William blake and the body

William Blake and
the Body
Tristanne J. Connolly


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William Blake and the Body

10.1057/9780230597013 - William Blake and the Body, Tristanne Connolly


William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 2(1).

10.1057/9780230597013 - William Blake and the Body, Tristanne Connolly

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Frontispiece


Tristanne J. Connolly
Department of English
Butler University
Indianapolis

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William Blake and

the Body


© Tristanne J. Connolly 2002

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William Blake and the body / Tristanne J. Connolly.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-333-96848-4
1. Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Criticism and interpretation.
2. Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Knowledge – Anatomy. 3. Body, Human, in
literature. 4. Body, Human, in art. I. Title.
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Contents
vi

Preface

vii

List of Abbreviations

xvii

1 Textual Bodies

1

2 Graphic Bodies

25

3 Embodiment: Urizen

73

4 Embodiment: Reuben

95

5 Divisions and Comminglings: Sons and Daughters

125

6 Divisions and Comminglings: Emanations and Spectres

155

7 The Eternal Body

192

Notes

222

Bibliography

232

Index

241

v
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List of Illustrations


Frontispiece William Blake. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 2(1).
Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s
edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.
ii
2.1 William Blake. Elohim Creating Adam. © Tate, London 2001.

26
2.2 W. Pink after Agostino Carlini. Smugglerius. Royal Academy
of Arts, London.
36
2.3 William Cowper. Myotomia Reformata. Page 8. The
Wellcome Library, London.
49
2.4 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 45. The
Wellcome Library, London.
50
2.5 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Appendix 3.
The Wellcome Library, London.
51
2.6 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 25. Reproduced with
permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of
Blake’s Illuminated Books.
52
2.7 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 24. Reproduced with
permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition
of Blake’s Illuminated Books.
54
2.8 William Blake. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 6.
Reproduced with permission from the William Blake
Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.
55
2.9 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 60.
The Wellcome Library, London.
56
2.10 William Cowper. Anatomy of Humane Bodies. Table 62.
The Wellcome Library, London.

57
5.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 69. Reproduced with
permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of
Blake’s Illuminated Books.
150
5.2 Francesco Saverio Clavigero. A History of Mexico. 1787.
Plate viii, page 279. Benson Latin American Collection.
University of Texas at Austin.
151
6.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 35 [31]. Reproduced with
permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of
Blake’s Illuminated Books.
161
7.1 William Blake. Jerusalem. Plate 95. Reproduced with
permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of
Blake’s Illuminated Books.
200

vi
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List of Illustrations


One would think there would be nothing more to say about the body in
general, or the body in Blake. ‘The Human Form Divine’ is Blake’s selfproclaimed central image and ultimate reality; the human body is what we
live in every day, what we are, what is most familiar to us. Yet, the body is
as alien as it is commonplace, as unfathomable as it is known: think of how

many involuntary movements, such as heartbeat, are essential to its regular
functioning, and how unexpectedly and inexorably disease and death can
overtake the body. Blake’s depiction of the body communicates this: the body
both provides and threatens identity. The simple question, ‘What does Blake
think of the body?’, is difficult to answer, even though understanding the
significance of his main preoccupation would be essential to understanding
his work. The body is Blake’s preoccupation not because of a confident admiration of it, but rather a troubled obsession. He has a love/hate relationship
with his favourite image; he at once reviles and glorifies the human body.
This paradox could be swiftly resolved by claiming that, in fact, there are not
really any bodies in Blake at all. The things that happen to Blake’s characters could not happen to real bodies: wives do not burst from their husbands’
chests in globes of blood; poets do not possess other poets by entering their
left feet in the form of falling stars; and the city of London is not normally
accessed by entering anyone’s bosom. These are symbolic characters, it could
be argued: allegories whose bodies are mere vehicles for meaning. If Blake’s
were a simple dualism, then not only his characters’ bodies, but also the real
human body, would be only vehicles which could be discarded for the sake
of their more valuable contents. However, not even the most stilted allegory
can completely transcend the symbols which embody its meaning, and
Blake’s allegory is much more a tangled web than a nut in a shell. He takes
his symbols very seriously. Coleridge saw in Blake a ‘despotism of symbols’,
and Yeats christened Blake with the title, ‘literal realist of the imagination’
(Coleridge, in Bentley, Critical Heritage 55; Yeats 119). Blake’s allegorical characters are endowed in both design and verse with bones and blood, fibres
and flesh; indeed, they are depicted in all gory detail. Because of this, I take
them as bodies; because Blake presents them as bodies, he must be making
statements on the body through his choice of images. The statements he
makes do not boil down to another possible simple answer, that the physical body is bad and the spiritual body good and both ultimately separate
from each other. Blake often caricatures the mortal body as pathetic, restrictive and painful, and there is truth in his exaggeration: again, think of all
that cannot be controlled and all that must be suffered in mortal human
form. Yet, his adulation is not saved exclusively for incorporeal spiritual
vii

