William Blake and the Body

  William Blake and the Body Tristanne J. Connolly William Blake and the Body

  Frontispiece William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 2(1).

  

William Blake and

the Body Tristanne J. Connolly Department of English Butler University Indianapolis

  © Tristanne J. Connolly 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

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  ISBN 0–333–96848–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Connolly, Tristanne, J., 1970–

  William Blake and the body / Tristanne J. Connolly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-333-96848-4 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Criticism and interpretation.

  2. Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Knowledge – Anatomy.

  3. Body, Human, in literature.

  4. Body, Human, in art.

  I. Title. PR4148.B57 .C66 2002

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  02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents List of Illustrations

  vi

  Preface

  vii

  List of Abbreviations

  xvii

  1 Textual Bodies

  1

  2 Graphic Bodies

  25

  3 Embodiment: Urizen

  73

  4 Embodiment: Reuben

  95

  5 Divisions and Comminglings: Sons and Daughters 125

  6 Divisions and Comminglings: Emanations and Spectres 155

  7 The Eternal Body 192

  Notes

  222

  Bibliography

  232

  Index

  241 List of Illustrations Frontispiece William Blake. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 2(1).

  Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books. ii

  2.1 William Blake. Elohim Creating Adam. © Tate, London 2001.

  26

  2.2 W. Pink after Agostino Carlini. Smugglerius. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

  36

  2.3 William Cowper. Myotomia Reformata. Page 8. The Wellcome Library, London.

  49

  2.4 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 45. The Wellcome Library, London.

  50 2.5 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Appendix 3. The Wellcome Library, London.

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  2.6 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 25. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.

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  2.7 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 24. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.

  54 2.8 William Blake. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 6. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.

  55 2.9 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 60. The Wellcome Library, London.

  56 2.10 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 62. The Wellcome Library, London.

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  5.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 69. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books. 150 5.2 Francesco Saverio Clavigero. A History of Mexico. 1787. Plate viii, page 279. Benson Latin American Collection. University of Texas at Austin. 151

  6.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 35 [31]. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books. 161

  7.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 95. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books. 200 Preface

  One would think there would be nothing more to say about the body in general, or the body in Blake. ‘The Human Form Divine’ is Blake’s self- proclaimed central image and ultimate reality; the human body is what we live in every day, what we are, what is most familiar to us. Yet, the body is as alien as it is commonplace, as unfathomable as it is known: think of how many involuntary movements, such as heartbeat, are essential to its regular functioning, and how unexpectedly and inexorably disease and death can overtake the body. Blake’s depiction of the body communicates this: the body both provides and threatens identity. The simple question, ‘What does Blake think of the body?’, is difficult to answer, even though understanding the significance of his main preoccupation would be essential to understanding his work. The body is Blake’s preoccupation not because of a confident admi- ration of it, but rather a troubled obsession. He has a love/hate relationship with his favourite image; he at once reviles and glorifies the human body. This paradox could be swiftly resolved by claiming that, in fact, there are not really any bodies in Blake at all. The things that happen to Blake’s charac- ters could not happen to real bodies: wives do not burst from their husbands’ chests in globes of blood; poets do not possess other poets by entering their left feet in the form of falling stars; and the city of London is not normally accessed by entering anyone’s bosom. These are symbolic characters, it could be argued: allegories whose bodies are mere vehicles for meaning. If Blake’s were a simple dualism, then not only his characters’ bodies, but also the real human body, would be only vehicles which could be discarded for the sake of their more valuable contents. However, not even the most stilted allegory can completely transcend the symbols which embody its meaning, and Blake’s allegory is much more a tangled web than a nut in a shell. He takes his symbols very seriously. Coleridge saw in Blake a ‘despotism of symbols’, and Yeats christened Blake with the title, ‘literal realist of the imagination’ (Coleridge, in Bentley, Critical Heritage 55; Yeats 119). Blake’s allegorical char- acters are endowed in both design and verse with bones and blood, fibres and flesh; indeed, they are depicted in all gory detail. Because of this, I take them as bodies; because Blake presents them as bodies, he must be making statements on the body through his choice of images. The statements he makes do not boil down to another possible simple answer, that the physi- cal body is bad and the spiritual body good and both ultimately separate from each other. Blake often caricatures the mortal body as pathetic, restric- tive and painful, and there is truth in his exaggeration: again, think of all that cannot be controlled and all that must be suffered in mortal human form. Yet, his adulation is not saved exclusively for incorporeal spiritual viii William Blake and the Body

  forms. He often celebrates sexuality, and even admires nerves and organs. In the end, those nerves and organs are immortalized, making Blake’s eternal body most definitely a body.

