Wimbledon, the collapse of the once-proud railroad system and near-catastrophic

breakdowns in the Tube, has rebounded. They may have lost the empire; they may

have lost tennis, rugby and cricket; they may even have lost Minnie Driver-but

by God, they have Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Ritchie, in her latest

incarnation as True Brit. As one British journalist kvelled: "Simply through

her presence, she has made London glamorous again."

When Madonna called upon the deity to spare the royalty

during her Fourth of July concert at London's massive Earl's Court arena, one

had to wonder which queen she wanted Him to save. If Madonna's residence in

London and her posh new English accent have done a lot for British self-esteem,

it could also be said that the new persona of "Madge" (the nickname

affectionately bestowed upon her by the local media) has done a lot for pop's

ruling figure. At 42, still an absolutely fabulous, terrifyingly athletic and

inventive performer, Madonna has nonetheless gone through more sexual personae

than all her rivals put together. Now, as both Lady Madonna, the gracious

doyenne of the castle, and Madge, the down-to-earth British mum, she is

starting the new millennium with more respectable, and possibly more durable,

roles than material girl and dominatrix.

Why does London love Madonna? Post-Diana, the city has been

starved of celebrities to populate its tabloids and flesh out its fantasies.

Since Oasis is between albums and Tom and Nicole broke up, who could be counted

on for a decent photo op or to upgrade a cultural event? London has been

struggling along with D-list "stars"-footballers, D.J.'s, models, remote

royalty, hat designers, politicians, artists, and assorted climbers and drunks.

These pseudo-celebs  gamely do their

best, but their antics are becoming repetitive, not to mention hard to sustain

from detox or jail. But Madonna is the real McCoy, a genuine superstar who

dresses her babies in Versace and buys £5 million houses.

Moreover, she follows local fashion. Her music recycles

Europop and techno. Her famously morphing hair is now long, blond and straight

like all the It Girls in the society

pages of Tatler . She expresses a fondness for going down to the pub. She had her

son Rocco christened at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland, and later married

British filmmaker Guy Ritchie in nearby

Skibo Castle. It's rumored that she plans to send daughter Lourdes to

upper-crusty Cheltenham Ladies' College. And both Lourdes and Rocco fit well in

a country where today's rich kids are named Tarquin, Dido and Merlin. She has

found friends in a chic crowd of rock royalty, including Stella McCartney, who

designed her wedding dress, and Trudie Styler, wife of Sting, who introduced

her to Mr. Ritchie.

The British are thrilled that she wants to be one of them;

all is forgiven, even her amateur guitar-playing and her slurs on the national

health system (she returned to California for Rocco's birth, claiming the

London hospitals were "old and Victorian"). As Alexis Petridis wrote in The Guardian after the July 4 show, "If

Madonna loves England, the feeling is clearly mutual. No matter what she does,

her British audience-last night featuring everyone from posing über-trendy to

suburban secretary plus London's gay male population-steadfastly refuses to be

alienated." Madonna lost some of her American following in the mid-90's, after

her heavy-handed sexual exhibitionism and her appearance as a manipulative diva

in the documentary Truth or Dare . But

"in Britain, every transgression is pardoned: her acting, her doltish

collaborations with husband Guy Ritchie, even the £85 tickets for last night's

show."

In Ms. Petridis' view, what impresses the British audience

is neither Madonna's glamour, nor her flattering adoption of local customs, nor

her shameless sucking up to the British public. ("What I really think," she has

announced, "is that even the most stupid Englishman is about 10 times smarter

than the most stupid American.") No, what the British admire in Madonna,

according to Ms. Petridis, is her commitment to "irony and experimentation."

For decades, the Brits have cherished the notion that not only are they the

world's most ironic nation, but that Americans are peculiarly deficient in this

sophisticated kind of wit. They enjoy celebrating Madonna as an exception, an

expatriate whose doltish countrymen cannot appreciate her avant-garde

sensibilities.

On the other hand, Madonna has also said that "you can start

all over again in England." And-in an irony the British should appreciate-she

is starting again by dismantling her postmodern image, her iconic status as a

creature of masks and guises, eternally reinventing a "self" that is no more

than an illusion of conventional beliefs about gender, power, nationality and

race. Rather than reinvent herself again, Madonna claims that in England she is

discovering a self beneath and beyond all the pretense and role-playing: "I'd

rather think that I'm slowly revealing myself, my true nature. It feels to me

like I'm just getting closer to the core of who I am."