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Preface


forms. He often celebrates sexuality, and even admires nerves and organs. In
the end, those nerves and organs are immortalized, making Blake’s eternal
body most definitely a body.
Because the body is basic to human experience and fundamental to Blake’s
art and verse, it is an inexhaustible topic. Anthropologist Mary Douglas
argues that ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system’
(115). Because the range of the body’s symbolism is so broad, thinking about
the body involves thinking about other things. The result is that, though
there has been recently a tangible wave of interest in writing about the body,
the works which represent it do not necessarily cohere into a body of work
on one subject. Of course they do not all see the body as having the same
significance, because they study the body through various disciplines, and
in various cultures of various eras. But even beyond this variation, different
works on the body attach themselves to vastly different issues. There are
economic bodies, political bodies, medical bodies, sexual bodies, and more,
each with numerous subdivisions and interrelations. A book on Blake and
the body could be about many things; too many things. The way I approached the topic was to read Blake’s works and categorize the different
kinds of bodies I perceived there; having categorized them, I would try to
determine the characteristics of each category, and explore the significance
of those characteristics through whichever historical, cultural and literary
contexts they suggested. The general categories I deduced were: texts as
bodies; bodies in Blake’s designs; bodies coming into existence, or being
shaped; bodies which split off from or fuse with other bodies; the ideal,

eternal body; bodies which dissolve into landscapes; bodies which are also
places, such as cities or countries. To focus the project, I decided that its
border would be the border between the body and the world. Considering
Blake’s bodies in relationship to their environment, and as symbols of
nations or political systems, would be a fruitful topic for a separate study;
there is a wealth of material, some of it already approached from a different direction in Jason Whittaker’s William Blake and the Myths of Britain. That
the remaining categories continued to shape my work will be seen from a
glance at the Contents list, and the chapter outline provided at the end of
this preface. Concentrating on how bodies are formed and connect with
each other lent itself to a number of contexts, one of the most central being
gender.
Gender has been a tortured topic in Blake studies, until recently stymied
by the division between critics who see Blake offering an ideal, liberating
vision of equality between the sexes, and those who consider that vision to
be fundamentally misogynistic. There is evidence to support both stances
in Blake, and the factors involved in interpreting the evidence allow much
leeway for personal critical desires. Many passages central to the question
are placed in the mouths of ‘fallen’ characters who could be speaking under
delusions the reader is meant to catch and disapprove. The fallen/eternal

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viii William Blake and the Body


ix

distinction in Blake can be a convenient trapdoor to save him from many

sins: anything unpalatable can be explained away as fallen. Because one
might hope to find Blake’s ideals, unfiltered through any point of view, in
the eternal realm, the question of Blake’s feminism or lack of it devolves to
a great extent on the place of the female in eternity.
Though Blake creates a seemingly equal unification of male and female
in eternity, that ‘human’ is overridingly male. Jean Hagstrum, in The
Romantic Body, contends that ‘Blake did break away from the prison of his
own sex long enough to define and envision an intersexual world of intense
mutuality and equality’ (140), but his arguments are undermined by
embarrassed explanations of exceptions. A good example of the difficulties
Hagstrum runs into is found in his response to the most problematic passage
for defenders of a non-misogynist Blake:
It is true that Blake says that in Eternity woman ‘has no Will of her own’
(Last Judgment, E., 562). But if woman is denied will in Eternity, we should
remember that under the Covenant of Forgiveness the new and gentle
Jehovah also lacks will. . . . Will tends to be absent from the state of
highest fulfillment: other qualities and other quests and a different
orientation toward the self make it irrelevant or obtrusive. So it is no loss
that Jerusalem in particular and idealized women in general lack it.
(138)
Hagstrum must fudge definitions to hold his point; and he does not take on
Blake’s preceding words which indicate that the absence of will is due to
‘Woman’ being ‘the Emanation of Man’. Brenda Webster finds, ‘although
Blake announces the end of sexual organization, male sexuality continues
to stand as a model for the human, while the female is either incorporated
or isolated restrictively in Beulah’. She holds that ‘in his late Christian
prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, [Blake] suggests that the female should
cease even to exist independently and become reabsorbed into the body of
man where she belongs’ (‘Sexuality’ 203, 194). Alicia Ostriker agrees: ‘at its
most extreme, Blake’s vision goes beyond proposing an ideal of dominancesubmission or priority-inferiority between the genders’ (which is bad

enough). ‘Blake wishfully imagines that the female can be re-absorbed by
the male, be contained within him, and exist Edenically not as a substantial being but as an attribute . . . the ideal female functions as a medium of
interchange among real, that is to say male, beings’ (163). Essick, in his
article, ‘William Blake’s “Female Will” and its Biographical Context’, considers the argument that
females in Blake’s allegorical poetry must be understood metaphorically.
They are the representatives of otherness within the human psyche and
its projection into an alienated nature. He is making use of sexual divi-