  Because the body is basic to human experience and fundamental to Blake’s art and verse, it is an inexhaustible topic. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system’ (115). Because the range of the body’s symbolism is so broad, thinking about the body involves thinking about other things. The result is that, though there has been recently a tangible wave of interest in writing about the body, the works which represent it do not necessarily cohere into a body of work on one subject. Of course they do not all see the body as having the same significance, because they study the body through various disciplines, and in various cultures of various eras. But even beyond this variation, different works on the body attach themselves to vastly different issues. There are economic bodies, political bodies, medical bodies, sexual bodies, and more, each with numerous subdivisions and interrelations. A book on Blake and the body could be about many things; too many things. The way I ap- proached the topic was to read Blake’s works and categorize the different kinds of bodies I perceived there; having categorized them, I would try to determine the characteristics of each category, and explore the significance of those characteristics through whichever historical, cultural and literary contexts they suggested. The general categories I deduced were: texts as bodies; bodies in Blake’s designs; bodies coming into existence, or being shaped; bodies which split off from or fuse with other bodies; the ideal, eternal body; bodies which dissolve into landscapes; bodies which are also places, such as cities or countries. To focus the project, I decided that its border would be the border between the body and the world. Considering Blake’s bodies in relationship to their environment, and as symbols of nations or political systems, would be a fruitful topic for a separate study; there is a wealth of material, some of it already approached from a differ- ent direction in Jason Whittaker’s William Blake and the Myths of Britain. That the remaining categories continued to shape my work will be seen from a glance at the Contents list, and the chapter outline provided at the end of this preface. Concentrating on how bodies are formed and connect with each other lent itself to a number of contexts, one of the most central being gender.

  Gender has been a tortured topic in Blake studies, until recently stymied by the division between critics who see Blake offering an ideal, liberating vision of equality between the sexes, and those who consider that vision to be fundamentally misogynistic. There is evidence to support both stances in Blake, and the factors involved in interpreting the evidence allow much leeway for personal critical desires. Many passages central to the question are placed in the mouths of ‘fallen’ characters who could be speaking under delusions the reader is meant to catch and disapprove. The fallen/eternal

  Preface ix

  distinction in Blake can be a convenient trapdoor to save him from many sins: anything unpalatable can be explained away as fallen. Because one might hope to find Blake’s ideals, unfiltered through any point of view, in the eternal realm, the question of Blake’s feminism or lack of it devolves to a great extent on the place of the female in eternity.

  Though Blake creates a seemingly equal unification of male and female in eternity, that ‘human’ is overridingly male. Jean Hagstrum, in The

  

Romantic Body, contends that ‘Blake did break away from the prison of his

  own sex long enough to define and envision an intersexual world of intense mutuality and equality’ (140), but his arguments are undermined by embarrassed explanations of exceptions. A good example of the difficulties Hagstrum runs into is found in his response to the most problematic passage for defenders of a non-misogynist Blake:

  It is true that Blake says that in Eternity woman ‘has no Will of her own’ (Last Judgment, E., 562). But if woman is denied will in Eternity, we should remember that under the Covenant of Forgiveness the new and gentle Jehovah also lacks will. . . . Will tends to be absent from the state of highest fulfillment: other qualities and other quests and a different orientation toward the self make it irrelevant or obtrusive. So it is no loss that Jerusalem in particular and idealized women in general lack it.

