Sexy Blake

H. Bruder, T. Connolly, H. Bruder, T. Connolly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137332844
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

This book lays bare numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, the poet-artist's work celebrate Blakean attractions and repulsions.

II

Chastity, Redemption and Feminine Desire

5

In the ‘Lilly of Havilah’: Sapphism and Chastity in Blake’s Jerusalem

Sean David Nelson

Nicholas M. Williams, writing on Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake from a Marxist perspective, asks, ‘Are [Blake’s] utopias reasonable exceptions to the otherwise universal ideology or are they merely the projections of a naïve ideological consciousness?’ (23–4). Insofar as the question is relevant to Blake’s visions of sexual utopia, the two choices that Williams presents here – between what he calls the ‘“here” of ideology’ and the ‘“nowhere” of utopia’ (24) – appear more as the poles of a dialectic that must necessarily become intertwined and made thematic for Blake as a critical utopian writer.¹ That is, Blake’s understanding of history requires him to critique both contemporary sexual ideologies and the poet’s ability to envision utopia. In Jerusalem, Blake turns his critical eye toward the institution of chastity. For Blake, chastity is one of the greatest evils that humanity inflicts upon itself. Not only is sexual freedom holy in Blake’s eyes – a view borrowed in part, however perversely, from Milton – but chastity transforms sex into little more than the currency of patriarchal power. Jerusalem represents Blake’s most pointed critique of the institution of chastity and his fear that contemporary advocates of reform in gender relations concede too much to hegemonic power by refusing to discard such an institution. Wollstonecraft’s defence of chastity in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman remains in his sight throughout Jerusalem. But both Wollstonecraft and Blake understand and examine the ways in which queer sexualities, especially sapphism, are threatening to heteronormativity, chastity and marriage. However, Blake’s use of sapphism, in the image of Jerusalem and Vala’s ‘comingling’, as a means of critiquing chastity is unique in its depth of thought. Instead of viewing chastity as a natural phenomenon, Blake sees the creation and continuation of chastity as a power struggle: men, like Albion, feel an anxiety of emasculation and usurpation when confronted with the idea of women’s sexual autonomy, and women view chastity as a false ideology either to be rejected as oppressive or to be wielded as a tool for power. Yet Blake ultimately cannot theorize a means within history for overcoming the power dynamics to which chastity is central. His form of critique remains incompatible with a pragmatic politics – like Wollstonecraft’s – because he cannot imagine the political means of bridging the gap between history as it is and his vision of a sexually free utopia. The dialectic of utopian thought becomes productive as a critical method, but fails to provide a political programme for sexual liberation.

Blake invokes Milton as a precedent for Jerusalem’s belief in sexual freedom. After Albion’s Sons have derided Jerusalem as a ‘Harlot-Sister’ and praised Vala as ‘the Goddess Virgin-Mother’, Albion retreats towards Beulah to find the two women:

He found Jerusalem upon the River of his City soft repos’d

In the arms of Vala, assimilating in one with Vala

The Lilly of Havilah: and they sang soft thro’ Lambeths vales,

In a sweet moony night & silence that they had created

With a blue sky spread over with wings and a mild moon,

Dividing & uniting into many female forms: Jerusalem

Trembling! then in one comingling in eternal tears,

Sighing to melt his Giant beauty, on the moony river. (19:40–7, E164–5)

Blake metaphorically sets his scene in Eden; Vala is called ‘The Lilly of Havilah’, a reference to the land in the Garden of Eden through which the river Pishon flows (Genesis 2:11). Blake’s description of the two as ‘comingling’ and ‘assimilating in one’ recalls Paradise Lost and Raphael’s description of angelic sex, in which ‘spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need / As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul’ (VIII:622–9). Albion prefers to describe the scene as a ‘deep wound of Sin’ (J 21:13, E166). The difference between Milton’s representation of Edenic sex and Blake’s is that Blake’s myth involves two women. Blake’s myth also appears more egalitarian than Adam’s proud exclamation to Raphael of Eve’s ‘sweet compliance’ (VIII:604). Jerusalem instead calls for a mutual exchange ‘[w]here we delight in innocence before the face of the Lamb: / Going in and out before him in his love and sweet affection’ (20:9–10, E165). By this point in his career, Blake had long been fascinated by the origins of female sexuality and in the ability of women (and poets) to imagine humankind’s downfall from a state of ideal sexual innocence, as in Thel, and to re-imagine this initial innocent state in the face of oppressive history and experience, as in Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