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Preface


x

William Blake and the Body

One might ask, what is a more fundamental problem than sexual division?
One might also ask, if ‘they’ figure forth otherness in the ‘human’ psyche,
does that not exclude ‘females’ from the category of the ‘human’? From a
female point of view, the female is not other. Essick finds ‘forceful rebuttals’
offered by ‘feminist critics’, including this: ‘the argument that females
are the metaphoric vehicles for genderless meanings is blind to how tropes,
and a poet’s choice of the lingual signs he manipulates into tropes, carry
unavoidable ideological orientations, in part through their non-metaphoric
references’ (Essick, ‘Female Will’ 617). Especially since Blake’s personifications are so fleshy, it is difficult to consider his use of gender as mere
metaphor. There is nothing ‘mere’ about metaphors, which can turn the
supposedly genderless Christian God into a father and an old man. The

critics Essick refers to are David Aers, Diana Hume George and Susan Fox.
Aers finds that Blake’s use of ‘dominant male ideology . . . inevitably feeds
back into the realm of human interrelations from which it has been derived’
(37). For George, ‘Blake’s portrayals of sexuality and of women . . . are problems of symbol formation that express themselves in the limitations of
language’ (199). Fox will not discount either of two ‘conflicting attitudes’:
metaphor cannot ‘apologize away Blake’s occasional shrillness towards
women’, yet ‘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’ (509). Such equivocation weakens
her position, falling into apology. Shrillness may be part of Blake’s ‘vastest
implications’.
Going to Blake’s prose to avoid statements in the mouths of unreliable
characters does not result in a clear, definitive picture because in works such
as A Vision of the Last Judgment he is writing for a particular purpose, and at
a particular time, so his statements may not be equally applicable to his
whole oeuvre. Another trapdoor for any unattractive opinions in Blake is
the traditional theory that Blake changed between his early and late works,
becoming more otherworldly and misogynistic, transferring his radical
desires for liberty to the spiritual realm and consigning the evil natural world
and women to each other. I call this a trapdoor not because I believe Blake
never altered his opinions; after all, that would breed reptiles of the mind
(MHH 19:7–9). However, in Blake’s case, it is the changing opinions that
apparently produce mental reptiles. It seems to me it would be helpful to
come up with a way to account for the relationship between his apparently
contradictory assertions, rather than to say he changed his mind, or even
to look for what caused him to change his mind. This is not asking for a

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sion to figure forth more fundamental psychological and metaphysical
problems.
(616)


xi

reconciliation of contraries so that one of them disappears; rather, it is an
attempt to answer a rather Lockean personal identity question posed by
David Punter, which for me sums up the Blake gender debate: ‘We are forced
to ask how it can be that the same writer who sees so acutely into the
pressures on individuals caused by ethical rigidity and repression seems at
the same time to construct such an apparently male supremacist space’
(‘Trauma’ 481). Like Punter, I feel disappointed in Blake, because he makes
a conscientious effort toward gender inclusiveness, and to a certain extent
succeeds, but not completely. He does not go far enough. What blocks him?
A dark epiphany, placed at a certain historical moment, is not a fully adequate answer. His later works are not devoid of fervour for sexual and political liberty combined: there is the response to trials of homosexuals in Milton
found by Christopher Hobson; there are the eloquent pleas of Jerusalem and
Mary for forgiveness of sexual sin and against warlike sacrificial violence
(Hobson, 113–43; J 20–2, 61). Likewise, his earlier works are not devoid of
misogynist hints, or at least bugs in any system of Blakean feminism. There
is in Visions of the Daughters of Albion the ‘harem fantasy’ which, for Helen
Bruder, ‘marks the moment of Oothoon’s most acute apostasy, as she offers
to become an energetically ensnaring procuress’ (82) as an early indication
that if Blake’s women are liberated, they are liberated to give sexual pleasure to men. There is in The First Book of Urizen Enitharmon as ‘the first
female now separate’ (16:10) as a foreshadowing echo of that embarrassing
later statement that in Eternity the female has no will of her own. More
arguably, there is the failure of both Thel and Oothoon to get what they

want – perhaps a compassionate presentation of women’s frustration,
perhaps even an endorsement of female community among the daughters
of Albion and in the vales of Har – but why not an imagining of female
freedom? Why only sympathy for women in a female sphere, and women
who fail? If Blake does not envision a full equality between genders and liberation for both, it is not because he could not, but because he would not.
As Punter suggests, Blake was able to see through many values which were
imposed as unquestionable by his society. Other concerns more important
to him clashed with the project of imagining female equality and liberty,
and delineating these concerns will be a task of the following chapters.
What has recently given a kick-start to the study of Blake and gender and
sent it in new and prolific directions is the application of new historicism
and cultural studies, and the shift from feminist criticism to gender studies.
These developments occurred since the two landmark books on Blake and
the body appeared: Thomas Frosch’s Awakening of Albion and Anne Mellor’s
Blake’s Human Form Divine, both published in 1974. These new approaches
provide new opportunities to rethink Blake’s most central image. My
concerns and methods in doing so are comparable to those of the two important recent studies mentioned above: Helen Bruder’s William Blake and
the Daughters of Albion and Christopher Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality.

