Embodied Perception and Criticism of William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion

The title page of Visions, showing the heroine Oothoon running across the ocean, embracing desire, while a patriarchal god-figure flies above with his arms wrapped around his body, a gesture that in Blake’s work is never a good sign. Playful sexual figures dance within the rainbow even as a storm bears in from the side.

The frontispiece to Visions, showing the three characters locked together in an eternal triangle.

The final page of Visions, where the heroine soars engulfed in flames, while her sisters huddle fearfully below, able only to “hear her woes and eccho back her sighs.”

This (very long) essay is adapted from the final chapter of my Master’s thesis, which examines how almost the entire critical discussion of Blake’s Visions enacts the exact dynamics (which we could anachronistically label ‘rape culture’) that the poem itself dramatises in order to dissect. I hope it can be of interest beyond Blake enthusiasts to anyone wanting to understand if being interested in ‘how we perceive’ makes one an individualistic neo-liberal asshole, and to anyone interested in how dualistic ways of seeing (encompassing transcendence and materialism equally) abuse our bodies and the world.

Nay I see that God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall; and that God is the life and being of them all, and that God doth really dwell, and if you will personally… in them all, and hath his Being no where else out of the Creatures.

—The Ranter Jacob Bauthumley, 1650

The Bishops never saw the Everlasting Gospel any more than Tom Paine.

—William Blake, Annotations to Watson

William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion is an extraordinarily rich poem. The work’s challenge to slavery and patriarchy, its position at an approachable threshold to Blake’s later prophecies, its inspiring heroine, and its genesis in a politically explosive England, have stimulated great critical attention. This attention has spread an exceptionally wide net, resulting, as E. P. Thompson charts, in “a great many William Blakes on offer… most of [which] have some plausibility” (xv). This essay charts how accounts of the poem have often either isolated or ignored certain passages of the poem, resulting, I will argue, in distortions of possible meaning overall. Robert N. Essick’s commentary on Visions, for instance, observes that the epistemological middle section of the poem “delves into some rather obscure eighteenth-century debates over the nature of the senses” and as a result, “does not speak directly to the issues of sex, slavery, and colonialism of central interest to modern commentators” (48). This chapter examines whether this claim can be upheld and considers the implications of ignoring or isolating these passages. Lastly, I propose an ‘embodied’ reading which aims to find some historically grounded relevance in these so-called “obscure…debates.”

The segregation of the perception-focused middle section (2.21 to 4.24, as bookended by the chorus of the Daughters) from the rest of Visions creates an unhelpful, ‘disembodied’ split between ways of perceiving and ways of acting. Essick, for example, notes that the shift from “the immediate tyrannies of [Oothoon’s] situation” to “the tyranny of the limited senses” may imply “that Blake links them to the same fundamental errors in thought and deed,” but does not further explore what this crucial connection might entail (49). Such dismemberment of the poem into ‘action’ and ‘philosophy’ parallels larger divisions between ways of reading Blake’s work. Nicholas Williams writes of “the war between Blake’s socially oriented critics and those who would interpret his poetry as an internally coherent, largely mental and necessarily ahistorical triumph,” describing it as “a war between the mental and the corporeal themselves” (1). In the case of this debate, he argues, “Blake stands at one of the busiest intersections in English literature” (xii). Yet this “war” between idealistic and materialistic modes of reading is to some extent played out in Visions itself, where both modes are revealed as complementary aspects of a dualistic epistemology that surprisingly, as I will show, share a denigration of the material realm and the body. Placing the epistemologically-inclined sections in relation to the rest of the poem reveals the connections Blake draws between ways of seeing and their lived expressions. I will also indicate how Blake uses this relationship to criticize specific cultural practices found in his time, anatomizing epistemologies he opposed, thereby “Giving a body to Falshood that it may be cast off for ever” (Jerusalem 12:13). I use the framework of ‘Embodied Visions’ to reassert the necessary continuity of the poem, and explore, to borrow Peter Otto’s phrase, “the fate of the body in a culture of transcendence” (8).

The critical relationship with the dissection of modes of perception in the sections of the poem has shifted over time. Older studies in the footsteps of Northrop Frye or Harold Bloom are more likely to engage with the apparently metaphysical bent of Oothoon, Bromion, and Theotormon, yet their common focus on transcendent ‘free love’ often depends on the very dualisms that, as I hope to demonstrate, the central sections criticize, meaning they were misinterpreted or isolated from the rest of the poem.

