Queer Blake

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10.1057/9780230277175 - Queer Blake, Edited by Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly

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Queer Blake


Also by Helen P. Bruder WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION

Also by Tristanne Connolly WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE BODY LIBERATING MEDICINE 1720–1835 (co-edited with Steve Clark)



WOMEN READING WILLIAM BLAKE (editor)

Queer Blake Edited by

and

Tristanne Connolly



Helen P. Bruder

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21836–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Queer Blake / edited by Helen P. Bruder, Tristanne Connolly. p. cm. Summary: “Over the last decade, Romanticism and queer theory have been mutually illuminating and incredibly productive, but this canonical ‘queering’ has somehow veered away from William Blake. This collection looks anew at Blake’s celebrated sexual visions, to see how they might appear once compulsory heterosex has been ditched as an interpretative norm”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978–0–230–21836–9 (hardback) 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Knowledge—Psychology. 3. Homosexuality and literature—England—History—19th century. 4. Homosexuality and literature—England—History—18th century. I. Bruder, Helen P. II. Connolly, Tristanne J., 1970– PR4148.H63Q44 2010 821 .7—dc22 2010002679 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



© Helen P. Bruder & Tristanne Connolly 2010. Chapters © their individual authors 2010

Contents vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’ Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly Pansexuality (regained) Helen Kidd

1 21

1 Blake and the Evolution of Same-Sex Subjectivity Christopher Z. Hobson

23

2 Blake and the Queering of Jouissance Richard C. Sha

40

3 Drawing Lines: Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas Peter Otto

50

4 Anal Blake: Bringing up the Rear in Blakean Criticism Elizabeth C. Effinger

63

5 The Body of the Blasphemer Martin Myrone

74

6 Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art Jason Whittaker 7 ‘Real Acting’: ‘Felpham Billy’ and Grayson Perry Try It On Helen P. Bruder

87 97

8 ‘Fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic Tristanne Connolly

116

9 ‘Woes & . . . sighs’: Fantasies of Slavery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion Bethan Stevens

140

v



List of Illustrations

Contents

10 ‘The lineaments of . . . desire’: Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Romantic Literary Treatments of Rape Caroline Jackson-Houlston

153

11 ‘Yet I am an identity / I wish & feel & weep & groan’: Blake’s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative Steve Clark

163

12 ‘By a False Wife Brought to the Gates of Death’: Blake, Politics and Transgendered Performances David Fallon

186

13 ‘No Boys Work’: Blake, Hayley and the Triumphs of (Intellectual) Paiderastia Mark Crosby

199

14 ‘Hayley on his Toilette’: Blake, Hayley and Homophobia Susan Matthews

209

15 ‘My little Cane Sofa and the Bust of Sappho’: Elizabeth Iremonger and the Female World of Book-Collecting Keri Davies

221

Works Cited

236

Index

256



vi

Cover illustration: William Blake, Wat Tyler and the Tax Gatherer. Charles Allen, A new and improved history of England. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. G. E. Bentley Collection, Victoria University Library (Toronto) c British 3.1 William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night III, page 40 Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Add. 39764 folio 20v) 3.2 William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night VIII, page 112 [108]. c British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Add. 39764 folio 54v) 5.1 William Blake, The Blasphemer (circa 1800), pen and ink and c Tate: Bequeathed by watercolour on paper, 384×340mm c Tate, 2009 Miss Alice G.E. Carthew 1940 5.2 Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825), Dame vor c Laokoon, 1801/1805, pen, 32×40.4 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich 2008 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved 6.1 Joel-Peter Witkin, ‘Woman Once a Bird’, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 2004 6.2 Joel-Peter Witkin, ‘The Tyger’, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 2004 c Manchester City Galleries 11.1 William Blake, Alexander Pope 14.1 Johann Henrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli, 1741–1826), The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women, 1810, pencil and c 2009 Kunsthaus Zürich. All watercolour, 31.5 × 40.8 cm rights reserved

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57

60

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83 90 95 166

216


List of Illustrations

Helen P. Bruder, amateur, wrote William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997), ‘Blake and Gender Studies’ in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies (ed. Nicholas M. Williams, 2006) and edited Women Reading William Blake (2007). Steve Clark is currently Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo. He is the author of Sordid Images: the Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994) and has published a number of articles on eighteenth-century philosophy and the poetry of sensibility. He has also published widely on new historicism and theories of historiography, with a focus on the work of Paul Ricoeur. Co-editor of several collected volumes, including five on William Blake, his most recent are Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and South East Asia (with Paul Smethurst, 2008) and Liberating Medicine 1720–1835 (with Tristanne Connolly, 2009). Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor in the English Department at St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She is the author of William Blake and the Body (Palgrave, 2002) and articles on various aspects of Blake. She is co-editor, with Steve Clark, of Liberating Medicine 1720–1835 (2009), and editor of Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability (Intellect, forthcoming 2010). As a co-investigator on a five-year interdisciplinary project, ‘City Life and Well-Being: the Grey Zone of Health and Illness’, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), she is currently researching representations of reproduction in the long eighteenth century. Mark Crosby is currently the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has just completed a book that examines Blake’s responses to patronage, entitled Immortal Friendship: William Blake and the Politics of Patronage and has published a number of articles on Blake in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, the British Art Journal and the Huntington Library Quarterly. He is also the bibliographer for the Blake Archive. His next project will attempt to recuperate William Hayley in the eyes of the literary community. Keri Davies is Vice-President of the Blake Society. An independent scholar, he has written on William Blake’s parents (particularly in relation to his mother’s links with the Moravian Church), and on the social and intellectual milieu of early Blake collectors, and other friends and acquaintances of the painter-poet. viii





ix

David Fallon is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, working on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature. He completed his doctoral thesis, ‘William Blake and the Politics of Apotheosis’, at the University of Oxford and is currently working on a book on Blake, politics, and Enlightenment accounts of myth and religion. His articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Life and Literature Compass, and he contributed an essay to the collection Blake and Conflict. Christopher Z. Hobson, Associate Professor of English at State University of New York, College at Old Westbury, is author of The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (1999) and Blake and Homosexuality (2000) and co-editor of Blake, Politics, and History (1998, with Jackie DiSalvo and G.A. Rosso). He is currently at work on a two-volume study of prophetic traditions in African American religion and literature. Caroline Jackson-Houlston is a Senior Lecturer and Field Chair of English at Oxford Brookes University, working in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Her monograph on allusion to folk song in nineteenth-century prose fiction, Ballads, Songs and Snatches, came out in 1999 and she is currently working on a book-length study of gender in the work of Walter Scott and his contemporaries. Helen Kidd teaches on the English Studies, Creative Writing and Critical Practice degree course at Ruskin College, Oxford. Her last collection of poetry, Blue Weather (2005), won the Cork Poetry Manuscript Competition, and she has been an editor, reviewer and academic working on poetry for many years. She has worked with artists and musicians on a number of projects in prisons, hospitals and schools, and co-founded the Cross Arts installation group Folding Air in 1998. Susan Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. She published on Blake and on the women’s novel in the early 1990s. Recent essays have appeared in Blake, Nation and Empire (ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall, Palgrave 2006) and Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (ed. Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker, Palgrave 2007). A monograph, Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness, is forthcoming in 2010. Martin Myrone is a Curator at Tate Britain, London. He has written widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and culture, with an emphasis on questions of gender, identity and cultural value. His publications include



Elizabeth C. Effinger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, specializing in transgressive bodies and technologies within contemporary theory and Romanticism. She has an article on cyber-suicide appearing in the collection Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability (ed. Tristanne Connolly, Intellect, forthcoming 2010).


monographs on Henry Fuseli and George Stubbs, essays on antiquarianism, exhibition culture and spectacle, and the major study Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (2005). As a curator, he has worked on exhibition projects covering the full range and variety of British art, from medieval sculpture through to the contemporary. He was co-curator of the international loan exhibition, Gainsborough (Tate Britain, London; National Gallery, Washington and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2002–03), and curator of Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (Tate Britain, London 2006). Peter Otto is Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His recent research has focused on the emergence of modern notions of virtual reality in the literature, popular entertainments and art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has coedited two collections of articles on Romanticism and authored two books on William Blake – Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction (1991; 2001) and Blake’s Critique of Transcendence (2000; 2006). A microfilm collection of Gothic Texts (338 volumes), co-edited with Alison Milbank and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, and an accompanying monograph, were published in 2002–03. A second microfilm collection, Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science (220 volumes), was published in 2007. Richard C. Sha is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. He has published The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (1998) and Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (2008). He has edited two collections of essays: one on ‘Romanticism and Sexuality’ for Romanticism on the Net in 2001, and another on ‘Historicizing Romantic Sexuality’ for Romantic Praxis (January 2006). Bethan Stevens is a DPhil student at the University of Sussex. She catalogued the William Blake collection at the British Museum. Her essay, ‘Putting to rights some of the wrecks: Nancy Flaxman’s contributions to the Italian journey’ is in David Bindman (ed.), John Flaxman: Master of the Purest Line (2003), and she has published work on Blake and on the Pre-Raphaelites. Jason Whittaker is Professor of English and Media Arts at University College Falmouth. He is the author of William Blake and the Myths of Britain (Palgrave, 1999), and, with Shirley Dent, Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife (Palgrave, 2002). He is co-editor with Steve Clark of Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2007). He has also published a number of essays on Blake, plus three books on new media and technology, and various articles on cyberculture and communities.



x

E BA

Erdman, David V., ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake The Blake Archive: www.blakearchive.org

Unless otherwise noted, all references to Blake’s text are taken from E, and all references to images from BA. BR BIQ BT SIE MHH VDA Am Eur SL BU Ah BL M J FZ DC PA OED ODNB

Bentley, G.E. Jr, Blake Records Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly The Book of Thel Songs of Innocence and of Experience The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Visions of the Daughters of Albion America: A Prophecy Europe: A Prophecy The Song of Los The Book of Urizen The Book of Ahania The Book of Los Milton Jerusalem The Four Zoas A Descriptive Catalogue Public Address Oxford English Dictionary Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

xi



List of Abbreviations



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Introduction: ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’

Over twenty-five years ago W.J.T. Mitchell expressed the hope that in future critics would give attention to the ‘dangerous . . . nasty . . . filthy’ Blake sanitized by earlier scholars in the process of making him ‘safely canonized’, and the study of his works properly professional (Mitchell 1982, 410, 411, 414). During his prophetic musings, Mitchell identified a fat streak of Blakean sexual obscenity, which often took very queer forms and though it’s now uncomfortable to witness his herding of homosexual fellatio, effeminacy and lesbian voyeurism along with rape, lust and sadomasochism under the single (dirty) banner of ‘abnormal sexuality’, the vivid – heterosexconfounding – scenes he revealed (414) made it reasonable to assume that when queer came in from the cold, Blake Studies would offer a warm welcome. At that decade’s end Camille Paglia’s (1990) lurid account of Blake as ‘the British Sade’ (270) certainly suggested a similar critical future. Her apparition of the poet may tremble and thrash beneath ‘the Great Mother’ but Oedipal terror gifts queer insight too, for ‘Blake’s dreadful fate was to see the abyss from which most men shrink: the infantilism in all male heterosexuality’ (287). And, in the 1990s, queer glimmers did occasionally flash out from scholarship on gender, particularly that which tried to leap the brick wall that feminist criticism had come up against in trying to adjudge Blake’s ‘misogyny’. While scholars like Marc Kaplan (1995) dug in, mentioning homosexuality only to write it off as arrested development and to assert that Blake’s ideas of gender are essentialist, Steve Clark in Sordid Images: the Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994) found that Blake’s performative language causes desire to float untethered, not requiring any ‘relation to a specific individual’ (158). Blake’s binaries aren’t based on traditional gender opposition either, as often ‘both terms are dubbed masculine’, for instance the Prolific and Devourer (159), and taking this to Jerusalem Clark senses that ‘to be “mutual in love divine” is a homosocial, if not homoerotic, condition’: ‘the “fibres of love” that run “from man to man” . . . become explicitly spermatic’ (173). 1



Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly

Queer Blake

Other work was queerly suggestive, too, for while Clark found Sedgwick’s (1985) uneasy love triangles in Jerusalem, Eijun Senaha (1996) identified in ‘The Sick Rose’ a masturbating girl who may have something other than men on her mind: though he believes ruddy ‘Rose’ is probably imagining a male lover, there is still a recurring emphasis on the ‘rejection of heterosexual relationships’ (27), leading to a suggestion that female auto-erotic self-sufficiency only looks ‘sick’ to men excluded from the charmed circle. Interesting, too, was Betsy Bolton’s (1997) use of Randolph Trumbach’s (1991) research on mollies and tommies, sodomites and sapphists in her consideration of hermaphroditism, which helped sharply focus just how predominant gender fluidity is throughout Milton. Historicism also produced queer insights when married to traditional textual studies. In an essay in Blake in the Nineties (1999) Keri Davies unearthed, in the evocatively named Mrs Bliss, not only the fact of a lesbian readership, but the possibility of the influence on Blake of the friendship, and library, of ‘a dissenting, woman-centred, female connoisseur’ who seems to have exemplified eighteenth-century-style passions between women (212–13, 221). Davies’s insistence that in light of this we should reassess Blake’s contemporary audiences was a timely reminder that Blake Studies needed to catch up with the then-growing influence of queer studies in Romanticism. The start of the new century, then, felt appropriately auspicious, with the appearance of Andrew Elfenbein’s ‘Genius and the Blakean Ridiculous’ (1999) and Christopher Z. Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality (2000) clearing two fruitfully queer paths for Blakeans to pursue. Elfenbein’s chapter is a joyous clarion call for the recognition of Blake as queer art’s ‘honorary icon’, the ‘patron saint’ of marginality (150) and his sublimely playful reading of scenes from Milton reveals the camp maestro Elfenbein is so keen for others to love. Far-reaching too is the claim that ‘Part of the fun of reading’ Blake ‘is that his campiness shatters illusions about the reader’s neutrality’, for turning a queer spotlight on the investments of ‘pokerfaced’ (150) critics is as enlightening as it is enjoyable. An outsider spared indoctrination into the Blake cult, Elfenbein is unabashed in his critique of ‘customary, heterosexist guides’, exhorting camp stormtroopers to ‘challenge the heterosexism that . . . prevailed in Blake criticism’ for much of the twentieth century (176, 15). Rather different, tonally and methodologically, is Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality, whose meticulous mode of argument twinned with illustration is, in its own way, equally rebellious. Hobson, a critic fully versed in Blakean lore, subtly and searchingly modifies the dominant historicist mode to show, in detail, a Blake who, in contrast to his murderously homophobic contemporaries (even those whose political enthusiasms he shared (1–22)), became increasingly accepting, even appreciative, of same-sex couples, acts and self-images. Like the feminists before him, Hobson reveals new sexual contexts and histories, and amongst his book’s many virtues is the space it finds to discuss lesbian liaisons



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(63–75, 150–62), couplings easily smothered by Blake’s volcanic homoerotic outpourings. Taken together, Elfenbein and Hobson sophisticated, indeed surpassed, Mitchell’s imaginings, thereby seeming to guarantee that a subject which Margaret Storch (2003), in a review of Blake and Homosexuality, readily acknowledged to be ‘an important aspect of Blake that is too often ignored’ (38) had attained a place at the top table of Blake Studies. It’s extraordinary, then, that until Queer Blake precious few followed either critic’s lead: neither celebratory reinterpretation nor queer historicizing has flourished. Furthermore, what little work has been produced is characterized by a strange modesty. A striking example of this perplexing diffidence is queer’s place within Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker’s Radical Blake (2002). These critics clearly share Elfenbein’s impatience with the obfuscating pieties characteristic of the straight academy, yet oddly hobble their evident enthusiasm for accessible alternatives by opting to diffusely discuss the queer nation (80–8). Since spiky Derek Jarman appears as Blake’s most noteworthy fellow Bent Brit, we sadly learn little about the ‘light . . . vision . . . beyond . . . machismo’ which elsewhere they tantalisingly claim ‘Blake offers’ to ‘artistic radicals, male and female, straight and queer’ (136). Baffling too are the related choices made in Mark Douglas’s ‘Queer Bedfellows: William Blake and Derek Jarman’ (2007), for since he candidly confesses that it’s ‘by no means obvious’ the pair ‘make comfortable’ slumberbuddies, why not dump Jarman and his ‘peculiarly complex and elite English structure of feeling’, his ‘Queer cultural conservatism’ (116) in favour of, say, even such supremely populist queens of Bent Britishness as Little Britain’s Lucas and Walliams? Either way, Blake’s queer significance goes transatlantically beyond British masculinities, as Edward Larrissy’s (2006) aside about Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, ‘gay poets who regard Blake as an ally in the reaction against orthodox heterosexuality’ (126), suggests; but, again, extant comparative studies are minimal and timid. Marcus Wood’s (2002) eye-watering account of ‘the outrageous humour which Blake and [Robert] Mapplethorpe bring to the subject of the white man’s terror at the black man’s penis’ (124) indicates what a regrettably curious silence this is. And we remain aeons away from full understanding of the fascinating ‘love affair between gay writers and William Blake which’, Elfenbein explains, ‘has been long and happy’ (199, 149), something that’s surely odder still, given the paucity of ‘happy happy Love!’ (VDA7:16, E 50) in either Blake’s canon or the criticism it has inspired. Tom Hayes, author of ‘William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal’ (2004), certainly struggles to keep hold of the blissful, polymorphously perverse ‘utopia’ he believes Blake offered for the delectation of fey ‘young men’ (141, 161). His essay is a refreshingly expansive intervention, though one somewhat hampered by the centrality of Hayes’s singular conviction that Blake’s queerness is best accessed by fixing critical attention on the allegedly




Queer Blake

homoerotic gaze of a putative self-portrait (141–4). Doubtless fugitive torment was involved if a Romantic man were ‘to avoid conforming to the code of heterosexual masculinity’ but we’d likely gain a finer sense of Blake’s achievements if Hayes went beyond the Lacanian notion of ‘so-called queer desire’ (Hayes 2004, 143–4; our emphasis) and directed his conceptual concern toward the body of work, rather than reading the face of the artist. Still, his audacious argument stands out, especially when viewed alongside the modest presence of queer theorizing within a recent clutch of otherwise gender-rich postcolonial, postmodern and feminist collections: Clark and Suzuki’s The Reception of Blake in the Orient (2006), Clark and Worrall’s Blake, Nation, Empire (2006), Clark and Whittaker’s Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (2007) and Bruder’s Women Reading William Blake (2007). Looking over these volumes, surprise is again the keynote, for with a couple of rare exceptions, queer questions receive little more than a nod of acknowledgement. It’s striking, too, that this marginalization coincides with a renaissance of passionate argument in favour of the peerless productivity of the copulating heterosexual couple. Whilst neither Marsha Keith Schuchard’s Why Mrs Blake Cried (2006) nor Magnus Ankarsjö’s William Blake and Gender (2006) is exclusive or antagonistic, Schuchard’s graphically illustrated conviction that Blake ‘made clear . . . conjugal love between an earthly husband and wife . . . is the true key to spiritual vision’ (334) and Ankarsjö’s belief that a Blakean ‘gender utopia’ is best achieved through vigorous ‘malefemale reunion . . . togetherness’ (3) do refashion straight idealism at precisely the moment when we might reasonably expect it to be queered. These days, even Blake sceptics who know a thing or two about sexual liberation, like Germaine Greer, readily acknowledge ‘his ideal of gratification . . . dissociated from reproduction . . . free of any identification with any particular way of sex’ (2007, 84). Frankly, the whole situation is queer, with some firmly persuaded that Blake’s married marvels are the visionary’s greatest gift to us, whilst others sense that it is his uniquely liberal depiction of homosexuality, at a time when ‘publicly expressed’ views ‘varied only in nuances of execration’, which can go ‘some way toward preserving, in modified form, Blake’s status as “prophet”’ (Hobson 2006, 149). Obviously, we dwell in the latter camp, and we do so for the beautiful reason that Blake tells us to. ‘All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of / Los’s Halls’, he confides, and the capaciously inclusive sexual imagination which opts to catalogue ‘every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or / Wayward Love . . . Every Affinity . . . In all their various combinations’ (J 16.61–7, E161; our emphasis) can be termed queer, in traditional and contemporary senses alike, for it encompasses the humanly odd, grotesque and outlandish and it confounds narrow, natural norms through a ‘wondrous Art’ that consciously declares its aim to capture humanity’s awesomely diverse erotic and emotional proclivities. In rudimentary, raw encounters with Blake it is precisely this pan-eroticism – transgendered in



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imagination, bisexual in appetite – which most resoundingly smacks the reader/viewer between the eyes. Whilst familiarity can deaden the thwack of his remorselessly flexed and sinuous flesh, for Blake’s contemporaries it was an immediate shock to sensibilities, and almost definitive of Blake’s visual style that he made spiritual bodies, too, impossibly fleshy. Reviewing his designs for Blair’s Grave, The Examiner (1808), for example, honed in on how ‘an appearance of libidinousness intrudes itself upon the holiness of our thoughts’, while The Antijacobin (1808) wished for some heavenly male modesty: ‘the descending angel . . . might have been furnished with wings to infold his nakedness’ (BR 261, 272). And fresh encounters today, though less judgemental, still involve shocked responses to his gallery of taut pecs, long limbs, pert butts and phalli agogo – and not least because these sexual/ized shapes and poses were very evidently important to, and hugely significant for, Blake himself. Why else would he confer his most moving, magnificent rump on the unrobed Milton, or attach his most proudly displayed penis to Los, to brandish centre-stage at an unprecedented moment in macho European history: ‘And with a cry that shook nature to the utmost pole, / Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood’ (Eur 15:10–12, E66)? That euphoric icon of celebratory male physicality, Glad Day / Albion Rose, seems to lift his perfectly proportioned arms over Blake’s whole corpus, animating perhaps even actions like the cruciform dance of Christ’s ecstatic, worshipful emulator on Jerusalem Plate 76. Moreover, since these naked bodies are so shameless, and ‘All deities reside in the [remarkably muscular, often androgynous] human breast’ (MHH 11, E38) why hasn’t Blake’s status as queer icon gone hand in hand with his long-standing status as energetic sexual liberator and religious rebel? To get Orwellian, it would appear that some countercultures are more equal than others, for there seems to be an unspoken limit placed on the allencompassing assertion, ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ (MHH 27, E45). This question, of how far ‘every thing’ applies, recalls the difficulties Blake’s contemporaries found with transferring the Rights of Man across genders, races and (as Hobson examines) sexualities. Saree Makdisi (2003) argues that much British radicalism relied on the very non-radical move of projecting what was not rational or self-controlled on to a decadent Orient, and he celebrates Blake for being the only one to avoid such Anglocentrism (204–59): a move which interestingly resembles that same projection in that it deflects undesirable characteristics away from Blake, even though they may well be detected in his work. Importantly, this kind of move also sheds light on the strategies which have long upheld and protected the ideal of Radical Blake. William Bloke1 is healthy, macho, rough and ready, ‘typical’ English working-class. As much as literary canonizers like Frye had to deflect the imputation of Blake’s insanity, Radical canonizers had to be in denial about his perversions beyond free love, and about the credibility of his desire to get ahead




Queer Blake

in effete upper-class aesthetic milieux. The politico-sexual subtext? Queer is for poofy toffs; transgender softness for bleeding-heart liberals. For a founding father of Radical Blake, E.P. Thompson, a feminized Christ is the emblem of everything that is milky and condescending about reforming Methodists. He quotes the physically intimate hymn, ‘His bleeding heart shall make you room, / His open side shall take you in’ and shortly proceeds to set up Blake as a sharp-eyed critic of such smarm: ‘In London a Jacobin engraver went to the “Garden of Love” and found’, as we know, a chapel with ‘ “Thou shalt not” writ over the door’ (1968, 40, 44). To Thompson, this is a Methodist chapel and Blake is pointing the finger at ‘the reactionary – indeed, odiously subservient – character of official Wesleyanism’ (45). But how does he know that is where Blake’s protest is aimed, rather than against another repressive command, ‘thou shalt not’ approach Christ emotionally or, God forbid, sensually? Thompson denounces ‘sexual sublimation streaked through with masochism: the “bleeding love”, the wounded side, the blood of the Lamb’, and credits Blake with criticizing, as Thompson himself does, ‘social energies denied outlet in public life which were released in sanctified emotional onanism’ and ‘a cult of “Love” which feared love’s effective expression’ (44). Yet this estimation overlooks Blake’s efforts to expand the definition of ‘love’s effective expression’, evidenced in, for example, the appeal of the tenderly feminized Christ; Jerusalem’s spermatic Christian brotherhood; even the beautifully vulnerable masculinities displayed by his boys in Songs. We might also ask, what exactly is the status of onanism and masochism in Blake’s cry against religious repression? In ‘The Garden of Love’, ‘priests in black gowns’ (SIE 44:11, E26) may be figures of constraint, yet they also call up Gothicized Protestant associations of Catholic clergy with a long and lurid list of perversions. Also, the juxtaposition of ‘binding with briars’ and ‘joys and desires’ may be more complicated than it seems (are we meant to take the speakers in Experience straight?) when considered alongside ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’: just how delightful is it that ‘her thorns were my only delight’ (SIE 43:8, E25)? From the way Thompson’s ideas developed, within and beyond his own work, it seems that if Blake is to be associated with erotic mysticism, it must not be of any queer sort. The kind of sexuality celebrated in Schuchard’s (2006) picture of Moravian practice is positive and mutual (as against pleasure in pain, or self-pleasuring), and its life-giving power is solidly based on its fertile male-female potentiality. Yet, despite the explicitness of its symbolism, it is strangely sublimated and restrained (all of this sexual energy channelled toward spiritual purposes), and despite its hetero emphasis, the subordination of the female as vessel and the overwhelming celebration of the phallus suggest homoerotic impulses painstakingly reoriented. Interestingly, Thompson found that in Muggletonian eternity there are male forms only, but they are spiritualized and asexual (Thompson 1993, 83–4).



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In this context, of course, critical passions run very high, and not least because Blake’s self-proclaimed status as prophet (religious, political, sexual) has the effect of encouraging readers to take the position of devoted disciple, true believer, proselytizing preacher. Recently, for example, Jonathan Roberts’s William Blake’s Poetry: a Reader’s Guide (2007) painted a portrait of Blake that is thoroughly, admirably Christian, but also thoroughly sexless: there is much discussion of love but none of sexuality, let alone nonheteronormative sexuality. On the expansion of perception in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he claims Blake’s ‘argument is that to see reality, our sensory perceptions have to be combined with compassion or love, which means, effectively, that we need to see the world and each other with the eyes of God’ (65). ‘Improvement of sensual enjoyment’ (MHH 14, E39) is not quoted, nor its (devilish?) pansexual suggestions considered. At times Roberts gets almost evangelical (‘In Blake’s view, we are called upon . . . ’ (62)), yet he can’t really be blamed: this is a passionate, particular response to Blake’s passionate prophecy. It is certainly understandable that those who espouse Blake on the touchy subjects of politics, religion and sex will be deeply upset by views of Blake which do not accord with their cherished image – for he is, without doubt, a cult figure, and not least because his wideranging insistence on ‘all’ and ‘every’ makes him available to many factions to claim as mascot (the classic example being ‘And did those feet’ as jingoistic hymn or radical anthem). Perhaps even more intriguing, though, is the intensity which is common across a diversity of positions. Philip Pullman (2006), vocal about his atheism, nonetheless distils a ‘credo’ from Blake, and is eloquently self-conscious about his personal attachment: ‘I find it hard to write about Blake because I can’t be objective about him. I can’t be judicious and measured, weighing his merits against his deficiencies and coming to a balanced and thoughtful conclusion. The fact is, I love him. I am as intoxicated at 60 as I was at 16.’ Evidently, wherever one stands – politically, religiously, sexually – loving Blake as much as many of us do is at least a little bit queer. The range of lovers – hetero, bi, lesbian – bestowing bouquets in Women Reading William Blake (Bruder 2007) further demonstrates this. Plus, ‘Youth of delight come hither’ (SIE 54:1, E31), it starts young: a recent exhibition reviewer comments, ‘Students . . . clearly loved their subject, their playfulness a sure indicator of how Blake’s work became their own’ (Rovira 2008/9, 111). Returning to his objects of desire, it’s clear Blake’s bodies tend to meld the sacred and profane so unnervingly that the canonizers’ embarrassment is almost forgivable. And yet it remains one of queer’s most pressing and valuable tasks to refocus the ultra- and omni-sexual undertow of Blake’s deepest concerns, for even a glance at a couple of scenes, one verbal (M 19:1–14, 27–31, 20:7–14, E112–14) one visual (J 6 with J 5:66–7:7, E148–9), shows that he eagerly invites us to. Milton’s riverside confrontation with Urizen is a crucial step in his redemptive journey, and it’s crucial too that Milton’s




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Queer Blake

. . . moulding it with care Between his palms: and filling up the furrows of many years Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him As with new clay a Human Form (19:9–14, E112) This is one of the loveliest depictions of that redemptive, human(e) handiwork so constitutive of Blakean ‘Vision’ and, importantly, it’s a homosensual process of rebirth – ‘giving life . . . To his adversary’ (19:29–30, E113) – through which Godlike artistic genius is transgendered, as shaping and birthgiving marry: ‘Milton stood before / The darkend Urizen; as the sculptor silent stands before / His forming image . . . patient labouring’ (20:7–9, E114). A queer eye, then, deepens appreciation of poignant male moments, and if we turn to Jerusalem and glimpse masculine mental processes, we see that critical gaydar picks up on meaningful manly obscenity too. Jerusalem 5:66–7:7 (E148–9) describes the dreadful hour when Los loses his Emanation and is left alone with his Spectre in a femme-free world. Their anguished proximity – ‘His spectre . . . black and / Opake divided from his back . . . and . . . stood over Los / Howling in pain’ (6:1–2, 4–5, E148–9) – is visually represented with unusual directness on Plate 6. What is also strikingly direct is the graphic implication that in man-only spaces intense connection is inclined to take physically intimate forms, for the Spectre’s ‘hunger and thirst: / To devour Los’s Human Perfection’ (6:13–14, E149) crystallizes in his greedy appetite for Los’s superhumanly erect ‘tool’, which the prophet playfully caresses (beneath these words), pointing its coyly covered tip straight into the Spectre’s face. In a scene framed by licking flames and blowing bellows, Los’s uptilted head and rapt gaze carry vivid sexual suggestions. Even to overstimulated twenty-first century orbs this is a shocking image. Obscenity and revelation seem to be two sides of a single coin for Blake, and so it must be queer’s aim to examine why he chooses to open one of his most thoroughgoing explorations of spectrousness (for Plates 7 through 11 teach, for example, that the Spectre is man’s ‘Holy Reasoning Power’ (10:15, E153) and, under coercion, is immensely productive) with what appears to be a cameo of triangular homopsychic and homosexual jealousy. The Spectre, ‘bitterly cursing’ Los ‘for his friendship / To Albion’,



renunciation of the hard, repelling masculinity figured in his alter-ego’s marble and rock, ice and snow, is achieved through a restorative laying on of hands. True to type, Urizen’s ‘broad cold palm’ pours forth ‘icy fluid’ but, as Milton transforms himself by transforming his creation, he opts to work in a soft, feminized medium, ‘red clay’, lovingly making a new man for, and of, himself from this pliable element:

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condemns the Great Man’s suspiciously oral lust: ‘He drinks thee up like water!’ (6:6–7, 7:11, E149). Certainly, unease accompanies the apprehension of sweaty Los, ‘panting like a frighted wolf’ during a tearsoaked spat with his aroused Spectre, but since this murky male trusts he’ll be able to ‘lure Los . . . by spasms & extended pains’ (7:1, 6–7, E149) it’s a dimension of prophetic psychosexuality which we’re obliged to weave into the mix. While here queer reading confronts domination and subordination between men, it can also enliven ongoing feminist debate about the objectification of women and freshly inflect discussion of that perennial poser: are female sexuality and feminine sensuality structurally – axiomatically – subservient within Blake’s homocentric, political, national, erotic, religious, artistic agendas? Though stark statements rarely pin his testy, tricksy nuance, a couple of observations are possible. The first is that when it comes to sexual objects, especially visual ones, Blake’s love of muscle and sinew – in a word, of strength – dictates that it is male bodies that are displayed with most relish. Indeed, his heft is so heartily in this direction that female physique frequently figures as a waxy afterthought, plastered over the beloved male chassis beneath; and though resort to the ‘human form divine’ (SIE 18:11, E13) gets some safely beyond this uneven ‘androgyny’, a queer eye, alternatively, registers with interest the manifold reverberations of Blake’s brazen pleasure in the hands-on making of a universe of boys and men who walk – and leap and bound and hammer and heave – in sublimely potent beauty, like the buff yet graceful figure running across Plate 3 of The Book of Urizen, embodying controlled energy, and licked by flames. The canonizers, sadly, got caught in their own straight/jackets. Like Behrendt with his more recent idealization of ‘Blake’s embrace of healthy heterosexual sensuality and sexuality’ (2004, 415), they assumed that the in life (ostensibly) heterosexual Blake was in imagination solely straight too, thereby failing to incorporate into their foundational formulas, models and interpretative systems the structuring force of his rangey homoeroticism. A fatal error, for if we are to assume that queer elements can only be validly found in Blake’s productions if also found in his life, then the same logic would invalidate much of Blake criticism and of Blake’s work. After all, he probably did not actually have dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel, or meld with Milton via his left foot (MHH 12, M 15[17]:45–50, E38, 110). Such ‘did he or didn’t he’ literalism is supremely un-Blakean, and again raises the question of why for Blake criticism some flights of fancy are more equal than others. Why should Fantasy remain the neglected poor, indeed embarrassing, relation of Imagination and Vision? The illustrations to The Four Zoas clearly show that Blake’s obscene doodling and eternal inspiration cannot be untangled from each other; this inextricability is only reinforced by the awkward and infuriating attempts at erasure. Plus, even if we do go by biography, it might not rule out queer views of Blake as categorically as one might expect. Yes, he was married (like




Queer Blake

Oscar Wilde . . . ) and indeed he and Catherine were, legendarily, a model of lasting monogamous domestic bliss. However, the cherished truths and myths about the Blakes’ marriage may reveal more about the cherishers than about William and Catherine. William Hayley observed twenty years after their nuptials that ‘they . . . are as fond of each other, as if they Honey Moon were still shining . . . they seem animated by one Soul’, and describes Catherine as ‘an invaluable Helpmate’ to Blake in his work (in Bentley 2001, 69–70). If this is an ideal marriage, it is a hierarchical one which reduces if not dissolves independent female existence: seeing it as uncomplicatedly happy requires embracing contentment with a certain (familiar, patriarchal) form of dominance and submission. This combination of latent sexism and heterosexism involved in traditional idealizations of Blake’s marriage, in turn, became part of the interpretative system for Blake’s works, whether as a guiding principle or an obstacle to be navigated. Furthermore, since we know that many of the domestic legends – most richly, playing Adam and Eve in the Lambeth garden (BR xxvi–xxvii) – are quite likely not true, why cling solely to them rather than to other equally speculative possibilities? Among the anecdotes is also Blake’s desire for a concubine (Ellis 1907, 90–1; BR 447), which might open up similar desires (and interpretative problems) as the girl-procuring scenario in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Another mythic tableau is the early conflict between Robert and Catherine where Blake commands her to kneel before his brother or never see his face again. What does this submissive position suggest, dominantly commanded ‘in tones which . . . unmistakably showed it was meant’ (Bentley 2001, 95)? (Can we picture him cracking a whip like Theotormon, or is it Bromion, in VDA 6?) And which relationship is most important here? We could speculate further, pondering the intensity of the twin portraits of William and Robert in ecstatic poses in Milton. Did brotherly love ever morph into eroticism? What opportunities might there have been for the adolescent, Michelangelo-adoring Blake to experiment (perhaps with the other boys at Pars’s or Basire’s)? Or, later, with friends like Fuseli, might not the adult Blake have found some interesting occasions for sexual exploration? Blake describes him as ‘The only Man that eer I knew / Who did not make me almost spew’ (E507), a statement as curious as it is hilarious, expressing attraction by denying repulsion, in abject terms of bodily fluids (if he didn’t spew, presumably he swallowed). It is worth noting that Fuseli wrote love poetry to Lavater – the ‘rhapsodic’ Complaints: ‘Then I laid my hand upon your bared, softly-beating heart’2 – and that in Fuseli’s translation of Aphorisms on Man, Blake began his annotations by encircling Lavater’s name and his own in a heart (E583). According to Matthew Craske, Fuseli’s ‘frankly erotic drawings testify to his desire to experiment sexually’, which was put into action: ‘Fuseli and a number of his circle in Rome . . . took part in quasibacchanal festivities’ and ‘all manner of orgiastic excess . . . were recorded’ in sketchbooks. ‘In one particularly vibrant drawing Fuseli shows a group of



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sculptors . . . carving an erotic classical group in which he makes a clear association between the act of carving and sexual penetration. One of the group appears to drill into the marble with an implement emerging from his groin’ (240–1). Artistic collaboration, comparable to Fuseli’s making use of Blake’s graver, is clearly and actively homoeroticized. The crucial questions for (queer) Blake’s biography, then, are the same ones that vex and fascinate the history of sexuality in general, and queer history in particular: how can we know what people actually, physically, sexually did? And to what extent does that matter, compared to how people saw themselves, what they desired, and what their experiences meant to them (whether real or imagined, whether emotionally mild or physically raw)? As with so many other historical figures, we simply cannot fully know Blake’s sexual biography. But, lucky for us, we know an enormous amount about his fantasy life. Though the line between desiring and acting on desires cannot be ignored – ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’ (MHH 10, E38) – the idea that there should be a line, and that it should be charged with so much significance, is itself worthy of inquiry. Surely one of the powers of Imagination, or Fantasy, is to move the line, breach seeming boundaries; and creating art out of desire surely counts as acting on desire. Moreover, such acts record and preserve those desires, for our study, our understanding, and our pleasure. There can be little doubt of how far (or ‘how sweet’) Blake ‘roam’d’ (E412) to share pleasures and blur boundaries. Just as bisexualized Blake fully knew and enjoyed men’s pleasure in each other’s physicality, so his art engages with women’s self-involved carnality too. Indeed, the impress of nascent lesbianism is so firm – from Thel’s languid, and Oothoon’s lascivious, voyeurism onward – that feminism’s slowness to pluck this appealing arrow of desire from Blake’s bristling quiver is truly strange. Fear of complicity with sexist fantasies is a worry, but queer goes a long way toward displacing the exclusively masculine gaze upon which they rest, as indeed did Blake himself. Again it’s his great compendium, Jerusalem, which showcases these impulses most tantalizingly, as Vala and Jerusalem’s serpentine shadow-dance – visually represented with curvy élan on Plate 32 – tracks and ghosts the poem’s many other attractions, repulsions, re/unions; and though summary cannot do justice to the poem’s textured treatment of ladies’ love, its resonance, from the outset, is unarguable – as the lesbian leanings of the title page’s lush labia make clear. This is another Blake image capable of jolting even jaded eyes, for ‘Albion’s Couch’ (1:2, E144) first figures as a ruby tipped, and emphatically female, ‘bed / Of crimson joy’ (SIE 39:5–6, E23) on which an abandoned Jerusalem throws open the most recherché, decoratively patterned lips imaginable beneath the contemplative gaze and raised palm of a watching woman. That this lippy plate savours of Sapphism is indicated not solely by Blake’s surprising decision to linger over the vulvic regions – ‘Gates of Paradise’ (E32, 259) more usually pushed through with




Queer Blake

rapidity in phallocentric erotica – but also by the imagery’s warm afterglow. Wing-petal-feather fringes richly ornament Jerusalem’s visual vocabulary, as rainbow kissed (J 14) or sunlit (J 53) flowers for the romantic, juicy bat wings for those of Gothic tastes (J 58) and, crucially, they also form a downy couch beneath Blake’s most seductively rendered pair of ‘come to bed’ eyes (J 23). Albion, here, may feel Jerusalem’s ‘soft repose!’ bespeaks ‘Inward complacency of Soul’ (23:14–15, E168) but then he (and the mankind he represents) isn’t the only one looking at her (and the females she contains): a revelation about human desire clinched, in every sense, amidst the huge curling petals of Plate 28. These are the poem’s most exuberant tongues/lips, which in their swaying energy seem to hint at the infinitely satisfying labial caresses of the female lovers tucked within their folds. To a queer eye this is one of Blake’s most iconic images, and its magnificent aura of repletion and same-sex sufficiency can be sighted elsewhere too. It lights, for example, the kissing girls corkscrewed by fiery desire on Marriage’s title page, and also the breaststroking/brow-kissing exchange blazoned beneath Vision’s Argument – itself an incandescent emblem of Sapphic sensuality which consummately illustrates Blake’s beloved belief, ‘[S]he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sun rise’ (E470). Surely it must be significant that Blake’s sunniest, hottest images of intimacy involve same-sex or gender-indeterminate couples? Especially since hetero kissing is largely left to angels, cherubs and children (‘The Blossom’, ‘The Little Girl Lost’; Eur 3, 4; J 18) with the only mature kiss we’ve sighted involving a desperate woman astride a guy who appears to be – in every sense – dead (Am title page). If Blake’s queer themes are striking and abundant, it’s also well worth pursuing the queer aspects of Blake’s aesthetics, especially those which emerge when we reach toward the mercurial artistic persona active within the clashings and mergings of masculine and feminine modalities that are the hallmark of his oeuvre. Indeed, this was the case even during Blake’s creative infancy, for his adolescent Poetical Sketches (1783) bring into suggestive proximity beguiling seasonal songs, tales of tragic Gothic heroines, romances pierced by ‘the prince of love’ (E413), cheek-by-jowl with struttingly ambitious literary imitations, biblical and historical sketches, and gory Boys’ Own ballads: ‘The god of war is drunk with blood’ (E419). In essence, fit genres for the princes charming and errant nestle intimately together. Likewise, An Island In The Moon (1785) revels in generic, gendered, dialogic dissonance, as the puffed-up masculine rhetoric of its cast of lawyers, medics, philosophers and artists struggles to be heard above the loquacious eruptions – ‘They call women the weakest vessel but I think they are the strongest’ (E457) – of Miss Gittipin, with her passion for fashion, and the Blakesong outbursts of Mrs Nannicantipot. The sexually boisterous vanities of this diverse verbal community animate The Island, and though these are sometimes conceived conventionally – ‘She was thinking of the shape of her eyes & mouth & he was thinking, of his eternal fame’ (E449) – their creator scarcely raises



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his own voice to take a (gendered) side, for all are his, perhaps all even are him. Moreover, Blake’s queerly hybrid approach to sexualized timbre and genre can be identified and tracked almost at random across his later works. Europe (1794), for example, is such a sexually variegated treasure precisely because of its meshing and colliding of starkly gendered and highly stylized visual and verbal modes. The heroic, archetypally rendered, masculine powerstruggles thematically foregrounded at the outset by juxtaposed emblems of hostile virility – the oddly phallic arm of the iconic Ancient of Days versus the upthrusting tongue of the title page’s rampant serpent – are questioned, qualified, queered by the deft deployment of a roster of feminized visual aesthetics which encode and disclose both the sexual subconscious (Eur 3, 4, 5, 8, 10) and domestic reverberations (Eur 6, 7, 15) of revolutionary militancy and ensuing wartime hardships. Textless Plate 6 is an especially stunning example of Blake’s sensitive adoption and adaptation of a feminine modality, as he intervenes in topical home and hearth debates through an image of horribly impossible female choice. His crouching woman, doubled over by dreadful indecision, dead infant at her feet, fiery cauldron bubbling on the stove behind, clearly draws upon notions of political cannibalism fondly deployed in public wartime discourse, especially by the political cartoonists. But whereas a masculine caricature, like Gillray’s Un petit Souper a la Parisiènne: – or – A Family of San Culotts refreshing after the fatigues of the day (20 September 1792), makes savage international points by framing in its fireplace a hungry, gleeful crone, enthusiastically basting a hapless babe, skewered for supper on a Gallic spit, Blake’s intimate, sensually appealing cameo of mute, collective, female despair brings politics home, foreshortening perspective to the size of a broken heart. Further, this generic, gendered see-sawing of political perspective – from macro to micro, micro to macro – is locked in a dynamic tango with Europe’s equally persistent verbal flipflopping, as family conflicts and global convulsions vie for poetically realized pre-eminence, perhaps finding aesthetic perfection in the significantly safer interior of Enitharmon’s ‘crystal house’, where seductively lyrical (feminine) diction (momentarily) reigns supreme. With queer Blake, then, it’s never just what is said, sexually, that matters; the way it’s said has meaning too. Though it is only possible here to hint at the extent of queer Blake’s ambisexual aesthetic syntheses, we can at least signal how integral they are to his formal uniqueness, to his experimental Blakeness, by further noting how often his thematically and stylistically transgendered eruptions occur at moments of especial significance and intensity. In Night Nine of The Four Zoas, for example, Blake fashions a piteous form of regressive pastoral, formally able to usher into life the amniotic retreat which is ‘Vala’s Garden’, that ‘land of doubts & shadows sweet delusions unformd hopes / [where] They saw no more the terrible confusion of the wracking universe’ (126:22–3, E395). Realm




Queer Blake

and register shift, and gender experimentation and transformation are the drivers, as they are in the unexpectedly ecstatic birds-and-flowers chorus which significantly shifts – feminizes – lifts Milton’s tone, early in Book Two (31[34]:27–63, E130–1). Here nature-adoring lyricism – mesmerically fixated on that transformative dawn moment when the once-slumbering Rose ‘bursts her crimson curtaind bed / And comes forth in the majesty of beauty’ – gifts an interlude of poetic ‘order sweet & lovely’ so blissful that even Milton’s monumental ‘Men are sick with love!’ (31[34]:57–8, 62, E131). More significant, still, are the twenty-two quatrains of surprisingly easy rhymed verse which offer the weary traveller in/to Jerusalem a potted version of Blake’s entire mission statement (27:1–88, E171–3). Crucially, this emotive Christianity, practised by cooperative feminized believers – who ‘Mutual shall build Jerusalem / Both heart in heart & hand in hand’ (27:87– 8, E173) – is an open, accessible faith expounded in an open, accessible form, and thus is a creed as different formally, as sexually, to the faith set down in stone by ‘cruel Patriarchal pride / Planting thy Family alone / Destroying the world beside’ (27:78–80, E173). These brief examples (and, in future, those more detailed ones we expect queer Blakers will pull out) reveal an artist who refused to stay within either generic or gender boundaries (and they are often indivisible), whose roving imagination birthed a creative productivity which could not be curtailed by any of the conventional gender identities which might seem naturally to flow from Blake’s biological sex and his apparent heterosexual disposition. For an orderly, quiet life one might intone with Urizen, ‘return O Love in peace / Into your place, the place of seed not in the brain or heart’ (FZ 126:7–8, E395) but little in Blake’s work suggests that he desired a Urizenically straight, sedate existence, not least because he evidently could not limit sexual love to a biological or even a physical function. As we saw at the outset, Blake wanted to catalogue and encounter, think through with his ‘brain’ and feel with his ‘heart’, all kinds of sexual subjectivity. ‘Every Affinity’, he says, interests him. So we shouldn’t be surprised that what we’ve termed Blake’s queer capaciousness is also actually an ineluctable motivator of the Blakean tendency toward infinite imaginative regression, as Blake strives toward comprehension of the inevitably sexual origins of human trauma and distress, and yet further still, toward our harmonious pansexual prehistory, which he hopes his art can rebirth in human consciousness, restoring knowledge of those ‘Times remote! / When Love & Joy were adoration: / And none impure were deemed’ (BL 3:7–9, E90). The condensed diagnosis and cure offered in The Book of Los (1795) by Blake’s intriguing alter ego ‘Eno aged Mother’ is especially sexually significant too, since this doyen of the unctuous female genital realm ‘Leutha’ offers a resoundingly feminine – indeed presciently Cixousian – sexual remedy which redounds through Blake’s own redemptive recommendations, as Eno recalls an era when destructive passions, the personified and masculine-gendered Covet, Envy, Wrath and Wantonness, were effectively transformed by sacrificial



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to unhoard . . . this is what nourishes life – a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies . . . she gives . . . she gives more, with no assurance that she will get back even some unexpected profit from what she puts in. She gives that there may be life, thought, transformation. (1982, 264) Stirring stuff, and when practised by earth-dwelling individuals, a utopian sexual politics with decidedly dubious female outcomes – Addie Stephen’s attempt to live as Oothoon being a striking case in point. Nonetheless, the centrality of feminine generosity to Blake’s unique conception of redemption is evident; as, importantly, is his transsexual artistic identity when he enunciates his gendered redemptive doctrine. For it is Blake’s females – from Oothoon, through Ahania and Eno, to Ololon and Jerusalem – who most passionately advocate, enact and embody such beliefs, and it is unbiddable female eroticism that emblematizes their action with most poetic force. Even early on, the promise of abundance that emanates from the Golden Shrine of female sexuality, ‘pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild/Another flower shall spring’, is urgently and quizzically contrasted with mindless acquisition: ‘Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water’ (VDA 1:8–9, 7:17, E46, 50). That Oothoon even offers other girls (perhaps against their will) in testimony that she will never ‘with jealous cloud / Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring’ shows the extent of Blake’s commitment to ‘free born joy’ (VDA 7:2, 28–9, E50). From a womanly viewpoint, to be sure, it’s quite a problematic stance, but one that nonetheless hammers out queer Blake’s hatred of the masculine economies of trade and exchange, exemplified in Visions by the slavetrader, ‘merchant . . . industrious citizen . . . fat fed hireling . . . parson’ fixated on making all things ‘mine . . . mine’ (5:12–17, 1:20, E48, 46) and eschewed by Blake himself via the mind-boggling abundance of his transgendered aesthetic. Vitally, queer Blake is aesthetically queer because his own boundless, generous artistic practice shares in this redemptive, orgasmic abundance. Blake’s timbre and tempo scarcely ever dip below the ecstatic, whilst his mixed media experiments leave even the lustiest eyes full to bursting. ‘Enough! or Too much’ indeed (MHH 10, E38). It’s impossible to conclude without fully acknowledging that feminists have had a host of good reasons to look wryly upon such queer-inspired exultation. After all, sexually expressed female self-sacrifice is hardly a novel remedy for human unhappiness, and though Mellor’s resonant complaint



satiety (3:1–2, 10–26, E90–1). Where patriarchal dogma and denial deepen the devastations of acquisitive desire, maternal indulgence restores humanity, especially its male members, by giving them more of what they want than any man could ever wish for. Or, as Cixous sings it,

Queer Blake

that ‘In Blake’s art, women at their best are nurturing mothers, generous sensualists, compassionate lovers, all-welcoming and never critical emotional supporters’ (1982, 154) is potentially good news for lesbians, her perspective still packs a real and salutary punch. Also, a queer critical orientation certainly has the potential to reinstall with renewed rapture the phallocentrisms of yore. An adoring focus on male forms, masculine genius, father-son conflicts and fraternal strife does mean queer agendas could easily eclipse hard-won feminist gains, marginalizing all things female and feminine quite as effectively as many older male-dominated critical perspectives. It’s significant, too, that whilst queer has a playful, provocative tendency to relish men’s ‘regressive’, ‘unproductive’ sexual indulgences, early feminist Blake scholars were at pains to catalogue the toxic fallout for women when ostensibly adult men embark on (perverse) oral, anal or wanky sexual odd/ysseys. Back in 1990 Margaret Storch catalogued the disasters that ensue because, so often, Blake’s ‘male characters are incapable of mature love’ (73) – a perspective itself indebted to the earlier groundbreaking psychological analyses of Diana Hume George and Brenda Webster. Plus, it’s true, sexist double standards were (indeed, are) as operative in the queer realm as in any other, with some freer than others to deviate laudably. We need only contrast the critical mauling of Thel, for little more than bemusement at heterosexuality and its results, with the almost universal approval of Los’s displacement of his relationship with Enitharmon in favour of connection with Albion, over Jerusalem’s last plates. Uniting ‘Man with Man’ (88:12, E246) is evidently an ideal almost everyone can approve. Yet still, and mindful of the pitfalls, queer Blake exists. And this collection, which seeks so energetically to draw him out, is in large part motivated by an eagerness to explore whether a fruitful, civil (here’s hoping, even equal) partnership can thrive between one of the most productive critical perspectives of the 1980s and 1990s, feminism, and that which may be equally revelatory from the noughties on, queer. Only time will tell how well this dynamic synthesis shapes up, and ensuring space for bisexual and lesbian perspectives will obviously be important, but it is actually vital to forward the attempt in as many imaginative ways as possible precisely because a femiqueer synthesis is an unrivalled way to approach, enter and cherish Blake’s omnisexual genius. From the camp panto gusto of ‘I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?/And that I was a maiden Queen’ (SIE 41:1–2, E24) to Jerusalem’s affecting bisexual theologizing, O Vala what is Sin? that thou shudderest and weepest At sight of thy once lov’d Jerusalem! What is Sin but a little Error & fault that is soon forgiven; but mercy is not a sin Nor pity nor love nor kind forgiveness ( J 20:22–5, E165)



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Children of the future Age, Reading this indignant page; Know that in a former time. Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime (SIE 51:1–4, E29) His impassioned critiques of fixed, cold, hard masculinity make it quite clear Blake wanted that prophesied ‘[lover] of books!’ to know this side of him too, for his invitation couldn’t be more tenderly beguiling (nor, with its deletions, more adamant that it is there whether we love it or not): ‘[Dear] Reader, [Forgive] what you do not approve, & [Love] me for this energetic exertion of my talent’ (J 3, E145; italics in the original).

Contents ‘And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?’ (Eur 2:13, E 61) The roomy definition of queer we’ve deployed in this introduction applies as well to the contents of the volume, which, far from diluting the term by allowing it to mean anything and everything, on the contrary mine its richness, and, importantly, probe and question its limits. Wary of the perils of précis, and happily aware of our contributors’ elegant abilities to speak for themselves, a brisk whistlestop tour of Queer Blake’s contents is most apt, starting on the shimmering shores of poet Helen Kidd’s celebration of pansexuality – composed in responsive reaction to Blake’s designs of angels, Dante’s Commedia, Jesus in the wilderness, and to his poetic eroticism in Marriage, Visions and Milton. Then come a clutch of essays which open up academic debates in novel and unexpected ways, asking not what can queer reveal about Blake, but rather, can Blake’s work bring insights to queer theory? The results are revelatory, as Christopher Hobson takes on the pressing issue of the longevity of same-sex subjectivity, and finds that Blake’s sensitivities and awareness place him fascinatingly at odds with what a wide range of modern and postmodern historians and theorists have posited about his culture. Summary cannot do justice to Hobson’s searching formulations, though his spotlight on Blake’s insights into internalized repression and his call to be ever mindful about the constructedness of sexual utopias are especially prescient, as is the Blakean deduction that ‘Paradise then does



he speaks not just with a female voice but with his female voice. We have to get to know both the queer and female Blakes, just as fully as we know the familiar straight and male ones, if we are to fully appreciate the richly nuanced rage behind Blake’s perennially prophetic declaration,

Queer Blake

not lie in the past and cannot be regained. If it is to exist at all, we must first conceptualize and then build it.’ Next, Richard Sha, exploring what Blake’s stance may be on the significance of jouissance, emphasizes agency, arguing that the committed self-annihilation of Christ, Milton and Ololon are not automatic, and that sex is not inherently liberating. In turn, Peter Otto pursues the question of sexuality and transcendence in Swedenborgian terms, with a reading of two illustrations from The Four Zoas which shows that the bounding line between heaven and hell, above and below, is, for Blake, contingent. Further, and in a related move – while Otto shows Blake literalizing Swedenborg’s recommendation to put the flesh beneath and behind – Elizabeth Effinger asks why Blake critics have been so reluctant to face his pressing buttocks, clearly in view in Blake’s productions. To show the potential of cheeky readings, she focuses on anality in The Book of Urizen. Then come some essays with a visual – often contemporary – art focus, with Martin Myrone turning his eagle eye on Blake’s Blasphemer and arguing that the ‘spectacular corporeality’ of Blake’s graphic works transgresses artistic principles. Blake’s bodies cannot be aesthetically or erotically pinned down; his approach to physicality is queer in that it at once constitutes and disrupts identity. Jason Whittaker, too, brings quizzical caution to the concept of queer Blake, considering side by side Blake’s ‘denunciation of fallen sexuality in all its forms’ and his inspirational influence on a wide range of queer artists, focusing especially on Cerith Wyn Evans and Joel-Peter Witkin. Next, Helen Bruder takes Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry as ‘spiritguide’ on her trip to Felpham, exploring traces of seaside transvestism in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript and marvelling over the multiple attractions ‘the frillies and the sexies’ hold for inventive, unabashed, male artists. Another attention-seeking contemporary artist provides a sexual/contextual framework for Tristanne Connolly who slides Blake’s art into revealing proximity with that of Brit Art nympho Tracey Emin, and emerges from the emotional and aesthetic mess of process-driven art with insight into alternative, nonidealized sexual metaphors for creation which becomes the cornerstone of a sadomasochistic reading of The Book of Urizen. Sex, violence and slavery are taken up by Bethan Stevens, too, as she places Visions of the Daughters of Albion in the context of abolitionist poetry, bringing out the Daughters’ homoerotic gaze toward objectified Oothoon, and daringly suggesting that male-male rape may be Theotormon’s unspoken torment. Caroline Jackson-Houlston also situates Visions in an unusually broad literary and cultural context, emphasizing the Romantic tendency to depict the loss of virginity as necessarily violent, and fearfully painful, for women – thereby rendering heterosexual intercourse, at best, problematically appealing to girls. Blake is different, and neither prurient nor evasive in depicting rape – in contrast to such contemporaries as Walter Scott, James Macpherson, John Cleland and Elizabeth Hands.



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Steve Clark then continues, and questions, the interest in Blake’s depiction of feminine experience, and his adoption of feminine voices. Reading The Four Zoas, Blake’s Notebook and The Pickering Manuscript closely alongside originating male-authored sentimentalist texts by Pope and Merry, he traces the unpredictable and perverse effects of bringing fluctuating interior experience into language, as Blake self-consciously transforms ‘a sentimentalist idiom into an always potentially grotesque sexual identity’. David Fallon, in turn, carries Blakean performativity over into a range of political contexts, thereby explaining the power play behind Blake’s apparent misogyny through analysis of some significant, culturally constructed, gender roles. From Dalila in ‘Samson’ to Vala in Jerusalem, women in Blake struggle and strive to perform vigorous, public, ‘masculine’ roles, and so prove troubling to straightminded republican rubrics and rhetoric. The next two chapters ponder gender and power in some contexts provided by Blake’s ‘patron’ William Hayley. Mark Crosby intimately examines the three-way relationship between Blake, Hayley and another, younger, protégé, the Oxford student Edward Marsh, in terms of the educational paradigm of Paederastia. For him, feminization under Hayley flows from this passive position, a junior role which could significantly inhibit creativity. Susan Matthews also aligns Hayley with masculine classical culture, similarly complicating his traditional association with male effeminacy. She finds that Blake and Fuseli share a ‘make love not war’ attitude to the classics, calling on polite culture to confess to the erotica in its library rather than using Greek and Roman art to lend attractiveness to Britain’s military interests. Finally, the collection closes with a chapter by Keri Davies which brings Blake, personally, into the world of warm female friendships, asserting the positive choice of bookish spinsterhood made by one of Blake’s first collectors, Elizabeth Iremonger, and recreating in charming detail her material and intellectual surroundings – of which Blake’s works were an integral part. Davies uses Iremonger’s life and relationships to shed light on R/romantic alternatives to the ‘marriage hearse’, and also to contextualize Blake’s appreciation of ‘virgin bliss’.

Acknowledgements We would like to express our appreciation to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave for believing in Queer Blake, to Steven Hall for his diligent assistance, and to Barbara Slater for her incomparable copyediting. Also, for various kinds of interest, help, diversion, HPB wants to thank Magnus Ankarsjö, Paula Booth, B. and P. Bruder (perennially!), Chloe, Jonathan and Sara Butcher, Jennie Cockram, Mark Crosby, Sibylle Erle, David Fallon, Jean Freed, Sian Gaines, Frances Heydon; plus an especial thank you to my inestimably kind sister Jane (yes, ‘Damn. braces: Bless relaxes’ (MHH 9, E37)). TJC would like to thank Steve Clark for inspiring conversation always, and particularly for




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Queer Blake

Notes 1. No criticism meant here of Billy Bragg, a fine example of intelligent, popular reception that simultaneously embraces queer and Radical Blake: he released extra tracks from the sessions for his album William Bloke under the title Bloke on Bloke. 2. Quoted in the entry for Henry Fuseli, ODNB.



material toward the Introduction; Ayako Wada for her grace and generosity; Krista, Alvaro, Cal and Gill, my parents, and Ken, for listening and encouraging. Much gratitude to the Grey Zone research project for supporting this endeavour, and thank you to Morgan Tunzelmann for help in preparing the manuscript.

Pansexuality (regained)

So let us celebrate our sexual pavanes. More of the rallentando, diminuendo, crescendo. Listen, the wobble board of thunder presages rain. No surface holds. Our depth is density of body, of touch ‘all over’. There is no above/below, back/front, right side/wrong side. Our All flows.

They find the morning stars learning how to sing of woken skin, the voices of sky water; the heart within the touch the soul within the hand, the sinew that is thought,

the wet dog lick of heat behind my knees, and sticky in the grass: a breeze bends air and wafts its silky on my skin. Its scarves, its traces over groin and thigh, nipples, nape, these might be where. . .

and all the beasts are named with love, even the serpent nudges and purrs; the stag arches under the run of air and Paolo and Francesca rise from the flood, translated to pearl.

We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves, heterogenous, Yes. ‘The housewife’s complaint’, she said, ‘sounds like making love to trees out of boredom; not much fun.’ she said. but I am one, and maybe more like this, on leafy nights they’ll shift and sigh and cool in your hair, twining with Pan faces, witchy in the wood. Or Flamenco women, chin high and a fist against convention, ‘We who have nothing and not even the peace of having nothing, our lips speaking together, saying ourselves.’

And how the wilderness breathes and falls in love with walkers, with solitude and bare soles caressing the silks of grass; hands and leaves write green together; and folded nights rescue us from what the day cast out.

or we might lie along the very cool and damp of grass at midnight dark; the earth folds into you, salts body creases. Or on the heat of sand,

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Helen Kidd

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Queer Blake

the suck and clop of the sea along the ear, its plock and sway and green pressure of a mist of wet over a flooded eye. A splay of legs and hair cradled under its lip. and lazing fish-handed flipping the swish and roll. Then I spurtle through the smoothy skin, flink and dazzle to the hole of air, drop back against the cushion of its loll and swell, this glossy flank, the slick and glide of its dark skin, watermouths all over and between, that take me out, out into the sprawl of the horizon.

Even Leviathan sings of the delights of Love. Daughters and Sons of Albion reach out amidst the waves and laugh together. Dante and Milton discover Hope is oceanic, and the broad horizons of sexuality unfold in the wide billows of Beatrice’s peacock robes. She smiles . . .

For her joyous benefits she is erogenous, our bone swimmer. In flight she does not cling to herself: she is dispersible, prodigous, shining, desirous, and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she is not, of you . . . here might be a land, cathedrals at least of dreams, courtyards of sea. The lift of air takes us along the featherings of mind And paper scraps are shredded by the wind before the gale that’s rising, the embrace of storm that is our song. You kiss me and the world enlarges until the horizon vanishes. Are we unsatisfied? Yes, if that means we are never finished.

There is no journey’s end, except a break where clouds open a path across the sea where life stretches its naked limbs to call the Lost home into a tides kiss and blast blazes into sunfire, lightning into generous desire; bodies burnished & translated by the sunspill of a moment . . . to the marriage of Heaven and Hell. And so begins the joy of it once more

NB. Blake’s new dancing partners are Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Federico Garcia Lorca.



its grain and dry salt on your breast on mine is travelling in silver on your belly over and my tongue explores your feet, hips, hollow of your back . . .

1 Christopher Z. Hobson

[S]elf-condemn’d to eternal tears (Milton 12[13]:47, E106) Blake has much to teach about culturally possible conceptualizations of same-sex relations in the early nineteenth century. In earlier work, I examined what I thought were relatively sympathetic portraits of these relations in some Blake poems and designs.1 I did not, however, focus on what these portrayals implied about subjectivity or about recent theorizations of how homosexual subjectivity evolved – theorizations I think largely wrong. Here I examine implied ideas of same-sex subjectivity in Blake – including an element of self-repression rather than external repression that I did not originally see – and I compare these ideas to recent theorizations by Michel Foucault and his followers, by Stephen O. Murray, and by Randolph Trumbach. The comparison makes clear that Blake’s implied conceptions were more heterogeneous and more ‘modern’ – a term I want to deconstruct – than these theorizations’ rigid periodizations would allow.

Modelling the evolution of same-sex desire Of the models just mentioned, Foucault’s has had the greatest continuing impact. Foucault’s formulation of a binary relation between conceptualizations of same-sex subjectivity before and after the mid-nineteenth century must be familiar to anyone doing research in the area. Foucault proposed in part: As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology [. . .] Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of 23



Blake and the Evolution of Same-Sex Subjectivity

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Queer Blake

My interest in Foucault’s paradigm lies primarily in its reception and application by Foucault-inspired scholars. Though the formulations just quoted are a detail in an overall discussion of how modern-era conceptions of sexuality have expanded possibilities for sexual expression while restricting and channelling self-understandings of such expression, scholarly interest has focused largely on Foucault’s proposal of a period before which homosexuality was yet unknown. While it is difficult to get at a precise meaning behind Foucault’s playfully ironic language and his shifting between official and general social discourses, roughly speaking he does propose that in these earlier periods, people’s same-sex acts or desires were not central and crucial parts of their subjectivities. David M. Halperin has argued that Foucault eventually recognized some forms of pre-nineteenth-century same-sex subjectivity,2 but his earlier position – along with his theorization of genderbased same-sex activity in classical Greece,3 which has been adapted to apply to later ‘pre-homosexual’ subjectivities – has had a continuing social impact. Foucault’s formulation involves a false binary between the post-nineteenth-century view of homosexual subjectivity, on the one hand, and on the other an assumed earlier view (and reality?) of acts without any subjectivity. This conception excludes the possibility that earlier centuries possessed and/or recognized comparable but different subjectivities in which same-sex desires were central. Already in 1990 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pinpointed as a weakness of Foucault’s and similar conceptions their view that ‘one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another’. Sedgwick argued that such conceptualizations develop not by fully supplanting one another but by ‘the unrationalized coexistence of different models’ (47). If so, the coexistence of nominally incompatible homosexual self-conceptualizations that Sedgwick perceives in our own time (85–90) may also have been present in earlier periods, under different terminology. Among hundreds of empirical studies questioning or modifying Foucault’s emphases, one might mention Kenneth Borris’s study of Richard Barnfield’s poetry as exemplifying an ‘Elizabethan protohomosexual subjectivity’ and as indicating an ‘extended construction’ of homosexuality over several centuries; studies of Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray, Lord John Hervey and other eighteenth-century figures that find such terms as ‘homosexual’, ‘homoerotic’ and/or ‘homosocial’ applicable to their lives and works even taking Foucauldian cautions into account, or that argue, as George E. Haggerty does even from within a Foucauldian framework, that a William Beckford embodies ‘the beginnings of a particular kind of male homosexual sensibility’ that effects ‘a link between sensibility and erotic activity that will not be fully



sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault 1990, 42–3)

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realized until the end of the nineteenth century’; and for women, studies of such figures as Charlotte Charke, Anne Damer, Anne Lister, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and others, showing the development of ‘lesbian’ (Liddington) or ‘sapphic’ (Lanser) subjectivity from the late 1600s to the 1830s.4 It is safe to say that a consensus now perceives some forms of subjectivity linking sexual practice and personal identity during the several centuries preceding Foucault’s mid-nineteenth-century date. Further, even the larger debate between ‘continuism’ and ‘alterity’ – emphasis on similarity to modern subjectivity in earlier periods and on incommensurability – has been modified by recognizing alterities within similarity and the reverse, while these poles remain as opposed methodological starting points (Traub 2003, 326–54). David M. Halperin has restated and refined Foucault’s model in two notable books. In One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), Halperin argued from the basics in asserting that a linkage between ‘a person’s sexual tastes’ and his/her overall personality ‘never occurred to pre-modern cultures’ (27). But he also argued that this ‘new conceptualization seems to coincide with the emergence, in the same period (or in the centuries immediately preceding it), of some new sexual types – namely, the homosexual and the heterosexual, defined [. . .] as persons who possess two distinct kinds of subjectivity’ (43). This conception extended the transition between types of same-sex behaviour to cover several centuries, and in the process blurred the ‘personage/acts’ distinction: the theoretical idea of ‘sexuality’ remained exclusively modern, but prior to its emergence there were ‘new sexual types’ with accompanying ‘kinds of subjectivity’. Halperin’s later How to do the History of Homosexuality (2002), while maintaining these emphases, ventures an admittedly tentative Foucauldian ‘genealogy’ (109) of the modern idea or ideas of homosexuality. Halperin does show that what he defines as modern conceptions of the topic did not exist before the modern era. But he does not show that affectional same-sex relations or a conception of firmly rooted behaviour did not exist, nor that the pre-‘homosexual’ categories that he considers – effeminacy, pederasty (active-role sodomy), affectional male love, and passivity or inversion (109–28) – existed or were conceived only independently of one another, as he contends. If Foucauldians like Haggerty and Halperin have retreated from Foucault’s original binary and if ‘alterity’ and ‘continuism’ are now more poles of emphasis than absolute divisions, why go back to Foucault’s initial formulation? Because, along with the overt understanding of Foucault as proposing that the social meaning of sexual acts changes over time, there has been (at least frequently) a substrate directly based on the ‘acts/personage’ dichotomy that has asserted that at some point same-sex acts were not (or were not understood as being) deeply linked to subjectivity. This substrate – Foucault’s idea in relatively pure form – retains a considerable hold on scholarly and public conceptualizations. In its original form, for example, Foucault’s




Queer Blake

binary serves as a theoretical-historical undergirding for an Amici Curiae brief by ten prominent historians5 in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the 2003 US Supreme Court case that invalidated laws against homosexual sodomy. Arguing ‘as historians’ (Chauncey et al. 2007, 1), the writers seek to undercut earlier Court doctrine that prohibiting homosexual conduct is a long-standing US practice; they do so by arguing that earlier centuries prohibited sodomy in general, not homosexual sodomy, and that discrimination against homosexuals is a twentieth-century innovation (2). Citing the infrequency of persecutions and executions and various cases of leniency toward sodomitical offenders, the writers argue that early Americans saw ‘sexual transgressions [as] a form of sinful behavior in which anyone could engage [. . .] not [. . .] the condition of a particular class of people’ (8). Only later, the brief summarizes, did the latter idea arise: ‘As Michel Foucault has famously described this evolution, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”’ (11). The Amici brief shows that Foucault’s ideas retained some influence in the quite recent past. Apparently, despite latter-day Foucauldians’ insistence that Foucault himself did not hold to the ‘personages/acts’ binary or abandoned it, the idea that at some point in the relatively recent past homosexual acts did not involve a distinct subjectivity and were not seen by society as doing so remains powerfully attractive. Two other paradigms need less discussion. Stephen O. Murray’s Homosexualities (2000), continuing earlier work that applied a cross-cultural social-historical approach, classifies its subject under three predominant headings: age-structured, gender-defined and egalitarian homosexuality (2, citing Barry Adam; a fourth category, ‘professionally defined’, is for Murray less significant). Targeting Foucault, Murray notes that many pre-modern and non-Western societies have conceptualized homosexual activity, and ‘many languages have labels for kinds of persons known to engage in it recurrently’ (9). Further, in any particular society, ‘relationships structured by age, gender, profession, and comradeship may coexist’, though ‘one of them tends to be more visible “on the ground”, both among those who are native to the society and in explanations to aliens who ask about sexual relations’ (9) – so schematics of development such as Foucault’s and Halperin’s are in Murray’s view oversimplified. With these qualifications, Murray proposes that ‘Western European societies exemplify a succession in prominence of age, gender, and gay [egalitarian] subcultures, with a gap of some years in the late seventeenth century between the predominantly age-stratified and the predominantly gender-stratified eras’ (12). Murray’s approach is valuable for demonstrating that there is a comparative and non-dichotomous constructionism distinct from Foucault’s conception. Nonetheless, it is far from clear that gender stratification (one partner playing ‘opposite sex’ roles and/or psychically defined by gender inversion) was in fact predominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At least in terms of



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conceptualizations by a non-participant, Blake’s works will provide some perspective on this issue. Finally, Randolph Trumbach, who has done more than perhaps anyone else to recover the same-sex subcultures of eighteenth-century London, posits a shift in this period from ‘three sexes’ and two genders to two sexes and ‘four genders’ (1991, 112; 1994, 289).6 Trumbach means, first, that in pre-modern Europe, males, females and hermaphrodites were viewed as three sexes, with the conception of only two biological sexes emerging in the eighteenth century. Second, Trumbach argues that in prior periods, sex between an older, penetrating male and a younger, penetrated male was seen as conforming to masculine and feminine (or indeterminate, for adolescents) gender identifications, while during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this system gave way to one of ‘four genders – male, female, sodomite, and sapphist’ (1994, 289). The two latter ‘genders’ consist of a passive, effeminate, sodomitic identity and an active, masculinized sapphism, respectively (1989a, 135–40; 1989b, 425–6; 1994, 291–4). Trumbach does not, however, appear to mean simply that men who preferred sex with men might be either ‘male’ or ‘sodomite’, but rather that those who did so were in almost all cases passive-effeminate; similarly for women. Sodomites or homosexuals, Trumbach specifies elsewhere, were passives who ‘from childhood were socialized into their deviant role’ (1998, 6). Trumbach agrees with Murray, then, that there was a shift from age to gender-role differentiation in the long eighteenth century, but has a different schema – ‘four genders’ – for conceptualizing the result. Trumbach has contributed some enduring stereotypes to discussions of these matters, notably that of the pre-eighteenth century libertine who ‘was often pictured, and could be found, with his whore on one arm and his boy on the other’ (1989b, 408) and the identification of London’s samesex underworld in general with the particular subculture of the ‘mollies’ or male passive or cross-dressing sodomites. It is therefore worth noting that neither Trumbach nor others have shown that the bisexual rake was a major social type either in elite or non-elite seventeenth-century cultures,7 and further, that Trumbach’s more empirical studies, such as ‘London’s Sodomites’ (1977), do not show a particular prominence of effeminate, feminine-identified, or ‘molly’ persons among their subjects. On the other hand, Trumbach’s conception that what he considers a ‘new’ anxiety over being defined as a sodomite contributes to the psychic solidification of heterosexual identity (1998, 6, 194–5, 394–5, and elsewhere) will prove relevant in what follows. Trumbach’s theorizations, however, will probably stand or fall depending on whether his two ideal types, the ‘permanently effeminate passive adult male’ and the ‘masculinized woman’ displaying ‘a combination of male and female traits’ (1989b, 426; 1994, 296, 294) are seen as applying generally to same-sex activity and subjectivity in the period. Again, Blake’s imaginative rendering of these relations will prove instructive.




