Blake, Gender and Culture

Helen P Bruder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317321156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Blake's combination of verse and design invites interdisciplinary study. The essays in this collection approach his work from a variety of perspectives including masculinity, performance, plant biology, empire, politics and sexuality.

1 ‘Merely a Superior Being': Blake and the Creations of Eve

Mark Crosby

DOI: 10.4324/9781315655130-1

In his 1793 painting, The Creation of Eve, Henry Fuseli flirted with theological controversy by including the head and shoulders of a statuesque male figure illuminated by a radiant, halo-like aura above a supine Adam and a supplicating Eve. ¹ Part of a series of paintings illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost that formed the basis of Fuseli’s Milton gallery, The Creation of Eve plays on the representational ambiguities of its source in depicting divine agency. Milton destabilizes the biblical formulation of divine agency by establishing a celestial hierarchy that devolves creative power from the Father to the Son. This hierarchy is complicated by Milton’s inclusion of two contrasting accounts of Eve’s creation and her creator. In book 7, Raphael paraphrases Genesis 1:27–8, ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he them’, to identify the Father as the creator of both Adam and Eve. ² In the following book, Adam’s version of Eve’s creation follows Genesis 2:21, ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs’, to identify the Son as Eve’s creator. While Fuseli’s statuesque deity was intended to invoke ‘the shape / Still glorious’ that plucked out Adam’s rib to form Eve, ³ some viewers of the painting found this treatment of divine agency troubling. Fuseli’s patron, William Roscoe, for example, opposed the inclusion of the statuesque deity. Writing to Roscoe, a committed Unitarian, on 14 August 1795, Fuseli offered the following explanation for his rendering of Eve’s creator:

[The Creation of] Eve encounters probably some difficulty … from the Supposition in which Yourself Seem to be that the aerial figure may perhaps aim at being a representation of the Supreme Being: no such thought entered my head – for Believers, let it be the Son, the Visible agent of His Father; for others it is merely a Superior Being entrusted with her Creation. ⁴

Responding to Roscoe’s apparent opposition to visual representations of God, Fuseli describes his rendering of Eve’s creator in capacious terms as a multivalent signifier for divine agency. ⁵ Roscoe was not convinced and sent a lengthy list of objections. Fuseli responded with a more explicit identification:

the Messiah, against representing whom, any more than against the representation of an Angel, there exists no Theologic Law – To Him who reads Milton there can exist no Uncertainty who it is; the expression of the figure, looking upwards for approbation, points to a Superior Being. ⁶

In highlighting the importance of the hermeneutic relationship between the painting and its source, Fuseli reframes his earlier response. For readers of Paradise Lost (presumably Fuseli has Milton’s ‘judicious reader’ in mind) the identity of Eve’s creator is clear: the Son seeking the Father’s approbation. Fuseli’s explanations, while failing to convince Roscoe, gesture to a strand of biblical criticism that came to the fore in England during the final two decades of the eighteenth century.

Following Thomas Hobbes’s observation that the Bible contained numerous narrative discrepancies during the previous century, scholars began interrogating the transcendental origins of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible traditionally believed to have been authored by Moses. The two accounts of creation given in the first two chapters of Genesis came under intense scrutiny, with the two different versions of Eve’s creation receiving much attention: was she created at the same time as Adam, as related in Genesis 1:27, or after Adam’s failure to find a suitable helpmeet among the beasts, as described in Genesis 2:20–2? While Orthodox interpretations were heavily influenced by the Pauline tradition, which drew on Genesis 2:21 to support the superiority of men and the subordination of women, Hermetic exegetical traditions (Rabbinic, Gnostic and Neoplatonic) sought to resolve Eve’s two creations by interpreting Genesis 1:27 as the creation of an androgynous human who is divided into a gendered binary at Genesis 2:21–2. In his textual and pictorial interpretations of Eve’s creation, Blake not only drew on both biblical accounts, but also appropriated Gnostic interpretations. In addition, like Fuseli, Blake illustrated the scene of Eve’s creation from Paradise Lost. Compositionally indebted to Fuseli’s earlier painting, Blake’s depiction of divine agency in his Paradise Lost watercolours follows Milton’s celestial hierarchy with the Son as a prelusive Christ figure. In his other interpretations of Eve’s creation, Blake is less conventional in his treatment of divine agency. For example, in the final year of his life, he began work on an illuminated manuscript of Genesis for his patron John Linnell. ⁷ Before his death, Blake produced eleven leaves comprising two title pages and the Genesis text, closely following the King James Bible, chapters 1 through 4:15, decorated with sketched head and tailpieces, including two treatments of Eve’s creation. In these designs Blake not only reconfigures the contending biblical versions of this event according to his own mythopoetic system, but also presents two very different interpretations of divine agency that draw on the debates questioning the divine authority of the Pentateuch. In Britain these debates centred on Blake’s main commercial employer during the 1790s, Joseph Johnson, and the textual scholarship of one of Johnson’s authors, Alexander Geddes.

