INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript .has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from anytype ofcomputer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations andphotographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely. event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to beremoved, a note willindicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuingfrom left to right in equal sections with smalloverlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back ofthe book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell tnformatlon Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. MI48106-1346 USA 313;761-4700 800:521-0600 _____ 0-_. 0_. .__ . ------------ THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE FEMALE SELF: STUDIES IN THE SHORTER POEMS AND DESIGNS OF WILLIAM BLAKE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH MAY 1995 By Clifford R. Ames Dissertation Committee: Daniel Stempel, Chairperson Eliot Deutsch Craig Howes John Rieder Beth Fowkes Tobin UMI Number: 9532576 Copyright 1995 by Ames, Clifford Ronald All rights reserved. OMI Microform 9532576 Copyright 1995, by OMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, HI 48103 -- ---- - ----- (C) Copyright 1995 by Clifford R. Ames All Rights Reserved iii - -------------- -- Acknowledgments It is customary for a graduating doctoral student to express his gratitude to the members of his Dissertation Committee for their assistance in guiding his research and in determining the final form of the manuscript. I would like to honor this tradition, but with a difference. My committee members -Eliot Deutsch, Craig Howes, John Rieder and Beth Fowkes Tobin- were exceptional both in the quality and exactness of their critical comments and the kindness and patience with which they delivered them. To all of these people, I am deeply grateful. About the supervisor of my dissertation, all I can say is sine qua nihil. Professor Daniel Stempel has offered his time and his erudition freely over the last five years, not only in shaping my understanding of William Blake, but also in directing my course of study through the doctoral program. On the professional level, I am grateful to have been his student and to have had the honor of studying under him, on the personal level I am thankful for his warm friendship and for the frienship of his wife, Angela Stempel. I am also conscious of the large part Professor Joseph Kau has played in supporting my applications for grants, in particular the generous RCUH fellowship that funded my travel to England to research the literature of the iv - -- ---~----------- dissenting churches and to view the Blake collections in the British museum, the Tate and the Fitzwilliam. In addition, I must thank Joe Kau for introducing me to Professor Stempel and recommending that I study with him. I am of course in debt to my parents for their ongoing encouragement and support, and I really do not have the words to express my gratitude to my brother Roger, his wife Bonnie, and their sons, Jason and Austin. All I can say is that we have had some wonderful times together. Thank you for everything. I can see that I have left Eliot Deutsch, his wife Marcia Morse Deutsch, and David Hall to the end, but fortunately order in this context is not a measure of importance or they would be very near the beginning. Thank you all for your encouragement, for your helpful comments, and for your friendship. v Abstract The thesis of this dissertation is that William Blake was an antinomian working in an obscure tradition of dissent that stretches back through his own century into the doctrines of the nonconformist churches of seventeenth­ century England. His anti-Enlightenment stance on the hegemony of Reason undermines the univosity of language and the uniformity of sYmbol, and his denial of the authority of religious and civil law in favor of an "everlasting gospel" of Love challenges the conventional assumptions governing the role of the woman in society and in the patriarchal family. Although much of Blake's eccentric vocabulary, both verbal and visual, can be traced back to these earlier religious sects, there is little that he received from his sources that he did not reinterpret or radically transform for his own aesthetic and philosophical purposes. Indeed, Blake frequently used the original, orthodox meaning of a doctrine as an ironic foil for his own idiosyncratic, frequently heretical, sometimes richly paradoxical reading of biblical metaphor, and his deployment of the sYmbols and images of an insistently patriarchal culture and mythology in new aesthetic contexts reshaped Judeo-Christian mythology into a revolutionary new cosmology that is both intellectually coherent and psychologically compelling. vi - ----------------------- .- Also, like the narratives in the Bible, Blake's poems repeatedly tell the story of humanity's fall into division and its final reintegration into a single unified consciousness. The first chapter begins with the historical recontextualization of the woman within the pre-Commonwealth world of seventeenth-century England that witnessed the rise and quick suppression of the dissenting churches as one aspect of a broad and popular cultural revolution. The second chapter picks up the largely underground antinomian tradition as it enters the eighteenth-century and describes how it struggled against the growing public acceptance of scientific rationalism and the quest for certainty, and attempts to locate Blake within this ideologically subversive movement. The final three chapters recontextualize the woman in selected short poems and designs of Blake and explore in these various narratives the poet's attitude towards the contemporary woman's role in society, and her place in his larger prophetic cosmology. vii ------------. -- Table of Contents Acknowledgments i v Abstract vi Key to Abbreviations x Introduction xii I . THE MYTH OF REALITY: Recontextualizing the Woman in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century English Society CHAPTER ONE Old Metaphors in New Narratives: The Woman in the Seventeenth Century 1 CHAPTER TWO Metaphorical Habits are Hard to Break: The Woman in the Eighteenth Century 23 II. THE REALITY OF MYTH: Recontextualizing the Woman in Early Blake CHAPTER THREE The Book of Thel: Rejecting the Orthodox Construction of the Woman 54 CHAPTER FOUR Songs of Innocence and of Experience Exploring Society's Construct of the Woman 104 Antecedents 104 Innocence and Experience: these States we now Explore 114 viii The Flower Poems of Innocence and Experience 124 Unorganized Innocence, An Impossibility 143 Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance 178 Woman, What Have I to Do With Thee . 188 CHAPTER FIVE The Pickering Manuscript: Critiquing Society's Construct of the Woman 251 Conclusions (Deferred): "Unity is the cloke of Folly" .. 288 Bibliography 297 ix Key to Abbreviations All quotations from Blake's works appear parenthetically in the text by plate and line number, followed by the letter "E" for Erdman and the appropriate page number from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake revised edition, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Press, 1982). Where the arrangement of plates in the different copies of the illuminated works makes citing pages by plate and line number confusing, I have included references to the reproduced plates in David Erdman'S The Illuminated Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), citing the text as "IB" and following this abbreviation with the page number. In order to preserve the aesthetic integrity of Blake's texts I have retained his idiosyncratic spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. , America a Prophecy The Book of Ahania All Religions Are One Crabb Robinson in Arthur Symons William Blake (New York, 1907) Descriptive Catalogue The Everlasting Gospel Europe a Prophecy The Four Zoas The Gates of Paradise (For Children and For the Sexes) The Ghost of Abel x ._. ---------------- IM An Island in the Moon iI Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion Job Illustrations for the Book of Job !! The Book of Los Lac The Lacoon Lav Annotations to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man LBD A Large Book of Designs Let Letters M Milton a Poem Misc Miscellaneous Prose MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell NNR There is No Natural Religion (a and b texts) PM The Pickering Manuscript PS Poetical Sketches Rey Annotations to The Works of Joshua Reynolds SI Songs of Innocence and SE Songs of Experience SL Song of Los Swed Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom The Book of Thel The [First] Book of Urizen Visions of the Daughters of Albion A Vision of the Last Judgment Annotations to Watson's An Apology for the Bible xi Introduction Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that it shall be when we know more. (NNR b IIi E 2) Blake's anti-Enlightenment stance that what we know now will be different when we know more provides some insight into why doctoral dissertations (and most other activities as well) are brought to an abrupt end but ~re never truly finished, and it is one explanation for the difference between the way in which this project got started and the shape it now takes.