  (138) Hagstrum must fudge definitions to hold his point; and he does not take on Blake’s preceding words which indicate that the absence of will is due to ‘Woman’ being ‘the Emanation of Man’. Brenda Webster finds, ‘although Blake announces the end of sexual organization, male sexuality continues to stand as a model for the human, while the female is either incorporated or isolated restrictively in Beulah’. She holds that ‘in his late Christian prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, [Blake] suggests that the female should cease even to exist independently and become reabsorbed into the body of man where she belongs’ (‘Sexuality’ 203, 194). Alicia Ostriker agrees: ‘at its most extreme, Blake’s vision goes beyond proposing an ideal of dominance- submission or priority-inferiority between the genders’ (which is bad enough). ‘Blake wishfully imagines that the female can be re-absorbed by the male, be contained within him, and exist Edenically not as a substan- tial being but as an attribute . . . the ideal female functions as a medium of interchange among real, that is to say male, beings’ (163). Essick, in his article, ‘William Blake’s “Female Will” and its Biographical Context’, con- siders the argument that females in Blake’s allegorical poetry must be understood metaphorically. They are the representatives of otherness within the human psyche and its projection into an alienated nature. He is making use of sexual divi- x William Blake and the Body

  sion to figure forth more fundamental psychological and metaphysical problems.

  (616) One might ask, what is a more fundamental problem than sexual division? One might also ask, if ‘they’ figure forth otherness in the ‘human’ psyche, does that not exclude ‘females’ from the category of the ‘human’? From a female point of view, the female is not other. Essick finds ‘forceful rebuttals’ offered by ‘feminist critics’, including this: ‘the argument that females are the metaphoric vehicles for genderless meanings is blind to how tropes, and a poet’s choice of the lingual signs he manipulates into tropes, carry unavoidable ideological orientations, in part through their non-metaphoric references’ (Essick, ‘Female Will’ 617). Especially since Blake’s personifica- tions are so fleshy, it is difficult to consider his use of gender as mere metaphor. There is nothing ‘mere’ about metaphors, which can turn the supposedly genderless Christian God into a father and an old man. The critics Essick refers to are David Aers, Diana Hume George and Susan Fox. Aers finds that Blake’s use of ‘dominant male ideology . . . inevitably feeds back into the realm of human interrelations from which it has been derived’ (37). For George, ‘Blake’s portrayals of sexuality and of women . . . are prob- lems of symbol formation that express themselves in the limitations of language’ (199). Fox will not discount either of two ‘conflicting attitudes’: metaphor cannot ‘apologize away Blake’s occasional shrillness towards women’, yet ‘one cannot ignore the abstract quality of his sexual divisions, because to do so is to miss the vastest implications of his observations and to make those observations much more strident and condemnatory than we have evidence they were meant to be’ (509). Such equivocation weakens her position, falling into apology. Shrillness may be part of Blake’s ‘vastest implications’.

  Going to Blake’s prose to avoid statements in the mouths of unreliable characters does not result in a clear, definitive picture because in works such as A Vision of the Last Judgment he is writing for a particular purpose, and at a particular time, so his statements may not be equally applicable to his whole oeuvre. Another trapdoor for any unattractive opinions in Blake is the traditional theory that Blake changed between his early and late works, becoming more otherworldly and misogynistic, transferring his radical desires for liberty to the spiritual realm and consigning the evil natural world and women to each other. I call this a trapdoor not because I believe Blake never altered his opinions; after all, that would breed reptiles of the mind (MHH 19:7–9). However, in Blake’s case, it is the changing opinions that apparently produce mental reptiles. It seems to me it would be helpful to come up with a way to account for the relationship between his apparently contradictory assertions, rather than to say he changed his mind, or even to look for what caused him to change his mind. This is not asking for a

