So I turned into a sty
And laid me down among the swine.
The chapel doors suggest a symbol that occurs frequently in the prophecies: the vagina as the holy of holies in the temple of Jerusalem, which it was forbidden to view. In Blake’s interpretation, what is hidden is not holiness but “secret lust, when hid in chambers dark the nightly harlot / Plays in disguise in whispered hymn and mumbling prayer.”25 Back in the early days of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his message might have been that abolishing secrecy could liberate sex for frank and open enjoyment. In the later poems, however, that no longer seems so easy. On the contrary, it is precisely hiddenness and mystery that make sex alluring—but also entrapping and obsessional.
The Four Zoas manuscript contains a number of erotic drawings; others were erased after Blake’s death, presumably by someone who found them too shocking (a few of the erased drawings can be dimly made out with the aid of infrared photography). One remarkable pencil sketch (figure 39) could stand as an illustration for I saw a chapel all of gold. In it the goddess of nature, regularly identified as such in Blake’s pictures by her spiky crown, does indeed have a Gothic chapel between her legs. Blake probably knew about an especially transgressive form of Gnosticism, the Ophitic (“serpent-worshipping”) cult, which expressly invoked a symbolism of phallic assault. As a scandalized Saint Epiphanius described their ritual, loaves of bread were placed on an altar, a serpent was put on them, and each of the faithful ate of the loaves after kissing the serpent on the mouth. To the Ophites the serpent symbolized the forbidden knowledge of the Garden of Eden, and more specifically sexual initiation.26 To Blake it connotes degradation. Ejaculation is horribly evoked as the slimy serpent brutally forces the doors, finally “vomiting his poison out / On the bread and on the wine”—the stress on “vomiting” is especially shocking. The bread and wine of shared communion have been defiled by brutal lust, and that lust, in turn, was provoked by the alluring but hidden shrine. So the self-loathing speaker lies down in a pigsty, like the Prodigal Son in Christ’s parable.
39. Vala manuscript, page 86
That sexual desire entices us to gaze at specific body parts must seem to most people a simple fact, and indeed an agreeable one. Blake, however, seems to have found it disturbing. Even in peaceful Beulah, we find the ominous shrine, “beautiful” but therefore entrapping.
Humanity knows not of sex: wherefore are sexes in Beulah?
In Beulah the female lets down her beautiful tabernacle,
Which the male enters magnificent between her cherubim,
And becomes one with her, mingling condensing in self-love
The rocky law of condemnation and double generation and death.27
By contrast with male and female sex, Blake imagines his Eternals as enjoying a mysterious union like that of Milton’s angels, total rather than genital.
Embraces are cominglings: from the head even to the feet,
And not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.
No one has ever been able to explain what Blake’s ideal “cominglings” are supposed to be like.28 At any rate, this is clearly not the body we are currently equipped with.
Blake is not really a prophet of unconflicted sexuality, and his vision is closer to the tragic one that Freud expresses: “Something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the achievement of absolute gratification.”29
13. THE FEMALE WILL
“Mother of My Mortal Part”
ALTHOUGH Blake criticized patriarchy, in important ways he was by no means opposed to it. As a man, he hated authoritarian control and was suspicious of fathers even when they were well-intentioned. But he took for granted male superiority over female. In Milton, to be sure, Milton’s spirit is reconciled with the sixfold emanation—his three wives and three daughters—over whom he supposedly tyrannized in life. But that reunion is asserted theoretically, not demonstrated.
As Blake’s obsessive image of the secret shrine suggests, he tended to think of female sexuality as an insidious threat. That erotic relations involve power is a familiar fact. As the old metaphor of being in someone’s “thrall” suggests, it can feel like a kind of slavery. Blake definitely saw it that way. And his indictment of the female, in his later poems, enlarges in scope until it is blamed for almost everything—even war. The most fundamental charge is that it is the female who binds us down to mortal existence, for it is women who give birth.
Conventional religion taught that the only good thing about sex is that it leads to reproduction. According to Blake that was exactly what is bad. It was common to imagine nature as maternal: “O Nature, O my mother,” Rousseau exclaims, “I am under your protection alone.” Even the skeptic Hume refers to “nature herself.”1Blake was sympathetic to actual mothers, as the Songs of Innocence makes clear, but he had no use whatever for the sentimental ideal of Mother Nature.