Therefore when Jane Peterson wrote in 1973 that “Visions of the Daughters of Albion has not yet been discussed as Blake’s portrayal of the problem of perception,” the observation was fair, yet her solution did not heal the divide (253). Instead, as in Mark Bracher’s “The Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” the epistemological sections are abstracted, made dominant, and used to insist upon autonomous individual responsibility for all outcomes, which are ultimately based on “the metaphysical decision which one makes” (Bracher 164). Vernon E. Lattin, for example, finds that “the condition of Oothoon’s enslavement is her mental attitude” (14). These approaches ignore how Oothoon deconstructs the structures that inculcate such metaphysics to begin with. Relating the centre of the poem to the ‘action’ will show that ‘Urizenic’ perception is not merely an unfortunate individual choice made in a vacuum of non-ideological freedom.

Uncomfortable with the implications of Blake as champion of an illusive “sovereignty of the individual” (Bracher 164), more recent criticism began to move away from Visions’  exploration of perception. Nancy Moore Goslee in 1990 registers unease with “the way Blake’s representations of freedom from enlightenment metaphysics merge with symbols of a more conventional enslavement by gender” (102). Goslee argues that the epistemological sections compromise the more “revolutionary claims of race and gender,” by “suggest[ing] that private, metaphysical vision brings about social change” (104). David Blake and Elliot Gruner criticize “[t]he metaphysical registers of Blake’s polemic…[which] divert attention away from the suffering which initiates the poem” and are therefore a “retreat from these original social concerns” (26). As we will see, such suspicions can be read as a reaction to the imposition of models of transcendence and idealism onto the poem by earlier critics, founded in a separation from, and often denigration of, the material and the body. Ironically, by avoiding discussion of modes of perception in the poem we miss out on Blake’s dissection of the forces which made those sections appear distasteful or reactive to begin with.

II

Before considering how dualistic epistemologies appear in both the critical tradition and in Visions itself, a brief outline of an alternative standpoint may be a useful starting point. What follows derives from my reading of Visions, rather than Blake’s entire oeuvre (although I have drawn on other works, especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), and more investigation would be required to see if it would serve as a way of reading other poems. In some ways this is a conclusion before the argument, but the landscape is subtle and full of pitfalls, and it may be useful to have an alternative, ‘embodied’ vision with which to negotiate it.  

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from E. P. Thompson’s study of Blake’s antinomian tendencies, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Working in the tradition of historians A.L. Morton and Christopher Hill, Thompson noted the striking similarities between radical cultures of antinomian Dissent—such as the Ranters—and Blake’s idiosyncratic style, and traced the possible transmission of these cultures through to Blake. Subsequent scholarship has both challenged and focused this connection. Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard disproved Thompson’s hypothesis of a maternal Muggletonian connection by discovering Blake’s mother’s connections with the evangelical Moravian church, yet as Thompson himself writes, his “argument does not stand or fall upon the Muggletonian hypothesis” (106). Hill and Thompson note the prevalence of antinomian currents in the late eighteenth-century, with “innumerable reprints of seventeenth-century antinomian books and pamphlets” (Thompson 6 and passim, Hill 214-226). John Mee argues that the “conscious revival of ranting ideas” arose from a similar historical moment rather than any direct lived tradition (“Heresy” 43). It is not my endeavour to establish precisely where and how Blake encountered a cluster of immanent visions: either way provides a vocabulary and historical grounding to the enriched materialism which Blake’s work presents.

Accounts connecting antinomianism in the revolutionary 1650s to Blake are concerned with the ‘enthusiastic’ tradition of opposition to all forms of hierarchical authority or ‘Moral Law,’ especially church and state. In many writings by Ranters, Muggletonians, and others of antinomian persuasion, reliance on inner (embodied) revelation depends upon rejecting any soul/body creator/creation dualism (Thompson 83). The Ranter Laurence Clarkson wrote “till flesh be made Spirit and Spirit flesh, so not two but one, thou art in perfect bondage” (qtd. in Makdisi 97). Morton saw this “radical, quasi-pantheist redefinition of the notion of God” as the key Ranter belief (Thompson 26). Such dissent was taken as a political threat, not as a matter of private concern: Joseph Bauthumley (author of my epigraph) was imprisoned by the state together with other antinomian writers, their works burned, and Bauthumley’s tongue bored through (Makdisi 95). Thompson traces how critics like Kathleen Raine, who seek to recruit Blake wholesale to ‘The Tradition’ (i.e. Behmenism, Neo-Platonism, hermeticism, alchemy), often connect him with religious groups such as the Philadelphians. However, he writes, “the fierce antinomian opposition between our faith and their reason becomes, with the Philadelphians, an opposition between mundane materialism and supercelestial visionary mystery,” leading to “the loss of radical attack [and] failing social content” (46). As Edward Larrissy notes, “Blake inverts the values of the occult tradition. He believes that body and soul are one” (33). The “Argument” of the Marriage could be read as an expression of this gradual historical slide of embodied dissent into anti-materialist dualism: once, in the seventeenth-century, “The just man kept his course,” creating a “perilous path” which gave an enriched vision of the world— “Roses are planted where thorns grow.” However “the villain left the paths of [conventional] ease” in order to appropriate the “perilous paths, and drive | The just man into barren climes,” where he “rages in the wilds” outside polite acceptance. The "sneaking serpent" usurper of the path now “walks | In mild humility,” masking conservative quietism with the trappings of spirituality (Pl. 2). Read thus the argument would be an appropriate, historically meaningful opening statement for Blake’s attack on dualist epistemologies in the Marriage.