In 1786 Geddes advertised his forthcoming translation of the Bible, claiming that the King James text was based on corrupt sources. For his new translation, Geddes proposes returning to the original Hebrew text, the Samaritan Pentateuch. ⁸ Over the following decade, Geddes developed his ‘fragment hypothesis’, arguing that the Pentateuch was composed of textual fragments that were compiled by a single editor during the time of Solomon. Of particular significance were the differences between the first two chapters of Genesis. Though both describe the seven days of creation, their narrative order differs and is frequently contradictory. Moreover, the concept of deity alters between the chapters. In Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2, the creator is abstract and omnipotent; from Genesis 2:4 to 3, the creator is anthropomorphized, nescient and envious. The Hebrew Bible denotes these differences by using the plural term ‘Elohim’ for the deity of Genesis 1 through 2:3 and the compound term ‘Jahweh Elohim’ from 2:4 through the end of the chapter. The translators of the King James Bible de-emphasized these etymological and narrative distinctions by using ‘God’ and ‘Lord God’ respectively. In 1792 Johnson published the first English translation of Constantin Volney’s Ruins: or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires. Like Geddes, Volney considered the Pentateuch as a redacted collection of chronologically disparate textual fragments that repeat or contradict one another and that ‘Genesis in particular was never the work of Moses, but a compilation digested after the return from Babylonish captivity’. ⁹ The same year Johnson also published the first volume of Geddes’s new translation of the Bible, which uses a similar methodological approach to Jacob Bryant’s New System (1774–6), in its treatment of Genesis as a collection of redacted Hebrew myths. ¹⁰ In his early illuminated books Blake takes a similar tack to Geddes, deconstructing organized religion into a series of myths authored by Hebrew poets to explain their particular sociological and environmental circumstances. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–3), for example, Blake provides an ontological explanation for priesthood that accords with Geddes’s ‘fragment hypothesis’, further arguing that once systematized along polytheistic principles of obedience and sacrifice, religion had successfully concealed its origins: ‘men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast’ (MHH 11, E38).

In The Marriage, Blake also satirizes one of the key strategies used to refute interrogations of the divine authority of the Bible, specifically the case against Mosaic authorship. As articulated by Hobbes, the argument against Moses centred on chronological anomalies in the Pentateuch in relation to its author: how could Moses write about events prior to his birth and after his death? This argument could be sidestepped if details of such events, like those described in Genesis, were transmitted to Moses from a transcendental locus via divine inspiration. ¹¹ Blake satirizes this formulation of divine inspiration by relocating divine agency from an abstract to a human locus in the narrator’s conversation with Isaiah, who is described as a Hebrew poet inspired by his own reflective processes: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote’ (MHH 12, E38). In the preface to the second volume of his translation, Geddes is more forceful in his rejection of divine inspiration:

After reading the hebrew writings themselves, and finding in them, to my full conviction, so many intrinsic marks of fallibility, error and inconsistency, not to say downright absurdity, I could not, to use the emphatical language of the just mentioned apostle [St Paul] believe inspiration, were an angel from heaven to teach it. ¹²

In 1793, another writer associated with the Johnson circle, and acquainted with Blake, weighed in on the authorship question with arguably the most incendiary attack on the Bible of the period. The first part of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794) is a deistic argument against the Bible’s historical accuracy and spiritual authority. Paine refutes the idea that the Bible is the word of God, arguing that the mutability of language necessarily ensures that all verbal and textual constructs are open to suppression, alteration, corruption and fabrication. For Paine, the Bible demonstrates how language has been manipulated ‘to terrify and enslave mankind’. ¹³ Echoing Blake’s critique of divine inspiration in The Marriage, Paine argues that the biblical narrative is predicated on the uncorroborated revelations of prophets whom, he goes on to assert, were actually poets. Like Geddes, Paine considers the Bible as a collection of redacted myths composed by ‘jewish poets and itinerant preachers, who mixed poetry, anecdote, and devotion together’. ¹⁴ In the second part of Age of Reason (1795) Paine examines the numerous chronological and narrative discrepancies in the Bible, beginning with the Pentateuch, to argue against Mosaic authorship. ¹⁵