As in the picture A Sunshine Holiday, the state that Blake calls Generation—the human life cycle from birth to death—is highly equivocal in significance. Our goal, he repeatedly asserts, should be an interior apocalypse that breaks through to Eternity, and we should aspire to the genderless “cominglings” of the Eternals—whatever those may be. His suspicion of Generation is already evident in a miniature book of emblems entitled For Children: The Gates of Paradise. The date of that work is 1793, the same year as Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Songs of Experience. In traditional emblems, brief texts accompanied allegorical pictures to convey conventional didactic lessons. Blake means to instruct in a very different way, encouraging suspicion of life experience as it is normally understood.2
The first tiny image in For Children is captioned “What is Man!” It shows a caterpillar feeding on a leaf, with a baby-faced larva or chrysalis on another leaf below (figure 40). Here begins the cycle from birth to death; we have seen that Blake sometimes calls man “a worm of sixty winters.”3 It is true that a butterfly, traditionally symbolic of immortality, will one day emerge from its chrysalis and soar into the air. But meanwhile, childbirth has brought yet another vulnerable mortal into the world.
The second emblem (figure 41) illustrates ironically where babies come from, in the sort of preposterous fiction that children used to be told. A mother is pulling an infant out of the earth, with an already-harvested babe cradled in her dress. When Blake retouched these emblems years later, with the new title For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he added some explanatory verses entitled “The Keys of the Gates.” On this picture he comments:
My eternal man set in repose,
The female from his darkness rose,
And she found me beneath a tree
A mandrake and in her veil hid me.4
It is in Albion’s slumbrous “repose” that the sexes separate from each other—“the female from his darkness rose.” As for the mandrake, since its bifurcated root resembles human legs, it was regularly associated with procreation, as in the story of Jacob and Leah in Genesis, or Donne’s line, “Get with child a mandrake root.”5
40. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate I
What did Blake think children could possibly grasp in this strange little book? Perhaps it wasn’t really meant for children at all, but intended rather to challenge the conventional attitudes of adults by subverting the complacent message of ordinary emblems. The revised title, For the Sexes, makes the message clearer: to accept the cycle from birth to death as inevitable means enslavement to the natural world.
The final emblem is captioned, “I have said to the worm: Thou art my mother and my sister” (figure 42). Mortal bodies subside into the ground from which an earthworm emerges, wrapping itself around a seated figure who is cowled like a traditional image of death. According to “The Keys of the Gates,” she represents the female in all of her manifestations:
41. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 3
42. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 18
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sp; The door of death I open found
And the worm weaving in the ground.
Thou’rt my mother from the womb,
Wife, sister, daughter to the tomb,
Leaving to dreams the sexual strife
And weeping over the web of life.6
In Blake’s late prophecies the maternal creator of the mortal body is given the name Tirzah, the capital in the Old Testament of the ten lost tribes, and therefore opposed to Jerusalem. At some stage he added a final poem to Songs of Experience entitled To Tirzah:
Whate’er is born of mortal birth
Must be consumèd with the earth
To rise from Generation free;
Then what have I to do with thee?
The sexes sprung from shame and pride,
Blowed in the morn, in evening died.
But mercy changed death into sleep;
The sexes rose to work and weep.
Thou mother of my mortal part
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving tears
Didst bind my nostrils eyes and ears;
Didst close my tongue in senseless clay
And me to mortal life betray.
The death of Jesus set me free;
Then what have I to do with thee?
“Blowed” means “bloomed,” as in Wordsworth’s “the meanest flower that blows.” The fourth line of To Tirzah repeats what Jesus says to his mother just before he turns water into wine: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”7 As Blake adapts the question, it is addressed not to Mary but to Tirzah, “mother of my mortal part.”
“The sexes sprung from shame and pride” refers to the orthodox story of the Fall. In Genesis, Adam and Eve experience shame at their nakedness after committing the original sin, and they are condemned by God to work with the sweat of their brows. But in Blake’s Eden there are no distinct sexes, and the existence of sex in the world of Generation is a consequence of the primal disintegration rather than of sin. As for work, it is valuable in itself, not a punishment that should have been avoided.
“The death of Jesus,” as Blake understands it, is entirely different from the orthodox doctrine of atonement, in which the Son of God sacrificed himself as our surrogate in order to appease an angry Father. In Blake’s myth, Jesus’ death symbolizes the self-sacrifice in which everyone should participate.
Jesus said, “Wouldest thou love one who never died
For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?
And if God dieth not for man and giveth not himself
Eternally for man, man could not exist, for man is love
As God is love. Every kindness to another is a little death
In the divine image, nor can man exist but by brotherhood.”8
Brotherhood, not motherhood. Blake’s attack on Tirzah as mortal mother is nothing less than an attack on nature itself—or rather, nature herself, since in his opinion nature in its fallen form is the responsibility of the female. First she entices the male into reproduction by luring him into her secret tabernacle, and then she perpetuates the cycle of fallen existence by giving birth. In Jerusalem Los exclaims,
I hear the screech of childbirth loud pealing, and the groans
Of death in Albion’s clouds dreadful uttered over all the earth.
