“FREEBORN JOY”: SEXUAL EXPRESSION AND POWER IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION

LISA MARIE LIPIPIPATVONG

Sexuality as determining all aspects of human nature is a common theme that runs throughout William Blake’s works – in his notebook lyrics, in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and in the myths he was to create, sexual relations explain the functions and failings of society as he saw it. Nowhere is this so apparent as in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which tackles such issues as the imbalance of gender rights that Mary Wollstonecraft protested against in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published a year earlier in 1792, as well as slavery and religious oppression. Harold Bloom calls Visions “a tragic but exultant hymn to the exuberant beauty of sexual release”, where Blake’s “longing for full freedom in sexual expression” already evident in his lyrics “receives its final and perfect statement”.1 The heroine of the poem, Oothoon, represents America, a land of liberty and of oppression, which fought a revolutionary war with Britain in order to become independent but at the same time used slave labour. To Blake, justice is an all-encompassing freedom for every individual, including women, children, and black people. Though Blake relied heavily on the Bible for inspiration, he turned away from the laws of the church that he saw as a manipulation of the Scriptures. Robert Ryan notes that “Blake’s usual religious posture … is a detailed indictment of the collaboration of all the churches in the exploitation of the poor, the degradation of labour, the subordination of women, the abridgement of political liberty, the repression of sexual energy, and the discouragement of originality in fine arts”.2 Any institution that seeks to repress and restrict the normal tendencies of human nature, Blake opposed. Visions of

1 Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, New York, 1970, 101. 2 Robert Ryan, “Blake and Religion”, in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves, Cambridge, 2003, 150. 156 Lisa Marie Lipipipatvong the Daughters of Albion is Blake’s version of a minor epic where the heroine struggles to find freedom in a confining world of such laws. Whereas slavery is the power of one man over another, freedom can be seen as the individual wholly empowered. However, there are various levels of power that are exemplified through the characters in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Ranging from the “Enslaved” Daughters of Albion, to Bromion and Theotormon who abide by the laws of Urizen, and to Oothoon who seems to rise up and outside of society, each character or group of characters has its own form of power, its own ideal of freedom, which, when they are brought together, causes a conflict left unresolved by Blake at the end of the work. The epigraph on the title-page – The eye sees more than the heart knows – seems to signify that whereas the eyes accept the reality of the world they are exposed to, the heart is selective in what it perceives or understands. This phrase will come to judge the characters, who see and hear and feel as humans, but perceive as individuals. Following the epigraph is “The Argument”. Since this is expressed from the point of view of Oothoon, we may assume that she is the character we are meant to sympathize with and her plight we are meant to comprehend:

I loved Theotormon, And I was not ashamed; I trembled in my virgin fears, And I hid in Leutha’s vale.

I plucked Leutha’s flower, And I rose up from the vale; But the terrible thunders tore My virgin mantle in twain.3

S. Foster Damon describes the role of “Leutha” as “sex under law”, and therefore “may most easily be understood as the sense of sin, or guilt”. Damon also notes that the plucking of Leutha’s flower, a marigold, is symbolic of a sexual act.4 Oothoon explains that she was not “ashamed” to love Theotormon and is aware that to progress human nature has to

3 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in The Poems of William Blake, ed. W.H. Stevenson, text by David V. Erdman, Longmans’ Annotated English Poets, London, 1971, 173. 4 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, London, 1973, 237-38.