Postmodernists deny the very idea of a core identity, but

they may discover that in the security of her new home, Madonna will unveil a

self both tantalizing and familiar to students of American culture. Her story

certainly has some parallels to the stories of Henry James and Edith

Wharton-the dynamic American heroine storms the Old World. Here is J. Randy

Tamborelli (the new Henry James?) describing the wedding in his best-selling

biography of Madonna: "She had come so far that her middle-class youth in Bay

City, Michigan must have seemed light years in the past as 42-year-old Madonna

Louise Ciccone gazed down at her guests, her manner composed, her demeanor

regal. As she stood at the top of a majestic staircase, its balustrade laced

with ivy and white orchids, she was resplendent in the supernatural light of

the great old castle." 

In some sense, Madonna

has become the people's queen without having to suffer, to sacrifice, to humble

herself, to show compassion. The woman who is about to get the full Princess

Diana treatment from biographer Andrew Morton didn't even bother to show up at

a recent London charity event she had allegedly sponsored. Mr. Tamborelli tells

a story of her Michigan dance teacher explaining that women like Judy Garland

and Marilyn Monroe achieved the status of gay icons because they were tragic.

"Well then, forget it," Madonna replied. "I will never be tragic. If it takes

being tragic to have gay fans, then fuck it."

Madonna's core self-composed of drive, focus and toughness,

and resulting in a series of unqualified and unapologetic successes-may be

exactly what makes her such a favorite in Britain now. In a country still timid

and embarrassed about overt ambition and the desire for power in men, let alone

women, Madonna is the perfect object of fantasy, projection and adoration-at

least for now (for royalty in exile is always precarious). Let Britain's other

female stars hide their light-let 18-year-old singer Billie Piper give up her

career to push supermarket carts full of booze for her yobbish husband, disc

jockey Chris Evans; let Emma Thompson go to Africa to help the needy and Mary

Archer defend her swindling, philandering husband in court-Madonna is carrying

the flag for self-assertion, the pleasure principle and having it all. What

could be more timely-and, ultimately, more American?

God save both queens.

In February 1870, the banker and editor Victoria Claflin Woodhull had a spectral guest in her mansion in Murray Hill: The Greek orator Demosthenes came to her in a vision and told her to lead a revolution to save women.

Immediately, Woodhull decided to run for President. "While others sought to show that there was no valid reason why a woman should be treated … as a being inferior to man," she explained, "I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country and, I now announce myself as a candidate for Presidency."

Feminist veterans like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, frustrated and exhausted by warring factions that had split the suffrage movement over issues like race, thought Woodhull might be the feminist Messiah or "new evangel of womanhood" they had eagerly sought. She was beautiful, and they were dowdy. She was rich and they were needy. She was charismatic and they were merely clear. "I have never in the whole 20 years' good fight felt so full of life and hope," Susan B. Anthony wrote of Woodhull. "Go ahead! bright, glorious, young and strong spirit."

But Harriet Beecher Stowe was horrified by the thought of a woman in the political mudpile. "Who ever is set up to be President of the United States," she wrote, "is just set up to have his character torn off from his back in shreds and to be mauled, pummeled, and covered with dirt by every filthy paper all over the country. And no woman that was not willing to be dragged through every kennel, and slopped into every dirty pail of water like an old mop, would ever consent to run as a candidate."

Soon they would all discover that Woodhull was already an old mop who had been slopped through many a pail. Before she came to New York, she had been a fortuneteller, clairvoyant healer, actress and even prostitute. She shared the splendid house in Murray Hill–bought with payoffs from Cornelius (Commodore) Vanderbilt for illicit stock-market tips–with two ex-husbands, her strange children Byron and Zulu and the whole parasitic Claflin clan of scam artists and snake-oil salesmen, who flocked to her like caterpillars to the green leaf. Her younger sister, Tennessee, had even been indicted for manslaughter after a death in her father's bogus cancer clinic.

Worst of all, Woodhull was an outspoken advocate of free love and free divorce. In 1871, she electrified the National Women's Suffrage Association's convention with her declaration of a "war upon marriage" as "the most terrible curse from which humanity now suffers." Using the oratorical skills she had developed on the stage, Woodhull called on American women to "rise and declare … yourself free…. We mean treason, we mean secession, and … we are plotting revolution!"

