Now the rape is more clearly recounted. The rapist is Bromion, from a Greek word meaning “roarer” or “thunderer,” and he describes himself as a slave owner. Immediately after “rending” Oothoon, he addresses her lover Theotormon, whom he advises insultingly to marry her before she bears Bromion’s child:
Bromion rent her with his thunders. On his stormy bed
Lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appalled his thunders hoarse.
Bromion spoke: “Behold this harlot here on Bromion’s bed,
And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid;
Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north and south.
Stamped with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun.
They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge;
Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent.
Now thou mayest marry Bromion’s harlot, and protect the child
Of Bromion’s rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.”
The action is set in America because Blake is suggesting an analogy between the African slaves there and women in England, whom Wollstonecraft explicitly compared to slaves. She added, however, “When I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense.” Blake would agree with that, but in Visions of the Daughters of Albion he is also critiquing psychic and sexual repression.10
Oothoon’s name was adapted from Oithóna, the heroine of one of James Macpherson’s Ossianic prose poems, who likewise suffers rape, is avenged by her lover, and then commits suicide anyway because she is convinced that she has been irrevocably defiled. Unlike Oithóna, Oothoon denies that she is defiled, much less that she is a harlot as Bromion contemptuously calls her, but Theotormon rejects her all the same. His name suggests “God-tormented.”
Appealing directly to Theotormon’s repressive God, Oothoon cries out to Urizen (who is mentioned here for the first time in Blake’s poems):
O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken demon of heaven:
Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.
How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys
Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a love!
To Theotormon, Oothoon protests eloquently,
How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure?
Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, and the soul preyed on by woe,
The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke and the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river.
Defiantly she proclaims erotic freedom: “I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy love! free as the mountain wind!”11 “Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on” sounds like an explicit contradiction of the symbolism in The Sick Rose.
But what exactly is meant by “free” love, and why does Oothoon describe Theotormon’s image as “pure”? Striving to win him back, she makes a remarkable proposal:
Silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,
And catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold;
I’ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play
In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon.
Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam,
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud
Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring.
Critics disagree about the implications of this statement. Perhaps Oothoon is simply happy in the expectation that Theotormon is going to be happy, although that would seem reminiscent of the self-abnegating clod in The Clod and the Pebble. Or perhaps she expects to derive gratification of her own from voyeuristically observing the “lovely copulation.” Even in Beulah, as we learn in Jerusalem,
Every female delights to give her maiden to her husband;
The female searches sea and land for gratification to the Male genius.
Oothoon’s proposal to trap golden and silver girls, as Helen Bruder observes, is a harem fantasy. The reason Blake wants women to be liberated is so that they can give pleasure to men.12
Another speech of Oothoon’s, together with its illustration (color plate 28), seems disturbingly masochistic:
Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up;
But she can howl incessant, writhing her soft snowy limbs
And calling Theotormon’s eagles to prey upon her flesh.
“I call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air,
Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect
The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.”
The eagles at her call descend and rend their bleeding prey;
Theotormon severely smiles; her soul reflects the smile,
As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure and smiles.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes and echo back her sighs.13
Contradicting what she said before, Oothoon now describes her bosom as “defiled” and invites Theotormon’s eagles to “rend” it, much as Bromion rent her at the beginning. In the picture, she displays herself provocatively like a seductive Leda.
Blake must have been thinking of a celebrated painting by his close friend Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (color plate 29), which depicts a woman in a very similar pose. Educated as a minister in his native Zurich, where he was known as Johann Heinrich Füssli, Fuseli had been working for years as a painter in England. Blake found in him a kindred spirit, inspired by the German Sturm und Drang movement to create imagery of intense emotion. The Nightmare was exhibited in 1782 at the annual Royal Academy show, reproduced in a print that sold thousands of copies, and constantly imitated and parodied.14
In this nighttime scene a gnomelike incubus crouches heavily on a woman’s body, while behind them a pop-eyed horse thrusts its head through heavy curtains. In Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary “nightmare” is defined thus: “Night and mara, a spirit that in the heathen mythology was related to torment or suffocate sleepers. A morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” Actually it is only a verbal coincidence that female horses are called mares, but popular lore did associate nightmares with evil horses.
No one was quite sure what Fuseli’s picture meant, but its sexual intensity is obvious, and Erasmus Darwin described the sleeper as orgasmic:
Back o’er her pillow sinks her blushing head,
Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed,
While with quick sighs, and suffocative breath,
Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death.
