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The Female As Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry Author(S): Susan Fox Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry Author(s): Susan Fox Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 507-519 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342937 . Accessed: 21/06/2013 07:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.144.12.2 on Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:28:23 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry Susan Fox Studies of male authors' attitudes towards women have become so fash- ionable that a critic ought to hesitate to initiate one lest he or she dilute the real social and literary values of such studies by overworking a for- mula. In the poetry of William Blake, however, images of females are not merely cultural phenomena but artistic and philosophical principles, and they have been so little defined that they have clouded full under- standing of his work. A study of Blake's use of females as metaphors should not only identify his complicated attitudes towards women but also reveal a serious self-contradiction in his vision of the universe. In his prophetic poems Blake conceives a perfection of humanity defined in part by the complete mutuality of its interdependent genders. Yet throughout the same poems he represents one of those mutual, contrary, equal genders as inferior and dependent (or, in the case of Jerusalem, superior and dependent), or as unnaturally and disastrously dominant. Indeed, females are not only represented as weak or power- hungry, they come to represent weakness (that frailty best seen in the precariously limited "emanative" state Beulah) and power-hunger ("Female Will," the corrupting lust for dominance identified with women). Blake's philosophical principle of mutuality is thus under- mined by stereotypical metaphors of femaleness which I believe he adopted automatically in his early poems and then tried to redress but found himself trapped by in his late works. In the margin of his 1789 edition of Lavater's Aphorismson Man Blake wrote, "let the men do their duty & the women will be such Parts of this essay are elaborations of material included in Susan Fox's Poetic Form in Blake's Milton, copyright ? 1976 by Princeton University Press. 507 This content downloaded from 193.144.12.2 on Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:28:23 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 508 Susan Fox The Female in Blake's Poetry wonders, the female life lives from the light of the male. see a mans female dependents you know the man. .. ."1 The condescension dis- guised here, no doubt even to Blake, as appreciation marks an ambiva- lence towards women which is a significant feature of all Blake's poetry. He admired women, but not enough to imagine them autonomous hu- man beings. He cites the failure of men as the cause of the failure of women, and yet throughout his works he more bitterly (though perhaps no more strongly) condemns the females for the lapse. His ambivalence has been matched by a strong and confusing am- bivalence among his critics as to how to take his combined respect and derogation. On the one hand they apologize for what seems like Blake's shrill antifeminism in promulgating such an idea as "Female Will" by sterilizing the conception of its sexual conrinotations: Another feature of the Ulro vision requiring comment is the "female will," the separated objective world that confronts us in the fallen perspective. The outer world of nature is a "Female Space" (M. 11:6) because, like a "harlot coy" increasing her price by pre- tending to be a virgin, it continually retreats from the perceiver. The perceiver is a human being, who may be a man or a woman -in other words Blake's "female will" has nothing to do with human women except when women dramatize it in their sexual rituals, as they do, for instance, in the Courtly Love convention.2 On the other hand they, like all responsive readers, must recognize that one of the most moving and provocative features of Blake's poetry is its profound psychological probing into sexual and familial relations, a probing embodied in such gender distinctions as spectre (always male, though it has a usually female counterpart in the "shadow"), emanation (almost exclusively female, with a revealing exception we shall deal with below), and Female Will. In other words, Blake's poetry has been rep- resented both as a sexless abstraction of a universal human mentality divided metaphorically into sexual factions and as a profound study of human relations, including the sexual, in which metaphors of gender suggest not universal abstractions but the minute particulars of daily life. 1. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), p. 585. All subsequent quotations of Blake will be from this edition. 2. Northrop Frye, "Notes for a Commentary on Milton," The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetryand Art of WilliamBlake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (1957; rpt. New York, 1968), pp. 115-16. Susan Fox is currently working on a book of poems and has written articles on Spenser and Blake as well as Poetic Form in Blake's Milton. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City Uni- versity of New York. This content downloaded from 193.144.12.2 on Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:28:23 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 509 It would appear that the reader must choose between these conflicting approaches, but to do so, it seems to me, is to lose half the greatness of Blake's poetry. One cannot apologize away Blake's occa- sional shrillness towards women by calling it merely metaphoric, because to do so is both to ignore the richness and aptness of his social observa- tions and to beg the question of what a metaphor is anyway and why one chooses it. One cannot ignore the abstract quality of his sexual divisions, because to do so is to miss the vastest implications of his observations and to make those observations much more strident and condemnatory than we have evidence they were meant to be. One encounters this critical dilemma in Blake's poetry only in terms of his representation of the relations of the sexes. In no other issue do abstraction and particularity seem so seriously to contradict each other. The abstract elements of Blake's political, aesthetic, and historical at- titudes are compatible with thfeir personal elements, but the personal dimension of his attitudes towards women is so ambiguous that it inter- feres with the generalization he would build out of it. We may see this ambiguity in every facet of his poetic vision, from its cosmology to its individual characterizations. Of the four states of being in Blake's universe, the only realm in which females are both powerful and constructive is Beulah. In Eden, females, supposedly merged perfectly with their male contraries, have no independent power; when they attempt to assume such power, as Luvah's emanation Vala does in trying to usurp all of Albion's love, they destroy Edenic wholeness. In fallen reality, as we shall see, females are either passive or pernicious. In Beulah alone do female forms have power and use it for good. Yet even in Beulah the positive image of femaleness is tainted by condescension: a female state is necessarily a limited state in Blake's universe. In the Songs of Innocence, generally considered a study of proto- Beulaic existence, the positive internal powers of the realm are female. The little boy lost by his father is found by his mother, the black child who yearns hopelessly for his father-god's love is comforted by his mother, other mothers and nurses protect children from darkness and grief. The piper who sings of innocence and the shepherd who guards it are male, but they are no more its natural inhabitants than the poet who describes Beulah and the Divine Family who created it dwell within it. Male adults act as constructive powers in the Songs of Innocence only from outside its boundaries; God appears to the lost boy or an angel appears to the chimney sweep from realms beyond their comprehension. Other- wise male adults are either helpless (weeping fathers) or pernicious (beadles with disciplinary wands and fathers who sell their children) -just as female adults are in the fallen states. The power of the females in the Songs of Innocence is entirely posi- tive, though severely restricted in that the ultimate power in the Songs This content downloaded from 193.144.12.2 on Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:28:23 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 510 Susan Fox The Female in Blake's Poetry resides in males outside the borders of pure innocence-in piper, angel, father-god. The female power which governs the Beulaic vales in The Book of Thel is not only restricted, but negative in implication.
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