  Preface xi

  reconciliation of contraries so that one of them disappears; rather, it is an attempt to answer a rather Lockean personal identity question posed by David Punter, which for me sums up the Blake gender debate: ‘We are forced to ask how it can be that the same writer who sees so acutely into the pressures on individuals caused by ethical rigidity and repression seems at the same time to construct such an apparently male supremacist space’ (‘Trauma’ 481). Like Punter, I feel disappointed in Blake, because he makes a conscientious effort toward gender inclusiveness, and to a certain extent succeeds, but not completely. He does not go far enough. What blocks him? A dark epiphany, placed at a certain historical moment, is not a fully ade- quate answer. His later works are not devoid of fervour for sexual and politi- cal liberty combined: there is the response to trials of homosexuals in Milton found by Christopher Hobson; there are the eloquent pleas of Jerusalem and Mary for forgiveness of sexual sin and against warlike sacrificial violence (Hobson, 113–43; J 20–2, 61). Likewise, his earlier works are not devoid of misogynist hints, or at least bugs in any system of Blakean feminism. There is in Visions of the Daughters of Albion the ‘harem fantasy’ which, for Helen Bruder, ‘marks the moment of Oothoon’s most acute apostasy, as she offers to become an energetically ensnaring procuress’ (82) as an early indication that if Blake’s women are liberated, they are liberated to give sexual plea- sure to men. There is in The First Book of Urizen Enitharmon as ‘the first female now separate’ (16:10) as a foreshadowing echo of that embarrassing later statement that in Eternity the female has no will of her own. More arguably, there is the failure of both Thel and Oothoon to get what they want – perhaps a compassionate presentation of women’s frustration, perhaps even an endorsement of female community among the daughters of Albion and in the vales of Har – but why not an imagining of female freedom? Why only sympathy for women in a female sphere, and women who fail? If Blake does not envision a full equality between genders and lib- eration for both, it is not because he could not, but because he would not. As Punter suggests, Blake was able to see through many values which were imposed as unquestionable by his society. Other concerns more important to him clashed with the project of imagining female equality and liberty, and delineating these concerns will be a task of the following chapters.

  What has recently given a kick-start to the study of Blake and gender and sent it in new and prolific directions is the application of new historicism and cultural studies, and the shift from feminist criticism to gender studies. These developments occurred since the two landmark books on Blake and the body appeared: Thomas Frosch’s Awakening of Albion and Anne Mellor’s

  

Blake’s Human Form Divine, both published in 1974. These new approaches

  provide new opportunities to rethink Blake’s most central image. My concerns and methods in doing so are comparable to those of the two im- portant recent studies mentioned above: Helen Bruder’s William Blake and

the Daughters of Albion and Christopher Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality. xii William Blake and the Body

  Bruder’s book is a masterwork of new historicist criticism. She takes by the scruff of its neck the rather flabby argument that apologizes for Blake’s views of women by appealing to the limitations of his historical context, and tests it mercilessly, with positive and fascinating results. She pursues in detail the question of what feminism was in the 1790s, and places Blake in it as a rather forward-looking figure. However, she still finds flaws in Blake’s femi- nism, such as that action of Oothoon’s; she ascribes Oothoon’s failure to ‘historical considerations’ which forbid the conception of a solution (88). Other scholars notable for historicizing Blake are Jon Mee and David Worrall. In order to give precision to their researches, it was wise for them to concentrate on Blake’s earlier works. Their practice of contextualizing Blake in the high and low culture of Britain of his time is illuminating, though, not just to works produced in the 1790s; my study, taking in Blake’s whole oeuvre, carries this approach through his later prophecies (counter- ing their reputation as otherworldly). Hobson and I both take advantage of the best of both worlds, combining gender criticism with historicism. Hobson takes a queer theory perspective on Blake, while mine is a wider gender studies one; Hobson considers Blake to succeed in endorsing and empowering liberty for male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, while I examine the shortcomings of his ideals, and the motivations which contribute to them. Though it was back in 1982 that W.J.T. Mitchell pre- dicted critics would ‘rediscover the dangerous Blake’ since he was ‘now safely canonized’ and ‘ready to take a little abuse’, the need and profit of such an approach continues (Mitchell 410 –11). Hobson, who notes that critics in the 1980s and 1990s largely ignored Mitchell’s exhortations, explicitly responds to the questions Mitchell asks about Blake’s obscenity (Hobson xii). My impulse to confront the dangerous Blake comes from a deep conviction of the strangeness of his work, that to normalize him is to lose something valuable, even at the price of finding something undesirable. Blake is scary; a good part of the power of his work derives from its bizarreness, a good part of which in turn derives from his simultaneous adoration and abomi- nation of the human body.

