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Oothoon Awakening Sexuality and Gender Roles in Visions of the Daughters of Albion

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Oothoon Awakening Sexuality and Gender Roles in Visions of the Daughters of Albion Oothoon Awakening Sexuality and Gender Roles in Visions of the Daughters of Albion GABRIELA SUTTON Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in which William Blake examines the dynamic of gender roles and sexual relations, is a crucial component of his criticism of society and his intensive study of the psychology of liberation, or, in his own particular mythological system, the building of Jerusalem, which “is called Liberty among the Children of Albion” (Jerusalem 54.5). In Blakean literature, each individual must struggle for social justice in a complex, multi-faceted reality that is formed around the fracture and suppression of the deepest aspects of human consciousness—here specifically, real and natural sexuality unfettered by the manmade restrictions of institutionalized heterosexuality and monogamy (Aers 511). His poem examines the widening of the consciousness of Oothoon, a young woman, from innocence to experience, in suffering first the violence of rape and later the unmerited censure of society, and her subsequent assumption of the prophetic voice of the piece. He carefully constructs her radical feminist critique of her own situation and the larger plight of the Daughters of Albion who are “enslaved” by Religion and the Law, which control human society, but leave the dialectic unresolved— with Oothoon bound to Bromion, crying out to the deaf Theotormon—in what could be interpreted as an offering 201 to the reader, as his generation of thinkers looked to the west, to America, where solutions to the problem of gender inequality and sexual repression would hopefully manifest. At the heart of the Visions, then, is the birth of a revolutionary consciousness, as a young woman realizes the magnitude of her potential outside of the fate patriarchy has predetermined for her and demands the freedom to fulfill that potential—a demand that, in Blake’s time, was yet to be met. In the Argument, a simple introductory poem to the Visions, Oothoon describes first her love for Theotormon and then her search for sexual experience, euphemized in the plucking of a golden flower in Leutha’s vale. Her exploration ends abruptly and tragically in her rape at the hands of Bromion. In the simplicity of the first line, “I loved Theotormon,” Blake deftly conveys the permeation of patriarchal values into Oothoon’s consciousness—Theotormon is not only her love, but her primary identification, the purpose of her entire being (Visions 3.1). It is not to the development of her own potential as an individual, but to him that her “whole soul seeks” (Visions 3.21). In this way, Blake turns the larger scope of the work to the condition of all women, whose societal and self-worth depend on their relationships to men. By giving Oothoon the first voice in the poem, Blake invites the reader to view the events of the tale from her female perspective, the anguished widening and sharpening of which constitutes the main arc of the poem’s narrative. That is, the frame story of Visions recounts Oothoon’s painful fall from innocence into experience. Blake’s particular arrangement of diction—beginning the Argument with the word ‘I’ and ending with ‘twain’—seems to indicate a “fracture of Oothoon’s existence”: her wholeness has been shattered forever by the violence of Bromion’s sexual aggression (Munteanu 66). Here Blake seeks to examine the restless perturbation of innocent souls. Although Blake’s virgins are “sinless,” their innocence “is neither psychologically nor ontologically 202 equivalent to perfection” and is primarily expressed in yearning and discontent—at the beginning of the narrative, Oothoon “wandered in woe” (Visions 3.11, Schneider 356). An explanation of this sorrow lies in a further examination of the Blakean concept of innocence: [I]nnocence is neither an original perfection that’s swept away by experience, nor a half-state waiting for its compliment. Instead, anxious innocence is [for Blake]…the “possibility of possibility”, and the starting and end point of the individual’s journey of self-discovery. (Schneider 351) In this light, innocence is practically explosive, a constant state of wide-eyed, earnest blossoming into the great Unknown. This condition of exploration, of reaching out into the void, can only be a fearful one. “[E]xperience surrounds the innocent consciousness as an uncannily sensed presence which that consciousness is by definition incapable of conceptualizing” (Schneider 354). This “presence” creates an anxiety that torments the innocent soul, tempting it into the endless spiraling of questions of human existence, into the quest for answers, into experience. This ‘anxiety of innocence’ is pivotal to Blake’s philosophical model because of his investment in theodicy, or the study of the problem of evil, a poetic endeavor he began with John Milton in 1804. The crux of theodicy centers on the question unde malum, or, “whence evil” in a universe governed by an all-good, all-loving, omniscient and omnipotent Creator? Who can be blamed for the fall of Angels and men but God, who made them in all of their imperfection? Blake’s inquiry into this paradox becomes the basis of his artistic inversion of Christian moral codes and sacred scriptures to unmask their failings and injustices. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake dramatizes the inherent collapsibility of the innocent state, revealing that it “carries within itself the seeds of its 203 own undoing. Innocence is fated to give way to experience by the uniquely human—and ambivalent—gift of free will” (Schneider 352-4). This tension provides a point of departure for the tragedy that befalls Blake’s heroine, whose innocence proves not only naïve but dangerous. Oothoon’s particular anxiety—her yearning for sexual knowledge, which is undoubtedly strongly entwined in her desire to please Theotormon—tempts her to stray carelessly from the safety of her valley on an “impetuous course” to see her lover, at which time she is intercepted and overpowered by Bromion (“roarer” in Greek), who rapes her. Bromion crows over his conquest, likening her female body to the “soft American plains” ravaged by the onslaught of European imperialism, which were stolen, exploited, and made fertile for the profit of the oppressor. She is also associated with the enslaved “children of the sun” (the imported African or the Native American) whose flesh is “stampt” or branded with the initials of their master (Visions 3.29-31). Bromion’s exultation that the daughters of subjugated indigenous peoples “worship terrors and obey the violent” demonstrates the phenomenon of internalized oppression—the absorption of the master’s values and ideals into the slave mind and heart, which in turn leads them to be complicit in their own domination (Aers 502- 4). The power of Theotormon’s responding anguish somehow consumes and binds Oothoon and Bromion “back- to-back” in Bromion’s caves as Theotormon himself crouches nearby at the mouth of the sea, consumed by condemnatory wrath and misery (Visions 5.5). This image was the subject of the frontispiece Blake painted for the book Visions of the Daughters of Albion and has been praised as one of his most famous and dramatic illustrations (Goslee 101). The triad of characters can be symbolically read as three alienated aspects of the “divided self ”: Bromion, the active, unreasoning Body; Theotormon, the carnally repressed, philosophic and abstract 204 Reason; and Oothoon, individual, artistic, and revolutionary Imagination (Goslee 111). Oothoon, in an attempt to regain the “God-tormented” Theotormon’s favor, assumes the Christ-like role of self- sacrifice, calling his eagles to “‘Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect/The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast’” (Visions 5.15-16). Little does she realize that she already ‘wears’ his image from the beginning, when she first placed the golden flower between her breasts and turned her “whole soul” to the task of becoming that which would most please him (Visions 3.21). The eagles can only painfully uncover that which has been concealed: her true identity as an individual woman. They comply with her macabre request, but their master, although filled with perverse pleasure by her bloody punishment—“Theotormon severely smiles”—still does not consider her purified (Visions 5.17). This, her first disappointment at his hands, marks the beginning cracks in what Oothoon had accepted as the dominant conception of both human society and the ordered universe, which foreshadows her emergence into radical feminist rhetoric later in the poem (Goslee 111). The terrible realization is dawning in Oothoon’s mind that she has been denied the opportunity to fully develop her personhood because of the narrow space in the world that patriarchy has circumscribed for her. They told me I had five senses to enclose me up, And they enclosed my infinite brain into a narrow circle, And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning, Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (Visions 5.31-4) Although this is entwined in the Blakean concept of the binding of Eternals and their emanations to human form, it also is layered with the idea of patriarchal molding of women 205 into diminished domestic and sexual forms that do not reflect the enormity of their splendorous creative and erotic potential (Munteanu 74). However, while Oothoon ascends to a new comprehension of her disadvantaged position, the male speakers in the poem refuse to allow their understanding of the rape (and their role in both its perpetration and later aggravation) to evolve or become illuminated by the experience of the victim. Although the word “adulterate” (Visions 2.3-7) seems to suggest that Theotormon is here the cuckold husband, the narrative structure indicates that his union with Oothoon is anticipated, but not yet consummated.
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