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. Theotormon’s lamentation, however, is not sorrow for Oothoon’s pain or violated dignity, but anguished envy of Bromion’s sexual possession of her—he has been ‘deprived’ of the experience of being the first man to enter (and therefore also own and destroy forever) her Edenic virginity. He is consumed wholly by his jealousy and selfish despair, and can only answer Oothoon’s pleas to “arise” with impotent reflections of his own misery: “Tell me what is the night or day to one overflowed with woe” (Visions 3.22, Goslee 108)? In an attempt to quell his grief, he moves further and further into the abstract, away from the physical reality of Oothoon’s injury, to questions that are so gigantic in their ambit as to be unanswerable and utterly pointless. Where, he asks, are the origins of thought and joy, that he might reclaim his happiness (Visions 6.23-7.8)? Bromion, too, is mired in the metaphysical question of perception and existence outside of its limited scope, and also does not respond to Oothoon’s pleas. To him, there are no wars “beside the wars of sword and fire”, no sorrow “beside the sorrows of poverty”, no joys “beside the joys of riches and ease” (Visions 7.19) because his position in the race/sex/class hierarchy has prevented him from knowing anything else— he has never been oppressed, and therefore imagines that oppression is a natural condition, without actual perpetrators (like himself) or victims. It is he, wielding male privilege and

206 the forces of imperialism, who shapes the dominant narrative of society; his limited perspective is considered ‘reality’. His Law configures the structure of society in all of its inequity, and because it has been thus constructed, he believes that there is no other way it could possibly be. The failure on the part of both males to answer her cry, to rethink their own understanding of the situation or consider her standpoint, “surely drives her toward the more specific attacks upon the distortion of sexual desire by society” (Goslee 115). Particularly, Theotormon’s refusal to “see” Oothoon awakens her to the realization that she must create her own self-perception, leading her to a “positive division into self-consciousness”, or a cognitive and ideological break from him that is her first step towards an autonomous identity (Goslee 114). In her frustration with the rigidity and abuses of the powerful male order, Oothoon curses Urizen, the creator of their fallen world, for teaching Religion to men, which from her feminist social perspective is the real evil.

With what sense does the parson claim the labor of the farmer? What are his nets and gins and traps, and how does he surround him With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude, To build him castles and high spires where kings and priests may dwell? (Visions 8.17-20)

Oothoon claims on etymological grounds that the material lives of separate classes of people are different, therefore their knowledge/perspective of the world is fundamentally different. From her position of oppression she has a privileged view of the injustice of the patriarchal systems of Religion and Law, which are configured to give enormous power to certain individuals and strip down the very human rights of other

207 according to their particular position in social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, race, and belief. The “cold floods of abstraction” are tied to an individualistic doctrine which isolates man from man, so enabling ruling groups in Blake’s society to build “castles and high spires where kings & priests may dwell.” Abstractionism [or Religion] serves domination and manipulation, the logical tool of Urizen…(Aers 501) Oothoon reveals how learned dogma binds lower castes to their slave mentality and leads them to replicate conditioned behaviors that collaborate with their own oppression, a principle well known to the masters who author the dogma, as Bromion proclaims in the aforementioned passage, Visions 3.29-31 (“Their daughters worship terrors…”). Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was completed in the same year as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), already laid the dialectical groundwork for the associative bridge between “sexual desire and individual imagination”, which both emanate from Hell or the diabolic and rebel against the restrictive law of Heaven (Goslee 116). In Visions, Blake uses Oothoon’s keen feminist critique to pinpoint the threat sexuality poses to the “fixed” social and economic order, as well as its subsequent restraint under the financial and moral institution of heterosexual marriage. It was probably from Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake’s renowned feminist contemporary, that he absorbed this concept of marriage as domestic and sexual slavery.

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound In spells of law to one she loathes. And must she drag the chain Of life in weary lust? Must chilling murderous thoughts obscure

208 The clear heaven of her eternal spring? —to bear the wintry rage Of a harsh terror, driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod Over her shrinking shoulders all the day, and all the night To turn the wheel of false desire?—and the longings that wake her womb To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form That live a pestilence and die a meteor, and are no more? (Visions 8.21-29)

