196 Book Reviews

Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (eds.) Sexy

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 220 × 140 mm. xii + 260 pp. £55)

Minne Tanaka

The ever productive pair of Blake scholars, Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, have compiled yet another collection of essays, Sexy Blake, which covers a wide range of topics from detailed source studies and textual analy- ses to cutting-edge technology and creative writing. The fi fteen contributors (8 female/7 male) present various sexy Blakes refl ecting the lively atmosphere of the event leading to this collection. Blake, Gender and Sexuality in the Twenty-First Century, aka The Sexy Blake Conference, held on 15–16th July 2010, at St Aldate’s Church, Oxford, was a huge success, attracting dozens of Blake scholars from all over the world. The book retains its heady atmos- phere of rich and varied debate. The purpose of this whole project is to tackle the issue of sexuality and gender in Blake’s work head-on. In the Introduction the editors argue that ‘Sexy Blake’ is a topic which has been carefully avoided by several recent monographs published by female Blake scholars. Although “[w]omen schol- ars, of course, are not obliged to till this particular patch”(1), it is still im- portant for the feminist cause to “nag.” Citing Mary Daly’s comments, they remind us that “ ‘nag’ means ‘to affect with recurrent awareness, uncertainty, need for consideration or concern: make recurrently conscious of something (as a problem, solution, situation)’”(6). They also state that “[a]ttention to sex and gender could, at least, act as one possible antidote to the creeping depoliticization of historicist methodologies”(6) and suggest that we should be able to “see historicism and interpretation as equal partners in a mutually rich relationship”(6). After the pendulum swung to the full from Northrop Frye’s symbolic interpretation in (1947) to G. E. Bentley Jr.’s minute detective work in digging and tracing Blake’s biography, Blake scholarship has been seeking a moderate path of listening to and understand- ing what Blake says. “[H]ere, with its transgressive powers, eroticism crosses eras, and we indulge in some vivacious necrophilia by declaring that we love 書評 197