The sapphic scene in Jerusalem is a conflation of these pre- and post-lapsarian imaginings, transforming an image of a metaphorical female ‘relationship’ found in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman into a sexual scene placed just before the fall. Wollstonecraft writes:

Perhaps, there is not a virtue that mixes so kindly with every other as modesty. It is the pale moonbeam that renders more interesting every virtue it softens, giving mild grandeur to the contracted horizon. Nothing can be more beautiful than the poetical fiction, which makes Diana with her silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. I have sometimes thought, that wandering with sedate step in some lonely recess, a modest dame of antiquity must have felt a glow of conscious dignity when, after contemplating the soft shadowy landscape, she has invited with placid fervor the mild reflection of her sister’s beams to return to her chaste bosom. (242)

The similarities in phrasing are numerous: the ‘dame of antiquity’ as the primary actor, Blake’s ‘mild moon’ and Wollstonecraft’s ‘pale moonbeam … giving mild grandeur,’ his description of Jerusalem as ‘soft repos’d’ and Wollstonecraft’s ‘soft shadowy landscape’, and Blake’s literalization of Wollstonecraft’s dream of reuniting with a ‘sister’. Christopher Hobson puts forth the most radical interpretation of the encounter in Blake as ‘a positive view, even an idealization, of lesbian relations as mutualistic and embodying possibilities of female autonomy’, and reads against what he calls Vala’s ‘deceptive’ qualities and what Harold Bloom calls the ‘sinister beauty’ of the scene (qtd. in Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality 153). Blake’s transformation of Wollstonecraft’s idyllic scene into a sexual relationship challenges her image of modesty – Wollstonecraft’s scene can only remain ideal as long as it is non-sexual and explicitly chaste. Milton’s example shows, for Blake, that sexuality is actually divine.

Wollstonecraft’s scene, though, is itself a compromise, a political gesture towards a larger audience. In an earlier novella, Mary, a Fiction (1788), she questions the assumptions of chastity that underlie heterosexism. In the novella, Mary – a stand-in for Wollstonecraft herself, as Godwin would reveal in the Memoirs – attempts to escape the dysfunction of her family by becoming friends with a neighbour’s sick daughter, Ann. Their friendship becomes intensely significant to Mary, amounting to love, and Wollstonecraft eventually notes how Ann’s husband describes their bond as a ‘romantic friendship’ (18). Ashley Tauchert describes convincingly how Wollstonecraft ‘openly hints at the sexual nature of that love’ (44).² Whether their love is sexually consummated or not,³ the memory of their friendship, once Ann dies from her illness, is seen by Mary’s central male love-interest, Henry, as an obstacle that must be overcome in order for them to begin their own romantic relationship. As Wollstonecraft writes, ‘had Ann lived, it is probable she would never have loved Henry so fondly’ (40). But even Mary and Henry’s romantic relationship is short-lived. Henry is also sickly and weak, and the passion of their ultimate embrace, in Chapter XXVI, leads to his death shortly afterward. Mary finally retires to her unhappy marriage and lives waiting for death, imagining a world without marriage. What is clear in the novella is the powerlessness of Mary to break out of the system of heterosexual marriage and to freely embrace her sapphic love. As her prospects for emotional fulfilment through love become dim, she must repress her desires and reorient them towards more socially acceptable interests, until she finally reaches the most acceptable of all choices, heterosexual marriage, and is emptied of joy, save for the few moments when she can sublimate her desires in her efforts to help the poor. In Mary, Wollstonecraft anticipates Blake’s argument that same-sex love may threaten heteronormativity by providing a more fulfilling emotional experience than marriage.

