Love Quote by Mary MacLane

A teenage girl in buttoned-up 1902 Butte, Montana declaring "I love devils" is not dabbling in Halloween aesthetics; she is throwing a lit match into the parlor. Mary MacLane wrote at the tail end of Victorian moral certainty, when female desire, ambition, and self-worship were supposed to appear only in sanitized forms. Her line works because it refuses sanitation. "Devils" is a compact symbol for everything the era coded as dangerous: appetite, vanity, dissent, erotic curiosity, intellectual arrogance. She loves the thing she is told to fear, and in doing so, she yanks the lever that turns shame into power.

The intent is partly theatrical - MacLane knew scandal is a megaphone - but the subtext is sharper than mere shock. Devils are not just rebels; they are also mirrors. To love devils is to admit attraction to transgression, yes, but also to acknowledge that the so-called evil is often just the self, unapproved. MacLane's writing stages a flirtation with damnation as a way to claim authorship over her own interior life. If society insists she's sinful for wanting more than marriage and modesty, she will take the label and wear it like a medal.

Context matters: MacLane's confessional voice predates our influencer-era oversharing, but it anticipates its logic. She markets the private self as spectacle while critiquing the rules that make it scandalous. "I love devils" is a slogan of self-creation: if holiness is the cage, she'll choose the horns.