  As explained above, this book is organized around five of the categories of somatic imagery I found in Blake’s works: the categories dealing with the body’s relationship to itself, to the self it embodies, and to other bodies. The text as body is the first category of imagery, explored in the first chapter and throughout. One substantial chapter is then devoted to a particular aspect of Blake’s textual bodies: the human figures in Blake’s graphic art. Then, in two chapters on Urizen and Reuben, I discuss central passages describing how Blake envisions the beginnings of the material body. The birth imagery involved in those passages becomes more alienating as I move on to treat in two chapters multiple bodies which split from and unify with each other. The fifth kind of body imagery, upon which the others rely as either imi-

  Preface xiii

  tations or parodies, is that of the ideal, eternal body, which occupies the study’s final chapter.

  The questions of whether identity is defined or protean, how identity is affected by birth, and how language and literature are affected by these con- cerns, beg for comparison with Julia Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic, the symbolic, and the abject. Despite their similar concerns, Kristeva is rarely considered in relation to Blake. They both struggle with the advantages of having a flexible identity, and the dangers of being scattered and undefined. Digging back into the origins of Kristeva’s thought, I find that Mary Douglas’ theories in Purity and Danger (which Kristeva makes use of in Powers of Horror) are also a valuable way to explain the dynamic of the relationship Blake envisions between his bodily text and its reader. Blake makes use of what Douglas would call the sacredness of bodily borders to gain a certain degree of control over who his audience is and how they read his works. Blake creates different kinds of entry points, or orifices, in his works: while they allow readers access to the body that is the text, the transgression they require of readers ensures that the squeamish are repulsed, while the brave are challenged.

  In the chapter entitled ‘Graphic Bodies’, I examine anatomical art as an influence on Blake. His graphic figures involve criticism of eighteenth- century anatomy books. With particular reference to William Cowper (an anatomist who drew many of his own figures) and William Hunter (Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy while Blake attended), I assert that Blake uses echoes of anatomical art to question empirical observation of the body, and offer the possibility of dissection by imagination. The art theories of Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth and Johann Winckelmann contextualize Blake’s radical contribution to controversies over representa- tion, and pain in art, while psychological and physiological theories of sym- pathy (Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Robert Whytt) elucidate the powerful and intimate reactions Blake sought for his works. A comparison of how Burke and Blake use the terms ‘pity’ and ‘delight’ reveals that Blake sees sym- pathy as a threat to individual identity. True sympathy is not enabled by putting oneself in the place of another, but rather by becoming fully oneself.

  The relationship between body and soul is central to my commentary on Blake’s graphic bodies. That chapter begins with a discussion of Blake’s print,

  

Elohim Creating Adam, an important visual depiction of how the physical

  body comes to be. In the two following chapters, I explicate central verse passages on the human body’s beginnings: the embodiment narratives of Urizen and Reuben. While these embodiments borrow images from foetal development and birth, they are not ordinary births. I claim that Blake’s variations on the childbearing process betray an obsession with birth. This obsession arises from a recognition of the problems of parturition: the limitations of physical existence, the pitfalls of parent-child relationships, xiv William Blake and the Body

  and the possibilities of malformation and miscarriage. Blake’s metamorphic foetal imagery takes off from Ovid’s process-fascinated descriptions of change to suggest that the new, strange form is our familiar human body. It also reflects the protean nature of Blake’s creative works; the meaning of Blake’s birth imagery applies equally to humans and artworks. The terrify- ing aspect of uncanny growth and change culminates in miscarriage imagery through which Blake depicts the failure of creation, both human and artis- tic. I offer some evidence for a biographical basis for Blake’s treatment of miscarriage in his poetry (Catherine Blake possibly suffering one or more failed pregnancies), but I concentrate on explicating Blake’s poetic imagery. From it I conclude that Blake ‘perversely’ values nonreproductive sexuality. He expands the possibilities of what sexual activity can produce, such as personified emotions and artworks.