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Queer Blake

Blake’s works give detailed, though relatively brief, treatment to three main ideas of same-sex subjectivity: (1) a conception basically defined by gender inversion, but not involving a distinct gender identity; (2) an affectional model involving more or less egalitarian relations not differentiated by gender roles or subjectivity; and (3) a universal-potential idea treated as part of relations in eternity. The second is probably most important, as each of the others is partly included in it.8

Gender-defined same-sex attraction and its repression (Milton 7–13[14]) Several commentators see allusions to male homosexuality in Milton’s narrative of Satan asking for control of Palamabron’s harrow and Leutha’s retelling of this material (7–13[14], E100–7). S. Foster Damon, for example, sees Leutha’s actions in feminizing Satan’s ‘perceptions’ (12[13]:5, E105) as symbolizing ‘unconscious homosexuality’, which he attributes to William Hayley, Blake’s patron, often considered a referent for Satan in the poem (Damon 1998, 238; see also 178, 277, 357, and Webster 1983, 254). Andrew Elfenbein, in contrast, without referring to Hayley and focusing on the Bard’s Song as a whole (M 2–14[15], E96–108), urges that ‘Blake shows what happens when men are not open to [. . .] cross-gendering. The result is the straight male mind’ (1999, 156). The material possibly involving passive male sexuality begins with an apparent departure from gender norms: Satan pleads for control of the harrow ‘with incomparable mildness; / [. . .] with most endearing love / He soft intreated Los’, who believes his complaints ‘thro Satans extreme / Mildness’ (7:4–6, 12–13, E100). This repeatedly emphasized ‘mildness’ (7:21, 9:19; ‘mildly’, 7:34, E100, 103, 101) at this point registers basically as an unexpectedly soft nuance in Satan’s behaviour, part of his quality of ‘Seeming a brother, being a tyrant [. . .] / [. . .] under pretence of pity and love’ (7:22–6, 100–1). In eighteenth-century gender discourse, male softness and tears are not necessarily unmasculine but may be a sign of ‘sensibility’ – itself, however, often erotically tinged (Haggerty 1999, 82). Satan’s ‘mildness’ has catastrophic results that are not fully explained: Satan cannot control the harrow’s horses, who are ‘maddend’, or its servants the Gnomes, who are provoked to ‘fury and fire’ (7:18–19, E100), and he ultimately sinks on a couch of death (9:48–52, E103–4). Following this account, Leutha appears and renarrates (11[12]:28–13[14]:11, E105–7) what must be the same events, since the frenzy of the horses and the Gnomes is repeated (12[13]:12–15, 37–9, E105–6) and Satan ends similarly on a ‘Sick Couch’ (13[14]:1, E106). Leutha’s version essentially presents a psychogenesis of these events from the standpoint of gender inversion.



Blake and models of same-sex subjectivity


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entering the doors of Satans brain night after night Like sweet perfumes I stupified the masculine perceptions And kept only the feminine awake. Hence rose his soft Delusory love to Palamabron (12:4–7, E105) Satan’s ‘soft / Delusory love’, clearly a version of the mildness and ‘pretence of pity and love’ already mentioned, results, then, from actuation of ‘feminine’ perceptions: it is a male-male love based on the presence of a feminine-gendered principle in the brain. This meaning helps explain the previously unmotivated events involving the horses and Gnomes: in Leutha’s story their madness and fury is sparked by her two attempts to emerge from Satan’s brain, attempts the horses balk at in contrast to their tractability when handled by Elynittria and which prompt the Gnomes to call Leutha ‘Sin’ (12[13]:10–15, 38–9, E105, 106). In sum, this feminine principle’s efforts to act openly in the social world – in contrast to similar acts by a male’s female consort – are rejected, apparently as the appearance of a female principle abhorrent in a male. While Leutha’s narration does present a gender-inversion conception of male-male attraction, this conception differs significantly from the models summarized earlier. Satan’s feminization is, on the one hand, neither adventitious and without subjectivity nor a manifestation of masculine-gendered sodomitic activity. Blake imagines Leutha as activating ‘feminine’ perceptions that, apparently, have been present but unexpressed while ‘masculine perceptions’ were active (12[13]:6, 5, E105). The feminine perceptions’ ascendancy is at least a shift in gender balance in the brain, though a temporary one. And, as models of gender-inversion homosexuality suggest, this ‘feminine’ love is directed toward an apparently straight male, Palamabron. On the other hand, Blake does not show a stably existing ‘third gender’ socialized ‘from childhood’ (Trumbach 1998, 6): Leutha’s words, ‘the masculine perceptions’ and ‘the feminine’ ones, treat both as occurring typically. The picture that Blake draws through Leutha, then, is closer to one of multiple sexual potential and at least momentary gender fluidity than to any of the models discussed above. Though Blake’s presentation does show the basis for a gender-inverted same-sex subjectivity, it does not show its consolidation, but rather the solidification of a rigid different-sex subjectivity excluding ‘feminine’



Leutha’s tale, though marked by ambiguities both about what happens and about its reliability, is relatively simple in its gender/sexual outlines. Leutha, identified as a female entity related to Satan (her ‘Parent power’, 11[12]:36, E105), seeking, apparently, to effectuate her love for Palamabron (11[12]:37–8, E105), testifies that

Queer Blake

components absolutely. Here, Trumbach’s discussion of the ‘profound anxiety’ to which any hint of overt homosexual attraction gave rise (1998, 6) is instructive, if differentiated from other elements of Trumbach’s model. In Leutha’s narrative, heterosexual consolidation seems to occur in two stages: first, as a need for concealment resulting from the disastrous social consequences of open same-sex display (the fury and accusations of the horses and the Gnomes), and second, as a renewed appeal of different-sex attraction, depicted as a response to seductiveness when ‘Elynittria met Satan with all her singing women’ (12[13]:42, E106). The upshot is that Leutha, having twice emerged in her own right and twice retreated into Satan’s brain, is expelled altogether: ‘self-condemn’d to eternal tears, he [Satan] drove / Me from his inmost Brain & the doors clos’d with thunders sound’ (12[13]:46–8, E106). Leutha’s narration thus shows both an internalization of social norms and the costs of this internalization. To the male the costs are those of denied possibility and unrecognized regret, ‘self-condemn[ation] to eternal tears’. To the displaced ‘feminine’ perceptions – if we can accept Leutha as a character as embodying them – they are costs of guilt and self-accusation, as shown by the parallel between the Gnomes calling Leutha ‘Sin’ and her own ‘I am the Author of this Sin!’ (12[13]:39, 11[12]:35, E106, 105). Leutha is not a proud sapphist and/or sodomite and apologizes for actuating what was already present: self-accusation and acceptance of guilt too often are components of same-sex subjectivity. Finally, the social-cultural costs are those of exclusionary morality, Satan’s ‘Moral laws and cruel punishments’ (9:32, E103) and the more general structures of social oppression and violence that Blake always associates with displaced sexuality.

Affectional same-sex relations and their repression (Jerusalem 19–28) Blake explores affectionally based female and male same-sex attraction in Jerusalem through a sapphic scene (19–20, E164–6), commentary on and visual representation of this scene (20–3, 28, E165–9, 174), and a linked memory of male homoerotic dancing (24, E169–70). The first of these episodes has been widely recognized as lesbian or sapphic, while the last has been little discussed in any terms.9 Narratively and symbolically complex, and deeply linked to Jerusalem’s central plot lines, these events are nothing so simple as a poetic-symbolic representation of how same-sex relations are experienced, yet isolating their inferable view of this matter is necessary for full understanding. To say, for example, that Vala ‘shudder[s] and weep[s] / At sight of [her] once lov’d Jerusalem’ (20:22–3, E165) is to say that false religion, oppression and war, and the psychic structures underpinning them abhor redemptive love and its embodiment in social outcasts; but



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Blake chooses to say this through a narrative of interrupted woman-woman love that itself explores these psychic structures’ origins. Blake dramatizes sapphic love in the scene of Vala and Jerusalem ‘upon the River of his [Albion’s] City soft repos’d / [Jerusalem] In the arms of Vala’, the two ‘in one comingling’ (19:40–1, 46, E164, 165) and in the more explicitly sexual design for plate 28, usually taken to refer to this scene, which shows two probably female forms on a lily – Vala’s flower – embracing tightly and kissing mouth to mouth. Coloured by Albion’s responses (the scene is presented from his viewpoint) and by the couple’s subsequent shame, the scene nonetheless bears witness to Vala and Jerusalem’s love and, in a less homophobic culture than Blake’s or our own, would long have been recognized as a deeply lyrical evocation of sexual love. In a parallel scene – really a memory-trace stimulated or, perhaps, newly constituted by Vala and Jerusalem’s love scene and its aftermath – Albion testifies to an apparently primordial time when he and others ‘reared mighty Stones: we danced naked around them: / Thinking to bring Love into light of day [. . .] / Displaying our Giant limbs to all the winds of heaven!’ (24:4–6, E169). Inferably male – they have ‘Giant limbs’ – the participants apparently engaged in ritualistic naked dancing that almost, but not actually, led to open ‘Love’. Like Vala and Jerusalem’s later thoughts, this memory is suffused with guilt: the giants’ attempted love, Albion now feels, would have been ‘to Jerusalems shame’ (24:5, E169). These scenes visualize same-sex attraction as equal-status subjectivity in a way inferably different from earlier Blake works and from the theorizations outlined above. In neither scene, for example, is same-sex behaviour presented as age-related or as preparatory for heterosexual relations, as samesex contacts arguably are in some earlier Blake works (VDA iii, 1:1–15, E45) and in some literature of the period such as Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1985, 10–34). In place of Oothoon’s fleeting sexual instruction from a female before she seeks Theotormon, Vala and Jerusalem’s love, at least as Jerusalem recalls it, was sufficient to itself while it lasted – Vala’s veil ‘inclosd pity & love; because we lov’d one-another!’ (20:34–5, E165). This self-sufficient quality has a parallel in the early and mid-eighteenth-century genre of ‘sapphic picaresque’, which presented women ‘in intimate relations that [were] depicted as primary and chosen bonds’, were ‘offered as a viable or equal alternative, rather than an adjunct, to relations with men’, and usually continued until interrupted by external factors (Lanser 2001, 255, 256). Representations of relations like this one, then, were present elsewhere in Blake’s culture. Both scenes further portray affectional behaviour without reference to gender inversion. Blake employs neither an imagery of masculine and feminine ‘perceptions’ nor tropes associating the participants with gender-inappropriate affect, as in Milton. Vala and Jerusalem’s night is ‘sweet’, the moon ‘mild’, the partners ‘Trembling’ and ‘Sighing’; Jerusalem




Queer Blake

retrospectively speaks of Vala as ‘beautiful’ and of her own ‘virgin loveliness’ (19:43–7, 20:28, 38, E164–5) – all implicitly feminine-gendered terms. Albion’s memory is of something like tribal ritual dance, often if not universally a male activity. Neither scene, in sum, repeats Milton’s ideas of altered psychic gender balance. Nor, specifically, do these scenes fit ‘third’ or ‘fourth gender’ models (passive males, masculinized females). Plate 28’s visual tableau, in contrast to the text scene it alludes to, may partly incorporate ideas of sapphic masculinization. The left figure, often taken as Vala, is sexually ambiguous enough to be seen as male by some (for example, Damon 1988, 241), and in monochrome copies has a possibly ‘masculine’ assertive brow and eyes. On the other hand, these details are softened in copy E through colour effects, though still discernible under magnification.10 As so often, then, Blake’s design opens different nuances from those in his text, but in general, these scenes do not strongly imply gender inversion. If neither age-structured nor gender-defined, the behaviour adumbrated in these scenes does involve a subjectivity: Jerusalem and Vala’s actions (as Jerusalem remembers them) expressed love, as also Albion’s potentially did (20:32, 33, 35; 24:5, E165, 169). Yet the behaviour does not show a relatively stable preference, an ‘orientation’; it is striking how malleable the characters’ interests are, at least on the surface. Rather than an ‘orientation’, both incidents seem to show a plural potentiality. But Blake shows the consolidation neither of such a potentiality, nor of any other form of same-sex subjectivity, nor, finally, of a different-sex subjectivity from which same-sex potential has vanished without trace. Rather, as in Milton, Blake shows the disruption of same-sex subjectivity by outside enforcement and internal self-affirmation of social gender norms, leading to a different-sex subjectivity in which the repression of same-sex potential poisons personal life and helps form a world of gender and social oppression. Vala and Jerusalem’s idyll is disrupted in multiple, perspectivally exclusive, ways. In the narrator’s account based on Albion’s perceptions, Vala and Jerusalem break off ‘Astonish’d! Terrified!’ at the sight of Albion fainted on Lambeth’s vale, but in Jerusalem’s recollection the same event – as shown by the repetition of ‘Astonish’d’ – occurs as a response to male aggression: observing Vala ‘Beautiful thro’ our Love’s comeliness’, Albion ‘lov’d thee [Vala]! he rent thy Veil! [. . .] / Astonish’d at his beauty & perfection, thou forgavest his furious love’ (20:1–2, 33–7, E165). In both versions the characters internalize ideas of their love’s wrongness, ideas stronger in Vala’s case – she speaks of her ‘shame’ and ‘griefs’ (20:19–20, E165) – and less pronounced for Jerusalem because of her ethic of forgiveness (20:22–5, E165). Both partners, in sum, accept that male patriarchal right and women’s obligation to love only men trump their mutual attraction, and they rationalize this acceptance as positive love. In turn, the male dancing scene is not disrupted by any external factor; rather, internally-generated shame causes a visceral revulsion: ‘Sudden / Shame siezd us, we could not look on one-another for abhorrence’ (24:6–7, E169).



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These points help put in perspective the idea that before modern ideas of homosexuality developed, ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration’ (Foucault 1990, 43). If indeed Foucault’s meaning is that in earlier periods same-sex acts were not, or were not seen as, central and crucial parts of people’s subjectivities, then Blake’s portrayal of same-sex guilt and selfabhorrence goes off Foucault’s map altogether. While Vala and Jerusalem’s same-sex acts and desires, and Albion’s, are apparently not central to their subjectivities when undertaken – in the sense that the characters show a plural sexual potentiality – the self-repression of these acts and desires, reinforced by patriarchal norms, creates new subjectivities to which this repression is central. The repression prompts, for Vala and Albion, a violent mental shift toward guilt, acceptance and rationalization of their own suffering, and rationalization and enforcement of sexual and social persecution. This shift occasions the characters’ own degeneration; in Albion’s recollection, immediately upon his and his companions’ sudden ‘Shame’ and ‘abhorrence’, the ‘Blue / Of our immortal Veins & all their Hosts fled from our limbs’ (24:7–8, E169). And the shift occasions or helps call into being the dark and terrifying present social world in which I hear my Childrens voices I see their piteous faces gleam out upon the cruel winds ... I see them die beneath the whips of the Captains! (21:37–42, E166–7) Same-sex subjectivity in Blake is no merely incidental aspect of the psyche, because the rigidly different-sex character structure that we know, unsolidified during the same-sex episodes themselves, is constituted by repression of this subjectivity and reciprocally constitutes both the repression itself and the outward projection of the denied subjectivity as moral condemnation and war. Foucault’s point is disproved by the determined exclusion of samesex potentiality rather than by its consolidation as a subjectivity, and the assumed lack of a defined sodomitic self-conception that Foucault relies on to prove the disjunction between acts and subjectivities deconstructs itself into a critique of an exclusionary, as well as psychically crippled and guiltridden, subjectivity. This of course is Blake’s viewpoint as Foucault’s is his, but the social fact that Blake could hold his view reveals some simplification in Foucault’s.

Utopian projections of same-sex subjectivity (Jerusalem 86–90) Several passages in Jerusalem outline a utopian conception of gender fluidity and a more inclusive – but not fully inclusive – idea of gender than




Queer Blake

in previous works. These ideas implicitly include same-sex subjectivity and build on the earlier depictions of plural sexual potentiality.11 These passages include a broadly doctrinal exposition on the relation of eternal beings and emanations (88:1–15, E246) and related discussions of the consummation of bliss in the world of ‘Generation’ (86:42–7, E245), the separation of ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ emanations from eternal beings or ‘Man’ (90:1–13, E249), and the consolidation of defined single-gender identities (90:52–7, E250). These ancillary passages argue that eternal beings cannot know ‘bliss’ except on our earth: those ‘whose Emanations weave the loves / Of Beulah for Jerusalem & Shiloh’12 cannot ‘consummate bliss without being Generated / On Earth’ (86:42–4, E245). Further, this process is compromised when ‘The Feminine separates from the Masculine & both from Man, / Ceasing to be His Emanations, Life to Themselves assuming!’ (90:1–2, E249) – when the ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ emanations of eternal beings assume independent existence. When this occurs and ‘the Individual appropriates Universality’ (roughly, qualities that individuals partake of but do not or should not embody, including those of gender) then ‘He divides into Male & Female: & when the Male & Female, / Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death’ (90:52–4, E250). That is, separate gender identities on earth, separated from ‘Man’ in eternity, are a ‘Death’. In contrast, ‘When in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter / Into each others Bosom’ through the ‘embrac[ing] & comingl[ing]’ of their emanations, ‘Which stand both Male & Female at the Gates of each Humanity’ (88:3–4, 6, 11, E246). Taken together, these points outline a conception of multivalent gender potentiality for beings ‘in Eternity’ that is largely or entirely blocked in the present world and that includes but is not limited to same-sex acts. Blake uses gender terms to conceptualize, implicitly, both different-sex and samesex possibilities, but in a way that does not entail defined gender definitions or roles for either. His model is based on a revision of the idea of ‘Emanations’, which, contrary to earlier presentations, are now both male and female. Each ‘Man’ in eternity has ‘both Male & Female’ emanations at its ‘Gates,’ and eternal beings ‘converse’ when (and only when) these emanations ‘comingle’. They may, apparently, ‘comingle’ in any combination – male and female, male and male, or female and female. This possibility is implicit not only in Blake’s diction – male and female at the gates of each humanity – but also in what Blake tells us in the ancillary passages about the costs of exclusionary gender identity, that is, the costs if we assume only male-female ‘comingl[ing]’ is possible (or allowed). In the present world, Blake understands, the genders have ‘appropriate[d] Individuality’ and samesex combinations are excluded or shunned. Beings ‘in Eternity’, in contrast, for whom ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ are emanations but not individualities – that is, are sexual human bodies but not gendered identities – can, apparently, ‘comingle’ without restriction.



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This conception of homo/hetero and gender parity is evidently contradictory, since the most inclusive category used to express it, ‘Man’, is male-gendered. Discussing my earlier formulation that Blake’s humanities may unite ‘through male and female, or male and male, or female and female emanations’ (Hobson 2000, 172), Tristanne Connolly comments, ‘Hobson is able to interpret it this way because he places more faith [than I] in the assertion that emanations are “both Male & Female” [ . . . ] I argue that [these] are token gestures which reveal Blake’s good intentions to increase gender equality in his eternity, yet also reveal [ . . . ] an underlying assumption of maleness’ (2002, 229–30 n. 9). I think this is fair enough and would only note my conclusions in that work that Blake’s late ideas of gender are ‘fluid, even contradictory’ and that his critique of sexual norms was ‘capable of partly transcending hierarchic conceptions’ (Hobson 2000, 187, 189). But I would also urge that Blake’s masculinist assumptions are in play against more gender-equal ideas, rather than being necessarily more fundamental (‘underlying’). Ideologies, I think, are most often not unified and consistent, but multiform, contradictory, and possibly changing. Further, while Blake’s conceptions in these passages are indeed contradictory, they do not stand alone but are consistent with the episodes in both Jerusalem and Milton involving same-sex subjectivity. The multiple-potentiality conceptions of this subjectivity in both works accord with the idea of female and male emanations ‘at the Gates of each Humanity’; indeed Milton’s ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine perceptions’ within the brain are one form that male and female emanations could take. I would also note the significance of Blake’s idea that eternal forms ‘converse’ through male and female emanations as against alternative ideas that Blake’s gender utopia is fully androgynous, merging sexual difference into an inclusive, undifferentiated form. This concept has been voiced frequently, as in Warren Stevenson’s Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime (1996), but also contested, as in Claire Colebrook’s ‘Blake and Feminism: Romanticism and the Question of the Other’ (2000). Both feminist and queer criticism have reason to be wary of utopias that would merge difference into sameness: there is a real contrast between an apocalypse that homogenizes difference and one that recognizes continual difference, continual struggle with others and oneself, and yes, continual forgiveness of sins. The conception that eternal beings can mingle (not merge) only through sublunary forms that are themselves sexually differentiated but are not gender ‘identities’ is, I think, of value to queer and feminist criticism alike.

Blake, the evolution of same-sex subjectivity, and some other same-sex utopias Blake’s depictions show same-sex behaviour and subjectivity in ways strikingly different from those posited by recent theorizations. This fact does not,




Queer Blake

of course, disprove the theorizations; no single depiction can, particularly an imaginative literary-visual one. Blake’s presentations do show, however, that ways of conceiving same-sex subjectivity in the early nineteenth century were more varied than the theorizations assume. Such a pluralism both in conceptualizing same-sex relations and in their occurrence on the ground is suggested by some other evidence from the period. Contemporary accounts of both male and female relations imply, at least, that they could and did take less gender-inflected form than some theorizations assume; on the necessarily more elusive issue of subjectivity, some accounts show that such acts could be seen by others as involving a distinct and lasting proclivity.13 Blake’s depictions demonstrate, as well, that it was possible in his time to conceive same-sex behaviour in surprisingly ‘modern’ ways – as a subjectivity, though not one readily maintained against social norms; as, therefore, involving in present society a fateful dichotomy between same-sex and different-sex subjectivities; and as a component of a potentially degendered sexuality. The ‘modernity’ just mentioned, of course, is only apparent: these attitudes appear recent because we have not been aware of their existing in earlier periods, because of assumptions about their recent origins and specifically because of models that draw overly sharp oppositions between assumedly present and earlier conceptions or that posit overly neat developmental sequences. In the light of Blake’s representations, both major theorizations of samesex behaviour and subjectivity considered here reveal real weaknesses: neither the Foucauldian conception of a period in which such behaviour was not central to subjectivity nor Trumbach’s gender-based models account well for the ways in which Blake sees this behaviour. Murray’s comparative cross-cultural model works somewhat better, if only because it admits that different forms (and presumably understandings) of same-sex behaviour may exist in the same period, but its conception of transition from age-based to gender-structured same-sex behaviour, with the latter prevalent in Blake’s time, also seems schematic in light of Blake’s portrayals. One implication of Blake’s treatments, in fact, is that, as Sedgwick already argued, sequential models oversimplify what are in reality complex, not fully consistent conceptions coexisting in any given period. Considered themselves as part of the history of ideas, the major paradigms discussed here, particularly Foucault’s, reflect in part a kind of retrospective utopian thinking. On one side, by showing that conceptions of same-sex behaviour have varied sharply over time, these models free theorists and potentially their readers from the seeming objectivity and permanence of present sexual conceptions. On the other, by presenting the earlier past as a kind of blank slate, the theorizations project a preferred alternative – a state in which sexual object choice does not matter – backward onto a mythologized past. Ironically, such resonant and frequently repeated ‘memes’ as Trumbach’s Restoration rake ‘with his whore on one arm and his boy on the



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other’ and Foucault’s ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’ may never have been important in social life. The persistence of Foucault’s binary in particular – especially its appearance in socially motivated arguments to US judicial authority – may indicate how much is emotionally invested in the idea of a past in which, at some point, sexual choice was not important for one’s subjectivity or for the social world around one. Such persistence suggests that these conceptions represent a validating historical myth for yet-unrealized desires. Such myths are attractive but they have a price, in this case rationalizing as free choice what may have been a state of terror and despair. Blake’s larger practice offers a corrective to this tendency to idealize an imagined less frightful past. Blake understands that humanity’s past was barbaric, a reign of ‘War & Princedom & Victory & Blood’ (FZ 11:24, E306); and his depictions of ‘fall’ never show paradise and its loss but rather the characters’ retrospective belief that they have lost paradise. Paradise then does not lie in the past and cannot be regained. If it is to exist at all, we must first conceptualize and then build it.

Notes 1. See my Blake and Homosexuality and ‘“What Is Liberty”’ (Hobson 2000, 2006). 2. For a detailed exposition, see Halperin (2002, 162–4 n. 1). 3. See Foucault (1990, vol. 2); for extensions, a critique, and rejoinder, see Halperin (1998, 2002), Sha (2006) and Halperin (2006). 4. Borris (2001, 236 (section heading) and 237–44), Gleckner (1997, 16, 18), Mack (2000, 38, and 32–40 generally), Rowland (1998, 87 and elsewhere), Haggerty (1999, 143, 146), Liddington (1998) and, on Butler and Ponsonby, Lanser (1998–99, 2006), on Damer, Elfenbein (1999, 91–124), Lanser (2001); earlier sources in Hobson (2000). See also Van Leer for a critique of ‘extreme constructionism’ (which Van Leer does not think Foucault shared) and the argument that ‘it seems a kind of false precision to insist that there is no way to talk about homosexuality before 1870’ (1999, 217, 216). 5. George Chauncey, Nancy F. Cott, John D’Emilio, Estelle B. Freedman, Thomas C. Holt, John Howard, Lynn Hunt, Mark D. Jordan, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Linda P. Kerber. 6. Trumbach’s researches appeared in essays from the 1970s to the 1990s. His Sex and the Gender Revolution (1998) focuses on eighteenth-century heterosexual identity and uses little of this material. 7. Trumbach’s statements about this figure progress from empirical description to open-ended generalization. In 1989, Trumbach notes evidence of ‘bisexual libertinism’ in a circumscribed subculture and period – among ‘the relatively small circle of aristocratic libertines in the 1660s and 1670s’ in England (1989a, 130). The same year, the rake ‘often’ found with whore and boy characterizes the whole period from 1100 to 1700, at least as an image (Trumbach 1989b, 408). Two years later, Trumbach says that before 1700, the ‘minority’ who had sex with men ‘ordinarily had sexual relations with both genders’ (1991, 114). And in 1998 he writes that in pre-eighteenth-century Europe as a whole ‘probably most males felt desire for both males and females. Adult men expressed this by having sex with both adolescent males and with women’, removing the proviso that only a minority




8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Queer Blake acted on the desire (5). In this instance Trumbach cites Michael Rocke’s study of fifteenth-century Florence, Forbidden Friendships (1996), which argues from criminal records that two-thirds of Florentine men were accused of sodomy by age forty (Trumbach, 1998, 5; Rocke 1996, 115). Rocke, however, carefully notes Florence’s exceptionalism, that the sodomy usually took place only ‘sporadically or over relatively brief periods’, and that it most often served as ‘sexual solace’ before marriage (3–4, 15, 14) – all qualifications that Trumbach omits. (Further, Rocke’s statistics themselves are problematic; in particular, he seems to estimate sodomy cases as a percentage of Florence’s gross male population rather than of the much larger number of men who passed through the requisite age groups in the 72-year period he considers. See Cohn (1999) for a sharp though flawed critique.) In addition, see ‘Eton College’ and Comus for designs suggesting male adolescent homoeroticism (Hobson 2000, 95–104); see below on possible initiatory femalefemale eroticism in VDA. Blake does not explore either idea in detail. On the text scene, see sources cited in Hobson (2000, 152, 154, 220 n. 6) and, additionally, see Connolly (2002, 214–15) and Ankarsjö (2009, 163, 173). The latter clearly reads the scene as sapphic or lesbian but avoids either term. On the plate 28 design, see descriptions and bibliography in E307, 399, Blake (1991, 173–4) and Blake Archive, Jerusalem ‘Object 28’. Based on inspection of copies E, F, and the proof states of F, and on digital magnification of E in the Blake Archive reproduction. In the first proof state the characters’ posture, clumsily executed, suggests straddling by the nearer figure and has been taken as representing different-sex intercourse, but equally can represent tribadism (no genitals are visible). In the second proof state and all finished copies, the left figure has a female pubic V. Several commentators nonetheless see this figure as male, an instance of the general point that same-sex sexuality often remains literally unseen unless absolutely explicit. See Hobson (2000, 162–73, 182–90) for an earlier presentation not focused on ideas of subjectivity. On Shiloh, the ‘Masculine Emanation among the flowers of Beulah’ (J 49:47), see Hobson (2000, 164–7), which I now think overstates the evidence linking Shiloh with male homosexuality, as distinct from his significance as male emanation. Evidence of sodomites following a defined feminine affect or gender identification is very mixed. Some is found in molly house accounts; on the dangers of regarding these as sociologically accurate, see Patterson (1997). In the cases most familiar to me, of the pillorying and executions of patrons of the White Swan, Vere-street, in 1810–11, a polemical account, The Phœnix of Sodom (1998), describes a ladies’ dressing room and a marriage chapel at the Swan, standards of the molly house genre, and refers to ‘equivocal gender customers’, but also describes upstairs rooms used by hustlers and/or trysting lovers; it describes patrons’ use of female names but not female dress, and questions stereotypes about effeminacy, noting that ‘the Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher are now personified by an athletic Bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre Smith’ and disputing the ‘mistaken notion’ that ‘the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only’ (10–13, 50; emphasis in the original). News accounts show that the tavern’s patrons wore men’s clothes and were not effeminate – on arraignment after being held overnight they were ‘flashy dressed fellows, in coloured clothes, with nankeen trowsers, silk stockings, &c. all hale robust fellows, the oldest not above 33’ (‘Bow-Street, July 9’ The Times, 10 July 1810, 3). We know nothing of the deportment of members



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of a sodomitical group in Warrington in 1806 (three hanged), since ‘[t]he Judge very properly ordered that no notes should be taken’, but it is reported that the men ‘regularly assembled at the house of [one of them], on Monday and Friday evenings; and [ . . . ] they called one another brother’ (‘Provincials’, Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 31 August 1806, 276) – that is, they were not a molly house group or overtly feminized. Other police and court reporting generally makes no mention of differences in gender deportment. Concerning women, evidence again is mixed: alongside relationships with a (somewhat) more masculinized partner, like those of Butler and Ponsonby and Anne Lister and Ann Walker (Liddington 1998), and a woman sometimes called a sapphist and regarded as over-masculine who guarded her privacy rigorously, like Anne Damer (Elfenbein 1999, 91–124), there is the case of Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, forced to disband their girls’ school because of allegations that they had sexual relations; neither apparently appeared masculinized, and each was alleged each to take the top position on some occasions (‘State of the Process’ 1975, 3–7). On subjectivity, we know almost nothing first-hand, but newspapers’ regular use of terms like ‘abominable propensities’, and the same pamphlet’s description of the ‘vice’ as ‘the effect of a dreadful malignant malady’ having ‘an irresistible dominion over the faculties’ (Phœnix 1986, 17) reveal a public perception of something like an ‘orientation’.




2 Blake and the Queering of Jouissance

On the face of it, Blake is so queer that it is simply astonishing that it has taken so long to produce a collection of essays on queer Blake. Although Blake’s poetry lends itself to deconstructive analysis, and although queer theory is often indebted to deconstruction, his poetry is perhaps more resistant to certain forms of queer theory than we might expect. This chapter, therefore, examines the unexpected pressures Blake may be said to put upon queer theory. It does so by considering how Blake resists certain concepts in queer theory because he does not embrace the necessary disruptiveness of jouissance, meaning enjoyment; rather, he insists upon the consequences of desire when he suspends reproduction yet demands that jouissance lead to self-annihilation.1 Building upon Jonathan Dollimore’s (2001) sense of queer theory as a form of wishful theory because desire is framed as disruptive, but rarely disrupts the critic, I argue that Blake insinuates a gap between jouissance and self-annihilation, and therefore, desire cannot be inherently radical or subversive if it contains desire back in forms of identity like gender or essentializes desire as disruption. By making jouissance not the end, but the means to self-annihilation, and by not granting jouissance the automatic power to shatter the self, even when that self embodies heteronormativity, Blake frames jouissance as a precondition for change, but one that does not in and of itself achieve meaningful change.2 These gaps, moreover, allow us to ask what gives jouissance the power to disrupt? Blake knows that, to the extent that self-annihilation can lead to self-satisfaction, the repudiation of narcissism can unwittingly reinstall it (Edelman 2004, 50). I will show that since Blake does not see masturbation as leading to self-annihilation, he is wary of its capacity to enhance rather than shatter the self. Whereas deconstruction and queer theory rely upon language’s ability to ‘ignore or outflank’ the pressures of materialism (Terdiman 2005, 60), Blake, by contrast, explores the ways in which linguistic incarnation need not be tantamount to tyranny. The poet’s turn to incarnation reveals that, rather than presuming the gap between text and 40



Richard C. Sha

Blake and the Queering of Jouissance

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referent to be foundational, Blake not only constructs gaps to undermine societal notions of morality, but also recognizes the extent to which the degree of ‘disjunction between sign and referent is never determined in advance’ (Terdiman 2005, 47).

I begin with queer theory’s framing of jouissance so that we can better think about the advantages and disadvantages of using this concept to think about Blake. In No Future, Lee Edelman defines jouissance as ‘the unnameable remainder . . . a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law’ (25). He equates ‘intransigent jouissance’ with the ‘queerness [that] embodies this death drive’ because it ‘figure[s] sexuality’s implication in the senseless pulsions of drive’ (27). Edelman, in turn, riffs off of Leo Bersani’s idea that ‘sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart’ (Bersani 1987, 222). Bersani and Edelman want to link jouissance with anti-relationality, the death of the heteronormative social. This allows Bersani to collapse masochism and sexuality: as he puts it in The Freudian Body, ‘sexuality . . . could be thought of as a tautology for masochism’ (1986, 39). For Edelman, this notion of jouissance confers upon queerness an intransigence which defies a reproductive temporality that falsely renders the future heteronormative by making it impossible to conceive of futurity without the figure of the child. Yet both notions of jouissance raise problems, and not just for an understanding of jouissance in Blake. First, given that it is sometimes equated with a gap, what is the ontology of jouissance? Is jouissance a cause or an effect? Is it merely sensuous or cognitive or some combination of the two? Is it merely beyond pleasure, or does it mean suffering/pain (Braunstein 2003, 103)? Second, to the extent that disruption is automatic or unconscious, then why should this disruption acquire ethical value? And what makes jouissance a form of counter-culture? How does it challenge heteronormativity? And third, what lends jouissance the power to disrupt if it is outside signification and outside identity? How does it gain the traction it needs to do its work?3 These problems originate with Freud’s concept of the death drive, a concept Freud created to explain why human beings are compelled to experience the repetition of unpleasure. Such painful experiences made it clear that pleasure could not be our primary or sole motivator. More important, such experiences demonstrate that the instincts were not exclusively conservative (on the side of life). For Freud, the death drive was the ‘drive (Trieb) to return to the inanimate state’ (1955, 38). Spanning



Queer Jouissance: Edelman’s, Bersani’s, Lacan’s Freud

Queer Blake

a compulsion/drive and motivating force, and passiveness and activeness, Freud’s Trieb introduces the problem of origin, one exacerbated when Trieb is translated into ‘instinct’. The neuroscientist Steven Rose points out that ‘instinct’ covers ‘at least nine conceptually different ideas’, each of which ‘assume what they set out to explain, that is, an autonomous developmental sequence’ (2005, 114) and this conceptual elasticity has enabled it to adapt to prevailing needs. For Freud, where does this longing to return to inanimate nature originate? Why would the living long to return to the inanimate? And if it is the inanimate longing to return to its original state, how does the inanimate pine for such a return? In the end, the concept of the death drive may help explain masochism, but it does so, pace Rose, by assuming what it sets out to explain. If Lacan simply moved the problem of origin from instinct into language, thus reminding us that instinct is fundamentally located in language, the problem only gets worse when he equates jouissance with the unrepresentable real.4 Where Freud sought to name the beyond of pleasure, Lacan argued that this beyond was in fact beyond representation.5 Bersani and Edelman, then, rely on Lacan’s take on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define jouissance as an effect and as a cause, thus granting it the potential to produce the effects with which they agree. Here again is Edelman’s jouissance: ‘In a political field whose limit and horizon is reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this death drive, this intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexuality’s implication in the senseless pulsions of that drive’ (2004, 27). The chiasmatic structure of jouissance allows one gap to subsume other gaps: queerness substitutes for the death drive even as the gap between pleasure and the body substitutes for the gap between symbols and signs. This is to say, bracketed within discourse, queerness both ‘embodies’ and ‘figures’, but what it embodies hovers between a figure and a drive. Jouissance thereby performs its ‘intransigence’, the shattering of signification. Such performativity is heightened by the definition of jouissance in terms of figuration – witness Lacan’s shifting formulations of the term – a definition that allows one gap to metonymically subsume all other gaps.6 Queerness thus takes on the senseless pulsions of the death drive and yet transforms those senseless pulsions into a non-reproductive intransigence. It does so through figuration, a figuration that is at odds with reality (reproductive futurism). Indebted to Lacan, ‘pulsion’ names the ‘unconscious drive or impulse influencing the development of human personality’ (OED), and the gap between bodily pulsion and figuration is here obscured by the incarnation of Trieb into the body along with the sign of the drive that stands in for bodily experience. Moreover, in this formulation, cause is collapsed with effect in so far as jouissance enacts the very potential for intransigence against reproductive futurity which Edelman demands while at the same time functioning as the symptom (sinthome) of sexuality.



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Similarly building upon Freud’s death drive, Bersani turns to jouissance to name a kind of desire that ‘does not seek its own extinction in “satisfaction”.’7 He elaborates, ‘the pleasurable-unpleasurable tension of sexuality – the pain of self-shattering excitement – aims at being maintained, replicated, and even increased’ (1990, 36). How does tension aim? Thus formulated, jouissance now shatters not only the self, but also ‘self-shattering is turned into rageful aggressiveness, and the excited dismantling of identity is degraded into the longing for a merely biological death’ (45). But how is this turn from self-shattering to aggressiveness achieved? And what accomplishes this turning? Jouissance is beyond the pleasure principle in that it leads to masochism and anti-relationality, which is what gives Bersani’s notion of sexuality value to begin with. As he asks in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’ (1987, 222): ‘What if the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it?’ Bersani adds that self-jouissance . . . dissolves the person and thereby, at least temporarily, erases the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence. If sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart . . . it can also be thought of as our primary, hygienic practice of nonviolence . . . (Bersani 1990, 4) Although his polemic questions the ability of art to redeem both society and selfhood, Bersani has in effect turned to jouissance in the form of ‘socially dysfunctional sex’ to transform the self from an ethical ideal into a mere convenience. Once again, cause has become blurred with effect – they are ‘plunge[d] into’ jouissance – and his version of jouissance fails deliberately to rescue art from masochism. Against the violence of the self when held up as an ethical ideal, Bersani’s orgasm ironically redeems the self from its own tendency toward violence.

Blake, jouissance, and self-annihilation Blake’s jouissance certainly sometimes looks like a shattering of the self and society. When he figures desire as the excess, that excess often undermines conventional morality. The poet sometimes yokes desire with violence, particularly in Orc, and thus anticipates Freud by demanding an explanation beyond the pleasure principle. Indeed, for the poet, jouissance binds together joy and orgasm and looks forward to the Lacanian moment




44

Queer Blake

our steeds drink of the golden springs Where Luvah doth renew his horses: look’st thou on my youth, And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more. Nothing remains; . . . when I pass away, It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy . . . (3:7–11, E5) The renewal of lust’s horses leads the cloud to vanish: to the extent that Luvah represents lust and ‘golden’ and ‘horses’ are synecdoches for sex, orgasm results in the disappearance of the self/cloud. That disappearance does cause fear, albeit fear in ‘thee’, and it thereby moves orgasm beyond the pleasure principle. Thel, by contrast, resists the idealistic stance towards self-annihilation as offered by the cloud.8 This passage leads to her declaration of difference writ large in sexual difference. ‘I fear that I am not like thee’, she insists (3:17, E5). More importantly, whereas the cloud does not have to think about how he will be judged, she, by contrast, worries ‘Thel delights in these no more because I fade away, / And all shall say, without a use this shining woman liv’d’ (3:21–2, E5). Here, Blake allows for the possibility that since women and presumably not men are judged by the standard of use, women can only with difficulty see jouissance as a means to a higher good. The framing of herself in terms of the third person highlights how women are acculturated to think about themselves from the standpoint of others. This awareness then mandates a gap between jouissance and disruption. Put another way, jouissance may be a form of disruption that is less available to women. Thel cannot think outside of use: in life she was without use and thinks of herself as having acquired use in death as the food of worms. Thel makes clear that Blake is not blind to the fact that sexuality can lead to sexism, violence and narcissism. Unlike Edelman and Bersani who think that sexuality is necessarily masochistic or narcissistic, Blake remains alive to the possibility of pleasure and mutuality. At the same time, he knows how difficult they are to achieve, given the pernicious influence of moral law and cultural ideals of modesty and chastity. Ultimately, Blake is closer to Freud who wants to recognize both the pleasure principle and the death drive within sexuality.9 If Freud acknowledges pleasure and pain in human sexuality, Lacan has tilted jouissance towards pain. For him, it names an unsustainable intensity, which is why pleasure and pain are necessarily mixed.10 Whereas Edelman and Bersani align jouissance with disruptive power, Blake is more cautious. By splitting ‘our’ into I and thou in the above passage, Blake reminds us that the experience of jouissance does not necessarily



when pleasure modulates into pain. Thus the cloud in The Book of Thel announces:

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transfer from one to the other. To be sure, Blake does turn to sexuality to disrupt the social conventions of his day. We ‘wither’ our natural bodies even further ‘by Laws of Sacrifice for Sin / By Laws of Chastity and Abhorrence’ (J 49:25–6, E196). Nonetheless, while the poet makes orgasm proximate to bliss, and sometimes blissfully disruptive, he insists that orgasm does not necessarily result in self-annihilation, what he elsewhere terms the forgiveness of moral sins.11 The poet writes, ‘he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise’ (E470): ‘joy’ for Blake is often sexual and joy here is the prerequisite for breaking from our corrupt senses and moving towards eternity. Blake insists upon a gap between orgasm and meaningful disruption through his ideas of vegetative sexuality, and the meaningless reproductivity of generation: concepts that may look like jouissance but which are bereft of spirit. Blake’s mythological characters, such as the Whore of Babylon, show that an enslavement to desire is far from a form of freedom. Jouissance may be a precondition for the disruption of the very notion of self, but it does not automatically lead to that disruption. The clearest place to witness this is in the poet’s treatment of masturbation. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake on the one hand connects masturbation with ‘the moment of desire!’ (7:3, E50). On the other hand, Oothoon denounces that both ‘the virgin / that pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys / In the secret shadows of her chamber’ and the ‘youth shut up from / the lustful joy. shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image / In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow’ (7:3–7, E50). These are ultimately the ‘places of religion’ (7:8, E50) because religion thrives upon guilt. While masturbatory orgasm looks and feels like self-annihilation, it in fact fails to achieve the loss of egotism. Hence Blake refers to it as ‘the self-enjoyings of self-denial’ (7:9, E50), a form of pleasure that masks power rather than confronts it. Blakean jouissance, thus, is not necessarily disruptive. Nor is it automatically outside of polite culture. Adding to his scepticism that jouissance entails disruption are the influence of moral law over sexuality (what he calls ‘Sexual Love as iron chains’ (J 54:12, E203)), the tendency of sexual repression to lead to an uninhibited sexuality that is nonetheless enslaved to desire and to vegetative corporeality (generation), and the general difficulty of truly bringing together bodies and souls. When Blake has Orc rape the shadowy and nameless female at the outset of America, and writes of her ‘womb’ that ‘It joy’d’ (2:3–4, E52), he thereby inserts a necessary scepticism about human sexuality, queer or not, as a means to liberation or intersubjectivity. To what extent can rape be the form of liberation? Moreover, the gap between identity and ‘it’, foregrounded in the metonymic substitution of the womb for the self, belies the possibility of intersubjectivity. Blake’s insistent metonymies here at the very least demonstrate the poet’s recognition of the costs of misogyny. Nonetheless where Lacan’s jouissance causes the breakdown of the subject into organs, and where Bersani and Edelman value sexuality for its ability to suspend sociality, Blake turns to sexuality to suspend liberation so that




Queer Blake

he can evaluate whether or not liberation has taken place. Put another way, the breakdown of the subject is meaningless for Blake unless it results in forgiveness. In Milton, Blake underscores his scepticism that jouissance leads automatically to the death of selfhood when Ololon, now combined with Milton, blame themselves for causing Milton’s self-sacrifice to result in the enhancement of ‘Natural Religion’, not the destruction of it.12 Moreover, she worries that the ‘Children of Jerusalem’ may be ‘annihilated in thy [Milton’s] annihilation’ (40[46]:16, E141): annihilation may have pernicious effects. The very fact that Blake divides self-annihilation into two forms or events insists upon gaps between self-annihilation and meaningful consequences. If queer theory emphasizes the annihilation half of self-annihilation, Blake reminds us that one must have a self in order for it to be annihilated. Milton’s self-annihilation (M 14[15]:10–15[17]:20, E108–9) is recapitulated and legitimated by Ololon, who casts off her selfhood, which has taken the form of virginity, on Plate 42. Milton figures his descent in explicitly sexual terms (Mitchell 1973, 302). By contrast, although Bersani, Edelman and Lacan define jouissance in terms of the gap between sign and signification, they tend to foreclose a gap between jouissance/sexuality and disruption.13 Blake demands a gap between jouissance and self-annihilation because an automatic connection would make jouissance essentially a passive experience, whereby something happens to the body. Passivity would cheapen the active self-sacrifice of Christ, Ololon and Milton. Not only does Blake have Milton repeatedly insist ‘I go to Eternal Death’ (14[15]:14, 22, 32, 33, E108), but he also elongates Ololon’s descent over twenty-four plates (12–36). Recognizing consequences for their sacrifice, Milton and Ololon actively choose to sacrifice. This gap between jouissance and self-annihilation further highlights another problem: how does jouissance in the text get transferred to the reader? To arrive at solutions to this problem, Blake emphasizes that Milton’s self-annihilation exists to awaken others to self-annihilation (Wittreich 1975, 239–40): it is not an end to itself.14 Finally, on Plate 41 of Milton, Blake makes explicit what self-annihilation entails: the ‘cast[ing] off’ of ‘Rational Demonstration by Faith’, the substitution of ‘Inspiration’ for ‘Memory’, the taking off of ‘filthy garments’ and replacing them with the spiritual garment of Ololon, the casting off of the ‘idiot Questioner’, and the recognition that ‘Benevolence & Virtue’ are but names for murder and destruction (41:[48]:3–6, 12, 20, E142). Blake writes, I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration. (41[48]:2–7, E142)



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Although this lengthy catalogue links many signifiers together, it puts particular pressure on the Lacanian idea that a signifying chain will do the work of self-annihilation. For one, there are so many different kinds of issues to grapple with. For another, the gap between names and things does not in itself accomplish anything, a point underscored by Blake’s repetition of the infinitive form of the verb, ‘to cast off’. Anaphora makes clear the work of casting off is never done, and that someone must do it. Against Edelman, Blake equates self-annihilation with a Christian intensification of mutuality, not the doing away with it. In Milton, for instance, the ‘laws of Eternity’ dictate that ‘each shall mutually / Annihilate himself for others good, as I [Milton] for thee [Satan]’ (38:35–6, E139). Self-annihilation is the casting off of the self as ego, a feat never complete. In Jerusalem, moreover, self-annihilation encompasses the forgiveness of sins; Blake literally defines forgiveness ‘which is Self Annihilation’ (98:23, E258). While Blake idealizes sexuality by allowing it potentially to stand in for mutuality, he invokes the principles of Christianity to help enable it. Also queer from the perspective of queer theory is Blake’s simultaneous depiction of jouissance in terms of self-annihilation and in terms of incarnation. Whereas queer theory connects jouissance with the smashing of signification and the shattering of the self, and further links this shattering with disruption, Blake has jouissance lead ultimately to the incarnation of perversion within Christ. The fact that Blake’s Christ broke all ten of the commandments, the moral norm of his time, means that Blakean incarnation reinstalls perversion within divinity. Christ’s perversion is intensified when he unites with the holy lust of Luvah. The poet’s incarnation of perversion thus insists upon an embodied gap within divinity. While deconstruction locates the liberating possibilities of language within the gap between word and thing, a point embraced by both Edelman and Bersani, Blake understands both the incarnational and deconstructive powers of language to have liberating potential. In Milton, Ololon’s descent and selfannihilation of her identity as a virgin results in her incarnation into an ambiguously gendered divine garment, one that embodies ‘woven letters’ which amount to ‘Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression’ (M 42[49]: 13–14, E143).15 Blake here emphasizes both the divine and literal facets of language, and both have the potential to achieve liberation. By neglecting the incarnational side of language, deconstructive critics forget to consider how counter-arguments move beyond the gap to gather the traction they need to do their work. They fail to consider the limitations of the gap. Jerusalem also ends in incarnation, culminating in the oneness of Christ’s body. Indeed, the ‘Non Ens / of Death was seen in regenerations terrific’ (98:33–4, E258). Here, the poet unites sexual joy, self-annihilation and the incarnation of Christ; Blake turns the ‘Non Ens’ of orgasmic death into Christ’s embodiment/resurrection. Not only does this passage highlight ‘nerves expansive’, nerves being the organs of bliss, but it also announces




Queer Blake

the awakening of the ‘body of death’ into life (98:16, 21 E257). Even the line number is significant: such death occurs in line 33, the age when Christ sacrificed himself. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the devil stipulates that ‘no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from im / pulse: not rules’ (23–4, E43). Blake in turn shows his allegiance by refusing to capitalize the ten commandments, and by elongating ‘impulse’ over two plates. ‘Pulse’ further testifies to the virtues of corporeality. Since perfect incarnation makes interpretation unnecessary because words are now the thing, Blake demands an imperfect incarnation (he splits ‘im’ and ‘pulse’) that still requires us to think through the problems of perception. Yet the fact that he relies upon incarnation when queertheorists like Edelman and Bersani grant queer sexuality the deconstructive power to shatter signification implies that, at least for Blake, shattering is not enough. Edelman (2004, 9) argues that sexuality is based on ‘drives that carry the destabilizing force of what insists outside or beyond, because foreclosed by, signification’. Blake is aware of the material consequences of bodies, and thus cannot embrace as given and foundational the gap between word and thing. Of course, he recognizes how this gap can be a persuasive lever for power. By transforming the Ten Commandments from a set of rules into ‘the wond’rous art of writing’ (J 3, E145), Blake insists upon a gap between God’s alleged words and reference. But this gap can only be meaningful when it is not automatic. After all, when the gap is taken as a given, Blake’s achievement is rendered invisible. At the same time, Blake knows that endless vertigo cannot be mistaken for liberty: it may be a means of achieving liberation, but it is not the same as liberty. His use of the vortex hints that he does not mistake endless vertigo for liberty. Differences aside, Blake may be closer to Bersani’s notion of jouissance than to Edelman’s. Unlike Bersani, who considers sexuality as antithetical to the redemptive powers associated with art, Blake insists upon the redemptive powers of the imagination and the pleasures of imaginative art. And yet, since Bersani can be seen to be redeeming us from the notion that art redeems us, underneath his take on sexuality as jouissance and as antirelationality is the radical possibility that sexuality will undermine society as we know it. While the negativity of sexuality and art, therefore, refuse to redeem, this is in fact a reverse redemption since such negativity strips away one of art and sexuality’s most powerful illusions: the pleasure principle. So here, Bersani and Blake are not so much at odds with one another as they are allies through negation. Where Bersani wants jouissance to strip away the veil of redemption, an anti-redemption which nonetheless redeems art from its illusions and sex from pleasure, Blake imagines jouissance as a vehicle that enables, but does not deliver, the casting off of memory for imagination and inspiration, along with the pleasurable reintegration of self and society into the oneness of a perverted Christ.



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1. In Blake, sexual joy greatly exceeds reproduction. 2. If jouissance maps Blake’s self-deconstructions, so does trauma (see Rajan 1997). Blake criticism searches for new names for this deconstructive bent. I thank Tom Ratekin for his helpful criticisms of this essay. 3. I am indebted to Richard Terdiman for this insight (see Terdiman 2005, 133–7). Terdiman notes that Diderot defined jouissance as the moment when we meet someone of the opposite sex and have ‘floods of humours run through the nerves’ (ibid. 85). 4. See Verhaeghe (2001, 72–7). 5. Lacanians do not agree on what jouissance means. Fink (1995) argues that jouissance means satisfaction. Braunstein, by contrast, argues that ‘if desire is fundamentally lack, lack in being, jouissance is positivity, it is a “something” lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure. It is a plus, a sensation that is beyond pleasure’ (2003, 104). Braunstein further suggests that ‘jouissance is a satisfaction – the satisfaction of the death drive’ (ibid., 106). Verhaeghe combines Fink and Braunstein to argue that there are two forms of enjoyment in Lacan: one where the law regulates enjoyment and another that belongs to the body and stands outside the subject and the symbolic (2001, 90). 6. Space does not allow me to detail these manifold transformations in Lacan’s definitions of jouissance. Compare his early essay ‘The Jouissance of Transgression’ (Lacan 1997, 191–204) with ‘On Jouissance’ (1999, 1–13). 7. Bersani argues in The Freudian Body (1986, 63–4) that Freud represses ‘sexuality as productive masochism’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. ‘The possibility of exploiting the shattering effects of sexuality in order to maintain tensions of an eroticized, de-narrativized, and mobile consciousness has been neglected, or refused, in favour of a view of pleasure as nothing more than the reduction of all tension and the evacuation of all excitement.’ 8. On Thel’s engagement in ‘subversive sexual speculations,’ see Bruder (1997, 52). Webster (1993, 49), by contrast, sees Thel’s resistance in terms of her ‘unconscious response to the latent meaning’. 9. On the oppositional friendship between Freud and Blake, see George (1980). 10. I am indebted to Tom Ratekin for this definition. 11. I critique Christopher Hobson’s argument that Blake approves of all forms of perverse sexuality in chapter five of Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (2009). 12. On Ololon’s ‘blurred gender identity,’ see Elfenbein (1999, 167–8). 13. Lacan sometimes seems more ambivalent about jouissance. While he equates jouissance with indecency, he also links jouissance with surplus value, the profit that one has the right to enjoy in one’s property (Fink 1995, chapter 7). 14. Wittreich (1975, 239) shows how Milton as awakener helps to break readers out of the cycles of history, thus fomenting true revolution. 15. On garment imagery in Blake, see Paley (1973).



Notes

3 Peter Otto

O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Sampson shorn by the Churches! Shewing the Transgressors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven: Heaven as a Punisher & Hell as One under Punishment . . . (M 22[24]:50–3, E117–18) Forming a Sexual Machine: An Aged Virgin Form. In Erin’s Land toward the north, joint after joint & burning In love & jealousy immingled & calling it Religion (J 39[44]:25–7, E187) In The Four Zoas, Blake appropriates elements of the spiritual system elaborated by the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, drawing in particular on his The Delights of Wisdom pertaining to Conjugial Love [sic] and A Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, in order to construct a ‘language’ able to describe the rigid bodies formed in accordance with Urizen’s rational/religious laws, while also indirectly presenting the ungrounded, contingent bodies formed through performance. Discussions of Blake’s views on bodies and sexualities are often divorced from his aesthetics and politics, but in this poem Blake’s account of contracted, expanded and dynamic bodies is closely related to his radical experiments with line and to his delineation of a politics concerned with what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004, 12–19). The following pages develop these remarks. They provide an overview of Swedenborg’s ‘sexual’ religion, focusing in particular on the prominent role played by the sexes in his thought, before turning to pages 40 and 112 [108] of The Four Zoas (Figures 3.1 and 3.2 below).1 The former portrays a key moment in the emergence of the fallen world’s ‘Sexual Machine’; the latter pictures the moment when it grinds temporarily to a halt. Between these two points, the vast panorama of human history (as portrayed in The Four Zoas) again and again takes shape, ‘joint after joint . . . burning / In love & jealousy’. 50



Drawing Lines: Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas

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As I shall argue, on each of the levels on which this machine operates, a set of primary oppositions (mind and body, active and passive, male and female and so on) are articulated by a bounding line. In other words, each pole is divided from its opposite by a line that (like all boundaries) also links them to each other, defining and expressing them by ‘imposing’ determinate form. Swedenborg assumes that these lines and the world they define are congruent with the nature of things, as defined by God, but as his descriptions proliferate and become more detailed this claim is subtly undermined: once its mechanisms have been mapped, Swedenborg’s ‘eternal’ world seems contingent, only one of many possible worlds, and the relation between ‘opposites’ that it endorses only one of their possible conjugations. This paradoxical reversal informs the logic of Blake’s prophetic poetry and, more particularly, his recognition in The Four Zoas that one can escape from the fallen world’s sexual machine only through what at first seems to preserve it, namely the bounding line.

‘[A] Sexual Machine: An Aged Virgin Form’ The experience that transformed Swedenborg, in his middle fifties, from a sober student of natural science into an inspired teacher of spiritual arcana is well known. After eating his evening meal at a London inn, he noticed ‘that a vapor’ had ‘clouded his sight’ and then that ‘the walls of [his] chamber appeared to be covered by frightful creeping things, such as serpents, toads, and the like’. When the vapour dissipated, Swedenborg found he had been joined by an unknown man, who was sitting silently ‘in the corner’ of the room. Terrified by these apparitions he hurried home but ‘the following night the same man appeared’ again, this time with the revelation that he was ‘God the Lord’ and would take Swedenborg as his pupil, teaching him ‘the spiritual sense of the holy Word’. From that time onwards, until the end of his life, Swedenborg claimed to be able, on a daily basis, ‘to see what was done in the other world’ and ‘to converse with angels and spirits’ (Robsahm 1862, 170). Even if one doesn’t believe these claims, it is hard not to be impressed by the spiritual world he unveils in book after book for the next twentyseven years of his life: ‘The fierce geometry, the crystal / Labyrinth of God and the sordid / Milling of infernal delights’ (Borges 1988, 353). As these lines by Borges suggest, the landscape ‘discovered’ by Swedenborg is marked by an elemental antagonism between Heaven and Hell: the first expresses the order, reason, love and truth that flows from a ‘God [that] is Order’ (Swedenborg 1784, 57);2 the second embodies the chaos, passion and falsity that emerge as one turns from that god. Unlike most Christian cosmologies, which place a deep gulf between Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg brings them into claustrophobic proximity with each other: Hell’s ‘infernal mansions’ lie



Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas

Queer Blake

immediately below ‘every mountain, hill, rock, plain, and valley’ of Heaven (588). Swedenborg declares that ‘Heaven takes the form of a Grand Man, and all Angels and all Spirits are Men in a perfect Form’ (1778, 11). They are perfect, it should be added, because they are unencumbered by the flesh. Conversely, Satan, Hell and all devils are men in monstrous form because they are divorced from reason and therefore from God. These starkly opposed realms touch each other, struggle against each other’s influence, but nevertheless don’t mix. Consequently, because the influence of one is exactly equal to that of the other, the universe is held in equilibrium. This constellation of perfectly balanced forces provides the archetype for the ‘Aged Virgin Form’ described by Blake in Jerusalem (39[44]:25, E187). It holds life in a state of suspended animation by dividing mind from body, reason from the passions, and active (masculine) from passive (feminine) powers. The material world and each individual within it are marked by this schism. Although the former ‘proceeds derivatively . . . from [Heaven], and subsists by continual influx from’ that realm, it also bears ‘the impressions and properties’ of Hell, making it ‘a kind of torment-house to us’ (Swedenborg 1784, xxxviii). Each individual is linked directly to Heaven by reason (the internal man) and to Hell by the senses (the external man). The former provides a conduit for ‘all the good and truth’ that flow from God, but this is balanced by the ‘evil and false’ that flood into our minds through the senses from Hell. Because the influence of Heaven is exactly equal to that of Hell, we are free to choose whether to be shaped by the former or the latter. When a ‘man’ chooses the second, he begins the long descent from the natural to the sensual-natural and finally to the corporeal-natural, where he will be ‘carried away by the alluring stimulant heats of the body’ (Swedenborg 1794b, 442). If he chooses the first, he sets out on the opposite journey, from the corporeal to the sensual, natural, rational, and finally the spiritual, in the course of which ‘the world in him becomes [entirely] subordinate, and subservient to Heaven’ (447). This ascent can be completed only after death. While in our mortal bodies, Hell is always resurgent and we therefore must continually struggle to abstract ‘the intellect from the fallacies of the senses, and . . . the will from the allurements of the body’ (145). At each stage of our ascent towards Heaven, Reason must discipline the body, gradually bringing it into a relation of congruence with divine order. This erects a progressively more formidable defence against Hell. Each stage in this process also functions as a plane, built so the higher can rest on the lower, ‘as a palace on its foundations’ (447). Those living on the higher storeys of this palace are quarantined from the body’s passions (excluded by the walls of the palace or buried beneath its foundations) and are therefore blessed with vision not qualified by the flesh. They look out to the world through ‘Walls [that are] continued Windows of chrystalline Glass’, allowing



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them to ‘look all around into the City, and view it in its Extent, and know every House therein’. In contrast, those dwelling ‘in the lowest Storey’ peer out at the world through ‘Windows . . . made of Paper, pasted together’ and are therefore unable to ‘see any Street out of the House, but only the Things contained in the House’ (Swedenborg 1781, 2:839). In Blake’s oeuvre, the oppositions that structure Swedenborg’s thought are humanized: Heaven and Hell are re-imagined as human rather than divine locales, the domains respectively of reason and energy. Swedenborg’s ‘God’ is troped as a figment of Urizen’s religion and the static order he imposes is represented as ‘a Sexual Machine: An Aged Virgin Form’, the motor and the never-finally-achieved goal of morality, law, commerce and empire. One of this machine’s most important sub-routines concerns human sexuality.

Conjugial Love The antagonism between Heaven and Hell appears in relations between the sexes as an opposition between scortatory love, which ‘ascends out of hell [sic]’, and conjugial love, which ‘descends from heaven [sic]’ (Swedenborg 1794b, 439). The former begins with ‘the stimulant fires and itchings of the flesh’. As it proceeds, these ‘fires and itchings’ become ‘filthy allurements, which, as they ascend and descend, and reciprocate, so they excite and inflame’, infecting the spirit with ‘what is evil and false’ (440). The latter begins with the desire for internal rather than external conjunction of the sexes, which flows from reason rather than the body. Internal conjunction purportedly brings us into accord with our most fundamental nature for, as Swedenborg explains to his readers, ‘the male man and the female man were so created, that from two they may become as one man, or one flesh, and when they become one, they are then, taken together, man (homo) in his fulness’ (37). If he is to reach this state, the inner man must labour to bring the female body (as well as his own) into a relation of congruence with the divine. To the extent that this is achieved, ‘love made spiritual flows into and acts upon rational love, and through this flows into and acts upon sensual love, and through this lastly flows into and acts upon that love in the body and the flesh’ (447). Nevertheless, even on the upper storeys of the palace of conjugial love, this love is never altogether chaste or pure . . . [even amongst the angels] there is still somewhat not chaste or not pure, which adjoineth or subjoineth itself thereto . . . and there is as it were a door with a hinge interposed by the Lord, which is opened by determination, and is providently prevented from standing open, lest one principle should pass into the other, and they should mix together . . . (146)




Queer Blake

This one-way flow of fluid from mind to body might suggest that conjugial love is asexual, but this would be a serious misunderstanding. According to Swedenborg, conjugial love opens a ‘vein of potency’; it ‘makes man more and more a man (homo) and a man (vir [virile])’; and consequently angels ‘are in this lastingness to eternity’, blessed it seems with a permanent erection (44, 433). The delights of the flesh have been replaced by the ‘[delights] of the spirit in the flesh’. The spirit now enters chaste into the body, and fills the breasts with the delights of it’s blessedness, and from the breasts [fills] also the ultimates of that love in the body, in consequence whereof the spirit with these [ultimates], and these [ultimates] with the spirit, afterwards act in full communion. (441) This flood of ‘chaste’ spirit into the body brings the external (female) so completely into conformity with the internal (male) that she almost disappears. Indeed, when Swedenborg meets a conjugial pair during one of his many visits to Heaven, he finds it difficult to discern the female half of ‘man in his fulness’: I viewed the building within, and observed that it was divided into two, and still was one; it was divided into two by a translucid wall, but it appeared as one by reason of the translucidity, which was like that of the purest chrystal: I inquired the reason of this? He said, I am not alone, my wife is with me, and we are two, yet still not two but one flesh. (65[56]; see also para. 42) As we have seen, the spiritual man, with his body safely confined beneath him, looks at the world through large, transparent windows. The external bodies of our conjugial pair are similarly buried beneath them, forming the ground that holds them aloft. The spiritual man (the inner man) is consequently divided from his inner female only by ‘a translucid wall’. Whether he looks at the inner female or the spiritual world, nothing obstructs his sight. This produces an intimacy so complete that, like Narcissus making love to an image of himself that has sprung into life, ‘when the husband spake, he spake at the same time as from his wife, and when the wife spake, she spake at the same time as from her husband’ (42). Where does all this ‘chaste fluid’ come from? What could hold the quantities of this liquid necessary to effect this reorganization of the body? Swedenborg is confident that it stems ultimately from God (who is love and wisdom). Pages 40 and 112 of The Four Zoas provide a different answer. As I shall argue, the illustrations to these pages parody the sexual relations that, according to Swedenborg, structure interactions between Heaven and Hell, mind and body, and men and women. While Swedenborg aligns these



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relations with the non-violent, harmonious essence of things, Blake presents them as a grotesque, misogynistic sexual machine. Curiously, these pages of The Four Zoas have sometimes been used as evidence to support the claim that Blake endorses conventional gender stereotypes (Webster 1987, 217–24). But this is convincing only if they are interpreted apart from the context provided by The Four Zoas and in ignorance of the object of their parody. Rather than forming the necessary ground of reality (as Swedenborg supposes), the relations that animate the world’s sexual machine are contingent rather than necessary, constitutive elements of a tragi-comedy rather than an order ordained by God. Blake’s parody suggests therefore that, contrary to appearances, the fallen world is itself an ungrounded body. The next step in our path towards queer Blake will therefore seem at first to lead in the wrong direction.

