepentant) precedent for women's intellectual and artistic ambition. Romantic Satanism persisted in "enlightenment," "Romantic," and "Victorian" women's writings, across the boundaries of literary periods (and gendered spheres) that we have retrospectively imposed. In fact, Romantic Satanism is visible in the most "feminine" poetic phenomenon of the century—that of the "poetesses" of the 1820s and 1830s, and their numerous poems lamenting "The Fallen Pleiad." Once we include Satan's recurring rise and fall among the precedents for women's literary struggles, Corinne and Sappho become alternate axes around which to organize our genealogies, not the starring heroines in a linear history.