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Preface


William Blake and the Body

Bruder’s book is a masterwork of new historicist criticism. She takes by the
scruff of its neck the rather flabby argument that apologizes for Blake’s views

of women by appealing to the limitations of his historical context, and tests
it mercilessly, with positive and fascinating results. She pursues in detail the
question of what feminism was in the 1790s, and places Blake in it as a
rather forward-looking figure. However, she still finds flaws in Blake’s feminism, such as that action of Oothoon’s; she ascribes Oothoon’s failure
to ‘historical considerations’ which forbid the conception of a solution
(88). Other scholars notable for historicizing Blake are Jon Mee and David
Worrall. In order to give precision to their researches, it was wise for them
to concentrate on Blake’s earlier works. Their practice of contextualizing
Blake in the high and low culture of Britain of his time is illuminating,
though, not just to works produced in the 1790s; my study, taking in Blake’s
whole oeuvre, carries this approach through his later prophecies (countering their reputation as otherworldly). Hobson and I both take advantage of
the best of both worlds, combining gender criticism with historicism.
Hobson takes a queer theory perspective on Blake, while mine is a wider
gender studies one; Hobson considers Blake to succeed in endorsing and
empowering liberty for male and female, heterosexual and homosexual,
while I examine the shortcomings of his ideals, and the motivations which
contribute to them. Though it was back in 1982 that W.J.T. Mitchell predicted critics would ‘rediscover the dangerous Blake’ since he was ‘now safely
canonized’ and ‘ready to take a little abuse’, the need and profit of such
an approach continues (Mitchell 410–11). Hobson, who notes that critics
in the 1980s and 1990s largely ignored Mitchell’s exhortations, explicitly
responds to the questions Mitchell asks about Blake’s obscenity (Hobson xii).
My impulse to confront the dangerous Blake comes from a deep conviction
of the strangeness of his work, that to normalize him is to lose something
valuable, even at the price of finding something undesirable. Blake is scary;
a good part of the power of his work derives from its bizarreness, a good
part of which in turn derives from his simultaneous adoration and abomination of the human body.
As explained above, this book is organized around five of the categories
of somatic imagery I found in Blake’s works: the categories dealing with the
body’s relationship to itself, to the self it embodies, and to other bodies. The
text as body is the first category of imagery, explored in the first chapter and

throughout. One substantial chapter is then devoted to a particular aspect
of Blake’s textual bodies: the human figures in Blake’s graphic art. Then, in
two chapters on Urizen and Reuben, I discuss central passages describing
how Blake envisions the beginnings of the material body. The birth imagery
involved in those passages becomes more alienating as I move on to treat
in two chapters multiple bodies which split from and unify with each other.
The fifth kind of body imagery, upon which the others rely as either imi-

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xii


xiii

tations or parodies, is that of the ideal, eternal body, which occupies the
study’s final chapter.
The questions of whether identity is defined or protean, how identity is
affected by birth, and how language and literature are affected by these concerns, beg for comparison with Julia Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic, the
symbolic, and the abject. Despite their similar concerns, Kristeva is rarely
considered in relation to Blake. They both struggle with the advantages of
having a flexible identity, and the dangers of being scattered and undefined.
Digging back into the origins of Kristeva’s thought, I find that Mary Douglas’
theories in Purity and Danger (which Kristeva makes use of in Powers of Horror)
are also a valuable way to explain the dynamic of the relationship Blake
envisions between his bodily text and its reader. Blake makes use of what
Douglas would call the sacredness of bodily borders to gain a certain degree
of control over who his audience is and how they read his works. Blake

creates different kinds of entry points, or orifices, in his works: while they
allow readers access to the body that is the text, the transgression they
require of readers ensures that the squeamish are repulsed, while the brave
are challenged.
In the chapter entitled ‘Graphic Bodies’, I examine anatomical art as an
influence on Blake. His graphic figures involve criticism of eighteenthcentury anatomy books. With particular reference to William Cowper
(an anatomist who drew many of his own figures) and William Hunter
(Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy while Blake attended), I assert
that Blake uses echoes of anatomical art to question empirical observation
of the body, and offer the possibility of dissection by imagination. The art
theories of Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth and Johann Winckelmann
contextualize Blake’s radical contribution to controversies over representation, and pain in art, while psychological and physiological theories of sympathy (Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Robert Whytt) elucidate the powerful
and intimate reactions Blake sought for his works. A comparison of how
Burke and Blake use the terms ‘pity’ and ‘delight’ reveals that Blake sees sympathy as a threat to individual identity. True sympathy is not enabled by
putting oneself in the place of another, but rather by becoming fully oneself.
The relationship between body and soul is central to my commentary on
Blake’s graphic bodies. That chapter begins with a discussion of Blake’s print,
Elohim Creating Adam, an important visual depiction of how the physical
body comes to be. In the two following chapters, I explicate central verse
passages on the human body’s beginnings: the embodiment narratives of
Urizen and Reuben. While these embodiments borrow images from foetal
development and birth, they are not ordinary births. I claim that Blake’s
variations on the childbearing process betray an obsession with birth. This
obsession arises from a recognition of the problems of parturition: the
limitations of physical existence, the pitfalls of parent-child relationships,