Ascending and descending Swedenborg’s stairway to Heaven Night the Third of The Four Zoas begins with Urizen, ‘the King of Light’, seated ‘on high upon his starry throne’, and with Ahania (his emanation or female portion) ‘bow’d . . . before his splendid feet’ (37:1, 2, E326). Yet despite his elevation and authority, Urizen is not yet ‘one man’ with Ahania, and he is disturbed by mutterings, arising from within the foundations of his palace, that foretell a time when Luvah and Vala (sexual love and the emanation of that love) will erupt from the body and sweep him from his throne (38:2, 6–10, E326). To circumvent this possibility Urizen disciplines the body, but this has effects quite different from those predicted by Swedenborg. His ‘curbs of iron & brass’ feed the body ‘with intoxication from the wine presses of Luvah / Till the Divine Vision & Fruition is quite obliterated’ (39:5–7, E326–7). In response to his fears, Ahania describes the primordial collapse of Albion (the whole man) that brought Urizen to power. Only dimly aware of the complex relations between elevated and disciplined (spiritual and corporeal) bodies, she attempts to reassure Urizen that collapse of the body will be followed by resurrection of the mind. But as her narrative proceeds, supplemented by the illustration at the bottom of the page, a more complex picture is drawn. At the beginning of Ahania’s narrative, Albion walks with Vala ‘on the steps of fire before his halls’ (39:15, E327). Rather than standing in one of his palace’s upper storeys, he has descended to enjoy the pleasures of scortatory love. Because influx from Heaven is consequently being supplanted by that from Hell, he is described by Ahania as ‘the Darkning Man’ (39:15, E327). Confirming this judgement, when Albion looks upward, he sees Urizen’s faded ‘splendor’ (39:18, E327). Shocked by these changes, Albion acts like a good Swedenborgian: he ascends ‘mourning into the splendors of his palace’ (40:2, E327). As he rises,




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Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen pure he hover’d A sweet entrancing self delusion, a watry vision of Man Soft exulting in existence all the Man absorbing (40:3–6, E327) It is now heavenly rather than fleshly things (the ‘Shadow’ rather than Ahania or Vala) that animate Albion’s body: If thou withdraw they breath I die & vanish into Hades If thou dost lay thine hand upon me behold I am silent If thou withhold thine hand I perish like a fallen leaf O I am nothing & to nothing must return again (40:14–17, E327) Yet as the attendant allusions to dream, shadow and self-delusion suggest this ‘sweet entrancing self delusion’ is conjured by a contingent arrangement of material bodies. These bodies are the subject of the drawing at the bottom of the page (Figure 3.1). Although parts of this sexually-explicit drawing have been erased, probably by one of its more prudish readers, most of its main features can still be discerned.3 Vala lies naked at the bottom of the page, with her face pressed against the ground. Albion lies ‘astride Vala, in the position of coitus from the rear’ (Magno and Erdman 1987, 46). The lower part of his body is lodged between Vala’s outstretched legs; his face is lifted only a short distance above the centre of her back. And sitting on Albion’s buttocks, a small winged Cupid, with the face of an old man, is driving spurs into Albion’s rump while he pulls on reins attached to Vala’s hands. What can this strange design mean? Surely Albion’s ascent ‘into the splendors of his palace’ puts this kind of activity well beneath him? If Albion is to turn from Vala, his physical desires as well as his lover’s must be placed ‘beneath’ and ‘behind’ him. Only then can the inner man and the inner female be drawn into one by God. In broad outline this is the scene depicted in this drawing: Vala lies beneath Albion, forming the ground on which he lies and rises. The lower part of his legs, from his feet to his phallus, remain on the same level as Vala, while the upper half of his body, from his phallus to his head, lifts itself above her. As we have noted, conjugial love supposedly remakes ‘the male man and the female man . . . as one man, or one flesh, and when they become one,



and as his gaze turns towards Heaven, Vala disappears from view, displaced by a spiritual body:

Figure 3.1

c British Library Board William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night III, page 40



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they are then, taken together, man (homo) in his fulness’. The drawing makes this literal: Albion and Vala together form the outline of a giant phallus, its head outlined by Vala’s arms.4 Male and female, active and receptive powers, are here represented in perfect harmony, a point that is underlined if one notices that their parallel bodies also suggest the lips of a giant vagina. The female body has become a passive receptacle for, and to that extent perfectly embodies, active male power.5 Blake’s drawing suggests that to achieve this state the female must turn her back on her lover: her bodily desires and passions, along with the ‘face’ in which they are expressed, are turned away from Albion, leaving her back to serve as the reflective surface in which he sees an inverted reflection of himself. We can therefore surmise that the ‘Shadow . . . Of living gold’ (which from Albion’s point of view appears hovering above his head) is in fact projected within the narrow space between Albion’s head and Vala’s back: what seems above is in fact beneath him. This is the supposedly transparent ‘window’ that gives Albion an uninterrupted view of (spiritual) reality. Absorbed by what he can now see, Albion peers into this space, transfixed by a ‘watry vision’ that, because it inverts his mortal life, conjures what he takes to be a revelation of the divine. The door that (according to Swedenborg) opens a channel from the chaste to the unchaste realms of the body is in this drawing located at the point of sexual conjunction. The phallus itself plays this role, being placed midway between Albion and Vala, and between the higher and lower portions of Albion. Despite Swedenborg’s claim that this door is secured in such a way that traffic is permitted only from the chaste to the unchaste regions of the body, there is here no obvious influx from Heaven. Instead, the body’s energies have been turned against itself: sexual desire serves an atemporal ideal. To this point I have been discussing Blake’s drawing as if it depicted an achieved state. In fact it describes a dynamic process. It is the desire for the ideal body glimpsed in conjugial love, the phallus/vagina, and the God they both indirectly present that drives Albion forward. The small figure of Cupid represents this passion: his spurs incite Albion to further exertions, while his reins guide and restrain Vala. The head of this remarkable sexual machine points forward into the poem, identifying itself as the engine of the violent history described in the following nights. It nevertheless seems deeply comic. It is not difficult to image that, as Cupid applies his spurs to Albion and pulls on the reins attached to Vala, their phallic body will swell, lifting its head upwards, until it mirrors the wall of text floating above them. Elevated this far above the body, its rigid form would indeed be ‘chaste’ (in Swedenborg’s sense of the word) or at least congruent with the still more rigid bodies found in Heaven. As a figure for ‘man in his fulness,’ it would offer a foretaste of the resurrection, of a future state in which Albion, like the angels, would be ‘in this



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lastingness to eternity’. But in the universe of The Four Zoas, this last step is not taken. Erection is always followed by deflation, the state depicted on page 112 (Figure 3.2). Having at some time in the intervening pages lifted its head from the lower right-hand corner to the centre of the page, as if it were the hand of a clock moving counter-clockwise (on page 88[96] the phallus stands erect, its head at twelve o’clock), Albion and Vala’s phallic body appears to have continued in the same direction, until coming to rest with its head in the lower lefthand corner of this page. Two large testicles are visible on the right-hand side of the now flaccid penis. Its head resembles a large toe, linking the phallus with the lowest rather than the highest of things (Swedenborg 1984, 4938).6 During its movement up and then down, the relation between male and female powers has been reversed. The penis is now a sofa on which Vala reclines. Cupid sits on Vala’s rather than Albion’s buttocks; he has lost his wings, is without spurs and is unstringing his bow. Although Vala’s face is contorted with pain, and her arms still reach around behind her back, she is no longer held by Cupid’s reins. Swedenborg’s sexual machine has run out of steam. Is this the prelude to apocalypse? Perhaps. But it is more likely to be followed by re-inflation. Albion has once more been immersed in the body, and like those who indulge in scortatory love he is becoming ‘more and more not a man and not a male’ (Swedenborg 1794b, 433). Swedenborg reports that, as this devolution proceeds, ‘the ability and vigour which is called virile becomes enfeebled until none is left; and that then comes cold even to the sex, and after this a loathing [of the sex] verging on disgust’ (433). Terrified by his waning powers, Albion will no doubt soon look upwards, see Urizen’s faded ‘splendor’, ascend ‘mourning into the splendours of his palace’, and so once more attempt to find eternal life in the death of the body. As this sequence is repeated again and again, each attempt at transcendence, each effort to find a way out, brings him back into the labyrinth of the fallen world. Yet the designs we have been discussing are not as bleak as this suggests.

Lines The drawings on pages 40 and 112 are centred on the thick line that divides Albion from Vala (and joins them to each other). In the first, Albion lies above, and Vala below, this line. In the second, this relation is reversed. On both pages these collocated bodies together form a second line, the sometimes rigid and erect, sometimes flaccid and horizontal line of a phallic body. On page 40 the Cupid’s wings are positioned immediately beneath the phrase ‘He ceased’ (40:19, E327), the first words on the last line of the page, marking Albion’s complete absorption by the heavenly ‘Shadow’ and




Figure 3.2 Board

c British Library William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night VIII, page 112 [108].



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the consequent beginning of fallen history. On page 112, the Cupid’s head underlines the word ‘desolate’ (112:36, E384), signalling the conclusion of this history. Our first and second lines therefore define a third, namely the ‘line’ of human history that stretches between them. As this suggests, all three lines are closely intertwined with a fourth, namely the lines of text that, on the one hand rise above Albion and Vala and, on the other hand, connect the two pages we have been discussing. On page 40, Albion and Vala’s outstretched forms mirror the lines of text above them. It is as if they are attempting to become, like lines of text, a body subordinate to the meaning it carries. And on page 112, this line has unravelled, bringing to the foreground a body of flesh and sensation (here seen in pain and exhaustion) on which each line we have mentioned rests. For Swedenborg, the lines between male and female, reason and the body, angels and devils, Heaven and Hell are inscribed in the nature of things. We are free to choose only whether to embrace or rebel against the nature inscribed by God. Yet as Blake sets out the elements and relations that constitute Swedenborg’s sexual machine, the line it maintains comes to seem contingent, the result of a particular arrangement of bodies and powers. Rather than defining an essential nature, the line is here a sign that enacts, on each of the levels on which it appears, a drama of sexual difference. But this drama can be performed differently, which is to say that its elements can be articulated – linked, divided, defined and expressed – in myriad ways. Like the lines of text, image, gender and history that compose The Four Zoas, the bounding line is always actually or potentially in motion, embodying or making possible the leaps of metamorphosis. This view of the line explains the otherwise oxymoronic conjunction of art and politics in Blake’s oeuvre, evident for example in the claim that ‘Poetry Fettr’d, Fetters the Human Race! Nations are Destroy’d, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy’d or Flourish!’ (J 3, E146). Rather than being an ornament to truth, art here includes in its domain ‘the distribution of the sensible’, or what Rancière describes as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’. Aesthetics in this sense is concerned with the ‘delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stake of politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière 2004, 12, 13). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake describes Swedenborg as ‘the Angel sitting at the tomb’ and ‘his writings’ as ‘the linen clothes folded up’ (3, E34). Although Jesus has already left the tomb, discarding the doctrines that once confined him, Swedenborg remains within it, staring at the absent body, as if absence-of-the-flesh were itself the human form divine. The implication is, of course, that if we were also to turn from Swedenborg’s doctrines (and more broadly the ideologies of transcendence that in




Queer Blake

this poem he represents) we would also step from the tomb of the fallen world into a more expansive life. In The Four Zoas, begun after the Terror in France, and written for the most part during the Napoleonic wars and in an atmosphere of increased political repression in Britain, this turn no longer seemed so straightforward. Instead Blake returns with renewed interest to Swedenborg’s system in an attempt to elaborate the social and sexual mechanisms it rehearses, convinced that they provide a key to the fallen world’s sexual machine. In Milton, Blake revises his estimate of Swedenborg, describing him as ‘the Sampson shorn by the Churches!’ As this suggests, if read against his conscious intentions, this Sampson is still capable of bringing down the temple he so carefully describes. It is Blake’s own remarkable re-reading of Swedenborg’s sexual machine that enables him to move beyond the libertarian heterosexuality of his early works to the still more radical sexual ideology of the later poems. In the former Blake pits himself against laws that govern relations between spirit and flesh, intellect and emotion, men and women: the elements seem fixed even though the relations between them can be transformed. But the latter suggest that these elements can themselves be transformed by the line that articulates them. It is in this sense that, as Hobson argues in Blake and Homosexuality, Blake leaps in his later poems ‘even beyond the liberalized, still hierarchic and sexually restrictive order of the next two centuries’ (Hobson 2000, 189).

Notes 1. For an extended account of the graphic and textual ‘narrative’ within which these designs occur, see my Blake’s Critique of Transcendence (Otto 2000). Although Blake left The Four Zoas unfinished, he worked on it for more than ten years. Most of the poem was written between 1797 and 1803, but he continued to revise it until at least 1807. 2. References to Swedenborg’s works cite paragraph rather than page numbers. 3. Magno and Erdman (1987) provide a useful description of this design, supplemented by a line drawing that reproduces its main features and an infra-red photograph of the whole page. 4. For an account of Urizen’s ‘phallic’ religion and its Swedenborgian sources see my ‘A Pompous High Priest’ (Otto 2001). 5. This collocation suggests the anxiety attendant on phallic sexuality, also explored in The Four Zoas, namely that the rising male will be engulfed by the female. 6. For still more disturbing implications of the big toe of the left foot, particularly its nail, see ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’ (2000, 73–4). See also Schuchard’s more extended study of the esoteric background of Blake’s work, published with the same title in 2006.



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4 Elizabeth C. Effinger

Following the 1982 Blake conference at the University of California Santa Cruz, Geoffrey H. Hartman characterized the proceedings as a series of Blakean ‘blockages’. Hartman relates this experience of blockage to the difficulty of finding the ground, or the bottom, of Blake’s conceptual universe. In fact, Hartman suggests that groping Blake’s bottom is likely to land you on yours: If your leg is pulled you fall on your bottom. The problem with Blake is that, to use a good Quaker expression, there is a process of unbottoming. You think you have a bottom, or you have reached the bottom, and by conversion or pressure that bottom is taken away; suddenly you sink. (Hartman 1986, 243) Hartman’s tropes of blockages and bottoms merit further plumbing. Were we to use our ‘literal imaginations’, to riff on that prominent phrase, touching the Blakean bottom might mean slipping into a crack which offers us a whole new view. Cheekily, then, my focus here is on the buttocks and anuses in The Book of Urizen and Milton, and the corresponding anxiety within Blake criticism surrounding the reading of butts. James Aho (2002, 2) explains that ‘among the most telling organs in the anatomy of the lived-body are its entry and exit points, its orifices’, and he suggests that the degree of anxiety correlates to the orifice’s proximity to death: out of terror of their own mortality, human beings devise legends about body openings and invent ceremonies to police their display and effusions . . . Tears are farthest from death, hence the least revolting and the least subject to regulation. Next in rank come hair, nails, and sweat, followed by spit, nasal discharge, and vomit. Urine and scat are nearest to death. (Ibid., 7) 63



Anal Blake: Bringing up the Rear in Blakean Criticism

Queer Blake

Aho argues that among the bodily excretions associated with the lower stratum of the body, urine and scat are closest to death in their purging from the body, as they have nothing to contribute to the life of the organism. And what Aho says about our humanness – ‘we move through our worlds carnally, through handshakes, smiles, couplings, and sleep; tactically adorning, perfuming, and veiling certain body parts’ (1) – we might also say about Blakean criticism. Note the plentitude of criticism on Blake’s flowers, vegetation and earthy organicism; or, on the other extreme, the archival projects which disconnect Blake from physicality through inadequate, sterile hypertext databases. Seemingly, when it comes to Blake criticism and editions, which is to say the manner in which Blake’s work is mediated to us, either the abject is missing from the body or the dirty body parts are missing from the sanitized database – a result of Java scripting errors, web-browser compatibility, colour-bit settings, and most frustratingly, the limited and limiting database search fields. Although the William Blake Archive includes a ‘buttocks’ field for image searching, the results are limited to plates from Milton, Jerusalem, Europe and America.1 There are far more appearances of buttocks in Blake’s than those the archive registers, especially in The Book of Urizen;2 the archive therefore accentuates the butt’s literal disappearance in the way that it is only a butt if tagged as one. Certainly, the archive testifies to how tightly policed Blake’s buttocks are. Of those who have braved the subject of Blake’s sexual body, Christopher Hobson, in his book Blake and Homosexuality, enthusiastically wades into The Book of Urizen, and reads Urizen’s lake as a sea of spent seed; Peter Otto also offers an anal reading of Europe; and Tristanne Connolly’s William Blake and the Body dedicates itself to some of the messiest of the bodily functions. Criticism beyond these seems to manifest a general desire to look through the body rather than actually at its dirty parts or plates – especially those in The Book of Urizen. The image behind Urizen’s head on the title page to The Book of Urizen has a multitude of interpretations: they have been read as stone tablets, a double headstone and tablets of the law.3 Paul Mann sees the looming shape behind Urizen as ‘wings’, ‘tombstones’, ‘doors of a stony cavern’ and an ‘entrance to the book’ (1986, 50–1). To this collection of readings, I offer one of incredibly bulbous buttocks raised high into the air. Such a reading of what is behind Urizen complements some of the critical variations on Urizen’s name, as Hazard Adams interprets: ‘You Risen’, ‘Your reason’, ‘Urine’, ‘Uranus’ and ‘Your Anus’ (1986, 439; capitals as in original). Following Adams’s ‘Your Anus’, the title page in Copy D of The Book of Urizen lends itself particularly well to this kind of reading, where, in terms of colouring, Urizen and the mysterious bulbous objects share the same blueish hue – allowing the images to be seen as all part of Urizen’s body. This (k)inky reading spreads wide the interpretation of the entire title page and positions it as a view from/of the rectum: the plate’s trees with their



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fibrous limbs are inked brown and help to evoke the insides of the rectum. What Peggy Meyer Sherry sees as ‘double columns’ in an ‘environment of stone’ (1978, 140–1), I see as double cheeks in an environment of excrement, truly making Urizen, in Mann’s reading of his name, a ‘horror-zone’ (Mann 1986, 50). Such a reading has precedent in Otto’s (1998) reading of Europe, while many critics take the title page of The Book of Urizen to evoke the grave. Simon Watney (1987) and Leo Bersani (1987), within the AIDS context, address these concerns in examining the grave in its relation to the rectum. Numerous plates in The Book of Urizen and Milton place the buttocks in the visual centre, aligning the reader’s eye with the figure’s anus.4 Nelson Hilton reproduces the title pages from both texts – two of the most curvaceous examples of Blakean buttocks – in a curious nine-page chapter of Literal Imagination on the etymology of grave/engraving. Here, Hilton briefly enters and withdraws from the grave to unearth the fact that ‘[t]he history of “grave” manifests unconscious associations by which engraving may be perceived as digging and burying as much as sculpting’ (Hilton 1983, 19). Barbara Stafford further reveals the ‘intimate connection . . . between the etching process and the exploration of hidden physical or material topographies. Important, too, was the entire panoply of probing instruments, chemicals, heat and smoke, revealing and concealing grounds’ (Stafford 1991, 70). These ‘probing instruments’ involved in the engraving process amplify the sexuality inherent in the relationship between Blake, his engraved bodies, and even his reading bodies. Although scant, Hilton’s stimulating chapter adopts a deeply sexual premise: the grave figures metaphorically for the vagina. Hilton argues the ‘engraved line is hollow until filled with the body of ink . . . The hollowness of the grave is also that of the womb, waiting to be filled’ (Hilton 1983, 22). And yet, Hilton leaves textual traces that suggest we have good reason to question his reading. Hilton argues that ‘Milton similarly opens with its protagonist entering the dark ground’ (23). Although this ‘dark ground’ may be a tomb, womb, cave or grave, as Hilton suggests, I argue that it may also be a rectum. This reading confronts and is confronted by Milton’s tight buttocks, which appear at the centre of the frontispiece of Hilton’s book – the same location as in the title page of The Book of Urizen. Visually, then, we are faced with the buttocks rather than the vagina as the dark orifice that swallows. Elsewhere in Milton, Blake’s two figures with the most notorious buttocks meet in an undeniably erotic embrace. Plate 16 reveals Milton’s foot penetrating deep into the word ‘Self-hood’, Urizen’s hands spreading wide the bulbous figures (stones), and what appear to be Milton’s hands spreading wide Urizen’s legs. The Blake Archive identifies this scene as Milton ‘wrestling and sculpting the ancient form of Urizen’ and describes Urizen’s facial expression as one of ‘grief’. However, this ‘wrestling’ also appears to be




Queer Blake

a highly erotic act of asphyxiation, and Urizen’s expression one of ecstasy. Despite the archive’s heteronormative gloss, Blake’s work is open to queerly sexed (sp)readings. Hilton isn’t the only one to gloss over the buttocks; both Thomas Vogler (1986) and Molly Anne Rothenberg (1993) address them as metaphor only, enacting Blakean criticism’s resistance to coming near the dirty orifice and risking critical contamination. Vogler, in his essay ‘Re:Naming MIL/TON’, opens with an image of the poem’s title page, including the image of Milton’s backside. And while the essay addresses the ‘/’ cleft in the title, ‘the emphatically chirographic splitting represented on the title-page . . . as Milton’s (?) own hand is shown reaching through and “breaching the name” ’ (Vogler 1986, 142), Vogler overlooks the graphically similar chirographic splitting, or ‘/’ cleft, that is Milton’s butt crack. Most a(s)stonishingly, as Vogler breaks down the different meanings and connotations of the words ‘breach’, ‘chasm’ and ‘cracks’ (153), he refrains from acknowledging their connection to the literal ‘crack’ on Milton’s body. Despite focusing on the crack, the chirographic split, the breach, Vogler avoids actually breaching it.5 The handling of the buttocks is more curious in Rothenberg’s Rethinking Blake’s Textuality, wherein an analysis of the figure in Jerusalem Plate 97 concludes ‘the odd lines marking the left back and buttock of the figure might stand out as a female head and torso’ (1993, 94). Here, the figure’s buttocks are not examined as such, but rather as something else – or, as Rothenberg reveals by making out a woman’s head and torso, as someone else. Such a reading would rather make the female an arse than face the arse, and goes to unlikely lengths to avoid Blake’s potentially homoerotic butt fascination.6 Perhaps the most ambiguous butt belongs to Urizen. In Urizen’s rock-hard buttocks, Hilton (1983, 25) sees ‘a double headstone . . . graven tablets of the law’. Hilton’s reading reveals a fear of the orifice – a surprising phobia for a Blakean since, as Connolly notes, ‘Blake’s books are preoccupied with the orifices of the body’ (2002, 3–4). As she argues, they themselves are orifices, ‘likely to swallow up their readers’ (2). Connolly’s invocation of being ‘swallowed’ speaks eloquently to the permeability of body boundaries, as well as to the slippages between the grave/rectum, reader/rectum. As readers we incorporate and are incorporated by the text, drawn into the buttocks that function as the punctum, ‘a wound, a puncture that defamiliarizes the already known, illuminates details that at first glance seem insignificant’ (Min 2002, 239). Being ‘swallowed’ is erotically charged, and complements Hilton’s figuration of the vortex in bodily, genital terms. (Connolly neither specifies nor limits which orifices are involved.) Furthermore, if entering the text is akin to entering the body, a vulgar reading of the title page of The Book of Urizen and the frontispiece of Milton reinforces this entering; as the text opens into the body, so Urizen’s text (‘graven tablets of the law’) opens to a reading of Urizen’s body.



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Hilton’s interpretation avoids this and reveals a policed reading that leaves the cleft and crack of Milton ultimately untouched. Connolly warns that ‘[a] reader unwilling to fill in the blanks, to participate, to take that risk of emotional investment in the text, may be frustrated and repulsed by the demands and the dangers imposed by the orifices of the illuminated books’ (2002, 12). It is more than a simple risk of emotional investment; it is also the risk of performing a queer reading that might threaten to contaminate the purified grounds of other texts. Blake is orificial: we might have to swallow him as he swallows us. The process of swallowing recalls the figure of the vortex, which Hilton cites as ‘a translation of “female” ’ that finds a reference in Edmund Burke’s anxiety ‘about those drawn into the “vortex” of the French Revolution’. However, Hilton’s alignment of the vagina with a vortex that has ‘great power and energy’ (1983, 206) is occluded by his own reference to Burke, whose gendered writings on the French Revolution align male chivalry with great power and energy. Burke, who ‘love[s] a manly, moral, regulated liberty’ (Burke 1993, 7) imagines chivalry as having the power of ‘ten thousand swords’ and fears the loss of this manpower: ‘the age of chivalry is gone . . . the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise . . . that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound . . . under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness’ (76). Burke also references anxiety over his innards: ‘We are not the converts of Rousseau . . . In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails’ (86). Burke describes the Revolution as powerful enough to disembowel, to penetrate one’s entrails. Imagery of the Revolution is also scatological. Claude Gandelman describes it as ‘an upside-down structure inside an upside-down structure’ (1996, 15), an inverted scatological hierarchy wherein the highest position, the head of state or king, becomes the lowest, as ‘father arse’ – and images of this kind featured often ‘in the caricatures of the French Revolution’ (21). Thus, the French Revolution is the clincher (or rather the sphincter) that constricts the (privileged) vaginal reading of the Blakean vortex. Hilton admits that vortex is a ‘somewhat indeterminate word’ (1993, 206), but overlooks the parallel way in which the vaginal veil – the hymen – also is indeterminate. The image of the hymen shares properties with the anus, since, and as Niall Lucy clarifies, ‘[t]he hymen as the veil or tissue in general (and not exclusively a membrane belonging only to women) occupies a sort of “non-space” between an inside and an outside’ (2004, 49). Derrida, in more detail, specifies that hymen also stands for the ‘filmy membrane enveloping certain bodily organs; for example [. . .] the heart or the intestines’ (1981, 213). The hymen, like the vortex, fibrously interweaves many senses (including, as Derrida offers, ‘membrane’, ‘tissue’, ‘textile’, ‘fabrics’, ‘canvases’ and ‘spider web’ [ibid.]). As the hymen can be conceptually




Queer Blake

torn from the property/propriety of the female, so too can the even more indeterminate revolutionary vortex. Another incarnation of anal/vortex imagery is that of the serpent. As Connolly explains, the serpent is interwoven in Blake’s bodies: ‘Blake’s concept of the woven body . . . through the serpentine line, is connected to the vortex . . . the vortex exemplifies the downward spiral which is the fall into the flesh, the gravitational pull of the material body’. According to Connolly, the serpentine line is ‘a wavy line which moves in three dimensions like a spiral or vortex’ and ‘is not only like the revealing tool, but also like what is revealed’ (2002, 59). Connolly’s equation of the serpentine line with the vortex, echoing Frye’s findings in ‘Notes for a Commentary on Milton’, which claims the vortex iconography ‘is often serpentine’ (1957, 133 n.1), helps stabilize a queer reading of the scene. That the vortex and the serpentine line converge in the anus is seen by Peter Otto, who observes the proximity of the serpent to Urizen’s anus. When Otto argues that in the act of turning ‘from frontispiece to title page, one moves from mind to body, from up to down, from sky to earth’ (1998, 238), he performs a Bakhtinian reversal. Otto takes the bottom position, arguing that perhaps ‘the strongest suggestion of the interconnection between the serpent and Urizen appears if one imagines oneself in the abyss beneath Urizen’ (ibid.) Although Otto focuses only on Europe, the connection he makes between the serpent or serpentine line and Urizen’s anus is still useful for The Book of Urizen. Otto suggests ‘One could almost imagine the serpent as being about to complete his cycle by diving into Urizen’s anus. Desire inhabits the interior of Urizen’s world’ (239). Diving deep into the anal possibilities here, Otto suggests: the way in which Urizen’s shoulders and the serpent intersect, and the ambiguous shape taken by Urizen’s back, fleetingly suggest that it is Urizen’s anus that faces us . . . If one allows this possibility, Urizen’s head is hidden behind his broad back, sunk in a gesture of despair; and the serpent is either excreted by Urizen or has become a long penis which Urizen is trying to conceal by literally and metaphorically putting it behind him. (Ibid.) With the possibility that the serpent is either excrement or a long penis behind Urizen, Otto queers him, yet Otto’s summation that admitting this anal reading is to recognize Urizen’s head hung in a ‘gesture of despair’ ignores the possible pleasure afforded by the serpent, of a head hung out of ecstasy, an ejaculatory gesture. After all, sexual pleasure itself is framed as serpentine, as Emanuel Swedenborg in Arcana Coelestia (1794a, 1:251) argues, the



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Swedenborg’s rooting of the serpent in the sensual, particularly masturbatory sensation, makes his mention of haemorrhoids (a variety of snake which Buffon identifies as being ‘so called from the haemorrhages which its bite is said to produce’ (1792, 2:277)) a playful link between the serpent and the buttocks. The serpent also attaches itself to the anus as a treatment for purging the haunted body. Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, an eighteenth-century philosopher, rids himself of haunting visions of dead persons by ‘the application of leeches to the anus’ (1803, 170), where leeches are annelids that share the shape of the serpent. That the leech and snake do not belong to the same scientific classification is here unimportant, since, as Rodney Baine observes, eighteenth-century artistic depictions of reptiles and snakes often interchanged species and varieties ‘without trying to be herpetologically accurate’ (1986, 103). Clinging for a moment to the leech, annelid derives from the Latin for anellus, ‘little ring’ (OED), and as an image it puckers the relationship between the serpentine figure and the anus,7 and, given the leech’s hermaphroditic nature (see Buffon 1792, 2:306), queers it further. Thus, the numerous connections between the serpentine and the anal offer a queer coupling between the serpentine vortex and the serpentine anus. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque is a good framework to apply to Urizen, particularly considering its inverted structure and the inverted placement of Urizen’s buttocks, since, as Katherine Young describes, ‘[t]he carnivalesque move is to turn upside down or inside out, to invert or reverse’ (1997, 113). More specifically, Urizen’s body-language positions him as a Bakhtinean clown, as described in Rabelais and His World: ‘the buttocks [are] persistently trying to take the place of the head and the head of the buttocks’ (1984, 353). Such a reversal degrades the body and the orifice of the mouth: ‘To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously . . . to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth’ (21). The state which straddles both life/death, inside/outside, finds a metaphor in the rectum. Watney, in Policing Desire (1987; from which Bersani borrows the title of his essay of the same year) explores the connection between the grave and the rectum more fully and physically than Bersani, grounding himself in AIDS discourse and activism, making the body and the writings about it meet on an orifice. With Watney, the metaphor of grave/rectum is fully fleshed out. Both Watney and Bersani – the latter particularly in Homos (1995) – are capable



ground and reason why the serpant signifieth all evil in general, and selflove in particular, is, because all evil hath it’s rise from the sensual . . . being manifold, and consisting of various genera, and still more various species, is distinguished in the word by different kinds of serpants, as by snakes, cockatrices, asps, haemorrhoids . . .

Queer Blake

and comfortable doing dirty work, and speaking candidly about the guarded nature of the male rectum. Watney writes, ‘that the male rectum is the most thoroughly policed part of the male anatomy suggests that a particular effort is needed to redirect the libido away from deeply repressed memories of anal erotic pleasure in infancy’ (1987, 126). For me this touches a nerve in terms of what is repressed in Blake studies. For help digging out this rectal reading, there is Jean Genet whose description of rimming rouses imagery similar to that found in Blake: Then I tried hard to do as good a job as a drill. As the workman in the quarry leans on his machine that jolts him amidst splinters of mica and sparks from his drill, a merciless sun beats down on the back of his neck, and a sudden dizziness blurs everything and sets out the usual palm trees and springs of a mirage, in like manner a dizziness shook my prick harder, my tongue grew soft, forgetting to dig harder, my head sank deeper into the damp hairs, and I saw the eye of Gabes [the anus] become adorned with flowers, with foliage, become a cool bower which I crawled to and entered with my entire body, to sleep on the moss there, in the shade, to die there. (Genet 1969, 253) The level of detail in Genet’s rimming, particularly in the description of the mossy anal foliage, complements the intricate sketching of buttocks and anuses found in Blake’s Notebook.8 Beyond Genet’s imagery, which further buttresses the association between stones and butts, there is also the touching of the (grave)stone and anus through AIDS. As Watney (1987, 126) asserts, ‘Aids [sic] offers a new sign for the symbolic machinery of repression, making the rectum a grave.’ The fact that the ‘stones’ on the title page of The Book of Urizen appear to be blank slates nicely complements the text’s virginity, having not been previously read quite so anally. However, what cannot be ignored is the dirt of the scene. The brown inking at the top of the plate invokes the rectal walls. As Bersani says, ‘there is, to be sure, a reversal of given terms here: the anus produces life, waste is fecund, from death new landscapes emerge. But perhaps such reversals could take place only after the entire field of resignifying potentialities has been devastated’ (1995, 179). Perhaps this is how we might situate a fertile anal reading as only coming now, after every other interpretation of The Book of Urizen, and after it has been devastated – when, as Paul Mann (1986, 54) says, ‘binding Urizen backfires’. The fecundity that grows out of waste, as Bersani would have it, challenges how we read Urizen’s ‘prolific delight obscurd more & more’ (10:13, E75), a reference to masturbation that Hobson (2000, 39) identifies as ‘improlific’ insofar as it does not procreate. Urizen’s ‘In dark secrecy hiding in surgeing / Sulphureous fluid his phantasies’ (10:14–15, E75) leads Simpson, Hobson



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and Connolly all to readings of masturbation. While Hobson seems to have a better grip on the masturbation imagery, arguing that ‘Urizen’s masturbation also constitutes his world – his body and his social character result from it’ (2000, 39), Simpson’s interpretation favours a more ambiguous reading: ‘this passage could also be read as describing Los hiding Urizen in his (Los’) phantasies, or Los hiding Urizen’s fantasies . . . or all at once’ (1986, 16). Simpson here implies that more than just fantasies may be hidden; rather that Urizen himself, his penis, may be hidden in Los, in Los’ body. This reading is most plausible following Copy A, given its general dark colouring, which is perhaps revealing for what it conceals (a partner within the darkness?) The possibility of secret fornication complicates the consensus that declares this is a scene of masturbation. Perhaps this reading is merely to skim the surface, and invoking hiding is to stereotype, yet both are familiar to Blake. As Connolly notes, Blake’s ‘poems are literally “stereotyped”, a word Blake himself uses to refer to his illuminated copper plates’ (2002, 85). According to Simpson (1986, 24), Blake ‘offers more incentives for the move behind the text, and invites reference to a substantial archive to which the text may be related. Like many Romantics . . . he insists always on the existential seriousness of superficiality when it does occur’. And after all, as Hartman (1986, 245) suggests, ‘[t]here is a remarkable surface to Blake. We are unable to grapple with that surface lest we drown or get lost in its dark and dangerous forest’. Blake’s relation to these fluid-covered figures reveals not simply masturbatory desire of Urizen for himself, but also a desire for controlling the directionality of such dissemination, in orgasmic shooting. As one definition offered by the OED suggests, shooting is ‘To discharge (excreta) . . . also to shoot one’s belly, bowels’ (18b), an explicit reference to excretion, popular between the 1600s and the 1730s, which would have been available to Blake. This definition of shooting one’s belly, suggestive also of vomiting and perhaps even childbirth, further opens up the way in which we might read Urizen’s ‘shot’ as more than spilled seed. The physical presence of ejected excrement during childbirth lends itself to a reading where Urizen’s self-delivered world is a process and place bound to excrement. Connolly, Hobson and Mann steer the direction of Urizen’s shot away from the seedier, more perverse spill of excrement (more perverse because of the orifice it is shot from). Urizen’s shot is further directed away from the anus by vaginal readings of Blake’s line ‘a roof shaggy wild inclos’d’ (10:34, E75), which are framed earlier by Blake’s comparison of Urizen’s world to a womb: ‘And a roof, vast petrific around, / On all sides He fram’d: like a womb’ (5:28–9, E73). Connolly extends the womb imagery: ‘Considering the womb as a cave is appropriate to this birth, as it is a birth into solidity and stasis. As the description of Urizen’s embodiment continues, there is a recurring theme of the solid being able to move, grow and enclose the fluid and flexible’ (2002, 87). Ultimately, what Connolly also calls ‘a solid,




Queer Blake

claustrophobic womb’ (ibid.) might be another way of articulating the rectum – which is notably smaller and presumably more claustrophobic, being frequently filled with solids. Using his signature elephant dung, contemporary British painter, Chris Ofili, radically reframes classic Blake; his Seven Bitches Tossing their Pussies before the Divine Dung is a comment on Blake’s The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne. Ofili substitutes a giant turd for God (Dent and Whittaker 2002, 166–7); by doing so he reveals the visual arts’ enthusiasm for the Blakean buttocks and their by-products, as well as affirming the value of supplementing immortal readings with immoral ones. Buttocks are the real ‘fearful symmetry’ within Blake studies. In ‘The Tyger’, Blake asks ‘What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ (SIE, lines 3–4, E24). His fearful symmetry invitingly dares a body to frame: to ‘form’, ‘construct’, ‘imagine’ or ‘fabricate’.9 An anal reading, a willingness to see ‘all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (MHH 14, E39), is afforded by extending both Otto’s suggestion that we imagine ourselves in the abyss beneath Urizen, and Connolly’s reading of Blake’s texts as ambiguous, swallowing orifices. Perhaps a fearful imagination over the literal symmetry accounts for the gap in Blake studies over the buttocks, evidenced perhaps when Hilton (1983, 27) surprisingly confesses that ‘we all know the desire not to know, to misread, or, having read, to forget’. This vague disclosure lends itself to substantiating what I have argued is a repressed anal reading, an admission of a tight policing, and of a deliberately denied reading, revealing a fear of being swallowed and of swallowing what is shot in our face. At the very least, the symmetrically chiselled buttocks engraved throughout much of his work invite us to get cheeky with Blake.

Notes Thank you to Tristanne Connolly for her insightful comments and careful readings of this chapter. 1. ‘Buttocks’ is tagged on the following plates: America i, ii, 15; Europe 2, 9, 13; Milton i, 16; Jerusalem 58, 66, 73, 75, 80, 81. 2. Buttocks appear in The Book of Urizen on Plates 1, 10, 13, 14, 17, 21, 27 (Erdman’s ordering). 3. For stone tablets see Mitchell (1969, 84); for ‘a double headstone . . . the graven tablets of the law’ see Hilton (1983, 23). A future reading might interpret it as a sideways letter ‘B’ – a reference perhaps to the fallen state of language or of the Bastille. 4. Buttocks appear prominently in Milton on Plates i, 8, 16. 5. Vogler never says he intends to perform a deep reading; rather, he says ‘I write Blake’s title in the form MIL/TON in order to approach a little more closely the emphatically chirographic splitting’ (1986, 142; emphasis mine). This suggests perhaps that Vogler has no intention of venturing beyond a critically safe distance, but it also demonstrates a widespread fear of slipping into the crack. Also worth noting



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7.

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is that within the title of Vogler’s essay he typographically employs the ‘colon’, recalling the anus. Along similar lines, Rothenberg strangely discloses her general preference for a tightly policed reading, which troubles her claim of truly ‘rethinking’ Blake’s textuality: ‘When I read a Blakean text, I do not find counter truths that correct my erroneous thinking, but I do meet at every turn my own rage for determinacy, my own strategies for rigidifying what is inherently fluid, my own need to impose order and to dominate, my own desire for the very transcendent guarantees that legitimate tyrannies’ (Rothenberg 1993, 45–6). Another connection between the leech and ‘little ring’ is found in the definition of ‘leech-finger’, also known as ‘medical finger’, the Old English term for ring-finger (OED). A more recent connection between anus and ring is in Richard Brautigan’s poem ‘Negative Clank’: ‘He’d sell a rat’s asshole / to a blindman for a wedding / ring’ (1970, 21). For example, in Blake’s Notebook, page 16 reveals a detailed sketching of buttocks, complete with what appears to be wild anal hair, calling to mind Urizen’s ‘roof shaggy wild inclos’d’ (10:34, E75). ‘Frame’ is defined by the OED as: ‘7. To make, construct’; ‘8a. To contrive; to devise, invent, fabricate; b. To form, articulate, utter (words, sounds); c. To form or construct in the mind; to conceive, imagine’; ‘9. To set in a frame; to enclose’.




5 The Body of the Blasphemer

Blake’s output as a visual artist has figured relatively little in the efforts of scholars to recover or detect homoerotic, homosexual and anti-homophobic themes, motifs or values at play in his art. As art historians working on Blake have repeatedly emphasized, his work as a visual artist in watercolour and tempera can appear the least exceptional aspect of his creative output: it is, simply put, in his drawings and paintings that he most looks like his contemporaries, and is most clearly dependent on specific visual precedents (pre-eminently the work of Henry Fuseli).1 His work in these media has been of diminishing interest to a tradition of scholarship largely taken up with the effort to demonstrate Blake’s exceptionalism. There have, accordingly, been only occasional attempts to identify homosexual motifs or themes within Blake’s visual output. Some of this has been highly speculative, such as the discovery in the watercolour of the heroically proportioned Satan Rousing the Rebel Angels (V&A) of ‘the rare spectacle of homosexuality as demoniacal vision, the temptation of naked male form’ or Camille Paglia’s detection in the large colour print of God Creating Adam (1795) of ‘an unnatural sex act, homosexual and sadomasochistic’ (Fernandez 2002, 209; Paglia 1990, 274). Seymour Howard, unusually, took a broader view of Blake’s visual production in arguing for an ‘erotic symbolism’ within his use of classicism and, specifically, his classicizing androgyny, while Anne Mellor concluded that Blake’s use of Michelangelo’s figures as a model for the human form implied a similar ‘hostility to the female body as well as his homosexual celebration of the male body’ (Howard 1982, 117–49; Mellor 1982, 152). More recently, Tom Hayes has used what he interprets as an idealized self-portrait to launch his case for Blake’s androygnous self-identification (2004, 141–65). More sustained analysis has focused on the emergence of an ‘androgynous figure style’, primarily within the illuminated books; one that, as Helen Bruder has elaborated, helps constitute a liberatory aesthetic that promises to move beyond the constraints of sexual difference.2 But it is above all the interpretation of Plates 41 and 43 [21] from Milton that has brought the most 74



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productive commentary, with significant contributions by W.J.T. Mitchell, Jean H. Hagstrum and Marc Kaplan (Mitchell 1973, 48, 66; Hagstrum 1989, xvi n., 218 n.; Kaplan 1995, 168).3 Christopher Hobson’s may be the most nuanced and relatively sceptical of these arguments; while his discussions are presented under the provocative heading of the ‘homosexual plates’, he argues against interpreting Plate 41 as a deliberate representation of oral sex and concentrating instead on the ‘inescapably ambiguous’ qualities of Plate 43 [21]: ‘the sexual implications in these Milton designs are not some artefact of the positioning of figures with different, nonsexual meanings, but result from distinct reworkings of a preceding design to retain its essential elements while removing the overt depiction of a specific homosexual act’ (Hobson 2000, 137–8). The homosexual content of these plates is thus ghostly, but available, and defused by the incongruent poses of the figures that appear ‘unlikely’ to represent ‘an actual sexual act’. The possibility that these sexual elements were, quite precisely, ‘artefact’ had been proposed by Christopher Heppner in his sustained analysis of Blake’s visual style. In focusing on the peculiarities of Blake’s pictorial constructions, Heppner has drawn attention to the irregular ‘perspectival syntax’ that can result in ‘ambiguity and misinterpretation’, not least in Plates 43 [21] and 41 of Milton where ‘a kind of bad and unintentional pun has occurred, in which the different implications of flat superimposition and three dimensional mere proximity have collapsed into one visually ambiguous statement’ (Heppner 1995, 220). Heppner and Hobson have produced starkly contrasting readings of the Milton plates; they are, however, agreed on assuming that the making visible of homosexuality depends on the open and deliberate representations of ‘actual’ or at least ‘believable’ sexual acts between men – a point that can seem reasonable enough. If only tacitly, these interpretations rest upon a powerful, near-hegemonic set of assumptions about the nature of the gaze and the visual construction of gender. The visual economy of the male body in Western culture is, we are told, one of fearfulness, anxiety, evasiveness and guilt.4 Homosexuality is necessarily encoded, hidden, and inevitably ambiguous enough that the suggestive conjunction of bodies in the Milton plates are legible as mere accident. My purpose here is to attempt to move away from the interpretative framework that would require a fixed classification of an image as ‘homophobic’ or ‘anti-homophobic’, ‘straight’ or ‘homosexual’, as if the image represents these existing values or views, and the related effort to see the signs of such values and views as categorically either intentional (if repressed) or revealed by mere accident. A first move, necessarily made in a rather emblematic fashion in the context of this brief text, would be to expand the range of images that we take into account in addressing this question. In the simplest fashion, the ‘art historical’ Blake has much to offer in any search for direct representations of Blake’s view on ‘homosexuality’;



The Body of the Blasphemer

Queer Blake

there are, notably, those watercolours from within his illustrations to Dante (1824–27) which involved Blake actively finding visual signs for figures identified as sodomites, and representing the obscene gesture of ‘making the figs’ which was, as Blake clearly knew, associated in medical discourse and literary and classical scholarship with anal eroticism.5 More generally, however, and what I would like to address here through attention to a single example, are the qualities of Blake’s heroic figurative style, the uneasy graphicity of his bodies which resists the regulatory functions accorded to the body and the gaze in much gender criticism. Importantly, I do not pursue this issue with Blake’s ‘own’ queerness in mind – whether he was homosexual, or latently so, repressed or evasive or, even, homophobic or anti-homophobic. I am not, here, seeking out evidence of a consistent Blakean view, or looking to explain apparent inconsistencies in Blake’s positions on homosexuality by arguing for logically progressive changes of attitude or by referring to a matrix of prohibitions and permissions made evident in the revisions, erasures and elisions discovered in his designs and writings. The starting point for this ‘queer’ reading of Blake’s bodies is instead a radically unstable queerness that cannot be simply identified (however politically useful this might be at certain junctures) with homosexuality, for which the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick are, obviously, the key points of reference. To follow Sedgwick, in her much-quoted formulation, queer may be ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (1994, 8). Queer in this sense is certainly not taken as a synonym for homosexual. It is the name for the making visible of the irresolution at the heart of identity. As Calvin Thomas has put it, provocatively, ‘queer theory’s great intervention has been to denaturalize and disrupt the common-sense assumption . . . that one must have a coherent identity of some sort, that eroticism of any and all kinds must be routed through some regulatory political fiction of personhood that can (and must) be affixed with a clearly legible label’ (2006, 2). One of the major possibilities of queer interpretation, in this sense, is its de-pathologizing power, for it alerts us to the potential for inconsistency and incoherence, not as a malaise or sickness marring, frustrating or making incomplete identity, but as a condition of identity. In relation to cultural production, there is the possibility, again highlighted by Thomas, in reference to literary texts, that ‘literary expression itself queers heterosexuality, that writing itself, always already beside itself, is what can never define but only disturb identity’ (4). A queer reading would, arguably, allow for the possibility of an eroticized content within representation, not as a revelation of a hidden, disavowed or confrontationally displayed ‘truth’ of sexuality but rather as a necessary and inevitable feature of figurative representation which, attentive to the ‘historicity’ of queer (Butler 1993, 227 and 282n.7), we can locate within the emerging cultural modernity of Blake’s time. Blake’s



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graphic bodies can be located within a cluster of adjacent and overlapping late eighteenth-century phenomena which, as a range of scholars are beginning to argue, we can view as always already queer and as such disruptive of, as well as constituting, identity. To begin this, inevitably rather exploratory, effort to make such a queer reading of Blake’s corporeal aesthetics, I want to focus on one of his most spectacular depictions of the body, the memorably truncated heroic male form that appears in the biblical watercolour of The Blasphemer (c.1800; Figure 5.1), one of the earliest of the long series of biblical illustrations the artist produced for Thomas Butts in the first years of the nineteenth century (Butlin 1981, 1:316–72). The Blasphemer presents a radically contorted, naked and massively muscular male, the transgressor of the work’s conventional title, in the course of being stoned by a group of bearded, older men. Ranged to his left and right and facing one another, these figures are presented identically cloaked and with closely similar features, each with an arm raised ready to throw down a stone in the same way. The stones shown on the ground around the blasphemer suggest that one round of blows has already been dealt; the next is imminent. Above the head of the blasphemer, and between the two rows of his oppressors, is a plume of dark grey smoke. For all the immediacy and formal directness of this image, it has proved elusive as regards subject matter. The original inscription on the watercolour’s old mount identified the source as Leviticus 24:10–25, the story of Moses condemning to death the blasphemous son of an Israelite woman. The authority of these inscriptions has been subject to some discussion, and accordingly it has also been suggested that the subject is, instead, ‘The Stoning of Achan’ from Joshua 7:18–25 (see Butlin 1981, cat. no. 446). Having confessed to sinful covetousness, Achan is condemned to death by stoning and his worldly goods are stoned and burned by the orders of Joshua. If the horribly contorted victim here was Achan, this would explain the plumes of dark smoke that occupy the centre of the composition. The uncertainty concerning the narrative source of this design is unlikely to be resolved; the literary source matter is, in either case, extremely slight, a mere pretext for an exercise in the grand style, resonant of the most elevated traditions of art.6 The massive proportions of the blasphemer’s body, his heroic nudity, the complexity of his pose and the linearity of Blake’s design can all be associated with the example of Michelangelo and the classical tradition. The awkward, slightly asymmetrical twist of the torso across and back into space, the thrown-back head and the position of the thighs match that of the crouching figure from the acclaimed Niobe Group. The amplified musculature of the torso is reminiscent of the provocatively posed Barberini Faun. Most of all, though, for the treatment of the heavily muscular physique and the overall silhouette, effectively decapitated and lacking arms and lower legs, the image evokes the Belvedere Torso.7




Figure 5.1 William Blake, The Blasphemer (circa 1800), pen and ink and watercolour c Tate, 2009 on paper, 384 × 340mm



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But if The Blasphemer evokes a tradition of representation that was endowed with considerable cultural authority, it also transgresses against it. In its material dimension there are simple questions of technique and format. Though highly determined in its composition and delineation, it would be classed as a sketch rather than as a complete, discrete work of art. Blake’s restrained use of the watercolour technique, as Greg Smith has pointed out, is redolent of ‘craft’ traditions of tinted drawing that were increasingly in question by the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the more individualistic and expressive techniques of free-hand watercolour painting were proclaimed (2002, 211–14). (The absurdly perfunctory, inarticulate blobs of colour that sit within the outline of each of the stones may in some way lampoon such fluency.) In its physical dimensions, The Blasphemer is relatively small, destined either for framing as ‘furniture’ in Butts’s home or, perhaps, as an extra-illustration (Bindman, in Cormack 1997, 76–7). At once grandiose in its source matter and visual language and domesticated, The Blasphemer sits queasily between the public realm of heroic art, where ‘universal’ standards of expression were expected to be attended to in media (namely, oil painting) which demanded intellectual and formal resolution, and the world of privatized consumption where there were greater allowances for extravagance, excess and, importantly, individual imagination – what John Barrell, analysing Reynolds’s commentary on this issue, labels the ‘pleasures of indeterminacy’ (1991, 13). The troubled reception history of Blake’s exhibited works in watercolour and the unconventional painting medium of tempera bear witness to the contestation of precisely this indeterminate mixture of individual eccentricity and public ambition. The very graphic language of The Blasphemer bears the mark of this unease. Although the emphatically linear ‘romantic classicism’ exhibited in this design has been associated by art historians with (masculinist) mental clarity, there is a powerful element of indeterminacy at play here.8 Blake’s graphic mannerisms belong within a specific recent tradition of draughtsmanship, learned from the immediate models of John Hamilton Mortimer and, particularly, Henry Fuseli, which emphasizes outline, certainly, but which in the characterization of masculine forms also becomes more complex and ambivalent.9 Characteristic of this style is the ambiguity of the drawn line which can be read as marking a surface, an incision, an outline, or sometimes a combination of these (Myrone 2005, 183–5). The use of pen and ink in the creation of sharply defined and barely modulated lines, rather than pencil or chalk which facilitated finely graded tonal effects, is significant. The tracery of pen lines that defines the silhouette of the blasphemer’s body and runs across its inner surfaces expressing the cleavage of muscular forms suggests volume and contour, but also divides and separates each form, breaks the figure down into individually legible sectors, sections, slices. There is a violence here, to which contemporaries of Blake were alert. Blake’s figure-style




Queer Blake

was lambasted as ‘that detestable taste, founded on the depraved fancy of one man [Fuseli], which substitutes deformity and extravagance for force and expression, and draws men and women without skins, with their joints all dislocated’ (BR 74). Thus, too, the protestation of an otherwise appreciative Coleridge: ‘Is it a garment – or the body incised and scored out?’ (BR 336). These are responses of disgust; the alternative was laughter: to see these designs as caricatures, their excess and extravagance as comical. The Fuseli-like delineation was thus also cancellation: the excessive graphic unity of the representational body is also its undoing. In the marking of the divisions of the musculature, an image of physical energy is made redolent of death and the degradation of the anatomy hall.10 This indeterminacy applies to the composition as a whole. The central placement of the figure matches basic prescriptions of academic theory, but the symmetry and repetition of the oppressors may be more problematic. As Reynolds had asserted, ‘The rule of contrasting figures, or groups’ was ‘universally known and adopted’, to the extent that it could become mere affectation, recommending that even the ‘artless uniformity of the compositions of the old Gothick Painters is far preferable to this false refinement’ (Malone 1797, 2:232). Blake’s use of the device of repetition can, then, be interpreted as a primitivist gesture, a sign of allegiance to the ‘Gothick’ that might be given some licence by contemporary aesthetic rhetoric, but which remained a transgression against strict academic propriety.11 More insistently troubling is the radical treatment of the blasphemer’s bodily contortion. In what can be considered the elementary text-book of academic precepts in painting, one certainly current in Blake’s time, Charles Du Fresnoy had emphasized that even where drapery appeared at such points, it should uncover rather than occlude the joints and movements of the body: The joints in each extreme distinctly treat, Nor e’er conceal the outline of the feet: The hands alike demand to be exprest In half-shewn figures rang’d behind the rest; Nor can such forms with force or beauty shine, Save when the head and hands in action join, Each air constrain’d and forced, each gesture rude, Whate’er contracts or cramps the attitude, With scorn discard. (Malone 1797, 2:163–4) This is William Mason’s translation, first published with a commentary by Reynolds in 1783 and certainly known to Blake. Interpreted against the standards of academic figure drawing proposed here, Blake has produced,



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at best, a fudge, with the joints and extremities largely hidden from view. The ‘head’ and the ‘hands’, from which the narrative can be elucidated, are occluded. This abjected body (a body we are expected to ‘with scorn discard’) is, in Laura Mulvey’s influential terms, a ‘spectacle’ rather than an agent of narrative (1992, 267–8). The most extraordinary element of Blake’s figure may be the position of the head, thrown back and foreshortened with such violence that the features are almost entirely obscured. This is an amplified version of the screaming head of the damned in Fuseli’s illustration to Lavater’s famous essay on physiognomy, engraved by Blake himself in 1789–90 and itself an exaggeration of the archetypal head of the protagonist, writhing in the throes of death, in Raphael’s Death of Ananias (1515–16; Royal Collection, on loan to V&A Museum, London), a virtual copy-book of poses and expressions utilized extensively by British artists through the eighteenth century, and a set of features isolated as an iconic representation of ‘Agony, mental and corporeal’ by Benjamin Ralph in his School of Raphael (1759) (see Montagu 1994, 91–2). There, the eyes are visibly rolling back into the head, in a motion that from Bataille, via Foucault, we can recognize as ‘the spectacle of erotic deaths, where upturned eyes display their white limits and rotate inwards in gigantic and empty orbits’ (Foucault 1977, 47). We could even classify it within what the film historian Linda Williams has termed the ‘body genres’, featuring ‘the spectacle of the body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion’ overtaken by ‘ecstatic excesses . . . the body “beside itself” with sexual pleasure, fear and terror or overpowering sadness’ which inspires a sense of over-involvement in the viewer, an over-involvement that is improper in lacking ‘aesthetic distance’ (Williams 1999, 703, 705). These are, clearly, ahistorical assessments. However, there is a genealogical link between the transgressive imagery of the modern age and the spectacular corporeality of Blake’s art. This is less a matter of shared or inherited motifs than one of a recurrent, culturally produced breakdown of ‘aesthetic distance’.12 In this respect, the incomplete perspectival recession within the design of The Blasphemer is suggestive, for, as Peter de Bolla has explored, perspective served to locate and fix in space both viewer and represented object; perspective secured a social relation or viewpoint.13 The erasure of ‘aesthetic distance’ effected by this spectacularized treatment of the heroic body offered opportunities for subjective latitude. Blake’s evocation of the model of the radically truncated Belvedere Torso is, in this respect, telling. As Alex Potts has so persuasively explored, the very incompleteness of the Belvedere Torso allowed Winckelmann the liberty of fantasizing erotic and subjective fulfilment; the viewing subject is allowed to make complete this perfect yet incomplete male physique (1994, 180), moving towards a sculptural ideal of the figure, not just in the ostentatious dependence on sculptural models for Blake’s treatment of the blasphemer’s




Queer Blake

body, but more importantly in the isolation and de-narrativization of the figure. As John Barrell and Chloe Chard have charted, the sculptured figure was a site of ‘queer’ cultural readings in the eighteenth century, precisely because the narrative and formal frameworks that structured subjectivity in relation to the act of viewing painting were opened up by the experience of sculpture (Barrell 1991, 63–87; Chard 1994, 142–61). The lack of a narrative framework in the visual encounter with sculpture made possible a degree of erotic engagement that was otherwise effectively policed. The spectacularly (hetero-)erotic potential of the torso (and the Belvedere Torso) is thematized by Henry Fuseli’s remarkable pair of drawings (see Figure 5.2) of a young woman in elaborate contemporary costume literally reeling from the sight of the Laocoon group – or rather, a partially rendered Laocoon in which, as with Blake’s Blasphemer and the Belvedere Torso, the head and extremities are discarded and the thrusting, swelling torso and upper thighs brought centre-stage.14 The response of the woman (sometimes identified as a portrait of Fuseli’s young wife, sometimes as Maria Cosway, but almost certainly a generic figure) speaks of physical arousal, signalled in the backwards lean of the figure, the tightly clenched fists, the expression of alarm – all suggestive of temporal dimension, a moment of surprise. But at what? The mere appearance of this heroic torso? What I think The Blasphemer and the scenario of Fuseli’s contemporaneous drawing bear witness to is a spectacularization of the heroic body, a spectacularization which was intrinsically ambivalent, indeterminate in its meanings and connotations – including the sexual. It is not, then, coincident that efforts were being made to recuperate such excess within aesthetic language. Foremost among these was, of course, the discourse of the Sublime, with its evocation of (masculine) physical and mental invigoration and destruction, its ‘intermingling’ (to quote Alex Potts 1994, 143) ‘of erotic pleasure and traumatic self-destruction’. What Burke (1990, 134) termed the pleasurable ‘exertion of the contracting power of the muscles’ as an effect of the Sublime matches the visual effects conjured and thematized in the Fuseli and Blake designs shown here.15 Working within the traditions of academic art discourse, and astute in his commercial exploitation of the transgressive indeterminacy of the Sublime, Fuseli ingeniously discounted the traditionally elevated genre of ‘Historic’ art as worthy but also shackled by ‘truth’. Fuseli invents the category of the ‘epic’ (the genre in which much of Blake’s painted output could, arguably, be situated), ‘the loftiest species of human conception’ where ‘the aim is to astonish whilst it instructs; it is the sublime allegory of a maxim’ (Bungarten 2005, 128, 130). Within the Fuseli epic, the issue is not the expression of narrative or historical fact, but the creation of immense physical dramas that impress through their spectacle, potentially detached from nature and conventional social values. The realm of the epic is, in this account, one of supremely subjective, even anti-social, freedom, associated with masculine ‘genius’.



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Figure 5.2 Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), Dame vor Laokoon, 1801/1805, pen, c 2008 Kunsthaus Zürich 32 × 40.4 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich



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Queer Blake

The temptation to allegorize The Blasphemer and make it emblematic of (perhaps frustrated, qualified or repressed) homoerotic desire or opposition to homophobia is undoubtedly strong. The watercolour offers largely selfevident opportunities for interpretation through Blake’s personal myth (the chained Orc), his ironic valorization of blasphemy (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) or the mythological heritage (Prometheus, most obviously). His opposition of mechanically posed elders, their caricatured features bulging and glowering and feeble bodies cloaked, and the massive, swelling, virile form of the blasphemer offers a contrast between light and energy, and darkness, shame and oppression, impressive sexual power and neutered conformity.16 My point is not to disregard such interpretations, but to draw attention instead to the transgressive qualities of this design as culturally produced, rather than ‘belonging’ to a Blakean world. As a concluding gesture we can imagine, therefore, as included within a single historical arc, the processes of revision and transformation which have brought Blake from a position of social and economic vulnerability to canonicity, from, in the matter of artistic creativity, eccentricity to exemplarity, and, in his view of sexuality, turned him into an inspiration. As Andrew Elfenbein notes, ‘In the intertextual heritage of queer art, Blake has become an honorary icon’ (1999, 150). The absurdity of Blake’s visual art – what Elfenbein terms its campness – is vital here. Blake’s Blasphemer is absurd, ‘Gothick’ and ‘half-shewn’ in defiance of academic principle, yet also hyperbolically evocative of the grandest traditions of visual art despite its modest scale and the perceived limitations of its medium. However, I do not interpret Blake’s proto-queerness as a matter of poetic intent, or, as Heppner would have it, formal accident, but as instead symptomatic of a culturally productive confusion that lies at the temporal head of modernity and at the heart of modern identity politics. This is what I have elsewhere called the ‘blind spot’ of cultural modernity, in which distinctions of value are radically unstable and interminably contested, and which might otherwise also be called the Sublime, or the Gothic, or Genius – or, even, Romanticism itself.17 To remark on the patent visual resemblance between the graphic style of The Blasphemer and modern comic books would be neither original nor particularly insightful. Each forces visual attention onto a fantastically embodied, graphically self-evident masculinity, open to exaggeratedly homosexual and heterosexual readings, but reducible to neither. The point, however, is that the recurrence of this amplified, exaggerated, spectacular corporeal style relates to a productive breakdown between high and low, aesthetic distance and involvement, which makes visible the artifice of identity. A design like The Blasphemer would be hard to fix as an icon of sexual preference; instead, it belongs within this cluster of discursive phenomena which herald the queering of culture, and which made possible the eventual visibility of homosexuality (if only through its ostentatious repression).



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1. See the classic studies by Blunt, The Art of William Blake (1959), and David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (1977). 2. See Bruder’s William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997), citing works by Margaret Walters and Linda Nochlin. 3. See also Blake, Milton (1993, 33–4). 4. ‘Man’, asserts Laura Mulvey, in her seminal ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975, 28) ‘is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like’. The gaze itself is gendered, and requires – insists upon – a female object; where the male body is given as the object, there is always the danger of transgressive desire. If the almost absolute prohibition imagined by Mulvey has been tested, and the possibility of an erotic male spectacle entertained, the basic expectation that the male body requires special treatment to be permissible in visual representation remains: ‘The eroticised male seems in patriarchy to require secrecy, disguise, disavowal’ (Mackinnon 1997, 187). 5. The watercolours in question are The Blasphemers with the Usurers and Sodomites (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Vanni Fucci ‘making the figs’ (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA). In the first, the group of sodomites is represented including both male and female figures – contrary to Dante and to the early nineteenth-century tendency to reduce the crime of sodomy to what we can now identify as specifically male homosexual acts, at least as far as legal prosecutions were concerned. Despite this documented history of prosecutions (for which see Hobson 2000) the legal definition of the crime of ‘sodomy’ claimed it could be perpetrated by women as well as by men. Blake presents the obscene gesture of Ficci as a palimpsest; Blake both shows him ‘making the figs’ (a gesture he could have found described by Winckelmann and Francis Douce, and illustrated by Richard Payne Knight) and the gesture of ‘pointing’ recorded in the bowdlerized translation of H.F. Carey. Yet the Dante watercolours are not mentioned at all in Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality, notwithstanding the laudatory comment that this book ‘picks up on every reference to homosexuality in Blake’s writings and illustrations’ (O’Rourke and Collings 2004, para. 9). 6. For Blake’s expansive use of slight biblical sources, see Heppner (1995). 7. For these classical sculptures and their reputations, see Haskell and Penny (1982). 8. The classic study of the linear style remains Rosenblum’s Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (1967). On Blake and ‘romantic classicism’ see Mellor’s Blake’s Human Form Divine (1974). 9. I should emphasize that this point is made with reference to ‘masculine’ rather than ‘male’ forms; Fuseli’s treatment of androgynous and feminine figures may, paradoxically, convey rather more in the way of the kind of linear clarity and unity associated with ‘masculine’ mental capacities. For an account of the gendering of form in Fuseli, which could, though, have been much more attentive to the paradoxes highlighted here, see Myrone (2005, esp. 240–2). 10. On Blake and anatomy see Connolly (2002, 25–72). On Blake and caricature see Myrone (2006, 31–40). 11. On Blake and the Gothic see the classic study, Bindman’s ‘Blake’s “Gothicised Imagination” and the History of England’ (1973, 29–49). 12. See Myrone (2006). 13. On perspective and regimes of vision see de Bolla (2003).



Notes

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14. Schiff (1972, cat. nos. 1072–1072a (1801–5)); the drawings are on the recto and verso of a single sheet. 15. See also Furniss (1993, 17–40) and Balfour (2006, 323–36). 16. Precisely such a reading is offered by Dent and Whittaker (2002, 144). 17. On spectacle as a ‘blind spot’ within modernity, see Myrone (2007, 297). On the queerness of Romanticism see O’Rourke and Collings (2004) and, more fully, Elfenbein (1999) and Haggerty (2006).


Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art Jason Whittaker

Blake’s influence on post-war artists in Britain and North America often makes for surprising encounters. Where we might expect to find some indication of his impact is with those artists who, in some shape or form, engage with the human figure, which is at the centre of Blake’s painting – his ‘human form divine’. Thus the fact that Anthony Gormley, for example, cites the life mask of Blake in the National Gallery as one of the sources behind his moulded human forms (Hutchinson et al. 1995, 44) – whether represented as expanded hollow forms (such as the lead body-case works of the 1980s and 1990s) or as solid blocks (Critical Mass, 1995) – is hardly surprising; nor, likewise, is the central role played by Blake in Christopher Bucklow’s art, such as the abstract figurative ideograms in the exhibition ‘I Will Save Your Life’ (2004). More surprising is the role played by Blake in the art of Chris Ofili, for example, his 1995 paintings Satan and Seven Bitches Tossing their Pussies before the Divine Dung, both of which were directly inspired by Blake paintings, Satan in all his Original Glory (c.1805) and The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne (c.1803–5), and which form part of what Lisa Corrin describes as a series of playful dialogues with artists such as Blake, Picabia and Mike Kelley (1998, 16). The large 2000–01 exhibition of Blake’s work at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, alluded to a number of artists who claimed Blake as a precursor, although it is clear that this frequently amounts to little more than name-dropping. Mike Goode (2006) provides an at times amusing list of the often superficial, even banal, invocations of Blake regularly made in popular culture, such as the proverb ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ being counted among ‘365 excuses to get soused’ (2006, 770). Even where the connection is clear, as, for example with Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait II – after the Life Mask of William Blake (1955), we should pause before jumping to conclusions about the intrinsic value of 87



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Queer Blake

the Romantic engraver and poet to later generations of artists. Bacon, for example, found what he saw as Blake’s mystical claptrap to be deeply unappealing, and this should not be seen as some defensive act of misprision, a painterly clinamen that ultimately emphasizes the reciprocal psychoanalytic attraction of the strong artistic son to the equally strong but threatening artistic father as part of an anxiety of influence. Bacon appeared to have little sympathy – or time – for the myth (at least) of the Christian Romantic artist, but was strongly attracted to the particular Blakean artefact of Deville’s life mask – which I have referred to elsewhere as Blake’s only major piece of performance art centred on his body (Dent and Whittaker 2002, 6). Blake as performance artist draws attention to a more intriguing element of his influence on the arts, particularly in the spheres of conceptual, installation and video art. Bill Viola, for example, drew directly on Blake in his 1976 Songs of Innocence, part of the videoscape Four Songs, depicting a group of school children performing on the lawn in front of a large building. Similarly, although Caravaggio rather than Blake was Derek Jarman’s most important visual precursor, as Mark Douglas observes, ‘Blake is acknowledged as a major influence by Jarman himself . . . [something] echoed by Jarman’s commentators and admirers alike’ (2007, 118). While Blake frequently crops up in the diaries and notebooks, one interesting example of his use conceptually in Jarman’s art is the appearance of the text to ‘The Sick Rose’, accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s setting of the poem to music, in Jarman’s short film Imagining October. ‘The Sick Rose’ is also deployed to rather startling effect by the avant-garde occult music group, Coil, in their 1991 release Love’s Secret Domain, a psychotropic dance album described by group members Peter Christopherson and the late John Balance as full of Blakean energy (as well as inspired by the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin). These queer, cross-cultural inseminations – that might, to paraphrase Deleuze on the history of philosophy as a daisy chain, constitute an event whereby the artist approaches his ancestor and gives him a monstrous child – also fertilize, as we shall see, the installation art of Cerith Wyn Evans, a conceptual artist who, like Coil, worked with Jarman and was inspired by Burroughs and Gysin as well as Blake. There are plenty of examples where Blake is invited to the orgy to participate in the immaculate conception of a new child, monstrous or beautiful. Furthermore, a certain perverse symmetry can be enjoyed in the fact that Blake’s entrance into respectable art criticism was facilitated by the active homosexual and communist spy, Anthony Blunt, with his The Art of William Blake, published by Columbia University Press in 1959. While the focus of this chapter is on Blake’s influence on the visual arts, the eagerness with which he has been often been claimed by gay writers such as W.H. Auden, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs should not be forgotten. For Ginsberg in particular, the visionary qualities of Blake’s art were tied up with a political activism that involved radical



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sexual politics, a line of protest that reached back to what Theodor Roszak called ‘the ecstatic radicalism of Blake . . . [where] the issue is never as simple as social justice; rather the key words and images are those of time and eternity, madness and vision, heaven and the spirit’ (1968, 126). Larrissy suggests that both Ginsberg and Duncan ‘regard Blake as an ally in the reaction against orthodox sexuality’ (2006, 124), although he adds a much more nuanced interpretation than Roszak’s rather glib celebration of countercultural appropriation. Thus gay poets such as Ginsberg are as likely to see in Blake an example of the ‘bad father who rejects them’ as much as the Romantic precursor who validates their participation in a pan-sexual commonwealth, with Blake’s unwavering Christianity often presenting a barrier to uncritical acceptance on their part. What is just as interesting, however, is that – in the case of Duncan and Ginsberg at least – Larrissy also argues that they recognize the possibility that this repressive father figure is also inside themselves: thus Blake’s struggles with moral law take on a positive agonistic form for such poets in their own struggles with a clearly definable repressive and external moral authority, which interplays with their own sadomasochistic, more self-destructive urges. Because of his significance to the artists that will be dealt with in more detail later in this chapter, the role of Burroughs, who as various critics have noted draws upon Blake’s writings for his own distorted mythographies, from The Naked Lunch (1959) through to Cities of the Red Night (1981) and The Western Lands (1987), should be noted if only in passing. Burroughs has, according to Jamie Russell in Queer Burroughs, been largely excluded from the queer canon because the author of Queer dealt with a homosexual subjectivity that was troubling to a more mainstream gay community. Yet it is precisely this transgressive, sadomasochistic imperative, distorted through a Blakean lens, that is a driving force behind the art of Joel-Peter Witkin among others. What the examples of many of these writers draw attention to is an ambivalence in the reception of Blake – at least where such reception goes beyond the superficial – which should never be glossed over. While it is easy to find examples where Blake’s text and images could be seen as supporting queer sexuality, it is also important to remember that he also referred to ‘Sexual Garments’ as: the Abomination of Desolation Hiding the Human Lineaments as with an Ark & Curtains Which Jesus rent: & now shall wholly purge away with Fire Till Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration. (M 41:26–9, E142) Although a careful reading of this would probably draw attention to the fact that Blake is critiquing sexual difference as much as anything, it is hard to



Blake and Contemporary Queer Art 89

Queer Blake

Figure 6.1 2004

Joel-Peter Witkin, ‘Woman Once a Bird’, Songs of Innocence and Experience,

ignore the simple fact that the rhetoric of these lines – with their appeal to Jesus and the abomination of desolation – are situated in a long tradition of the denunciation of fallen sexuality in all its forms. Strictly speaking, the ‘Abomination of Desolation’ is a political phrase from Matthew 24:15 echoing the book of Daniel and referring to Antiochus Epiphanes’ sacrifice of a pig in the Temple, thus profaning it; but within it is also carried the load of denunciations against those many acts in the Old Testament which roused the disgust of Jehovah, including sexual transgressions (Leviticus 18) and – shame on Grayson Perry – the adoption of the clothing of the opposite sex (Deuteronomy 22:5). With this general warning in mind, then, that we should be wary of making Blake simply say what we want him to say in a postmodern, polymorphously sexual contemporary world, there is also the equally simple



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observation that throughout Blake’s art there are plenty of examples where he does indeed appear to exult in a world of sexual ambiguity. Likewise, for subsequent generations, his non-mimetic, figurative art of angelic forms, superhero beefcake and mutating grotesques certainly does appear to exploit new horizons of sexual possibility. Christoher Z. Hobson has, of course, made comparisons between Blake’s art and Republican mores (for and against) during the eighteenth century, drawing attention to lesbian scenes in The Four Zoas and the revision of Milton in response to the Vere Street persecutions of 1810–11. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when addressing the subject of male homosexuality in particular, Hobson avers that Blake typically works by innuendo rather than direct declaration, and considering the fate of those arrested at Vere Street, such circumspection was entirely appropriate. It does, however, raise a difficulty in terms of fully supporting some of Hobson’s assertions – for example, that homosexuality offers a ‘prototype of mutual, non-dominant relations’ (Hobson 2000, 178). There have been receptions of Blake’s visions of sexuality that have attracted sexually dominant and perverse interpretations, one example of which will be returned to later in this chapter, and while those examples, from Bataille through to Witkin, can easily be demonstrated to lack the critical nuances of Hobson’s work, the simple fact is that they do respond to elements of Blake’s vision that at least verge on the sadomasochistic. Similarly, while Marsha Keith Schuchard (2006) probably claims a little too much in terms of the specifics of Blake’s ‘tantric’ sexual practices, certainly his art is full of sexual interests that can be interpreted as very diverse – and some of which, we should not forget, made Mrs Blake cry. Rather like Hobson, Schuchard appears to view Blake’s sexual philosophy as something almost entirely to be celebrated; I, however, am inclined to view Blake’s sexual ideas much more cautiously. While the importance of a queer aesthetic to eighteenth-century artistic theory and practice is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting the observations of writers such as Alex Potts and Simon Richter on Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Thus, for Potts (1994), an eroticized ideal of male beauty lay at the heart of Winckelmann’s 1765 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, while for Richter and McGrath (1994) his lush prose gave gay men the language of desire. It is tempting to see in Winckelmann two poles of a queer aesthetic, one joyously jubilant with regard to the male body, the other engaged in a more transgressive meditation on pain, as Richter points out in Laocoön’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (1992). There is, however, something more subtle than transgression in any rather coarse Bataillean sense taking place here. Richter remarks that, ‘though pain and the soul’s efforts to conceal pain are violently opposed, it is only in their mutual tension that representation takes place’ (1992, 38). This is a view echoed by Morton Paley when discussing Winckelmann in relation to Blake’s own version of the Laöcoon, or Yah & his two Sons Satan & Adam:




Queer Blake

‘The purpose of great art [after Winckelmann] is to reconcile the viewer with suffering through the transmutation of the suffering subject into an aesthetic object’ (Paley 2003, 59). Of course, by changing the title of his engraving from a Greek name to a Hebrew one, Blake was upholding his theory concerning the origins of Greek art in the Levantine world as well as satirizing many aspects of classical aesthetics (as Paley points out), but the language of desire never disappears from Blake’s religious art, whether in the more conventional erotic subjects such as Bathsheba at the Bath (c.1799–1800) or more disturbing depictions such as The Temptation and Fall of Eve (c. 1808) or The Blasphemer (c. 1800), in which a heroic naked man, Shelomith, is stoned to death after the story in Leviticus 24:10–16.1 The sadistic connotations of such images can provide some context for a perversely queer interpretation of Blake, but the first of the two contemporary artists to be considered in detail in this chapter is concerned to take from Blake a much more enlightened interpretation of the body. Cerith Wyn Evans was born in Wales in 1958 and studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. After his first exhibition at Saint Martin’s as part of the ‘Other Contemporaries’ exhibition in 1978, he worked as an assistant to Derek Jarman before moving on to create his own video art. As a conceptual artist (Wyn Evans moved from video art to installations and sculptures during the 1990s), his work is as much concerned with literary intertextuality as with references to the visual arts, and he has spoken about the ways in which he considers his art as creating ‘somewhere that is out of place’, at the hinge or skew of reality (Meredith 2000, 2). His 1996 Inverse, Perverse, Reverse, for example, begins with a mirror reflection that flips the image of the viewer upside down, attempting to capture the moment preceding the entrance into language which the artist then reconfigures as an ‘elaborate brocade of texts’ from writers such as J.G. Ballard and Judith Butler (Rehberg 2006). Similarly, in 2004, he created a palimpsest in a slide installation, The Sky is Paper Thin Here, overlaying astronomical images and photographs of Japanese rituals that drew on the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Gysin has been particularly important to Wyn Evans, most notably in his various recreations of the Dreamachine (1998–2006), a stroboscopic device designed by Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1961 as an art object to be viewed with closed eyes to induce hypnagogic states. Also important to Wyn Evans is Gysin’s calligraphic painting, which used Japanese and Arabic script, each overlaid across the other, to undo the linear composition of language. Gysin’s artistic practice was invoked by Wyn Evans in a personal response to Blake that accompanied the 2000 Tate exhibition of Blake’s work. Entitled Cleave 00, it consisted of a glitter ball in a darkened room onto which Blake’s verse was transmitted as visual Morse code, creating a sparkling celestial disco which interpreted the Blakean body in an innovative way. The palimpsest of stellar words, theoretically readable but practically indecipherable to the majority of visitors, combines Gysin’s calligraphy with



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the hypnagogic visions of the Dreamachine to reconfigure both its Blakean source and the viewer’s body. Wyn Evans claims inspiration for his installation came from a small pencil and watercolour sketch from 1819 or 1820 entitled ‘Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall’ or (after W. Graham Robertson, who owned the piece) ‘A vision: Probably representing the Poet, in the innermost shrine of the imagination, writing from angelic dictation’; on this drawing, Frederick Tatham has written that he supposed it to be Blake in the midst of one of his visions, its strange, minimalist perspectives suggesting very simply the space of heavenly imagination so often evoked by Blake’s art (Butlin 1990, 251). As such, Cleave 00 seeks not to recreate Blake’s idiosyncratic representation of the neoclassical body, but is rather a kind of desiring-production dreamachine which embodies angelic forms within its space. The artistic dance floor, inscribed with coded photons, creates what Henri Corbin (who was also interested in the relationship between Swedenborgianism and esoteric Islam as well as the philosophy of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi) described as ‘l’homme de lumière’. For Corbin, Iranian Sufism was a key to what he called the coincidentia oppositorum, the action whereby we do not pray to an external divinity for compassion but bring that compassion into being through us – or, to translate Suhrawardi’s illuminationist philosophy into the words of Blake: And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk, or jew; Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell There God is dwelling too (E13) While this extends beyond the queer body of Wyn Evans’s early video work inspired by Jarman, the filmmaker’s influence can also still be seen here: Cleave 00 is, in some sense, the installation artist’s version of the Blakean vision of the garden that so inspired Jarman’s later work, particularly Modern Nature (1994) and Chroma (1995), where he repeatedly invokes the apocryphal story of the Blakes playing Adam and Eve in London, as well as their cottage at Felpham and Songs of Innocence such as ‘The Ecchoing Green’. In the space of Cleave 00, the visitor’s body becomes a free-floating, disoriented entity occupying the gap created by his psychedelic disco. The second artist to be considered here uses Blake in an approach to the body that is very different to that of Wyn Evans, one which emphasizes the grotesque. Born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother in New York in 1939, Joel-Peter Witkin worked as a war photographer in Vietnam before becoming a Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Although his output has consisted entirely of photographic work, he is heavily influenced by painters such as Bosch, El Greco, Goya and Blake as




Queer Blake

well as by the Surrealists, particularly Max Ernst. Religious influences have always played an important part in Witkin’s work, although with an emphasis on pain and suffering that Beyst (2007) calls the ‘relentless expansion of [Witkin’s] sadomasochistic universe’. In terms of post-war art, Witkin shares some similarities with the extreme physical art of the Vienna Actionists and the Orgien Mysterien Theatre of Hermann Nitsch, with their obsessions with transgressive violence, self-mutilation and bodily excess. However, there are also important differences to be made between such groups and the art of Witkin: in particular, the rise of the ‘action’ was itself intended as a deliberate provocation not simply against the tastes and sensibilities of bourgeois audiences in the 1960s, but also against the very notion of a commodifiable work of art, something the Actionists shared with other contemporaries such as Fluxus. Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, for example, both served sentences for acts that were seen to deface symbols of the state or were deemed an unacceptable outrage, Mühl even becoming a fugitive for a while after his 1968 ‘Piss Action’ in Munich. The tone of Actionist art can be given simply by the alternative title of one of Brus and Mühl’s most notorious pieces, officially titled 20. September but often referred to as The Eating, Drinking, Pissing and Shitting Movie (Kren 2005). Brus, Mühl and other Actionists conceived of their actions in deliberately disgusting terms as a reaction to what they saw as the sanitized hypocrisy of post-Nazi Austria in particular. On one level, Witkin’s photographs, with their depictions of amputees, hermaphrodites and extreme sexual perversions, are an aestheticization of the physical degradation that lay at the heart of Actionism, and it cannot be denied that his individual photographic plates, beautifully hand-crafted, are eminently desirable commodities to collectors. Yet if Witkin rarely goes beyond the politics of the personal, as an artist championing the ‘spectacle of perversion’ as a manifestation of the divine (Celant 1995, 21) his work offers an intriguing perspective on how Blake may be queered to a deliberately perverse interpretation. The precursors to this provocative misreading can be traced back through figures such as Bataille to Swinburne, a revision that sees Blake as clearly of the devil’s party and knowing it. Although, as I have intimated earlier, I find this transgressive view far too limiting with regard to the reception of Blake, it is not entirely without substance – for after all, while it may not arouse an equal level of disgust in us as the actions of Brus and Mühl, it should not be forgotten that one of the topics of dinner conversation with Ezekiel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is why the prophet decided to eat shit, inspired as he was by ‘the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite’ (E39). While Blake figures as a minor player in Witkin’s earlier list of influences, his role was brought to the fore in Witkin’s 2004 collection, Songs of Innocence and Experience. Using the poetry of Blake as a context for some 62 images, 40 of them new to this project and 22 taken from previous work, in John Wood’s introduction Witkin claims that he channels the ‘face of the Divine’



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Figure 6.2

Joel-Peter Witkin, ‘The Tyger’, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 2004

through an exploration of death, sex and deformity. For Wood, this is ‘a great polyphonic hymn to the body in all its manifestations’, sadomasochistic imagery abounds, such as ‘Cuisine of a Failed Romance’ in which a winged penis takes aim at a nude suspended from the ceiling, or disembodied hands clap the marker board for the shooting of a female amputee in ‘First Casting for Milo’. Occasionally, the link between Blake’s verse and Witkin’s imagery is made explicit, as in ‘Blackman’, a photograph of an African male nude between two threatening white males, which is accompanied by ‘The Little Black Boy’, but more often Blake’s poems are meant to be read evocatively and allusively (Witkin 2004). The images are immensely powerful and also incredibly beautiful, although, ultimately, there is far too much of the Tyger in this collection and very little of the Lamb. It is not that this is intrinsically problematic – the diabolical reading of Blake has its most important roots in Swinburne’s 1868 William Blake: a Critical Essay, in which he praised elements of Blake’s work as ‘grotesque almost to grandeur, and full of strength and significance’ (66) – but, unlike Bataille who sees Blake almost entirely as a writer in whom ‘evil attains a form of purity’ (1973, 9), Swinburne also responded forcefully to the Arcadian pastoral vision of Blake’s Songs of Innocence. What Witkin presents is almost entirely a Songs of Experience. Of course, it could be observed that it




Queer Blake

is the limitation of my own vision that fails to perceive the innocence that can be sublimated from perversity – and certainly one thing I do not wish to argue is that Witkin’s art has no grounding in Blake’s imagination. From the early, rather jejune Gothic nightmares of the Poetical Sketches to the vicious butcheries of the Sons and Daughters of Albion in Jerusalem, as well as the torments of the damned in his final engravings for Dante, Blake was easily capable of depicting visceral body horror that, for all its condemnation of Moral Law and clear-sighted denunciations of the theories of Edmund Burke, is also more than a little fascinated by the sublimity of terror: the creation of Urizen in The Book of Urizen easily matches anything that one would find in the gut-wrenching visions of David Cronenberg or William Burroughs. And yet, there is not really the divine marriage that a number of critics claimed for Witkin’s version of the Songs alone: it is a hell of diabolical bodies that, I believe, cannot (or does not wish to) transcend its own inferno. Witkin, then, performs an act of violence on Blake, but he is in good company here, choosing to read white where I read black in much the same way that Blake aggressively engaged with Milton and the Bible – and plenty of Milton scholars in particular have rued Blake’s casual, brilliant carnage in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even though I may be troubled by Witkin’s hacking away of the conjoined contrary of Innocence (after all, such a remarkable anomaly of nature would have been a subject much more fit for the photographer’s art than the self-contained, atomized body of Experience), the corpus he mutilates contains plenty of examples of aberrations and grotesques of its own. Indeed, for me this is one of the best challenges of Blake, the distortions and ambiguities, the (dare we admit it?) sheer incomprehensibility of so much of his art. For Blakean scholars and critics, it is a dangerous path to follow the hermeneutics of anything goes – hence some of my scepticism regarding any unproblematic queering of Blake’s texts within the original contexts in which he worked. Yet the prerogative of any artist (and a prerogative which Blake enjoyed to the full) is to grapple with the body of that text, to spawn monstrous offspring if necessary, and the demonic progeny of Witkin are as much the product of Blake as the angelic, dreamy children of Evans. The queer vision of Burroughs, important to both Witkin and Evans, recognized this when he drew upon an earlier vision to conclude The Western Lands: ‘You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair’ (1987, 257–8).

Note 1. See Myrone, Chapter 5, for another possible biblical attribution, and a full interpretation of this design.



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7 Helen P. Bruder

This chapter complements my discussion of the ways Blake’s friendship with Ann Flaxman tempted the artist to delve into the pleasures of feminine aesthetics (Bruder 2007b). Ample, beautiful evidence for that transgendered play was found in the unique set of watercolour sketches William produced as a gift for Ann (1797) and here I chart a further sexually experimental step, into textual transvestism, by focusing on an unprecedented verbal collection – one so unusual that Blake never named it, though it is now (fluidly) titled The Pickering Manuscript or The Ballads or The Auguries Manuscript (1800–07).1 My spirit-guide will be the peerless transvestite creator Grayson Perry, whose autobiographical, cartoon and cartographic works in particular provide an invaluable rudder for my adventurous hand; but before considering the eager passion some heterosexual male artists have for absorbing and performing femininities, it’s vital to explore some suggestive aspects of the unique years which may well have animated the ‘Real Acting’ I perceive within ‘Felpham Billy[’s]’ poems (E764, 504). The collection was composed during the only period the Blakes spent away from what both, by 1800, felt to be the ‘terrible desart of London’ (E708), and the poems William penned ‘On the yellow sands’ or with ‘wind singing above our roof & the sea roaring at a distance’ (E712, 726) are awash with salty waves of emotional release. Indeed in the Pickering universe ‘tears for ever flow’ and, significantly, blur gendered thought/feeling dualism, for here ‘a Tear is an Intellectual Thing’ with tender, transcendental, significance: ‘Every Tear from Every Eye / Becomes a Babe in Eternity’ (‘The Golden Net’ 4, E483, ‘The Grey Monk’ 29, E489, ‘Auguries’ 67–8, E491). And Blake’s own words show that this cute, reconstituent emotion – keenly felt: ‘I wept for joy like a dove I mourn’ (‘The Land of Dreams’ 11, E486) – was pandemic. As the seaside cottage he ‘fell in love with’ became to him ‘more & more beautiful’ so ‘Sweet Felpham’ worked its softening magic, and (vitally for us) like the village’s other ‘Men’ Blake morphed into one of ‘the mildest of the human race’ (BR 95, E713, 709, 717). Interestingly, ‘The Mental Traveller’ also finds his ‘akeing heart’ is warmed by the feminized interior of a cottage, whose 97



‘Real Acting’: ‘Felpham Billy’ and Grayson Perry Try It On

Queer Blake

‘hearth’ births a dazzling ‘Female Babe’ (29–60, E484-5). She’s a mesmerizing incarnation, with some connection perhaps to Blake’s exquisite portrait of himself as a new-hatched, Felphamized homemaker, ‘full of the Business of Settling the sticks & feathers of my nest’ (E712). Either way, village life abounded in the feminine pleasures of domestic posing, for it is here that we sight Blake, picturing himself, ‘very Happy sitting at tea by a wood fire’ or recalling mutual friends ‘over a dish of Coffee’ (E726, 766). In particular his friendship with the oft-remembered Miss Poole gestures toward tantalizing new forms of convivial self-consciousness, glimpsed in the cameo Blake provides of the rude health enjoyed by this country horsewoman on the momentous day ‘she’ (no doubt calming Blake’s urban shakiness) ‘first mounted me on my belov[e]d Bruno’ (E748). Blake, reciprocally, wished her ‘a continued Excess of Happiness’ (E737) and it’s fascinating to see how touchy-feely friendships like this one bring Felpham Billy out of the shadows. It’s revealing too, to see how many opportunities these years gave Blake to stage images of himself and aspects of his emotional life, often in confessional performances which are especially dramatic in the context of the community of epistolary versifiers he inhabited. The letter poems Blake sent to George Cumberland, Thomas and Elizabeth Butts, John and ‘Anna’ Flaxman not only nail broad thematic Felpham/Pickering links – through shared preoccupation with domestic and rural life, significant animals, fairies and angels; even visionary perception and divine humanity (for example, ‘Auguries’ 1–4,125–132 E490-3 and letter verses E721–2, 712–13) – they also feature the kind of ‘Real Acting’ that underlies Blake’s Felphamliberated Pickering transvestism. As an aperitif to that rich fare we’ll look at some more of the many shimmering, omnisexual poses Blake pulled off for his friends. First, on the eve of departure (1 September 1800), Blake steps out as a titan: ‘Behold me . . . Rending the manacles of Londons Dungeon dark’ – Cumberland can have had no doubt of either Blake’s passion or his prowess, muscles flexed – ‘I have rent the black net & escap’d . . . I have torn it from my limbs’ (BR 97, my emphasis). Yet, just a fortnight later, he performs as a visionary coquette (14 September) imploring Ann Flaxman to ‘entice’ husband John ‘far away’, for a divine seaside jolly, ‘for Heaven is there / The Ladder of Angels descends thro the air’ (E708–9). The associated visits from dead friends and relatives are grave matters, of course, as a later letter to Butts reveals (22 November 1802, E720–2) but what’s striking is that Blake confides details of his often supernatural travails in terms of a self-consciously dramatic, emotional hypersensitivity. The implication? For tenderized, self-staging Felpham Billy it’s all so much worse: ‘What to others a trifle appears / Fills me full of smiles or tears’ (25–6, E721). This almost bipolar volatility (a common Pickering affliction) presages fascinating forms of sexual self-consciousness and its latent femininity becomes evident in a further letter verse for Butts (16 August 1803) in which Blake worries acutely



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about his singular appearance and about the potential of his extreme moodiness – whether ‘Elate’ or ‘Meek’ – to imperil friendships (10, E733). Letters, of course, are an apt medium for the sharing of confidences, and from the very beginning, revelations about gender shifts and shapes pepper Blake’s salty pages. Prophetically (as it turned out), Blake early raved to Butts (2 October 1800) about Felpham’s ‘soft Female charms’, confiding that ‘in her fair arms / My Shadow I knew / And my wifes shadow too’ (37–40, E713). My aim isn’t to chase gender whilst diminishing the extraordinary metamorphosis this led to, as mortal baby Blake is literally cuddled into regeneration (42–59, E713). Rather, I salute the village’s unisexual amniotic embrace, whilst also noting that, even at this moment of touching transcendental transformation, Blake still playfully confounds gender conventions: though a shape-shifted ‘Child’ he’s ‘a Ram hornd with Gold’ too (62, 70, 73, E713). Vulnerability of this and other kinds interestingly complicates mature masculinity, and is vividly productive of yet more self-conscious selfstagings, as Blake’s Felpham brush with the uber-macho military well illustrates (Letter to Butts, 16 August 1803; all quotations from E731–4 unless otherwise indicated). When confronted by a drunken dragoon belligerently acting a ‘Soldierlike’ (E737) part and putting ‘himself into a Posture of Defiance’ (my emphases) Blake initially matched with a performance of bluff strength, ‘putting aside his blows [I] took him again by the Elbows’. Yet his self-confessedly ‘too passive manner’ soon creates dissonance in this confident masculine picture, as Blake goes on to confess both that he’ll need a tribe of villagers to save him from the legal fallout and – fascinatingly – that the ‘consternation’ caused by their ruckus has emasculated the local men: ‘Every Man is now afraid of speaking to or looking at a Soldier’. Trembling fear clearly wasn’t the sole preserve of Blake’s ‘much terrified Wife’. Felpham, again, bisexualized a conventionally gendered experience, this time of physical menace; and tracing terrified vulnerability’s artistic afterlife reveals that for Blake that experience was sharp indeed,2 for Private Schofields proliferate in his later works, often, as Damon notes, ‘contemptuously misspelled’ (1988, 360). More, directly the soldier who ‘threatened to knock out my Eyes’ (surely every artist’s worst nightmare) receives a laser-like riposte via sublime Pickering celebrations of vision, both as an erotic treat in ‘The wild game of her roving Eye’, and as a now-talismanic route to transcendence, for it’s here Blake explains how ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower’ (‘The Mental Traveller’ 71, E485, ‘Auguries’ 1–2, E490). No longer sympathizing with the ‘hapless Soldiers’ of ‘London’ (11, E27) Blake prefers to savour one ‘Palsied’, to picture a man who impotently ‘strikes the Summers Sun’ (‘Auguries’ 78, E491). Another kind of vulnerability may be in play here too, as garden fisticuffs perhaps gave Blake an intimation of the weakening, and male ego-denting, effects of age. It’s certainly interesting that the Pickering crew – preoccupied by courtship, betrothals, the care of young children – are on average a



‘Real Acting’: ‘Felpham Billy’ and Grayson Perry Try It On

Queer Blake

generation younger than their creator. Later I’ll explore the intriguing range of Blake’s sexual investments and identifications across this youthful band, but for now I just flag the possibility that, bruised by a soldier, forties Blake may have apprehended with some anxiety the gulf between that Orc-like ‘bleeding youth’, who rends chains to nail girls, and ‘Cottage’ dwelling old men beset by ‘freezing Age’, who faint in their sexual forays (‘The Mental Traveller’ 13–28, 29–60, E484–5). Again, it’s in a letter verse for Butts that Blake dramatizes himself personally facing this, as he explains how visionary perception enables him to see a cautionary ‘old Man grey’ inside an obstructive talking ‘Thistle’ (22 November 1802, E720–3). This spiky emblem of male ageing raises the ‘spectrous’ possibility that ‘Poverty Envy old age & fear / Shall bring thy Wife upon a bier’ and though Blake’s response is dramatically virile, ‘I struck the Thistle with my foot / And broke him up from his delving root’ (37–8, 41–2) the potency-threatening fears he raised only got worse, as we see in a letter Blake wrote to William Hayley, immediately after his return to London, in which he complains of the difficulties ‘a Man almost 50 Years of Age’ experiences when he seeks work in the capital (7 October 1803, E736–7). At this moment Blake was not quite 46, but when competition comes in the form of ‘a boy of twenty who . . . Saunters about the Playhouses’, age is more a state of mind than of body. And, yet again, it’s Blake’s experience of vulnerability, this time in a marketplace where he fears only ‘such a fop’ can flourish, which lures him toward sexual self-dramatization: young artists, tarting themselves around town, now set the tone and, Blake surmises, since ‘other Engravers are courted. I suppose I must go a Courting which I shall do awkwardly’. It’s fascinating that in this performed and shared self-image, artistic and personal allure intimately overlap – just as they do in Blake’s provocative Felpham question, ‘Was I angry . . . with Macklin or Boydel or Bowyer / Because they did not say O what a Beau ye are’ (E504). Gender mutability is obviously crucial too, making it enthralling to explore the poetical wardrobe of fantastical guises Blake tried on in defiance of these commercial (and many other) realities, and though fantasy may be sniffed at in Blake Studies beside its sober kin imagination and vision, it’s a Felpham-fostered flamboyance which seems to craft and animate the Pickering poems. The rest of this chapter tracks Blake’s fabulous claim that ‘Real Acting . . . is . . . No Boys Work’ (E764) through a series of close readings titled Girly Blake, Bicurious Blake, Kinky Blake – and, actually, the passage for these feminizations was eased by one more compelling component of the seaside years: William Hayley, whose personal and professional effeminacy Blake paid both rough and reverent tribute to, is this discussion’s and the region’s absent queen.3 He brought artistic women into Blake’s life, feminine aesthetics into his imagination and feminized feelings into his friendships.4 Hayley’s links to Pickering gender concerns can be easily established too. For example, the power of looks and the significance of physical



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appearances, so crucial in girly poems like ‘The Smile’ and ‘Mary’, were surely shaped by Hayley’s many portrait commissions.5 ‘Miniature Painting’ wasn’t perennially ‘a Goddess in my Eyes’ (10 May 1801, E715), but the collection’s theme-setting first line, ‘There is a Smile of Love’ (E482) foretells that for Felpham Billy small gestures will be relentlessly significant. Even more directly, two publications Blake and Hayley laboured on together exist almost solely to showcase the links between performance and femininity that I’m pursuing. The ‘6 small plates for a New Edition of Mr Hayleys Triumphs of Temper. from drawings by Maria Flaxman sister to my friend the Sculptor’ (10 January 1803, E723) dramatize a hugely successful fiction of ‘feminine excellence’ (Hayley 1781, v) as the aptly named Serena learns how to act heroically in her battle to overcome the horrors of Spleen, whilst their collaborative Animal Ballads bind Felpham and feminization together more tightly still. Not only are the Pickering poems written on paper used in the printing of the Ballads but Hayley’s composition of verse crafted to ‘exhibit’ Blake’s ‘diversified talents’ for both ‘original design and delicate engraving’ (Hayley 1802, ii) ties skill and sensibility together in significantly gendered ways. Hayley’s incredible tales of female emotion and devotion, which Blake (dis)embodied, urgently deserve sustained attention – though here, sadly, I can only underscore how directly his message about the wondrous potency of (feminine) feeling – ‘She has shot with the Strength of her heart / She has pierced the foe’ (Hayley 1805,109) – soaked into the Pickering Manuscript, for Hayley’s adoration of that womanly ‘empire of the Soul’ (ibid., 159) truly spills over into Blake’s feminized celebration of ‘the gems of the Human Soul’ (‘The Mental Traveller’ 33, E484). In essence, the Pickering universe is one in which male riches, status and power weigh light beside ‘The rubies & pearls of a lovesick eye / The countless gold of the akeing heart’ (‘The Mental Traveller’ 34–5, E484) and it’s with these treasures that Blake adorns himself and his work – just, indeed, as he told Hayley that Cowper’s epistles ‘ought to be printed in letters of Gold & ornamented with Jewels of Heaven Havilah Eden’ (12 March 1804, E743). Ornament, Matthews (2007, 206) reminds us, ‘is a strongly positive word for Blake’ and so it’s no surprise that when Felpham Billy found himself ‘within a mile of Bognor to which our fashionables resort’ (BR 95) accessorizing shot up his agenda.

Girly Blake Preciousness, display and ostentation are desirable. (Perry 2007, 151) Mary moves in soft beauty & conscious delight (E487)



‘Real Acting’: ‘Felpham Billy’ and Grayson Perry Try It On 101

Queer Blake

Luminously eye-catching girls are the most visible Pickering characters. Appearing alongside the angelically brilliant Mary are ‘Three Virgins . . . Dazling bright’ (‘The Golden Net’ 1, 8 E483), a duo of Maidens, ‘Translucent lovely shining clear’ (‘The Crystal Cabinet’ 14, E488), an outstanding ‘Babe . . . of solid fire / And gems & gold’ (‘The Mental Traveller’ 44–6, E484), plus that ‘ruddy & bright’ hottie who wreaks havoc in the womanly world of ‘William Bond’ (31, E497). This is quite a pageant, and Blake of course has 1790s form for animating glittering girls we can’t help but ogle, with Thel and Oothoon being this glowing bevy’s brightest sisters, shining as they do in pastel, rainbow and sunburst hues – and though it’s a distraction to dip deep into ongoing debates,6 it is useful to note the critical tilt a transvestite edge of empathy, emulation, esteem brings to the interpretation of their girly stories. Obviously, it’s not breaking news to observe that much of the abuse Thel has attracted derives from distaste for her pubescent feminine attachment to attractive surfaces, especially her own (for example, 1:6–10, 2:11–12, E3–4), but if we allow that the creator of this ‘daughter of beauty’ may himself be implicated in the enjoyment of his ‘shining woman’s’ (5:7, 3:22, E5–6) appearance, aesthetically, for its own sake, then Thel’s reluctance to sacrifice her lovely young body to the rigours of motherhood and the deadly corruption it could bring is less contemptible. Maybe Blake even shares Perry’s (oft performed) adoration of the visual pleasures of girly hyper-femininity: ‘merely standing there and looking gorgeous is enough’ and ‘The perfect transvestite experience would be traipsing along the street with someone holding a gigantic mirror in front of me’ (Perry 2007, 50, 75). Thel’s naughty sister Oothoon is certainly a bold self-regarding eyeful, as I guess she ought to be in a work where ‘eyes’ enjoy ‘happy copulation’ (6:23–7:1, E50). The bicurious elements of Visions figure later, so here I’ll just cast a beam on the profusive momentum of Oothoon’s spectacularly queer sexual arc, which opens with the performance of a gesture of visual allurement – placing, like a pendant, that suggestively plucked flower ‘here to glow between my breasts’ (1:12, E460) – and rushes toward the orchestration of a voyeur’s festival, in which Oothoon catches yet more dazzling ‘girls’ of ‘silver’ and ‘gold’ to be visual stimulants not only for Theotormon but also for herself (7:23–9, E50). Any straight account of Oothoon as, negatively inflected, an erotic object falters under the range and energy of Blake’s ocular sexual investments within Visions; investments rendered so varied and dynamic, I suspect, by his wish not just to see Oothoon, but also to see as Oothoon – to try girliness on and out, from within. The simile-addicted Thel (1:8–11, 2:11, 3:3–4, 17–23, E3–4), after all, visually experiments with other identities by donning, performing, physically aping either the indicative stance (bowing, flying) or emblematic gesture (breast-cherishing) of her omnisexual guides – the Lilly, Cloud and Clod respectively – and surely it’s possible that her creator, head again full of romantic girls and with the Pickering mood music singing ‘That sweet Love



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& Beauty are worthy our care’ (‘Mary’ 12, E487), may also have learnt by trying on and acting out. Years ago, Catherine McClenahan speculated about transsexual play in the collection, wondering whether Blake ‘may have learnt from women how to exploit the contradictions and loopholes of a “feminized” position’ (1990, 190) and with what we’ve seen of Felpham Billy’s coastal experiences, the wisdom of her clue is clear. Indeed there’s an arresting scene in that greater Felpham achievement, Milton, which directly illustrates his willingness to personally converse with the feminine, on Plate 36, where we’re treated to a unique verbal/visual self-portrait of Blake engaged with a girl ‘of twelve years’ (36:17; E137). The cameo of course is visionary: Ololon is flying above the footpath, but it’s domestic too, directly labelled an encounter in the (now safe) garden of ‘Blake’s Cottage at Felpham’, which indicates that even in this monumental work where the majestically orgasmic ‘WILLIAM’ rouses ‘up . . . Young Men of the New Age’ (29, 1, E95), girls remain not just metaphysically or symbolically important, but emotionally, imaginatively and aesthetically vital too. Whilst only a fool would question the dominion of Blake, the prophet, whose foot Milton so dramatically enters, a Pickering fan will nonetheless observe how quickly that fetishistic portal is dressed up with ‘a bright Sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold / I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity’ (21:4,12–16, E115). So, even his visionary footwear is eye-catching and, in converse compliment, Pickering Blake confers symbolic meaning on everyday fabrics too: from the ‘swadling Bands’ and ‘winding Sheet’ which flag mortality, to the ‘Princes Robes & Beggars Rags’ that materialize inequality (‘Auguries’ 63, 116, 51, E491–2), through the double-sided fabric of ‘The Golden Net’ (E483) whose unusual ‘twine’ (9)7 underside covers female affliction, yet topside allures the ‘young Man’ (2) who inspects it. Standard readings tend to condemn fishnetty male ‘imprisonment’, and even those who sympathize with ‘females . . . already trapped themselves’ sight a snare (Stevenson 1996, 603; McClenahan 1990, 193), which is odd since clear hazard warnings are issued (2–3), texture/al trauma is brazenly apparent (5–7) and Blake significantly diminished the role of female agency as the poem morphed from notebook to neat.8 There really are no tricks: the girls’ lives are defined by their garb, and showing shiny fabric is their lives’ work (5–7, 9–10) and so the real point of interest must be the transformative empathy of the young man dazzled by their dressy display (8), who – perhaps like the ‘trannies’ Perry describes who ‘can only visit . . . certain feelings . . . banished from the kingdom of their masculinity . . . when they dress as a woman’ (quoted in Goodhart 2004) – finds a tide of confessional first-person emotion released when, soul melted, he views ‘Love & Beauty’ in extremis (11–16). They ‘in tears clothd’ bring matching ‘Tears’ to his eyes (15–17) and it’s this experience of transgendered recognition which dresses him too, as their smile of sisterly sympathy lifts the net ‘on downy Pinions soft / Over’ his willing head (18–21). Captivity




Queer Blake

and complaint have been sensed at the poem’s close (22–6) but the crafted trio of entreaties match too neatly the number of girls and garments for this to convince (23–5 and 1, 5–7), whilst his pathetic closing wail, ‘O when will the morning rise’ – so stagey given the poem’s dawn setting (1) – persuades me that this guy is a ‘Real Actor’, whose fabricated falsetto fears convey as much relish as regret at his feminine enrobement (just as bicurious containment, ‘O . . . O’, within ‘The Crystal Cabinet’ or, ‘O’, again, within William Bond’s kinky kingsize, speak at worst of ambiguous bondage (16–17, E488, 46, E497)). The clincher? His direct admission of continuing liberty: ‘Underneath the Net I stray’ (22, my emphasis). Unlike the girls who are defined, even, à la Wollstonecraft, deformed, by their garments – some as sharp as ‘Iron Wire’ (24) – this lad has plenty of wriggle room within his costume and, like Perry’s showy, potty Precious Boys (2004), materializes an obvious but profound fact, ‘Transvestism is not about being a woman; it’s about dressing as a woman’ (Perry 2007,151). ‘The Golden Net’, then, is a tranny snapshot: to try out weeping woe a young man slips under a feminine covering. ‘Mary’ (E487–8), by contrast, is cinematic, for here Blake finds in the first adored then despised titular heroine a complex female alter ego who, like Perry’s Claire and her army of photographic and ceramic avatars, allows him to girlishly experience a world of high emotion. Moreover, though the repetition of phrases and themes from Blake’s ‘Picture’ of his own face and fate (E732–4) within the self-portrait of this girl so lovely she inspires near-murderous envy (21–32) has been noted, little has been made of the fact that Blake tries out this victimized feminine self in the very same letter which re-enacts his scary showdown with soldier Schofield (Letter to Butts, 16 August 1803, E731–4; all following quotations from this letter unless otherwise indicated). It most certainly should be explored, though, since this context reveals the poem to be a purgative transvestite psychodrama. Perry talks of transvestism revealing ‘the heraldry of’ his ‘subconscious’ and of the art world allowing him to ‘wear’ that ‘subconscious’ on ‘his sleeve’ (Perry 2002, 109; 2007, 50) and ‘Mary’ suggests that the ‘wild terror & fear’ (47) eddying through the darker recesses of endangered Blake’s Felphamized brain found artistic vent in a hyperbolic and hysterical tale, where false accusations are tossed at an angelically innocent village girl who – unable to avert insult and scorn – is hounded to death by her embattled sensitivities. Interestingly, Blake called the case against him ‘a Fabricated Perjury’. ‘Mary’ strikes me as confabulated catharsis, generically akin to Perry’s ‘cathartic fable’ Cycle of Violence (1992), where Blake in a fussy, feminine ‘Bustle to defend myself’ dresses the ‘mire’ ‘bespatterd’ Mary with feminized versions of the ‘abominable imprecations’ and ‘Contemptible’ ‘abusive threats’ he’d recently endured: ‘Proud’ ‘Mad’ ‘whore’ (36, 34, 17). Surely a wonderful safety valve – and distancing strategy – for the subconscious. Schofield’s ‘contempt for my Person’ is objectified, then exorcized, via the body of this shit-covered feminine self/other. It



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seems the ‘Scorn’ and ‘disdain’ which are ‘Like foul Fiends inhabiting Mary’s mild brain’ (41–2) helped dissipate the awful, haunting, threat of ‘any villain [who] in future may come & drag me and my Wife out of our House, & beat us in the Garden, or use us as he please, or is able, & afterwards go and swear our Lives away’ (E735, my emphasis). Reading this, I hasten to say that applauding Real Acting doesn’t trivialize raw anguish. The terror of mutual violation expressed here, as William and Catherine figure together as powerless females, is genuinely shocking and reminds us that Felpham delivered as much personal pain as professional angst. Nonetheless, the biographical prompts to textual transvestism remain important, and not least for the interpretative light they cast on the poem’s curiously unbalanced structure and inscrutable narrative trajectory, whereby adoring descriptions of Mary, which make up half the work (stanzas 1–3 ecstatic appreciation, 10–12 the ideal dissolves), wrap around an account of inexplicable overnight rejection, which the heroine attempts to reverse through a change of clothes; though alas ‘plain neat attire’ (35) is impotent here. It’s also clear that considering Mary to be Blake’s cathartic alter ego helps appraise his prizing of superhumanly expressive but vulnerable appearances (44–8). ‘Trannies’, as Perry concedes, ‘are usually too dressy’ (2007, 151) and Mary’s ‘first time’ in the ‘Ball room’ (1, 2) manifests this excess, as her Arcadian radiance converts ‘Men & Maidens’ alike to a tender creed of ‘Sweet . . . sweet . . . sweet Love & Beauty’ (3, 1, 10, 12). This Mary, like the host of Claires raped, hung and dismembered by soldiers on the ceramic surface of Interior Conflict (2004), stands no chance against military menace, and so through the provisional identification of textual transvestism Blake can simultaneously be both in and out of danger. As Perry pertinently notes, ‘Dressing up as a young girl shifts the process from authentic to symbolic . . . the boundaries aren’t blurred’ (2007, 49–50), hence his Maryself may die but Blake himself remains intact. Additionally, Mary’s emphatic but perplexing deduction that ‘Envy’ motivates her attackers (21–32, echoed in Blake’s assessment of his own fate, 10, E733) may also have a bellicose biographical cue in Blake’s bafflement that Schofield and his comrade ‘Plann’d’ a ‘method of Revenge . . . after’ their scuffle despite the fact that ‘The Soldier has been heard to say repeatedly, that he did not know how the Quarrel began’ (E732, 734). Perhaps it’s the force of meanly ‘fabricated’ ‘Charge[s]’ (E741) which drives character and creator to collectively wail, ‘O why was I born with a different Face’ (21, E487, 1, E733). The cry certainly captures their mutual (adolescent) incomprehension, for as girls – male and female – so often feel, why me?

Bicurious Blake trannies tend to have an air of excitement to them (Perry 2007, 151)




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Queer Blake

O what a pleasant trembling fear

Slipping on a transvestite imagination doesn’t only bring pain, though. Once, like Perry, a mature man has ‘succumbed to the frillies and the sexies’ (2007, 151) there’s a pleasurable pay-off too, not least via the thrill of engaging with girls relieved of one’s pressing phallic load. The she/he speaker of Blake’s ‘The Crystal Cabinet’ (E488–9) provides a breathless firstperson account of such synthetic bicurious joys as the experience of being ‘caught’ like those girls in Visions; ‘silken nets’ here leads to a stimulating floorshow – with this trapped she-man getting to ‘view’, like trapper Oothoon, maids locked together in ‘wanton play’ (‘Crystal Cabinet’ 1, VDA 7:23–5, E50). That’s a gold standard tranny result but what’s striking too is their achievement of a complex ‘Threefold’ feminine consummation (15, 17, 20), which, in the context of Blake’s contemporaries’ scorn for female same-sex eroticism (touched on below), represents a radical gesture. Indeed, Blake’s rare Cabinet may encode the same kind of ‘guerrilla tactic . . . stealth tactic’ as Perry’s prizewinning pots, for it too is a ‘beautiful work of art, but on closer inspection, a polemic or an ideology will come out of it’ (Turner Prize Catalogue 2003). Moreover, the dazzling surface Blake draws our lingering gaze over is actually a shimmering female interior and, given the alarming genitalia evident elsewhere, the light and precious aesthetic which reigns here is surely significant. Certainly, the ‘Cabinet’ is more enthusiast Ankarsjö’s ‘wondrous place’ (2009, 254) than detractor Paglia’s ‘reliquary . . . crematorium’ (1990, 248). We are, in fact, offered an entire sexual ‘World’ (7) redolent with hints of the reverence revealed in Blake’s extraordinarily explicit 1808 Vision of the Last Judgement through which, as Susan Matthews argues, one of Blake’s few female patrons was offered a spiritual schema in which ‘Christ becomes the clitoris’ (Matthews 2006, 97). The interpretative implications of this are mindblowing, and, so, it’s frankly a relief to find that the Cabinet’s sexual ‘Another’ places are actually earthed in the known world of ‘London . . . England’ (9–11). Furthermore, Blake’s sense of an alternative urban world of metrosexual experiment is itself fascinating and harks back to hints dropped in his early tales of the city, An Island in the Moon, which as Paul Miner observes is a ‘street-wise document’ (2002, 281) – not least through its arch premiere of Mr Femality and its knowing reference to ‘the Queen of Frances Puss colour’ on the gossipy lips of a young ‘Miss’ babbling about female ‘pleasure’ and ‘Girls’ who ‘have their own way’ (E465, 456–7). Marie Antoinette, of course, was the late eighteenth-century’s most notorious (imaginary?) lesbian, ‘Head’ as Hester Thrale put it, ‘of a Set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists’ (Thrale Piozzi 1942, 2:740, 1 April 1789) – and, suggestively, one of Blake’s near Lambeth neighbours was Jeanne de la Motte of diamond necklace fame, who with aplomb retailed racy French rumours to an English



(‘The Crystal Cabinet’ 16, E488)

audience (Miner 2002, 306–7). Given Felpham Billy’s enthusiastic observation that ‘Paris’ is ‘scarce further off than London’ (E718) it’s very tempting to revisit the ‘sports of night’ played out in the ‘crystal house’ of his own musical European queen Enitharmon (13:9–14.36; E65–6), but I will stay on this side of the Channel, since here too according to Thrale cities seethed with Sapphism: ‘Bath is a Cage of these unclean Birds I have a Notion, and London is a Sink for every Sin’. Intriguingly, Thrale’s revulsion at metropolitan ‘female Fiend[s]’ (Thrale Piozzi 1942, 2:949 n.3, 9 December 1795) echoes Albion’s tremors after ‘He found Jerusalem upon the River of his City soft repos’d / In the arms of Vala’ (J 19:36–47; E164–5), which resonates powerfully here, since ‘The Crystal Cabinet’ rehearses that pivotal scene: its ‘lovely Moony Night’ (8) reflects the later ‘sweet moony night’ (44), its trembling girls ‘each in the other closd’ (15) are sisters to Jerusalem’s slippy pair, ‘assimilating in one . . . Dividing & uniting into many female forms’ (41, 45). Unlike Albion, however, Blake evidently found his ‘Giant Beauty’ easily ‘melt’ed (47) by girly embraces. Though there’s probably no direct seaside prompt to his sympathetic, synthetic bicuriosity, the 1801 ‘hope’ Blake expressed to Flaxman that he may visit France ‘to see the Great Works of Art, as they are so near to Felpham’ (E718) does tantalizingly link to John’s fellow sculptor Anne Damer, English high society’s most scandalous Sapphist. Like the Flaxmans, Damer and her companion Mary Berry did visit the treasures of Paris (and meet Napoleon) during 1802, and as well as her suggestive movement within the artistic and theatrical circles of William’s friends, it’s also interesting that both Blake and Damer styled Shakespearean scenes through which woman’s love could shine.9 Shame and disgust, though, were emotions more commonly associated with same-sex female sensuality, as Emma Donoghue’s fictionalized account of Damer’s traumas, Life Mask (2004), makes painfully clear. The distaste driving Wollstonecraft’s criticism of ‘grossly familiar’ ‘female intimates’ and of young girls’ propensity to learn ‘very nasty tricks’ is so typical (1989, 197)10 that the purity radiating from the Cabinet’s delicately orgasmic fourth stanza is stunning: Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closd O what a pleasant trembling fear Essentially, girls like the ‘Boarding School Miss[es]’ (E719) Felpham Billy made unusual mention of achieve a form of ‘Threefold’ rapture which presages the enlightened ‘Cominglings’ beloved of his epic phase (J 69:3 E223). They’re prophetic in other ways too, since the status of three as Blake’s quintessential feminine number is itself a far-reaching seaside formulation




Queer Blake

(for example 86, E722) and, crucially, when Blake deepens the eroticism of the digit he eschews the top-shelf girl-on-girl titillation latent in fixation on, and multiplication of, the three obvious female O-rifices. Girly O’s are on the agenda but his Daughters of Albion have ‘Three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine / Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins’ (M 5:7–8, E98; my emphasis). This modulated female formula, ‘Head & Heart & Reins’ (J 86:2–3 E244) grants feminine eroticism a satisfying complexity. When the aspiring faux femme inside the Cabinet’s sexy city decides, in stanza five, to act, it’s revealing that s/he is drawn toward the mouth, that most expressive of openings, for as Blake’s early Islanders observe, ‘A girl has always more tongue than a boy’ (E457). Indeed even in Innocence the ‘sweet round mouths’ of ‘Mary and Susan and Emily’ (E11) speak of triple charms so fine that later, though age-battered, even Mental Travellers are helpless to resist: ‘The honey of her Infant Lips . . . Does him to Infancy beguile’ (69, 72, E489). The vogue has been for queerer Blakers to favour his ‘dark visions of torment’ (BU 2:7, E70) and there are fine reasons to follow Connolly in pursuit of Blake’s valuable strangeness, for his ‘simultaneous adoration and abomination of the human body’ (2002, xii) does render his murkier sexual outpourings copiously compelling. In the context of ‘The Crystal Cabinet’, though, these function as stark, contrasting, backdrops to the poem’s sweet sensuality: for, very unusually, the mood which reigns here is one of ‘Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love!’ (VDA 7:16, E50) and not least because sexual trembles are paired with encouraging smiles (16–17). Perry says his transvestite fantasies are ‘about creating a situation in my mind where the emotions turn me on’ (quoted in Walsh 2006) and it is fascinating that it’s a look of affection which licks our she-man’s fires into life. In the 1790s we became used to masculine desire figuring as a blazing heat, as those ‘fires of Orc, / That play . . . in wreaths of fierce desire, / Leaving the females naked’ (Am 15:20–2, E57) but Felpham Billy seems to have incorporated some of Catherine’s feminine heat, of the kind which glows through his proud confession to Hayley that ‘My wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels’ (E709). This is heat and light, mutually enjoyable, not a hot irresistible rage. The almost reverential, certainly reciprocal, eroticism it leads to is a revelation: ‘I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid / And found a Threefold Kiss returned’ (19–20). Blake may be right that heterosexual ‘men’ and ‘women’ ‘require . . . The lineaments of Gratified Desire’ (E474–5) from each other, but, nonetheless, it’s this transvestite experimenter’s trip into an enclave of samesex love which delivers one of those rare moments in Blake’s work where gratification is achieved, shared, enjoyed. As Keri Davies beautifully shows, Bliss for Blake is a suggestively Sapphic experience, and his ‘mutual, equal, noncoercive’ lesbians are, according to Hobson, models for many kinds of desirable human interaction (Hobson 2006, 143; 2000, 150–62).



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Still, the kissing, of course, soon stops. Like most Pickering poems, this one’s final stanzas contain ‘woes’ – though it is, doubtless, significant that our ambisexual speaker is more upset by return to his/her original ‘wild’ state (25, 1) than by any alleged containment. It’s revealing too that the crucial cabinet-bursting sixth and seventh stanzas are open to varied and nuanced interpretations, as subtly inflected sexual and gender identities are inferred, or conferred. For example, if one savours Sapphism, the ardent striving of hot fingers might seem just the overeagerness of an inflamed novice who temporarily descends into babyhood when her and/or her lover’s cabinet dramatically bursts for the first time. Current lesbian historiographers and Blake’s contemporaries, alike, define late eighteenth-century female samesex desire as a sexuality of excess (‘immoderate’ or ‘revolting’ as one’s eye sees (Binhammer 2003, 472))11 and through that peep-hole our reclining, experientially liminal, character – simulaneously ‘Babe . . . and . . . Woman’ – may weep only as a ‘passing’ interlude before returning to that now more familiar landscape of wet spots, swelling ‘Hills’ and ‘pleasant . . . bower[s]’ (25–6, 8, 11–12): ‘pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild / Another flower shall spring’ (VDA 1:8–9, E46), indeed! Alternatively, if we see the masculine imagination in mufti animating this fantasy of happy capture and girly gazes which ends with a bang, then the obviously relevant ‘crystal form’ of Blake’s shimmering Antamon is our best sexual signpost, famed as this ‘prince of the pearly dew’ is for his ‘beautiful, flexible hands’: ‘floting upon the bosomd air’ ‘Alone’ he’s a masturbatory maestro (Eur 14:15–20, E65–6). Importantly, that Antamon’s later redemptive moulding of recalcitrant spectres is likened not just to a ‘Sower’ taking ‘seed’ but also to ‘the Artist his clay’ grants solitary sexual imaginings a productive gravitas, eclipsed if one gets hung up on ‘The self enjoyings of self denial’ (M 28:13–20, E126, VDA 7:2–11, E50). Further, if we cherish the insights of a tranny potter whose chosen maker’s mark is W ‘Anchor’,12 then creative self-arousal emerges, not least in ‘The Crystal Cabinet’, as far from risible. Like other imaginative practices, this too defends and enhances the self, and there’s ample evidence of the masturbatory imagination’s varied powers in Perry’s W ‘Anchor’ catalogue (Perry 2004): from a terrified Claire’s mustering of a defiantly enormous erection on A Pattern of Bruises and Cigarette Burns, through atheist Perry’s shocking benediction St Claire (Thirty Seven Wanks Across Northern Spain) to the strikingly Blakean Wisdom is Cool, where verbal-visual dynamics bring penile perspective as a huge, grinning, primary coloured Claire jiggles her grapefruit testes into an arch of spraycan expression amidst dumb/wise graffitti: ‘Frilly Dresses are Peaceful’, ‘Gays can be Boring’, ‘Heteros Murder Children’, and so on. Such openhandedly obscene phallic scepticism won’t be to everyone’s taste (as Perry’s pot anticipates: ‘Cull Artists Now’) but quizzically gargantuan tackle isn’t unknown to Blakeans (for example J 6, SL 8) and what the emphatically non-phallocentric megamasturbatory transvestite imagination suggests




Queer Blake

about Blake’s poem is that, after five and a half stanzas of interactive, selfsatisfying, fantasy, six concluding lines of damp distress aren’t a bad pay off. Reverencers of the straight phallus may concur with Ankarsjö that the poem is a tragedy of premature ejaculation (2009, 255–6) or fear like Paglia that the Cabinet ‘destroys by miniaturizing (cutting an erection down to size)’ (1990, 284) but if we value how a transvestite imagination spreads arousal around and offers an unbounded range of sexy roles to males unburdened by the need to master any one, not least themselves, then one begins to suspect that the concluding babyish burst may actually be the cream on Blake’s cake: as another of Perry’s W ‘Anchor’ pots, I’m in Here Somewhere, confides, ‘No-one ever died of embarrassment in fact it gives me a hard on.’ Clearly this interpretative emphasis could raise critical eyebrows, as may the related suggestion that these Felpham letter-verse lines perhaps speak to the present theme: ‘My hands are labourd day & night’ ‘And Ease comes never in my sight’ ‘My Wife has no indulgence given’ ‘Except what comes to her from heaven’ (E722) But I must carry on regardless, because I suspect Ankarsjö’s speculation that the Pickering poems are ‘a kind of therapy’ (2009, 260–1) is extremely sage. Furthermore, Kinky Blake will plumb the depths of Blake’s audacity, as we see yet more Real Acting deliver darker consolations.

Kinky Blake There are too few sadists to go around (Perry 2007, 57) Then he rends up his Manacles And binds her down for his delight (‘The Mental Traveller’ 23–4) A year after the Blakes’ return to London and with the Pickering Manuscript still a work in progress, William wrote a famously ecstatic letter to William Hayley describing his feelings, ‘O Glory! and O Delight!’, at having successfully subdued a ‘spectrous Fiend’ who had despoiled his and Catherine’s creative and sexual partnership for twenty years (23 October 1804, E756–7). This now-transformed ‘beast’ embodied imperious hyperhard masculinity, he was an ‘enemy of conjugal love’ who had ‘bound’ Blake under his ‘ironhearted’ tyranny – and, crucially, this letter also explains that Blake felt



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‘eternally indebted [to ‘lovely Felpham’] for my three years rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy’. In essence, their interlude of sexually therapeutic seaside R&R enabled the couple’s escape, ‘my feet and my wifes feet are free from fetters’. Since the Pickering poems are so blatant about the traumatic sharpness of Blake’s struggle, it’s surely heartless and erroneous to be impassive over his psychosexual candour. Just, in fact, as it’s unfeasible to sincerely encounter Perry’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007) completely untouched by the raw tale of how Claire could ‘blossom fully’ only once Perry ‘went in to therapy at the age of thirty-eight’ (189). Though alert to the pitfalls of psychological anachronism, they are worth braving, I think, in pursuit of a fuller sense of the daring, restorative, psychosexual strategies these artists share. Most obviously, Blake and Perry push past the singular male self by constructing multiplying models of the psyche: the plural emanation/zoa self echoes in Perry’s expanding Claire/Alan Measles duo; in turn the Bear King’s dream territory is, like Blake’s eternity, a realm of idealized fours (14–20) and, beyond, they diffuse and profuse manhood throughout the teeming populations of their equally brimming, equally original, verbal and visual worlds. All this is driven by the transvestite presentiment that men’s successful maturation depends upon savouring womanliness too: ‘If I eer Grow to Mans Estate / O Give to me a Womans fate’ (E502). Perry couldn’t put it better himself. They also share a compulsive passion for minutely charting male inner space, and though summary can’t do justice to either Albion’s seething subterranean territories or to the hundreds of labelled landmarks which dot Perry’s engrossing Map of an Englishman, their shared sense that men can only know themselves by exploring, itemizing, classifying the details of their variegated, territorial interiority is plain to see. It’s not insignificant, either, that the largest city on Perry’s map is the domed BODY, from which a man uses the bridge HUMANITY to cross the river ORGASM, to the monumental landmark LOVE. Blake wouldn’t be surprised either to find WIFE dwells here, nor to see that these dominating habitations abut the map’s largest, darkest, pool: CONSCIOUSNESS. Mental Travellers will thrill with recognition here, at every turn, for no male fear, fetish, folly or fantasy goes unremarked. BODY, for example, also contains structures tagged PRISONER, HUMILIATION, OBJECT, TERROR – and as these labels vitally reveal, Perry, like Blake with his ‘weeping & pain & woe!’ (BU 25:6, E82), refuses to prize only positives. ‘Sadness, disgust, anger, fear [he insists] are not second rate emotions because they are seen as negative’ (Perry 2006b,15), and the Pickering poems are a concentrated, therapeutic rendering of this truth, as sensitized by the seaside years (and perhaps by hunting down ‘Tragic’ and exquisitely ‘pathetic’ artworks for Hayley’s memorials immediately afterwards (23 February, 4 May 1804, E741–2, 748–9)). Blake vents himself in a dramatic carnival of suffering: tormented animals, bereaved boys, stricken mothers, bleeding martyrs – all are ‘wounded wide’ (‘Auguries’ 5–42, E490–1,




Queer Blake

‘The Land of Dreams’ E486–7, ‘The Grey Monk’ 1, 6 E489–90). Moreover, when it comes to directly sexual ‘negativity’, it seems that as for Perry, ‘Humiliation is one of the most powerful turnons’ (2007, 48), so too for Felpham Billy. Take Long John Brown & Little Mary Bell (E496), the sing-song story of a ‘loving Young Swain’ (9) slain by impotence in the full view of his gossipy neighbours (13–14). This is Blake’s most obscene, genitally fixated poem, its title amended to foreground manly length.13 Yet, in the Pickering world, prodigious prowess turns on its possessor and so John ends up stuffing with the vigour of ‘ten Men’ (12) not ‘Pretty’ ‘Little Mary’ (18, 3), but himself! ‘Worse’ still, manly abasement is ghosted by mocking male arousal, for Big John’s ironically tiny male companions, the Fairy and Devil, easily crack Mary’s ‘Nut-shell’, skipping ‘out & . . . in’ (4–5) of her sweet, soft, centre as their respective passions move them. ‘I don’t truly want to be humiliated, I just want the fantasy’, says Perry (2007, 48), and as Blake splits himself between mammoth and midget males, that tricksy double is achieved. Moreover, the WB behind ‘William Bond’ (E496–8) is a master of delightful, dual indignities. Generically this poem is British Bedroom Farce, in which mischievous Fairies and Angels leer over worried Willys (‘I wonder whether the Girls are Mad’ (1)) and journey to the safe berth of moonlit matrimony (‘sweet Love is the Comforter of Night’ (48)). Predictably, all the fun derives from gendered, cartoon humiliations, as enfeebled William is almost pinioned by a pair of weeping women (16–20) and yet another (poor) Mary has to endure the bone-chilling revelation that ‘Yes’ her sweetheart does ‘Love’ a dazzling sexpot ‘far better than thee’ (25–32). Ouch! Such ungallantry was rare even during what Wolfson calls Blake’s ‘playboy’ incarnation (261–2) and here it’s met by a sobering middle-aged slap: soon remorseful, the bedbound Willy lets trembling Mary join him – and that she wakes ‘Laid / On the Right hand of her William dear’ involves a digital doubletake (38–9) which tinges the poem’s stated moral, ‘Seek Love . . . In the gentle relief of another’s care’ (49–50), with the sauciest impiety. We know ‘sickness’ sometimes made ‘all . . . unpleasant’ in Felpham (E726) but WB hints that if peaky pains are cast camply, even poor puppies can enjoy scenes of negotiated pleasure. In short, these sniggering sketches have a therapeutic undertow. As we’ve seen repeatedly, fear, distress, embarrassment, anxiety can be neutralized – then transformed – through dark, daring fantasies which diffuse sexual identity and multiply sexual identifications. In ‘The Mental Traveller’ (E483–6), this transvestite creativity finds sublime expression, birthing a world entirely shaped by sensual terror: ‘The Senses roll themselves in fear / And the flat Earth becomes a Ball’ (63–4). ‘Wandring round’ (30) Blake’s mental sphere, mesmerized by his ‘dreadful things’ (3), interestingly parallels the pacing for perspective demanded during direct encounters with Perry’s perverse pots. To see all sides one must keep moving, on and on, without instruction – but



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though the deferral integral to such queer legwork is alluring, I will conclude by letting my gaze settle on a few scenes, which crystallize my interests here. And, helpfully, current critical drift – away from alarm over female evils (Paley 1961; Paglia 1990; Stevenson 1996, 604–7) and toward acknowledgement that within this unique ‘Land of Men & Women too’ (2) there’s a ‘parasitic symbiosis between the sexes’, ‘reciprocal male / female victimization’, even ‘character categories revolving and metamorphosing’ (Fallon 2009, 88; Essick 1999, 213 n.18; Chandler 2006, 112) – nicely furthers my sense that this poem incarnates some of Perry’s furthest reaching observations; for instance, that in ‘every fantasy we have, we are all the fantasy characters’ and that ‘In the S&M world, people are willing to swap roles’ (quoted in Walsh 2006). For years now, critics have acknowledged that ‘The Mental Traveller’ is a ‘strange’ and ‘puzzling’ poem (Raine 1969, 1:306; Levitt 1982, 186) but what actually mustn’t be ducked is Blake’s unblinking sadomasochism; as the transvestite urge to be inside both sexes simultaneously leads to identification with interlocking pairs of characters who find the grisliest ways to enter, feel and know sexual otherness – from the Old Woman who gets at youthful masculinity by cutting out a boy’s heart and fingering his ‘every Nerve’ (9–20) to the reciprocally penetrating young stud who, turned on by the girlishness his agonies provoke in his one-time time-warped tormentor, ‘plants himself’ firmly inside her. That ‘She became his dwelling place / And Garden fruitful Seventy fold’ (21–8) further suggests womanly habitations’ transvestite abundance. It’s significant too that the casting of ageing as an elastic yet elusive process, which whips the Traveller’s crazed narrative along, is itself a tragicomic conception tightly bound to the poem’s bleak transvestite fantasizing, both through the wry irony that whilst male ageing reduces phallic potency (29–72), it boosts tranny power – ‘The most passable transvestites are small, old and need hardly any make-up’ (Perry 2007, 150) – and the tragic one, which twins the ultimate sexual futility of growing ‘Younger & younger every day’ (74) with the impossibility of trannies ever fully convincing – ‘No matter at what age . . . men . . . began dressing, none . . . was fully passable as a woman’ (ibid., 149). Transvestite Blake seems to sense that the performance of any sexual role – cutie or crone, buck or buffer – is as fleeting as the satisfying performance of any sexual act, which leads to mutating erotic frustration, for in ‘The Mental Traveller’ the shorter poems’ embers of sardonic resentment seem to fan into a forest fire of rage. As in Perry’s Cycle of Violence, the frantic, indeed homicidal, pursuit of the sexual other is inescapably a hunt for one’s sexual self, and when even a man’s female avatars have the horn of ‘the wild Stag’ (77), his quest for fugitive fulfilment is sure to bruise. Blake can reverse Eve’s curse (5–6) but desire still births human time-bombs, and so it’s small wonder that when ‘the Babe the Babe is Born’, ‘Terror strikes thro the region wide / They . . . flee away on Every side’ (94–6). Perhaps – finally back where he/we started – this too




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Queer Blake

is an image of Blake the Felpham baby, endlessly rediscovering humanity’s remorseless, omnisexual cravings.

Grayson Perry frankly confides his revulsion at masculine artistic authority, preferring instead to ‘have his hand on the shoulder of the viewer as they come to terms with his work . . . quietly and submissively’ (Perry 2004, 6, 9) and I suspect that Blake’s transformative seaside experiences prompted the crafting of a collection of intimate interconnected poems, guided by a similar spirit of confessional, feminized quiescence. Elsewhere the artist is prophet, pugilist, provocateur but Pickering Blake also works on a modest microscale, demure enough to confess even pointless drama-queen petulance: ‘The Poison of the Honey Bee / Is the Artists Jealousy’ (‘Auguries’ 49–50, E491). His willingness to inhabit even insects in the service of self-expression and exploration underscores, again, the range and reach of Blake’s Real Acting. Hopefully, too, my speculations about the transvestite aspects of Blakean performativity are convincing enough to signal the significance of a transvestite sensibility well beyond these semi-private poems ‘made for some friend or patron’ (E859), for surely Blake is inside Milton and Jerusalem’s sublime femmes in countless showy, but as yet uncharted, ways. At the very least, the throwaway remarks of some critical grandees, like Morton Paley, who comments that the ‘leotard’ is a garment ‘familiar to us from many . . . Blake designs’ (2003, 24) and Robert Essick, who speaks of ‘Blake’s predilection for tight-fitting (partly see-through) jumpsuits’ (2007, 122), should be taken for what they are: evidence of pervasive transvestite passions. Indeed, Geoffrey Hartman (2007) goes so far as to describe Blake as a ‘baglady’ when it comes to ‘visionary methods’: a fabulously feminine tagging of his awesome eclecticism which only enhances Felpham Billy’s queer credentials.

Notes 1. This is the only handwritten Blake collection in existence. B.M. Pickering owned it 1836–78 (Ryskamp 1972, 1). Bentley opts for Ballads (1977, 341–3), Johnson and Grant favour Auguries (2008, 396). All agree that the unique years I discuss birthed the poems. Thanks to Messers Ankarsjö, Crosby and Fallon for sharing materials and ideas, and to Tristanne Connolly for her innumerable, invaluable, insights. 2. Alternatively, Bentley sees Schofield ‘humiliated . . . by a little man like Blake’ (2001, 253). 3. Matthews comments, Hayley ‘has often been represented as the effeminate man’ (1999, 89) – not least by Blake, whose Notebook offers ribald assessment (‘Of Hs birth this was the happy lot / His Mother on his Father him begot’ (E506)) and visualization (‘Thus Hayley on his Toilette seeing the Sope / Cries Homer



To conclude, ‘the Eye altering alters all’ (E485)

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

is very much improved by Pope’ (E505)). Letters convey the inference more fragrantly: Blake speaks of Hayley’s ‘Beautiful Muse’ (E762) and says his creation Venusia is ‘Your Daughter & is like you’ (E757). In particular Lady Hesketh (Bentley 2001, 225–6, 232–3, 236–40), their mutual friend John Flaxman’s three arty women (Bruder 2007b, 1–11) and Caroline Watson, ‘I admire Miss Watsons head of Richardson it is truly delicate’ (E754, 764). Over time, convivial and commercial contact brought a feminine inflection to Blake’s aesthetic vocabulary, so for example Romney’s Lear and Cordelia is ‘an incomparable production . . . exquisite for expression . . . most pathetic’ (E748), Hayley’s poetry ‘beautiful and elegant . . . a peerless Jewel for a Prince to wear’ (E759, 757); while their co-produced ‘Beautiful Affectionate Ballads’ express ‘the Meekness of True Art’ (E767). A comment, to Butts, perfectly captures the modality: ‘Be assured My dear Friend that there is not one touch in these Drawings & Pictures but what comes from my Head & my Heart in Unison’ (E719, my emphasis). Since complex friendships resist summary, I simply note Blake’s open-heartedness – especially his solicitude for Hayley’s safety (E739), Blake’s confiding of frustrations (E736–7) and joys (E756–7), and also the intimacy evident in his decorative tips: ‘I cannot help suggesting an Idea which has struck me very forcibly that the Tobit & Tobias in your bedchamber would make a very beautiful Engraving’ (E755). Interesting too is the awesome gaze Blake bestows upon Hayley’s creation Marcella, which halts the ‘fiercest of Arabias race’ in his tracks: ‘For, as if thy fixed eyes / Darted fascinating flame, / He, to thy devout surprise, / Stood before thee fondly tame’ (Ballads 206, 211; Blake’s illustration opposite 203). Suggestive recent readings come from Connolly (2002, 111–20, 215–16), Makdisi (2003, 92–99), Wolfson (2007, 261–7); others summarized, Bruder (2006, 141–6). Twine is one of a group of girly words rarely used outside the Pickering world, and of its two other appearances, one is as a feminine material caught in the complex liaisons of Jerusalem, Vala, Albion and the Lamb of God (J 20:30). Other significant femme rarities are the genital ‘Cabinet’ (E488–9) and ‘Nut-shell’, and the title ‘Miss’ (E496). The lines most emphatically amended in Blake’s draft are, ‘Wings they had & when they chose . . . They would let them down at will’ (Poem 64, Notebook 6). So, the girls of ‘The Golden Net’ explicitly lack choice and a means of escape. Damer’s meeting with Napoleon probably interested Ann Flaxman, who gleaned first-person assessments of ‘Bonaparte’, including that ‘He has no taste for Art’ (30 August 1802; Farington 1922–28, 2:5–6). Damer’s vision of Cleopatra’s death was used by Boydell (reproduced in Elfenbein 1999, 117). Blake too engraved this womanly tableau for Charles Allen’s A New and Improved Roman History (1797). See too Blake’s friends Hayley and Fuseli on the ‘sterile embraces’ of manless women (Matthews (2006, 92). Marie Antoinette’s ‘revolting excesses’ are noted in The Jockey Club, Part the Third (1792, 66–88; see especially 80). W above the figure of an anchor has been Perry’s imprint since 1992. A crowned, golden variant adorns the cover of the catalogue in which Lisa Jardine discusses his ‘masturbatory fantasies’ (7). Erdman contends ‘The words “long” and “little” were added to the title as an afterthought’ (E860); maybe, but the emendations and substitutions are unprecedented in this otherwise tidy collection.




‘Fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic Tristanne Connolly

David Bowie describes Tracey Emin as ‘William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh’ (1997, 24). What connection between them would prompt this catchy sound bite? A certain emotional nakedness, it would seem; a compulsion to bare secrets and lies. Plus, a transgender aptitude: Emin is able to be Blake as a woman; Blake is able to be a woman in Emin; and Leigh’s films are able to portray raw female emotional experience. Bowie goes on to emphasize, at once, ‘the dawning of late eighteenth-century self-consciousness, that first realisation of self you find in early nineteenth-century portraits’ and ‘the deeply dysfunctional work found at Gugging Hospital in Vienna, the bastion of working “Outside” artists’ (ibid., 24). The link to ‘ “Outside” artists’ may have to do with craziness, but also technical skill. Can Blake or Emin draw properly? Or spell properly either? And Leigh, strictly speaking, doesn’t exactly write his films; he’s famous for having his actors improvise, a much looser way to compose. Bowie’s characterization, then, links emotional excess and technical sloppiness. Yet the juxtaposition with portraiture suggests a strange combination of naivety with high and deliberate skill. These people make messy art; but successful messy art which ‘realizes’ the modern self. Another thing these three artists have in common is a preoccupation not only with sex but with reproduction: a large part of the ‘dysfunction’ Bowie identifies here involves dysfunctional family relationships, as well as the ways sex and birth go wrong (rape, abortion). I think part of Bowie’s difficulty in articulating what is going on with Blake and Emin is that the connection between art and identity he calls upon relies on a realized self and is stuck on reproduction. This is akin to the archetypal metaphor of artistic creation as birth and of the creation of bad art as misbirth, as in Pope’s Dunciad for example. But what Blake and Emin offer is an opportunity to think beyond this metaphor’s limitations. What happens if sexual 116



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disasters rather than sexual successes are taken as the spawning force of art? What kind of art comes from what Jennifer Doyle suggestively coins a ‘bad sex aesthetic’, which recognizes that all sex is not, and does not have to be, respectful, affirming, wonderful, pleasurable or fertile? (Doyle 2006, 97–9.) What makes these questions more curious is that Blake and Emin (and Mike Leigh too) aren’t led by them to a cynical or nihilistic conclusion. These artists not only insist on creating art out of bad sex, but they combine it with what (as Doyle points out) Barthes remarked is now more ‘indecent’ than sex (good or bad): sentimentality (ibid., 114). Perhaps what they have in common, perceived by Bowie, is that they somehow manage to recognize the pains, disappointments and horrendous consequences of sex, yet still cling, in their very midst, to the poignant possibilities of love and interpersonal connection.1 Take for example this passage from Emin’s acrostic meditation on ‘Masculinity’: I remember when I was fourteen, crying on some sofa. I had just been fucked by an almost complete stranger. I mean, I knew his surname. He wasn’t a bad person, but he said, ‘Why didn’t you stop me if you didn’t want me to?’ I can count the times I have had sex – or made love – lying on my back. It has always been my choice to bury my face in the pillow. Sometimes I open my eyes and look over my shoulder. But these days, when I do, I smile. (Emin 2005, 142) What Tracey Emin seems to ask in her work is what kind of art can result from ‘so many shit relationships, and two abortions’ (ibid., 141). I want to ask, what kind of art does Blake see resulting not from the idealized union of male and female, nor even the ideal brotherhood of heroic males, but from a messy male-male relationship? Blake’s homosexual aesthetic is most clear in his images of the heroic male body. But if Blake is as known for painstakingly recording the discord between male and female as he is for idealizing their union, I want to show the same is true for his treatment of same-sex male relationships. In parallel, Blake is famed for his idealization of artistic creation, of Imagination and Vision, and also for stark depiction of the pains, difficulties and failures of creation. Is it possible to creatively confront bad sex and bad art without the need to either redeem or condemn them? I want to ask (with special reference to The Book of Urizen which seems an ideal locus for these questions) what happens when art gets embarrassing, when excessive emotions lead a creator to bite off more than he or she can chew (so to speak), and end up making a mess.



Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic

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I: Queer media

. . . molested continually by blotting and blurring demons . . . (Blake, DC, E546) Blake is explicit about his struggles with artistic failure, and frequently enough casts them in terms of antagonistic male forces acting upon him: from ‘blotting and blurring demons’ to the legendary ‘spectrous Fiend’ who caused him to be ‘Incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well’ (E756). Bad art under these circumstances went with bad sex: ‘He is the enemy of conjugal love’. The solution to the problem, however, is not so much good sex as a role-reversing combination of domination and affection: ‘he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a brother who was my enemy’ (E756). Art is struggle, and that belabouring is not hidden as process or written off as failure, but is itself ‘worthy of attention’. Blake explains about a picture that fell foul of ‘Venetian and Flemish Demons’, it may be worthy of attention, not only on account of its composition, but of the great labour which has been bestowed on it, that is, three or four times as much as would have finished a more perfect Picture; the labour has destroyed the lineaments, it was with difficulty brought back again to a certain effect, which it had at first, when all the lineaments were perfect. (DC, E547) He also adds, ‘Note. These experiment Pictures have been bruized and knocked about, without mercy’ (DC, E548). The emphasis on process, a commonplace in our understanding of Blake’s artworks, depends on mess and violence. Blake writes recurrently about textiles as a figure of flawed mortal bodies and the often painful relations they get woven tightly into; Emin creates fabric art, stitched together out of similar kinds of physical and emotional disasters. By calling attention to the labour put into their works, they create a kind of intimacy, which might be called queer in the sense that it reveals the hidden and is not ashamed of what does not seamlessly cohere with a controlled form or identity. Because that labour often takes the shape of accidental effects, it might be considered as embarrassing as a stain or a dirty secret, evidence of a failure to conform to proper appearances. In his book Cooking with Mud: the Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and



I can make loads of things that look good but that’s not what it’s about (Emin, in Fortnum 2007, 59)

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Fiction, David Trotter theorizes messes and stains as confrontations with contingency which ‘subtly corrode the idea of yourself you have prepared for the world’s inspection’ (2000, 2). What Emin and Blake might be doing is reclaiming the very idea of ‘dirty’ from an insult to a potential point of pride, or at the very least a reality it would be duplicitous to deny. As George Cumberland’s sons once reported, ‘We call upon Blake yesterday evening[,] found him & his wife drinking Tea, durtyer than ever[;] however he received us well & shewed his large drawing in Water Colours of the last Judgement[;] he has been labouring at it till it is nearly as black as your Hat’ (BR 320).2 Blake and Emin both do printmaking, essentially a messy process, and the visual effects both achieve are messy as well. Copies of The Book of Urizen are among Blake’s experiments in colour printing, and the consistency of ink used for the purpose results in surfaces which are highly textured, even gloppy, leaving evidence of the act of pulling the page off the plate, and also emphasizing the physical consistency of the ink. The effect may have been an adventitious result of the viscosity necessary to keep the different colours applied to the plate from mixing. But even if Blake purposely intended to create such texture, he would not be able to control the individual reticulations. In his examination of Blake’s colour printing, Viscomi notes various elements that could cause a plate to be imperfect, ‘mere accidents of inking (sometimes called “foul inking”) and color printing that do not intentionally contribute to the printed image’ and finds ‘The vast majority of Blake’s relief etchings contain at least minute examples of such flaws’ (Viscomi n.d., Part 4). In Emin’s monoprints, flaws are predominant and even contribute to their recognizable character. There are smudges, and things crossed out, and in the writing, letters which came out backwards. Given the sketchiness of these productions, one might wonder why she didn’t just sketch; why go through the process of printing if it only contributes to such errors? Clearly, the process is important, and the errors are important. The monoprints share the ‘skillful carelessness’ that William Muir discovered in working closely with Blake’s prints to reproduce them in the Quaritch edition (quoted in Viscomi n.d., Part 5). Monoprinting requires more materials and acquired skills than drawing alone; it also places, as Doyle describes it, ‘the touch of the artist’s hand at a slight remove from the page’ which, she argues, results in a ‘light touch’ which ‘makes the work feel quick, executed without much of a plan, with a minimum of intention’; even ‘tossed off’ (Doyle 2006, 105). Similar things could be said about Blake’s engravings: they insist on the individuality of the artist’s hand, yet at the remove of printing, and they demand even more stages of labour (also potentially avoidable: why not just write, or just do a watercolour?) In both, there is a combination of untidiness with attentive, even obsessive, working of the object. In Emin this comes out perhaps even more clearly in her fabric art,




Queer Blake

with characteristics of slapdash composition, words and images all over the place seemingly unplanned, and with mistakes like spelling errors, but with painstakingly small, neat and careful stitching. Emin says, ‘You can put loads of patches down and think that’s it and then you suddenly change your mind and change them all over again. You sew them all down and then pick them all off and put them back on again . . . Sometimes . . . the blanket is leading what the words are, because I’ve only got this amount of room for fixing it in’ (Fortnum 2007, 55-6). Blankets are soft, copper plates hard, but the close work is similar, the willingness to change what was fixed, shuffling the order of plates, as well as squeezing text into available space (a classic example from The Book of Urizen is ‘books formed of me-tals’ (4:24)).3 Plenty of the snippets of language that appear in Emin sound as though they could come out of the kind of lovers’ quarrels Blake unflinchingly records in his work’s devotion to ‘the torments of Love & Jealousy’ (FZ title, E300). Compare the complaint of Blake’s Enion, Once thou wast to Me the loveliest son of heaven – But now Why art thou Terrible and yet I love thee in thy terror till I am almost Extinct & soon shall be a Shadow in Oblivion Unless some way can be found that I may look upon thee & live (FZ I:20–3, E301) with Emin’s ‘Love Poem for CF’: You put your hand across my mouth But still the noise continues Every part of my Body is Screaming Im lost. About to be smashed into a thousand million Pieces Each Part For Ever Belonging to You (Emin 2002, 352)4 This intensive need for recognition by the absent or potentially rejecting other is comparable to the position of the artist, especially the messy artist who does not put forward a flawlessly finished façade with the labour and frustration involved in creating it hidden or subsumed. In Blake’s work, this kind of existential neediness seems to feed into arguments for his misogyny (and for Emin would support the case for seeing her as exactly not a feminist artist). However, the artistic and emotional self-reflexivity with which both



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create such abject pleas may point to something more. A further parallel to the above two quotations would be Enitharmon’s cry ‘in great terror’ towards the end of Blake’s final prophecy: ‘The Poets Song draws to its period & Enitharmon is no more . . . / My Looms will be no more & I annihilate vanish for ever / Then thou wilt Create another Female according to thy Will’ (J 92:8, 11–12; E252). Her fear of abandonment is also a fear of the end of the poem, indicating that sex and art (especially the kinds in question here) both rely on recognition. Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love, which expounds an interpersonal psychology based on mutual recognition, provides a way of understanding the tension between internal desire and external reality which underlies the torments and obsessions of these lovers and artists. They document and lament the discrepancy between what one wants from another and what that other is willing to give, and they dramatize its implications for identity: the internal desires are so intense that they create their own enclosing reality, and external resistance is painful to the point of threatening the self with annihilation. Benjamin considers the relationship between subjectivity and creativity, but from a more comfortable position: in the safety that a non-intrusive other provides . . . there is no need to react to external stimuli, an impulse can arise from within and feel real. Here begins the sense of authorship, the conviction that one’s act originates inside and reflects one’s own intention. Here, too, begins the capacity for full receptivity and attention to what is outside, the freedom to be interested in the object independent of the pressure of need or anxiety. (Benjamin 1988, 42) ‘The sense of authorship’ here resides in a secure self quite unlike Enion, Enitharmon or Emin. The word ‘authorship’ makes a connection between art and fantasy, as spaces which allow for internal sensations to be felt as real, but obviously art and fantasy are possible without the freedom and independence described. For Benjamin, mutual subjectivity comes from learning the boundaries between self and other, testing the limits of one’s power over the other and feeling out the other’s resistance; if the self meets little resistance, it can begin to believe in its own mental omnipotence, while if it meets too much resistance, it cannot establish its own subjectivity and relies excessively on the other’s recognition. These positions Benjamin associates with sadism and masochism respectively. She builds on D.W. Winnicott’s description of this process, which he calls ‘destruction’: It is a healthy thing for a baby to get to know the full extent of his rage . . . If he really is determined he can hold his breath and go blue in the




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Benjamin explains how she connects this idea to the master/slave dialectic. This relation of destruction and survival is a reformulation and solution to Hegel’s paradox: in the struggle for recognition each subject must stake his life, must struggle to negate the other – and woe if he succeeds. For if I completely negate the other, he does not exist; and if he does not survive, he is not there to recognize me. But to find this out, I must try to exert this control, try to negate his independence. To find out that he exists, I must wish myself absolute and all alone – then, as it were, upon opening my eyes, I may discover that the other is still there. (38) This scenario, with its tension of power and solitude, reminds me of Urizen, complete with tantrum on the seventh day of his creation: Enraged & stifled with torment He threw his right Arm to the north His left Arm to the south Shooting out in anguish deep, And his Feet stampd the nether Abyss In trembling & howling & dismay. (BU 13:12–17, E76) Urizen does not see a world unharmed by his destruction: he remains ‘bound in a deadly sleep’ while Los responds, not with the equanimity of a good parent: ‘In terrors Los shrunk from his task: / His great hammer fell from his hand: / His fires beheld, and sickening, / Hid their strong limbs in smoke’ (13:20–3, E77). Benjamin interprets bondage relationships as mutual recognition that has gone awry, in order to explain ‘the unpleasant fact that people really do consent to relationships of domination, and that fantasies of domination play a vigorous part in the mental lives of many’ (1988, 55). We might use a similar framework to query what kind of ‘sense of authorship’ is Urizen’s, and also to ask, what exactly is Los doing to him with all those chains and fetters?



face, and even have a fit. For a few minutes he really intends to destroy or at least to spoil everyone and everything, and he does not even mind if he destroys himself in the process . . . yet [if] the people around him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real. (Winnicott quoted in Benjamin 1988, 40)


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II: The Bonds of Urizen The Immortal endur’d his chains

In Blake and Homosexuality, Hobson centres on the masturbatory nature of Urizen’s creativity and interprets it as negatively portrayed: ‘since his “fountain” of thought is shut in, this process is the same as, or parallel to, the obscuring of his prolific delight in masturbatory fantasy’ and ‘the human fear of change and sense of sin . . . are metaphorized as products of Urizen’s masturbation. As “improlific” sexuality, it generates an unprolific world’ (Hobson 2000, 39). Urizen, here, is an ultimate example of bad sex producing bad art – or, more precisely, self-absorbed masturbation producing a self-absorbed, and thus infertile, warped and deluded creation. However, it may be possible to see these products of masturbation along the less judgmental lines of the ‘bad sex aesthetic’. Urizen creates ‘in tormenting passions’, ‘In enormous labours occupied’ (3:19, 22, E71), carried away, obsessed and intent, somewhat like Blake and Emin themselves as I’ve described them. There may, after all, be value to gratuitous self-indulgence. In writing, alone, The secrets of dark contemplation By fightings and conflicts dire, With terrible monsters Sin-bred: Which the bosoms of all inhabit (BU 4:26–9, E72) Urizen may be solipsistically and despotically projecting ‘Sin’, but let he who is without ‘secrets of dark contemplation’ cast the first stone. Urizen admits it; he is the one to intimately, queerly, even exhibitionistically declare, ‘Lo! I unfold my darkness’ (4:30, E72). His words also allow the possibility that ‘the bosoms of all inhabit’ the ‘dark contemplations’, ‘fightings’ and ‘monsters’, suggesting that one effect of a bad sex aesthetic may be, far from repulsion, an audience’s vicarious immersion in an artist’s ‘secrets’ and ‘conflicts’. Urizen’s book appears in the illustrations as the kind of messy art that might be expected from his emotional struggles: in most copies its pages are daubs and blobs of more or less excremental colour.5 In copy G there are linear elements approaching some kind of script, but illegible, and bleeding out into smears, comparable to the effect in Emin’s monoprints. Why, then, does this end up being a book of ‘Laws’? Because Urizen is anal. (Emin writes, in neon, the pithy questions, ‘Is anal sex legal?’ ‘Is legal sex anal?’ (2006, 361, 363).) Also because Urizen is a sadomasochist, indulging dark contemplations of discipline.



(BU 13:26, E77)

Queer Blake

It is true he declares, ‘I have sought for a joy without pain’ (4:10, E71), but this is by no means a negation of S/M desires. As Bersani points out (critically), arguments which address the pain involved in S/M tend to explain it away. ‘The pain so-called masochists enjoy is actually pleasure. They have simply found ways to transform stimuli generally associated with the production of pain into stimuli that set off intense processes identified as pleasurable. Far from enjoying pain, masochists have developed techniques to bypass pain’ (1995, 93). Urizen seems to follow such techniques of interior transformation of stimulus, especially if section 5 of Chap: II is read as an explanation to the Eternals of what he did in seeking a joy without pain. First I fought with the fire; consum’d Inwards, into a deep world within: A void immense, wild dark & deep, Where nothing was: Nature’s wide womb (4:14–17, E72) There is plenty to notice here about S/M and identity – Urizen is plunged inward and confronts the void through his struggles; he also returns to the womb. The mention of the womb also suggests the fertility Urizen is able to find in this kind of sexuality – he creates a world here. He asserts his mastery by binding: ‘I alone, even I! the winds merciless / Bound; but condensing, in torrents / They fall & fall’ (4:19–21, E72). Again, Blake blurs subject and object, allowing Urizen to bind and be bound by the world he creates. This is not news as a reading of The Book of Urizen, but it is interesting as a signal of the role-swapping Urizen later participates in with Los, and it is fascinating, I think, to consider the kind of creation Urizen is pursuing here – where the creator is overwhelmed, relishing intense emotions, and the resulting world or artwork goes out of control; and, in its imagery of struggle and binding, dramatizing a sadomasochistic alternative to traditional, organic male/female birth metaphors for creation. The contents of Urizen’s book are contradictory and confusing. They are ‘Laws of peace, of love, of unity: / Of pity, compassion, forgiveness’ as well as the more magisterial demands of ‘One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law’ (4:34–40, E72). The latter commands could be the master’s insistence on his exclusive authority and on abject obedience and loyalty from the slave, and this would not necessarily be at odds with the former. Bersani quotes, and extends his sarcasm to, positive descriptions of S/M. He finds one from Juicy Lucy which claims ‘S/M is: passionate, erotic, growthful, consensual . . . trust-building, loving . . . creative, spiritual, integrating.’ And on the male side, Bersani adds, ‘the emphasis on communal male jolliness is such that you might think a Rotary Club promotional piece had been mistakenly inserted in a volume on



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leatherfolk’ (1995, 92). What Bersani considers as the desire to make bondage nice, or what from a point of view like Benjamin’s (1988) might be a search for actual loving bonds, is not a totally anachronistic reading. Marcus Wood explores the continuities in the history of the collar from fetish gear back to slavery, mediated through the connotations of the dog collar: ‘To love a black slave child as if it were your own child was unthinkable, to love a black slave child like your favourite dog, was the most natural thing in the world’ (2002, 404). Further, slave narratives from Equiano to Mary Prince rhetorically assert that there is something wrong with those who do not form caring ties in the human closeness and indebtedness entailed in the master-slave relation.6 A more familiar reading would be that the contradiction in Urizen’s commands comes from religious oppression and moral laws that bind people’s energies and pervert relationships between the sexes. The S/M reading is inherent in the traditional interpretation. Benjamin’s extrapolation of the characteristics of the master from the dynamics of The Story of O sounds as though they could equally be based on the standard interpretations of Urizen as ‘Your Reason’, ‘Horizon’ and so on: the control, order, and boundary that the master provides are essential to the erotic experience of submission. Indeed, it is the master’s rational, calculating, even instrumentalizing attitude that excites submission; it is the image of his exquisite control that makes for his thrilling machismo [think of Urizen on the Europe frontispiece]. The pleasure, for both partners, is in his mastery. His intentions, with their sacramental formality, take on the purposefulness of a higher order. The sadist’s disinterestedness, the fact that he does it ‘less for [his] pleasure than for [the masochist’s] enlightenment,’ offers containment and protection. This protective power constitutes the all-important aspect of authority, without which the fantasy is not satisfying. This authority is what inspires love and transforms violence into an opportunity for voluntary submission. (Benjamin 1988, 64) Benjamin offers a framework to account for the ‘love’ associated with Urizen better than traditional Blake criticism does (for instance, Damon states baldly, ‘Unfortunately, laws cannot establish love’ (1988, 424)). And yet it doesn’t quite fit, because Urizen doesn’t actually inspire love or receive voluntary submission, despite his initial, nice laws (or perhaps because of them: they are hard to interpret because they are a crack in the mask of mastery which suggests Urizen might not be tough enough to be a good sadist). He is caught in the sadist’s dilemma, slightly different from the Hegelian one of the destruction of the other, but similar to the dilemma of Milton’s God: the end of his authority is necessarily to strip the submissive of will, but the domination isn’t satisfying unless the submission is voluntary.




Queer Blake

Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love, Where only what they needs must do, appeared, Not what they would? What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When will and reason (reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity, Not me. (Milton 1968, III:103–11) God knows it’s hard to be a sadist who wants love. Perhaps Urizen tries to solve these problems by role-reversal, entering into a masochistic relationship with Los. At the start of The Book of Urizen, Urizen seems to be alone, thus the masturbation readings. However, it could be that Urizen is not exactly alone, nor exactly unproductive, right from the beginning of Chap: I. ‘Times on times he divided’ (3:8, E70): perhaps this is a mere multiplication of self, but it also suggests ‘homo’ defined as desire for the same and associated with narcissism. Later it’s revealed that ‘Urizen was rent from his [Los’s] side’ (6:4, E74). Eternal gossip might run, ‘They broke up? But we didn’t even know they were together!’ Except perhaps for an orthographic hint: the first line of Chap: I copulates the two characters, ‘Lo, a shadow of horror is risen’ (3:1, E70; emphasis added)7 – Lorisen, sort of like Brangelina. Plato’s Symposium has been suggested by Paley as an analogue for the creation of the female out of the male in Blake,8 one instance, of course, being the appearance of ‘the first female now separate’ (18:10, E78) here in The Book of Urizen – but that occurs after the separation of Los and Urizen. The more obvious analogue, then, in this narrative and for the reputation of the Symposium, is that Los and Urizen are a primordial male-male couple. In The Book of Urizen, they separate painfully while Eternals watch in horror; in the Symposium they are sliced apart by Eternals to protect their power. In Sydenham’s translation (as The Banquet, 1767, 87–8),9 the original humans’ ‘Force and Strength were prodigious; their Minds elevated and haughty; so they undertook to invade Heaven’. This isn’t exactly what happens in The Book of Urizen, but ‘the primeval Priests assum’d power, / When Eternals spurn’d back his religion’ (2:1–2) can be read as a mentally haughty usurpation – and can be read as plural yet singular (‘Priests’, ‘his’), Urizen and Los acting together as one. Jupiter proposes cutting humans in two as punishment, and further threatens, ‘if any Remains of Insolence shall ever appear in them, and they resolve not to be at Quiet, I will again divide them, Each into Two’ (Plato 1767, 89). In The Book of Urizen nobody ends up ‘upon One Leg, hopping’ (ibid.), but they do continue to divide – and it happens to



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them uncontrollably; they seem to do it to themselves (involuntarily) while the Eternals are horrified to witness it. Apollo uses his healing arts to tidy up the split humans; the description of what he does is centred on ‘One Orifice or Opening, he tyed up at the Middle of the Belly this Orifice, now called the Navel . . . a few Wrinkles, those on the Belly and Navel, he let remain for a Memorial of their old Crime and Punishment’ (90). So orifices, here too, are a sign of falling from godly nature and a reminder of separation. Famously, Aristophanes categorizes the kinds of double beings that were split in two, including men who were once part of a male-male unity, who seek out other men. These, like Urizen, ‘apply themselves to Political Affairs’ and ‘have naturally no inclination to marry and beget Children: they do it only in Conformity to the Laws’ (Plato 1767, 93–4). In The Book of Urizen, the closest Urizen comes to having a female partner is his production of the ‘Web’ that ‘is a Female in embrio’ (25:18, E82), gossamer and barely existent. His emanation has her own book, The Book of Ahania, and there again she is insubstantial, a ‘lamenting voice . . . / Weeping upon the void . . . Her voice was heard, but no form / Had she’ (4:45–50, E88). Her complaint centres on Urizen’s neglect. ‘Why didst thou despise Ahania / To cast me from thy bright presence / Into the World of Loneness’ (4:62–4, E88). The rest of her lament concentrates on fertility, with sensuous imagery of heterosexual fruition which she remembers once enjoying with Urizen – ‘When I found babes of bliss on my beds. / And bosoms of milk in my chambers / Fill’d with eternal seed’ (5:19–21, E89) – but now she bewails its loss: The sweat poured down thy temples To Ahania return’d in evening The moisture awoke to birth My mothers-joys, sleeping in bliss. But now alone over rocks, mountains Cast out from thy lovely bosom (5:35–40, E89–90) It is more Ahania’s arousal and pleasure in Urizen here described, than Urizen’s in Ahania. Even in her retrospective idealization there are clues that his interests, both intellectual and sexual, were more in the public sphere, and involved a different kind of insemination: Then thou with thy lap full of seed. . . Walked forth from the clouds of morning. . . On the human soul to cast The seed of eternal science (5:29–34, E89)




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he curs’d Both sons & daughters; for he saw That no flesh nor spirit could keep His iron laws one moment (BU 23:23–6, E81) He curses ‘sons & daughters’, perhaps because he is disappointed in their not being able to bend their sexuality to social purposes where necessary, as he had to, or perhaps cursing the idea of ‘sons & daughters’ generally, reluctantly recognizing his own difficulty in fulfilling the reproductive imperative. Aristophanes imagines a solution to the separation of halves: ‘were Vulcan to stand by with his Tools in his Hand’ and offer to the lovers, ‘I will melt you down, Both of you together, and together form you Both again, that, instead of Two, ye may become One; whilst ye live, living a Joint Life, as One Person; and when ye come to dye, dying at once One Death, and afterwards, in the State of Souls departed, continuing still Undivided’. Aristophanes comments, I am certain, that not a single Mortal, to whom Vulcan should make this Offer, would reject it. ’Twould appear, that None had any other Wish; and every Man would be conscious to himself, that the secret Desire, which he had of old conceived in his Heart, was at length brought to Light and expressed in clear Language, that is, to be mingled and melted in with his Beloved, and out of Two to be made One. (Plato 1767, 95) Los’s metalworking is related to this: his ‘Beating still on his rivets of iron / Pouring sodor of iron’ (10:8–9, E75) is perhaps a failed attempt to bring together the male halves painfully severed, especially considering the sexual and sadistic suggestions of beating,10 and the ejaculation of pouring. Perhaps that is one function of bondage, an attempt to unify, intensely and intimately, physically and spiritually, estranged halves of one being. This isn’t quite the same as master and slave having mutually constituted identities; this is a shared identity – an attempt to mend or dissolve otherness – and very physicalized. ‘Los howld in a dismal stupor, / Groaning! gnashing! groaning! / Till the wrenching apart was healed / But the wrenching of



This is more like masturbation and lawgiving or cultural development, Urizen’s activities in his own book. There, his attachment to the Law and his expectation that ‘flesh’ should make some effort to conform to it whatever one’s desires may be, especially in relation to offspring, come out in the moment where

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Urizen heal’d not’; he continues to be ‘Rifted with direful changes’ (7:1–4, E74). Los’s efforts to bind him only result in (or are unable to stop) the orifices, which are marks of separation, especially in their shrinking and their intractability to will. There is also the curious quasi-voyeurism of the Eternals. ‘Lo, a shadow of horror is risen / In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!’ (3:1–2, 70). Secret, nonreproductive, undefined sexuality could indicate homosexuality as much as masturbation. In light of Foucault-inspired debates about homosexual identity before 1870, the debate in eternity is especially interesting: they don’t know what to call him. ‘Some said / “It is Urizen”’ (with a non-gendered pronoun), and later again questioning, when Urizen is rent from Los’s side, ‘The Eternals said: What is this? Death’ (3:5–6, 6:9, E70, 74). This reminds me of the episode in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (cut from some but not all editions in Blake’s time (Cleland 1985, xxvii)) where Fanny, like the Eternals, looks down from a concealed height upon a scenario she has difficulty naming. Two young ‘sparks’ move into the public-house room next to hers; she takes some effort to find and re-open a peep-hole so high she needs to stand on a stool to reach it, just so that she can ‘see who they were, and examine their persons and behaviour’ (157). Initially ‘signs of an amorous intention . . . made me conclude the other to be a girl in disguise’, but soon enough, ‘they now proceeded to such lengths as soon satisfied me, what they were’ (158). Like the Eternals, she goes to a lot of trouble to see or not see these mysterious activities, and her response to them is rejection and potentially condemnation to death: ‘All this, so criminal a scene, I had the patience to see to an end, purely that I might gather more facts, and certainty against them in my full design to do their deserts instant justice’ (happily, before she can ‘raise the house upon them’ she falls from her stool and knocks herself unconscious (159)). Yet what really upsets the Eternals and causes them to erect the tent that obscures Urizen completely from their sight is the arrival of the first female, who, emerging as she does from Los, might be the revelation that he is an invert, ‘a girl in disguise’, all the more shocking since he has been the dominant partner, chaining up Urizen and hammering at his orifices. Los, rather than the authority figure Benjamin describes, seems like a different kind of sadist – a sublime sadist, who gets a rise out of being terrified by his own actions. He is ‘Frightend at the hurtling bones’ (or boners?) ‘And at the surging sulphureous / Perturbed Immortal mad raging’ (8:2–4, E74). Urizen’s sulphur has been recognized as masturbatory ejaculation (Hobson 2000, 39); here it swirls ‘in whirlwinds . . . Round the furious limbs of Los’ (8:5–6, E74). Los’s fear seems to be the cause of his resorting to bondage: And Los formed nets & gins And threw the nets round about He watch’d in shuddring fear




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The dark changes & bound every change With rivets of iron & brass

Though at the end of the binding of Urizen Los’s ‘terrors’ cause detumescence – he ‘shrunk from his task: / His great hammer fell from his hand’ (13:20–1, E77) – there is excitement for him at the beginning: The Eternal Prophet heavd the dark bellows, And turn’d restless the tongs; and the hammer Incessant beat; forging chains new & new (10:15–17, E75) The result is the sulphureous foam surging thick Settled, a lake, bright, & shining clear: White as the snow on the mountains cold. (10:21–3, E75) As Urizen had previously His prolific delight obscurd more & more In dark secresy hiding in surgeing Sulphureous fluid his phantasies, (10:12–14, E75) it is difficult to tell whether the white lake is filled with the ejaculate of Urizen, or Los, or both mixing together. Though perversion, and S/M particularly, are often defined as seeking sexual pleasure in something other than climax as a goal, for Los and Urizen, the heavy work and the restraint become orgasmic, whether out of pleasure, or strenuousness, or perhaps out of terror (Emin puts a feminine version in neon letters: ‘my cunt is wet with fear’ (2006, 205)). Urizen’s body itself is corset-like in its restraint, which might be pleasurable: ‘bones of solidness, froze / Over all his nerves of joy’ (10:40–1, E75).12 Indeed, the major ways in which the binding of Urizen can be read as sexual bondage are, beyond puns on binding and hammering, not only the exchange of fluids, but also the control of orifices. This whole part of the narrative is about Urizen’s organs being bound and constrained, his changing body itself a complicated form of blindfolding and gagging.13 He is subjected by Los, and by his own body and desires, to intense stimulation combined with sense deprivation.



(8:2, 7–11, E74)11

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If Urizen is a sadist who wants love, Los is a sublime sadist, in true Burkean fashion: he is turned on by terror when he struggles with the powerful Urizen,14 but once Urizen is subdued, pity arises: ‘we love what submits to us’ (Burke, 1990, 103). (Burke also says, ‘It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love’ (143). Poor Urizen.) Los ‘saw Urizen deadly black, / In his chains bound, & Pity began’ (13:50–1, E77). This appears to be the cause of the further division, as threatened in the Symposium, and perhaps the kind of God-offending insolence that was supposed to merit it, since this causes the tent to be spread, bound, erected, fastened, ‘That Eternals may no more behold them’ (19:2–7, E78). Los dividing into male and female is more horrible than Urizen and Los dividing into two men who yearn to be bound again. Or perhaps the coincidence of bondage and pity is what is horrifying: the strange possibility that Los could pity or love Urizen whom he’s just tortured, that ‘perversion’ might coexist with tenderness. If the appearance of the first female form is what repulses the eternals, it may be because of misogyny, or because of the category shift involved in Los splitting into a heterosexual pair – as an invert, as previously suggested, a woman trapped in a man’s body, now coming out, in a spectacle the eternals don’t want to see – or as a man who can’t quite be categorized as either a gay sadist or a het incestuous rapist.

III. Queer birth Eternity shudder’d when they saw, Man begetting his likeness, On his own divided image (19:14–16, E79) It is uncertain just how reproduction works here, further expanding the question of what kind of creations result from this kind of sex. Eternity shudders, not wanting to see; having erected their blinders, the shudder may be orgasmic, indicating the eternals have their own kind of pleasure in repression, of the variety of seeing yet not wanting to see, peeping at abominable horrors as Fanny Hill does. The shudder may be the simultaneous pleasure and dread that come with conception, implicating the Eternals in the birth of Enitharmon. Further, with all the divisions going on, what is ‘his own divided image’? Los is begetting his likeness, his son Orc, on his quasi-sister-self Enitharmon. Yet it could also be read as the begetting of Enitharmon out of man on ‘his own divided image’: Urizen and Los. She is after all brought into existence by the pity Los conceives on seeing Urizen in chains. With the birth of Orc, Los experiences yet another kind of bondage, as ‘A tight’ning girdle grew, / Around his bosom’, which he bursts by sobbing, only to have another grow, until ‘These falling down on the rock / Into an




Queer Blake

iron Chain / In each other link by link lock’d’ (20:9–10, 18–20, E80). This seems to be a sort of psychological self-binding, caused by, then inflicted upon, family relations. They take Orc to the mountaintop and ‘They chain’d his young limbs to the rock / With the Chain of Jealousy’ (20:23–4, E80). But who is jealous of whom? The standard reading is an ingenious anticipation of the Oedipus complex, with Los and Orc jealous of each other for the attentions of Enitharmon, but there is also the possibility – given that this chaining is done ‘Beneath Urizens deathful shadow’ – that Urizen is the jealous one, for the attentions of Los. It may be because of his repressive laws that the Oedipal relation must take place, but it may also be that he has lost Los, his partner in bondage, and seen him go on to create with another, one who only came to be through their relationship. Los’s ‘sorrow & pain’ (20:8, E80) may be as much at hurting Urizen as at the strains of fatherhood or the burdens of heterosexuality. The embodiment of these feelings in the form of chains only ties them back to his relationship with Urizen. Tying Orc down could be a way of trying to keep him from Urizen, to hide Orc, as the Eternals similarly ‘beat down the stakes and cords’ to close their tent (19:47–8, E79), or to protect him, as Los later, in turn, ‘encircled Enitharmon / With fires of Prophecy / From the sight of Urizen & Orc’ (20:25, 42–4, E80–1), hiding her from the threat of both kinds of jealousy. All things, heard the voice of the child And began to awake to life. And Urizen craving with hunger Stung with the odours of Nature Explor’d his dens around (20:28–32, E80) Urizen reacts differently from all others to ‘the voice of the child’, and his response is ‘hunger’, which could also be a renewed and now unsatisfiable sexual craving for Los (recalling, when being beaten into shape by Los, ‘Within his ribs bloated round, / A craving Hungry Cavern’, the creation of the stomach, but also of desire, with the corseting feel of its pressing against the containing ribs, and with the ‘Tongue’ that is ‘like a red flame . . . Of thirst & of hunger’ (13:5–6, 8–9, E76)). Or, equally potential in ‘Stung with the odours of Nature’, a desire for procreation. It is at this point that he begins his particularly Godlike activities of forming chaos into creation in measured fashion. He becomes preoccupied with the (anal) ‘Abyss’ which he plans to divide with (phallic) tools: ‘He formed golden compasses / And began to explore the Abyss / And he planted a garden of fruits’ (20:39–41, E81). On Effinger’s reading, this could be compared with Genet’s fantasy of seeing the anus ‘become adorned with flowers, with



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foliage, become a cool bower which I crawled to and entered with my entire body’; what Bersani calls ‘the promise of a new kind of fertilization’, observing, ‘during such a vision, a world is getting born. The rimmer in his jouissance has demiurgic powers’ (in Bersani 1995, 166, 178). But Urizen, ingenious demiurge as he is, must be somehow doing it to himself through his own creations – tools, and his world, which is himself, and self-created, as traditional Blake criticism recognizes. He has been abandoned by Los and seems to be trying for fertility on his own, or seeing if his previous union with Los has left any trace of conception. Urizen’s world has, from the beginning of the poem, been likened to a womb. At his first introduction, he is ‘Brooding secret’, and striving ‘with shapes / Bred from his forsaken wilderness’ (3:7, 14–15, E70). After he has written his book of laws, he continues to struggle and create, and ‘a roof, vast petrific around / On all sides He fram’d: like a womb’, but he does this by digging in the dirt: ‘He ran raging / To hide, but He could not’ and ‘dug mountains & hills in vast strength’ (5:28–9, 20–2, E73). Later, when his orifices are being hammered by Los, ‘a roof shaggy wild’, read by Effinger as an anal image, ‘inclosed / In an orb, his fountain of thought’ (10:33–4, 75). The creative mind and the womb are the familiar parallel, but Blake adds the arse as a further analogue. It could be, since Urizen by this method tends to produce ‘ruinous fragments of life’ (5:9, E73), that this is not a new kind of fertilization but rather a clear sign that sodomy is unnatural, negatively contrasted to proper, heterosexual forms of union and creation. Yet, though Orc began ‘like a Worm / In the trembling womb’, it seems he comes out behind instead, ‘Delving earth in his resistless way’ (19:21–2, 44, E79). An instructive parallel can be found in anti-sodomitical literature, for instance an anonymous satire on William III called ‘The Lady’s Complaint’: The Q[u]een too (God bless her) as ‘tis said by some, Matrimonyall service receives at her bum, And that is ye reason ye doctors all tell yee, She has a great A— instead of great belly. (In Patterson 1997, 261) Here, too, anal creation is not exclusively male-male. Yet, in Ned Ward’s Secret History of the Clubs, the verse concluding the chapter on ‘the Mollies club’ invents an interesting genealogy for ‘Men’ who ‘on each other doat, / And quit the charming Petticoat’. Sure the curs’d Father of this Race, That does both Sexes thus disgrace,




Queer Blake

Must be a Monster, Mad, or Drunk, Who, bedding some prepostrous Punk, Mistook the downy Seat of Love, And got them in the Sink above; So that, at first, a T—d and They Were born the very self same Way, From whence they draw this cursed Itch, Not to the Belly, but the Breech. (Ward 1709, 299) He goes on to say that sodomites fall in Love with one another, As if no Woman was their Mother: For he that is of Woman born, Will to her Arms again return; And surely never chuse to play His Lustful Game, the backward Way. (Ibid., 300) In the case of Urizen and Los, no woman was their mother; and this propensity (and the way Orc is born) could be an explanation for why Enitharmon ‘wept’ and ‘refus’d’ (19:11, E79). Man’s own divided image could be the divided buttocks, the way in which, as Benjamin emphasizes taking her cue from The Story of O, a woman can be used ‘as a boy’ (1988, 77). For Benjamin, this is the (male) master’s denial of the (female) slave’s separate, subjective identity. This can apply in the case of Urizen, because of the way he attempts to impose his laws on his creations. Yet, when he tries to create his own world separate from Los, this authority, this position as master, falls apart: ‘he saw / That no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment’ (23:24–6, E81). When his mastery failed previously, he could submit masochistically to Los to have his identity forged; but now ‘Cold he wander’d on high, over their cities / In weeping & pain & woe!’ (25:5–6, E82). It is at this point that Urizen feels what he calls ‘Pity’, and begins to divide as Los had divided. But instead of a complete, separate female, Urizen’s division produces another fragment of life, undeveloped: A cold shadow follow’d behind him Like a spiders web, moist, cold, & dim Drawing out from his sorrowing soul ...



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Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all The tormented element stretch’d From the sorrows of Urizens soul And the Web is a Female in embrio

The web is ‘twisted like the human brain’, suggesting that she never goes from being a mental image to being a full outward creation; this and the abstraction, and the cooled-down chastity, of Urizen’s master/slave desires at this point, now that he is and remains alone, is underlined by the web being called ‘The Net of Religion’ (25:22, E82). A touching, sad end for Urizen, a sadomasochist wandering lost without a master to form him, and unable to form a proper slave for himself. Urizen’s children, in the first generations, are either vast enormities Frightning; faithless; fawning Portions of life; similitudes Of a foot, or a hand, or a head Or a heart (23:2–6, E81) or ‘Sons & Daughters’ emerging fully formed from the elements, Thiriel for instance ‘Astonish’d at his own existence’ (23:10–12, E81). They are messy creations, and they get away from their creator; not what he intended, not what he can control. As the generations proceed, they, Symposium-style, get farther and farther away from eternity, and are mired deeper in a filthy world with ‘streaky slime in their heavens’ (25:33, E82). The ‘remaining children of Urizen’ who have not entirely ‘shrunk up from existence’ rebel and stage an exodus: ‘they left the pendulous earth; / They called it Egypt, & left it’ (28:20–2, 25:39, E83). Parallel to the Eternals, they try to name Urizen’s deviant sexual and creative practice, and in this case are able to, decisively: slavery in the sense of morally wrong and divinely condemned political oppression. They do not entertain the kind of slave relationship that Urizen had envisioned in his laws, requiring, as well as constraint, love and voluntary submission. These slaves are no longer slaves because they are not playing the game anymore. Those left behind might fall more readily into the Hegelian scheme – the master has successfully destroyed them as subjects – if, many of them merely a hand here, a heart there, they ever constituted subjects in the first place. Urizen’s creations are either completely botched, or they abandon him.



(25:9–11, 15–18, E82)

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Conclusion: fe/male space?

The space thus described is created by Enitharmon to contain Satan after his little bit of messy work, his disastrous changing places with Palamabron: it is a place ‘for the poor infected’ (M 8:43, E102), for containment of disaster. It is, like Beulah which is similarly conceived as a space for the weak, a place for recovery, constantly described as ‘moony’.15 According to the OED, the sense of ‘moon’ as buttocks goes back to 1756 (moon, n.1, 14). The arse/womb parallel might apply also, then, to the ‘Female Space’, and raises the question of whether such spaces are exclusively female, and whether they may be places of queer creation. The Female Space making itself seem infinite sounds like a description of Emin’s self-indulgence. Her embroidered tent entitled ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95’ (2006, 343) is an evident and interesting analogue for the idea of the Female Space, and one that is not simply a womb, not simply to be entered, not simply for heterosexual fertility. The names within the tent mix up the idea of ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’ by including women as well as men, but also by including family members, friends, and perhaps most strikingly, ‘Foetus 1’. This not only confuses roles as regards gender and sexual acts, but also the border between sexual relationships and other kinds of human bonds, as well as other kinds of human activity, as Jeannette Winterson sums up: The tent . . . manages to combine the pleasures of childhood (you have to crawl in and lie on your back), camping (you have to crawl in and lie on your back), coitus (well, you don’t have to lie on your back), and culture (when you don’t understand it, just crawl in and lie on your back). (In Emin 2006, 6) Lying on your back doesn’t necessarily mean sex, and it doesn’t necessarily mean a feminine position. But the question is whether the tent causes a check to automatic sexual assumptions, or whether it sexualizes all relationships, and all the activities it suggests – Emin apparently did have sex with most of these people, and much of her art would suggest that childhood and culture are highly sexualized. In a way, the tent is the essence of bad art and bad sex. It is self-indulgent (Emin says, ‘it was just a woman who nobody knew or cared about, making a record of part of her life which a lot of people do, consciously or subconsciously’).16 It is sloppy in its emotions and in its naive look but obsessive in the amount of labour and the precision of stitching required. As a womb, or



The nature of a Female Space is this: it shrinks the Organs Of Life till they become Finite & Itself seems Infinite (M 10[11]:6–7; E104)

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an anus, many have been in it, those inscribed there and those who viewed it (surely causing conflict and making everything even more messy); it is a place that is too awkwardly intimate and private. In another archetypal Blake parallel, this womb is also a tomb (‘it nearly killed me doing it’); it’s a memorial (‘it was like carving out gravestones’); in itself it is empty; it has been destroyed (‘I couldn’t make the tent again’). Comparing the tent constructed by the Eternals in The Book of Urizen to Emin’s suggests that the former might be seen as a Male Space. Like Emin’s tent, it brings together and blurs a variety of messily uncategorizeable human relationships. Like the Female Space, it serves similar functions of containment, but for different purposes, not to nurture the tired but to disavow the taboo. It is very different in what it contains: male on male violence and struggle, suffering and failure, quite the opposite of Beulah as ‘a most pleasant Sleep / On Couches soft, with mild music, tended by Flowers of Beulah, / Sweet Female forms, winged or floating in the air spontaneous’ (M 34[38]:9–11 E134). The Daughters of Albion each have gates to the Heavens of Beulah in ‘their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins’ and ‘whom they please / They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight’ (M 5:6–10, E98). In The Book of Urizen, it is not entry into another, consensually, by heavenly gates, but, as I’ve argued, a hammering at orifices for entry or for control, by which the characters seem possessed beyond their volition. Perhaps one of the reasons the binding of Urizen by Los has been hard for readers to judge as positive or negative, successful or failed, adversarial or merciful, is its proximity to male fantasy. Within this space the desire, and the fear and punishment for the desire, coincide and mix. The Book of Urizen can be read as, simultaneously, a fantasy of male-male original union (via the Symposium) and a dire punishment for even imagining, let alone acting upon, such a fantasy – as if the very desire for that kind of rough and ‘dirty’ sex is mirrored in the filth and violence with which it’s rejected, whether by the potential partner in a misjudged gay advance, or by society upon discovery. The pillory, which Hobson considers impressed upon Blake the injustice of the ‘Moral Law’ toward homosexuals (2000, 113–30), embodies this combination of attraction and repulsion (as spectacle) and this primal association of sexual transgression with mess and dirt (arousal by something ‘filthy’ means one will end up covered in filth). It can also embody the terrible transfer of S/M play to real pain: the sexual transgression of voluntary submission leading to forced submission under the law (not a law of love). Perhaps Blake began to perceive this even before the Vere Street persecutions, and The Book of Urizen is a messy struggle between disgust, fear and (as I have emphasized) sympathy. Because it is embodied in a work of art which is itself messy and not completely under the control of its maker, requiring struggle and filth to create, there is potentially great sympathy for the characters whose desire has led them further than they intended. In the recently discovered images from the




Queer Blake

second copy of Small Book of Designs, Plate 7 of The Book of Urizen (the figure in flames on his knees with his mouth and eyes wide open and his muscular arms about his head) comes with the inscription, ‘I sought Pleasure & found Pain / Unutterable’ (Butlin and Hamlyn 2008, 69). In the context of this reading, this figure seems an icon of the gay male fantasy of The Book of Urizen. Considering his posture, it may be desire for the forbidden pleasure of anal penetration that has brought him ‘Pain / Unutterable’, the unspeakable crime surrounding him in the fires of hell, or the physical pain of sodomy being more than he bargained for. Is this an attempt to illustrate that moment in S/M when the torture becomes too much? He could ask for the game to stop but, ‘unutterable’, he seems self-trapped in the pain that was initially voluntarily sought as pleasure. This image, and The Book of Urizen as a whole, can be seen as entering that dark space between consent and force, between what is desired and what is beyond control. The Male Space of fantasy and queer creation is certainly not a place ‘where no dispute can come’, but it is ‘a place where Contrarieties are equally True’ (M 30[33]:1, 3, E129).

Notes I am grateful to Helen Bruder and Steve Clark for suggestions, challenges and encouragement in their responses to this chapter. 1. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick (1990, 144) notes that ‘in recent feminist criticism . . . . a conscious rehabilitation of the category of “the sentimental” has taken place, insofar as “the sentimental” is seen as a derogatory code name for female bodies and the female domestic and “reproductive” preoccupations of birth, socialization, illness and death’, and finds that ‘it would make sense to see a somewhat similar rehabilitation of “the sentimental” as an important gay male project as well’, insofar as a fondness for ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ involves ‘constructing a new family romance on new terms’. Emin’s and Blake’s respective versions of these feminist and gay renovations embrace excessive affect but do not make it this positive or useful. 2. While Cumberland himself found the Blakes ‘still poor still Dirty’ (BR 316), works by Emin such as ‘I’ve got it all’ (2006, 235) show that she embraces filthy lucre in a way that is opposed to Blake’s professions about art and commerce. Her successful self-promotion also calls into question any attribution of emotional nakedness in her work (perhaps unabashed greed, for money or fame, is as ‘indecent’ as sentimentality). Blake’s own less profitable self-promotion is evident in A Descriptive Catalogue and Public Address. 3. This hyphenation isn’t recorded in Erdman’s edition (E72) but can be seen in BU 4 in the Blake Archive or Additional Plate 1 in Worrall’s edition (Blake 1995). See Essick, ‘Blake’s Body’ for discussion of this as a response to ‘physical constraints’ (1996, 215). 4. This transcription comes from the version in neon; Emin puts the same words into embroidery as well, with different line breaks and all in caps (‘Love Poem’, Emin 2006, 139).



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5. See Effinger, Chapter 4 in this volume, on excrement and anality in various plates of The Book of Urizen. 6. See, for instance, Equiano’s loyalty to his master even after being reluctantly allowed to buy his manumission (Equiano 2002, 155–8), and most emphatically, Prince’s (1967, 88) complaint, ‘This was the fourth time they had threatened to turn me out, and, go where I might, I was determined now to take them at their word; though I thought it very hard, after I had lived with them for thirteen years, and worked for them like a horse, to be driven out in this way, like a beggar.’ 7. For this textual observation, and for illumination on the presence of Los at the beginning of BU, I am indebted to David Shakespeare and Keith Friedlander. 8. See Paley (1983, 106, 256). It seems Paley considers Aristophanes’ mythical creatures in the Symposium to be strictly androgynous, as he describes same-sex unions as departures from this example (in the case of Urthona and Los (256), and the reworking of the figures in the lily in J 28 (170)). 9. Blake’s access to Plato was largely through Thomas Taylor, but he didn’t translate the Symposium; Sydenham’s translation later appears in Taylor’s 1804 Plato Works which, as the title indicates, has Nine of the Dialogues by Floyer Sydenham, and the Remainder by Thomas Taylor. 10. Though beating as masturbating is a mid-twentieth-century sense, it is ‘said of hares and rabbits in rutting-time’ from the early seventeenth century (OED, beat, v.1, 2b and draft additions). 11. Note that Blake uses nets in sexually-charged bondage situations, such as ‘The Golden Net’ (E483), ‘Song’ [How sweet I roam’d. . .] (11, E412–13), and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (7:23, E50). 12. One definition of ‘bone’ is ‘a strip of whalebone used to stiffen stays’ (OED 5d). 13. From a political perspective on the importance of gagging to BU, Worrall notes ‘a general movement to control free speech culminating in the December 1795 Gagging Acts . . . Blake wrote his three Urizen books during this period of repression’ (Blake 1995, 19). 14. On ‘how pain can be a source of delight’, Burke considers the ‘rousing’ properties of ‘labour’. ‘As common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system’, especially if it acts ‘upon the eye or ear, as they are the most delicate organs’ (1990, 122–3). Los’s labouring on Urizen’s delicate organs, then, covers the spectrum of delightful pain both gross and fine. 15. The space created because of Satan is a ‘moony Space’ in M 8:45, E102, 11[12]:6, E104, and Beulah is ‘moony’ in M 30:5, 13, E129, for example. 16. This and the following parenthetical quotations are from the interview in Fortnum (2007, 56–7).




9

Bethan Stevens

In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon is raped by a slave-holder, Bromion, and rejected by her beloved, Theotormon, while the daughters of the title watch enthralled. Visions has a unique slant on sex, feminism and chattel slavery, manipulating a parallel that was current at the time, between a white English wife – whom Blake describes as ‘bound / In spells of law to one she loathes’ (5:21–2, E49) – and branded black slaves, who are ‘stampt with [the slave-holder’s] signet’ and whose ‘daughters worship terrors and obey the violent’ (1:21–3, E46).1 Arrestingly, Blake’s characters weave together pleasure with trauma in their bewildering experiences of violence, sex and bondage. Recent interpretations of Visions correct a former blindness to all but straight sexualities, and Helen Bruder (1997) and Christopher Hobson (2000) draw attention to Oothoon’s openness to diverse kinds of pleasure.2 In what follows, I focus on the more disturbing, imperialist desires of the sympathetic English daughters and the slave-holding Bromion. I address two unanswered narrative problems that resist straight readings: first, what precisely is the nature of the daughters of Albion’s ‘sighs’ (1:2, E45) toward Oothoon? And second, what does Theotormon suffer that requires ‘silence’ and ‘secret tears’ (3:21, 2:7, E46–7, emphasis added)? While some interpreters tacitly or explicitly characterize the daughters as ‘almost silent’ (Erdman 1952, 243), I pay particular attention to them, building from criticism that has seen Visions’ structure and title-page as indicators that the daughters have a share in the book’s knowledge and narration (Goslee 1990, 106–7; Wright 2007, 66).3 The daughters appear just four times in the main text, in the opening lines and refrain, but because they sturdily frame the different sections of the book, these lines acquire considerable interpretative weight. Furthermore, the title Visions of the Daughters of Albion, within a literary tradition linking vision with authorship, begs a reading of the daughters as fictional creators. The title makes the book theirs, although it is of course grammatically ambiguous (Vogler 1987, 280), cleverly suggesting the visions are both by and about them. In other words, 140



‘Woes & . . . sighs’: Fantasies of Slavery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion

they are female puppet authors, whose visions of Atlantic slavery, sex and feminism – lurid and political – are in turn under scrutiny. In adopting this viewpoint, Blake made an intertextual connection with poetry by a group of Englishwomen known to have furthered women’s political agency through their campaign against chattel slavery: abolition poetesses (Sussman 1994, 64; Midgley 1992). In what follows I highlight this underexplored literary context for Visions. I begin by showing how the daughters of Albion’s visions have a deviant twist, in that their sympathetic gaze toward Oothoon is homoerotic and racially queered. I go on to put this in a broader context of abolition sympathy, its voyeurism and its sexualized rhetoric. Finally I argue that the daughters’ visions verge on the unutterable, as Bromion’s rape of Oothoon is followed by his veiled sexual assault of her slave lover Theotormon. In alluding to the homosexual abuse of a slave, Blake creates a unique picture of sexual violence and breaks a crucial taboo of abolition literature.

Sighing toward Oothoon When, at the start, Bromion sexually and racially objectifies Oothoon, telling her, ‘thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south’ (1:20, E46), we are only too familiar with his tired trope of (erotic) foreign woman as (exotic) landscape. Importantly, though, this language parallels an earlier description of Oothoon on the same plate, also ‘soft’ and ‘American’, but instead the object of the daughters’ attention: ENSLAV’D, the Daughters of Albion weep: a trembling lamentation Upon their mountains; in their valleys. sighs toward America. For the soft soul of America, Oothoon wanderd in woe (1:1–3, E45) In these lines, Oothoon is introduced as ‘America’ for the first time, through the daughters’ ‘trembling’ sighs. Bromion actually possesses Oothoon (‘mine’, 1:21, E46). The distant daughters of Albion, on the other hand, ambiguously sympathize with and/or desire her: ‘sighs toward America’. This ambiguity recalls the uncertain ground the daughters occupy, as English women with limited legal rights, between being subjects and objects of imperialism. Critical parallels are often made between the daughters and Oothoon, who are similar in that they are oppressed women and potential feminists. Nonetheless, Visions offers an additional parallel between the daughters’ perspectives and Bromion’s. While the daughters empathetically imagine themselves the (feminine) victims of Oothoon’s rape, at the same time, their gaze aligns them with the desires of its (imperial) perpetrator.



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The daughters are oriented exclusively ‘toward’ Oothoon and her feelings, and never named with reference to Bromion or Theotormon. The precise meaning of their repeated voicing of ‘sighs’ in response to Oothoon’s ‘woes’ demands closer interrogation than it has received – ‘The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs’ (2:20, 5:2, 8:13, E46–51). The daughters hear ‘woes’ but neglect to report them. They interpret and report only ‘sighs’. Blake may be adapting this verbal contrast from elsewhere. John Jamieson’s Sorrows of Slavery (1789, 9) had addressed ‘Ye British fair, whose gentle bosoms heave / The sigh of pity at the tale of woe’. Whereas Jamieson exhorted those gently heaving bosoms to feel for slavery generally, Blake’s ‘trembling’ daughters are directed ‘toward’ a specific body: Oothoon’s. The OED tells us that whereas woe is always negative, in sighs there is a slippage from ‘dejection’ and ‘lament[ation]’ to ‘longing’ and ‘desire’. This distinction in definition was well known to abolition poets, who almost always prefer woe when describing unambiguous evils. One of the most influential poems, ‘Slavery’ by Hannah More, emphatically represented ‘no fictitious ills’, but rather ‘substantial woe’ (1778, 4). Another poet, Helen Maria Williams, wrote of slavery that ‘Fancy o’er the tale of woe / In vain one heighten’d tint would throw’ (1823, 179), arguing at length that the ‘sacred claim of . . . woe’ is so solid and terrible it has no need of the writer’s imagination (ibid., 177). The working-class abolitionist Ann Yearsley described ‘the tardy step / Of leadenfooted woe’ (1788, 12); this is mirrored by Blake’s Oothoon who ‘wanderd in woe’ (1:3). Oothoon’s woes may be concrete, but the daughters’ echoes and sighs are by definition more nebulous. Yearsley writes about the ‘vap’rous sighs and tears’ of hypocritical Christians (1788, 3). What a contrast between vaporous sighs and substantial woes. ‘Eccho’ and ‘sighs’ also get across the overwhelming distance between the English women and the slave. Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse pointed out that we sigh for what we don’t have, for the one who isn’t there with us (2002, 15). In abolition poetry, the word ‘sighs’ is often reserved for passages that are disturbingly sentimental and sexualized: we hear of one slave’s ex-lover, ‘Banish’d from his arms, / She seeks the cold embrace of death; her soul / Escapes in one sad sigh’ (Yearsley 1788, 14). When, as here, death is an embrace, or when rape is a fantasy – as in Visions and other eighteenth-century literature – then, apparently, the appropriate response is a sigh, all the more libidinized for being non-verbal. The daughters’ ‘sighs’ are an expression of political sympathy, but they also contain this desiring element. And perhaps this desire is what helps knit together the relation between them and Oothoon, creating the short, sharp, geographically distant intimacy that makes the refrain so powerful. Throughout Visions’ illustrations, Oothoon’s Blakean nudity (BA 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11) contrasts with the daughters’ clothing and drapery (BA 9, 10).4 If Oothoon is a product of the daughters’ voyeuristic imagination, this contrast is culturally and erotically important. It recalls John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796



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Narrative of a Five Year Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam – a book about slavery for which Blake engraved at least seventeen illustrations at the time he was composing Visions. Stedman describes an ‘Indian girl’, ‘stark naked’ and ‘fair’, whose nudity he cannot resist imagining through the eyes of his countrywomen and their bodily reaction: ‘To be sure an European woman would blush to her fingers ends at the very idea’ (2:190). As in Blake’s Visions, the European male writer imagines the exoticized woman through the sexualized gaze of the white woman: a familiar, straight male fantasy of homoerotic femininity. Both Oothoon and Theotormon are exoticized. Oothoon distances herself from hypocritical Christianity and performs a sexualized ritual at a ‘golden shrine’ (1:10, E46), reminding us of abolitionist descriptions of slaves as notyet-Christian, like More’s characterization of their ‘pagan soul’ (1788, 5). Theotormon is the possessor of eagles, described in Oothoon’s ‘holy voice’ as ‘kings of the sounding air’ (2:14, E46), and evoking pastoral, hunting landscapes that feature in abolitionist poems as the fantasized origins of slaves (for example, Yearsley 1788, 10–12). Blake’s well-known frontispiece (BA 11) revisits landscapes from abolition poetry such as Eliza Knipe’s ‘black swamp’ over which ‘the rising sun displayed / his fiery orb’ and a ‘cry re-echoed’ from ‘surrounding caves’ (51–2).5 If Oothoon and Theotormon seem straightforwardly exoticized, one of the queer things about them is their overdetermined race. Visions gives so many contradictory clues about skin colour that critics have been able to pick and choose to suit their arguments.6 Oothoon’s colours shift as she attempts to ‘reflect’ (2:14, E46) Theotormon’s changing image: she is variously ‘transparent’, ‘white and pure’ with ‘soft snowy limbs’, ‘mudded’, ‘ting’d with the village smoke’, stained with ‘red earth’ and ‘clos’d . . . in . . . deadly black’ (2:12, 2:16, 2:19, 2:29, 3:18–20, E46–7). Visions’ single illustration of a labouring black man – the only unambiguous visual representation of chattel slavery in the illuminated books – was carefully positioned by Blake immediately below the words ‘the image of Theotormon’, which look like a caption or naming of the black body (BA 4). However – although the differences in colouring from copy to copy mean that the other figures can occasionally look greyish or even green – all the other illustrations of all the characters in Visions represent whites: to my knowledge, Erdman is alone in reading the images of Oothoon as ‘American Indian’ (1952, 249). Blake had every reason to see slaves’ skin colour as far from absolute. Contemporaries, including Stedman, emphasized the light skin colour of some slaves such as those labelled quadroons, who resembled whites. Stedman’s Narrative even produced a colour chart showing gradations and categories of skin colour between black and white, in which skin colour starts to resemble




Queer Blake

the different choices on an artist’s palette – although it can always, unlike Oothoon, be fitted into a system.7 In 1788, Hannah More’s anti-slavery poem had posed the question, ‘Does then th’immortal principle within / Change with the casual colour of a skin?’ (5). Visions’ attitude to skin colour is disconcertingly ‘casual’ in a way that More’s actually isn’t – although, as elsewhere in Blake, we also sense a racist implication that beneath the skin, everyone is white. At least on the surface, Oothoon’s fantastic multi-colour has an impossibility to it. She refuses to be categorized, despite the fact that racial categorization is essential to heteronormativity, which requires race to be known so that it may be reproduced through the straight lines of heterosexual generation (see Ahmed 2006, 126–9). While Oothoon’s racial unknowability is not equivalent to today’s slippery category, ‘mixed race’, nevertheless in the twisting undecidability of her race, we may remember recent theoretical arguments that ‘having a mixed genealogy is a rather queer way of beginning’ (154). Oothoon’s racial overdetermination does not operate in isolation but queers her relations to other characters. She herself has been called a daughter of Albion (Wood 2002, 183), and the daughters have been freely interpreted as her ‘sisters’ (see Vine 1994; Mellor 1995; Ankarsjö 2006). In my view, using this word to describe the relation between Oothoon and the daughters has a straightening effect, flattening out the daughters’ sexualized sighs, and the odd relation Oothoon has to them as both black woman and white woman, kin and other. Unless we posit a queered sisterhood, to describe Oothoon and the daughters as ‘sisters’ is to accept abolition rhetoric at its word,8 ignoring Blake’s achievement in creating a complex portrait of the abolitionist fantasy of slavery. We risk the kind of disavowal of homoeroticism that happens in discussions of Blake’s famous engraving, Europe supported by Africa and America (in Stedman 1796, 2: facing 394) – another image of slavery and transnational feminine sympathy. In 1952, Erdman described it as a ‘sisterly’ image of ‘three comely nude women tenderly embracing each other’; he then unpacked the racial politics of the image, but its sexuality remained smothered by this ‘tender’, ‘comely’ word, ‘sisterly’ (244). Recent critics continue to emphasize the print’s sisterliness (Rosenthal 2004, 4). Stephen Vine critiqued its sororial claims but still summed up, ‘Europe embraces her sisters but enslaves them’ (1994, 57). It’s as though, even when we get past it, this word ‘sisters’ just won’t go away. In contrast, Wood analyses the way ‘Africa and America stroke Europe’s body and reach towards her breasts the fingers straining from all directions’, replacing sister with the word ‘(lesbian?)’, wrapped in punctuation that visually shields it, marks it out as not quite fitting (2002, 136). With Visions too, the word ‘sister’ continues to appeal because we are not sure what word to replace it with, how to accurately describe this queer relation.



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Abolition poets utilized humanitarian sympathy, a philosophical concept of Adam Smith’s, which involved witnesses to suffering fantasizing a bodily as well as an emotional response. Sympathy was originally a virtue; however, by the late century it was a morally ambiguous tool. Particularly in the context of Atlantic slavery, as critics such as Marcus Wood have demonstrated, sympathetic feeling was susceptible to losing force and degenerating into sadomasochistic voyeurism and (hetero- and homoerotic) pornography.9 The real ‘daughters of Albion’ who published anti-slavery poetry in the late 1780s and early 1790s were alert to the potential of slaves and their spectators as sexualized subjects. Thus seventeen-year-old abolition poet Maria Falconar feels the need to protest her own innocence, declaring herself ‘fraught with feelings none should blush to name’ (1788, 2). Actually, her syntax invites her readers to wonder: she should not blush, but does she? The mere mention of blushing raises the idea of the female writer’s body and its libidinized reaction to her visions of suffering. More experienced abolition writers took up the sexualization of slavery more confidently. One example is Anna Letitia Barbauld, who created disturbing juxtapositions between slaves’ ‘sensual riot’ and the ‘sounding lash’ (1791, 11). Her fantasy of dark sensuality encompassed white ‘tyrants’ as well as enslaved blacks: for Barbauld, all ‘minds’ are ‘deprav’d by bondage known’, and this inevitably leads to ‘Passion’s flame’ and the ‘whirlwind wakes of uncontroul’d desire’ (8–9). Whilst such language was just one aspect of what abolition poets offered their cause, it is unsurprising that other abolitionists became bitterly critical of anti-slavery poetry and its sensuality. Kate Davies writes that campaigners became anxious about the feminine ‘desires aroused by reading sentimental anti-slavery verse’ (2001, 145); she quotes one popular pamphleteer condemning those ‘inclined to lend an ear to tales of human woe’, who sought ‘gratification in beholding . . . tragedy’ (143). Similarly, Wollstonecraft – whose voice is widely recognized in Visions – satirized abolitionist ‘fair ladies’ who could even worsen the conditions of slaves by publicizing their own fantasies of ‘unheard of tortures’ (Wollstonecraft 1989, 45). As suggested by the woes and sighs discussed above, Visions knowingly brushes up against such sensational representations of slavery. Blake’s illustration of Oothoon chained to a rock, engulfed in a wave that is also a flame, and alienated from the nearby Theotormon (BA 6) astutely echoes other depictions of torture and romance. If we see the tongue-like shape as a wave, it recalls ubiquitous representations of bound slaves drowning in the middle passage. For example, Eliza Knipe sentimentally describes a couple submerging ‘clasp’d in a fond embrace’ (1788, 60), unlike Blake’s estranged lovers whose relationship, more realistically, is damaged by slavery. Seen as a flame, Blake’s image could illustrate accounts such as Yearsley’s of a plantation



Daughters worshipping terrors

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Luco is chain’d . . . fuel is plac’d . . . See, it burns! He gazes on the growing flame, and calls For ‘water, water!’ . . . . . . the hot death approaches . . . . . . He writhes (Yearsley 1788, 19–20) Commonplace in abolition poetry, the word ‘writhing’ also appears in Visions (2:12, E46), and has been made much of as an indication that Oothoon responded to rape with arousal (Bloom in Blake 1988, 901; Heffernan 2006, 108; Mellor 1995, 369). Actually, the word says more about the genre, in which a vision is created for the spectator’s pleasure. The rape in Visions is explicit, as Oothoon describes how ‘the terrible thunders tore / My virgin mantle in twain’ (iii:7–8, E45) and we see an illustration of her and Bromion in ‘post-coital exhaustion’ (Mellor 1995, 368). At the moment of rape, Oothoon is romantically termed a ‘faint maid’ (1:17, E46); in the immediate aftermath, her anguish is horrifyingly sexual as we watch her ‘howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs’ (2:12, E46). This is a striking element of the daughters’ visions, especially since in the late 1780s and early 1790s the need to avoid being seen as perverse spectators inclined the real daughters of Albion to write veiled representations of rape. For example, Yearsley writes that she shall ‘teach sad Philomel a louder note, / When nature swells her woe’ (1788, 4). In writing about Philomela, Yearsley cites an Ovidian legend of capture, enslavement, rape and silencing, and explicitly offers to give the victim a voice, even a loud voice – reminiscent of the wonderfully vocal Oothoon (whereas elsewhere in abolition poetry, rape victims keep their mouths shut10 ). Philomela, of course, became a nightingale after her rape. Blake may have been remembering this when he had Oothoon say – right when she begins to feel positive about her sexuality again – ‘the nightingale has done lamenting’ (2:24, E47). By setting up, within a book about sex and slavery, the daughters of Albion as spectators – ‘trembling’ spectators who never stop sighing as they repeat their message of sympathy – Blake was tapping into and exploring a cultural discomfort with feminine, voyeuristic ways of reading and writing about slavery. Visions is well known as a text that reflects upon voyeurism, containing a visual and verbal proliferation of eyes, particularly the eye-shaped sun in the frontispiece (BA 11). This is brilliantly expounded by Thomas Vogler, who links it to a predominantly masculine gaze (1987, 280–8). But actually,



slave burnt to death as punishment. He is chained and pleading, like Oothoon:

Blake’s frontispiece with its giant eye surely interacts with its companion title-page, which as we know weds ‘Visions’ to ‘the Daughters of Albion’, and thus invites us to imagine active female voyeurs. By the end of Visions, the spectacle takes its toll on the spectators – as well as on the reader, perhaps – note the daughters’ haggard, watching faces by the end of the narrative (BA 9, 10). It is an ambivalent situation that Blake faces with characteristic courage. He avoids the easy deflection of voyeurism in some abolition poetry onto brutish, male overseers, who were an easier target for abolitionists than their socially elevated employers, or than the reader. For example, Yearsley describes an ex-convict overseer who ‘feeds, with gross delight, / Upon [the slave’s] suff’rings’ (1788, 17). Blake’s daughters of Albion ‘eccho back’ to Oothoon across the Atlantic; similarly, poets like the conservative Hannah More conceived of abolition as a transatlantic echo from coast to coast, imagining the day when ‘Astonish’d echo tells the vocal shore / Oppression’s fall’n, and Slavery is no more!’ (1788, 20). I have been exploring how Visions becomes an ‘eccho’ of the abolitionist ‘echo’ in its lurid and political representations of suffering. Visions is not an abolitionist text as such – if written for campaigning purposes, it could never have gone so far or been so open in its troubling exploration of sexuality and slavery. Blake gives the daughters visions that, for the real abolition writers, would have damaged their cause. In the next section I will demonstrate just how far Blake was prepared to go.

Storms rent Theotormon’s limbs A foundational achievement of queer studies has been its argument against the social compulsion of particular objects of desire or ways of desiring. And yet, countless critics have blamed Theotormon, not only for lacking Oothoon’s unique, heroic optimism, but also for impotency and for saying no to sex.11 Doubtless, being enslaved and having one’s beloved raped by the slave-holder, then being humiliated by the rapist – ‘Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot’ (2:1, E46) – is sufficiently horrible to warrant any reaction including Theotormon’s sense of being ‘o’erflowd with woe’ (3:22, E47), his silence and withdrawal and jealousy. Furthermore, Theotormon’s injured pride and passivity is characteristic of male slaves in abolition texts. Like him, Knipe’s hero Atomboka, for example, is in ‘silent woe’, while her heroine is more vocal, and like Oothoon, ‘indulg’d the keener transports of despair’ (1788, 57–8). Granted, if we accept that Theotormon is sexually unresponsive solely because he believes Oothoon is ‘defil’d’, as the heroine herself and many critics interpret it, this would be unattractive behaviour. But there is more to it. In Visions, mindful of the eroticized male-on-male violence he had helped reproduce in the illustrations to Stedman’s Narrative (Wood 2002, 87–140), Blake drastically extends this. Having raped a female slave, the slave-owner




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Bromion rent her with his thunders (1:16, E46) ... Then storms rent Theotormons limbs (2:3, E46) Right after hearing about Theotormon’s ‘limbs’ we are told that ‘he rolld his waves around’ (2:3, E46), recalling the description of Oothoon’s ‘writhing’ limbs. Mark Anderson has noted the similarity of these lines, concluding Theotormon was ‘raped mentally as Oothoon has been physically’ (1984, 6; my emphasis). But Blake’s language suggests violence to the body – ‘rent’ and ‘limbs’ – discouraging Anderson’s unexplained interpretation of ‘mental’ rape. If there is a second rape, then it must be physical. At the very least, this is assault rendered extraordinarily sexual by its uncanny similarity to Oothoon’s rape. While her rape is – horrifically – socially acceptable, the sexual abuse of Theotormon is of necessity veiled. Hence his ‘secret tears’ that follow close on, and all his subsequent silence, depression and humiliation. If the line quoted above with its stormy rending describes Theotormon’s rape, as the line with the thundery rending describes Oothoon’s, this may explain the heroine’s reaction to her lover’s rejections. She tries to be patient but also wants to ignore sorrow and enter a new chapter of their (sex) lives – bidding Theotormon ‘arise’ (2:23, 28, E47) in more ways than one. In fact, her mingling of sympathy and desire for Theotormon is a bizarre echo of the daughters’ libidinized sympathy for her. While, in a rare speech, Theotormon describes his suffering in terms of ‘woe’, ‘affliction’ and a ‘night of pain’ (3:22–4:9, E47–8), Oothoon chooses a more sexualized language, describing his ‘night of sighs’ (2:38, E47). Theotormon’s doubling of Oothoon’s role as sexual victim is also conveyed visually. In a pair of illustrations with backgrounds entirely formed of sky and clouds, first Oothoon then Theotormon engage in masochistic behaviour (BA 5, 8). Oothoon asks eagles to tear her flesh; the illustration of her arching body about to be penetrated by the eagle’s beak, of course, alludes to her rape. Moreover, Blake’s allusion to the Prometheus myth here means that although the body being penetrated is female, we cannot look without remembering the phallic beak pecking at Prometheus, who was perhaps art history’s best known male victim of violent, sexualized penetration. In the other illustration, Theotormon flagellates himself. In my view it is hard to explain his behaviour as a result of jealousy alone. Laura Haigwood was so uncertain about this she claimed Theotormon was beating Oothoon (1985, 85), but the position of his hand makes it clear this is not so. Understood as a libidinized masochism echoing Oothoon’s initial response



turns to sexually assault her male partner. It can be no accident that the language critics have always interpreted as narrating Oothoon’s rape is closely echoed in the description that immediately follows, about Theotormon:

to her rape, and portraying Theotormon’s shame at unutterable sexual abuse, this picture becomes more powerful and believable. Oothoon hides her face and won’t watch. Is she overcome with sympathy for Theotormon, or is she refusing to look or to acknowledge what has happened to him? I argued above that Theotormon, like Oothoon, has a queerly overdetermined race, shifting between black and white. It is also striking that his role in the narrative cannot be pinned down but shifts between that of jealous patriarchal lover and vulnerable, sexual victim. This gives a more layered meaning to many passages – such as when Oothoon insists she ‘reflects’ Theotormon’s purity. She reassures him not only that she is still pure, but that he is. Or perhaps she is being more assertive, insisting that if her purity is compromised, his is too. After all, she ‘reflects’ him at the very moment when she is being bloodily penetrated by the eagles (2:17–18, E46). Further on she confronts him with an ambiguous mingling of purity and decay, asking: ‘How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure? / Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul prey’d on by woe’ (3:16–17, E47). This comment makes him break his silence with a bitter speech. Theotormon’s sole speech is short and abstract, supporting the idea that whatever he has suffered is unspeakable. He comments obliquely that no ‘comforts’ have alleviated his ‘night of pain’, and he sounds nostalgic for lost (sexual) pleasure: ‘Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves? / And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past?’ (4:4–5, E48). Immediately on hearing this speech, Bromion ‘shook the cavern with his lamentation’ (4:12, E48). It is a surprising reaction – does Bromion feel rejected by Theotormon’s ‘despair’? Bromion then explains his own philosophy, apparently addressing Theotormon: ‘Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit’ (4:13, E48). Vogler has convincingly connected this line to a voyeuristic heterosexual Greek myth (1987, 361–2 n.31). With ‘Thou knowest . . . ’, Bromion establishes Theotormon’s and the reader’s knowledge of an ‘ancient’ narrative of pleasure, the word ancient linking back to Theotormon’s ‘ancient loves’. Bromion then continues, insisting that other sources of pleasure – ancient and otherwise, presumably – may be found if one opens one’s ‘eyes’ to them: But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? . . . In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown (4:14–15, 17–18; E48) In this speech, a wistful tentative address – ‘But knowest thou . . . ’ – introduces these mysterious, different ‘fruits’ that can ‘gratify senses unknown’: this surely alludes to a less conventional sexuality. Bromion creates a direct




Queer Blake

link between his sensual quest and his status as a ‘voyager’ ‘over . . . seas’; he tries to justify his brutal imperialism through his desire for unorthodox sexuality. Additionally, supposing Theotormon’s rape to have involved his first experience of anal penetration, Bromion’s delight in ‘places yet unvisited by the voyager’ conceives Theotormon’s body in terms of an exotic, sexual geography, just like Oothoon’s was: a repetition through which Blake transforms the conventional image of imperialism from a tired trope of heterosexual conquest, to a queer and challenging vision of omnisexual abuse.12 Still, typically for Blake, even when portraying a horrific rapist and slaver, his characterization, whilst never a defence, is more like an uncomfortable embrace than a beating.