With this in mind, Visions can be read as pointing towards an enriched vision that includes and reanimates the material world and physical senses, rather than to the imposition of imaginary ideals, as critics from diverse dualistic traditions have sought to prove. Blake described this elision in a variety of ways, from the clear statements of ‘The Voice of the Devil’  in the Marriage, that “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul,” and that “Energy is the only life and is from the Body” (plate 4, E34), to the narrator of Europe who asks his muse, a “fairy,” “what is the material world, and is it dead?,” to which the fairy promises to “shew you all alive | The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy” (iii.13, 16-17, E60). Such expressions are unequivocally not anti-materialist, yet because Blake condemns the narrowness of a dualised or devitalised vision, and criticises the tendency to “In ignorance… view a small portion & think that All,” many have assumed that what he values is an alternative or ‘better,’ ‘spiritual’ perspective  (E216). This is often framed as a conflict between ‘Accident’ (a tiresome material realm or body) and essence or “Substance” (an eternal, imaginative, superior, redemptive internal ‘soul’ or mind). The words are Blake’s, and despite seeming exclusive and antagonistic, it is not helpful to take them this way. “The Little Black Boy” from The Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a case in point: misreadings result when the boy’s chilling words “I am black, but O! my soul is white” and desire to “be like” the white boy “and he will then love me” are read straight rather than as a savage indictment of Christian dualism and the liberal desire for sameness (E9).[1] As Larrissy argues, “Blake uses the complex and ramified symbolism of a tradition marked by dualism of mind and body to attack that dualism” (33).

In context in Milton: A Poem, Blake uses these words to indicate how “Accident being formed | Into Substance & Principle, by the cruelties of Demonstration | It became Opake & Indefinite…” (29.35-37, E128). In other words, one could paraphrase, the physical, seen in a reductive way as the main and only event by the norms of rational empiricism, was stripped of agency and vitality. Victims of such a view, Blake suggests, can no longer see ‘through’ the literal-physical, perceiving only a reductive materialism, what philosopher Val Plumwood calls “a stripped-down, dualised machine nature” (6). The world becomes “Opake,” a one-dimensional realm that is paradoxically “Indefinite” because any other qualities become unproveable or indeterminate. Plumwood writes how, in this modern paradigm, “Being is split into an uncreative, featureless material part and a hyperseparate, externalised and often dematerialised ‘director’ or ‘driver’, usually intelligence, mind or reason, on the other side… it is to this external driver that true agency and respect is attributed” (“Nature” 4). Against the harmful effects of such dualisms, she argues for a reanimated relation to the material world, an enriched materialism, and Visions can be read as Blake’s dramatization of a similar critique and solution—an inclusive embodiment that enlivens perceiver and perceived. In Blake’s Critique of Transcendence, Otto tracks how The Four Zoas “treats chaos as a human creation, a product of the sublime turn from the suffering body,” whereby the sublime denotes “a wide variety of cultural practices designed to achieve transcendence,” that in their failure reveal “the suffering body that is [their] ground”—the very place they are designed to escape, control and disguise (8, 18). I rely on Otto’s framework in suggesting that Visions expresses an expanded, not transcendent, sensory engagement, that remains in the body and the world, as well as a scathing analysis of specific transcendent practices, fuelled by Blake’s “actively and overtly oppositional enthusiasm” (Mee “Heresy” 53). I will now outline what happens when instead of this embodied understanding, divisive frameworks are applied to the poem.