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Preface


William Blake and the Body

and the possibilities of malformation and miscarriage. Blake’s metamorphic
foetal imagery takes off from Ovid’s process-fascinated descriptions of
change to suggest that the new, strange form is our familiar human body.
It also reflects the protean nature of Blake’s creative works; the meaning of
Blake’s birth imagery applies equally to humans and artworks. The terrifying aspect of uncanny growth and change culminates in miscarriage imagery
through which Blake depicts the failure of creation, both human and artistic. I offer some evidence for a biographical basis for Blake’s treatment of
miscarriage in his poetry (Catherine Blake possibly suffering one or more
failed pregnancies), but I concentrate on explicating Blake’s poetic imagery.
From it I conclude that Blake ‘perversely’ values nonreproductive sexuality.
He expands the possibilities of what sexual activity can produce, such as
personified emotions and artworks.
From the bizarre birth of Urizen and the failed birth of Reuben, I move
on to examine one of the few Blake characters born normally, from a
woman’s womb: Orc. Through studying the Oedipal suggestions of his nativity, alongside its origins in Satan’s family romance with Sin and Death in
Paradise Lost, I demonstrate that in Blake, children (and mothers) can be
seen as facets of the father’s personality: each human is a family. At times
proliferating, and at times reuniting in monstrous conglomerated forms,
the children of Albion enable Blake to present a vast confusion of diversification and unification. I argue that sons and daughters (along with
emanations and spectres, the subject of the next chapter) dramatize the
multiplicity inherent in the Blakean human. The work of RenJ Girard allows
me to connect the identity-blurring involved in Oedipal relationships to the
acts of human sacrifice perpetrated by the Sons and Daughters of Albion in
Blake’s Jerusalem. They are flesh-bound attempts to establish individual identity and cross bodily borders.
That Blake’s human is manifold in itself, not just in its offspring or its
fallen manifestations, is revealed by his depiction of emanations and spectres. Emanations and spectres split, painfully and gorily, from the human of

whom they are constituent parts: psychic components separate and become
independent personifications. This divisibility of both flesh and spirit I show
to be an exaggerated outgrowth of Locke’s and Hume’s questioning of personal identity. Unlike the emanations of another manifold being – Wisdom
and the Devil, and the Son and the Spirit as personified aspects of God –
the intellectual births from Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ are depicted
viscerally. Their separations are fantasies of male mothering which reflect
on other creative processes, especially that of Blake’s illuminated books in
which they are described and pictured. Emanations and spectres, like God’s
hypostases, can help, hinder, and even become, creative productions.
Blake suggests that the multiple aspects of the human personality, which
in the fallen world may work against each other, in eternity are reunified in
the human form while retaining their individuality. My final chapter con-

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centrates on Blake’s few tantalizing suggestions of what life in eternity is
like. From these I attempt to describe the appearance and function of the
resurrected body. The presence of organs of sense indicates that for Blake
the ideal human form is not a disembodied spirit. The imaginings of Locke,
Berkeley, Swedenborg, St Teresa and St Paul on eternal bodies inspire an original ideal in which transparency and interpenetrability are valued as highly
as individual identity. The conversational and sexual ‘intercourse’ through
which ideas are embodied in eternity is an apotheosis of male homosexual
relations which harnesses the power of female sexuality. This leads me to

confront the question of why androgyny often veils a male form which
incorporates the female, rather than a genderless, or equally male and
female, ideal. I suggest that Blake’s final triumph over dualism is made possible, yet made incomplete, by subordination.

I would like to thank my supervisors and examiners, Kathleen Wheeler,
Simon Jarvis, John Beer, John Harvey and Andrew Lincoln, for their guidance of this project as it took shape. Scholars who provided assistance and
encouragement were Steve Clark, Jon Mee, David Worrall, Keri Davies, Bill
Goldman, and everyone at the Blake Society, Simon Szreter, Jeremy Boulton,
Ruth Richardson, John Sargent, and G.E. Bentley, Jr. Many thanks. Special
gratitude goes to my conscientious and constructive readers at Palgrave and
my sympathetic editors, Eleanor Birne and Rebecca Mashayekh. Portions of
Chapter 4 were first published in Romanticism 7.2 in the article ‘Miscarriage
Imagery in Blake’, and appear here by permission of the editors. I would like
to express my appreciation for the feedback and support I received from
Nicholas Roe and the reader he chose for the article. Sharon Ruston and
Lidia Garbin organized a British Association for Romanticism Studies conference and edited an essay collection, Spectres of Romanticism: the Influence
and Anxiety of the British Romantics, which were venues for a piece, ‘William
Blake and the Spectre of Anatomy’, which grew into Chapter 2: my thanks
for the excellent chance to share ideas, and again, for perceptive reading.
The William Blake Trust, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Tate Gallery,
the Wellcome Library, and the Benson Latin American Collection at the
University of Texas at Austin kindly granted permission to reproduce the
illustrations. Many thanks to John Commander and the Blake Trust for generosity as well as assistance, and Laura Valentine at the RA, Anna Sheppard
at the Tate, Matilde Nardelli at Wellcome, and Michael Hironymous at
Austin, for their speed, skill and helpfulness in providing pictures and
permissions. The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, The National
Chapter of Canada IODE, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, King’s College and the Cambridge University English
Faculty granted financial support. Thanks to all at McMaster University who