‘Love! Love! Love!’ There are clear parallels between the daughters of Albion’s libidinous sympathy and Bromion’s queer imperialism, both of which seem driven by an orientalizing thirst for exotic objects and experiences. Since the title sets the daughters up as spectators of the entire narrative – and there was a common prejudice in abolition discourse that ‘in torturing the fair excel’ (Marjoribanks 1792, 17) – we may also suspect the daughters of relishing the spectacle of the male-on-male sexual abuse Bromion inflicts on Theotormon. Indeed, this seems an intriguing pre-echo of today’s popular perception that women of diverse sexualities enjoy hard-core gay male porn (Taormino 2008). For many decades in the twentieth century, readers saw Visions as a neat heterosexual tug-of-war in which Oothoon was desired and rejected by Bromion and Theotormon respectively. In this chapter I have sought to contribute to recent readings that track different lines of desire in the book, and have explored the unequal, criss-crossing desires between Oothoon and the daughters, and Bromion and Theotormon. Instead of focusing on Oothoon and whether she enjoys her rape, I have asked a different question: do the watching daughters enjoy it? Rather than attributing Theotormon’s silence to weakness or a lack of compassion, I have interpreted his inarticulateness as a sign of something that was literally unspeakable in abolition literature at this time, analysing Visions’ language to find another, male-on-male rape. The overdetermined Oothoon has not been my focus, but I hope she comes out in my reading as a rather odd character: simultaneously a heterosexual heroine, a queer vision fantasized by the daughters and a white woman sliding into a black woman. Much remains to be discovered about the curious moments of interface between queer desire and queer race in Visions. I want to end by highlighting one of these moments: Oothoon’s famous declaration, ‘I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!’ (7:16, E50). The first words, ‘I cry’, make this selfconsciously an utterance. Oothoon is perhaps mimicking or performing a



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freedom to desire that is actually enacted by the queer white rapist Bromion (and to a lesser extent by the deviantly sympathetic authorial daughters). We may be facing a classic moment when, to borrow Philip Holden’s words, ‘Bhabha’s notion of mimicry is hauntingly similar to Butler’s concept of performativity’ (Holden and Ruppel 2003, 303). Seen alongside her relation to Bromion and the daughters, Oothoon’s cry for free love starts to take on a queerly raced irony – and perhaps, an irony that is uttered with a queerly straight face. If Visions’ line about free love is an instance of Blake making Oothoon the mouthpiece of his own desires (Mellor 1995, 366–7), then she is in a kind of compulsory drag, and is also dressed up to play the part of her white, nominally ‘free’ oppressors. But nor does Blake allow us to forget that the daughters themselves are ‘enslav’d’, and in the frontispiece even Bromion is in chains. In Visions, freedom, and sexual freedom in particular, is always only relative.

Notes I would like to express my thanks to Helen Bruder, Tristanne Connolly, Sarah Jackson and Marcus Wood for their invaluable suggestions and comments, and to the responsive audience of the ‘Blake at 250’ Conference at the University of York. 1. See Bruder (1997, 55–89) for a positive feminist reading of Visions in the context of late eighteenth-century sexuality and politics; for Visions’ engagement with Atlantic slavery alongside its gender politics, see especially Goslee (1990), Vine (1994) and Mellor (1995). The most famous eighteenth-century writer to exploit the wife/slave parallel was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose influence on Blake is discussed by all the aforementioned critics. 2. See also Nowell Marshall, who reads a ‘homosocial triangle’ in Visions (2006, 178). 3. The daughters of Albion have also been interpreted as textile workers (Erdman 1952, 243: Makdisi 2003, 93). This is problematic because it requires reading backwards from The Four Zoas and Jerusalem rather than looking at evidence in Visions itself. 4. For convenience I refer to reproductions of Visions copy A in The William Blake Archive http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copy.xq?copyid=vda.a& java=yes, with numbers referring to the website’s object number. 5. Eaves, Essick and Viscomi note that the visual landscapes of Visions are influenced by Macpherson’s Oithona (Blake 1993, 229) but abolition poetry is clearly another strong influence. See also Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the African Slave Trade: ‘When the sun’s beams at noon should sidelong gild / The cave’s wide entrance’ (1788, 10). 6. Some maintain Oothoon’s whiteness (Damon 1988, 438) while others are convinced that ‘Oothoon’s colours align her more with Europe’s darker sisters, Africa and America’ (Vine 1994, 58). Theotormon’s skin colour is equally hard to pin down: for a balanced view, see Goslee (1990, 108–11). Much criticism has used Visions’ colourful muddle as a crucial interpretative tool. For example, Marcus Wood suggests that, by putting white figures in a position of black enslavement, Blake ‘brings the effects of slave rape into the psychological domain of a white English couple’ (2002, 183).




Queer Blake

7. See illustration Gradation of Shades between Europe and Africa (Stedman 1796, 2: facing 98). 8. This abolition rhetoric is most marked in the well-known sentimental images Am I not a Man and a Brother? and Am I not a Woman and a Sister? See also Harriet and Maria Falconar’s Poems on Slavery (1788) in which they market themselves as anti-slavery sisters. 9. For the erotics of slave torture in humanitarian and abolitionist contexts, see Wood (2007), Klarer (2005) and Young (2008). 10. Male poet Jamieson describes an enslaved rape survivor who opens her mouth to call on her distant lover then stops herself, ‘Remembering the foul stain, that marks her out / As pure Love’s antidote’ (1789, 44). 11. Vogler eloquently summarizes some opinions of Theotormon’s detractors (1987, 271, 303). More recently, see Bruder (1997, 76, 77), Cox (1980, 75), Wright (2007, 86). 12. My thanks to Tristanne Connolly for the interpretation of ‘places yet unvisited by the voyager’, and to Helen Bruder for describing Bromion as an omnisexual abuser.



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‘The lineaments of . . . desire’: Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Romantic Literary Treatments of Rape Caroline Jackson-Houlston

Is there any hope for a feminist reading of Visions of the Daughters of Albion with, rather than against, the grain of Blake’s text? Its heroine offers to give pleasure to her lover through the entrapment of other women for sexual gratification. Many readers experience a sense of visceral revulsion at Oothoon’s complicity here with the gender ideology that has victimized and frustrated her.1 Without attempting to denigrate or deny such a reaction, this chapter addresses the degree of Oothoon’s (and Blake’s) capitulation to that ideology, by focusing on the heroine’s rape as crucial in both literal and symbolic ways to an evaluation of the poem. I argue that female sexuality, whether autoerotic or lesbian, is represented positively in this early work. It is not, as suggested by Christopher Hobson (2000, 29–30), just as a pis-aller or anticipation of heterosexual behaviour, though Oothoon’s primary sexual orientation is and continues to be heterosexual. While the ‘Argument’ is devoted to Oothoon’s sexual choice and rape, the first plate of the poem proper offers a different focus: the plural, anonymous, daughters of Albion, and slavery. ‘ENSLAV’D’ is the first word (1:1, E45). Although mention of ‘America’ (1:2, 3, E45) implies a more nakedly economic context, that of actual slavery, the lack of any such reference in the ‘Argument’ (iii, E45) makes us read the term in a more general sense of psychological imprisonment. However, Blake’s text is anchored in the consciousness that the fate of the mythological Oothoon is replicated in the experience of real women subjected to the most extreme forms of sexual and economic possession. The cause of Oothoon’s initial woe is indefinite, but resembles that of the timid virgin Thel, for whom death becomes increasingly a metaphor for sexual experience and the irrevocable breaking of the hymen (‘a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire’, BT 6:20, E6). A similar but much slighter anxiety appears in Oothoon’s response to the Marygold, ‘I dare not 153



10

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pluck thee from thy dewy bed’ (1:7, E46) but this anxiety is removed by the Marygold’s complete lack of concern for any putative loss because delight is immortal and inexhaustible. It is important to notice that it is Oothoon doing the plucking here, though only at the invitation of the Marygold. The picking of a flower has become a culturally archetypal metaphor for the initiation of sexual experience. What is less often emphasized is the gender imbalance in the use of this metaphor, the term ‘deflower’ carrying connotations of boastful male violence. Where the woman initiates the action (plucking rather than being passively plucked) the sense is much more positive (even if the results of her sexual exploration are unhappy) because she moves from object to subject, and asserts her right to initiate sexual encounters. Thus, in this encounter, Oothoon is figured as active sexual agent, but without the negative connotations applied to masculine agency because of the Marygold’s active invitation. This metaphor would work whatever flower was chosen, but the ‘Mary’ addition to the older name for the flower (Gold) is associated with the Virgin Mary (Hunt 1989, 60–1, 139, 242; Prior 1863, 145). This provides an implicit endorsement of Oothoon’s choice as not incompatible with the virtue of one who at the most important moment of her sexual career ‘kn[e]w not a man’ (Luke 1:34). Without suggesting that Blake is turning Christian orthodoxy so far on its head as to present the Virgin Mary as a lesbian, it is worth pointing out that Blake’s suspicion of virginity as rooted in repression and self-denial is not an absolute. His ‘Merlin’s Prophecy’ (E473), often taken to be a simple impossibility, is better read indirectly, in reverse. Thus, ‘When two virginities meet together’ is not an impossibility but something that produces a miraculous fruition (‘The harvest shall flourish in wintry weather’). Lines 3–4 make it clear that Blake sees the current repression of sensual potential as socially constructed, and therefore reversible. ‘The king and the priest must be tied in a tether / Before two virgins can meet together.’ Virginity, not as an irreversible singularity maintained by repression, but as a cornucopia of ever-fresh delight in life and its possibilities, is a positive term for him. This encounter between Oothoon and the nymph of the Marygold implies, though it is not limited to, a consensual and co-sensual enjoyment of sexuality between two female figures. There has been debate about the sex of the small figure on Plate iii whose hand Oothoon appears to be guiding to her breast and whose lips she is about to kiss.2 However, one would have to contradict the ‘she’ of the text to see this as male, and ‘nymph’ is only applied to female beings.3 It is a rear view, but the bodily proportions and fullness of the thighs suggest an adult female. I read the episode as an actual, if mythologized, encounter with an entity both other than the self (represented as non-human) and similar to the self (female), and thus lesbian, rather than as a psychomachia dramatizing auto-eroticism, as Helen Bruder does. I agree with her on its importance and see it as entirely positive, unlike Wes Chapman (Bruder 1997, 75–6; Chapman 1997, 11).



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Apart from the physicality of the image on the plate and the metaphor, the repeated word ‘bed’ here, though literally a flower-bed, strongly implies a customary site of sexual activity, its primary meaning only a few lines later in Bromion’s bed (1:16, E46). While his is ‘stormy’, the Marygold’s is pleasantly ‘dewy’, which also has positive sexual undertones. The Marygold’s assent to being plucked – indeed, her use of an imperative to signal that assent – contradicts any negative implications of victimization. Moreover, the visual separability of nymph from flower outweighs any sense of threat to her existence. It also allows for the depiction of a tender, fulfilling relationship unparalleled anywhere else in the text. The closure of her ‘golden shrine’ is both the folding of the petals in sleep (marigolds close up at night) and a suggestion that women’s genitals are holy. This shrine can presumably be re-opened at will and is not in danger, unlike that in the central image of the contemporaneous Notebook poem ‘I saw a chapel all of gold’, where the ‘golden hinges’ of the door are forced by a loathsome phallic serpent, an action that so disgusts the visionary that he rejects his own humanity and lies down with the swine (E467). Tristanne Connolly points out a tendency in writers from Juvenal to Cleland to regard physical displays of lesbian love as merely a kind of foreplay only fulfilled by heterosexual intercourse (2002, 215–16). The narrative of Blake’s poem denies this. Yes, Oothoon is basically heterosexual; her ‘whole soul seeks’ Theortormon in ‘wing’d exulting swift delight’ (1:13–14, E46). This is not all anticipatory, though, since she bears with her between her breasts a souvenir of the ‘soul of sweet delight’, the knowledge of the inexhaustible springs of pleasure to which the Marygold has opened her eyes. However, her goal of union with Theotormon is never achieved; rather, it is permanently deferred by her rape by Bromion, when he ‘rent her with his thunders’ (1:16, E46). This rape is not itself the climax of a pornographic series of encounters but a symbolically extreme realization of Oothoon’s ‘virgin fears’ (iii:3, E45). Bruder attributes these to concern over how her sexual assertiveness will be viewed (1997, 74). Given Oothoon’s cogent later critique of the doctrine of modesty, this is clearly plausible. However, I would prefer to separate the notion of shame from that of fear here; Oothoon is never ashamed of her sexuality but she is anxious about how her impulses will be physically consummated. Sexual mythology today presents female sexual initiation as physically unproblematic, the hymen as so fragile and ephemeral that it is frequently lost by moderate physical exercise before sex is even contemplated, and adult virginity as psychologically undesirable (for example, Delvin 1974, 53–8). Some of this is overcompensation for the alarmism of earlier periods which undoubtedly operated to police female sexuality. In Blake’s day, the hymen was widely regarded as such a substantial barrier that its breach involved considerable pain for the woman and effort on the part of the man.4 Several writers urge a comparison between Visions of the Daughters of Albion and



Blake and Romantic Literary Treatments of Rape 155

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John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure5 but do not focus on the implications of the act of penetration of Fanny by her much-desired lover: Charles puts her to ‘intolerable pain’ and subjects her to ‘fierce tearing and rending’ (Cleland 1985, 41; my italics). Because Charles meets Fanny in a brothel, he initially assumes that she is already sexually experienced and that therefore no foreplay is necessary. Thus, the intended seduction of an only semi-mature girl has the physical features of an act of rape, and there is an assumption that ‘normal’ sexuality is nasty, brutish and short, however great the mythologized delights of orgasm. Of course, sadistic impulses are at work in the text here, and the difficulty of the task is exaggerated in order to magnify the status of the phallus. Nevertheless, the basic assumptions are endorsed by those found in Romantic-period rape cases, such as the 1817 Ashford/Thornton murder trial, where ‘the surgeon called in to examine her corpse testified that the lacerations around her genitals were compatible with normal intercourse with a virgin’ (Porter 1986, 226).6 Thus, evidence that could be crucial in the determination of what was, until 1840, a capital crime could be officially treated as part of normal sexual relations. Within this sort of ideological context, ‘virgin fears’ could have a solid basis in anxieties about physical rather than social experience. Oothoon is undeterred by her first taste of sex; indeed, her experience with the Marygold is reassuring. Nothing that follows shows any sign of privileging heterosexuality, for the terms of her rape are then reinscribed in the image of Theotormon’s eagle rending Oothoon’s flesh (2:14–17, E46). The wider function of heterosex, as far as this poem is concerned, is as an instrument of violent colonial domination and possession, as Bromion boasts. He is also aware that fear leads its victims to internalize their own oppression, ‘worship terrors and obey the violent’ (1:23, E46). Theotormon himself is also a victim of a repressive sexual ideology, and like Oothoon is ‘rent’ by a stormy force (2:3, E46), but his reaction is to replicate Bromion’s strategies of violence and restraint. The fact that Bromion is ‘appalled’ by the woes he has caused Oothoon suggests a certain self-justifying knowingness in his application of the vocabulary of sexual condemnation in calling her a ‘harlot’ (1:17–18, E46). If Bromion is not just boasting to increase Theotormon’s distress, and Oothoon is pregnant, this could confirm the notion of her assent to sex with Bromion, for it was widely believed that orgasm was necessary to conception, and that pregnancy therefore must represent consent (Quaife 1979, 172–3; Clark 1987, 153). There is no space here fully to discuss Oothoon’s reactions in the long speech that forms nearly half the poem. However, two things are particularly significant for this argument. First, she reasserts her claim to the positive status of Blake’s ambivalent term ‘virgin’. That is, not the subtle, ‘modest’ dissembler, but the subject open to all kinds of experience (‘virgin bliss’, 6:6, 10, E49). As Stevenson puts it, ‘virginity is innocence, not abstinence’ (Blake 2007, 190). This experience is relational, not just consumptive, hence the



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metaphor of ‘happy copulation’, of enjoyment ‘wherever beauty appears’ (6:22–7:1, E50). It is this lack of outward relationship that causes Blake, using Oothoon’s voice, to condemn masturbation. However, what the text tells us here is that female masturbation is definitely more fun. The boy is ‘shut up from the lustful joy’ but the virgin female, even if she ‘pines for man’ manages to ‘awaken her womb to enormous joys’ (7:3–7, E50). In order to consider Oothoon’s reactions to her rape, it is worth examining what rape might mean in terms of post-Richardsonian eighteenth-century and Romantic discourse. ‘Rape’ (originally the forcible seizure of goods and of women in so far as they constituted property) is only one of many terms used to describe an offence of violence against women at this period. Terms like ‘ravish’, ‘violate’, ‘outrage’ and ‘ill-use’ were commonly used (Clark 1987, 18, 29–30, 64), and these can be arranged along a sliding scale of specificity, allowing for an increasingly disparate receptive understanding. Blake’s representation here of male sexual violence and its effects can be compared favourably with other literary treatments of rape from the mideighteenth century through the Romantic period. The threat of rape is itself the key narrative trope of romance, a genre prominent in Romantic verse and prose, but this threat is usually dissipated or displaced, at least with regard to the heroine. Where it does occur, conventional mechanisms are usually brought into play to contain it. The assumptions behind Blake’s/the text’s views of women have been demonstrated to have much in common with those behind eighteenth-century pornography. Nevertheless, the text of Visions clearly lacks the lubricious concentration on physical violation found in writers like Cleland, or Matthew Lewis in The Monk (1796), where much of the effect is due to the extent of that concentration and its repetition of asymptotic anticipations of the final climax. More respectable writers excise or obfuscate the act, creating a gap where absence speaks more than presence (Macherey 1978, 82–93). If they focus on the consequences for the victim, this reinscribes the initial sexist assumptions. As a supposedly experiencing subject, she is reduced to a mere object lesson, her consciousness bounded by the recognition and acceptance of the shame of her situation, even though this is ultimately based on the loss of her commodity value as a medium of property exchange rather than on moral fault. This shame can only be expunged by the victim’s death as scapegoat, or partially assuaged by her transfer to the possession of her aggressor. Alternatively, the consequences are denied altogether. What does not happen is that the woman continues as an experiencing, self-assertive subject. Popular ballads of Blake’s day tend to focus strongly on the issue of consent. There are even formulas for representing it, such as ‘speer’d at her sma’ leave’ or ‘right sair against my will’.7 On the other hand, although there are a few ballads where the heroine successfully resists rape, once it is achieved, she is often represented as experiencing a transfer of affection to her rapist, and ‘happy endings’ can be achieved by regaining her partner




Queer Blake

(‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’) and tragic ones by failure to do so (‘The Lass of Lochroyan’). The rape trope probably reflects collusive kidnapping as a function of a desire for exogamy and/or social advancement (in its positive aspect, the ‘Young Lochinvar’ theme). In Voltaire’s Candide (1759) women are raped as often and with as little effect as cartoon characters are run over; they just bounce back again, and Voltaire mocks on. A more attractive Enlightenment novelist of the 1780s and 1790s, Robert Bage, has a heroine’s Persian/Jewish mother gang-raped by Sepoys in Mount Henneth (1782). Caralia anticipates difficulties in marrying her rescuer – but from the point of view of his social milieu, not the prejudices of her own culture or her own psychological trauma. Her anxieties are formed by reading British novels, where ‘no author has yet been so bold as to permit a lady to live and marry, and be a woman after this stain’ (1:221). It is necessary for this question to be raised so that the difficulties can be exploded by a rationalist discussion dissociating books and life: ‘Is there upon earth a man so absurd, as to associate the idea of dishonour to thy sufferings?’ (1:221). Sympathetic as this is, since Bage assumes that the rape does not preclude a happy marriage or give any obscure genetic taint to his heroine, the novel immediately loses sight of this woman and any actual consequences by shifting the narrative attention to the next generation. Macpherson’s Ossianic heroine Oithóna, a key source for Blake’s poem (Blake 2007, 179), is apparently but not explicitly raped by Dunrommath; she is unable to be specific, telling her lover Gaul, ‘he took me in my grief’ (Macpherson 1996, 184). She first appears to the reader via a proleptic vision in which she is already mortally wounded. She is reluctant to welcome her lover because of her ‘fallen fame’ and when she attempts a warrior role her sex disqualifies her: ‘What could I do? My arm was weak; it could not lift the spear’ (ibid.) She acts less in hope of emulating and retaliating the male violence to which she has been subjected than ‘in search of death’ because she is a source of dishonour to her family (‘my father shall blush in his hall’, 186). What matters is not her own freedom to choose, or even the effect on her relationship with Gaul, but the value her virginity has for its patriarchal sponsor. At the other, even prissier, end of the Romantic period, Walter Scott chooses to depict a woman who does seek violent revenge, Helen MacGregor in Rob Roy (1818; Scott’s editorial matter, 1901, 1829–30). Helen’s political rape is the ultimate source of much of the plot action. Yet rape itself is not named; even the topic is avoided, and displaced to the later notes on Rob Roy’s sons, who figure in traditional ballads of forced abduction. David Punter claims that Helen MacGregor is ‘the subtext of whom no questions . . . may be asked’ (1993, 8) but in fact the text nudges readers all the time to ask, ‘What happened to you, then?’ Rob Roy hints that she has ‘deep wrongs to avenge’; Bailie Jarvie would have taken a cutlass to any one who had treated a woman ‘as it’s like they guided Rob’s wife’ (Scott



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1901, 492, 358). The introduction tells us that ‘it is to be hoped that the story sometimes told is a popular exaggeration’ – but it is not told here; all Scott is prepared to say is that ‘the legal satellites . . . insulted MacGregor’s wife, in a manner which would have aroused a milder man than he to thoughts of unbounded vengeance’ (Scott 1901, xlvi). Of the real woman, Mary Macgregor, we know little, though a contemporary account in 1818 also leaves a spectacular gap in the text by saying she was treated ‘in a manner too shocking to be related’ (Macleay 1818, 175–6). Scott’s Helen accuses the redcoats, ‘ye have left me neither name nor fame’ (1901, 429). From all this evasion, we can only assume that the word that fills the gap is ‘raped’. Helen, then, is a victim of male control manifested as sexual violence. Rather than displacing action onto her husband, her vengeance is to assume a supposedly masculine role as the perpetrator of violence. Like Blake, Elizabeth Hands came from a broadly lower-class background with limited educational opportunities.8 Her Death of Amnon is a revisionary account of the rape of King David’s daughter Tamar. Hands is acutely aware that rape is ‘a delicate theme for a female’, since women, who are the objects of rape, are socially forbidden to write about it as a subjective experience.9 Hands establishes her cultural credentials in this long biblical poem, condemned by Donna Landry for timid revisionism. While I would agree that The Death of Amnon offers ‘a critique of patriarchal ideology – and the means of that discourse’s recontainment within patriarchal ideology’ (Landry 1990, 41), it seems unfair to argue that Hands ‘shift[s] emphasis from the woman’s victimization’ (40), since Hands concentrates more on Tamar’s experience than do either the original or eighteenth-century biblical commentators, including Alexander Geddes, who was associated, like Blake, with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Geddes in 1792 remarks only on the difficulty of obtaining access to virgins in the East.10 William Dodd’s 1770 commentary focuses on the definitions of incest at the time of David, and on the problems David brought upon himself through his sexual irregularities. He approves Tamar’s ‘housewifely skill’ in preparing a meal for Amnon and speculates that she remained desolate ‘her whole life long, unmarried and undone’ and that the rape made her ‘miserable to the last moment of her life’ (2 Samuel:13 n.) Hands’s version is at least more positive than this. She creates a voice for Tamar in a first-person reflection of twenty-six lines on the social meaning of the rape: tho’ by the dignity of birth Protected from low insult, can I ’scape The meaning leer, the vain contemptuous smile, Or the more humbling pity of the proud? (Hands 1789, 27)




Queer Blake

This demonstrates quite a recognizable sense of patriarchal culture blaming and condescending to the victim. She reduces the biblical emphasis on Tamar’s talents as a housewife to one line. The Bible implies some acceptance by Tamar of Amnon’s sexual intentions, both before and after the act. After the rape, Amnon rejects her and she rebukes him: ‘there is no cause: this evil in sending me away is greater than the other that thou didst unto me’ (2 Samuel 13:16). Her brother Absalom initially advises Tamar, ‘regard not this thing’, as Amnon is also her brother (2 Samuel 13:20). Hands cuts all this. For her, the rape of Tamar is unequivocally criminal in two senses, as both incest and rape, as her Amnon makes abundantly clear from the beginning (1-2). After her rape – which is undescribed – Tamar finds a refuge with Absalom, a far more sympathetic figure in Hands, as he devotes himself to her care. However, modern readers are rightly suspicious of Tamar’s complete acceptance that she is defiled in honour, if not morally, by the rape (Landry 1990, 41; Todd 1984, 150). This appears to be the narrator’s view as well, and certainly shows Hands’s internalization of the high value placed on woman’s chastity by patriarchal thought; the text does not challenge the ideology of shame expressed by her heroine further than to allow her a subdued happy ending. We have examined a variety of literary contexts for Visions of the Daughters of Albion: traditional ballads, eighteenth-century pornography and satirical fable; realist fiction from both ends of the Romantic period; a mythologized poetic romance that was a source for the poem; and an epic-style revisionist biblical poem by a labouring-class woman. If we set Blake against these, we could note that he neither dwells pruriently on rape, nor does he leave it as a significant lacuna. He too fails actually to name the act of rape, neither does he recognize the significant fact that ‘most rape victims view rape as a life-threatening experience’ (Kilpatrick et al. 1979, 676). Nevertheless, he emphasizes, through the repeated use of the word ‘rent’, the violation of the body that seems inescapable in penetrative heterosexual intercourse as represented in Visions. Oothoon becomes neither vengeful nor suicidal. She could be seen as turning her experience of violence upon herself, as a victimstrategy to placate the beloved (or her aggressor) by replicating his fantasies of female submission. It is arguable that Blake not only dramatizes these lamentable psychological consequences but also intends the reader to recognize and condemn them, though modern critical consensus is not inclined to let him off so easily. But she refuses to submit to the ‘victim self-blaming’ which is a common aftermath, and, indeed, responds in a way consonant with a modern psychological study suggesting that those who have a firmer commitment to the idea of a ‘ “Just World” ’ ‘tend to show . . . more positive self-evaluation’ (Libow and Doty 1979, 676). Oothoon neither renounces her claim to sexual gratification in favour of celibacy in sexual retirement nor accepts intellectually the debilitating consequences of the ideology of



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modesty, against which she continues to rail. Nor is she silenced by the closure of the narrative. However much we may continue to deplore Oothoon’s proposal to entrap fellow women, we should concede that Blake recognizes and problematizes the relations between illegitimate and legitimate heterosexual intercourse. It is not my intention to champion an extreme view that all men are potential rapists; only to argue that, under the possessive patriarchal ideologies dominant in Blake’s day (where rape was nonetheless seen as a serious crime), aggressive male behaviours in sexual intercourse were more normalized than would be acceptable today. In this poem, Blake deplores such behaviour, and represents positively forms of female sexuality that do not involve penile penetration. The Daughters of Albion recognize Oothoon’s woes and see her victimization as their own. What they don’t see is that neither the command ‘arise’ nor the optimistic existential statement that ‘everything that lives is holy’ (8:9–10, E51) could conceivably be described as a wail.11 In other words, Oothoon needs a further audience beyond what the poem can provide within its own boundaries, and she retains at least the potential for enlightening positivism displayed at the beginning, in spite of, and not because of, her negative experience of heterosexual attitudes. To answer my initial question: in so far as literary criticism is a political act, a reading of Visions of the Daughters of Albion from a feminist viewpoint will inevitably involve a combination of reading the poem both with and against the grain, or, perhaps, reading the text with the grain but Blake partially against it – but only partially, as we can see by comparing him with a range of his predecessors and contemporaries and giving him credit for addressing what they do not.

Notes 1. For a selection of comments antagonistic to Blake, see Aers et al. (1981, 38), Linkin (1990, 187), Matthews (2006, 84), and for some support of Oothoon’s position, Connolly (2002, 215), Hobson (2000, 34, 36) and, again, Linkin (1990, 189–90). 2. For arguments that it is male, see Webster (1987, 213). 3. As Helen Bruder points out, the term also denotes female genitals (1997, 75). Another surprising possible connection between marigolds and the female can be found in a midwifery treatise of 1694, which recommended sex for procreation during menstruation, when ‘the Blood of the courses . . . is . . . of a florid bright colour, and smelling like Marigolds’ (quoted in Erickson 1982, 81). 4. It is possible to find gynaecological and forensic views consonant with modern ones about the unimportance of the hymen, just as it is possible today to find widespread residual beliefs that rape victims were ‘asking for it’. See Boucé (1982, 33), John Gordon Smith (1821, 395–7). 5. Notably Bruder (1997, 63–4, 75), Connolly (2002, 215–16), Hobson (2000, 30–1). 6. See the Trial of Abraham Thornton. The surgeon, George Freer, argued that laceration of ‘the parts of generation’ and ‘an unusual quantity of blood’ could be compatible with the intercourse taking place by consent (1926, 98). Freer was




7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

Queer Blake somewhat less cautious at the inquest than at the trial. For discussion, see also Anna Clark (1987, 71, 113–16). The servant victim of a rape in 1793 complained because she ‘found [her]self very bad indeed’ but ‘thought it might be because [she] had never known any body before’ (The Cuckold’s Chronicle 1793, 1:290). The liberal-minded clergyman Robert Wallace (1697–1771) saw a bride’s resistances to her husband’s physical advances as culturally determined, especially if she had never ‘suffered the gentle, accidentall or lascivious touches of a sister or female bedfellow’ (quoted in Norah Smith 1973, 434–5). ‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’ and ‘The Lass of Lochroyan’, in Scott (1803, 3:282, 2:62). For variants, see nos. 217 and 76 in Child (2003). Hands worked as a servant and married a blacksmith (Todd 1984, 149–50). Hands, ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of the Book having been Published and Read’ (1789, 51). Geddes was a pioneering radical Roman Catholic (Cambridge History of the Bible 1963, 3, 172). Reference is to his (incomplete) new annotated translation The Holy Bible (Geddes 1792, 2, 120). Several critics note splits between the viewpoints of the Daughters, the narrator, the illustrations and the heroine (for example, Linkin 1990, 185–8; Chapman 1997, 10).



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‘Yet I am an identity / I wish & feel & weep & groan’: Blake’s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative Steve Clark

I One recurrent motif of the essays in Helen Bruder’s Women Reading William Blake (2007a) is the re-evaluation of sentimentalism. Blake’s verbal and conceptual indebtedness to the movement has been established as far back as the lexicographical studies of Josephine Miles (1957), with an intellectual genealogy economically sketched by Stephen Cox (1980). This has not prevented the routine identification of Blake’s poetry with masculinist prophetic and sublime modes (as Tilottama Rajan demonstrates) to be safeguarded at all costs from the contamination of a feminized sensibility. (One symptom is the reflex vilification of the much-maligned William Hayley.)1 Once this stark dichotomy is challenged, it becomes possible to situate Blake’s poetry within the milieu of female contemporaries, opening up tantalizing possibilities of more specific reciprocal influences, moving away from the separate-spheres model of gender in the period. Bruder persuasively argues for the undervaluation of the Gray designs because of their female addressee, Ann Flaxman, and their hospitality to a feminized domestic and consumerist sphere; Connolly analyses the lyric fluidity and erotic amorphousness common to the respective Poetical Sketches of Blake and Ann Batten Cristall; Labbe situates Blake’s depiction of female power and victimhood of the early 1790s in the context of responses to Marie Antoinette by Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith; Linkin adduces a series of possible contexts of interrelation between Blake and female contemporaries such as Cristall, Smith, Tighe, Hemans and Hooper; and Wright uses more general definitions of the sentimental subject to argue for generic continuity between Blake’s prophecies and the closet-dramas of Joanna Baillie. 163



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It has become clear that sentimentalism, which begins as a maleauthored elite philosophical discourse before migrating to a market-oriented, female-dominated idiom, at the very least remains an available option, and with a comparatively slight adjustment of perspective can be regarded as dominant throughout the period. This requires not so much the rediscovery of a female romantic tradition as the recategorization of a male sentimentalist one. What would it mean to take Charlotte Smith’s judgement seriously, and see Blake as a potential ‘competitor’ for Hayley’s patronage as sentimental writer rather than as firmly located within an antithetical sublime/prophetic tradition?2 Famously in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine (54–62, E491) Human emotion depends on or is trapped within the ‘silken twine’ of the nervous system as a ‘Clothing for the soul divine’. ‘Joy & Woe’ become presiding goddesses, which ‘Man’ has been ‘made for’, to be sacrificed as in ‘The Mental Traveller’, also from the Pickering Manuscript: And if the Babe is born a Boy He’s given to a Woman Old Who nails him down upon a rock Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold She binds iron thorns around his heart She pierces both his hands & feet She cuts his heart out at his side To make it feel both cold & heat Her fingers number every Nerve Just as a Miser counts his gold She lives upon his shrieks & cries And She grows young as he grows old (9–20, E484) The ‘Woman Old’ may be mother, midwife or nurse, but what she practises implies an orthodox enough physiology in its literal ‘anatomy’ (or vivisection (OED 1b)) of the ‘infant joy’ (FZ 4:31, E302).



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Blake’s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative 165

‘The Golden Net’ opens with a kind of stage direction:

(1–4, E483) The Virgins may be victims or furies, external goddesses or internal impulses, offering warning or temptation. As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator has already attempted and failed to flee (hence the whither/wither pun). ‘Cry’ could also imply hunt, scenting the prey; it is presumably not their own ‘tears [which] for ever flow’. Pitying I wept to see the woe That Love & Beauty undergo To be consumd in burning Fires And in ungratified Desires And in tears clothd Night & day Melted all my Soul away (11–16, E483) The ‘I’ may be taking pleasure in the spectacle of the ‘Virgins’ as representatives of ‘Love & Beauty’; or adopting a clinical detachment to his own fluctuating sensations, mediated through the ‘net’ and ‘branches fine’ of the nervous system. It is noteworthy that to ‘undergo’ a state of ‘ungratified Desires’ produces an orgasmic intensity greater than physical consummation (‘Melted all my Soul away’). The narrator seems simultaneously to possess and be possessed by these feelings, which the closing line – ‘O when will the morning rise’ (26) – seeks to re-enact and accentuate by looping back into ‘break of day’ in the first line. Here discussion of Blake and sentimentalism converges with the concern of recent queer theory with affectivity: feeling is not necessarily outwarddirected, but can be regarded as both a state and an act, continually transforming its original point of enunciation. What does this imply for the semantic cluster of cause, motive, intention, outcome, consequence? If regarded as a distinctive form of speech-act – in Sedgwick’s coinage, a periperformative – under what conditions should the expression of emotion be regarded as (in)felicitous?3 Jerome McGann in The Poetics of Sensibility (1996) offers an intellectual genealogy running from Locke on ‘thought and materiality’ through to Pope’s Essay on Man (‘All are but parts of one stupendous whole’ (Pope



Three Virgins at the break of day: Whither young Man whither away: Alas for woe! alas for woe! They cry & tears for ever flow

c Manchester City Galleries William Blake, Alexander Pope



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Figure 11.1

1964, I:267)), then becoming the dominant style of the second half of the eighteenth century (1–18).4 Joseph Warton’s classic evaluation, however, offers an alternative narrative centred on Eloisa to Abelard, which, ‘together with the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, is the only Instance of the Pathetic Pope has given us’, and as such likely to be the most durable testament to his ‘reputation . . . as a poet, among posterity . . . For Wit and Satire are transitory and perishable, but Nature and Passion are eternal’ (1756; 1974, 407). This judgement is endorsed by Blake’s illustration of Pope’s Head (Figure 11.1), originally commissioned for Hayley’s library at Turret House in Felpham, placing a sensitive and dignified depiction between the ghost of the Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa lamenting in her cell.5 McGann mentions Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard in passing (1996, 103), but pays no attention to its status as not only a founding text of sensibility, but also arguably as precedent for the entire Romantic movement.6 I wish to relate Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (see Fairer and Gerrard 2003, 133–41) to the opening dialogue between Tharmas and Enion in book 1 of The Four Zoas (4:6–8:2, E301–4); to look at its evolution into the Della Cruscan verse of the 1780s, clearly in the tradition of heroic epistle (though McGann himself does not make this connection); then see how this might alter readings of Blake’s Notebook and Pickering Manuscript. From this perspective, they may be regarded as his most mainstream and accessible texts. This challenges the deeply ingrained notion that the Blake canon should be primarily, even exclusively, defined by the Illuminated Books.7 Like The Four Zoas, these texts were unpublished, comparatively private-sphere, but highly self-conscious in their transformation of a sentimentalist idiom into an always potentially grotesque sexual identity. This is particularly vivid in the erotic and scatological marginalia to The Four Zoas; these should be understood not as illustration or pictorial equivalent, but, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, as the result of constitutive tensions within the sentimentalist idiom evident throughout Blake’s work.8

II A simple question: what is a Zoa? If one looks it up, it is a Greek plural (of zoon) used as an English singular, taken from the four beasts seen by John the Divine in the Book of Revelation 4–5 (see Damon 1988, 458–60). The poem can obviously be placed within a long tradition of psychomachia, yet no stable allegorical translation is possible: even Urizen embodies as much courage, hubris and penitence as your-reason. The protagonists seem less characters than patterns of interaction, mutually reciprocating pulsations of attraction and repulsion. Affectivity precedes knowing, and always implies a narrative of expectation and response capable of transforming the original impulse.9




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The initial scheme of faculty psychology becomes immediately difficult to maintain; all parties are aggressive, impulsive, prone to verbalization as a form of assault (in lament as much as threat). The sublime may appear to involve an intrinsic violence, as something done to someone, but pathos equally stakes a claim in declaring a relation, potentially entrapping even in its gestures of submission or abjection. Gender criticism has tended to fix on the apparent subordination of feminine to masculine principles, and it is easy enough to summarize the Zoa/Emanation relation as a hierarchical binary. However, this does not adequately account for the unstable equilibrium within the dualism; driving out often implies sudden re-emergence and attraction into alternative orbits. Both Zoas and Emanations are evidently highly sexualized beings, but defined by recurrent tensions rather than unitary impulses: like many of the Pickering lyrics, narrative momentum seems impelled by a boundary-crossing without ultimate destination. If one shifts generic emphasis away from martial epic (as practised by ‘the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword’ (E95)) and onto the subtitle, ‘The torments of Love & Jealousy’, The Four Zoas may be seen as a late reworking of the tradition of heroic epistle that lies behind Della Cruscan and much other sentimentalist poetry. It may thus be seen as subject to ‘The jealous God’, in Pope’s famous lines from Eloisa to Abelard, who ‘when we profane his fires, / Those restless passions, in revenge inspires (81–2).10 The poem undeniably swarms with ‘restless passions’, but the question remains of what occupies the position of ‘jealous God’? In both Pope and Blake, there is a pattern of doubling and refraction, the poem as both incantation and exorcism. The masculine narrator adopts a persona of female victim in order to license grief; but also as a means to articulate an erotic frenzy identified with the act of composition: ‘Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys’ (16).11 Female monologue in Blake – the lyrical apostrophes of infinite and recessive yearning by Thel, Oothon, Ahania and Enion are surely among the finest passages in his poetry – is similarly structured as a necessarily static lament, and so faces the same problem of self-perpetuation as Eloisa. Interlocutors such as the Clod or Theotormon or Tharmas, like the figure of Abelard, seem more a pretext and occasion for desire than a plausible motivation or individualized focus.12 It may be helpful to adduce some further textual links between Eloisa to Abelard and the exchange between Tharmas and Enion that opens The Four Zoas, in an abrupt shift of register from the initial ‘long resounding strong heroic Verse’ of the ‘day of Intellectual Battle’ (3:2–3, E300). ‘Begin with Tharmas Parent power. darkning in the West’ (4:6, E301). ‘Parent power’ corresponds to Abelard’s position as Eloisa’s tutor: hence the subsequent ‘The Men have recieved their death wounds’ (4:15, E301). While it may seem far-fetched to read ‘Lost! Lost! Lost!’ (4:7, E301) as a reference to sexual mutilation, there is undoubtedly an abrupt and seemingly irreversible



168


Alas how chang’d! what sudden terrors rise? A naked Lover, bound and bleeding lies! Where, where was Eloise? her voice, her hand, Her ponyard, had oppos’d the dire command. (99–102) Eloisa seems empowered by the emasculation of her lover: ‘her ponyard’ doubling rather than opposing that of the ‘bloody hand’ (103).13 It is because of the consequent lack of sexual opportunity that the ‘visionary maid’ (162) develops her compensatory flights of erotic fantasy, raising the possibility that the castration of Abelard is the condition of her greater rhetorical satisfaction: ‘The joy of woman is the Death of her most best beloved’ (FZ 34:63, E324). Enion laments, ‘All Love is lost Terror succeeds & Hatred instead of Love / And stern demands of Right & Duty instead of Liberty’ (4:18–19, E 301). The ‘stern demands’ recall Pope’s ‘stern religion quenched th’ unwilling flame’ (39); ‘instead of Liberty’ may allude to Eloisa’s envisaging a state ‘When love is liberty, and nature, law’ (92). In a very literal sense ‘All Love is lost’ as ‘Terror [in the form of Eloisa’s uncle] succeeds’ in punishing Abelard for seducing his niece; in his subsequent emasculated state he chooses to retreat into building a sanctuary (‘Labyrinth’ (4:10, E301)), encouraging his former lover similarly to ‘hide in secret’ (4:8, E301). The repetition of ‘taken refuge’ and ‘fled / To me for refuge’ (4:14–16, E301) also applies to Eloisa’s situation in the convent’s ‘deep solitudes and awful cells’ (1), in a ‘Soft recess of darkness & silence’ (4:12, E301), given ample opportunity there to ‘Examine thus / Every moment of my secret hours’ (4:34–5, E302). (‘Females sleep the winter in soft silken veils’ (5:1, E302) is also reminiscent of Eloisa’s ‘sacred veil’ (111)). The emphasis on ‘Silent Contrition’ (4:9, E301) appears incongruous in terms of sentimentalist psychology, but accords precisely with Eloisa’s ‘fruitless penitence and pray’rs’ (288) as she attempts to ‘Repent old pleasures’ and ‘weep my past offence’ (186–7), in order to learn to ‘distinguish penitence from love’ (194). ‘Is this a deed of love I know what I have done. I know / Too late now to repent. Love is changd to deadly Hate’ (5:45–6, E303). The threat that ‘Despair will bring self murder on my soul’ (4:38, E302) also invites comparison with Eloisa (‘Love’s victim’ (314); compare ‘Victims to the Living’ (4:8, E301)), pondering suicide: ‘For all is calm in this eternal sleep’ (315). ‘Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy’ (4:33, E302) refers to the opening of Eloisa where ‘ever-musing melancholy reigns’ (3), and



transition in Tharmas’s status which is otherwise unaccounted for. This may be referred back to Eloisa’s outburst:

Queer Blake

the later famous personification: ‘Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws / A death-like silence, and a dread repose’ (165–6). Enion’s backdrop as she ‘sat among the Rocks / Singing her lamentation Tharmas groaned among the Clouds’ (5:7–8, E302) is not only the ‘Seas of Doubt & rocks of Repentance’ (5:49), but more specifically the alpine setting of Eloisa’s convent, whose landscape prefigures that of The Four Zoas: ‘rugged rocks’ and ‘grots and caverns’ (21–2), ‘mountains, wilds and deserts’ (132) and ‘dreary wastes’ (242). In both Pope and Blake, the expression of female desire and loss is mediated through a language of memory, or more accurately, forgetfulness. ‘A[ll] life is blotted out & I alone remain possessd with Fears’ (5:47, E303) recalls ‘All then is full, possessing, and possesst’ (93) and more precisely, ‘Blot out each bright Idea of the skies’ (236) (with ‘blot’ in the Lockean sense of erase a sense-impression).14 The theological context of ‘weeps and prays’ (15) is continually stressed, but Eloisa’s self is defined primarily through fluctuation of emotion even when explicit reference is made to the plight of her ‘soul’: E’er such a soul regains its peaceful state, How often must it love, how often hate! How often hope, despair, resent, regret, Conceal, disdain – do all things but forget. (197–200) I am like an atom A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible (4:43–5, E302) Enion’s ‘Nothing left in darkness’ recalls Eloisa’s ‘craving Void’ (94); later in the ‘Abyss’, Enion is described as ‘in direful hunger craving’ (23:16, E313). ‘Atom’ implies a unitary notion of ‘identity’ as permanent substratum, but both female voices proclaim and define their existence in terms of ‘wish & feel & weep & groan’. In Sedgwick’s terms, ‘the localness of the periperformative is lodged in a metaphorics of space’; the lamentations of Eloisa and Enion have ‘prestigious centers (the explicit performative utterances) but no very fixed circumferences’, whose ‘prestige . . . extends unevenly, unpredictably’ through the rest of the text (Sedgwick 2003, 68). I now wish to argue that the conventions established by Eloisa’s oddly promiscuous non-consummation are equally characteristic of Della Cruscan courtship: a flirtation of self with self, conducted via the mediation of an anonymous recipient, in epistolary form.15



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III

I’ve lost my Love, I know not where, I’ve ask’d her of the fiend Despair, He look’d aghast and bade me go To the dark abode of woe. (Merry, ‘Madness’, in McGann 1993, lines 1–4)16 ‘I’ve lost my Love’ suggests an emblematic narrative similar to Blake’s ‘Never pain to tell thy Love’ (E467), where the opening line similarly serves as both framing proposition and initiating act. ‘I know not where’ moves into a present tense with no specific location. The female pronoun ‘her’ might refer to feeling, lover, or (on the basis of subsequent Della Cruscan verse) the Muse who makes composition of the poem possible. ‘The fiend Despair’, if situated in the Spenser/Bunyan tradition, would be a monster; but at this point no moral coordinates have been established: asking of could suggest either asking ‘about’ or asking ‘from’, in either case the fiend serves as a kind of ambiguous oracle. The switch to ‘He look’d aghast’ highlights the as yet indeterminate gender of the narrator: a receptacle to be filled in the course of the poem. Despair may appear ‘A-ghast’, but also perhaps looks (at) a ghost, fit only for ‘a/bode of woe’. The noun ‘Abode’ contains and refutes the instruction ‘bade’; the phrase also occurs in the ‘Preludium’ to America, ‘When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode’ (1:2, E51).17 The genitive construction suggests both an allegorical state and teleological destination, inviting comparison with both Eloisa’s ‘sad variety of woe’ (36) and ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ in Blake’s ‘London’ (4, E26). I’ll seek her in the glare of day, I’ll seek her in the milky way I’ll seek her o’er the raging deep Yon wave shall rock her soul to sleep: (5–8) As in ‘Ah! Sunflower’, ‘Seeking after that sweet golden clime’ this offers no confident expectation that the ‘travellers journey’ will ever be ‘done’ (E25). Blake makes frequent use of chiasmus similar to that between ‘glare



Robert Merry’s ‘Madness’ (1784) may obviously be situated in the tradition of Mad Songs prominent in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a late variant of which also occurs in Blake’s Poetical Sketches (1782; E415).

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Ye wanton Sea-Gods! O beware! And do not violate my fair. On some far mountain lone, and drear, With arms across she sits to hear, How the torrents rage in vain, Emblem of her Lover’s pain. (9–14) The ‘Sea-Gods’ (Neptune) morph into a ‘far mountain’; the listening reminiscent of Eloisa (‘torrents’, visually almost indistinguishable from ‘torments’, suggests an alpine ‘murmur of falling floods’ (169); ‘lone, and drear’ referring to both woman and locale). Here ‘rage in vain’ becomes a passive state, confinement accentuating feeling rather than a moment of aggressive expansion. ‘Emblem’ foregrounds the subordination of location to state of mind, though ‘Lover’s pain’ could refer to the woman as well as the speaker (her ‘pain’ as a Lover; her ‘pain’ empathizing with that of her Lover; ‘a-cross’ echoing aghast and abode, a necessary distance). Or where Moon-light shuns the shade, Throws her down, my pensive maid, Tis the Roe-buck bounding by, Tis the Zephyr seems to sigh As his careless pinions rove Tis perhaps the voice of Love. (15–20) ‘Throws her down’ links to ‘violate’, suggesting an Orc-like rape-scene, though who does the throwing is unclear: quite possibly the ‘pensive maid’ in the Beulah-esque ‘Moon-light’, whose auto-eroticism invites comparison not only to Eloisa but also to Oothoon as ‘a virgin filled with virgin fancies’ (VDA 6:1, E49) and the intriguing ‘bright Onana’ (FZ fragments E845).21 Even masochistic fantasy cannot be ascribed exclusively to one gender, as in a Behn-like reversal the masculine narrator identifies with the object of violation, Psyche awaiting Cupid, or Leda the swan.22 Merry’s ‘rove’ inevitably recalls Donne’s ‘License my roving hands’, but is no means exclusively or



of day’ and ‘milky way’.18 Parallel states of equilibrium are always liable to interpenetration, and this moment of collapse of demarcation is repeatedly dramatized in the Pickering Manuscript as an irreversible transition between incommensurate but co-existing realms.19 The sublime of ‘Raging deep’ modulates into the lullaby pathos of ‘rock her soul to sleep’:20


Do not start, nor haste away, I have sought thee all the day, Yes, I sought thee in the cave Where the frantic furies rave, Dreadful was the brand they bore, One, her breast was stained with gore, One, her snaky locks, display’d And told me of my beauteous maid, Told me she was sunk to rest On my Rival’s burning breast: And the other smiled to hear: Curse on her malignant sneer! (21–32)

These lines might be an address, or equally plausibly, the ‘voice of Love’ speaking, perhaps auto-reflexively to itself. It can neither ‘start nor haste away’, begin or conclude; it is brought into existence as a performative act, and has no apparent duration beyond that utterance. Nevertheless a gap remains between cause and consequence: explicitly, in Merry’s ‘The Adieu and Recall to Love’, ‘I wish thee well for pleasure’s past, / Yet bless the hour, I’m free at last’ (13–14). A similar structure is apparent in Blake’s ‘I was born a slave but I go to be free’ (‘Why should I care’ E473) or ‘To rise from Generation free; / Then what have I to do with thee?’ (‘To Tirzah’ 15–16, E30): an acknowledgement of prior bondage and proclamation of future release with no mediation between the two states. ‘Cave’ may obviously be referred to the image of female body as receptacle, but is also reminiscent of Norse myth, via Gray, and inevitably of Virgil’s entry to the underworld, whose ‘dark abodes’ have already been invoked. The number of Furies is not specified: one plus one, plus possibly the ‘beauteous maid’ herself, in a love-triangle familiar from ‘When early morn’ in Poetical Sketches (E416–17) to ‘William Bond’ (E496–8). (‘Frantic pain’ incidentally concludes Blake’s own ‘Mad Song’ (24, E416)). The indeterminacy of narrative, caught up in a loop of protestation and self-justification, supplication and spite, is similar to that of ‘The Golden Net’ (E483) and also to Urizen’s encounter with his daughters (FZ 67:1–68:27 E344–6). Yet if there



even primarily heterosexual.23 The pronoun attached to ‘careless pinions’ has now shifted to ‘his’: ‘tis perhaps’ (but equally perhaps not) ‘the voice of Love’. This libertine tinge includes no apparent tactile contact, let alone actual bodily consummation: rather a succession of blurred and at times contradictory affective states, combining anticipation and retrospect, but no explicit present ‘moment of desire’ (VDA 7:3, E50).24

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Now I steal the Eagle’s wing, Like the Bird of Sorrow sing, I will hover o’er my fair, And my song shall pierce the air. Song of fury, mix’d with woe, Deep, pathetic, wild, and slow, Echo, if she chance to hear, Shall only answer with a tear. (33–40) ‘Hover’ and ‘pierce’ are reminiscent of ‘Theotormon’s Eagles’ summoned ‘to prey upon [Oothoon’s] flesh’ (VDA 2:13 E46). The polarity between subject and object, ‘wild’ and ‘pathetic’, collapses: the narrator may identify with ‘Bird of Sorrow’, but the condition of the ‘song’ is predatory violence. Given these elements, ‘Echo’ refers back to the myth of violation of Philomel, transformed into a nightingale; it recalls not only Eloisa’s ‘Grief to thy grief, and echo sighs to thine’ (42), but also ‘The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs’ (VDA 8:13, E51), whose lamentations are similarly self-accentuating, without apparent object of address. (The ‘frantic furies’ are now internalized as ‘fury, mix’d with woe’, whose ‘song’ both solicits and embodies pathos). Once around my fair I twin’d, Where the rose embrac’d the wind, And the plaintive Shepherd’s lay Soothed the parting ear of day. Was it rapture, was it pain, Was it hope that fired my vein, As I press’d my ravish’d fair? She I lov’d was never there. (41–8) Who are the questions addressed to? Who could authenticate the emotions of ‘rapture’ and ‘pain’ (seemingly indistinguishable in later Della Cruscan verse)? ‘Fired my vein’ might be offered as a gloss of ‘fir’d my vocal rage’ in Blake’s ‘ How sweet I roamed’ (10, E413): a bodily pulse, if not orgasmic impulse, rendered synonymous with a poetic ‘vein’. If ‘She I lov’d was never there’, in what sense could the ‘fair’ have been already ‘ravished’:



is no specified ‘Rival’, whose is the ‘malignant sneer’ (the narrator’s? The lover’s? One of the Furies’?) and what is the ‘Curse’? (The poem itself?)


Some are mad for love they say, Others fight, and others pray, Others lay them down and weep, Hush, my tyrant sinks to sleep. (49–52) The gnomic couplets delivered from a third-person vantage (‘they say’) suggest being ‘mad for love’ leading to post-coital sadness (fight, pray, lay down, weep, sleep), with the ‘tyrant’ of the previously haughty mistress merging with a detumescent penis. Not a leaf shall trembling move To disturb the maid I love, Near her bed of many a flower I will guard her slumb’ring hour With the mighty sword, of yore That the ruthless Giant bore. Nor the Genius of the storm Shall approach her lovely form. (53–60) Is this adopting the role of ‘genius’ as guardian spirit or Othello looming over Desdemona’s ‘death-bed’ (V.ii.252)? The speaker now seems to have become the ‘ruthless Giant’ (a re-emergence of the initial ‘fiend Despair’), now boasting of a phallic ‘mighty sword’; ‘the Genius’ whose etymology derives from the physical impulse to beget, bring forth, now appears to have been and gone. Ruffian! wouldst thou dare possess Her I love with rude caress? There’s my love, I see her there I know her by her streaming hair, I know her by her bosom’s snow By her frozen heart below; I know her by her flaming eye, Tis she, have mercy, for I die. (61–8)



as a ‘consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d’ (Hamlet III.i.63–4), or a violence directed against an unresponsive body (‘press’d’ as tortured to death (OED 1b)? Compare Eloisa’s ‘press’d to marriage’ (73))?

Queer Blake

The only ‘Ruffian’ appears to be the narrator himself, as Gothic alter-ego but also as fantasized rough trade of the ‘rude caress’, self-directed violation; ‘bosom’s snow’ and ‘frozen heart’ prefigure numerous later Della Cruscan lyrics preoccupied with an ethic of indifference, whose erotic self-display and post-mortem purity re-emerges in Blake’s ‘pale Virgin shrouded in Snow’ (‘Ah! Sun-flower’ 6, E25), in Lyca in ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (E20–1) and at the close of ‘Mary’: ‘And thine is a Face of wild terror & fear / That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier’ (47–8, E488). Yet the ‘flaming eye’ offers a final accusation and indictment; whose ‘mercy’ is implored? That of the audience or of the unspecified violation, which is both acknowledged and disavowed as constitutive of the speaker’s desire? This invites comparison with the close of ‘The Adieu and Recall to Love’: Alas! is this the boasted ease, To lose each warm desire to please, No sweet solicitude to know For others bliss, for others woe, A frozen apathy to find, A sad vacuity of mind? O hasten back, then, idle Boy, And with thine anguish bring the joy! Return with all thy torments here, And let me hope, and doubt, and fear, O rend my heart with ev’ry pain! But let me, let me love again. (33–44) Is ‘boasted ease’ fake, or a necessary means of articulation? The stoic renunciation (frozen apathy’) of ‘warm desire’ is itself oddly corporeal, ‘proved upon our pulses’ (Keats 1958, 1: 279),25 as with Eloisa’s ‘rebel nature’ and ‘stubborn pulse’ (26–7): to ‘lose each warm desire’ is also to ‘loose’ or release in order ‘to please’ (recalling her ‘paths of pleasing sense’ (69)). ‘Sweet solicitude’ is a form of knowing, but difficult to locate in any specific centre of sentience: ‘bliss’ and ‘woe’, ‘anguish’ and ‘joy’ seem oddly interchangeable as stimuli for achieving such an abstract and disembodied state. Yet ‘Rend my heart’ is peculiarly literal (compare ‘close the bleeding artery of grief’ in Merry’s ‘Diversity’ (20)). Similarly in Blake’s ‘The Smile’, the ‘Frown of Frowns’ is a gesture that ‘sticks’ like a knife or a scalpel in ‘the Hearts deep core’, the ventricle pulsing forth blood like lava from a volcano (7–9, E482–3). The outward-directed appeal of ‘let me, let me, love again’ also contains element of taunt and provocation; its brazenly exhibitionist mechanisms of self-generated desire are autonomous from, even disdainful of, outward interference. The reaction against Della Cruscan verse in William



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Gifford and others (see Strachan 2003) centres on this reversal of private emotion and public declaration (‘Transport’s dire excess’). ‘To gratify future curiosity’ as the Preface to The British Album (1790) puts it, anonymity must be accorded to all participants: while ‘genuine enthusiasm arose entirely from poetical sympathy’ the writers must be ‘totally unacquainted with each other, and reciprocally unknown’.26 McGann insists that the ‘erotic formalities’ of Della Cruscan verse ‘appealed as much to women’s as to men’s imaginations’. He also insists it is ‘specifically heterosexual erotic exchange’, but gives no reason why this should be regarded as exclusively or even primarily so (1996, 81). Della Cruscan verse is notably devoid of the customary courtship sequence of appeal (coercion/supplication), decision (refusal/yielding), consequence (relief/retribution/disappointment/contentment). Instead it performs a kind of short-circuit, by which the final stage, whether positive or negative, is never reached, where the ‘voice of Love’ is speaking, auto-reflexively to itself. Hence the difficulty in Della Cruscan verse of distinguishing motive, cause, consequence and outcome, and the recurrent collapse of demarcation between internal and external realms. Sentimentalist idiom is not a description of a prior state of mind but an event of meaning that transforms both protagonist and environment. The constitutive tension of this interaction is both inwardly and outwardly directed: willing to dissolve secure boundaries in its determination to engage in risk-taking perversity termed by Wordsworth the ‘degrading thirst for outrageous sensation’ (1974, 130). One may not agree with McGann that ‘the complete excision of Della Cruscans from the history of English writing has been a cultural disaster’ (1986, 96); but he certainly makes a convincing case for their domination of the 1780s provoking Wordsworth’s famous attack. I now wish to consider how Blake’s Notebook might be read in the context of the performative strategies emerging out of this body of writing.

IV It is usual for the Notebook to be read as a backdrop to Songs of Experience; drafts, off-cuts, rewrites. It has, however, a distinctive combination of aphoristic concision and self-imploding address, a peculiar absence of inwardness, and a thematic and structural concern with the ‘self enjoyings of self-denial’ (VDA 7:9, E50). Blake’s apparently propositional mode proves highly unstable on closer inspection: Thou hast a lap full of seed And this is a fine country Why dost thou not cast thy seed And live in it merrily




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(E469–70) The immediate question in the opening lines is the gender of speaker and addressee. One might relate it back to Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1 through 17, urging the beautiful youth to reproduce; equally, it could also be read as invitation from a whore to a potential customer (compare Ahania’s plea, ‘Then thou with thy lap full of seed’ (Ah 5:29, E89)). ‘Fine country’ might allude to Hamlet’s ‘country matters’, but that would also imply the taunt to Ophelia’s ‘Lady, shall I lie in thy lap’ (III.ii.110–17). ‘Cast thy seed’ suggests the story of Onan’s withdrawal from his brother’s widowed wife (Genesis 38:9) (as does Ahania’s reference to Urizen’s ‘hand full of generous fire’ (5:30, E89)). ‘Cast’, however, might imply throw away as well as scatter. ‘Shall I cast it’ could be spoken by either party, with both preferring to direct it onto ‘sand’, that might be transformed ‘into fruitful land’. The ‘stinking weed’ might be the speaker’s own syphilitic penis, already ‘blight[ed] with plagues’, by ‘the youthful Harlots curse’ (‘London’ 13–16, E27), hence requiring ‘tearing up’ in Origen-like self-mutilation; or the dirty smock of the street-walker, smeared with the physical residue of other acts of ejaculation (hence the ‘lap’ already ‘full of seed’).27 The questions are unresolved: blunt, coercive, embittered, seemingly pre-empting any response. Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs & flaming hair But Desire Gratified Plants fruits of life & beauty there. (E474) Again, the quatrain could be delivered by elderly libertine to younger male, or by a female speaker soliciting custom, resenting the homoerotic ‘sow[ing]’ or ejaculating over ‘ruddy limbs & flaming hair’ (presumably but not certainly male). This is contrasted to the penetrative intercourse of ‘plants’ within (though ‘there’ could be anal, of either gender). How are ‘fruits of life & beauty’ to be distinguished from the growth of the ‘stinking weed’ (and how can one ‘plant’ without first ‘sowing’)? Throughout the Notebook, there is a characteristic pattern whereby apparently antithetical speech-acts – the ‘Angel singing’ and the ‘Devil curse’



Shall I cast it on the sand And turn it into fruitful land For on no other ground Can I sow my seed Without tearing up Some stinking weed


Love to faults is always blind Always is to joy inclind Lawless wingd & unconfined And breaks all chains from every mind Deceit to secrecy confind Lawful cautious & refind To every thing but interest blind And forges fetters for the mind (E472) The title of ‘How to know Love from Deceit’ posits a position from which it is possible to define and encapsulate what occurs within ‘always . . . always . . . every mind’, and so itself ‘forges fetters’ (as the speaker of ‘The Garden of Love’ repeats rather than repudiates the ‘binding with briars, my joys & desires’ (E26)). The same kind of self-annulment is evident in Blake’s use of prosopopoeia. ‘Morning’ offers a reversal of Gray’s ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’, spliced with ‘shuts the gates of mercy on mankind’, with common usages of path, gates, mercy, lead:28 To find the western path Right thro the gates of Wrath I urge my Way Sweet Mercy lead me on With soft repentant moan I see the break of day. (1–6, E478) Wrath may prevent or invite or perhaps even become ‘Mercy’ (sublime into pathos);29 but who is ‘repentant’ and for what? If ‘lead’ is read as an imploring vocative rather than past tense, the ‘gates of Wrath’ become synonymous with those of birth, in which case the ‘moan’ may be that of a new-born child (or of the gasp of either parent in conception, or the mother’s labour-pains). The second stanza appears to gloss ‘break of day’: The war of sword & spears Melted by dewy tears Exhales on high



(E470) – converge and become indistinguishable through employing identical modes of verification.

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The Sun is freed from fears And with soft grateful tears Ascends the sky

If Wrath conducts the ‘war of swords & spears’ (as in the hyper-aggression of ‘Day’ (E473)), is it necessarily positive for this to be ‘melted by dewy tears’ (of bystanders? Of mourners?); is the Sun now ‘freed from fears’ accompanied by hypocritical ‘soft grateful tears’ as it ‘ascends the sky’? Wrath and Mercy are both already governing principles within the narrator, but also conditions yet to be striven for, oddly posthumous. The ‘western path’ that seems to offer freedom may equally well be read as ‘lead[ing] but to the grave’ (the narrating ‘I’ has vanished; ‘exhales’ could be the stench of corpses on a battlefield). There is a curious temporality by which the poem itself seeks to narrate the coming into being of states initially proclaimed as permanent. Eternity appears to contain a moment of origin and so potential demise. In both Innocence and Experience, imagining any kind of afterwards immediately activates ambiguities of stance, gender and outcome. This kind of semantic implosion is explored most explicitly in the untitled balladnarrative, itself indicative of the absence of point of closure or resolution: My Spectre around me night & day Like a wild beast guards my way My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my Sin (1–4, E475) ‘Spectre’ and ‘Emanation’ appear to introduce an idiosyncratic terminology, but the internal/external opposition between ‘around me’ and ‘far within’ is characteristic of the sentimentalist tradition. The status of ‘wild beast’ is ambiguous: ‘guards’ could be protecting or blocking (as in ‘Night’ (25–32, E14)). The status of ‘Sin’ is later redefined in terms of ‘What Transgressions I commit / Are for thy Transgressions fit’, which may simply imply boundary-crossing, erotic role-play – ‘They thy Harlots thou their Slave’ – in a ‘Bed’ which ‘becomes their Grave’, perhaps in the sense of to ‘fit’ the rectum (‘Postscript’ 5–8, E477). A Fathomless & boundless deep There we wander there we weep On the hungry craving wind My Spectre follows thee behind



(7–12, E478)


He scents thy footsteps in the snow Wheresoever thou dost go Thro the wintry hail and rain When wilt thou return again?

‘We’ may be speaker or emanation, or include the spectre; an additional ‘thee’ is introduced. The initial oceanic horizon (‘fathomless’ and ‘wind’ implying sea-vessels) acquires a ballad backdrop of ‘wintry’ climate – ‘snow’, ‘hail and rain’ – without any more specific location: ‘wheresoever’. ‘Scents’ implies pursuing hounds, something tracking ‘thou’, but could also be perfuming the trail. The refrain, oddly reminiscent of ‘When shall we three meet again?’ (Macbeth I.i.1), continues after a multiplication of loves, tombs and couches: When wilt thou return & view My loves & them to life renew When wilt thou return & live When wilt thou pity as I forgive (29–32, E476) ‘View my loves’ recalls Oothoon’s proffering of ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’ (VDA 7:24, E50). ‘Them to life renew’ implies polyandry, noncondemnation of adultery, immediately contradicted by ‘Living thee alone Ill have / And when dead Ill be thy Grave’ (35–6, E476). In the ‘I’/‘thee’ relation, even the opposition of ‘living’ and ‘dead’ is rendered ambiguous: the state of solitude seems to imply both isolation and merging. ‘As I forgive’ may refer either to the act of abandonment, or of ‘return’; it might reciprocate or wholly contradict the act of ‘pity’.30 Thro the Heavn & Earth & Hell Thou shalt never never quell I will fly & thou pursue Night & Morn the flight renew (37–40, E476) The triptych seems closer to medieval morality drama than Blakean prophecy: ‘never never’ can be read as either reinforcing or cancelling the negation (again Shakespearian: Lear’s ‘Never, never, never, never, never!’ (V.iii.307)). ‘Fly’ implies terror, but ‘flight’ is identified with ‘to life renew’: ‘thou pursue’ could be either pursuit of or by the narrator.



(5–12, E478)

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Queer Blake

Till I turn from Female Love And root up the Infernal Grove I shall never worthy be To Step into Eternity

‘Turn’ may be abandon but contains at least a hint of return to, the impossibility of abstinence without ‘root[ing] up the infernal grove’ (a gesture obviously reminiscent of ‘tearing up the stinking weed’). The ‘infernal grove’ could be either male or female genitals, in the context of early modern anatomy, easily regarded as inversions of each other; via Eliot’s ‘bloody wood’ it could be read as the onset of menstruation or the aftermath of castration.31 It is unclear quite what is involved by the ‘Step into Eternity’: is it a one-way trip or co-existing realms? Is it a promise of future action or something that has already occurred? Let us agree to give up Love And root up the infernal grove Then shall we return & see The worlds of happy Eternity (49–52, E477) This seems a vow of celibacy, but one which – as in ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ – leads to intensified satisfaction. In a cancelled couplet, Abelard’s emasculation is described: ‘Cut from the root my perish’d joys I see, / And love’s warm tyde for ever stopt in thee’ (259–60).32 As in Della Cruscan verse, a possible freedom opens up in the gap between ‘Love’ and ‘Eternity’, even when ostensibly vowing indifference. (It is noteworthy that it is Merry’s ‘adieu’ to desire that sets the whole epistolary exchange in motion.) D.H. Lawrence famously describes Blake as ‘one of those ghastly, obscene “Knowers” ’ (1955, 338). ‘Ghastly’ echoes Enion’s own self-description of ‘Horrible Ghast & Deadly’ (4:32, E302); the term ‘obscene’ is never used in Blake, although obviously applicable to The Four Zoas marginalia. One might have anticipated sympathy from Lawrence for a fellow non-conformist autodidact and prophet of desire, but quite the reverse. Blake is situated within a sentimentalist tradition of which Poe is seen to be the last decadent exponent. The knowledge that is offered, however, appears to involve an interminable repetition of the act of renunciation: Already are my Eyes reverted. all that I behold Within my Soul has lost its splendour & a brooding Fear



(41–4, E476)


Shadows me oer & drives me outward to a world of woe So wailed she trembling before her own Created Phantasm

Enion’s lament may be seen as the culmination of the sentimentalist tradition running from Pope’s Eloisa, through Della Cruscan verse, into Blake. The form of inward gaze paradoxically ‘drives me outward’ producing a ‘Created Phantasm’ that in turn seeks to control her. Introspection is not self-directed (a form of ‘self murder upon my soul’ (FZ 4:38, E302)) but instead produces an attempt to exert analytic control (‘the Spectre is every man insane & most / Deformed’ (FZ 5:38–9, E303)). Understanding both transforms and is transformed by the object of its attention. The process of bringing the ‘inmost Soul’ (FZ 4:11, E301) to language becomes at least potentially a form of violation, generating a whole series of perverse and unpredictable outcomes.