Oothoon here describes the miserable predestined existence of woman, who must sell her body, reproductive power, and domestic labor to man in the contract of marriage in order to eat, shelter, clothe herself, and otherwise survive in a patriarchal society that devalues her. Her freedom is the price of access to the social goods of the privileged male. The word “spells” in line 22 evokes the Blakean idea that the Law, “far from being a central manifestation of human community,” is more closely connected to the arcane power of the occult (Aers 502). Sexuality itself has become twisted and warped into the network of patriarchal social controls, and is governed and repressed by institutionalized monogamous heterosexuality (Aers 504). A woman is in ‘chains’; she is limited to the pure by ever-watchful society, bound by abstinence before marriage and fidelity and chastity afterwards. If she does not follow conventional laws of sexual conduct, she risks pregnancy, poverty, and public castigation. In the irons of wedlock she must toil in the home without monetary compensation, submit unconditionally to the sexual demands of her husband whenever they should arise, and bear however many children he begets on her exhausted, broken body, even in plague and poverty, even if they have no future but to also be enslaved by this system. In the face of this monstrous institution laid bare, Oothoon deconstructs the entire system of values upon which it is built, including the gender role in which she is confined.

209 It is the tyranny and injustice of deformed social custom, not only the misfortune of her sexual victimization, that is the cause of her fallen state. Because she refuses to accept oppressive standards of sexual morality, “[e]ven after the rape, the text implies, Oothoon preserves her virginal state of being (‘maid’) precisely because of her lack of physical, mental, or emotional involvement” (Munteanu 73). She rejects the controlled identity of harlot that Bromion and Theotormon project onto her and reclaims her purity in a bold challenge to the established patriarchal order—she names herself (“But Oothoon is not so: a virgin filled with virgin fancies”, Visions 9.21), “sees” or independently conceptualizes herself, envisions herself. From the divine perspective, Oothoon professes, “every thing that lives is holy” (Visions 11.10). New innocence [in Oothoon], born of terrifying experience [rape], is fearlessness, lustfulness, happiness, honesty, openness. By being “open to virgin bliss,” she is open to each moment of joy. Virginity, too, loses its sexual connotations. (Hinkel 287) Being open to the experience of joy in every living moment, in Blake’s mind, is to “redeem” every moment, to obliterate time and (in a creative space) our human mortality, to realize eternity. For Oothoon, the world is no longer, as Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “finite and corrupt”, but “infinite and holy” Marriage( 14.2). Oothoon’s desire for a deeper analysis into the meaning of real purity versus a patriarchal construction of purity leads her to uncover another characteristic of the ‘slave mentality’ of subjugated women in Visions 6.7-14: their passive acceptance of the negation of their personhood and mechanical efforts to make themselves as appealing objects as possible. The woman consents to […]the alienation of her own sexuality in a society organized around principles of power, domination, and subjection,

210 and she internalizes its norms. Having done so, she tries to manipulate the existing system of relations and values to carve out an area in which she seems to be “on top.” (Aers 507) She remains determinedly in denial of her demeaning reality— desperately competing with other women for male attention (which includes the benefits of financial security and societal status) through the only permitted expression of female power: sexual allure and manipulation. This ability to “dissemble” or skillfully entice men with sweetness, is integral to the schema of what patriarchal society defines as purity, but, as Oothoon makes known, it must be learned or affected by innocent virgins as part of conventional female behavior and is alien to real, natural purity, which is not deceptive (Visions 9.10). This separation of sexual expression from that which is sacred and good is, for Oothoon, the greatest tragedy of the society that encloses her. She demands an answer for the cruel repression of the natural and ‘holy’ euphoria of sexual bliss in contracts of monogamous, heterosexual ownership from the tyrannical author of patriarchal religion:

Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire? Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth! Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing? (Visions 10.10-13)

She will not bend to this frozen, unfeeling law and vows to remain fixed in opposition of its hypocrisy, forever crying “‘Love! Love! Love! happy, happy Love! Free as the mountain wind!’” (Visions 10.16) In an extension of her vision, she suggests to Theotormon that she spread “silken nets and traps” in order to seduce girls and “view their wanton play/ in lovely copulation bliss on bliss” with him (Visions 7.23-6,