Blake, furiously, in his mortal and eternal forms”(12). This book is a collec- tion of passionate love-letters to Sexy Blake. In Part One: Violence and Dominance, four women discuss this topic in Blake’s work. Comparing the two narratives in The Book of and The Four Zoas, Lucy Cogan convincingly deciphers ’s relation to the birth of his emanation Ahania. Dexterously wielding theories of Judith Butler, Georges Bataille, Jessica Benjamin and others, Cogan explains Aha- nia’s submissive subjectivity as a form of masochism. Ayako Wada takes up another more frequently discussed couple, and , in a less conventional interpretation. She reads a love triangle among Urizen, Los and Enitharmon and even claims that is a bastard son produced by an adulterous relationship between Urizen and Enitharmon. Paralleling The Four Zoas, Visions of the Daughters of and Jerusalem, Wada points out Blake’s awareness of the issue of a “wayward wife” and her “un/for- giving husband” (13) and interprets this episode as Blake’s tribute to the late Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In the next chapter Yoko Ima-Izumi continues with the reading of the pair of Enitharmon and Los, this time focusing on various forms of blood to interpret Blake’s poetry of gender struggle. Comparing Blake’s versions of creation myth in , The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, Ima-Izumi traces the change of terms related to blood at each stage as a man, then a woman is created, and they are attracted to each other, yet strive to take the initiative in sex and procrea- tion. From the beginning “male solid” is contrasted to “female liquid” (49), and different terms are used or focused on each stage, from “a vast Spine”, “Ribs” and “bones” (48) when Los is created, through “a red Round globe” (49) of blood at the birth of Enitharmon to “Loins” (51), “Fibres” (53), “milk and tears” (54), “bosom” (55) and “Womb” (56) while sexual desires are formed in both sexes and the man and the woman strive for dominion. Blake might have known Aristotle’s theory that semen and milk are produced from blood. Ima-Izumi concludes her chapter by citing two Japanese fi lms in which blood plays a similarly sexual role, Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism and Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, emphasizing Japan’s unique and early assimila- tion of Blake. Taking up the problematic issue of Blake’s seeming approval of rape, Michelle Leigh Gompf analyses The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, a Prophecy and some other passages to conclude that “the most important aspect is the response to the violence, both that of the senses awakening because manacles are broken and doors of perception are open, and the conscious response of the victims” (79). Rape functions as a device to show the restraint of the society, but it can 198 Book Reviews also serve as a violent and revolutionary energy that liberates the victims and leads them to enhanced perception. In Part II: Chastity, Redemption and Feminine Desire, fi ve papers are col- lected. The fi rst two chapters deal with chastity in Blake. Sean David Nelson elucidates how sapphism and chastity function at the vegetative, i.e. histori- cal level in Blake’s Jerusalem, while Magnus Ankarsjö tries to read Blake’s private life in his ‘confessional’ Notebook poems, refuting Tracy Chevalier’s recycling in her best-selling novel, Burning Bright, of the dubious anecdote of William and Catherine Blake acting out the roles of Adam and Eve in their garden. David Shakespeare focuses on vision both in imagi- native and empirical senses, in Milton, where concealment is connected to female fi gures. He analyses some key words, such as veil and garment, needle and woof, and polypus, to show that “Blake’s ideal of unifi cation between masculine and feminine is to unite vision that is transcendent with vision that is immediate” (124). In the latter two chapters of this part, Susanne Sklar and Kathryn Sullivan Kruger delve into some probable sources of Blake’s inspiration. Sklar comments on the erotic spirituality in the Petworth Last Judgement referring to Blake’s religious background in connection to Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem, whose meetings the Blakes are known to have attended, and the Moravian church, of which Blake’s mother was a fully communicant member before her second marriage to Blake’s father. Kruger unfolds a rich and exotic expatiation of Indian art, poetry, mythology and philosophy, which Blake knew through his master, James Basire’s illustration to Sir William Jones’s Asiatick Researches and Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon. She shows how Blake’s open mind was capable of accepting such very different and fascinating expressions to expand his own creative imagination. Part III: Conceptual Sex, Conceptual Art starts with a creative response to Blake’s poem, “”. Tommy Mayberry’s composition, accompa- nied by photos, is followed by his commentary. This modern artistic strain continues into the next chapter, in which Paige Morgan discusses Blake’s im- aginative method of opening our perceptual gates, or expanding the senses, in comparison to Aldous Huxley’s biochemical, and the Cypriot-Australian performance artist Stelarc’s hyper-technical, methods. “In using tools, and extending the body, understanding that tools do extend the body and that our selves are capable of being extended, we succeed at opening our own gates” (192). In the following chapter, Angus Whitehead and Joel Gwynne trace the literary representation of the poet’s wife, Catherine Blake in both 書評 199 biographical and fi ctional writing, starting with the sole female biographer, Mona Wilson, and covering various types of representation from best-selling novel to scholastic research. Whitehead and Gwynne explain how Catherine Blake’s sexuality attracted attention through successive waves of feminism. Interestingly all the four novels discussed here were published in the short period between 2000 and 2007. Philippa Simpson closes this section with her juicy argument on the line between art and pornography, citing intriguing ex- amples of other aritsts, such as D. H. Lawrence and Robert Mapplethorpe. The coda consists of two papers by Christopher Z. Hobson. The fi rst one states the present condition of Blake studies in terms of homosexuality since 2000, when he published Blake and Homosexuality. He fathoms and assesses unfi nished tasks “under three headings: overcoming the heteronor- mativity that remains characteristic of Blake studies; further understanding Blake’s awareness of homosexuality by incorporating now readily available archival material on eighteenth century homosexual life; and coming to grips with Blake’s presentation of the multiform perverseness of human sexuality” (221). The very last chapter “Commemorating the Vere-street ‘Monsters’” is the opening remarks of Sexy Blake Conference, remembering the bicentenary of two incidents arousing controversy concerning gays and lesbians, celebrat- ing how far we have come in terms of sexual freedom. “Love is love,” said the US President Barack Obama, lauding same-sex marriage activists in hail- ing ‘a victory for America’ after the US supreme court ruling declared same- sex marriage legal in all the states on 26th June 2015. Surely Blake must have welcomed and advocated such an action. One recurrent theme in this book is Blake’s idea of expansion of senses and cleansing of perception. In this high-tech, computer age, when we read such news with no time-lag through Facebook and ‘like’ and ‘share’ the article with our ‘friends’, Blake’s open and liberal text and illustration are all the more relevant and convincing. As Blake accepted a wide variety of sources and absorbed them to create his universe, the rich layers of this mythological world are open to our continual re-interpretation. The head-on confrontation of Sexy Blake with this process has produced an admirable result. This is highly recommended reading. (Lecturer, Sophia University)