Notes 1. Hayley’s status is reassessed in Matthews (forthcoming 2010). 2. ‘Before I would venture to send him my little book, I wrote to know if it would be acceptable, for notwithstanding he has begun a Poetical Buffon himself to assist his worthy friend Mr Blake, I was afraid mine would be deemed too puerile’ (Smith to Mrs Sergeant, 10 September 1804). Later she accuses Hayley of ‘writing such very sad doggrell, for the purpose of serving a Man, who might be anything rather than an engraver’ (20 March 1806). Both quoted by Linkin (2007, 130). 3. On periperformatives, see Sedgwick (2003, 3–8, 67–9). Esterhammer’s Creating States (1994) restricts its phenomenological and socio-political model of speechacts to the Songs, The Book of Urizen and Jerusalem, and so does not engage directly with the sentimentalist works. 4. This account is highly dependent on Yolton (1983). 5. The Pope design is also reprinted in William Blake’s ‘Heads of the Poets’ (Blake 1969). 6. On Eloisa as ‘test-case’, generating multiple responses, see Fairer (2003, 72–6). Incidentally, Fairer (2003) offers no discussion of Della Cruscan verse, which is also entirely omitted from Fairer and Gerrard (2003). 7. The division between ‘Illuminated Works’ and ‘Other Writings’ in the Norton Blake’s Poetry and Designs (Blake 2008) allows The Four Zoas to be cut within an inch of its life. This format is followed even by Bruder in her survey of ‘Blake and Gender Studies’ (2006). 8. On FZ marginalia, see Hobson (2000, 49–76), Otto (2001, 4–22) and Schuchard (2006). 9. Compare Sedgwick’s discussion of the subordination of drive (focused on specific objects) to a spatiality of affect (2003, 18–22). 10. Fairer and Gerrard (2003, 133–41; subsequent references are to line number), which retains the graphic couplet on Abelard’s castration (259–60). 11. For more recent discussion, see Carson (2007).



(FZ 5:50–3, E303)

Queer Blake

12. ‘Emanation’ occurs in Pope, but as the projection of female desire, rather than a Blakean confining role: ‘My fancy form’d thee of Angelick kind, / Some emanation of th’ all-beauteous Mind’ (61–62). 13. Also alluded to in ‘The Mental Traveller’: ‘Till he becomes a bleeding youth / And she becomes a Virgin bright’ (25–6, E484). 14. ‘I see the Shadow of the dead within my soul wandering’ (5:48, E303) would apply to Eloisa’s vision of Abelard’s ‘loved Idea’ as ‘mix’d with God’ (12; compare 266, 298); she similarly regards herself as ‘almost Extinct & soon shall be a Shadow in Oblivion’ (4:22, E301). Compare Fairer (2003, 106–7). 15. Della Cruscan verse originated in The Arno Miscellany (1784) followed by The Florence Miscellany (1785) in which Merry’s ‘Madness’ appeared; his ‘The Adieu and Recall to Love’ was published in the popular paper The World in 1787, and responded to by Hannah Cowley’s ‘The Pen’ under the pseudonym of Anna Matilda, with the subsequent dialogue collected in Poetry of the World (1788). 16. Texts for Robert Merry are taken from McGann, New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993). They are not, however, discussed directly in his The Poetics of Sensibility (1996). Subsequent quotations are given by line. 17. From Dryden’s Aeneid: ‘near your Grove, the Road / To Hell lies open and the dark Abode’; repeated ‘And visit, without leave, the dark abodes?’ (Dryden 1987,V:159–60 (531); the phrase is repeated 509–10 (544)). 18. ‘Stars somewhat like the Milky way’; not one of Blake’s usual locales, these nevertheless crop up in A Vision of the Last Judgment (E559). 19. Most obviously, in the attempt to ‘sieze the inmost Form’ in ‘The Crystal Cabinet’ (21–8, E488–9) but also in the abrupt alternation between ‘hot sun shine’ and ‘Moony light’ / ‘darkness of night’ in ‘William Bond’ (45–52, E497–8), and the final transfiguration of the ‘Face of sweet Love in Despair’ in ‘Mary’ (36–48, E488). 20. ‘Raging’ includes both sublime (anger) and pathos (pining). The 49 usages in Blake of ‘raging’ include ‘a World of raging Waters’ (M 19:23, E113; J 59:19, E209) ‘raging Ocean’ and ‘raging Sea’ (FZ 47:16, E331; fragments E845) and ‘raging foam tinging the black deep’ (MHH 18, E41). 21. ‘Shade’ recurs in the sense of erotic figment (for example, FZ 82:17, 22, 27, 37, E357–8); ‘she wept Embracing fervent / Her once lovd Lord now but a Shade herself also a shade’ (FZ 85:2–3 E360). 22. See Behn, ‘The Disappointment’ (in Behn 1993); Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’ (in Yeats 1984). 23. Donne, ‘Elegy XIX: To his Mistress going to Bed’ (in Donne 1971, 25). 24. For comparable sadomasochistic exchanges, see the cool amorality of ‘How sweet I roamed’ (E412), the impassive ‘traveller’ of ‘Never pain to tell thy Love’ (E467) or the ‘downy Pinions soft’ of ‘The Golden Net’ (E467). 25. Letter to J.H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818. 26. The British Album (1790), ‘To Anna Matilda’ (30) and Preface. On the anonymity of the exchanges, see Labbe (2007); on their formation of a surrogate communal identity, see Mee (2006). 27. On a post-colonial reading, it might refer to tobacco and the Virginia plantations; and ‘ground’ to the doctrine of terra nullius. 28. Gray, ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (in Fairer and Gerrard 2003, 355–6, lines 36, 68). 29. The gloss is supported by the appended couplet, ‘Terror in the house does roar / But pity stands before the door’ (E478).



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30. ‘Still for Victory I burn’ (33–4, E 476) is associated in Island in the Moon with Protestant triumphalism: ‘Victory Victory – twas William the prince of Orange’ (E465), so ‘return’ could be read in terms of invasion. 31. T.S. Eliot, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ (in Eliot 1969, 37); for the ‘bloody wood’ as residence of the ‘furies’, see Sophocles (1954, 1369–514). 32. Tharmas identifies Enion with a lost or absent phallus, ‘thou art thyself a root growing into hell’, towards which he is simultaneously imploring, vengeful and envious: ‘Tho thus heavenly beautiful to draw me to destruction’ (4:39–40, E302).




‘By a False Wife Brought to the Gates of Death’: Blake, Politics and Transgendered Performances David Fallon

During the narrator’s infernal tour in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he sees a striking proverb: ‘Let man wear the fell of the lion. Woman the fleece of the sheep’ (8:30, E36). At face value this is a bold assertion of male heterosexuality; in Burkean terms, the power of the sublime dominates the meek and yielding sheep. But the devil is in the detail. The verb ‘wear’ emphasizes a performative dimension to gendered identity, whilst the ambiguous imperative is deeply suggestive, gesturing towards an authoritarian scripting of gender roles, the granting of a freedom of assent to them, and the passivity involved in accepting conventional behaviours. The proverb slyly hints at fluid, dynamic identities and desires beyond the stark binaries of the lion and sheep. Judith Butler’s theoretical writings are particularly concerned with notions of gender as a performative identity. This is not simply gender as theatrical ‘play’ through which a ‘genuine’ biological identity sports and discards cultural gender at will. In Gender Trouble, Butler models her analysis on Austin and Searle’s philosophical investigation of ‘speech acts’. Susan Stryker summarizes Butler’s application of this approach to gender: To say that gender is a performative act is to say that it does not need a material referent to be meaningful, is directed at others in an attempt to communicate, is not subject to falsification or verification, and is accomplished by ‘doing’ something rather than ‘being’ something. A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is – and who then does what woman means. The biologically sexed body guarantees nothing; it is necessarily there, a ground for the act of speaking, but it has no deterministic relationship to performative gender. (Stryker 2006, 10) The gendered subject is shaped by the norms of its cultural context, constituted by numerous signifying actions, and is reified ‘through a series of 186



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acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time’ (Butler 1990b, 274). Although Butler qualifies her earlier work in Bodies that Matter (1993), emphasizing gender as a ‘citation’ of hegemonically scripted roles with which subjects find themselves presented, she consistently asserts the subversive and liberatory potential of performative notions of gender which expose conventional cultural binaries of heterosexual identity as neither ‘natural’ nor given (1993, 107–9). As the Marriage proverb suggests, Blake was unusually interested in those shifting, performative and troubling aspects of gender and sexuality that queer theory has so often identified as sites where heteronormativity can be contested. Blake’s oeuvre – from androgynous lyrics in Poetical Sketches through to the gender-clashes mingling Sons and Daughters of Albion and the final affirmation of the titular female character in Jerusalem – presents a complex and kaleidoscopic vision of possible identities. Discussions of Blake and gender have often adopted a binary framework and focused primarily on questions of misogyny.1 Anne Mellor attacked ‘Blake’s consistently sexist portrayal of women’, arguing that he echoed the repressive gender stereotypes of his society (1982, 144–55). In contrast, from Irene Tayler onwards, a number of critics have explored Blake’s complex negotiation of concepts of gender considered as distinct from biological sex and have taken a variety of positions: defending Blake as an advocate of female liberation, an androgynous ideal, proliferating sexual differences or a form of gender Utopia.2 Most helpfully, Helen Bruder has noted that Blake ‘constructs a notion of femininity centred upon dissent’ and asserts that ‘Blake is of value to feminism not because he maintained an exemplary and unwavering feminist commitment but rather because he took sexual power seriously’ (1997, 36). I want to suggest that rather than consistently reinforcing a simple misogyny based on biological notions of sex Blake’s negative presentation of female characters tends to arise when they assume conventionally public and ‘masculine’ attributes – that is, when they transgress into transgender identities which trouble the pervasive norms of republican political rhetoric. Characters and situations in which conventional sexuality is queered help Blake to complicate and interrogate traditional political discourse and the power relations it mediates, even if he may not be able fully to escape its presumptions. Blake’s male-females are probably more revealing of the dominant political vocabulary available to him, and of his sense of the political as a homosocial realm, than they are of his personal attitudes towards women. Transgender figures certainly troubled Blake’s contemporaries. Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined slang terms for effeminate men and masculine women. A ‘FRIBBLE’ is ‘An effeminate fop’, derived from ‘a celebrated character of this kind’ in Garrick’s farce Miss in her Teens. The female equivalent, a ‘JACK WHORE’, is ‘A large masculine overgrown wench.’3 Not only do these terms indicate consciousness of unusual



Blake, Politics and Transgendered Performances

Queer Blake

gender identities and the pejorative terms that worked within culture to police behaviour, they also suggest differing anxieties relative to each transgression.4 Whereas ‘Fribble’ suggests a theatrical diminution of masculine behaviours which renders the subject frivolous, the more aggressive term ‘Jack Whore’ emphasizes bodily power, threat, low social class and abjection. Such discourse frames the binaries of heterosexual identities as natural categories, but critically the ‘Jack Whore’ is reviled for actively usurping the vigour and power naturalized as the possession of men. Such a figure subverts assumptions about power and agency; Mary Wollstonecraft saw behind her contemporaries’ exclamations against masculine women their willingness to confuse female hunting, shooting and gaming with the adoption of a rational subjectivity and agency which might radically challenge social norms (1989, 74). Unsurprisingly, then, gender often inflects the discourse of political legitimacy. Although not simply separable from attitudes towards gender and sex, in an eighteenth-century society politically dominated by men, the use of gendered language reveals its metaphoricity and mobility. In The Independent Man (2005), Matthew McCormack examines gendered political rhetoric in Georgian England. The ideal citizen, the ‘independent man’ valorized by a wide range of political groups (especially the ‘Country’ opposition and Commonwealth-man tradition), was established upon the model of the patriarchal household as well as the civic humanist ideals and rhetoric of classical republicanism. This entailed independence from obligation, disinterested and patriotic concern for dependants and the public good, individual virtue, resistance to corruption and the effects of luxury, and a martial commitment to the defence of the nation. This identity was defined against an ‘Other’ characterized as female: passive, weak, dependent, foreign (especially French), artificial and corrupt. This discourse is structured by binary oppositions, with the male term privileged in a masculine signifying economy. Actors in political culture repeatedly established their own political legitimacy at the expense of their opponents’ dependent femininity or amphibious ambiguity, considered out of place in an upright, male political context. McCormack shows how ‘patriot’ language was structured upon the separation of a masculine political world and a dependent female sphere, implicitly domestic in character and to be governed patriarchally: Independence was the prerequisite for legitimate political action since only persons free from political obligations could act for the general good rather than with reference to sectional interests . . . Anyone who was subject to an influence or obligation that compromised their individual autonomy, on the other hand, was accused of being ‘dependent’ – a term with considerable force, connoting a degrading lack of manliness, virtue and free will . . . This state of ‘dependence’ was the polar opposite of



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McCormack exemplifies his argument with changes in the masculine rhetoric of independence used by the politician John Wilkes, who was popular with London artisans and greatly influenced radical discourse prior to the French Revolution.5 Wilkes ‘consciously cultivated the image of the patriotic warrior-citizen’, identifying with classical republican heroes, taking part in duels, and making much of his colonelship in the militia (84–5). Wilkites derided George III’s culture of political dependency as absolutist ‘Scots politics’ and used gendered terms to express their venom for the king’s favourites, especially Prime Minister Lord Bute. Courtiers were ‘identified with homosexuality, to be countered by rampantly heterosexual independent citizens’, like Wilkes. As a result, ‘feminine’ court dependence was encoded in the ‘figure of the sodomite’, which ‘recurs in Wilkite propaganda, as contrary both to “nature” and to conventional authority’ (86). Such constructions indicate the political charge in the misogynist and homophobic libertinism of Wilkes and his followers, exemplified by An Essay on Woman (1763) and its imitators. Although Wilkes toned down this libertine persona in the 1770s when less ‘foreign’ forms of masculinity became more popular, aggressive heterosexuality and attacks on opponents as hybrid, effeminate dependants, remained significant in radical political discourse. Anna Clark has similarly investigated the self-conscious masculinity of Wilkes’s republican rhetoric by examining representations of his relationship with the Chevalier d’Eon.6 D’Eon came to London in 1762 as a French diplomatic secretary for peace negotiations after the Seven Years War, and secretly spied for Louis XV. Passed over for promotion to ambassador, d’Eon pugnaciously and publicly squabbled with the French crown, and was indicted for publishing diplomatic correspondence relating to the negotiations. Many Wilkites initially associated the chevalier with their hero as a fellow martyr to regal tyranny, but cooled towards him and mocked his effeminacy when he appeared to withhold information about bribes allegedly accepted by British royals and nobles during the Treaty of Paris. Additionally, in 1771 a rumour arose that the slight, pretty and sexually inactive d’Eon, was in fact a woman. In caricatures, Wilkes’s critics, including radicals siding with John Horne, gleefully linked him to the chevalier in attempts to undermine his popular masculine identity. D’Eon’s ambiguous sex – he was only definitively proved male upon his death in 1810 – disturbed the masculine sexual norms of the political world and, according to Clark, embarrassingly exposed their essential theatricality (Clark 1998, 32). Marsha Schuchard has convincingly identified the chevalier with ‘Mr Femality’, mentioned in An Island in the Moon (1785). A character,



masculine ‘independence’: laudable in females, but contemptible – and supposedly effeminate – in adult men. (2005, 13)

Queer Blake

probably Quid, tells a female companion ‘now I think we should do as much good as we can when we are at Mr Femality’s’ (E465). In 1785 D’Eon caused a stir by returning from France to live in exile as a woman in London, and Schuchard notes the proximity of Blake’s residence at 28 Poland Street to this captivating figure, who entertained international guests at 38 Brewer Street, Golden Square (1992, 52–3). Blake seems likely to have been familiar with the politicized attacks on the chevalier’s ambiguous gender made by both Wilkites and their opponents, and we should not be surprised to see evidence of this discourse in his juvenilia. This gendered rhetoric particularly policed the behaviour of women as political agents. Although it occured after Poetical Sketches, the fiercely contested 1784 Westminster election exemplified these politicized sexual norms. Charles James Fox, leader of the parliamentary Whigs, stood in an acrimonious three-way election for two seats, in which the naval hero Lord Hood romped home, while Fox and the government candidate Sir Cecil Wray slugged it out for the remaining seat. Fox portrayed himself as a patriot hero, the ‘Man of the People’, independently resisting George III’s purchase on Parliament. To this end, Foxites made much of William Pitt’s youth and asexuality. A satirical poem, ‘This is the House that George Built’, mocked the shaky coalition between Pitt and George Grenville: Mr. Pitt. This is the Maiden all forlorn, that coaxed the bull with the crumpled horn, that roared with the dog, that barked at the cat, that eat the malt, that lay in the house that George built. Mr. Dundas. This is the Scot by all forsworn, that wedded the maiden all forlorn, that coaxed the bull with the crumpled horn . . . (Hartley 1784, 286) Footnotes to ‘Maiden’ and ‘wedded’ disingenuously deny slurring Pitt, but the passive, feminine terms clearly imply the contrast with the upright ‘Man of the People’. A notable pro-Fox caricature from February 1784, entitled The Parliament Samson Fighting with his Jaw, identifies Fox’s masculinity with the biblical figure famous for his strength and for bringing down the temple of Dagon onto the idolatrous Philistines. Identification with Samson was appealing to a politician assuming a guise of masculine independence and promising to pull down a corrupt and dependent court culture in defence of his nation. Fox also enlisted Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to secure votes and, while both sides used glamorous female aristocrats in canvassing, his reliance on Georgiana’s popularity problematized his patriot rhetoric. The Morning Post crowed that the Duchess of Devonshire ‘is the candidate to all intents and purposes. Mr Fox has not of himself polled a man this fortnight’, also alleging that Georgiana’s canvassing had caused her to grow a beard (Hartley 1784, 284; and Foreman 1998, 150). Likewise, a caricature from April 1784



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was captioned ‘O! Times O! Manners! The Women Wear Breeches & the Men Petticoats!’, while Rowlandson’s Every Man Has His Hobby Horse showed Fox piggy-backing on the duchess’s shoulders, undermining the unstable foundations of his rhetoric of masculine patriotism.7 The people’s independent Samson appeared damagingly dependent on an alluring female. But perhaps most importantly, both Tory opprobrium and gallant Whig defences made use of her gender and sexuality as sites for male battles over political power. This identification between Samson and the independent patriot suggests the political resonance of Blake’s prose poem ‘Samson’.8 Its debt to Milton’s Samson Agonistes has often been noted, joining it to a long line of republican readings of the biblical episode (see Hill 1977, 428–48). Although Blake follows Milton’s deviation from Judges 13–16 (making Dalila Samson’s wife), critics emphasizing Milton’s influence have obscured Blake’s deliberate choice of an earlier episode of the story which, depicting Dalila’s duping of Samson, engages with contemporary anxieties about the emasculation of the independent citizen. The speaker of the piece is clearly Blake’s nascent prophetic persona, invested with vigorous masculine vision. The opening invocation foregrounds issues of gender at stake in the tale: Samson, the strongest of the children of men, I sing; how he was foiled by woman’s arts, by a false wife brought to the gates of death! O Truth, that shinest with propitious beams, turning our earthly night to heavenly day, from presence of the Almighty Father! thou visitest our darkling world with blessed feet, bringing good news of Sin and Death destroyed! O white-robed Angel, guide my timorous hand to write as on a lofty rock with iron pens the words of truth, that all who pass may read. (E443) Blake instantly emphasizes Samson’s strength. In contrast to the sorrow, which he later states is ‘the lot of all of woman born’ (E444), Samson’s lineage is male. The opening sets up the conflict between the male hero and the betraying female in terms that contrast Samson’s independence and honest brawn with the artifice and secrecy of ‘woman’s arts’, which foster dependency. But the language also encodes anxieties about Dalila’s agency. She is ‘false’ in her deceit and betrayal, but also implicitly in the behaviours associated with a ‘wife’, which enables her to ‘foil’ Samson, suggesting martial combat. The tension between the male and female is structured by a binary opposition which Dalila destabilizes. In contrast, the abstract personification Truth is notably of ambiguous gender, associated with the conventionally male sun, with the male Jesus who lives in ‘presence of the Almighty Father!’ and mediates ‘good news’, but also with the angelic female muse. Despite the speaker’s initially ‘timorous hand’, Truth’s mediation is associated with the masculine sublime of the ‘lofty rocks’ and ‘iron pen’ with which it is inscribed. The interior experience of Truth merges gendered categories, but




Queer Blake

the prophet who assumes the public duty to communicate it is explicitly male and adopts a conventionally polarized gendered rhetoric in order to do so. The plot against Samson takes place under cover of ‘Night’, personified as a female, who ‘over the silent earth spreads her pavilion’ while ‘Philista’s lords’, their ‘strength failed’ and their young and old warriors ‘in dust together ly[ing]’, hold their ‘dark council’. Night’s cover emphasizes the council’s enfeebled and conspiratorial character. Dalila is addressed by a male voice originating from the lords, the imperatives of which enjoin her guilefully to exercise women’s arts, but in terms which indicate the merging of her female identity with a martial, masculine agency. Her supposedly private femininity is to be performed as a modulation of the aggressive, public ends of the weakened lords of Philista: ‘Go on, fair traitress; do thy guileful work; ere once again the changing moon her circuit hath performed, thou shalt overcome, and conquer him by force unconquerable, and wrest his secret from him. Call thine alluring arts and honest-seeming brow, the holy kiss of love, and the transparent tear; put on fair linen, that with the lily vies, purple and silver; neglect thy hair, to seem more lovely in thy loose attire; put on thy country’s pride, deceit; and eyes of love decked in mild sorrow, and sell thy Lord for gold.’ (E443) Along with the martial connotations of ‘overcome’, ‘conquer’ and ‘wrest’, the allusions to Judas (the ‘holy kiss of love’ and selling ‘thy Lord for gold’ are appropriate to the betrayer of Samson, Jesus’ biblical type) imply a disturbingly masculine aggression behind the alluring feminine behaviours Dalila is directed to use. But Blake suggests that Dalila’s actions do not express her essential self, but mediate the power of others. Significantly, by emphasizing the commands to adopt costume and act out alluring behaviours, Blake depicts Dalila performing a role dictated to her by the lords of Philista; in this respect, her femininity is a vessel through which male aggression acts. Moreover, if Dalila becomes merely a tool and expression of the lords’ power, she also becomes a triangulating point of intra-male power relations; Samson is ultimately seduced and unmanned by men. Blake appears to frame Dalila as a particularly foreign figure of courtly artifice and hypocrisy who can insidiously ‘unman’ the national hero. Blake’s presentation of the Philistine lords, whose bidding she does, recalls contemporary patriot attacks on a ‘foreign’ court culture characterized by luxurious excess and ‘secret influence’. Notably, Manoah’s prayer for deliverance depicts oppressors (‘The Philistine riots on our flocks, our vintage is gathered by hands of enemies’) in terms similar to the invading noble armies of ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, often read as Blake’s defence of popular



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resistance against un-English aristocratic oppression in the context of the American Revolution (Erdman 1977, 20–3). Whereas the violence in ‘Gwin’ is clearly the work of male tyranny, in ‘Samson’ Blake foregrounds a supposedly female political agency working secretly within private relations. By presenting Dalila’s performance of femininity for the political ends of her masters, Blake echoes anxieties about the role played during political negotiations by aristocratic women, whose hospitality was often a mask for surveillance and persuasion on behalf of their husbands (see Chalus 2000, 669–97). Blake’s primary focus in this text seems to be the process by which such ‘secret’ influence acts to undermine the citizen’s resolve and to trouble the identities upon which patriot discourse relied, while also indicating that the primary relationships in such narratives remain those between men. Dalila’s persuasive rhetoric functions through a number of strategies. She deceptively performs her own femininity as weakness, apostrophizing Dagon and the Palestinian gods to ‘withdraw your hand! I am but a weak woman!’ At the same time, she frames Samson’s martial masculinity in pitiless terms: ‘O Samson, hold me not; thou lovest me not! Look not upon me with those deathful eyes! Thou wouldst my death, and death approaches fast’ (E433). Despite these representations, she is engaged in an act of war under the guise of passive femininity. Blake suggests that all is not as it seems when he describes the effects of the entreaties: ‘Thus, in false tears, she bath’d his feet, and thus she by day oppressed his soul: he seemed a mountain, his brow among the clouds; she seemed a silver stream, his feet embracing’ (E443). As in the Marriage proverb, Blake invokes the masculine sublime and feminine beautiful, only to acknowledge their conventionality, linking these identities with the verb ‘seemed’. Dalila is the active agent in the dialogue. Samson is encouraged to perform a more penetrable, less vigorous form of masculinity in response to her accusations, and prefaces his story by adopting this identity: ‘Hear O Dalila! Doubt no more of Samson’s love; for that fair breast was made the ivory palace of my inmost heart, where it shall lie at rest; for sorrow is the lot of all of woman born: for care was I brought forth, and labour is my lot: not matchless might, nor wisdom, nor every gift enjoyed, can from the heart of man hide sorrow.’ (E444) Blake suggests that it is as much by bringing the binaries of his public identity (aggressive, masculine warrior) into conflict with his more dependent private role (lover and husband) as by persuading Samson to reveal his secret, that Dalila undermines him. The prose poem ends inconclusively. While Samson appears to yield to Dalila’s entreaties as in the biblical account, here he tells the tale of his birth




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rather than the secret of his strength. The reader remains uncertain whether Blake was dramatizing the downfall of the national defender or leaving open the possibility of further resistance to hypocritical arts which unman the patriot. Blake’s representation of the ‘Female Will’ is often regarded as a distinctive development in the later epics, but it seems clear that rhetoric associated with the widespread and traditional anxiety towards female political agency is already evident and, furthermore, is held in tension with a more positive vision of fluid identity, exemplified by ‘Truth’. The gendered political rhetoric of ‘Samson’ remains notable in Blake’s later works. In Europe the precondition for Enitharmon’s ascendancy (linked ultimately to that of Urizen) is the sleep of ‘Strong Urthona’. In this context, Enitharmon’s advocacy of ‘female secrecy’ and the onset of her ‘female dream’ is similar to Dalila’s exercise of power: Who shall I call? Who shall I send? That Woman, lovely Woman! may have dominion? Arise O Rintrah thee I call! & Palamabron thee! Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin! That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come: Forbid all joy, & from her childhood shall the little female Spread nets in every secret path. (5:2–9, E62) The agents of ‘woman’s dominion’ are king and priest, but clearly they conspire together to thwart male and female joy. These lines are less concerned with biological sex and more with a political context in which figures representing male citizenship, Urthona and Los, are subdued by a hybrid power, comprising the dominant agency of ‘male’ institutions but also a conventionally ‘female’ passivity in those whom they control. These repressive agents of state ideology encourage ‘the human race’ (not solely men) to perform a submissive identity. Significantly, this seems to reflect anxieties about the restraint of masculine and independent agency (associated with Urthona, Los and Orc) into feminine passivity via repressive institutions, an anxiety which recurs in Blake’s apostrophe in Milton to ‘Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches!’ (22:50, E117). Blake repeatedly seems more interested in ‘femininity’ as the non-performance of particular public behaviours rather than as the cultural expression of a sexed body. Thus Urizen builds the temple of natural religion at Stonehenge, over which Vala stands: Here Vala stood turning the iron Spindle of destruction From heaven to earth: howling! invisible! but not invisible



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Her Two Covering Cherubs afterwards named Voltaire & Rousseau: Two frowning Rocks: on either side of the Cove & Stone of Torture: Frozen Sons of the feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton & Locke.

Such a passage is clearly not literally related to biological sex, despite the genital form in which Vala’s temple is envisioned. Although grotesque and disturbing, the construction of a ‘feminine Tabernacle’ of doubt through the agency of sceptical male intellectuals acting as its labia suggests that Blake saw in gendered language metaphorical possibilities beyond the essentialist assumptions about gender that characterize straightforward misogyny. As in ‘Samson’, what is figured as an aggressive woman’s sapping of male vitality is actually an absorption of female sexuality into the exercise of male power. If we are willing to contextualize Blake’s merged gender categories as metaphors, then his notorious concept of the ‘Female Will’ can be taken to describe complex political behaviour. Coupling an adjective conventionally connoting passivity with a noun of activity, this hybrid figure produces a form of domination precisely through the fostering of inactivity.9 Images of supposedly dependent ‘female’ figures acting with barbarous aggression, exemplified by the warlike Vala, appear to encode Blake’s anxieties about the subtle and insidious operation of institutional power, which relies upon its subjects’ dependency and passivity even as its totality is manifested in brutal masculine aggression. In this context, his painting of The Spiritual Form of Pitt (c.1805–09) uses the sort of rhetoric that Pitt’s opponents had adopted in the 1780s and 1790s to criticize the premier’s claims to masculine citizenship.10 Blake depicted the notoriously asexual Pitt as the constellation Virgo, thereby associating him with ‘feminine’ dependency, perhaps a jibe at his close relationship with the king. But there is an additional friction in the portrait. The constellation traditionally depicts Astraea, a personification of peace and justice, but Pitt ‘directing the storms of war’ delivers neither. If his depiction as a female undermines claims to the active attributes of a male leader, the aggression he displays in the painting also marks his distance from positive female attributes. This ambiguous ‘spiritual form’ of Pitt is motivated by Blake’s attempt to satirize the former premier in gendered political terms familiar to an informed audience; his own ideas about femininity seem rather distant here. Blake’s most monstrous representations of aggressive females and hermaphrodites and his merging of conventional gender categories are repeatedly used to depict symbolic characters or constructs which fulfil a public and political role. In Milton, the ‘Giants mighty Hermaphroditic’, ‘the Female-Males’, and ‘the Male-Females’ comprise the distorted ‘Twenty-seven



(J 66:10–14, E218)

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Then All the Daughters of Albion became One before Los: even Vala! And she put forth her hand upon the Looms in dreadful howlings Till she vegetated into a hungry Stomach & a devouring Tongue. Her Hand is a Court of Justice, her Feet: two Armies in Battle Storms & Pestilence: in her Locks: & in her Loins Earthquake. And Fire. & the Ruin of Cities & Nations & Families & Tongues. (J 64:6–11, E215) Here, as a figure from whom national vengeance emanates, Vala strongly resembles the Spiritual Form of Pitt. Blake’s choice of a female personification dispensing masculine aggression strategically subverts conventional expectations of femininity (the maternal domesticity and nurturing associated with Jerusalem) and thus challenges the loyalist rhetoric in which Britannia was the preserver of European liberty and peace against French militarism. By contrast to his depiction of figures such as Vala, as I have discussed elsewhere, in his later work Blake moves towards a position in which conventionally feminine virtues are viewed as a source of strength when performed by male characters acting the public role of the citizen (Fallon 2009). This is especially evident in Jerusalem, where Los and Jesus actively engage in exchanges of sympathy, weeping, forgiveness and nurturing which are compatible with their public duty, conceived of as primarily masculine. Although in Jerusalem Blake’s personifications – like Vala – retain an anxiety about aggressive female figures in a public context, when he adopts a less critical and more constructive focus he seems to reject the separation of gender roles crucial to republican discourse in favour of a continuum in which the interaction and circulation of genders is desirable. This becomes evident when Rahab is absorbed into the Antichrist, at which point ‘The Feminine separates from the Masculine & both from Man, / Ceasing to be His Emanations, Life to Themselves assuming!’ (90:1–2, E249). The ‘Masculine’ is an attribute, as much an emanation from Man as the ‘Feminine’, a point evident when Jerusalem describes Beulah to Vala as a place or state where ‘the Masculine & Feminine are nurs’d into Youth & Maiden / By the tears & smiles of Beulahs Daughters till the time of Sleep is past’ (79:76–7, E236). Blake conceives of these gendered terms as attributes equally necessary to human existence, and his valorization of their interaction gestures towards a plenitude of



Heavens & their Churches’ visible in Milton’s Shadow (37:35–9, E138) which merge secrecy with power. This is particularly evident in descriptions of Vala. At key points, she is constituted by male-dominated domains of law and war, precisely the mechanisms that Blake regarded as sources of oppression rendering the citizen docile:


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no more the Masculine mingles With the Feminine. but the Sublime is shut out from the Pathos In howling torment, to build stone walls of separation, compelling The Pathos, to weave curtains of hiding secresy from the torment. (90:1–13, E249) Blake and his characters often use gendered language in a highly polarized fashion, but this passage indicates that in response to such language we should be alert to his strategic designs on the reader rather than using it as evidence of Blake’s personal opinions. Of course, Blake’s figurations and his characters’ utterances often rely upon the gendered norms of contemporary rhetoric; his writings are hardly convenient expressions of a straightforward ‘feminist’ viewpoint. Blake’s real value lies in his willingness to address and experiment with a range of positions, queering conventional sexual identities in ways that encourage readers to reconsider the categories they habitually use to order their experience. It is notable that his representations of ‘gender trouble’ vary depending on the context. Blake’s most negative presentations of females or transsexual figures tend to coincide with situations in which they act as expressions or instruments of male-male struggles for dominance, while more constructive human collaborations legitimate an alternative, positive potential for new and unfamiliar forms of identity. But as a writer engaged with his political nation, addressing a public steeped in binary gendered political discourse, he is inevitably enmeshed in its masculine signifying economy. While Blake states in his annotations to Lavater, ‘all Act [from Individual propensity] is Virtue’ (E 601), his investment in the traditionally gendered terms of republican discourse often appears in tension with his devilish instincts, even as both are directed towards goals of human liberation.

Notes 1. For an excellent summary of feminist approaches to Blake, see Bruder (2006, 132–66). 2. See Tayler (1973), Stevenson (1996), Williams (1998) and Ankarskjö (2006). 3. Blake makes pejorative use of ‘fribble’ in his annotations to Reynolds (E654) and, during his ‘Public Address’, suggests the ‘English Style of engraving’ emerged from the ‘Fribbles Toilettes’ of William Woollett and Robert Strange (E573). Significantly, this usage reflects the masculine norms in republican discourse, in which John Barrell (1986) shows Blake’s art writings are steeped.



combinations and configurations. By contrast, Antichrist reifies gender into fixed essences:

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4. As Christoper Hobson (2000) has shown, the treatment of male homosexuals in Blake’s Britain was often brutally violent, in contrast to the more comic connotations of this term. 5. Several commentators have suggested Wilkes’s influence on the young Blake, including Bronowski (1972, 59–61) and Erdman (1954; 1977, 13–15, 18). 6. My account of D’Eon is indebted to Clark (1998) and to Kates (2001). 7. 1 May 1784, British Museum Catalogue (BMC), nos 6533 and 6566. 8. Samson fascinated Blake, and featured in many of his artworks. See Butlin (1981) nos. 116, 388, 453, 454, 455. 9. Such self-division, rather than specific sexual attributes, is the primary characteristic of Blake’s hermaphrodites, for example in The Four Zoas (VIII, 104:19–21, E377), Milton (14:36–8, E108) and Jerusalem (58:20, E207). 10. For a fuller discussion of this painting, see Fallon (2007).



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‘No Boys Work’: Blake, Hayley and the Triumphs of (Intellectual) Paiderastia Mark Crosby

In 1804, London was whipped into a feverish state of anticipation by various puffs in newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets concerning the imminent arrival of a remarkable new acting talent. William Henry West Betty had garnered a considerable reputation over a very short period of time, playing alternately Romeo, Hamlet and Richard III to packed theatres in Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham before arriving to much fanfare in London. Such was the level of excitement generated by Betty that, according to The Times, the two main metropolitan theatres tussled over ‘possession of this dramatic prize’ (6 September 1804). Richard Brinsley Sheridan secured Betty’s services and there were reports that ‘not less than twenty-five guineas were offered in vain for a box’ to witness Betty’s opening performance (Young Roscius 1805, 17). An anonymous squib described the scene immediately before Betty took the stage: The appearance of . . . Betty before a London audience was ushered in by a thousand inauspicious accidents, such as beaux collaring their fellow fops in their endeavours to get admittance, ladies of delicate nerves fainting away in the arms of coal heavers and scavengers, and grey-bearded debauchees, and their mistresses squeezed together like barrelled herrings; while a thousand fragments of coats, gown, shawls, hats and bonnets strewed the scene of action! (9) The pamphleteer goes on to ascribe the public’s ‘mania’ for Betty to the actor’s age. Referred to by the press as the Young Roscius, William Betty was thirteen years old when he made his London debut. In a letter to his Sussex patron, William Hayley, of 22 March 1805, Blake also remarked upon Betty’s popularity: The Town is Mad Young Roscius like all Prodigies is the talk of Every Body I have not seen him & perhaps never may. I have no Curiosity to see him 199



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Blake’s disparaging remark focuses on the apparent inadequacy of youth to perform an adult’s task. Here Blake is arguing that to undertake ‘Real’ work, presumably work that has social and cultural importance, requires a level of maturity, or rather experience, not consistent with someone of Betty’s age. The comment echoes similar sentiments expressed to Hayley in a letter of 7 October 1803, where Blake is concerned with what he sees as the predominance of inexperienced boys in the engraving trade: How is it possible that a Man almost 50 Years of Age who has not lost any of his life since he was five years old without incessant labour & study. how is it possible that such a one with ordinary common sense can be inferior to a boy of twenty who scarcely has taken or deigns to take a pencil in hand. (E736) Again, Blake is proposing the triumph of experience over innocence when it comes to producing ‘Real’ work. While both comments may appear, perhaps not unlike Blake’s biting poetical fragments in his manuscript Notebook, the result of paranoia and jealousy, they may have been informed by his experiences working for Hayley in Felpham. Both letters are addressed to Hayley (the subject of a number of the more acerbic Notebook epigrams) and concern the inability of boys to fulfil men’s roles. Hayley had tutored numerous boys, including his son Thomas Alphonso Hayley, in his libraries, firstly at his Eartham estate and later at Turret House in Felpham, Sussex. He also tutored Blake in Greek, Italian and Hebrew during Blake’s three-year residence in Felpham. By addressing his complaints about the inadequacy of youth to Hayley, Blake is not only articulating an anxiety about being bypassed in commercial engraving, but is also referring to Hayley’s own experiences tutoring boys. This chapter suggests that one of the reasons for Blake’s struggles during his time in Felpham was because Hayley’s instructional methods appear to have been based on the classical Greek practice of Paiderastia.1 In ancient Greece, Paiderastia flourished, particularly in city-states such as Sparta, where it was institutionalized, and in Athens, where it was glorified, with the two prominent lovers, Aristogeiton and Harmodius, worshipped as tyrannicidal heroes. The relationship between an older man, known as the erastes, and his eromenos, a boy aged between 14 and 20, was seen as a crucial stage in the development of Greek males. The erastes provided his eromenos with, as Louis Crompton observes, ‘courage, virtue and wisdom’ (2003, 4). As illustrated in Plato’s Symposium, these



as I well know what is within the compass of a boy of 14. & as to the Real Acting it is like Painting No Boys Work. (E764)

relationships were also defined by their homoeroticism. For example, addressing his fellow Athenians, Phaedrus states: ‘I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to a lover than a beloved youth’ (Plato 1993, 20).2 At the end of the Symposium, Socrates also refers to the homoeroticism inherent in relationships predicated on intellectual instruction: ‘when a temperate man finds beauty in a youth and tries to educate him, such an intellectual marriage is more intimate than the union of man and wife’ (quoted in Crompton 2003, 59). Many Greek lyrical poets also celebrated Paiderastia, including Theognis (1973, 100) who opined: ‘Happy the lover who exercises, then / Goes home to sleep all day with a handsome boy’. In eighteenth-century Britain public views on Paiderastia were vehemently conservative, as the scandal surrounding William Beckford’s courtship of his seventeen-year-old cousin, William Courtenay, known as the Powderham Affair, indicates.3 In private, however, there was at least one advocate of Paiderastia. Jeremy Bentham’s tract on the subject, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, uses Greek mythology to argue for a change in sodomy law. Bentham asks: ‘if Hercules could be in a frenzy for the loss of Hylas, and the father of the Gods and men could solace himself with Ganymede’ could pederasty be an odious or infrequent ‘thing for mortal men to do?’4 Yet, despite key Enlightenment figures such as Montesquieu and Voltaire publicly expressing their views on same sex relations, the practice of Paiderastia was kept firmly in the closet in eighteenth-century Britain and when it did emerge, such as in the Powderham Affair, it was always met with vociferous condemnation. There was, however, another, more acceptable route for the Greek man-boy relationship paradigm, with its inherent homoerotic potentiality, to emerge from the eighteenth-century closet. A number of individuals practised a form of intellectual Paiderastia during this period, including Blake’s Sussex patron. Several Blake scholars, notably S. Foster Damon, have viewed Hayley as a homosexual. Damon uses Blake’s satirical notebook epigram, ‘Of H s birth this was the happy lot / His Mother on his Father him begot’ (E560), to support his assertion that Hayley was ‘unconsciously homosexual’ (Damon 1988, 178). Both of Hayley’s marriages were troubled, with suggestions that his first union was never consummated. In a letter to Walter Scott dated 15 September 1811, Hayley includes a third-person account of his first wife, Eliza, whose frigidity, he claims, was responsible for the failure of their marriage: ‘He had married a person to whom Nature not only refused the privilege of producing a child, but even those natural desires which she has wisely and tenderly given to Modesty herself for the preservation of the human Race’ (quoted in Bishop 1951, 65). The mother of Hayley’s only child was also the daughter of his housekeeper and he did not marry his second wife until 1809. Like the first



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marriage, the second failed to produce any offspring, and lasted only a few years. While Hayley admittedly experienced certain difficulties with his nuptial relations, entitling one of the chapters of his autobiography: ‘Of unsuccessful endeavours to counteract the calamitous pressure of connubial infelicity’, there is, as yet, no explicit primary evidence indicating that his sexual proclivities encompassed men (Hayley 1823, 1:339). Indeed, the manuscript draft of Hayley’s autobiography indicates that he embarked on two consecutive ‘persuasions’ with adolescent girls during Blake’s time in Felpham (Anecdotes n.d., 2:46–7). However, as we shall see, Hayley’s instructional relationships with adolescent boys seem to have been informed by the Greek practice of Paiderastia. Hayley had spent a decade tutoring a number of local boys before Blake arrived in Felpham. In 1795, after his illegitimate son was apprenticed to the sculptor John Flaxman in London, Hayley began tutoring the eldest son of George O’Brien Wyndham, the third Earl of Egremont. As well as teaching the young Wyndham, Hayley provided him with board and lodgings, despite the fact that Egremont’s estate was just three miles from Hayley’s Eartham residence. Hayley also entertained and tutored William Meyer, the son of the miniature-painter Jeremiah Meyer, in his library at Eartham. After the death of Hayley’s son in 1800, he spent two months in Kew with the younger Meyer, to whom he referred as his secondary son. Later that year Blake moved to Felpham and, around the same time, Hayley began to cultivate a friendship with Edward Garrard Marsh, the son of his friend, the composer John Marsh. The younger Marsh was about seventeen when he was introduced to Hayley. In October 1800, Marsh went up to Wadham College, Oxford, frequently corresponding with Hayley during term and visiting Felpham during vacations. Much of the correspondence survives and offers an intriguing insight into Marsh’s relationship with Hayley. In a series of letters corresponding to the period of Blake’s residence in Felpham, Marsh writes to Hayley describing his academic endeavours at Oxford. He also included fragments of Greek translations for Hayley to comment upon. In the first extant letter, dated 8 February 1802, the imbalance in the dynamic of their relationship is clear from Marsh’s confession of embarrassment during what appears to have been their initial meeting: When I last had the pleasure of seeing you at Mrs Poole’s, you observed a little bunch of papers hanging out of my waistcoat pocket, and accused me of their being verses. The charge was so direct and unexpected, that it covered me with confusion? I knew not, what I said or did; and when in the next moment I reflected on the wicked words, which had escaped me; (for I was guilty of a fib) it appeared to me, as the reflection . . . like a sudden, unaccountable delirium?5



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In an Ovidian poem that follows this admission, Marsh celebrates Hayley’s role as a poet and patron. While these verses ostensibly celebrate Hayley’s dead son, they spend more time extolling Hayley’s virtues, for example, describing Hayley as a divinely ordained guardian and ‘friend to Mankind’. In this context, the superabundance of flattery Marsh deploys configures Hayley as a patronal figure and, inverting the classical Greek paradigm of Paiderastia, where the erastes pursues the eromenos, Marsh seeks to offer himself as a substitute for Thomas Alphonso, that is, an object for Hayley’s instructional and paternal attention. This is further suggested by Marsh’s inclusion of 15 lines translated from the opening of The Odyssey for Hayley to examine and correct. Hayley responded swiftly, sending corrections as well as now lost verses that were dedicated to Marsh. In a letter of 21 February Marsh thanks Hayley: I know not how to express my gratitude to you for your sonnet, for your hymn, your advice, your schemes, your disinterestedness – in short I have so many favors from your hand to acknowledge, that I can only say, I wish, that I deserved them. (fol. 3) In a letter postmarked 9 February, Marsh also indicates that his attempts to translate Homer were made after a visit to Felpham where he appears to have been introduced to Blake: ‘while I was walking homeward from the land of inspiration, or (to use the words of the poetical sculptor) from Felpham, Mild village’ (fol. 10). As Robert Essick has shown, Marsh was almost certainly quoting from Blake (Essick 1987, 65). On 30 January 1803, Blake wrote to his brother about his activities in Felpham, revealing that, amongst other things, he was enjoying learning classical languages under Hayley’s guidance: ‘I go on Merrily with my Greek & Latin: am very sorry that I did not begin to learn languages early in life as I find it very Easy’ (E727).6 In the same letter, Blake appears to refer to Marsh, stating: ‘I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar’ (E727). That Blake and Marsh were being tutored by Hayley at the same time is further suggested in Marsh’s letter of 9 May 1802, where he anticipates hearing Hayley’s oral translation of the German poet Klopstock: ‘I may perhaps expect to hear you read it [Klopstock’s poetry], as the good Mr Blake has heard you read French authors and to reap the benefits of your perseverance’ (quoted in Essick 1987, 67). In his Memoirs, Hayley similarly recounts reading ‘Klopstock into English to Blake’ (1823, 2:42; Essick 1987, 68). It seems that from early 1802 to at least January 1803, Hayley instructed both Blake and Marsh in, amongst other subjects, classical Greek. In the case of Marsh this was primarily through correspondence, but there may have been instances when Hayley instructed both Blake and Marsh at the same time in the library at Felpham.




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Thus, my dear Mr Hayley, I have presumed to offer to your perusal a few Greek lines. Lines I call them, since lines they may be, how many faults so’ever [sic] you may detect to exclude them from the title of verses: and faults, no doubt, there are, and as many perhaps as can easily be conjured in so short a compass, my humble muse having been contented with British ground, or not having at farthest ventured beyond the garden of Latium so as to be utterly unqualified to catch the spirit of Grecian poetry. (fol. 11) Here Marsh is alluding to Hayley’s Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), which presents a peripatetic muse leaping through history and between poets and nations, as a form of mitigation for any mistakes in his Greek. The letter also includes an update on his attempt to translate Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica (c. 200 BCE) with a crucial reference to Blake: I must take the liberty of mentioning, that I hope to present you at my return to Sussex with a continuation of my version of the Rhodian to the end of the third book. Should it happen in any degree to please you, I cannot but flatter myself that your friendly artist will be glad to see this small portion of it [Apollonius’s] work translated by even my hand. (fol. 11)7 That the ‘friendly artist’ is Blake is confirmed in the next sentence of the letter in which Marsh refers to Blake’s designs to one of Hayley’s ballads: ‘I wish him success on his elephant, which from its rider might (I think) be called the Apollonia elephant, and hope to contribute my little assistance of the next turnpike on his tour’ (fol. 11).8 Later that year, on 18 October, Marsh dispatched five manuscript pages of his translation of Apollonius to Hayley.9 The particular section of the Argonautica that Marsh decided to translate covers the only explicitly homoerotic incident in the poem: the prelude to Hercules’s search for his lover Hylas. Marsh translates the moment prior to Hylas’s abduction, with Hercules chiding Jason and his Argonauts for deviating from their mission to capture the Golden Fleece to fornicate with the women of Lemnos. Rather than join Jason, and engage in a heterosexual relationship, Hercules chooses to stand guard over the Argo with Hylas. At this point in the narrative Aphrodite appears and decides to punish Hercules for his apparent homosexuality (Apollonius’s Hercules is seemingly immune to the goddess’s advances) by inspiring a passing nymph with an insatiable



The letters from Marsh during 1802 reveal that he was preoccupied with translating classical Greek poetry. On 20 June, Marsh sent Hayley an update on his attempts:

lust for Hylas. The nymph subsequently kidnaps Hylas, and Hercules quits the Argo to reclaim his lover. As several critics have noted, Apollonius provides two opposing sexual paradigms: heterosexuality, represented by Jason and his liaisons with various women (notably Medea), and homosexuality, represented by the relationship between Hercules and Hylas (Levin 1971, 22–8). In Apollonius’s poem, however, homosexuality is quickly regulated, being replaced by heterosexuality in the nymph’s desire for Hylas. The representative of homosexuality, Hercules, disappears from the narrative for long periods, only being referred to briefly in later sections, and Jason, the embodiment of heterosexuality, takes centre stage, becoming de facto leader of the Argonauts. Despite seemingly disavowing homosexuality in favour of heterosexuality, Apollonius does allow for the existence of a homoerotic potentiality in the form of an all-male ménage à trois centred on Hylas. To establish the relationship between Hercules and Hylas, Apollonius has Hercules make amends for murdering Hylas’s father, Theodamas, by taking care of his son. This paternal substitution quickly turns erotic. However, once on board the Argo, Hylas also attracts the attention of Polyphemus who, like Hercules, occupies the role of erastes to Hylas’s eromenos. Following Hercules, Polyphemus also leaves the Argo to search for Hylas. Apollonius does not explore this love triangle further, leaving open the homoerotic potentiality between the two Greek heroes and the object of their affection. By including a translation of this episode in his letters, Marsh may have been alluding to what he saw as a similar dynamic in his relationship with Hayley and Blake. As we can see from Marsh’s replies to Hayley, a degree of affection existed between teacher and pupil. Blake also appears to have taken to Marsh, articulating his admiration in a letter to Hayley of 27 January 1804, where he refers to ‘my much admired & respected Edward the Bard of Oxford whose verses still sound upon my Ear like the distant approach of things mighty & magnificent like the sound of harps I hear before the Suns rising’ (E741). Blake also introduces the quotidian Marsh into his mythopoetic universe, using personification to represent him as Oxford, a counsellor of Los, in Jerusalem: Lincoln, Durham & Carlise, Councellors of Los. And Ely, Scribe of Los, whose pen no other hand Dare touch! Oxford, immortal Bard! With eloquence Divine, he wept over Albion: speaking the words of God In mild perswasion: bringing leaves of the Tree of Life (41[46]:5–9, E188)10 The ‘words of God’ spoken by Oxford/Marsh warn Albion of his error: ‘One Error not remov’d, will destroy a human Soul / Repose in Beulahs night, till the Error is remov’d’ (41[46]:11–12, E188). Oxford/Marsh’s advice to ‘repose in Beulahs night’ is significant in the biographical context as it relates to




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Marsh’s eromenos role in the tripartite relationship. Beulah is described in The Four Zoas as ‘a mild & pleasant rest / . . . a Soft Moony Universe feminine lovely / Pure mild & Gentle given in Mercy to those who sleep / Eternally’ (5:29–32, E303). It is a curative, gendered realm that appears to share some similarities with Blake’s various epistolary descriptions of Felpham.11 In an addition to the poem, probably made c. 1800–04, the connection between the pastoral and feminine Beulah and Felpham is made more explicit, with Los and Enitharmon sitting ‘down upon the margind sea, / Conversing with the visions of Beulah in dark slumberous bliss’ (9:32–3, E305). As some critics have observed, ‘the margind sea’ may allude to Felpham, and in the context of this revision, the sojourn by the sea and the converse with the feminine visions of Beulah initially affords Los and Enitharmon respite from their jealous bickering (Richey 1993, 710). Yet while appearing to offer a form of sanctuary and benevolent counsel, the passivity of the visions of Beulah actually serves to dull the radical potential that Los and Enitharmon had previously possessed. In Jerusalem, Oxford/Marsh’s advice to Albion betrays the same gendered passivity as Blake’s configuration of Beulah in The Four Zoas. By counselling Albion to remain in Beulah’s Night and therefore also to remain passive, Oxford/Marsh does not address the cause of the error that initiates the fall, but actually promotes it. Not unlike Blake’s initial conception of Felpham, the visions of Beulah promise much, yet do not fulfil their promise. From late 1801, Blake became unhappy with his working and living arrangements in Felpham, seeing them as underlying a passive state that prevented him from following ‘the dictates of [his] Angels’ (E724). By 1802, Blake felt that his experiences in Felpham had compromised his role as a poet and artist and, while part of the blame lay in the various commissions from Hayley, the personified words of ‘mild perswasion’ Blake gives to Oxford/Marsh in Jerusalem imply that Marsh may also have been representative of a feminine, passive state that inhibits creative action. It is likely that Blake’s depiction of Oxford/Marsh was influenced by the homoeroticism inherent in Hayley’s instructional relationships. Marsh’s letters of 1803, as well as Blake’s letter to Hayley of 27 January 1804, indicate that Marsh spent time with Blake and Hayley in the Turret House library. In a letter of 23 November, Marsh makes an oblique reference to Blake that suggests he was aware of, or had witnessed first hand, Blake engraving. Referring to Hayley’s proposed biography of Thomas Alphonso, Marsh asks: Have you made any alterations in the life of Alphonso? I shall not easily forget the pleasure it has given me; and I have here to request your indulgence to a few scrambling lines, which I etched out one night in the turret, after we had read part of it together. (fol. 32, my italics)12



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The term ‘etched’ to describe the composition of poetry is significant as etching is a particular engraving technique that uses aqua fortis to corrode the surface of the copper plate. Blake used this technique in many of his commercial prints, including some of the plates he executed for Hayley, such as the illustrations to the 1803 edition of The Triumphs of Temper (1781). Blake also adapted this technique in his own relief-etching process, which he used to produce his illuminated books as well as other works, including Little Tom the Sailor (1800), the ballad Hayley composed when Blake arrived in Felpham to raise funds for a local widow. Marsh’s use of ‘etched’ suggests that he was familiar with Blake’s engraving methods, having observed them either in Hayley’s library or at Blake’s cottage. It is possible that while studying Greek together under Hayley’s tuition, a degree of competition arose between Marsh and Blake. Blake’s comment, ‘I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar’ (E727), implies that both he and Marsh were learning at the same rate and perhaps from the same texts. Marsh’s use of ‘etched’ to describe the composition of poetry indicates a desire to align himself with Blake. Perhaps not unlike the paradigm shift that occurs in his Ovidian poem dedicated to Hayley’s son, Marsh may have been attempting to situate himself in a similar position to Blake, or indeed usurp Blake as Hayley’s protégé. It is possible that Blake became aware of this shift between late 1802 and early 1803, and it may be, in part, behind his comments to Hayley in the letter of 22 March 1805. The reference to ‘No Boys Work’ in this letter focuses on the inadequacy of a boy performing a man’s task. By directing the remark to Hayley, Blake appears to have been alluding to a shared belief that Marsh’s age hindered his attempts to translate Greek. This emphasis on experience triumphing over innocence is also evident in Jerusalem, where Blake links Oxford/Marsh’s innocence to a gendered passivity. By forging this connection, Blake indicates that he not only recognized the existence of homoeroticism in the tripartite relationship, with Marsh occupying the feminized role of eromenos, but also considered that it inhibited creativity. In this context, Oxford/Marsh appears to actualize Thel’s revelation that a superimposed patriarchal femininity is ultimately destructive (see Bruder 2006, 141). Blake seems to have believed that Hayley’s instructional paradigm imposed a feminine passivity on his students, which is borne out by Marsh’s apparent difficulties in translating Greek. As Marsh’s letters make clear, these difficulties strengthened his relationship with Hayley. For Blake, however, Hayley’s tutorship perpetuated Marsh’s passivity and, while Marsh appears to have revelled in this restrictive relationship, Blake found it creatively debilitating. Instead of heeding Oxford/Marsh’s words of ‘mild perswasion’, perhaps including any encouraging remarks to continue the (intellectual) ménage à trois by staying in Felpham and thus prolonging the regulated creativity he experienced under Hayley’s patronage, Blake returned from his ‘Mild & Pleasant Slumber’




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(E767) on the banks of the ‘margind sea’ (FZ 9:32, E305) to re-engage in (auto)-creative action in London.

1. For a discussion of this term see Crompton (2003, 3). 2. Also see Aristophanes’s speech on man-boy sexual relationships (Plato 1993, 30–1). 3. For anti-homosexual views during this period see Hobson (2000, 4–10). 4. For an examination of Bentham’s tract, see Crompton (1978). 5. Marsh letters, Essick Collection, fol. 1. All the Marsh letters quoted in this essay are in the collection of Robert N. Essick, Altadena, California. I wish to thank Professor Essick for allowing me to consult these letters and for his permission to quote from them. 6. For an example of Blake’s Greek see the epigram on page 3 of The Four Zoas manuscript. Reproduced in Blake (1973, 175). 7. Also see Essick (1987, 69). 8. For an examination of Hayley’s ballad project see Sato (2006). 9. The sale catalogue of Hayley’s library lists three editions of Apollonius’s poem. See A Catalogue (1821, Cat. Nos 37–9). 10. Many of Marsh’s letters contain poems and, as Essick has persuasively argued, the Oxford bard in Jerusalem is probably Marsh (see Essick 1987). 11. Also see Blake’s letter to Hayley of 11 December 1805, where he describes his experiences in Felpham as ‘a Mild & Pleasant Slumber’ (E767). 12. This sentence is followed by a line from The Iliad, 24:677 [translated from the Greek]: ‘when all the other gods and men, marshallers of horses, were sleeping’.



Notes

14 Susan Matthews

Blake’s early satire An Island in the Moon ends with a fragment in which two characters plot a visit to ‘Mr Femality’s’: ‘now I think we should do as much good as we can when we are at Mr Femality’s do yo[u] snap & take me up – and I will fall into such a passion Ill hollow and stamp & frighten all the People there & show them what truth is’ (E465). There’s not much to go on here: Horace Walpole and the Chevalier d’Eon have been suggested as identities for Mr Femality but according to Christopher Hobson, Mr Femality is more likely a general figure of the ‘effeminate man or homosexual with a salon or literary evening’. Hobson sees evidence in this figure of anxiety about male homosexuality of a kind that he believes disappears in Blake’s later work (2000, 29, 10). In this chapter I want to separate the ‘effeminate’ from the ‘homosexual’ in order to trace Blake’s use of the satirical figure of the effeminate man in post-1800 references to William Hayley. My aim is not to uncover a secret of continuing homophobia but to understand the meanings of effeminacy in Blake’s work around the time of his failed exhibition in 1809. In the Notebook verses and the Bard’s Song of Milton I hope to find a guide to the meanings of male and female effeminacy to a liberal bourgeois counterculture in the last years of the Napoleonic wars and to question the assumption that the discourse of effeminacy is necessarily homophobic. The seven years or so between Blake’s return from his ‘three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean’ (E728) and the failure of his exhibition were ones in which he was actively attempting to restart his career and to claim a public voice. Explaining his decision to return to London in 1803 he wrote to Butts: ‘Every one who hears of my going to London again Applauds it . . . Observing that I ought not to be away from the opportunities London affords of seeing fine Pictures and the various improvements in Works of Art going on in London’ (E728). But improvement had its limits. As his exhibition foundered, Blake may have been aware of an outbreak of homophobia triggered by raids on the White Swan, a gay men’s tavern in Vere Street, not far from 209



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where he was living (see Crompton 1998, 163–70). Hobson argues that the spectacle of public pillorying and executions confirmed Blake’s outrage at the cruelties of the ‘moral law’ and produced in his work a greater openness to homosexuality (2000, 114–18). Around this time new demons also appear in Blake’s writing including the monstrous threefold form of Hand, Hyle and Coban. In Jerusalem, Los tells how Hand’s ‘indignant self-righteousness like whirlwinds of the north / Rose up against me thundering from the Brook of Albions River / From Ranelagh & Strumbolo, from Cromwells gardens & Chelsea / The place of wounded Soldiers’ (7:73–8:3, E150–1). Los associates Hand with a culture in which ‘the bars of condens’d thoughts’ are forged ‘Into the thundering cannon and into the murdering gun’ (9:4–6, E152). Hand and Hyle despise ‘the sinful delights / Of age and youth and boy and girl and animal and herb’ (18:16–17, E163) and Hand chooses ‘Hyle and Coban . . . for Emissaries / In War’ (18:41, E163). Coban’s name is a mystery. ‘Hand’ refers to the graphic symbol with which Leigh Hunt signed his reviews in the Examiner and reveals Blake’s hurt at the hostility of the sole review of his exhibition. ‘Hyle’ is probably Greek for ‘matter’ but Foster Damon adds the comment that ‘the name seems rather to be derived from that of Hayley, the brainless sentimentalist’ (1988, 193). Whilst in Jerusalem Hyle is implicated in the sacrifice of life in Britain’s wars, in the Notebook Blake includes ‘the brainless sentimentalist’ in some angry verses titled ‘Apology for his Catalogue’, charging him with what might appear to be a merely aesthetic misjudgement: ‘Thus Hayley on his Toilette seeing the Sope / Cries Homer is very much improvd by Pope’ (E505). Using the stock satiric image of the gentleman’s toilette, Blake attacks Hayley’s supposed preference for Pope’s translation of the Iliad. In its use of this satirical commonplace, Blake might seem to echo Pope’s attack on the bisexual Lord Hervey in the Epistle to Arbuthnot as an Amphibious Thing! that acting either part, The trifling head, or the corrupted heart, Fop at the toilet, flatt’rer at the board, Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord. (326–9, in Fairer and Gerrard 2003, 164) Hervey is named Sporus here after the boy kept by Nero for sexual purposes. In casting Hayley as the gentleman at his toilette, Blake’s notebook couplet might seem to reveal a tacit homophobia despite the focus of his poetry on the cruelty of the ‘moral law’. I want to work for the moment, however, with the assumption that the discourse of effeminacy is not necessarily homophobic. In this case, Hayley’s appearance in the ‘Apology for the Catalogue’ suggests only that



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Blake sees effeminacy as significant to his analysis of the culture of a nation still at war.1 In a variety of different ways, the works Blake selected for his 1809 exhibition focus on sexuality as a key component of national culture. Perhaps the most straightforward is The Penance of Jane Shore, a subject that Blake had been working on from as early as 1779 and which could be viewed as a repudiation of the evangelical campaign against the adulterous woman mounted by Hannah More and others in the decade after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1798.2 In this painting, Blake continues the attack on the cruelty of the ‘moral law’ that Hobson has linked to Blake’s vision of a ‘Christian sexual anarchism’ (2000, 177). But Blake also draws on the dirtier languages of satire which, as Vic Gattrell (2006) emphasizes, delight in sexual images. David Fallon shows that The Spiritual form of Pitt recycles a familiar caricature identity of the prime minister as a ‘Virgin in breeches’, representing him as Virgo and recalling ‘Opposition and radical jibes at his asexuality and lack of interest in women’ (Fallon 2007, 13–14, 19). According to the Descriptive Catalogue, the surprisingly red flesh of The Ancient Britons portrays the ‘flush of health in flesh, exposed to the open air, nourished by the spirits of forests and floods, in that ancient happy period’ (E545).3 In these paintings, Blake contrasts a modern Britain which wages war and punishes sexual crime with an ‘ancient happy period’ in which bodies display the ‘flush of health in flesh’. The Ancient Britons provides a British version of the dream of health and efficiency that Blake encountered in one of the first books he owned: Fuseli’s translation of Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. Winckelmann presented a lyrical celebration of Greek culture as one in which naked beauty was displayed: ‘Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such a liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies’ (1765, 10). Living at Felpham near Hayley, Blake had studied the Iliad in the original Greek using Cowper’s translation as a parallel text. As an epic of war, the Iliad must have focused for Blake the pressing issue of the celebration and the destruction of the male body. Hayley’s reading of the Iliad comes to represent the hypocritical ability of London’s art culture to separate ‘beautiful nakedness’ from its destruction in war. Most critics since Frye have assumed that Hayley is culturally insignificant and that Blake’s hostility is the ill-digested sign of a messy personal clash (Frye 1947, 328). Hobson, for instance, argues that ‘Blake’s relations with Hayley . . . are only a secondary focus of the Bard’s Song’ (2000, 80). He also ignores the similarity between the notebook image of ‘Hayley on his toilette’ and the passage from the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot even though he singles out Pope’s image as typical of a homophobic tradition of ‘hate-filled texts’ (10). The most significant critic to revisit Blake’s relationship to Hayley is Andrew Elfenbein and he does so in the



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course of an important discussion that argues that the period’s construction of ‘romantic genius’ draws on the figure of the homosexual. Elfenbein assumes that both the genius and the homosexual are figured as outsiders in the period and he finds in Blake’s treatment of the ‘Poetic Genius’ in the Bard’s Song of Milton signs of a camp aesthetic which rejects ‘all that Hayley represented’. It is Hayley, according to Elfenbein, who offered the ‘greatest challenge’ to Blake’s ‘sexual radicalism’ at the time he was writing Milton. Elfenbein sees Hayley as a figure of ideological conformity and as a ‘paragon of patriarchal virtue’ – the straight man to queer Blake (1999, 154). The problem is that gender categories in the period are often so fluid as to produce illegibility if read in modern terms: the subjects of this chapter (Pope, Homer, Shakespeare, Hayley, Cowper, Fuseli) can appear in masculine, feminine, effeminate, straight or queer guises. How Hayley is seen depends to some extent on whether we are looking at work or biography. Elfenbein’s picture of a ‘paragon of patriarchal virtue’ does not fit easily with a man whose intellectual interest in enlightenment libertinism (generously catered for by the resources of his fine library) was complemented by rumours of sexual irregularity. A more recent biographer finds hints that ‘Hayley arranged for sexual services during Romney’s late summer visits to Eartham’ (Cross 2002, 23). Whilst this might represent homosocial bonding of a kind entirely compatible with ‘patriarchal virtue’, the same biographer suspects that contemporary references to ‘impurities’ in Romney’s life were coded references to homosexual activity or ‘pronounced homoerotic leanings’ (26). Hayley was known not only for his support of friends such as Romney and Cowper – who present non-standard forms of masculinity – but also for his friendships with women writers. As a friend to Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith and Hannah More, Hayley might indeed be Mr Femality – the man with a salon. His Memoirs create a picture of a man formed by, devoted to and dominated by women and he traces his love of literature to ‘hearing poems read to him with taste and feeling’ by a mother who was widowed when he was only five. He was sent to Eton in a bid to counteract the undue influence of his mother and to produce ‘an accomplished manly character’ but he remained close to the women who raised him (Hayley 1823, 1:22, 25). His wet nurse continued to read to him for over fifty years (1:23, 237, 366) and her daughter (in an arrangement that borders on the incestuous) would be the mother of Hayley’s illegitimate only son. Hayley celebrated the changing cultural role of women, and some twenty-first century critical work by Dror Wahrman and Harriet Guest has begun to recognize the symptomatic importance of his writing (Wahrman 2004, 14; Guest 2000, 191, 201). Blake’s notebook attack on Hayley might therefore be read as an anxious response to the rising cultural power of women, despite, or because of, his own early encouragement by the Mathew circle that may offer one



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model for An Island in the Moon.4 As Tristanne Connolly and Harriet Kramer Linkin have suggested, women writers and readers were some of the first to value Blake’s work.5 But to make the leap from the negative discourse of effeminacy to misogyny is misleading because the charge of effeminacy was to an extent gender-blind: not only do writers such as Wollstonecraft attack what they detect as effeminacy, but women could also be seen as effeminate (see Wahrman 2004, 63). Blake’s picture of ‘Hayley on his toilette’ recalls the success of his 1780 poem The Triumphs of Temper which Hayley presented as a reworking of The Rape of the Lock for a pro-feminine age, replacing Pope’s ‘most delicate raillery on Female Foibles’ by an attempt ‘to delineate the more engaging features of Female Excellence’ (Hayley 1781, ix). Hayley’s poem thus turns Pope’s original from satire to celebration, as if The Rape of the Lock were to be rewritten from Belinda’s point of view. Even though Walpole has been suggested as a possible model for ‘Mr Femality’, he too saw effeminacy in Hayley’s poem for women, commenting that ‘Mr. Hayley has been put into a course of breast-milk, and sucked the nine muses, and is now as tame as a lamb.’6 Hayley’s fondness for his old nurse perhaps provides the subtext. By contrast, what contemporary criticism of Blake there was identifies his work in terms of sublimity and the epic and thus as belonging to a culture of republican masculinity. For Benjamin Heath Malkin in 1806, Blake’s ‘personifications are bold, his thoughts original, and his style of writing altogether epic in its structure’ (BR 572). Although Elfenbein sees Blake’s work as camp and Hayley’s as patriarchal, contemporaries tended to reverse the categories. That of effeminacy, however, only partially overlaps with modern taxonomies of gender or sexual orientation which were emerging at the end of the eighteenth century (see Wahrman 2004, 42–4). Although effeminacy could suggest homosexuality and ‘fops were occasionally accused of sodomy’, Philip Carter argues that the fop did not become synonymous in the eighteenth century with ‘a sexually defined molly type’ (2001, 145). It is more likely, I think, that Blake portrays Hayley as an asexual fop than that he lampoons him as the sexually active homosexual or libertine. I am arguing, in other words, that Blake’s use of sexualized discourses may bear no relation to the kinds of sexual practice a biographer might uncover. Blake’s position is therefore, ironically, not unlike that of Pope in The Rape of the Lock in so far as this is a pro-sex poem. Belinda at the toilette displays a form of narcissism that deflects sexual desire; Clarissa’s warning to Belinda is that ‘she who scorns a man, must die a maid’ (V:28, in Fairer and Gerrard 2003, 130). Pope attacks Belinda for her choice of the sexually controlling role of coquette and the poem ends with the apotheosis of the lock, a process which comically turns her prudery into an icon. As a mock epic, The Rape of the Lock turns war into a game of cards, a process that might threaten a society’s ability to wage war. Mandeville,