III

Mid-century critics established a tradition that set Blake against the material world, taking his denunciations of ‘Nature’ as transcendently anti-corporeal and explicitly anti-natural.[2] Northrop Frye’s landmark work Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake attributed the view to Blake that “nothing outside man [is] worthy of respect. Nature is miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic, and half dead. It has no intelligence, no kindness, no love and no innocence” (39). As Otto notes, this view “polarize[s] life between ‘the Creator and the Creation’” (28). Frye’s formulation was influential to the point that Blake’s 1995 biographer Peter Ackroyd could mention “the material world that [Blake] despised” without causing any reaction (272).[3] The formulation implies a transcendent force—Otto’s sublime, above—as the animating power that manipulates and gives meaning to an inert material realm, the “unconscious floundering universe” (Frye 39). Depending on the permutation, this transcendent force can take the form, for example, of the Christian God, the divided Cartesian mind, or the Platonic soul (or some forms of the Romantic Imagination).[4] This force is conceptualised in a dualised hierarchy with its ‘other’: Creator-creation, mind-matter, soul-body, imagination-mundane world—the permutations are many. The belief that Blake scorns the literal world around him, rather than criticising dualistic ways of being in that world, has influenced even those who are critical of this account. Michael Ferber, for instance, writes that Blake’s nature is “a demonic force whose power must be broken and trampled underfoot. It gets in the way of everything he honours: forgiveness, brotherhood, imagination, art. It fosters war, tyranny and slavery, it perverts religion, it degrades art. It is a snare and a delusion. And it is female” (91).

Ferber’s dramatic turn of phrase draws our attention to the way in which constructions of the material world as chaotic other and inert background are paralleled in what Plumwood calls “the western mapping of a gender hierarchy onto the nature/culture distinction” (10). Criticism of Visions has often been characterised by what Helen Bruder calls “a relentless association of women with an ensnaring natural world” (42). The division between the ‘passive nature/woman’ and the ‘active consciousness/man’ underscores comments such as Frye’s criticism of Orc’s “helpless dependence on Mother Nature” and admiration for how he “gets more control of her” (227-228). These constructions have several implications in terms of the way Visions and its heroine have been understood.

Firstly, a tradition dominant for much of last century has presented Visions as a “hymn to free love” whereby sexual experience is eternally redemptive of fallen materiality (Bloom, E900). Raine claims that Oothoon “knows the spiritual nature of love, and eloquently defends Platonic love, ‘free’ love, whose laws are based upon the nature of the soul as the Platonists conceived it” (1.166). This summarises the problem nicely: that ‘free’ love is seen to be timeless and “spiritual,” thus the body is always “defiled” already, and must be tutored by fallen experience and transcended.  As Otto explains, “If the fallen world can be redeemed by a simple turn to the imagination, there is no need to analyse its causes, mechanisms, or structures…one could [then] argue that the violence of the fallen world is redemptive” (8). This is what numerous readers have done.[5] Bloom refers to “the sexual awakening [Bromion] has brought about in his victim” (E901) and describes Oothoon as “having enjoyed the sexual act, though it was a rape” (anthologised in Romantic Poetry 45). He glosses Oothoon’s call for the eagles to “Rend away this defiled bosom”— a self-harming reflection of Theotormon’s body-negating asceticism— as a display of sexual enjoyment designed to manipulate Theotormon (E901). Michael G. Cooke describes the violent results as “an act of enlargement and love” (110). Robert P. Waxler writes how “entrance into sexual passion could lead the feminine consciousness to grace” (50). These perspectives, which as Goslee notes, assume that “sexual experience is so essentially good that it leads to a liberating imaginative experience” (114), rely upon a mutually exclusive distinction between mind/spirit and matter.[6] “Oothoon’s degrading experience of sex asserts the holiness of her love,” writes Stephen Cox in 1992 (113).  Cox argues that in Visions “Blake hardens his dualism” in distinguishing between the “repellently sensuous” and “defiled body,” and the “undefiled soul,” which in his formulation benefits from sexual violence. In his version of Visions, “every form of sexual joy can be a legitimate form of ‘Love’,” because delight is “incorruptible” (117, 113). Cox supports this with Wollstonecraft’s statement “I discern not a trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter,” aligning this with Blake’s view of the senses (119). The problem with Blake’s depiction of rape, Cox writes, is that “no matter what Oothoon may say against common notions of reason and sense, she will retain the reader’s sympathy” (123). Williams calls Oothoon’s statement “I am pure,”  “seemingly nonfactual” (86). These critical arguments would collapse if the central section of the poem were fully considered in the context of Bromion and Theotormon’s actions, as the poem’s dissection of dualistic perception would undermine their own critical assumptions.