In a collection of aphorisms Fuseli specified that an ideal woman should be “poised between pure helpless virginity and sainted ecstasy.”15 Perhaps he was thinking of Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, which he would have seen when he studied in Rome.
In most copies of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the poem does not begin with “The Argument” at all, or even with the title page that shows Oothoon running freely over the sea, but opens instead with a startling frontispiece (color plate 30) that must bewilder anyone who comes to it before reading the poem. It doesn’t illustrate any actual incident, but rather suggests the symbolic meaning of the poem as a whole. The rocky outcrop in midocean recalls the lost Atlantis, whose submergence into watery chaos Blake often invokes as a symptom of the fall. The identity of the three figures becomes clear as one reads on: Bromion the “roarer” is indeed roaring at the left, Theotormon hides his face at the right, and in the middle a disconsolate Oothoon is bound back to back with Bromion, who is himself shackled with a heavy ankle fetter. Her loathsome connection with the rapist remains a permanent burden. In all three, contortion is painfully extreme.
Since these are not novelistic characters but symbolic ones, it makes sense to think of them as conflicting aspects of human consciousness. No external force has bound them together; they are self-shackled and entangled, as in the “mi
nd-forged manacles” in London. It is possible to see the whole image as a human head, with the lurid sun as a single staring eye. That is suggested explicitly in the poem:
Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye
In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel house.
The overarching cavern would then be the top of the skull, as in another poem from the same period:
Once open to the heavens and elevated on the human neck,
Now overgrown with hair and covered with a stony roof.16
Bromion might represent the element of the self that desires sex possessively and brutally, while Theotormon would be the fearful, moralizing element that represses it. Oothoon is hopelessly trapped in the sadomasochistic dynamic. She defiantly proclaims free love, but in vain, and the Daughters of Albion echo back her sighs.
The Chain of Jealousy
The subtitle of The Four Zoas is The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgment of Albion the Ancient Man. Jealousy played a significant role in the Blakes’ relationship. It is not known whether Catherine showed interest in other men, but she was definitely aware of her husband’s interest in other women. Gilchrist heard from people who knew them that “there had been stormy times in years long past, when both were young; discord by no means trifling while it lasted. But with the cause (jealousy on her side, not wholly unprovoked), the strife had ceased also.” Whether there were actual affairs is not known, but what is known is that William suggested that like an Old Testament patriarch he should have more than one wife. Writing in German for discretion, Crabb Robinson reported him saying “that from the Bible he has learned that eine Gemeinschaft der Frauen statt finden sollte”—wives should be in common.17
Enitharmon may be expressing Blake’s own view when she exclaims,
The joy of woman is the death of her most best beloved
Who dies for love of her
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.18
Here jealousy is blamed on the female, but at other times Blake recognizes that it can breed obsessively within the jealous male.
One of Blake’s illustrations for Paradise Lost, Satan Watching Adam and Eve (color plate 31), addresses the psychology of jealousy with exceptional insight. Puritan though he was in theology, Milton was never morally puritanical, and in Paradise Lost he makes it clear that before the Fall sex was both sensual and innocent:
Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine
Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought
Mosaic; underfoot the violet,
Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay
Broidered the ground, more coloured then with stone
Of costliest emblem. . . .
Here in close recess
With flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs
Espousèd Eve decked first her nuptial bed,
And heavenly choirs the hymenean sung.19
Blake’s picture captures the delicate floral beauty. Milton doesn’t mention lilies, but Blake shows them—Adam is even plucking one—since they were associated iconographically with purity. The nuptial bed is a massive couch of pale pink roses, and more roses hang from the palm branches that frame the two figures. Eve plucks a rose, and Adam wears a rose garland.
In Paradise Lost Satan gazes “with jealous leer malign,” bitterly acknowledging his own isolation:
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two
Imparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to hell am thrust
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.
In Blake’s picture, however, Satan’s expression doesn’t look malign at all. On the contrary, he seems sad and perplexed. And he is not really looking at the lovers. His gloomy gaze is fixed instead on the golden-scaled serpent that coils around him while he strokes its flame-red head. Rossetti was struck by this image: “Satan holds the serpent—an amazingly subtle, prismatic-hued serpent—which seems in horrid counsel with him, draining his vitals. Satan has a languid, almost ‘sentimental’ air, yet very terrible.”20 Another way of putting it might be that the scene is narcissistic and autoerotic.