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Preface


William Blake and the Body

have continued to aid and advise me, especially Alvin Lee and David Clark;
and, at Auburn, Paula Backscheider for her unbeatable mentoring. Thanks
to Patricia Simmons for, in so many ways through good and ill, being my
fellow Daughter of the Empire. To those who often provided practical help
as well as warm friendship – Leo Sharpston and (in honoured memory)
David Lyon, George and Hilary Pattison, Margaret Watson (as well as Linda,
Josie and Marleen) – thanks. To Krista Johansen, for friendship: swylc sceolde
secg wesan, þegn æt Qearfe! Heartfelt thanks to my family: all the Noreyko
and Connolly clans, but most of all my parents Gaiyle and Robert Connolly,
my grandmother Margaret Noreyko, my brother and sister-in-law Cal and
Gillian Connolly, and my godparents John and Kae Noreyko, not least for
supplying the computers on which this was written, but also for their
patience, enthusiasm and love. The final thank you goes to my husband,
Ken Robinson.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Blake’s unengraved writings are
taken from Erdman’s edition and cited by page number (except for The Four
Zoas for which Night and line numbers are also provided), and all references
to Blake’s illuminated books are taken from the Blake Trust series and cited
by plate and line number. References to the notes from the Blake Trust
edition will be introduced as such, and cited by page number.
E

Erdman, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.

In Erdman:
FZ
The Four Zoas
AR
Annotations to Reynolds
DC
A Descriptive Catalogue
VLJ
A Vision of the Last Judgment
PA
Public Address
In the Blake Trust editions:
SIE
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
BT
The Book of Thel
MHH
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
VDA

Visions of the Daughters of Albion
E
Europe: a Prophecy
A
America: a Prophecy
BU
The First Book of Urizen
BL
The Book of Los
BA
The Book of Ahania
M
Milton: a Poem
L
Laocöon
J
Jerusalem
Unless otherwise indicated, definitions and biblical quotations are taken
from the following, which, when mentioned, are named by these
abbreviations:
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
KJV
The Bible, King James Version

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List of Abbreviations


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When Ezekiel is called to be a prophet, to speak to the hard-hearted children of Israel, the voice that speaks to him from his vision makes a remarkable request:
But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious
like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And
when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roll of a
book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within
and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning,
and woe. Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest;
eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth,
and he caused me to eat that roll. And he said unto me, Son of man,
cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee.
Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
(Ezek. 2:8–3:3)
In Ezekiel’s introduction to his mission, there is an emphasis on rebellion
versus obedience, and the unlikelihood that his audience will listen to him.
Eating the scroll goes against the usual rules; something is ingested which
normally remains outside the body. However, reading is an ingestion, if not
usually such a complete one: a reader eats up written words with his or her
eyes. This episode suggests becoming one with the text, making it completely part of oneself in order to deliver its message loyally and powerfully

under circumstances adverse to communication. It also suggests that going
against the common conventions of what remains inside and what outside
the body is part of prophecy. The voice also assures Ezekiel, ‘And they,
whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them’
(Ezek. 2:5). Ezekiel will affect his audience – make them react, leave an
impression on them – even if they do not wish to listen. According to the
voice, someone who is not rebellious eats what is given, receives completely
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without questioning or being picky. This is what the prophet should do, but
this is not what his audience will do. The strange crossing of bodily borders,
in eating the scroll, has something to do with getting through to an unreceptive audience.
The unreceptive audience is a dilemma of prophecy: why would redemptive words be needed if all were already open to divine truth? William Blake’s
illuminated books are also prophecies which try to work a redemptive
purpose, and recognize that they are not preaching to the converted.
However, Blake’s books are the opposite of Ezekiel’s scroll: they are more
likely to swallow up their readers. Blake sees his illuminated books as
human forms. When, at the beginning of his final prophecy Jerusalem, he
announces, ‘I again display my Giant Forms to the Public’, he refers at once
to his illuminated books, and the titanic characters they contain. Reading
the weighty Jerusalem, then, is like being swallowed up by a Giant Form,
entering its body. Blake continues, ‘My former Giants & Fairies having