Secondly, and closely related, ignoring Blake’s analysis of practices that divide and conquer the body prevents us from recognising Oothoon’s agency. Blake’s embodiment of certain epistemologies in violent characters is connected with his claim that “He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only” (There is No Natural Religion b, E3). “The Ratio” is a deanimated vision that turns everything outside the self into a resource, requiring manipulation by an external driver, and a female sexuality thus perceived has no desire or agency of its own. Within cultural practices that define female sexuality as inherently without agency, as psychologist and researcher into sexual violence Nicola Gavey charts, “sexual encounters can easily be narrated in ways where the absence of a woman’s desire and pleasure is not only permissible, but almost unremarkable” (142). Readings based on the assumption that for Blake “salvation comes from the ‘improvement of sensual enjoyment,’” ignore the textual evidence that Oothoon does not ‘enjoy’ Bromion’s violence (Hagstrum 115). Steve Clark, for example, writes that after picking the Marygold, Oothoon’s “subsequent ‘wing’d exalting swift delight’ (1: 14, E45) can, however, be read as synonymous with rather than opposed to the subsequent rape,” that “[t]he initial act can be read as a cruel dispelling of illusion, if read consecutively, or a longed-for consummation, if read as simultaneous,” and that “no mention is made of [Oothoon] putting up resistance, and her emission of ‘woes’ might be seen as motivated by the desertion of her assailant rather than by condemnation of his assault” (164). Susan Matthews contests accounts of Visions that imply “not just a fortunate fall, but a fortunate rape,” but only by quoting Martin Priestman’s argument that “though ‘Bromion rent her with his thunders’ certainly sounds like rape, Oothoon never makes an issue of her unwillingness” (147­–48). Rather than challenging the connection established by earlier critics between violence and vision, Matthews contests the coercive nature of Bromion’s violence by offering a dubious redefinition of consent.

In a further removal of agency, many critics have used language that frames Oothoon in objectified terms reflexive to Theotormon— she is liberated because she can “offer herself” (Bloom Romantic Poetry 45). Butler complains that “whatever [Theotormon] might have had to say” about Oothoon’s desire for him “does not seem to matter” (44). Several accounts describe Oothoon as “aggressive” or “wilful”.[7] These gendered misreadings of agency sometimes assume that Theotormon is the failed protagonist. Brenda S. Webster, for example, calls Theotormon the “hero,” the protagonist in an Oedipal psychodrama (91). When Bloom writes that “it only remains for Theotormon to truly fulfil [Oothoon],” the implication is that the critic is better placed to understand Oothoon, blurring mastery of the (passive) text with transformation of a (passive) female body (E901). Williams, for example, describes how, when other critics misinterpret the poem, “[t]he gap that Bromion forcefully opened is thus effectively closed” (90).

Sympathetic critical identification with Theotormon has obscured the extent to which critical enterprises have enacted the same dualistic denigration of the material and the body (and its associated idea of the ‘female’). Theotormon’s response is “moving,” writes Bloom, because “all men have suffered his jealousy,” but “to seek to possess, to appropriate another, is to diminish a human subject into a natural object” (111-2, 116, my emphasis). A fallen world that is impure and inert implies a fallen body that needs domination and control, in Frye’s words, “there for us to transform” (39). This calls to mind Bruder’s survey of late-eighteenth-century constructions of female sexuality as both passive, needing transformation, and ravenous, needing domination and control (65). In similar fashion, the removal of agency is justified by critical revision of Bromion’s rape of Oothoon as something she authored, because “[t]he feelings Bromion felt roused in him were against his consent” (Butler 46). “The trouble with Oothoon’s Thel-like prettiness,” continues Butler, “is that…[it] functions as a lure not for any particular man but all men—including, in Oothoon’s case, the reader” (45). “Oothoon has engaged in an extra-marital amour, apparently with Bromion,” was Frye’s phrase (239), but more recently too John C. Hampsey is able to write that “the poem is a prophetic cautionary fable about women who are unable to celebrate life and desire” (100). The constructed community of criticism—“all men,” “us”—has led to a selective tradition that favours certain versions of the text.

Concern over the removal of agency has prompted Laura Haigwood to object to calling Bromion’s actions rape as it “impl[ies] that Oothoon has no real will of her own toward it” (97). She argues that “Oothoon is not a rape victim but an active and aggressive participant in her experience,” as “she does not effectively protest” (98, 101). For Haigwood, acknowledging that sexual violence is violent, perpetuates models of femininity without agency. This argument ignores the violence of the text, and effaces the way in which Oothoon highlights the limits to agency imposed by cultural indoctrination. Visions gives us an analysis in poetic bodies of cultural practices and distorted ideologies that denigrate and subjugate women, which is not to insist on the inevitability of such practices. Haigwood’s liberal model of rational autonomy is unable to accommodate Bromion’s violence except as a result of Oothoon’s failed personal choices.