  From the bizarre birth of Urizen and the failed birth of Reuben, I move on to examine one of the few Blake characters born normally, from a woman’s womb: Orc. Through studying the Oedipal suggestions of his nativ- ity, alongside its origins in Satan’s family romance with Sin and Death in

  

Paradise Lost, I demonstrate that in Blake, children (and mothers) can be

  seen as facets of the father’s personality: each human is a family. At times proliferating, and at times reuniting in monstrous conglomerated forms, the children of Albion enable Blake to present a vast confusion of diver- sification and unification. I argue that sons and daughters (along with emanations and spectres, the subject of the next chapter) dramatize the multiplicity inherent in the Blakean human. The work of RenJ Girard allows me to connect the identity-blurring involved in Oedipal relationships to the acts of human sacrifice perpetrated by the Sons and Daughters of Albion in Blake’s Jerusalem. They are flesh-bound attempts to establish individual iden- tity and cross bodily borders.

  That Blake’s human is manifold in itself, not just in its offspring or its fallen manifestations, is revealed by his depiction of emanations and spec- tres. Emanations and spectres split, painfully and gorily, from the human of whom they are constituent parts: psychic components separate and become independent personifications. This divisibility of both flesh and spirit I show to be an exaggerated outgrowth of Locke’s and Hume’s questioning of per- sonal identity. Unlike the emanations of another manifold being – Wisdom and the Devil, and the Son and the Spirit as personified aspects of God – the intellectual births from Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ are depicted viscerally. Their separations are fantasies of male mothering which reflect on other creative processes, especially that of Blake’s illuminated books in which they are described and pictured. Emanations and spectres, like God’s hypostases, can help, hinder, and even become, creative productions.

  Blake suggests that the multiple aspects of the human personality, which in the fallen world may work against each other, in eternity are reunified in the human form while retaining their individuality. My final chapter con-

  Preface xv

  centrates on Blake’s few tantalizing suggestions of what life in eternity is like. From these I attempt to describe the appearance and function of the resurrected body. The presence of organs of sense indicates that for Blake the ideal human form is not a disembodied spirit. The imaginings of Locke, Berkeley, Swedenborg, St Teresa and St Paul on eternal bodies inspire an orig- inal ideal in which transparency and interpenetrability are valued as highly as individual identity. The conversational and sexual ‘intercourse’ through which ideas are embodied in eternity is an apotheosis of male homosexual relations which harnesses the power of female sexuality. This leads me to confront the question of why androgyny often veils a male form which incorporates the female, rather than a genderless, or equally male and female, ideal. I suggest that Blake’s final triumph over dualism is made pos- sible, yet made incomplete, by subordination.

  I would like to thank my supervisors and examiners, Kathleen Wheeler, Simon Jarvis, John Beer, John Harvey and Andrew Lincoln, for their guid- ance of this project as it took shape. Scholars who provided assistance and encouragement were Steve Clark, Jon Mee, David Worrall, Keri Davies, Bill Goldman, and everyone at the Blake Society, Simon Szreter, Jeremy Boulton, Ruth Richardson, John Sargent, and G.E. Bentley, Jr. Many thanks. Special gratitude goes to my conscientious and constructive readers at Palgrave and my sympathetic editors, Eleanor Birne and Rebecca Mashayekh. Portions of

  Chapter 4 were first published in Romanticism 7.2 in the article ‘Miscarriage Imagery in Blake’, and appear here by permission of the editors. I would like to express my appreciation for the feedback and support I received from Nicholas Roe and the reader he chose for the article. Sharon Ruston and Lidia Garbin organized a British Association for Romanticism Studies con- ference and edited an essay collection, Spectres of Romanticism: the Influence