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however, argued that modern war differed from epic combat in that it was in no way incompatible with politeness or refinement: officers could ‘destroy Cities a-bed, and ruin whole Countries while they are at Dinner’ (1724, 120–2).7 For Mandeville, therefore, effeminacy could coincide with militarism, an argument that is developed by Mary Wollstonecraft when she compares ‘the character of a modern soldier with that of a civilized woman’ (1989, 216). Whereas Burke called for a return to an age of chivalry, Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication lamented the loss of republican masculinity: ‘the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid, but not a less salutary stream’ (214). Like Mandeville, she believed that modern militarism thrived on effeminacy since ‘our British heroes are oftener sent from the gaming-table than from the plough’ and since the ‘present system of war’ is ‘rather the school of finesse and effeminacy than of fortitude’ (214, 216). What is different about Wollstonecraft’s use of the parallel is that both the soldier and the modern woman are seen as results of a corrupt society. These issues become focused in debates over the translation of Homer which seem concerned as much with attitudes to war as to gender. Blake probably misrepresents Hayley’s views on Homer translations since Hayley had in fact praised both Cowper’s 1791 translation and the contribution of Blake’s friend Fuseli as reader and consultant on the project (Knowles 1831, I:68). The sharpest criticism of Cowper’s translation came instead from Alexander Geddes, the radical biblical translator whose work Blake knew. According to Knowles, Geddes ‘was a great admirer of Pope’ and ‘was irritated beyond measure at the work, but chiefly by the praises bestowed in the preface upon Fuseli’ (I:74).8 But in casting Hayley as a supporter of Pope’s translation, Blake adopts a defensive closeness to Fuseli, ‘The only Man that eer I knew / Who did not make me almost spew’ (E509). I want therefore to investigate whether Blake shared some aspects of Fuseli’s reading of the Iliad. Reviewing Cowper’s Iliad for the Analytical, Fuseli predictably set Homer’s epic vision in contrast to a fashionable and effeminate world: ‘When we consider the magnificent end of epic poetry, – to write for all times and all races – to treat of what will always exist and always be understood, the puny laws of local decorum and fluctuating fashions . . . cannot come into consideration’ (quoted in Knowles 1831, I:82). His review praises Cowper for restoring the otherness of Homer’s voice and resisting the temptation to resolve difference: ‘He neither “attempts to soften or refine away” the energy of passages relative to the theology of primitive ages, or fraught with allegoric images of the phenomena of nature, though they might provoke the smile of the effeminate, and of the sophists of his day’ (I:82–3). The ‘effeminate’ here is the reader



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locked into the values of his own age, who laughs at primitive cultures. Fuseli singles out the scene of the ‘toilet of Juno’ in Iliad XIV as if in comparison with Pope’s account of Belinda at her dressing table to suggest that Pope’s Homer is contaminated by the feminization of the age which Pope affects to satirize in the Rape of the Lock. Cowper (according to Fuseli) avoids this danger for although ‘We are admitted to the toilet of Juno’ there is ‘no idle étalage of ornaments ready laid out, of boxes, capsules, and cosmetic’ (1:88). Precisely because the scene described by Fuseli lacks the jumble of a consumer culture, it carries a strong erotic charge: ‘the zone embraces her breast, perfumes rise in clouds round her body, her vest is animated with charms’ (ibid.) Fuseli thus defines a mode of sexuality which is distinct from that of the commercial world portrayed by Pope on Belinda’s dressing table. For Fuseli, the underlying question is whether effeminate culture can produce art: this question follows logically because he operates within a biological theory of civilization which assumes that cultures move from vigorous youth through maturity to decadence or effeminacy (see Craske 1997, 239–50). In a 1793 review of Bromley’s Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts, Fuseli offered a strangely limited account of the role of art, claiming that the ‘greatest praise’ of art is ‘to furnish the most innocent amusement for those nations to whom luxury is become as necessary as existence’ (quoted in Schiff 1975, 42). But Fuseli himself attempts to escape this role by overtly sexualizing his material; in The Nightmare, his best known and most frequently reproduced image, a dark and powerful sexuality disrupts the modern commercial world. Whereas a world of luxury demands ‘the most innocent amusement’, a more powerful form of art seeks out less innocent images. Fuseli’s Homer is frequently sexualized, most strikingly perhaps in a watercolour dated 1810 and known (rather unhelpfully) as The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women (Figure 14.1).9 The image carries a Greek inscription from ‘Iliad, X, 496.ff’, lines which Cowper rendered ‘for at his head / An evil dream that night had stood, the form / Of Diomede, by Pallas’ art devised’ (1802, I:327). Characteristically, Fuseli refuses to illustrate the lines from the Iliad in any straightforward sense. Instead of Thracian warriors or ‘the form / Of Diomede’ Fuseli shows two naked, sexually aroused but frustrated women. As dawn rises, the warrior flies from the bed of dreams (populated in this case by a three in a bed fantasy) and rushes back to war. The image could of course be read as showing that sexuality unmans the warrior, rendering the Thracians vulnerable to the night attack of the waking Odysseus and Diomedes. From a different political stance, the scene might show how war disrupts the polymorphous pleasures of sexuality. As a version of the favourite subject of Venus and Mars, Fuseli’s image carries both homosexual and heterosexual meanings revealing an idealized view of Greek culture






216 Figure 14.1 Johann Henrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women, 1810, pencil and watercolour, 31.5 × 40.8 cm c 2009 Kunsthaus Zürich


Peace is Thy Gift alone; for furious Mars, The only Governour, and God of Wars, When tir’d with Heat and Toil does oft resort To taste thy Pleasures of the Paphian Court. (Lucretius 1772, I:7) Fuseli’s image may also carry a reference to the Gillray satire of 1801, Dido in Despair, which shows Emma Hamilton (a friend of Hayley and fan of his writing) in bed, distraught at the loss of her hero Nelson. Fuseli’s women look similarly dissatisfied and, whilst from a pro-war perspective their bed of pleasures is a place of delusion, to the advocate of peace their sexual lures are beneficial. In this reading Fuseli would agree that Blake’s The spiritual form of Pitt, guiding Behemoth . . . that Angel who, pleased to perform the Almighty’s orders, rides on the whirlwind, directing the storms of war (E530) is rightly imaged as a ‘sexually frigid woman hater’ for, to both Blake and Fuseli, sexuality is a disincentive to war (Fallon 2007, 13). In his strangely sexualized Homer illustration, Fuseli rejects the view of poetry offered by Socrates in the Republic. According to Socrates, Homer’s poetry must be cut to exclude scenes where Achilles laments the death of fighters or where Hades is made to look uninviting: ‘We shall beg Homer, and the other poets, not to take it amiss, if we raze these things, and such as these; not, that they are not poetical, and pleasant to many to be heard; but the more poetical they are; the less ought they to be heard by children, and men who ought to be free, and more afraid of slavery, than of death.’ Accounts of illicit sexuality amongst the gods and even ‘excessive laughter’ are to go (Plato 1763, 87, 90). Homer is to be cut to construct an image of an ideal society in which the love felt for boys is innocent. The overarching function of censorship in Plato’s Republic is to protect the martial enthusiasm of the guardians who must be ready to fight in defence of the republic. Fuseli’s sketch can be read as a comment on cultural appropriations of Homer. Blake’s conflicting references suggest that he veers between a view of Homer as primitive poet and Homer as modern conformist. When he refers to ‘Homers hero’ in his Notebook it is as a figure of self-regulation who replicates much of what he dislikes in Hayley in these years: I am no Homers Hero you all know I profess not Generosity to a Foe My Generosity is to my Friends



as a place where sexual liberty brings peace. In this reading, the image would recall the address to Venus with which Lucretius opens De Rerum Natura:

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That for their Friendship I may make amends The Generous to Enemies promotes their Ends And becomes the Enemy & Betrayer of his Friends

So far I have argued that the crucial distinction for Blake – as for Fuseli – is between a culture which celebrates sexuality and one which masks and disavows sexuality in the interests of politeness. Yet a Notebook verse might be read as blaming militarism on Greek homosexuality: Twas the Greeks love of war Turnd Love into a Boy And Woman into a Statue of Stone And away fled every joy (E479) The verse raises the question of how Blake understands Greek sexual culture. Jonah Siegel argues that Fuseli returned from Italy with an awareness of the sexuality of classical culture that made him impatient with Winckelmann’s account of ancient art (Siegel 2000, 70–1). Even though, as we have seen, Winckelmann celebrated the physicality of Greek culture, he believed that art subjugates the physical to ‘ideal beauties, brain-born images’ (Winckelmann 1765, 4). In this verse, Blake imagines Greek culture in Winckelmann’s terms: the aim of Cupid as much as of the ‘Statue of Stone’ is to disrupt the progress of love. The reference to ‘The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero’ (E95) in the Preface to Milton suggests not only that the classics steal and pervert ‘the Sublime of the Bible’ but that they are themselves appropriated in both ancient and modern worlds by cultures that emphasize corporeal war and deny sexuality. Although Cowper was to become a favourite author of the evangelical middle class to whom he offered an image of a domestic, feminized masculinity, as translator of the Iliad (with Fuseli’s help) he stands for a masculine refusal to compromise with the effeminate present.10 The rhetoric of liberty used by Cowper in the Preface to his 1791 translation claims to recover a wilder Homer from Pope’s version in couplets: ‘Mr. Pope has surmounted all difficulties in his version of HOMER that it was possible to surmount in rhime. But he was fettered, and his fetters were his choice’ (Cowper 1791, I:v–vi). For Blake and Fuseli, Pope’s Iliad offers Homer moralized according to the terms set out by Plato to deny the horror of war and the fierceness of sexual desire. That this reading may be unfair to both Pope and to Hayley seems immaterial. Blake charges Hayley with the promotion of a literature which hears the past in present terms, and the present in the outmoded frame of the past, depriving past texts of their power to



(E502)

challenge the hegemony of the present. Hayley was successful, and his commercial success lay in his power to represent dreams to his female readers in a cleaned-up form which masks sexual content; the contrast between his two commercial successes, The Triumphs of Temper which is aimed at a female readership, and The Essay on Old Maids which assumes a predominately male readership, reveals the duplicity of his stance. Writing for women, Hayley can mask his commitment to a pro-sex culture sufficiently to win the praise of Hannah More (see Matthews 1999). In Blake’s couplet, Hayley’s crime is to disavow the fascination with sexuality that is cultivated within the walls of the elite library or the gallery of erotic prints. Pope’s Sporus is a ‘painted child of dirt’ but Blake’s Hayley is obsessed with cleanliness: ‘seeing the Sope’ he ‘Cries Homer is very much improved by Pope’. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote of the necessity for ‘the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society’ (1993, 77). This ‘bland assimilation’, I suggest, is what Blake attacks in the plan to ‘frighten all the People there & show them what truth is’ (E465). Both homosexual and homophobia are words that postdate Blake’s lifetime. Curiously, the OED offers quite different etymologies for the prefix of each word, deriving ‘homophobia’ (first used in 1920) from the Latin root ‘hom’ meaning ‘man’ plus ‘phobia’ meaning ‘Fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex’, whereas ‘homosexual’ is derived from the Greek root óµóς meaning ‘same’. If Blake displays homophobia, he does so in a sense not covered by either definition: Blake’s homophobia is not fear of men or of same sex desire but aversion towards the kind of sameness, the ‘bland assimilation’ that silences divergent voices. The eternals in The Book of Urizen are repulsed when they see ‘Man begetting his likeness, / On his own divided image’ (19:15–16, E79): their horror is triggered not by the sight of homosexual or heterosexual union but by an image of asexual narcissism which acts out a neo-Platonic fantasy of rejoining a mirror image. In the Bard’s Song of Milton, the ‘feminine’ is characterized as a process by which one person takes on another’s voice as when an eternal explains that ‘Palamabron dared not to call a solemn Assembly / Till Satan had assum’d Rintrah’s wrath in the day of mourning / In a feminine delusion of false pride selfdeciev’d’ (11[12]:24–6, E105). The process by which the mild Satan takes on Rintrah’s wrath in a ‘feminine delusion of false pride’ perhaps works through the complex gender politics of female support for a culture of militarism and of ‘that Angel who, pleased to perform the Almighty’s orders, rides on the whirlwind, directing the storms of war’. It is no accident that London’s first outdoor nude male statue was erected through exclusively female public subscription and took the form of a statue of Achilles in honour of Wellington, known as ‘The Ladies’ Trophy’ (Colley 1994, 258). As a figure not of the practising homosexual but of the limitations of polite discourse, Mr Femality




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may be connected with the ‘Female-Males’ and the ‘Male-Females’ in Milton, ‘the Dragon Forms / Religion hid in War, a Dragon red and hidden Harlot’ (37[41]:39, 42–3, E138).

1. See Russell for discussion of a 1771 print of ‘A Gentleman’s Toilette’ (2006, 35). 2. Butlin sees this painting as ‘a protest against orthodox sexual morality’ (1981, 23). On More and the attack on adultery see Hole (2002, 628–32). 3. On the significance of the red skin of the Britons, see Mee (1999, 73). 4. Gilchrist lists Chapone, Barbauld, Mrs Brooke, Mrs Carter and Mrs Montagu as visitors to Mrs Mathew’s ‘drawing room’ (Gilchrist 1863; 2005, 50). 5. See essays on Ann Batten Cristall by Connolly (2007) and Linkin (2007). 6. Letter 7 January 1783 (quoted in Bishop 1951, 80–1). 7. See Carter’s discussion of effeminacy and the military (2001, 133). 8. Geddes responded with a sample of his own version (Geddes 1792). 9. Zurich, Kunsthaus. The watercolour is dated ‘may 28. 10. June 4’. 10. On Cowper as feminized male, see Davidoff and Hall (2006, 166–7); on Cowper’s homosexuality see Elfenbein (1999, 73–84).



Notes

‘My little Cane Sofa and the Bust of Sappho’: Elizabeth Iremonger and the Female World of Book-Collecting Keri Davies

‘You would not have liked to be married?’ ‘No. I never wanted a full, normal life.’ (Compton Burnett 1972, 86) The eighteenth century has long been recognized as the age of the bachelor and the spinster. In his pioneering study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Lawrence Stone comments that, As a result of the shortage of suitable males, owing to the level of low nuptiality among younger sons and to the rise in the cost of marriage portions, there developed in the eighteenth century a new and troublesome social phenomenon, the spinster lady who never married, whose numbers rose from under five per cent of all upper class girls in the sixteenth century to twenty to twenty five per cent in the eighteenth century. (Stone 1977, 380) The plight of the eighteenth-century spinster was seen to be a problem at the time, and led William Hayley to issue his Essay on Old Maids in 1785.1 Hayley wrote in his Essay of ‘the mortifications of a single life’, and was, it seems, sincerely of the opinion that he was propounding a defence of this section of the community (3rd edn., 2:47). When actual ‘old maids’ fell upon him from every side and railed at him because he had made fun of them, he professed himself ‘deeply grieved’ (Bishop 1951, 133). Hayley’s Essay was published anonymously, and Anna Seward wrote, ‘Perhaps I wish no man had written it, while I feel that no woman would.’ She added, when her friend’s authorship had been revealed, ‘This whimsical work . . . so lightly, so 221



15

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Only a few single women from really affluent families seem to have managed to carve out a satisfactory life for themselves in the late eighteenth century, filling their time with visits to friends and relatives in country houses and in lengthy correspondence with other spinster friends. Miss Elizabeth Iremonger and Miss Mary Heber were two who seem to have come to terms with life as spinsters, though both were buoyed up by very comfortable incomes and powerful connections. In 1786 Miss Iremonger admitted to her friend that marriage was best. On the other hand, she was ‘clearly of the opinion that to be without a companion is far preferable to being tied to a disagreeable one’. She lived an apparently happy and interesting life by taking ‘every opportunity of forming and cultivating those sort of valuable female friendships that are the best substitute for the other sort of connection’. (Stone 1977, 386) Here Stone is citing Miss Iremonger’s words from a collection of letters written to Mary Heber by women friends, but citing them very selectively.2 Fuller quotation from that same letter gives a somewhat different impression: . . . to reply to your direct Enquiry about my Tabby Determinations . . . I have always admired Diderot’s Pére de famille. It has always been a great favorite of mine, & his manner of representing the two States is in many respects very just, tho’ I certainly know several Filles surannées who are very far from being in the disconsolate, miserable situation that He describes them to be. I make no resolutions, but I take every opportunity of forming & cultivating those sort of valuable female Friendships that are the best substitute for the other kind of Connection, & which will alone supply Comforts & Pleasures worth living for, at the same time that I am also fully convinced that no other Happiness on Earth can equal that of the Lien sacré to which Diderot does so much justice; but I say with Cecile ‘Ou sont de telles Femmes, et de telles Epoux?’ With no right to be difficult therefore, I profess myself extremely difficult, & am clearly of opinion that to be without a Companion is far preferable to the being tied to a disagreable one. (Bamford 1936, 20–1)3 Miss Iremonger is paying no more than ironic lip-service to the ideal of marriage as the chief fulfilment of a woman’s life. Her ‘Tabby Determinations’



wantonly betrays the cause it affects to defend, that I could wish it had never passed the press’ (1811, 1:115, 129). Lawrence Stone, like Hayley two centuries earlier, allows few exceptions to the empty, unfulfilled life of the spinster:

Elizabeth Iremonger: the Female World of Book-Collecting

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Lord George & Lady Louisa Lennox, & her two Daughters are coming here to Dinner. They are very Pretty Girls, & the Eldest has the reputation of refusing Sir Godfrey Webster, Sir George Thomas & Mr Luttrell. It has been said for some Years past that She is firmly resolved against Matrimony; She has seen so much Unhappiness from Gallantries in her own Family that She does not believe it possible that a change of condition can produce Happiness. In her ground-breaking study, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, Helen Bruder suggested that The Book of Thel was written as a deliberate riposte to Hayley’s Essay on Old Maids: Thel is a poem in which the sceptical enquiries of a determined young woman thoroughly unmask patriarchal ideology, an ideology which promised women that heterosexual romantic and maternal roles equalled heavenly fulfilment, but which Thel discovers amount to nothing less than death. (Bruder 1997, 44) In 1789, the publication year of Thel, William Blake’s sister, Catherine Elizabeth, was twenty-five and her still-unmarried state probably the cause of comment – she was already une fille surannée. (Blake’s wife, Catherine Sophia, had been just twenty when they were married in 1782.) ‘As Thel progresses she unmasks and rejects heterosexual culture’s romantic and maternal myths, but she is not able to construct any kind of workable alternative identity’ (53–4). Does Thel’s refusal of the heteronormative order of things reflect Catherine Elizabeth’s own life choice? As the only daughter of a prosperous shopkeeper there would have been no financial obstacles to her marrying. How did she escape what Blake condemned as ‘the marriage hearse’ (E27, 475, 796)? Blake uses the expression ‘old maid’ on just two occasions. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793, perhaps begun 1790), in one of the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, he writes that ‘Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity’ (7, E35). This example of Blake in saloon-bar mode, is, as Helen Bruder points out, ‘hardly consistent with the views of Thel’s author – a poem which shows both prudence and spinsters in a very different light’ (1997, 121). And in his Notebook, Blake writes, 2 O I cannot cannot find The undaunted courage of a Virgin Mind For Early I in love was crost Before my flower of love was lost



record her firm intention of remaining a spinster (n. 32). Stone should have continued to the next page of the same letter:

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These bleak little verses are written as shown, though numbered in reverse order. Stanza 1 is a coarsened version of Hayley, suggesting the bitterness of a woman (‘An old maid’) who feels her life empty of heterosexual experience (‘And wish that I had been a Whore’). In Stanza 2, on the other hand, a woman regrets the loss of ‘The undaunted courage of a Virgin Mind’. The poem is dated c. 1793 by both Keynes and Erdman. It makes an interesting comparison with the two-stanza ‘Argument’ to Visions of the Daughters of Albion (also 1793), where Blake writes ‘I trembled in my virgin fears’ (iii:3, E45). After 1793 the term ‘old maid’ with its negative connotations leaves Blake’s vocabulary. Instead, he chooses the term ‘virgin’, around which courage and fear constellate, together with a new word, ‘bliss’, as in Visions – ‘open to virgin bliss’ – and in America (again 1793) – ‘sweet valleys of ripe virgin bliss’ (VDA 6:6, E49, Am cancelled plate C:30, E59). Lillian Faderman (in her wonderful book Surpassing the Love of Men) has shown that passionate friendships with other women were a crucial part of the lives of middle-class women in the eighteenth century. Through correspondence and memoirs, she has pieced together stories that corroborate how ubiquitous the ideals of romantic friendship were among literate eighteenth-century women: Romantic friends courted each other, flirted, were anxious about the beloved’s responses and about reciprocity. They believed their relationships to be eternal, and in fact the faithfulness of one often extended beyond the death of the other. The fondest dream of many romantic friends, which was not often realized, was to establish a home with the beloved. (Faderman 1982, 125) There are striking examples of cohabiting friends in the Blake circle. The earliest identifiable owner of Blake’s works, Rebekah Bliss, met, some time before 1780, another orphan heiress, Ann Whitaker, and the two women set up home together in Church Street, Kensington. They lived together for nearly forty years. I have written elsewhere on the Blake books in Rebekah Bliss’s library and the likelihood of her personal acquaintanceship with the poet, suggesting that Blake’s poetry frequently plays on the name ‘Bliss’, where it seems to imply, as in the citations above, some aspect of female sexuality or sexual experience (see Davies 1999, 2006). Rebekah Bliss and Ann Whitaker are not the only female couple in Blake’s circle. Sarah Parker had kept house for her unmarried brother, the engraver



1 An old maid early eer I knew Ought but the love that on me grew And now Im coverd oer & oer And wish that I had been a Whore.4

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James Parker (Blake’s fellow-apprentice at Basire’s), until his death in 1805, when her friend Ann Pickering Shout joined her. The two women remained together until Sarah Parker’s death in 1825. Sarah Parker’s will leaves her entire estate to ‘my most intimate friend Miss Ann Shout . . . whose unremitted care love and attention I have received for twenty five years and who now resides with me’.5 Miss Iremonger had written to Mary Heber in 1791, You suppose me adding to my Stock of Knowledge. It is always my aim & endevor, my Comfort & my Amusement. Quiet & Retirement, Rural Simplicity & neatness (which is Beauty) all around, within, without ma demeure, Books to my Taste, & a Friend to my Heart – these are requisite ingredients to my System of Happiness &, possessing these, I have not a Wish for more. (Bamford 1936, 100)6 The friend to her heart was Catherine Louisa Shipley (‘My friend & I generally write twice a week, & we practice no reserves’) (201).7 After thirty years of epistolary friendship, and significant book-collecting, at least on Miss Iremonger’s part, they moved into adjoining houses around 1805.

*** ‘She does not notice anything when she is reading,’ said Venice. ‘Does she do nothing but read? I hope she will not teach you to be always poring over books. There are other things in life.’ ‘Not in every life,’ said Graham. (Compton Burnett 1972, 188) The importance of book collecting is not, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it is one of a number of means of reinforcing status discriminations, but that it is a cultural practice by which the collector learns what her culture’s ethos and her private sensibility look like. Blake’s Thel is a young woman ‘struggling towards a sense of identity in a hostile patriarchal environment’ (Bruder 1997, 34). Outside the poem, book-collecting seems to have offered very particular satisfactions – her library is in part what gives Miss Iremonger her sense of identity. Helen Bruder asks, ‘What can a young woman like Thel do once she has refused the seductions of conventional and acquiescent femininity?’ (181). In 1790, Elizabeth Iremonger wrote to Mary Heber of her bookish life in Hampshire, ‘My Collection of Livres Choisies has lately been presented with some valuable additions, & my sitting-room is so delightful to me that I confess I am always sorry to quit it’ (Bamford 1936, 96).8




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I am thankful I have much time to myself in my North Parlor, where I have so much delight & which is seldom interrupted but to breakfast sometimes at a very pretty Cottage & Garden & little Wood which we have by the Riverside & where I then pass the morning; or now & then drive with my Father & Mrs I. over our Forest in an open Carriage called the Sociable. With my books, this I honestly own is what I love better than anything the Town could afford me for, as every excess perhaps in some light is blamable, my danger is a Passion for Solitude, I believe. (Bamford 1936, 67)9 And of the books she read, Have you seen Mr Godwin’s novel, called Things as they are, or Caleb Williams? It is written in a masterly superior Style, quite a philosophic novel, & no Love in it. It portrays & analises Character admirably & is wonderfully interesting, but the perversion of fine Talents is Conspicuous thro’out. He is a known Democrat &, I believe, Infidel & the Author of a deep, mischievious, great Work entitled Political Justice, parts of which, I am told, have been taken out & published seperately & dispersed with great pains about Wales. Or have you met with Darwin’s curious & ingenious Work, the Zoonomia? (169)10 And, sometimes, pointed comments on their authors: Have you read Mrs Smith’s new novel, just come out, Montalbert? It is interesting & much better written than any she has produced latterly. I have not heard the music of Paul & Virginie: the Story has for several years been a favorite of mine. I am fortunate enough to possess a Sett of St. Pierre’s Works, & I have always valued them; they are selon mon goût. Not so much so, I confess, are Mr Seward’s Anecdotes, or Mrs Piozzi’s Synonimes, tho’ it is presumptuous in me to differ from Mr H. Browne. But I own that, without giving me much satisfaction, they only skim the surface of what to me is the least interesting part of Belles Lettres. And Mrs Piozzi has so much affectation that I never could bear her; she surfeits me at once. (173)11 Of the seven women known to have owned copies of Blake’s works in illuminated printing in his lifetime – Elizabeth Aders, Rebekah Bliss, Hannah Boddington, Maria Denman, Elizabeth Iremonger, Harriet Jane Moore and Catherine Louisa Shipley – only Elizabeth Aders and Hannah Boddington were married.12 The overwhelming majority of Blake’s women customers



In Elizabeth Iremonger’s letters we hear of her passion for reading:

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were spinsters. For business as well as family reasons, William Blake would have had to rethink the Hayleian view of spinsterhood. In September 1794, in the course of a correspondence in which they exchanged notes on books read, purchased, or just admired, the antiquary Richard Twiss wrote to his friend Francis Douce, ‘You will see several more of Blakes books at Johnsons in St. P[aul]s Ch[urch] y[ar]d.’13 If, as it seems from these words, Joseph Johnson, one of the foremost progressive publishers of the decade, was displaying Blake’s work for prospective customers, then it was perhaps from Johnson that Miss Iremonger acquired a copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Like Johnson, Elizabeth Iremonger was Unitarian in religion and an admirer of Joseph Priestley, Johnson’s most famous author. She wrote in 1790, in reference to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, ‘Have you read Mr Burke’s famous book? I have, & read & heard a variety of opinions of it beside, & am rather impatient for Doctor Priestley’s reply’ (Bamford 1936, 96).14 The sale of the Iremonger library in 1813 included Burke’s book as lot 180, and sixteen lots of books by Priestley. Elizabeth Iremonger was the younger daughter of Joshua Iremonger, of Wherwell Priory, Hampshire, by his second wife, Elizabeth Lacey, whom he had married in 1752. His first marriage, to Delicia Fryer, by which he acquired Wherwell Priory, was in 1742. His third marriage, to the widowed Penelope Morgan, took place in 1770. The family maintained residences in Hampshire (at Wherwell) and London (in Portman Square). After Joshua Iremonger’s death in 1804, her stepmother abandoned the Portman Square house and Miss Iremonger moved to Upper Grosvenor Street, next door to her friend Catherine Louisa Shipley.15 Louisa Shipley was the daughter of Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, and her family home was Twyford House near Winchester. In 1789, her London residence was with her mother in Curzon Street, but around 1803 she moved to No. 26 Upper Grosvenor Street, later extended to include No. 27 (the two houses knocked into a single large house behind a new front) (‘Upper Grosvenor Street’ 1980, 231–8). Miss Iremonger does not appear in the 28 March 1803 rate book for St George’s parish, but followed her friend to Upper Grosvenor Street around 1805, moving into a much smaller house at No. 25.16 Why did they choose to live in adjacent houses and not set up home together? They were both personally acquainted with a famous example of female cohabitation. Louisa Shipley had long been a protégée of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen, as frequently evidenced in the diaries of Lady Eleanor: Miss Shipley our guest. At one we three in Miss Shipley’s chaise made a moment’s visit to the vicarage, then proceeded to Acton. Company there Mr. and Mrs. Williams Wynn, Mr. and Mrs. Warden of Ruthin,




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Elizabeth Iremonger, too, was known to the Ladies, as Miss Shipley’s amie chérie. Lady Eleanor noted in her diary for 23 February 1789, ‘Letter from Miss Louisa Shipley dated Holywell House, St. Albans, seat of the Dowager Lady Spencer, where she has been since Saturday 14th. Miss Iremonger with her’ (ibid., 186). Elizabeth Iremonger was deeply distressed by some newspaper comment on the Ladies in 1790, and wrote to Mary Heber, I hope you have been incensed & concerned at the scurrilous illiberality of several Paragraphs lately in the Public Papers with regard to Miss Butler & Miss Ponsonby, attacking them most cruelly in the very heart of their Happiness. I heartily wish they could be insensible to it, as it must originate in the envy of Esprits bornés, who cannot understand the pure & innocent elegance of their lives; but in proportion to their own excellence & delicacy they are more alive to the pain of being hurt, & I am sorry to find they experience this most sensibly. To have Modest Retiring Worth bro’t forth into Notice, merely to suffer infamous Abuse, is very shocking. (Bamford 1936, 80–1)18 If such reports could disturb the tranquility of Plâs Newydd, how much worse for a niece of Lady Fetherstonhaugh of Uppark, and the daughter of the Bishop of St Asaph, in the full glare of Upper Grosvenor Street.19 Next-door neighbours they had best remain. In 1805, Henry Crabb Robinson, journalist and barrister, returned to England from Germany, where he had been studying at Jena. The English acquaintances whom Crabb had made at Jena and at Weimar were important acquisitions, providing him with entrée into their London circles. Mr Osborn has given me some coins to give to Sir Joseph Banks – Sir B. B. purposes to trust me with a Mss to get printed for him And Mrs Hare had promised me Letters of Introduction to her Sister who is a Maiden Lady & resides in Grosvenor Square And whose house is a place of Resort for Literati And I am promised in parlr the acquaintce of a Miss Ironmonger who is attached to German Literature and who is in possession of a good german library. (Quoted in Baker 1937, 138–9) Crabb Robinson’s ‘Mrs Hare’ was Louisa’s sister Georgiana Hare-Naylor, ‘tall, handsome, and self-sufficient, a scholar, and a painter’. She was a friend and pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds and ‘exhibited with applause’ at the Royal



Miss Ormsby Gore, Miss Gore. Dinner, cards, supper. At one we returned, leaving our beloved Miss Shipley at Acton. (Bell 1930, 340)17

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Academy in 1781, where she showed a portrait of a lady and two children (Leslie and Taylor 1865, 376). In Rome, in the 1790s, Georgiana Hare-Naylor commissioned Flaxman’s drawings illustrating Homer’s works, The Odyssey and The Iliad, and paid 15 shillings for each drawing. Flaxman’s illustrations to The Iliad were engraved and published in Italy in 1793 and in England in 1805. James Parker engraved two of the five plates added in 1805, and William Blake engraved the other three. In 1804, Hare-Naylor and his family left for Weimar, accompanied by Flaxman and his sister (who was governess to little Anna Hare-Naylor) (ODNB, entry for Francis Hare-Naylor). Louisa and Georgiana’s eldest sister, Anna Maria, married Sir William Jones, Oriental scholar. His monument by Flaxman is in the ante-chapel, University College, Oxford. Thus, in 1805, Crabb Robinson met for the first time Elizabeth Iremonger, ‘a literary lady who lived in Up: Grosvenor Stt ’, to whom he ‘took . . . a letter of introduct from Mrs Hare Naylor’. ‘She was a Unitarian . . . a sort of free-thinker – She kept good company And I owed her much by introducg me to some of my genteelest friends’, he noted on the back of one of her letters to him. These friends included ‘Mr & Miss Hope, the Brotherin-law (a widower) & niece of Mrs Hare’, and ‘Miss Shipley too, Sister to Mrs Hare, and who is my particular friend’, whom she invited him to meet at dinners at her house (BR 298).20 He explained the circumstances of his meeting with Miss Iremonger in the endorsement to another letter. She received me with great rudeness I believe I was not dressed well enough She thought I might be a suspicious Character however this letter [the one endorsed] made peace. And we were acquainted till she died . . . I have no doubt that Miss Iremonger was very little to blame I have no doubt that I was most to blame going dressed in a very slovenly & ungentlemanly way – I may have suffd much without knowlg of it in other cases H.C.R. (Quoted in Baker 1938, 142–3) Crabb Robinson left London in 1808, for Coruña in Spain, working for The Times as its war correspondent, returning to England in 1810. In his diary for 1810, Crabb Robinson wrote: I was amusing myself this spring by writing an account of the insane poet, painter, and engraver, Blake. Perthes of Hamburg had written to me asking me to send him an article for a new German magazine called Vaterlandische Annalen, which he was about to set up, and Dr Malkin having, in the memoirs of his Son given an account of this extraordinary genius with Specimens of his poems I resolved out of these to compose a paper. And this I did and the paper was translated by Dr. Julius who, many years




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Robinson began to call on persons who could give him information about Blake. The first of these was William Upcott, who had inherited some important Blake books on the death of his father, the miniaturist Ozias Humphry. In his ‘Small Diary’, which he kept in German, Crabb Robinson jotted down under Thursday 19 April 1810, ‘Bey Upcott der unter Bibliotheker Lond Instit – zeigte mir curiose Sachen v. Blake’; that is, At Upcott’s, the sub-librarian of the London Institution – showed me curious things by Blake (BR 298).22 The day after calling on Upcott, Robinson called on Elizabeth Iremonger. He noted in his ‘Small Diary’, ‘Good Friday. Vorm. copirte Blake’s Gedichte bey M rs Iremonger’: In the morning copied Blake’s poems at Mrs Iremonger’s (BR 601 n.) Over a week later, on Monday 7 May, Robinson was back copying Blake’s poems again, as he noted in his ‘Small Diary’: ‘Vorm: bey M rs Iremonger Blakes gedichte abschreibend’ (In the morning at Mrs Iremonger’s writing out Blake’s poems). And then on 25 May, Robinson wrote in the ‘Small Diary’, ‘Abend bey M rs Iremonger . . . sprach über Blake’ (Evening at Mrs Iremonger’s . . . talk about Blake) (BR 299). Thus, over a few days in 1810, Robinson copied poems from Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, America, Europe, the proposal for an ‘Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco’, and the dedication to Blair’s Grave, and he quoted most of them in his essay on Blake. Upcott had allowed Crabb Robinson to transcribe his copies of America and Europe (BR 446–7). Robinson’s transcriptions from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience are from the copy of the poems owned by Elizabeth Iremonger (Robinson’s own copy of the Songs was not bought until 18 February 1826 (Bentley 1977, 384, 413, 652; 1995, 77, 123)). No copy of Poetical Sketches is known to have been in the possession of Mrs Iremonger, yet it is entirely plausible that she owned one (Bentley and Nurmi 1964, 175; Phillips 1975, 23 n.3). As I indicated above, the Shipley family were friends and patrons of John Flaxman, who had sponsored its original publication. Three years later, The Morning Chronicle announced the forthcoming sale of THE Valuable and elegant LIBRARY, the property of Mrs. E. Iremonger, including some of the best Authors in History, Belles Lettres, in the French, Italian, German and English Languages, many of them enriched by Valuable M.S. notes and observations, and the whole in the finest possible preservation. (24 April 1813, issue 13718) By 1813, Elizabeth Iremonger’s widowed stepmother had retreated to her Irish estate, where she died in 1829 (Bamford 1936, n.47). Elizabeth’s



afterwards, introduced himself to me as my translator. It appears in the single number of the second volume of the Vaterlandische Annalen. (BR 223; Morley 1938, 1:15; Bentley 2001, 338)21

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nephew William inherited Wherwell Priory, and the books from Elizabeth’s North Parlour were put up for auction. In her draft will, she has crossed through some legacies of Vauxhall Loan Stock (‘since sold and spent’) and Globe Insurance shares, suggesting that she had also encountered financial reverses.23 The library (613 lots) was sold over three days, 26–28 April 1813, by King & Lochée. The first day’s sale included ‘LIVRES FRANÇOIS, ET ITALIENS’ (lots 1–109); ‘GERMAN BOOKS’ (lots 110–25); and the start of the English books, with lot ‘165 Blake (Will.) – Songs of Innocence and Experience, 8vo. elegantly bound – 1789’ (BR 316). The Iremonger copy of the Songs, now identified as copy D, comprises the complete series of fifty-four plates on thirty leaves, including the original final plate, ‘A Divine Image’, that was afterwards withdrawn. It has a contemporary morocco binding, with two of the flyleaves water-marked 1794, which reinforces my suggestion that it was acquired via Joseph Johnson, who was displaying work by Blake that year.24 Following the sale, Miss Iremonger’s copy of the Songs was acquired by her friend Louisa Shipley, who wrote her signature on the upper free endpaper verso. I presume it failed to attract bids at the sale, was bought in, and given to Miss Shipley as a token of affection. The Iremonger books in Italian, French and German include (by lot number): 23 Dante, la Commedia, 5 tom. 12mo. Venez. 1739 33 [Fenelon (Salignac de)] Telemaque, 12mo. Rotterd. 1719 82 ROUSSEAU (Jean Jacques) – Œuvres de, 35 tom. 12mo. – Deux Ponts, 1782 124 Wieland Sammlung Poetischer Schriften, 3 tom. 1785 (Her will also includes bequests of ‘my Italian Petrarch in blue Morocco binding Also Hallers Gedichte in Vellum’ and so forth.) Works by women authors include: 149 [Barbauld (Anna Letitia)] Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem, 4to. – [Lond.] 1812 269 Elstobb (Eliz.) – Rudiments of Grammar for the English Saxon Tongue, 4to. Lond. 1755 273 Epictetus – translated by Elizabeth Carter, 2 vol. 12mo. – [Lond.] 1768 Works in theology include: 158 [Bible (Holy)] by Alexander Geddes, with a vol. of Critical Remarks, 3 vol., 4to. portrait 1792–1800 404 [Magazine] Universal Theological;, 4 vol. in 2 [Lond.] 1804 405 —————— Freethinking, 2 vol. 8vo. ib. 1812




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There were also numerous books by Priestley (lots 471–86) and a copy of Watson’s Chemical Essays (lot 589). It was a very learned and serious-minded collection. In the study of history, G.M. Young tells us, it is necessary to ‘Go on reading until you hear people talking. Then you will understand why things happened as they did’ (1950, 9). In her will, drafted in 1824, we hear for the last time the voice of Elizabeth Iremonger. She leaves To Mrs C. L. Shipley 2 vols of ‘Cary’s Itinerary’ bound in white Vellum given given me by Mrs Mary Carter standing in my bookshelves near the first place in my Drawing room Also my little Cane Sofa and the Bust of Sappho /given me by Mrs Thomas Palmer/ and standing upon a Bracket over the small India ˆCabinetˆ in my Drawing room Also my Silver Pencil case given me by her Mother and always carried in my Pocket Also the two gilt frames hanging up in my dining parlour with the Sulphurs ˆcontained in them collectedˆ by Angelica Kauffman and given to me by Mrs Morgan and the italian list of them wherever it may be found Elizabeth Iremonger died in 1826 (Bamford 1936, n. 24). She was in her late sixties. The bequest to Miss Shipley of ‘the Bust of Sappho’ is carefully and deliberately made. Susan Lanser (2002) notes that the words ‘sapphism’ and ‘sapphic(k)’ are deployed with some frequency in the middle and later eighteenth century for female same-sex affiliation, though restricted to describing women of the gentry class and above. (Mrs Thrale had written of the Ladies of Llangollen and their friends as ‘damned sapphists’ and claimed that this was why various literary women would not visit them overnight unless accompanied by their husbands (Stanley 1992, 196).25 ) If Miss Iremonger thought of Sappho only in literary terms – as Plato’s ‘tenth Muse’ – then the bust might have been placed with bequests of books. Instead it is placed, representing a tutelary spirit, between the ‘little Cane Sofa’, emblem of friendship and intimacy, and the pencil case ‘always carried in my Pocket’. Domestic happiness, thou only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the fall!26 The will concludes, I trust to the honor of my Neice Catherine P Jones to burn all letters/ unread except those of my Father or of my Aunt Fetherston / and so do me Justice in all things and to take particular care that attention is strictly



442 Paley (Will.) – Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2 vol. 8vo. – – 1790 498 Repository (Monthly) of Theology, 2 vol. 8vo, [Lond.] 1805 527 Shipley (Jonathan) – Works, 2 vol. 8vo. Lond. 1792 590 Watson (R.) – Apology for the Bible, 12mo. ib. 1795

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paid to my injunction that I may be at once deposited in my coffin in whatever cloaths I die whether my decease takes place in bed or out of it in day or night quietly and decorously but without the common useless disagreeable custom of Stripping and laying out It is my further wish that my funeral may be respectably economical and unostentatious and that I may be buried either in Bunhill fields with my Dissenting Maternal ancestors or at Wherwell in my Fathers Family vault as may at the time be most convenient. Louisa Shipley, the friend of her heart, lived another fourteen years, and died on 20 March 1840, aged 81. The destruction of all letters requested in Miss Iremonger’s will, including presumably the letters from Miss Shipley (‘My friend & I generally write twice a week, & we practice no reserves’) leaves us able only to acknowledge the Iremonger-Shipley amitié, while knowing nothing of its nature. Writing of the Ladies of Llangollen, Colette suggested that what is essential to an understanding of their relationship is located only in missing texts. ‘Pour ce genre de renseignements, toutes les sources sont suspectes’ (Colette 1941, 43). For information of this sort, we must infer, all sources are suspect, with the exception of those that do not exist (Ladenson 1996, 25–46).

Notes A version of this chapter was presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6–8 January 2009, St Hugh’s College, Oxford. 1. The first (1785) and second editions (a 1786 re-issue with a new title page) carried no illustrations. The ‘Third Edition, With Corrections and Additions’ (1793) contains five plates (four of them after Stothard), including one illustrating the Book of Enoch engraved by James Parker. 2. Thirty letters of Elizabeth Iremonger to Mary Heber are transcribed by Francis Bamford (Bamford 1936). The originals remain in a private collection in Northamptonshire. 3. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 15 July 1786. 4. British Library Add. MS. 49460, 100. For Erdman’s arrangement, see E 474. 5. National Archives. PROB 11/1695, Will of Sarah Parker, Spinster of Saint Pancras, Middlesex (4 February 1825). 6. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 4 July 1791. 7. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 1st September 1800. 8. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 13 December 1790. 9. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 24 June 1790. 10. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 6 December 1794. The books mentioned are William Godwin (1794 and 1793) and Erasmus Darwin (1794). 11. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 9 July 1795. The books mentioned are Charlotte Turner Smith (1795), William Seward (1795) and Hester Lynch Piozzi (1794). Joseph Mazzinghi’s ballet score to Paul et Virginie was first performed on 7 April 1795 at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. Mazzinghi was music director (1785–94)




12. 13. 14. 15.

Queer Blake and harpsichordist (1785–98) at the King’s Theatre; he wrote prolifically, including many dramatic works and ballets. Mrs Iremonger’s ‘Sett of St. Pierre’s Works’ is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Études de la Nature, 3 vols (Paris: de l’imprimérie de Monsieur, 1784), or the subsequent editions in 4 vols (Paris, 1787) and 5 vols (Paris, 1791–92). This, his chief work, sought to prove the existence of God from the wonders of nature; it is rich in descriptive passages, and it added specific colour terms and plant names to the French language. A section of this was the sentimental prose idyll Paul et Virginie. Names derived from Bentley (1977, passim). Bodleian Library MS. Douce d. 39 fol. 72r. Letter of 25 September 1794. I have written in more detail of these letters in ‘Mrs. Bliss’ (Davies 1999). Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, 13 December 1790. Boyle’s Court Guides show:

1804 26 Upper Grosvenor Street Miss Shipley 1806–1807 25 Upper Grosvenor Street Miss Iremonger 26 Upper Grosvenor Street Miss Shipley 1826 25 Upper Grosvenor Street Mrs E Iremonger 26 Upper Grosvenor Street Mrs C L Shipley 1840 26 Upper Grosvenor Street Mrs C L Shipley

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

I am very grateful to Alison Kenney, Archivist, City of Westminster Archives Centre, for her help in locating the Iremonger and Shipley residences. City of Westminster Archives Centre ref C596. Nos 25 and 26 Upper Grosvenor Street can be conveniently located using the online edition of Richard Horwood’s 1790s map via the ‘Map Reference Database’ section of www.motco.com. Entry for Friday 2 October 1807. Miss Iremonger to Miss Heber, September 1790. The offending article, accusing the Ladies of transvestism and worse, appeared in The General Evening Post (24 July 1790). Sarah, only daughter of Christopher Lethieullier, married, 1746, Matthew Fetherstonhaugh, of Uppark, Sussex, who was created a baronet, 1747. Miss Iremonger was related to Lady Fetherstonhaugh through the marriage of her grandmother, Sarah, daughter of Edward Lascelles of Stoke Newington, and widow of Joshua Iremonger, to the same Christopher Lethieullier. Bentley is citing Robinson’s MS ‘Reminiscences 1805’, Miss Iremonger’s letters to him of 21 December 1805, 6 January 1806 and his notes about her written on the letters. In fact, Robinson’s article appeared under the title ‘William Blake, Künstler, Dichter, und religiöser Schwärmer’ (Robinson 1811). I have corrected a minor error of Bentley’s transcript. Upcott’s collection comprised Songs of Innocence and of Experience (H), and the Small Book of Designs, plus America (H) bound with Europe (D) and the Large Book of Designs. This and the following quotations from the will are found in National Archives. PROB 11/1710: Will of Elizabeth Iremonger.



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24. Description from The Collection of The Garden Ltd, lot 165, with col. illus. of 3 pp. See also Bentley (1977, 139, copy D). Exhibited: Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum, 1924: checklist, 1; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1939, no. 41. 25. Stanley (1992) is citing the manuscript diaries of Hester Thrale Piozzi in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. 26. William Cowper, The Task (1995, III:41–2). Cowper provides apposite lines on the sofa as an emblem of domestic intimacy in the well-known passage from Book IV, lines 36–41: Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.




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Adam, Barry, 26 Adams, Hazard, 64 Aders, Elizabeth, 226 Aers, David, 161n. Ahmed, Sara, 144 Aho, James, 63–4 Akenside, Mark, 24 Allen, Charles, 115n. Analytical Review, The, 214 Anderson, Mark, 148 Ankarsjö, Magnus, 4, 38n, 106, 110, 144, 197n. Anti-Jacobin, The, 5 Auden, W.H., 88 Austin, J.L., 186 Bacon, Francis, 87–8 Bage, Robert, 158 Baillie, Joanna, 163 Baine, Rodney, 69 Baker, John Milton, 228, 229 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 68, 69 Balance, John, 88 Balfour, Ian, 86n. Ballard, J.G., 92 Bamford, Francis, 222–3, 225–8, 232, 233n. Banks, Joseph, 228 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 145, 220n., 231 Barberini faun, 77 Barnfield, Richard, 24 Barrell, John, 79, 82, 197n. Barthes, Roland, 117, 142 Basire, James, 10, 225 Bataille, Georges, 81, 91, 94, 95 Beckford, William, 24, 201 Behn, Aphra, 172, 184n. Behrendt, Stephen, 9 Bell, Eva Mary, 228 Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 39n. Belvedere torso, 77, 81–2 Benjamin, Jessica, 121–2, 125, 129, 134 Bentham, Jeremy, 201

Bentley, G.E., Jr, 10, 114n. 115n., 230, 234n., 235n. Berry, Mary, 107 Bersani, Leo, 40–9, 65, 69–70, 124–5, 132–3 Betts, Miss, 201, 212 Betts, Mrs, 212 Betty, William Henry West, 199–200 Beyst, Stefan, 93 Bhabha, Homi, 151 Bible, 96, 231 Daniel, 90 Deuteronomy, 90 Genesis, 178 Joshua, 77 Judges, 190 Leviticus, 77, 90 Luke, 154 Matthew, 90 Revelation, 167 2 Samuel, 159–60 Bindman, David, 79, 85n. Binhammer, Katherine, 109 Bishop, Evelyn Morchard, 201, 220, 221 Blake Archive, 64, 65, 138n. Blake, Catherine Elizabeth, 223 Blake, Catherine Sophia, 10, 97, 99, 105, 108, 110 Blake, James, 203 Blake, Robert, 10 Blake, William America a Prophecy, 12, 45, 64, 72n, 108, 171, 224, 230, 234n. Annotations to Lavater, 10, 197 Annotations to Reynolds, 197n. Bathsheba at the Bath, 92 Blair’s Grave designs, 5, 230 Blasphemer, The 74–86, 92 Book of Ahania, The, 15, 127–8, 168, 178 Book of Los, The, 14–15 Book of Thel, The, 11, 16, 44, 49n., 102, 153, 168, 207, 223, 225 256



Index

Book of Urizen, The, 9, 18, 63–73, 96, 108, 111, 116–39, 183n., 219 Dante designs, 17, 18, 76, 85n., 96 Descriptive Catalogue, A, 118, 138n., 209–11 ‘Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall’, 92 Europe a Prophecy, 5, 12, 13, 64, 65, 68, 72n., 107, 109, 194, 230, 234n. Everlasting Gospel, The, 96 ‘Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco’, 230 Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne, 72, 88 Four Zoas, The, 9, 13, 14, 18, 19, 37, 50–62, 91, 120, 151n., 163–85, 198n., 206, 208, 208n. Gates of Paradise, The, 11 Glad Day / Albion Rose, 5 God Creating Adam, 74 Gray illustrations, 38n., 97, 163 Heads of the Poets, 166–7, 183n. Island in the Moon, An, 12–13, 106, 108, 189–90, 209–13 Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7–9, 11–12, 14, 15, 16–17, 19, 30–5, 38n., 45, 47–8, 50, 52, 61, 64, 66, 72n., 96, 107, 109, 114, 115n., 121, 139n., 151n., 183n., 184n., 187, 194–5, 196–7, 198n., 205, 207, 208n., 210 Laocoön, 91 Large Book of Designs, 234n. letters, 97–101, 104–5, 107–8, 110–11, 112, 114–115n., 118, 199–208, 209 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 22, 48, 61–2, 72, 84, 94, 96, 184n., 186–7, 193, 223 Milton a Poem, 2, 5, 7–8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 28–30, 31–2, 35, 46–7, 49n., 50, 62, 63–73, 74–5, 85n., 89–90, 91, 103, 108, 109, 114, 136–8, 139n., 168, 184n., 194, 195–6, 198n., 209, 211–12, 218, 219–20 Milton illustrations, 38n., 74, 92 Notebook, 12, 19, 45, 70, 73n., 108, 111, 115n., 154, 163–85, 200, 209–20, 223–4

257

Pickering Manuscript, 18, 19, 97–115, 139n., 163–85 Poetical Sketches, 11, 12, 19, 96, 139n., 163, 171, 173, 174, 184n., 185n., 186–98, 230 Public Address, 138n., 197n. Satan in all his Original Glory, 87 Small Book of Designs, 138, 234n. Song of Los, The, 109 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 72, 88, 93, 94–5, 108, 171, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183n., 223, 227, 230, 231, 234n. Spiritual Form of Pitt, The, 195–6, 211, 217 Vision of the Last Judgment, A, 106, 184n. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 31, 38, 45, 102, 106, 108, 109, 139n., 140–52, 153–62, 168, 172, 173, 174, 177, 181, 224 Bliss, Rebekah, 2, 224, 226, 234n. Bloom, Harold, 146 Blunt, Anthony, 85n., 88 Boddington, Hannah, 226 Bolton, Betsy, 2 Book of Enoch, The 233n. Borges, Jorge Luis, 51 Borris, Kenneth, 24, 37n. Bosch, Hieronymous, 93 Boucé, Paul-Gabriel, 161n. Bowie, David, 116–17 Bowyer, Robert, 100 Boydell, John, 100, 115n. Boyle’s Court Guides, 234n. Bragg, Billy, 20n. Braunstein, Nestor, 41, 49n. Brautigan, Richard, 73n. Britten, Benjamin, 88 Bromley, Robert Anthony, 215 Bronowski, Jacob, 198n. Brooke, Charlotte, 220n. Browne, Hawkins, 226 Bruder, Helen P., 4, 5, 18, 49n., 74, 85n., 97–115, 140, 151n., 152n., 154, 155, 183n., 187, 197n,. 207, 223, 225 Brus, Günter, 94 Bucklow, Christopher, 87



Index

Index

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, 69 Bungarten, Gisela, 82 Bunyan, John, 171 Burke, Edmund, 67, 82, 96, 131, 139n., 186, 214, 219, 227 Burroughs, William S., 88–9, 92, 96 Bute, Lord, 189 Butler, Eleanor, 25, 39n., 227–8, 232, 233, 234n. Butler, Judith, 76, 92, 151, 186–7 Butlin, Martin, 77, 93, 138, 198n., 220n. Butts, Elizabeth, 98 Butts, Thomas, 98–9, 100, 104–5, 115n., 209

Cott, Nany F., 37n. Courtenay, William, 201 Cowley, Hannah, 184n. Cowper, William, 101, 212, 214–15, 218, 220n., 232, 235n. Cox, Stephen, 152n., 163 Craske, Matthew, 10–11, 215 Cristall, Ann Batten, 163, 220n. Crompton, Louis, 200–1, 208n., 210 Cronenberg, David, 96 Crosby, Mark, 19, 199–208 Cross, David A., 212 Cuckold’s Chronicle, The, 162n. Cumberland, George, 98, 119, 138n.

Caravaggio, 88 Carey, H.F., 85n. Carson, Anne Elizabeth, 183n. Carter, Elizabeth, 220n., 231 Carter, Philip, 213, 220n. Celant, Germano, 94 Chalus, Elaine, 193 Chandler, James T., 113 Chapman, Wes, 154, 162n. Chapone, Hester, 220n. Chard, Chloe, 82 Charke, Charlotte, 25 Chauncey, George, 26, 37n. Christopherson, Peter, 88 Cixous, Hélène, 14–15, 22 Clark, Anna, 156, 157, 162n., 189, 198n. Clark, Steve, 1, 2, 4, 19, 163–85 Cleland, John, 18, 31, 129, 155, 156, 157 Cleopatra, 115n. Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, 38n. Colebrook, Claire, 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 80 Collection of the Garden Ltd, 235n. Colette, 233 Colley, Linda, 219 Collings, David, 85n., 86n. Compton Burnett, Ivy, 221, 225 Connolly, Tristanne, 18, 35, 38n., 64, 66–7, 68, 71–2, 85n., 108, 115n., 116–39, 155, 161n., 163, 213, 220n. Cooper, Lucy, 38n. Corbin, Henri, 93 Cormack, Malcolm, 79 Corrin, Lisa, 87 Cosway, Maria, 82

Damer, Anne, 25, 39n., 115n. Damon, S. Foster, 28, 32, 99, 125, 151n, 167, 201, 210 Dante, 22, 85n., 213 see also Blake, William, Dante designs Darwin, Erasmus, 226, 233n. Davidoff, Leonore, 220n. Davies, Kate, 145 Davies, Keri, 2, 19, 108, 221–35 de Bolla, Peter, 81, 85n. de la Motte, Jeanne, 106–7 Deleuze, Gilles, 88 Della Crusca, 167–8, 170–7, 182–3, 183n., 184n see also Merry, Robert Delvin, David, 155 D’Emilio, John, 37n. Denman, Maria, 226 Dent, Shirley, 3, 72, 86n., 88 d’Eon, Chevalier, 189–90, 209 Derrida, Jacques, 67–8 Deville, James, 88 Diderot, Denis, 49n., 222 Dodd, William, 159 Dollimore, Jonathan, 40 Donne, John, 172, 184n. Donoghue, Emma, 107 Doty, David W., 160 Douce, Francis, 85n., 227 Douglas, Mark, 3, 88 Doyle, Jennifer, 117, 119 Dryden, John, 184n. DuFresnoy, Charles, 80 Duncan, Robert, 3, 88–9



258

Index

Fabricius, 214 Faderman, Lillian, 224 Fairer, David, 167, 183n., 184n., 210, 213 Falconar, Maria, 145, 152n. Falconer, Harriet, 152n. Fallon, David, 19, 113, 186–98, 211 Fetherstonhaugh, Matthew, 234n. Fetherstonhaugh, Sarah, 228, 232, 234n. Fernandez, Dominique, 74 Fink, Bruce, 49n. Fisher, Kitty, 38n. Flaxman, Ann, 97, 98, 115n., 163 Flaxman, John, 98, 107, 115n., 202, 229, 230 Flaxman, Maria, 101, 229 Foreman, Amanda, 190 Fortnum, Rebecca, 118, 120, 139n. Foucault, Michel, 23–7, 33, 36–7, 37n., 81, 129 Fox, Charles James, 190–1 Freedman, Estelle B., 37n. Freer, George, 161–2n. Freud, Sigmund, 40–9, 132 Frye, Northrop, 5, 68, 211 Furniss, Tom, 86n.

Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich Füssli), 10, 19, 20n., 74, 79–80, 81, 82–3, 85n., 115n., 211, 212, 214–18 Fuseli, Sophia, 82 Gandelman, Claude, 67 Garrick, David, 187 Gattrell, Vic, 211 Geddes, Alexander, 159, 162n., 214, 220n., 231 General Evening Post, 234n. Genet, Jean, 70, 132–3 George III, 189, 190 George, Diana Hume, 16, 49n. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 190–1 Gerrard, Christine, 167, 183n., 184n., 210, 213 Gifford, William, 176–7 Gilchrist, Alexander, 220n. Gillray, James, 13, 217 Ginsberg, Allen, 3, 88–9 Gleckner, Robert F., 37n. Godwin, William, 226, 233n. Goode, Mike, 87 Goodhart, Benjie, 103 Gormley, Anthony, 87 Goslee, Nancy Moore, 140, 151n. Goya, 93 Grant, John E., 114n., 183n. Gray, Thomas, 24, 173, 179, 184n. see also Blake, William, Gray designs Greer, Germaine, 4 Grenville, George, 190 Grose, Francis, 187–8 Guest, Harriet, 212 Gysin, Bryon, 88, 92 Haggerty, George E., 24, 25, 28, 37n., 86n. Hagstrum, Jean H., 75 Haigwood, Laura, 148 Hall, Catherine, 220n. Halperin, David M., 24, 25, 26, 37n. Hamilton, Emma, 217 Hamlyn, Robin, 138 Hands, Elizabeth, 18, 159, 162n. Hare-Naylor, Anna, 229 Hare-Naylor, Francis, 229 Hare-Naylor, Georgiana, 228–9



Eaves, Morris, 151n. Edelman, Lee, 40–9 Effinger, Elizabeth C., 18, 63–73, 132–3, 139n. Elfenbein, Andrew, 2–3, 28, 37n., 39n., 49n., 84, 86n., 115n., 211, 213, 220n. El Greco, 93 Eliot, T.S., 182, 185n. Ellis, Edwin J., 10 Emin, Tracey, 18, 116–39 Equiano, Olaudah, 125, 139n. Erdman, David V., 56, 62n., 114, 115n., 138n., 140, 143, 144, 151n., 198n., 224, 233n. Erickson, Robert A., 161n. Ernst, Max, 93 Essick, Robert N., 113, 114, 138n., 151n., 203, 208n. Esterhammer, Angela, 183 Evans, Cerith Wyn, 18, 88, 92–3, 96 Examiner, The, 5, 210

259

Index

Hartley, J., 190 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 63, 71, 114 Haskell, Francis, 85n. Hayes, Tom, 3–4, 74 Hayley, Eliza, 201 Hayley, Mary, 212 Hayley, Mary, née Welford, 201–2 Hayley, Thomas Alphonso, 200, 202, 203, 206 Hayley, William, 10, 19, 28, 100–1, 108, 110–11, 114–15n., 163, 164, 167, 183n., 199–208, 209–20, 221–2, 223, 224, 227, 233n. Heber, Mary, 222, 225, 228, 233n., 234n. Heffernan, James, 146 Hegel, G.W.F., 122, 125, 135 Hemans, Felicia, 163 Heppner, Christopher, 75, 84, 85n. Hervey, John, 24, 210 Hesketh, Harriet, 115n. Hill, Christopher, 191 Hilton, Nelson, 65, 66–8, 72, 72n. Hobson, Christopher Z., 2–3, 4, 5, 17–18, 23–39, 49n., 62, 64, 70–1, 75, 85n., 90–1, 108, 123, 129, 137, 140, 153, 161n., 183n., 198n., 208n., 209, 210, 211 Holden, Philip, 151 Hole, Robert, 220n. Holt, Thomas C., 37n. Homer, 203, 208n., 210, 211, 212, 214–19, 229 Hood, Samuel, 190 Hooper, Lucy, 163 Horne, John, 189 Horwood, Richard, 234n. Howard, John, 37n. Howard, Seymour, 74 Humphry, Ozias, 230 Hunt, Leigh, 210 Hunt, Lynn, 37n. Hunt, Tony, 154 Hutchinson, John, 87 Iremonger, Delicia, née Fryer, 227 Iremonger, Elizabeth, 19, 221–35 Iremonger books, 231–2 Iremonger, Elizabeth, née Lacey, 227 Iremonger, Joshua, 227, 232

Iremonger, Penelope, née Morgan, 227, 230 Irigaray, Luce, 22 Jackson-Houlston, Caroline, 18, 153–62 Jamieson, John, 142, 152n. Jardine, Lisa, 115n. Jarman, Derek, 3, 88, 92, 93 Jesus, 6, 17, 18, 46, 47–8, 61, 191, 192 Jockey Club, The, 115n. Johnson, Joseph, 159, 227, 231 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 114n., 183n. Jones, Anna Maria, née Shipley, 229 Jones, William, 229 Jordan, Mark D., 37n. Julius, Niklaus Heinrich, 229–30 Juvenal, 155 Kaplan, Marc, 1, 75 Kates, Gary, 198n. Kauffman, Angelica, 232 Keats, John, 176 Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, 37n. Kerber, Linda P., 37n. Keynes, Geoffrey, 224 Kidd, Helen, 17, 21–2 Kilpatrick, Dean G., 160 Klarer, Mario, 152n. Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 203 Knipe, Eliza, 143, 145, 147 Knowles, John, 214 Kren, Kurt, 94 Labbe, Jacqueline M., 163, 184n. Lacan, Jacques, 40–9 Ladenson, Elisabeth, 233 ‘Lady’s Complaint, The’, 133 Landry, Donna, 159, 160 Lanser, Susan S., 25, 31, 37n., 232 Larrissy, Edward, 3, 89 Lascelles, Edward, 234n. Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 10, 81, 197 Lawrence, D.H., 182 Leigh, Mike, 116–17 Leslie, Charles Robert, 229 Lethieullier, Christopher, 234n. Levin, Donald Norman, 205 Levitt, Annette S., 113 Lewis, Matthew, 157



260

Libow, Judith A., 160 Liddington, Jill, 25, 37n., 39n. Linkin, Harriet Kramer, 161n., 162n., 163, 183n., 213, 220n. Lister, Anne, 25, 39n. Locke, John, 165, 170 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 22 Louis XV, 189 Lucas, Matt, 3 Lucretius, 217 Lucy, Niall, 67 Macherey, Pierre, 157 Mack, Robert L., 37n. Mackinnon, Kenneth, 85n. Macleay, K., 159 Macklin, Thomas, 100 Macpherson, James, 18, 151n., 158 Magno, Cettina, 56, 62n. Makdisi, Saree, 5, 115n., 151n. Malkin, Benjamin Heath, 213, 229 Malone, Edmund, 80 Mandeville, Bernard, 213–14 Mann, Paul, 64–5, 70, 71 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 3 Marie Antoinette, 106, 115n., 163 Marjoribanks, John, 150 Marsh, Edward Garrard, 19, 202–8 Marsh, John, 202 Marshall, Nowell, 151n. Mason, William, 80 Mathew, Harriet, 212, 220n. Matthews, Susan, 19, 101, 106, 114n., 115n., 161n., 183n., 209–20 Mazzinghi, Joseph, 233–4n. McClenahan, Catherine, 103 McCormack, Matthew, 188–9 McGann, Jerome J., 165, 167, 171, 177, 184n. McGrath, Patrick, 91 Mee, Jon, 184n., 220n. Mellor, Anne K., 15–16, 74, 85n., 144, 146, 151, 151n., 187 Meredith, Rachel, 92 Merry, Robert, 19, 171–7, 182–3, 184n. Meyer, Jeremiah, 202 Meyer, William, 202 Michelangelo, 10, 74, 77 Midgley, Clare, 141

261

Miles, Josephine, 163 Milton, John, 22, 96, 125–6, 191 see also Blake, William, Milton a Poem; Blake, William, Milton illustrations Min, Susette, 66 Miner, Paul, 106–7 Mitchell, W.J.T., 1, 3, 46, 72n., 75 Montagu, Elizabeth, 220n. Montagu, Jennifer, 81 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 201 Moore, Harriet Jane, 226 More, Hannah, 142, 143, 144, 147, 211, 212, 219, 220n. Morley, Edith J., 230 Morning Chronicle, 230 Morning Post, 190 Mortimer, John Hamilton, 79 Mühl, Otto, 94 Muir, William, 119 Mulvey, Laura, 81, 85n. Murray, Stephen O., 23, 26, 27, 36 Murry, Fanny, 38n. Myrone, Martin, 18, 74–86, 96 Napoleon, 107, 115n. Nelson, Horatio, 217 Nero, 210 Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich, 69 Niobe group, 77 Nitsch, Hermann, 93–4 Nochlin, Linda, 85n. Nurmi, Martin K., 230 O’Rourke, Michael, 85n., 86n. Oedipus, 1 Ofili, Chris, 72, 87 Origen, 178 Orwell, George, 5 Otto, Peter, 18, 50–62, 64–5, 68, 72, 183n. Paglia, Camille, 1, 74, 106, 110, 113 Paley, Morton, 49n., 91, 113, 114, 126, 139n. Parker, James, 224–5, 229, 233n. Parker, Sarah, 224–5, 233n.



Index

Index

Parliament Samson Fighting with his Jaw, The, 190 Pars, Henry, 10 Patterson, Craig, 38n. Payne Knight, Richard, 85n. Penny, Nicolas, 85n. Percy, Thomas, 171 Perry, Grayson, 18, 90, 97–115 Perthes, Friedrich Christoph, 229 Phillips, Michael, 230 Phœnix of Sodom, The, 38n., 39n. Pickering, B.M., 114n. Pirie, Jane, 39n Pitt, William, 190, 195 Plato, 126–9, 131, 135, 137, 200–1, 208n., 217, 218, 219, 232 Poe, Edgar Allan, 182 Ponsonby, Sarah, 25, 39n., 227–8, 232, 233, 234n. Poole, Harriet, 98, 202 Pope, Alexander, 19, 116, 165–70, 175, 182–3, 183n., 184n., 210, 211–12, 213–15, 218–19 Porter, Roy, 156 Potts, Alex, 81, 82, 91 Priestley, Joseph, 227, 232 Prince, Mary, 125, 139n. Prior, Richard Chandler Alexander, 154 Pullman, Philip, 7 Punter, David, 158 Quaife, G. R., 156 Raine, Kathleen, 113 Rajan, Tilottama, 163 Ralph, Benjamin, 81 Raphael, 81 Rancière, Jacques, 50, 61 Réage, Pauline, 125, 134 Rehberg, Vivian, 92 Reynolds, J.H., 184n. Reynolds, Joshua, 79, 80, 228 Rhodius, Appolonius, 204–5, 208n. Richardson, Samuel, 157 Richey, Paul, 206 Richter, Simon, 91 Roberts, Jonathan, 7 Robertson, W. Graham, 92

Robinson, Henry Crabb, 228–30, 234n. Robinson, Mary, 163 Robsahm, Carl, 51 Rocke, Michael, 38n. Romney, George, 212 Rose, Steven, 42 Rosenblum, Robert, 85n. Rosenthal, Angela, 144 Rothenberg, Molly Anne, 66, 73n. Rovira, James, 7 Rowland, Jon Thomas, 37n. Rowlandson, Thomas, 191 Roszak, Theodor, 89 Ruppel, Richard R., 151 Russell, Gillian, 220n. Russell, Jamie, 89 Ryskamp, Charles, 114n. Sappho, 221, 232 Sato, Hikari, 208n. Schiff, Gert, 86n., 215 Schofield, John, 99, 104–5, 114n. Schuchard, Marsha Keith, 4, 6, 62n., 91, 183n., 189–90 Scott, Walter, 18, 158–9, 162n., 201 Searle, John, 186 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 2, 24, 36, 76, 138n., 163, 165, 170, 183n. Senaha, Eijun, 2 Seward, Anna, 212, 221–2 Seward, William, 226, 233n. Sha, Richard, 18, 37n., 40–9 Shakespeare, 107, 175, 178, 181, 199, 212 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 199 Sherry, Peggy Meyer, 65 Shipley, Catherine Louisa, 225, 226, 227, 228–33, 234n. Shipley, Jonathan, 227, 232 Shout, Ann Pickering, 225 Siegel, Jonah, 218 Simpson, David, 70–1 Smith, Adam, 145 Smith, Charlotte, 163–4, 183n., 212, 226, 233n. Smith, Greg, 79 Smith, John Gordon, 161n. Smith, Norah, 162n. Sommerville, Ian, 92



262

Sophocles, 185n. Spenser, Edmund, 171 Sporus, 210, 219 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 65 Stanley, Liz, 232, 235n. Stedman, John Gabriel, 143–4, 147, 152n. Stephen, Addie, 15 Stevens, Bethan, 18, 140–52 Stevenson, Warren, 35, 103, 113, 156, 197n. Stone, Lawrence, 221–3 Storch, Margaret, 3, 16 Stothard, Thomas, 233n. St Pierre, Bernardin, 226, 234n. Strachan, John, 177 Strange, Robert, 197n. Stryker, Susan, 186 Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din, 93 Sussman, Charlotte, 141 Suzuki, Masashi, 4 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 18, 50–62, 68–9, 93 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 94, 95 Sydenham, Floyer, 126 Taormino, Tristan, 150 Tatham, Frederick, 92–3 Tayler, Irene, 187, 197n. Taylor, Thomas, 139n. Taylor, Tom, 229 Terdiman, Richard, 40–1, 49n. Theognis, 201 Thomas, Calvin, 76 Thompson, E.P., 6 Thrale Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 106–7, 226, 232, 233n, 235n. Tighe, Mary, 163 Times, The, 38n., 199, 229 Todd, Janet, 160 Traub, Valerie, 25 Trial of Abraham Thornton, 156, 161n. Trotter, David, 118–19 Trumbach, Randolph, 2, 23, 27, 29, 30, 36–7, 37–8n. Twiss, Richard, 227 Upcott, William, 230, 234n.

263

Van Leer, David, 37n. Verhaeghe, Paul, 49n. Vine, Steven, 144, 151n. Viola, Bill, 88 Virgil, 173 Viscomi, Joseph, 119, 151n. Vogler, Thomas A., 66, 72–3n., 141, 146, 149, 152n. Voltaire, 158, 201 Wahrman, Dror, 212, 213 Walker, Ann, 39n. Wallace, Robert, 162n. Walliams, David, 3 Walpole, Horace, 209, 213 Walsh, John, 108, 113 Walters, Margaret, 85n. Ward, Ned, 133–4 Warton, Joseph, 167 Washington, George, 214 Watney, Simon, 65, 69–70 Watson, Caroline 115n. Webster, Brenda S., 16, 28, 49n., 55, 161n. Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 219 Whitaker, Ann, 224 Whittaker, Jason, 3, 18, 72, 86n., 87–96 Wilde, Oscar, 10 Wilkes, John, 189, 198n. Williams, Helen Maria, 142 Williams, Linda, 81 Williams, Nicholas M., 197n. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 81, 85n., 91, 211, 218 Winnicott, D.W., 121–2 Winterson, Jeannette, 136 Witkin, Joel-Peter, 18, 89–91, 93–6 Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, 46, 49n. Wolfson, Susan. 112, 115n. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 104, 107, 145, 151n., 188, 211, 213, 214 Wood, John, 94 Wood, Marcus, 3, 125, 144–5, 147, 151n., 152n. Woods, Marianne, 39n. Woollett, William, 197n. Wordsworth, William, 177 Worrall, David, 2, 4, 138n., 139n. Wray, Cecil, 190



Index

264

Index

Wright, Julia M., 140, 152n., 163 Wyndham, George, 202


Yearsley, Ann, 142, 145–6, 147, 151n. Yeats, William Butler, 172, 184n.

Yolton, John W., 183n. Young, G. M., 232 Young, Hershini Bhana, 152n. Young, Katherine, 69 Young Roscius Dissected, The, 199


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