Thirdly, and again interrelatedly, the poem is often framed as a polemic against social restrictions, described as early as 1912 as an “outburst against restrictive law and reason” (Allardyce Nicoll 112). However, as with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, blind spots relating to power and agency meant that it was sometimes not questioned whose restrictions were lifted. Often liberated access to the female body is celebrated, rather than “the liberating joys of sexuality” for women (Ellis 26). Brian Wilkie, for example, claims that “Blake doubtless hates in women what Oothoon calls ‘hypocrite modesty’ (6.16) not only because it limits women’s erotic potential but also because it limits men’s sexual enjoyment of women” (83). Grounding Blake’s work in antinomian tendencies is a reminder that his concept of freedom differs from modern libertarian formulations of licence.[8] Cox registers confusion as to the difference, asking “if freedom isn’t doing what one likes, then what is it?” (123). To illustrate the distinction, Hill describes an antinomian in 1746 said to have rejected all moral laws: “When asked the obvious succeeding question,” Hill writes wryly, “‘Have you a right to all the women in the world?’ he replied, tactfully, ‘Yes—if they consent’” (224). Perhaps the recruitment of Blake to an agenda of sexual entitlement has certain parallels with the way in which “[m]uch of Ranter libertinism was taken over by restoration rakes” (Hill 22). As Thompson notes, the antinomian impulse might “lead to strange consequences in the unbalanced mind” (26-27). The ‘freedom’ celebrated in the poem will have serious limitations unless we pay attention to Oothoon’s celebration of agency in diverse forms outside the self, and opposition to ideologies that frame other beings as resources.

Blake’s annotations to Bishop Watson defend Tom Paine, whose deistic, revolutionary writings the Bishop had attacked. Blake felt they were both wrong, but as Thompson writes, “Paine (in Blake’s view) has much the best of the argument, since his polemics are directed, not at the Everlasting Gospel (which he does not understand) but at the Moral Law of Antichrist” (60). Both miss the fully embodied dimension, Blake suggests—“The Bishops never saw the Everlasting Gospel any more than Tom Paine”—but at least Paine does not reject the material world for a made-up transcendence, dismissed by Blake as “an allegorical abode where existence hath never come” (E62). Paine ignores what to Blake is the enriched view of the world: the Bishop denigrates the whole lot. Blake celebrates Paine’s attack on the authorities of church and state, even as he criticizes Paine’s rational Deism, referring to “the Holy Ghost who in Paine strives with Christendom as in Christ he strove with the Jews” (E614). Blake’s annotations deplore the Bishop’s hypocrisy in pretending to defend the Bible, whilst to Blake’s mind going against its very spirit. I note this in order to explain how historically oriented criticism emerges more favourably than Platonic, Christian dualist or ‘free love’ readings, in terms of gender politics. Questionable defences of ‘love’ or ‘the imagination’ depart from the text for superimposed ideals, distorting Oothoon’s words and actions, as shown above. By contrast, critics such as David Erdman have been able to read Visions on its own terms with less apparent difficulty. His prescient observation in “Blake’s Vision of Slavery” in 1952 that “[i]nterpretation…is sometimes blurred by failure to distinguish Oothoon’s offer of herself to Theotormon from her rape by Bromion” demonstrates why Erdman’s work remains important. He states here in uncomplicated fashion that “Oothoon’s argument is not that she likes Bromion or slavery but that she refuses to accept the status of a fallen woman,” and that “Oothoon resists Bromion” (247). The latter phrase, however, was removed in revision of the article into a chapter in Prophet (236). Nevertheless, without the rejection of the material implicit in idealist readings, the body fares better. Yet Erdman, whilst avoiding some of the tendencies charted above, still describes Oothoon as a resource: “a continent longing for fruit in her fertile valleys” who “wants to be cultivated by free men” (Prophet 227).

More recent critics have noted the destructive nature of ‘free love’ interpretations of the poem, and redefined Visions in historical relation to the tangible issues of oppression the poem indicts.[9] As mentioned above, Essick suggests that “modern interpreters” are more likely to focus on “the issues of sex, slavery and colonialism” than on the epistemological turn, leaving the question of perception, with all its taints of idealism, largely behind (48).[10] However to divide Visions is to accept epistemology and action as separate, and valorize the opposite, maligned side of the division, without examining how the poem connects these problems. Makdisi notes how

often in Blake scholarship, issues and questions in Blake’s work that seem, according to a modern political idiom, not to be readily identifiable as political in nature—his understanding of being, his views on art, his sense of love, his conception of the imagination—are assumed to mark a departure into some other realm: the mythic, the cosmic, the universal, the spiritual—all of which are assumed to be somehow opposed to or irreconcilable with the historical, the political, and the real. (2)

The assumptions Makdisi notes are understandable when we see, as detailed above, how universal knowledge claims have been invoked in service of biased and historically bound gender norms. But it must be remembered that despite his approval of Paine’s politics, Blake still saw something missing in the greater scheme of anatomizing the logic of domination. Critics such as Bruder have shown that Visions relates to specific late-eighteenth-century forms of, in her word, “literal” enslavement and patriarchal oppression, and is not a disembodied psychological or spiritual allegory (77). Having done so, is there now space to extend the understanding of Blake as “deeply engaged with politics and history” (Otto 14), to include the disorienting politics of Blake’s nondualist epistemology? In other words, is it possible to reintegrate the dynamic Blake builds between perception and action?