Nor is Satan the only one who gazes at the serpent. So does Eve, for she is looking, not lovingly at Adam as one would expect, but past him. Meanwhile Adam’s hand cradles her head in a mirror image of Satan’s hand cradling the serpent’s head. Adam’s face and Satan’s likewise mirror each other.21
In terms of Blake’s system, Milton’s Garden of Eden is actually a vision of Beulah, the state of existence below the true Eden. Beulah is the “married land” where contraries are equally true, but from which the sexes may plunge down into Generation. The Satan in Blake’s picture is Adam’s doppelgänger, embodying an instinctive jealousy that is inherent in love. At this moment in Paradise Lost Adam and Eve have no one to be jealous of, since they are the only two human beings in existence. But Satan already embodies what awaits. Both Adam and Eve have vacant expressions, as if in a trance.
Jealousy, in this conception, is all about obsession with self. One of La Rochefoucauld’s terse maxims is: “In jealousy there is more self-love than love.” As Blake imagines it, jealousy is like a chain that grows from within, as depicted in a remarkable picture in The Book of Urizen (color plate 32). Orc in this poem is the son of Los and his emanation Enitharmon; he is still sexual as he was in America, but he is no longer liberated. As soon as he is born, his father is overwhelmed by suffocating jealousy:
No more Los beheld Eternity.
In his hands he seized the infant;
He bathed him in springs of sorrow,
He gave him to Enitharmon.
They named the child Orc, he grew
Fed with milk of Enitharmon.
Los awoke her; O sorrow and pain!
A tight’ning girdle grew
Around his bosom. In sobbings
He burst the girdle in twain,
But still another girdle
Oppressed his bosom. In sobbings
Again he burst it. Again
Another girdle succeeds.
The girdle was formed by day:
By night was burst in twain,
These falling down on the rock
Into an iron chain
In each other link by link locked.
They took Orc to the top of a mountain.
O how Enitharmon wept!
They chained his young limbs to the rock
With the chain of jealousy
Beneath Urizen’s deathful shadow.22
In the picture all three figures are naked. The boy looks up at his mother (is his mouth reaching for her breast?), but she averts her face. Los gazes at them gloomily, yet his shoulder twists away; he is not part of the embrace. From his breast a heavy, bloody chain of jealousy descends to his left foot, which it conceals. His left arm seems to be missing, too, replaced by the idle hammer that hangs down like a prosthetic limb.
The same symbolic event is narrated in The Four Zoas, where Los binds Orc when he arrives at puberty and at the same time is cripplingly self-bound.
But when fourteen summers and winters had revolved over
Their solemn habitation Los beheld the ruddy boy
Embracing his bright mother and beheld malignant fires
In his young eyes, discerning plain that Orc plotted his death.
Grief rose upon his ruddy brows; a tightening girdle grew
Around his bosom like a bloody cord. In secret sobs
He burst it, but next morn another girdle succeeds. . . .
Enitharmon beheld the bloody chain of nights and days
Depending from the bosom of Los and how with griding pain
He went each morning to his labours with the spectre dark,
Called it the chain of jealousy
.
“Griding” is a Miltonic word meaning “piercing”: “So sore / The griding sword with discontinuous wound / Passed through him.”23
Freud’s Oedipus complex comes to mind. Unlike Blake, however, Freud locates oedipal jealousy in a small boy who has no possibility of taking his mother away from his father but who punishes himself nevertheless for wanting to violate the incest taboo. In Blake’s version jealousy begins in the father, not the son, when he becomes aware that the boy not only has reached puberty but is showing sexual awareness of his mother. And if she doesn’t actively encourage it, she permits the suggestive embrace, even as her tormented husband looks helplessly on.
The Forbidden Shrine
Blake often articulated the insight that to prohibit something is to make it more desirable, anticipating Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, but degenerated into Vice.” Is unrestrained sexuality forbidden because it’s bad, or bad only because it’s forbidden? In a prologue that appears in two of the surviving copies of Europe, a mocking fairy says that “five windows light the caverned man,” meaning the five senses. With the sense of touch he may “pass out what time he please,” connecting freely with the world and its gratifications—“but he will not; / For stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.” The allusion is to the Book of Proverbs: “Stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.”24
One of the most disturbing poems Blake ever wrote directly follows The Garden of Love in his notebook, and may well have been originally conceived as a Song of Experience.
I saw a chapel all of gold
That none did dare to enter in,
And many weeping stood without
Weeping mourning worshipping.
I saw a serpent rise between
The white pillars of the door,
And he forced and forced and forced,
Down the golden hinges tore,
And along the pavement sweet
Set with pearls and rubies bright
All his slimy length he drew
Till upon the altar white
Vomiting his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 19