211 Munteanu 62). Several literary critics have argued that this proposal on Oothoon’s part betrays her prioritization of pleasing Theotormon over her sisterhood with other women and also her willingness to be involved in the sexual enslavement of other women to the desires of men. However, her offer could also be interpreted as a new approach to sexual love that is not defined by possession. The contrast between Oothoon’s dream of free love unrestrained by societal necessity or convention, and Theotormon’s tempestuous rage and jealousy at the thought of another man touching her (even without her consent) […]strongly suggests that Blake’s conception of unfallen love and the sexual manifestation of creative power does not present or consider Oothoon’s offer as the equivalent of an insecure and scared woman forced to procure new delights for her lover. (Munteanu 77) In Blakean ‘eternity’, sexuality seems to have been untrained, unrestricted, and open (Munteanu 77). Unfortunately, her final triumphant speech of “eternal joy” is immediately followed by Blake’s narratorial pronouncement “Thus every morning wails Oothoon” (Visions 8.11, Goslee 122). She appears to be ensnared in a fruitless cycle of impassioned self-repetition, unable to make Theotormon hear her argument. Despite Oothoon’s failure to affect change at this particular epoch, her ability to construct such a sharp, rhetorically elegant, and thorough criticism of the malevolent patriarchal structures of Law and Religion that trammel the Daughters of Albion in the face of such massive opposition is an impressive etymological feat in itself. It is in her courage and tireless persistence to ‘sing her joy’ as a revolutionary act that is the core of the remarkable lyrical and ontological content of this piece of literature. She rebels against the prevailing eighteenth-century imperial model, which demanded that women feel sexual pleasure in their ‘colonization’, and refuses

212 to pass into mute acquiescence, matrimony, and maternity, professing through her resistance the erotic power and creative imagination of women (Munteanu 74). However, Blake does not allow the reader the peace of mind of a satisfying, just, or happy end for his heroine of feminism. As Blake himself waited and wrote for the eventual overturning of society’s injustices, he left the dialectic of Visions of the Daughters of Albion unresolved. Literary critics hypothesize that the discordant open-endedness of Visions of the Daughters of Albion could very well be Blake’s exhortation of the reader to activism, to the cessation of sexual antagonism and the deconstruction of the iniquitous institutions of patriarchy in our world. By leaving Oothoon’s prophetic call unanswered by Theotormon, Blake forces the reader to answer, to respond to the dire need she reports.

213 Works Referenced

Aers, D. “William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex.” ELH 44.3 (1977): 500-514. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2010. This article revolves around Oothoon’s discovery that organized religion and labor are manmade structures that bind individuals (especially women) to their place in an unequal society by controlling their behaviors with abstract, nebulous laws of morality that do not reflect the natural order. This almost Marxian analysis brings about the question of standpoint and the possibility of progress when each of the players in Blake’s work is fixed in the limited perspective allotted individuals of their particular social position.

Blake, William. “The Book of Thel.” Romanticism: an Anthology. By Duncan Wu. 3rd ed. Malden [Mass.: Blackwell Pub, 2006. 176-79. Print.

Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Romanticism: an Anthology. By Duncan Wu. 3rd ed. Malden [Mass.: Blackwell Pub, 2006. 206-17. Print.

Blake, William. “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Romanticism: an Anthology. By Duncan Wu. 3rd ed. Malden [Mass.: Blackwell Pub, 2006. 217-23. Print.

Goslee, Nancy Moore. “Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” ELH 57.1 (1990): 101-128. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2010. Elaborates on the epistemological gap between Oothoon and the male speakers in Visions because of her social positioning as an oppressed women and her horrifying experience of rape, documenting her suffering and frustration,

214 first with coming to terms with her own violation, then with the insurmountable task of explaining the injustice of her subjugation to Theotormon.

Hinkel, Howard H. “From Energy and Desire to Eternity: Blake’s Vision of the Daughters of Albion.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 15. (1979): 278-289. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2010. This article addresses Oothoon’s ‘moment of vision’ in which she fulfills the prophesy fromThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, seeing all things as infinite and holy. This becomes the hinge of her new belief and the climax of her final speech in Visions.

Munteanu, Anca. “Visionary and Artistic Transformations in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Journal of European Studies 36.1 (2006): 61-83. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2010. This article is chiefly concerned with the prophetic voice of Oothoon, which has been forged by violence and suffering. Her emergence as a powerful critic of the situation of the Daughters enslavement is a testament to the power of art and imagination to subvert oppressive systems.

Schneider, Matthew. “The Anxiety of Innocence in Blake and Kierkegaard.” European Romantic Review 16.3 (2005): 351- 359. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 1 May 2010. A review of the psychological/philosophical state of innocence (like the one Oothoon finds herself at the beginning of Visions). The inextricable coupling of innocence with anxiety in theodicy indicates that neither is innocence self-sustainable, nor is it equitable with perfection. In this sense, Oothoon’s fall into experience can be interpreted as a move toward language, knowledge, and ascending states of consciousness/awareness of her own situation and that of the larger world.

215