To avoid this question is to minimise Oothoon’s insights. Haigwood has a certain point when she criticizes the tendency to “overemphasise the victimization” of Oothoon (95). Unspoken but specific expectations of victim behaviour in response to sexual violence have contributed to the belief that Oothoon’s pursuit of the logic of domination into an analysis of perception is either irrelevant or unrealistic. Essick writes that “she is less a dramatized character, burdened with the trauma of rape and its aftermath, than a mouthpiece for Blake’s ongoing attack” on Newton and Locke (49). This echoes Gillham 34 years earlier, who claimed it “diminishes the Visions as a work of art” how “Oothoon is acting obviously as the mouthpiece of Blake who is making an attack on the moral philosophies of the 18th century” (49-50). Swearingen argues that her characterisation shows a lack of suffering and thus “insensitivity to the specifically sexual… event of the rape.” He thinks this is unrealistic and therefore shows the mythic nature of the poem: “Oothoon is not an actual woman, nor the rape an actual rape” (206). David Aers’ claim that “it is misleadingly undialectic to imagine a female consciousness like Oothoon’s” that has “so clear a revolutionary critique of sexual and societal exploitation” arguably comes from similar assumptions (“Sex” 32). The expectation is that she should follow a homologous pattern of disintegration. “It’s as if we see moving beyond… trauma as denying its impact,” writes Vanessa Veselka, emphasising that her argument is against the imposition of a single model of response onto all experiences of sexual violence, and not a reactive or minimising further set of demands (56-61). She argues that the expectation of collapse stems from the same narratives that construct rape as theft and connect a woman’s value with sexual purity, yet also notes the impact of these narratives on women’s experiences (58). There is no convincing reason as to why Blake would suddenly devolve into using Oothoon as “a mouthpiece” for abstract philosophical debates, as Essick suggests (49). Rather, the invitation to us as readers is to make sense of the connections between what Oothoon, Bromion and Theotormon say, do, think, and see. The same cultural norms exposed in Theotormon and Bromion’s treatment of Oothoon underwrite a reluctance to engage with her unfolding exposure of the interrelatedness of violent actions and thought structures.

Some of the phenomenological approaches increasingly prevalent within the growing area of literary ‘ecocriticism’ have engaged with issues of epistemology in Visions. Such accounts differ from the founding ‘Green Romanticism’ of Jonathan Bate, for example, by emphasising Timothy Morton’s view that “Nature [is] a transcendental term in a material mask” (qtd. in Hutchings “Ecocriticism” 196). Because Blake does not fit an approach solely celebrating texts about wilderness or ‘nature’—with the attendant dualism of such a generic code—ecocritical readers of his work necessarily participate in the same debates as the rest of Blake criticism.

Kevin Hutchings’ Imagining Nature is the only book-length study which explicitly aims to revise the characterisation of Blake as nature’s adversary, in part by reframing Blake’s damning comments against ‘nature’ as attacks on specific “discursive practices” (Nature 206). Hutchings argues that Blake’s work exposes how “nature embodies, on a conceptual level, the inescapable politics of human practice,” and elsewhere discusses Oothoon’s “attempts to refute the socially and ecologically destructive dualisms underpinning...the tendency... to align human biology with a hostile natural world that must be transcended in the name of an ostensibly liberatory spirituality” (Nature 9, “Pastoral” 1). Yet Imagining Nature concludes only that Blake’s works demonstrate an “ambivalent…stance,” as their “contrary sets of assertions are exceedingly difficult to reconcile” (113). Similarly, Mark Lussier argues that Blake’s accepted hostility to nature “needs to be re-examined,” but only because “Blake’s stance… did not crystallize into such a single vision” (“Ecology” 398). Rather than using the label of ‘ambiguity’ as what Matthews calls “the intellectual means to quiet conflict” in Blake’s work, these accounts need to be taken as an invitation to continue to re-consider the critical consensus as to Blake’s hostility to the material world (3).