Age of Reason, like the first volume of Geddes’s translation of the Bible, prompted a slew of responses, many of which sought to defend Mosaic authorship. The Anglican clergyman, Richard Watson, provided one of the more sustained defences of the Bible, focusing initially on the authenticity, and therefore the divine authority, of the Pentateuch. Watson’s An Apology for the Bible (1797) challenges Paine’s attack on organized religion, arguing that without the church acting as an external check to regulate individual judgement, which he claims is fallible, there would be no moral order. Watson responds to Paine’s attack on Mosaic authorship by rehashing the orthodox belief that Moses was divinely inspired when he wrote of events of which he could have had no direct knowledge. Blake annotated Watson’s tract around 1798, taking issue with, among other things, the clergyman’s defence of Mosaic authorship. ¹⁶ Reiterating some of the arguments from The Marriage, Blake considers the Bible as a rhetorical construct for unifying a community rather than a historically accurate chronicle of events. ¹⁷ Responding to Watson’s claim that the Pentateuch ‘may still contain a true account of real transactions’ even if Moses were not the author, Blake states, ‘If Moses did not write the history of his acts. it takes away the authority altogether it ceases to be history & becomes a poem’ (E616). Blake then invokes Paine’s attack on the historicity of the Bible to claim that ‘If historical facts can be written by inspiration Miltons Paradise Lost is as true as Genesis’ (E617). What is at stake here, for Blake, is not the efficacy of the text, be it Paradise Lost or the Bible, but recognizing, and so recuperating, the locus of creative agency responsible for producing the text. To claim, as Watson does, that the Bible is an accurate record of a series of quotidian events merely reinforces the hegemony of organized religion, stripping creative agency from the Hebrew poets and granting it to an abstraction.

Blake’s most sustained engagement in these debates occurs in The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795) and The Book of Los (1795), which aesthetically and thematically parody the opening books of the Pentateuch as well as the Book of Revelation. Typographically, the double column layout, chapter divisions and numbered verses of these illuminated books mimic the layout of the King James Bible. The verse form that Blake uses in Urizen also imitates, as Robert N. Essick observes, contemporary theories concerning ‘the grammatical and rhetorical characteristics of ancient Hebrew’, which suggests that he may have been aware of Geddes’s work. ¹⁸ Blake’s narrative is a parodic reconfiguration of Genesis and Exodus, with Urizen corresponding to the first three chapters of Genesis. In terms of verbal parody, Urizen presents material creation as series of cascading falls with the Mosaic account of Eve’s creations reworked as the splintering of integral entities into binary states.

In Urizen Blake follows the Pauline tradition of prioritizing the accounts of Adam and Eve’s creations in Genesis 2, reconfiguring these events as two acts of division. The first division is recalled in chapter 3: after being appointed by the Eternals to watch over the fallen Urizen, Los experiences the revelation that ‘Urizen was rent from his side’ (6:4, E74). Los’s insight plays on the implied violence of Genesis 2:21, the removal of Adam’s rib to create Eve. In Blake’s reworking, Urizen is a complex amalgam of the Scriptural accounts of the creations of both Adam and Eve. As perceived by Los, Urizen’s creation physiologically invokes Eve’s creation in 2:21: both are ‘rent’ from the side of other entities. Once separated Urizen formulates his hegemonic system of ‘One King, one God, one Law’ (4:40, E72) and subsequently enters an unproductive, petrific state. For the watching Eternals, Urizen is, like the Scriptural Adam, ‘laid in a stony sleep’ (6:7, E74), during which Los fashions a material body for him. Anticipating Lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Naked History Displayed
• 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
• 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake’s Rahab
• 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
• 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake’s Family
• 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
• 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
• 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
• 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake’s Visions, Darwin’s Loves and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman
• 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake’s Thel
• 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman’s Book
• 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake’s Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
• 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index