  

and Anxiety of the British Romantics, which were venues for a piece, ‘William

  Blake and the Spectre of Anatomy’, which grew into Chapter 2: my thanks for the excellent chance to share ideas, and again, for perceptive reading. The William Blake Trust, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Tate Gallery, the Wellcome Library, and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin kindly granted permission to reproduce the illustrations. Many thanks to John Commander and the Blake Trust for gen- erosity as well as assistance, and Laura Valentine at the RA, Anna Sheppard at the Tate, Matilde Nardelli at Wellcome, and Michael Hironymous at Austin, for their speed, skill and helpfulness in providing pictures and permissions. The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, The National Chapter of Canada IODE, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, King’s College and the Cambridge University English Faculty granted financial support. Thanks to all at McMaster University who xvi William Blake and the Body

  have continued to aid and advise me, especially Alvin Lee and David Clark; and, at Auburn, Paula Backscheider for her unbeatable mentoring. Thanks to Patricia Simmons for, in so many ways through good and ill, being my fellow Daughter of the Empire. To those who often provided practical help as well as warm friendship – Leo Sharpston and (in honoured memory) David Lyon, George and Hilary Pattison, Margaret Watson (as well as Linda, Josie and Marleen) – thanks. To Krista Johansen, for friendship: swylc sceolde secg wesan, þegn æt Qearfe! Heartfelt thanks to my family: all the Noreyko and Connolly clans, but most of all my parents Gaiyle and Robert Connolly, my grandmother Margaret Noreyko, my brother and sister-in-law Cal and Gillian Connolly, and my godparents John and Kae Noreyko, not least for supplying the computers on which this was written, but also for their patience, enthusiasm and love. The final thank you goes to my husband, Ken Robinson. List of Abbreviations

  Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Blake’s unengraved writings are taken from Erdman’s edition and cited by page number (except for The Four

  

Zoas for which Night and line numbers are also provided), and all references

  to Blake’s illuminated books are taken from the Blake Trust series and cited by plate and line number. References to the notes from the Blake Trust edition will be introduced as such, and cited by page number. E Erdman, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. In Erdman:

  FZ The Four Zoas AR Annotations to Reynolds DC A Descriptive Catalogue

  VLJ A Vision of the Last Judgment PA Public Address

  In the Blake Trust editions:

  SIE Songs of Innocence and of Experience BT The Book of Thel MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  VDA Visions of the Daughters of Albion E Europe: a Prophecy A America: a Prophecy BU The First Book of Urizen BL The Book of Los BA The Book of Ahania M Milton: a Poem L Laocöon J Jerusalem

  Unless otherwise indicated, definitions and biblical quotations are taken from the following, which, when mentioned, are named by these abbreviations: OED Oxford English Dictionary KJV The Bible, King James Version

  

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1 Textual Bodies

  When Ezekiel is called to be a prophet, to speak to the hard-hearted chil- dren of Israel, the voice that speaks to him from his vision makes a remark- able request:

  But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roll of a book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.

  (Ezek. 2:8–3:3) In Ezekiel’s introduction to his mission, there is an emphasis on rebellion versus obedience, and the unlikelihood that his audience will listen to him. Eating the scroll goes against the usual rules; something is ingested which normally remains outside the body. However, reading is an ingestion, if not usually such a complete one: a reader eats up written words with his or her eyes. This episode suggests becoming one with the text, making it com- pletely part of oneself in order to deliver its message loyally and powerfully under circumstances adverse to communication. It also suggests that going against the common conventions of what remains inside and what outside the body is part of prophecy. The voice also assures Ezekiel, ‘And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebel- lious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them’ (Ezek. 2:5). Ezekiel will affect his audience – make them react, leave an impression on them – even if they do not wish to listen. According to the voice, someone who is not rebellious eats what is given, receives completely

2 William Blake and the Body

  without questioning or being picky. This is what the prophet should do, but this is not what his audience will do. The strange crossing of bodily borders, in eating the scroll, has something to do with getting through to an unre- ceptive audience.

  The unreceptive audience is a dilemma of prophecy: why would redemp- tive words be needed if all were already open to divine truth? William Blake’s illuminated books are also prophecies which try to work a redemptive purpose, and recognize that they are not preaching to the converted. However, Blake’s books are the opposite of Ezekiel’s scroll: they are more likely to swallow up their readers. Blake sees his illuminated books as human forms. When, at the beginning of his final prophecy Jerusalem, he announces, ‘I again display my Giant Forms to the Public’, he refers at once to his illuminated books, and the titanic characters they contain. Reading the weighty Jerusalem, then, is like being swallowed up by a Giant Form, entering its body. Blake continues, ‘My former Giants & Fairies having reciev’d the highest reward possible’, connecting the personification of his books to their appreciation by his audience. He strongly asserts the salvific potential of his writing: he claims to hear God speak, and proclaims, ‘There- fore I print; nor vain my types shall be: / Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth shall live in harmony’ (J 3). By using vocabulary specific to his medium, ‘print’ and ‘types’, Blake links the supposed power of his work to its form. However, this sanguine attitude is marred by the gouging out of words from the engraving plate. For example, one line with deletions reads, ‘Therefore

