Issues) and Begin (Cambridge UP, 1995), Has Recently Retired from Mcgill with the Summer Issue
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY VOLUME 31 NUMBER 1 SUMMER 1997 s-Sola/ce AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY VOLUME 31 NUMBER 1 SUMMER 1997 CONTENTS Articles Angela Esterhammer, Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton Blake, Wollstonecraft, and the and William Blake Inconsistency of Oothoon Reviewed by David L. Clark 24 by Wes Chapman 4 Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of Not from Troy, But Jerusalem: Blake's William Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas Canon Revision Reviewed by John B. Pierce 29 by R. Paul Yoder \7 20/20 Blake, written and directed by George Coates Lorenz Becher: An Artist in Berne, Reviewed by James McKusick 35 Switzerland by Lorenz Becher 22 Correction Reviews Deborah McCollister 39 Frank Vaughan, Again to the Life of Eternity: William Blake's Illustrations to the Poems of Newsletter Thomas Gray Tyger and ()//;<•/ Tales, Blake Society Web Site, Reviewed by Christopher Heppner 24 Blake Society Program for 1997 39 CONTRIBUTORS Morton D. Paley, Department of English, University of Cali• fornia, Berkeley CA 94720-1030 Email: [email protected] LORENZ BECHER lives and works in Berne, Switzerland as artist, English teacher, and househusband. G. E. Bentley, Jr., 246 MacPherson Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 1A2. The University of Toronto declines to forward mail. WES CHAPMAN teaches in the Department of English at Illi• nois Wesleyan University. He has published a study of gen• Nelson Hilton, Department of English, University of Geor• der anxiety in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and gia, Athens, GA 30602 has a hypertext fiction and a hypertext poem forthcoming Email: [email protected] from Eastgate Systems. David Worrall, St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, DAVID L. CLARK, Associate Professor of English at McMaster Waldegrave Road, Twickenham TWl 4SX England University, has co-edited and contributed to New Roman• Email: [email protected] ticism: Theory and Critical Practice (U of Toronto P, 1995) INFORMATION and Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Con• temporary Theory (SUNY P, 1995), and has recently pub• BLAKE /AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY is published under the spon• lished essays in several volumes, including Animal Acts: sorship of the Department of English, University of Roches• Configuring the Human in Western History (Routledge ter. 1997). SUBSCRIPTIONS are $50 for institutions, $25 for individuals. All CHRISTOPHER HEPPNER is author of Reading Blake's Designs subscriptions are by the volume (1 year, 4 issues) and begin (Cambridge UP, 1995), has recently retired from McGill with the summer issue. Subscription payments received after University, and is now thinking about a variety of things. the summer issue will be applied to the 4 issues of the current volume. Foreign addresses (except Canada and Mexico) re• quire an $8 per volume postal surcharge for surface, an $18 JAMES MCKUSICK is Associate Professor of English at the per volume surcharge for air mail delivery. U.S. currency or University of Maryland. He is the author of Coleridge's Phi• international money order necessary. Make checks payable losophy of Language (1986). He is currently completing a to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Address all subscription or• book on the romantic origins of American environmen- ders and related communications to Patricia Neill, Blake, De• talism. partment of English, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. JOHN B. PIERCE is an Associate Professor at Queens Univer• sity. His book, Flexible Design: Blake's Writing o/Vala or, BACK ISSUES are available at a reduced price. Address Patricia The Four Zoas is forthcoming from McGill-Queens Press. Neill for a list of issues and prices. MANUSCRIPTS are welcome. Send two copies, typed and docu• R. PAUL YODER is Associate Professor of English at the Uni• mented according to forms suggested in The MLA Style versity of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is currently complet• Manual, to either of the editors: Morris Eaves, Dept. of En• ing a book on the narrative structure of Blake's Jerusalem. glish, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627; Morton D. Paley, Dept. of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1030. EDITORS INTERNATIONAL STANDARD SERIAL NUMBER: 0160-628X. Blake/An Il• lustrated Quarterly is indexed in the Modern Language EDITORS: Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley Association's International Bibliography, the Modern Hu• BIBLIOGRAPHER: G. E. Bentley, Jr. manities Research Association's Annual Bibliography of En• REVIEW EDITOR: Nelson Hilton glish Language and Literature, The Romantic Movement: A ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR GREAT BRITAIN: David Worrall Selective and Critical Bibliography (ed. David V. Erdman et al.), American Humanities Index, Arts and Humanities Citation PRODUCTION OFFICE: Patricia Neill, Department of English, Uni• Index, Current Contents and the Bibliography of the History of versity of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 Art. MANAGING EDITOR: Patricia Neill TELEPHONE 716/275-3820 FAX 716/442-5769 PRODUCTION OFFICE EMAIL: [email protected] © 1997 Copyright Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley Morris Eaves, Department of English, University of Roches• ter, Rochester NY 14627 COVER ILLUSTRATION: The Chimney Sweeper by Lorenz Email: [email protected] Becher. ARTICLES decentered a woman-centered undertaking, appropriating parts of it for his own political purposes and projecting upon it his own reimaginations of female character. Blake, Wollstonecraft, and the Wollstonecraft's Enlightenment Principles and Sexuality Inconsistency of Oothoon The opening pages of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the BY WES CHAPMAN Rights of Woman situate Wollstonecraft's polemic squarely in the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking, while em• phasizing certain terms above others. She argues that "[in] illiam Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion has the present state of society it appears necessary to go back long been taken to be a response to Mary W to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Un• to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of the derstanding Blake's attitude towards Wollstonecraft is ground" (81). The return to "first principles" to counter troublesome, however, because Blake's attitude towards "prevailing prejudice" is characteristic of writings in women in general has seemed so contradictory. Although Wollstonecraft's political tradition—of Rousseau, particu• some critics have taken Blake's apparent affirmation of larly, who, finding that "our wisdom is slavish prejudice, Wollstonecraft in Visions as a sign of his support for femi• our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion" nism—Mark Schorer, for example, claims that "the poem (Emile 10), turns back to nature, "which never lies" (Dis• is a perfectly direct allegory of [ Wollstonecraft's] doctrines" course on Inequality 10), as the foundation for his political (290)—Susan Fox, in an influential article, has argued that philosophy. Yet Wollstonecraft, in her exposition of "first Blake's conception in the prophetic works of "a perfection principles," does not allude explicitly to nature. She has not of humanity defined in part by the complete mutuality of abandoned the concept of nature as a grounding for the its interdependent genders" is belied by his representation truth of her discourse; references to nature and "natural" of women as either "inferior and dependent" or as "un• states abound in her work. But she de-emphasizes nature naturally and disastrously dominant" (507), a view that as a first principle, placing the emphasis instead on reason, Anne Mellor confirms (passim). Alicia Ostriker shows up virtue and knowledge. The three are carefully linked to• the problem nicely when she writes that there are in Blake's gether: knowledge with reason, in that reason establishes work not one, but four different sets of attitudes towards "man's pre-eminence over the brute creation" while knowl• gender and sexuality, indeed four Blakes: "the Blake who edge is "denied to the brutes"; both are enlisted in the celebrates sexuality and attacks repression"; the Blake who struggle with passion (the passions were implanted so that "depicts sexual life as a complex web of gender "man by struggling with them might attain a degree of complementarities and interdependencies"; the Blake, "ap• knowledge denied to the brutes") and so are aligned with parently incompatible with Blake number one, who sees virtue (81). In part, Wollstonecraft, knowing full well that sexuality as a tender trap rather than a force of liberation"; any challenge to conventional gender roles would ensure a and the Blake "to whom it was necessary, as it was to his counterattack on her sexual morality—and indeed, as Ali• patriarchal predecessor Milton, to see the female principle cia Ostriker points out, the Anti-Jacobin Review called the as subordinate to the male" ("Desire" 156). Rights of Woman "a scripture, archly fram'd, for propagat• Commendably, Ostriker does not try to resolve or re• ing whores" (rev. of Todd 130)—is establishing the moral duce these contradictions, and I shall try to follow her ex• high ground. But more specifically this fiercely impeccable ample in this respect. But if these contradictions are triumvirate of first principles sets her up to attack Rousseau, irresolvable they are nonetheless comprehensible. Blake was whose notorious anti-feminism needed to be answered, sympathetic to Wollstonecraft's condemnation of women's since he was a major figure