reciev’d the highest reward possible’, connecting the personification of his
books to their appreciation by his audience. He strongly asserts the salvific
potential of his writing: he claims to hear God speak, and proclaims, ‘Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be: / Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth
shall live in harmony’ (J 3). By using vocabulary specific to his medium,
‘print’ and ‘types’, Blake links the supposed power of his work to its form.
However, this sanguine attitude is marred by the gouging out of words from
the engraving plate. For example, one line with deletions reads, ‘Therefore
Reader,
what you do not approve, &
me for this energetic
exertion of my talent’ (3). Friendliness toward the reader is struck out, as is
confidence in the reader’s reaction.
The fact that Blake created his own books, designing, writing, engraving, printing, finishing and binding them, at once enables him to claim an
intimate relationship with, and strong influence over, his reader, and to
illustrate dramatically the failure of that claim on plate 3 of Jerusalem. The
unique form of Blake’s illuminated books makes them at first glance a different kind of text, a corpus embodied in a different way. They require awareness of the textual body. Unlike poetry embodied in words only, Blake’s
illuminated works cannot be fully reincarnated in any typeface; their body
and soul are integrated. Handmade, they include hints of the process of their
making. Existing between print and manuscript, they emphasize transgression of categories. Depicting characters who enter each other and are part
of each other, they dramatize the instability of bodily borders. From these
characteristics Blake draws prophetic powers for his illuminated books, to
achieve a transformative purpose, and to gain some control over his audience: what kind of readers he will have, and how they will be affected.
As a starting point for understanding the significance of the crossing of
bodily borders which Blake seems to demand of his readers, it is helpful
to turn to two thinkers who offer two different, but interrelated, theories

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on that subject: Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva. Douglas, writing from an
anthropological point of view and thus focusing on the social meaning of
the body, seeks in her study Purity and Danger to unravel the relationship between the unclean and the sacred. She looks at the abominations of
Leviticus, among other purity laws, to discover what characteristics cause
the unclean to be considered unclean. She comes to the conclusion that
‘holiness is exemplified by completeness. Holiness requires that individuals
shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that
different classes of things shall not be confused’ (53). Conversely, anything
that crosses categories or borders is an abomination. Douglas pays particular attention to defilement that relates to the body. When writing about ‘the
symbolism worked upon the human body’ in ritual, she argues:
the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.
The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and
their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We
cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva
and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society,
and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced
in small on the human body.
(115)
As an anthropologist, she concentrates on society as the system symbolized
by the body, but indicates that the body can stand for any system: for
instance, a system of language or of thought. By saying ‘powers and dangers’
are ‘credited to social structure’, she implies that these are not absolute, but
rather invented to support the system. Perhaps, then, this can be applied
to other systems: the borders of language, mental operations, and the body
itself can be seen as arbitrary, kept in place through the threat of danger. It

is possible to distort these boundaries since they are not absolute. Douglas
writes:
all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape
of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable
at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its
specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff
of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by
simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body.
(121)
When orifices and bodily fluids figure in a prohibition, a ritual, a text, then
that is a sign that the vulnerability of margins is at issue. As this study will
show, Blake’s illuminated books are preoccupied with the orifices of the

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body, particularly in the shape of sense organs, and fascinated with blood.
Investing the text with these images gives the text human attributes, and it
reinforces the idea that reading a Blake text means crossing bodily perimeters. The power Douglas sees in this crossing provides a way to understand
Blake’s prophetic purpose. Like the borders of social and other systems,
Blake’s claim to transformation may be arbitrary. As he recognizes, there
is always the possibility of failure; perhaps an encounter with his work will
not produce enlightenment or improvement, or even comprehension. By
dramatizing the taboos of the body’s limits, especially when he often depicts

bodies as not final in their form but metamorphosing and splitting, Blake
acknowledges this arbitrariness, but also borrows the power invested in
borders. By recreating the body in textual form, and encouraging the reader
to cross its borders as well as depicting border crossing within the text, Blake
demonstrates that the shape of the body as we know it is not absolute. This
makes possible a vision of a transformed body. Not only can the human
form exceed its present potentialities, but anything the body can stand
for – according to Douglas, any system of society or ideas – thus can also
potentially be transformed.
Douglas explains, ‘though we seek to create order, we do not simply
condemn disorder’ (94). What lies beyond, or threatens, the margins of a
system is not got rid of, but has a relationship to the ordered system, to
which ‘it symbolises both danger and power’. Douglas gives examples of
rituals in which a journey is made outside the system, whether into the
wilderness of a forest or desert, or the mental wilderness of dreams or irrationality. What is gained by such a journey include ‘powers and truths which
cannot be reached by conscious effort’ such as ‘energy to command and
special powers of healing’ (94). Transformative power is found by transgressing the limits of the system, or the body. This power is not gained
without risk: there is also danger on the margins. Rites of passage are a
variety of ritual which requires a journey outside the system. Because those
being initiated are in a transitional state, they themselves are dangerous,
‘simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable’. While in that ‘marginal period . . . the novices in initiation are temporarily outcast’. Such rites are often said to be highly dangerous, even
deadly, to an extent out of proportion to what actually occurs in the ceremony. ‘To say that the boys risk their lives says precisely that to go out of
the formal structure and to enter the margins is to be exposed to power that
is enough to kill them or make their manhood’ (96). Here again are the
‘powers and dangers’ which are ‘credited to social structure’: the power
seems to reside more in the idea of danger than actual danger. Blake, who,
as we shall see, likens entering his text to entering a human body or even
the underworld, must know that there is little actual, physical danger
in reading a book. To compensate for this inoffensiveness, he borrows
the imaginary power of transgression, and of spiritual journeys, so that his

