Judge — December 15, 1906 — page 7: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon satirizes extreme marital devotion through dark humor. It depicts a woman gazing wistfully at a scene showing the King of Annam (a French colonial territory in Vietnam) with his wife, referencing a literal or legendary account of the king consuming his beloved spouse as the ultimate expression of love. The joke mocks contemporary expectations of wifely sacrifice and devotion by presenting cannibalism as the logical extreme—the woman's envious exclamation "what wouldn't I give for devotion like that!" absurdly suggests she'd welcome such fatal commitment from her own husband. The satire critiques both the romanticization of self-sacrificial love and Western fascination with exotic (and often exaggerated or fabricated) accounts of non-Western royal behavior, which Judge's audience would have found simultaneously shocking and titillating.