However, Jerusalem and Vala’s sapphism is not an idealization of homosexuality as such, but is rather part of a larger critique of the ways in which heteronormativity views sapphism and queer sexualities as transgressions of its laws. Blake’s accompanying illustrations expand upon Vala and Jerusalem’s brief scene and make clear that Jerusalem functions partly as a symbol for Albion’s psychology. On plate 14, Albion lies wide-eyed and nervous beneath a vision of the winged Jerusalem, whose wings recall the image of a butterfly but also, more importantly, a Mandorla, or the large oval that completely encircles her.⁴ The Mandorla was used prominently in medieval book illuminations to portray Jesus as a holy figure. Jerusalem is, of course, the bride of Jesus. Albion, then, is disconcerted at the holy innocence of Jerusalem in his vision: he is lying down close to the earth and has turned his back to Jerusalem, whereas Jerusalem stands straight and is floating. In the accompanying text on the plate, however, Los describes Jerusalem’s state as one of ‘maternal anguish’ (14:31–2, E158). As Brenda Webster shows, Albion continually blames Jerusalem for his own guilt. Although Webster interprets Blake himself as the ultimate source of that guilt, the juxtaposition in this scene of Jerusalem’s actual anguish with Albion’s idealization of her power applies more directly to Albion as a character who ‘shifts blame for paternal cruelty on the female’, which allows Albion to ‘create his “Sexual Religion” of guilt’ (Webster, Prophetic 281). In fact, the image of women’s autonomy, as opposed to their actual degree of freedom, is the greatest cause of sexual anxiety for Blake’s male figures. Once the Daughters of Albion have subsumed all males, Blake writes that the ‘Daughters of Deceit & Fraud / Bear[ ] the Images of various Species of Contention / And Jealousy & Abhorrence & Revenge & deadly Murder. / Till they refuse liberty to the male’ (69:11–14, E223). This refusal is in opposition to Los’s yearning for a Beulah where ‘The Female searches sea & land for gratification to the / Male Genius: who in return clothes her in gems & gold / And feeds her with the food of Eden’ (69:16–18, E223). For both Los and Albion, the image of women ‘comingling’, whether in a sexual manner or otherwise, is a major cause for anxiety and emasculation. On plate 28, Blake reverses the juxtaposition of image and text found on plate 14. Albion’s rage at Jerusalem and Vala is represented by the text below, but the image above it depicts the two women embracing inside a pictured ‘Lilly of Havilah’. Vala’s nets and veils are nowhere to be seen, and according to Erdman (referring to an essay by John E. Grant⁵) – and not uncontroversially – the plate originally depicted Vala and Albion embracing in a ‘prelapsarian “furious love”’, (Erdman, Illuminated Blake 307).⁶ On plate 20, Jerusalem describes Albion and Vala’s marriage as ‘a time of love’ before the fall takes place, and so the image that opens chapter two represents Albion’s anxiety of emasculation being borne out in material reality (J 20:41, E166). He feels that he has been usurped by Jerusalem and lashes out to control her sexuality by instituting chastity.

Blake’s focus on women as images for men, and on his tendency to portray women as having more autonomy in his images, follows prevailing aesthetic notions of the later eighteenth century, which associate painting with the feminine and poetry with the masculine. Edmund Burke writes in his Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful ‘that poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general, as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions, than the other art [painting]’ (105). Painting is more likely to produce beauty because of its ability to render fine detail, and poetry is more likely to produce sublimity because of its ability to evoke strong emotions through its use of ‘obscurity’. Burke later strongly associates beauty with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: ‘Bring me my Arrows of desire’: Sexy Blake in the Twenty-First Century
• I Violence and Dominance
• II Chastity, Redemption and Feminine Desire
• III Conceptual Sex, Conceptual Art
• IV Coda
• Bibliography
• Index