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audience, even if not attentive, ‘shall know that there hath been a prophet
among them’. Additionally, the danger (even if imaginary) of such a rite of
initiation helps ensure that those unfit to receive the transformative power
of Blake’s prophetic books will fail, as unfit initiates will purportedly ‘die
from hardship or fright, or by supernatural punishment for their misdeeds’
(Douglas 96).
Julia Kristeva takes Douglas’ anthropological observations and applies
them to the individual psyche, and to writing. In Revolution in Poetic Language, through her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic, she considers
disruptions of the system of language, while in Powers of Horror: an Essay on
Abjection, Kristeva confronts threats to the borders of personal identity. To
build her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva begins with ideas
from Lacan: that the child is originally one with its mother and only later
realizes its separate identity. A separate identity is a condition of being able
to use language: one needs a position from which to speak, and an understanding of the existence of objects to be able to form a statement. Kristeva
imagines the characteristics of that pre-linguistic state, as far as they can be
imagined. She calls that state the semiotic chora, and explains, ‘the drives,
which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we
call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases
in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’ (Revolution 25). It
is ‘nonexpressive’, being pre-linguistic, yet it is not totally without structure.

It is ‘regulated’; the mother’s body (around which the child’s drives are
oriented) gives it order (27). Kristeva argues that:
the chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e.
it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another
position (i.e. it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in
order to attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the
chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is
analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.
(26)
The semiotic, then, is associated with drives and rhythm, and is a basis for
proceeding to independent identity and the use of language. Since it is a
basis for language, it continues to exist and occasionally show itself in language. The semiotic underlies, and as drives is perhaps the impulse or fuel
that powers symbolic language, which in turn is associated with order and
meaning. To proceed from the semiotic to the symbolic a child must master
the thetic: being able to have a thesis, make a judgment, take a position in
relation to an object.
Though absolutely necessary, the thetic is not exclusive: the semiotic,
which also proceeds it, constantly tears it open, and this transgression

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brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that
are called ‘creation.’ Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what remodels the symbolic order is always

the influx of the semiotic. This is particularly evident in poetic language
since, for there to be a transgression of the symbolic, there must be an
irruption of drives in the universal signifying order, that of ‘natural’
language which binds together the social unit.
(62)
Being concerned with music as well as meaning, poetic language is a suitable place to find eruptions of the symbolic, of drives, of speaking to express
an urge. When looking at texts, Kristeva denotes as ‘genotext’ passages
which ‘include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic’; the
‘drive energy’ they hold can be detected, for instance, in ‘the accumulation
and repetition of phonemes or rhyme’ as well as ‘melodic devices (such as
intonation or rhythm)’ (86). What she calls the ‘phenotext’ shows symbolic
language: ‘language which serves to communicate’, which ‘obeys rules of
communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee’
(87). Kristeva argues that ‘the signifying process . . . includes both the genotext and the phenotext; indeed it could not do otherwise’ (87–8). However,
‘every signifying practice does not encompass the infinite totality of that
process’ (88). That is, the semiotic and symbolic are both involved in all
writing, and each are revealed to a greater or lesser extent in genotext and
phenotext. In much writing the phenotext dominates because of sociopolitical constraints that make the signifying process fixed, that ‘obliterate
the infinity of the process’ (88). Kristeva insists that the semiotic is a process,
and reading texts which reveal the influence of the semiotic (an example
she gives is James Joyce) ‘means giving up the lexical, syntactic, and semantic operation of deciphering, and instead retracing the path of their production’ (103). Kristeva uses words which emphasize the transgression
involved in the semiotic disrupting the symbolic. Though the symbolic
relies on the semiotic, it is ‘torn’ by it. Like the wilderness that lies outside
of Douglas’ systems, the semiotic is a powerful threat to the symbolic, and
writers who tap into it harness its power, yet not without risk of the symbolic being wholly ‘torn’. If there is ‘an attempt to hypostasize semiotic
motility as autonomous from the thetic – capable of doing without it or
unaware of it’, that is, if the play of the semiotic is pursued so far that the
writer no longer has a position to speak from nor any concept of a listener,
then a ‘text as signifying practice’ will no longer be a text but fall into the
category of ‘drifting-into-non-sense’, the babble of madness (50–1).

For Kristeva, only some texts ‘manage to cover the infinity of the process,
that is, reach the semiotic chora, which modifies linguistic structures’: she
concentrates on ‘certain literary texts of the avant-garde (Mallarmé, Joyce)’,
but also finds that in ‘revolutionary periods . . . signifying practice has

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