  Reader, what you do not approve, & me for this energetic exertion of my talent’ (3). Friendliness toward the reader is struck out, as is confidence in the reader’s reaction.

  The fact that Blake created his own books, designing, writing, engra- ving, printing, finishing and binding them, at once enables him to claim an intimate relationship with, and strong influence over, his reader, and to illustrate dramatically the failure of that claim on plate 3 of Jerusalem. The unique form of Blake’s illuminated books makes them at first glance a dif- ferent kind of text, a corpus embodied in a different way. They require aware- ness of the textual body. Unlike poetry embodied in words only, Blake’s illuminated works cannot be fully reincarnated in any typeface; their body and soul are integrated. Handmade, they include hints of the process of their making. Existing between print and manuscript, they emphasize transgres- sion of categories. Depicting characters who enter each other and are part of each other, they dramatize the instability of bodily borders. From these characteristics Blake draws prophetic powers for his illuminated books, to achieve a transformative purpose, and to gain some control over his audi- ence: what kind of readers he will have, and how they will be affected.

  As a starting point for understanding the significance of the crossing of bodily borders which Blake seems to demand of his readers, it is helpful to turn to two thinkers who offer two different, but interrelated, theories

  Textual Bodies

  3

  on that subject: Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva. Douglas, writing from an anthropological point of view and thus focusing on the social meaning of the body, seeks in her study Purity and Danger to unravel the relation- ship between the unclean and the sacred. She looks at the abominations of Leviticus, among other purity laws, to discover what characteristics cause the unclean to be considered unclean. She comes to the conclusion that ‘holiness is exemplified by completeness. Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused’ (53). Conversely, anything that crosses categories or borders is an abomination. Douglas pays particu- lar attention to defilement that relates to the body. When writing about ‘the symbolism worked upon the human body’ in ritual, she argues: the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its bound- aries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.

  (115) As an anthropologist, she concentrates on society as the system symbolized by the body, but indicates that the body can stand for any system: for instance, a system of language or of thought. By saying ‘powers and dangers’ are ‘credited to social structure’, she implies that these are not absolute, but rather invented to support the system. Perhaps, then, this can be applied to other systems: the borders of language, mental operations, and the body itself can be seen as arbitrary, kept in place through the threat of danger. It is possible to distort these boundaries since they are not absolute. Douglas writes: all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body.

  (121) When orifices and bodily fluids figure in a prohibition, a ritual, a text, then that is a sign that the vulnerability of margins is at issue. As this study will show, Blake’s illuminated books are preoccupied with the orifices of the

4 William Blake and the Body

  body, particularly in the shape of sense organs, and fascinated with blood. Investing the text with these images gives the text human attributes, and it reinforces the idea that reading a Blake text means crossing bodily perime- ters. The power Douglas sees in this crossing provides a way to understand Blake’s prophetic purpose. Like the borders of social and other systems, Blake’s claim to transformation may be arbitrary. As he recognizes, there is always the possibility of failure; perhaps an encounter with his work will not produce enlightenment or improvement, or even comprehension. By dramatizing the taboos of the body’s limits, especially when he often depicts bodies as not final in their form but metamorphosing and splitting, Blake acknowledges this arbitrariness, but also borrows the power invested in borders. By recreating the body in textual form, and encouraging the reader to cross its borders as well as depicting border crossing within the text, Blake demonstrates that the shape of the body as we know it is not absolute. This makes possible a vision of a transformed body. Not only can the human form exceed its present potentialities, but anything the body can stand for – according to Douglas, any system of society or ideas – thus can also potentially be transformed.