What may man be? who can tell! but what may woman be?
To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave.
Helen Bruder, pondering Blake’s views on gender, concludes that he was “by turns a searching critic of patriarchy but also a hectoring misogynist.” She lists a whole anthology of archetypes that turn up repeatedly in his poems: virgin, maid, mother, harlot, nymph, queen.9
Alicia Ostriker distinguishes still further between four different Blakes. One is the prophet of free love and unchained desire, but only in the earliest works. The second sees the female as an “emanation” that should never have acquired separate existence at all. The third believes that female sexuality is a seductive trap, and the fourth holds that actual women—Catherine Blake not least—should be subordinate to men and devote their being to them. In some early notes Blake wrote, “Let the men do their duty and the women will be such wonders; the female life lives from the light of the male. See a man’s female dependents, you know the man.” It was in this sense that he called Catherine his “shadow of delight.”10 She was never a mother, and Blake may have thought that that was just as well.
Emanations and the Female Will
Although the emanations play a crucial role in Blake’s later poems, he never makes clear why they must always be female. Commentators used to argue that they are female only in a metaphorical sense, representing the agency through which each Zoa interacts with the world. Frye, fond of the word “total,” defines the emanation as “the total form of all the things a man loves and creates.” But why “a man”? Tristanne Connolly crisply observes, “From a female point of view, the female is not other.”11
An analogy with Jung’s concept of the anima is sometimes proposed, but it fails at just this point, since Blake does not represent women as having a complementary animus. And whereas Jung is concerned to give both anima and animus full value, Blake is preoccupied with an alleged domination of the female principle over the male. His concept of the emanation makes man the creator of woman, just as in Genesis Eve is constructed from Adam’s rib. His bitter complaint that women have power over men from cradle to grave is an irrational contradiction of the facts of life, a refusal to accept the natural power of the female.
Perhaps the most favorable image of an emanation in Blake’s poems is the descent in Milton of Ololon, Milton’s emanation. Blake would have known Johnson’s trenchant verdict: “It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton’s character in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.”12
As Blake imagines it, Ololon descends from the sky to his Felpham cottage, and by implication she will unite there with Catherine as Milton does with Blake. Her name may have been suggested by a Greek word meaning a cry of joy. This moment is illustrated in a charming picture (color plate 33) in which Blake looks up from the cottage garden while a winged Ololon glides down as if on a tightrope. Since he believed that eternity is fully present in each moment of time, the events in the poem are understood to be simultaneous rather than successive. Susan Fox explains, “Milton’s descent came before Ololon’s, but hers is completed first. Milton descended to find her, and she is waiting for him when he arrives—although it was his descent that precipitated hers.” Thus the crucial event “takes place in a single instant which takes Blake fifty pages to describe.”13
Throughout Blake’s myth, however, what we usually see is not reconciliation but rupture and strife between Zoas and emanations. After he developed the symbol of the spectre in The Four Zoas, he imagined each emanation splitting apart from her Zoa in the same catastrophe that detaches the spectre from the integrated self. A harrowing notebook poem describes the plight of the now-divided consciousness. It is not always clear who is speaking, but the general meaning is clear.
My spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.
A fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My spectre follows thee behind.
He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go
Through the wintry hail and rain;
When wilt thou return again?
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bsp; Having separated away, the shadow-spectre pursues the speaker like Frankenstein’s monster, while the emanation remains “within,” weeping with guilt at sexual desire that is now perceived as sinful. Once again, female jealousy is blamed for ruining happiness:
Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?
Seven of my sweet loves thy knife
Has bereavèd of their life.
Their marble tombs I built with tears
And with cold and shuddering fears.
Whether the “sweet loves” are actual affairs or just a yearning for them, the emanation has murdered them all. And the only solution seems to be to give up sexuality altogether:
Till I turn from female love
And root up the infernal grove
I shall never worthy be
To step into Eternity. . . .
Let us agree to give up love
And root up the infernal grove.
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy Eternity.
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you you forgive me,
As our dear Redeemer said,
This the wine and this the bread.
Here are the bread and wine of communion again, which were so horribly defiled by the serpent in I saw a chapel all of gold. As for sex in the usual sense, it is an “infernal grove” that must be uprooted and left behind.14
The original working title of The Four Zoas, as has been mentioned, was Vala, the emanation of the emotional and sexual Luvah. Vala is a nature goddess like Tirzah; her name should probably be pronounced like “veil,” a term that is regularly associated with her. At various times her veil represents the repressive moral law, the veil of the temple in Jerusalem, the mortal body, and even the ordinary empirical world that we mistake for the real one. If we can break through that veil we will continue to see the same world, but transformed, more immediate, more alive.
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 20