With 30 daily newspapers in New York alone to report it, the Woodhull scandal would polarize the women's movement, attract the prurient interest of self-styled Grand Inquisitors, and eventually implicate a wide circle of prominent citizens, including Stowe's own brother, the celebrated minister Henry Ward Beecher. Over a century before our own era's hysterical accusations of Presidential ritual abuse, these rumors of sexual wrongdoing would shock the Victorian establishment and expose the hypocrisy behind American public's values of domesticity and monogamy. Indeed, as Barbara Goldsmith argues in this sprawling but sparkling book, Victoria Woodhull was the star of a timeless American melodrama of politics, religion and sex.

Ms. Goldsmith has spent a decade researching Woodhull's life and placing it in the context of a huge and operatic cast of characters, but while she has done a heroic job in piecing the story together, the author has less success convincing us that Woodhull was a martyr ahead of her time. As ruthless as her opponents, Woodhull preached a doctrine more about freedom than love, which few women, then or now, were tough enough to embrace. The conflict between women's legal rights and their emotional and sexual wrongs divides feminists even today, and no female evangel has appeared during the century to resolve it.

Woodhull's career reflected a woman's "other powers" of spiritualism and clairvoyance during the era of Reconstruction, when a stern patriarchal religion maintained that women were sexless angels and helped deny them the vote. She grew up when many respectable American girls were dabbling in spirit rappings, magnetic healing and trance speaking, claiming to communicate with dead children or husbands lost in the War. Her parents, Roxy and Buck Claflin, ran a traveling medicine show in Ohio and taught their daughters the tricks of mind reading. Buck beat and starved the girls to encourage them in their trances; and the teenage Victoria later hinted that he also "made her a woman before her time." Today, she might have gone in for multiple personalities or recovered memories of satanic sacrifice; then, she took to her bed, talked to the angels and began to converse with spirits who promised her that "she would rise to a great distinction." A young local doctor, Canning Woodhull, came to treat her, and Victoria eloped with him when she was 14.

The marriage didn't last long, but Woodhull's subsequent adventures as a magnetic healer of female complaints and as a friend and supplier of goods to brothel-keepers brought her into contact with abuse, abortion, illegitimacy and other dark secrets of women's lives in Victorian America. Moreover, the raffish doings of the Claflins were only a more lurid and profitable form of what many respectable citizens were doing as well. They might be preaching family values by day, but they were trading wives by night. Moreover, the sexual puritanism of American life engendered an equally zealous and opposite reaction in free-love communes and cults like the Oneida Colony, New Harmony, Memonia and Modern Times, invariably led by alpha males like Stephen Pearl Andrews or John Noyes Miller, who ordained that they had the divine right to all the sex they wanted while others were assigned sexual partners and had to master esoteric disciplines of contraception. These colonies nonetheless attracted many female members.

Feminist utopian literature of the time also testified to women's fantasies of sexual diversity, control of fertility and guaranteed male companionship on their own terms. The two Iowa women who co-wrote the amazing Unveiling a Parallel (1893), for example, describe Cupid's Gardens, a luxurious manor of prostitution for women where, "lounging about on the lawn," the narrator beholds "several handsome young men."

Woodhull's rhetoric may have been strong, but in making sexual equality another power of women, she spoke for a hidden agenda in Victorian feminism. Laura Curtis Bullard, mistress of the editor Theodore Tilton, whose own wife, Lib, was having an affair with the married minister Henry Ward Beecher, declared that women wanted divorce more than they wanted the vote: "Women know their own wants, and they know that they do not want suffrage a thousandth part as keenly as they want a reform of the marriage and divorce laws…. What a woman wants is to marry and to be mistress of herself after marriage; freedom to freely surrender a yoke she has freely bound."

Thus when Woodhull was attacked in the press as a free lover, and when her own newspaper, exposing the Beecher-Tilton affair, was charged with obscenity by Special Postal Agent Anthony Comstock's Society for the Suppression of Vice, feminist leaders refused to join "the American inquisition." "If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified," wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns."

Drive the spikes they did: Woodhull went to prison, attempted suicide and renounced free love. As Stanton sadly admitted, the "scandalum magnatum" had "rolled on our suffrage movement," and it would be decades more before it recovered. But Stanton also maintained that Victoria Woodhull had "done a work for women that none of us could have done. She has faced and dared men to call her the names that make women shudder, while she chucked principle, like medicine, down their throats."