The willingness of those using a consciously ecocritical framework to re-engage with perception in the poem stems in part from the idealist approach to history prevalent in such frameworks. This approach argues that current ecological crises are, in ecofeminist Freya Mathews’ words, “a symptom of a deeper, metaphysical crisis in human consciousness” (qtd. in Rigby par. 2). Hutchings, for example, argues that “human conceptions of nature are largely the cause of nature’s devaluation and downfall” (Nature 207). Both Hutchings and Lussier implicitly continue what they see as Blake’s attempt to replace “the enlightenment episteme… with an episteme of wholeness” (Lussier “Ecology” 407). This one-directional causality stands in curious contrast to the focus on the material world found throughout the works of both authors, a contradiction at the heart of many ecocritical accounts. A perspective of “wholeness” is conceived as a stable ‘thing’ that Blake ‘had,’ and that the reader is implicitly encouraged to also ‘have,’ rather than as specific activity. Perhaps we need to remember that Blake’s insistence on the politics of being comes from a different tradition to the sovereign autonomy of “the Painite/Lockean individual” (Makdisi 39). Ecocritical accounts that rely on an ahistoric version of this concept of the individual struggle to recognise Blake’s engagement with specifics of human reality—in Otto’s words, “Blake’s patient delineation of the traumatic real and the relations on which it depends” (34). An embodied criticism needs to further value the material reality by attending to Blake’s dissection of how it shapes individuals. In the context of Visions, this means reading the epistemological inquiry in relation to the physical and social action of the poem, which it does not exist without.

IV

The motto which opens Visions—“The Eye sees more than the Heart knows”—has been subjected to every possible divergent interpretation. Bloom claims it suggests “the primacy of perception over the limited wisdom of the natural heart” (101), and Debbie Lee that it instructs “viewers to... disentangl[e] themselves from the self-centred heart” (99). Both seem to reference Blake’s tirade against “the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart” in Jerusalem (E201), but this is no reason to take all references to the “Heart” as critical. Wilkie dismisses the motto in exasperation—“whatever that enigmatic statement means, exactly” (68). Essick calls it “cryptic” and is “tempted to claim that Blake simply made a mistake” but admits this is “suspect,” before making a crucial comparison to Isiah 6:9: “Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not” (35). This comparison to the “firm perswasion” of the Biblical prophetic mode shows the importance of defining Blake’s conception of prophecy to a reading of the motto and the narrative of Visions (E38).

Blake’s prophetic mode is diagnostic, rather than prognostic. His works claim company with the Biblical prophets: when Isaiah dines with the narrator in the Marriage, he explains that he

saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. (E38)

Blake explains the prophetic role in his annotations to Watson: “Prophets in the modern sense of the word [as foretellers] have never existed... Every honest man is a Prophet he utters his opinion both of private & public matters | Thus | If you go on So | the result is So” (E617). By this account Blake’s prophetic function involves anatomising a culture, enquiring into the logic of the oppressions he sees around him, and uttering his indignant opinions as to what the problems are.

In Isaiah 6:9 the prophet is acting as cultural critic to identify a problem whereby information is taken in but not digested or absorbed. Similarly the motto may be read as a diagnosis of what is wrong with the Urizenic ideology the poem exposes: much is available at a sensory “Eye” level, but less is processed or understood at an integrated “Heart” level. This would parallel the Ranter Thomas Tany’s words: “Christ in the head is a lye, without being in the heart” (qtd. in Thompson 29). Blake’s use of the word “more” raises the question of quality versus quantity—the sense-based way of knowing evidently involves a great deal of information, but these sense data are of limited worth if the understanding is impoverished. The enrichment of the knowledge of the Eye constitutes both Oothoon’s perceptive progression and the narrative movement of the poem.

Thus I agree with Peterson’s remark that we must take the motto to indicate that the poem deals with “the problem of perception” (253). I disagree, however, that this means we must turn away from physicality and history as “the wrong kind of perception” to pursue a self-referential “true perception” of the “‘inward Eye’” (Peterson 253). The survey above indicates that such idealism, in Blake’s words,

…make[s] an Abstract, which is a Negation

Not only of the Substance from which it is derived

A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer

Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power

An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing

This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power

And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation. 

(Jerusalem 10.9-15, E153)

To conclude that “Heart” knowledge is superior to “Eye” knowledge, and that the senses are “the wrong kind of perception” is understandable, but it distorts Blake’s argument, which insists on enriching rather than transcending “the Vegetated Mortal Eye’s perverted & single vision” (E202). As my discussion of modes of seeing within the poem will suggest, Oothoon asserts an enlivened vision that includes and reanimates the physical senses, not the imposition of imaginary ideals.

The images and principal words from the motto recur at the point where Oothoon begins to question ways of seeing. Looking outside the culture that perceives and constructs her as degraded, she turns to figures of renewal and dawn from the natural world, echoing the Song of Songs, culminating in her statement “Arise my Theotormon I am pure” (2.23-28). The contrast between how she is viewed and how she now sees herself impels a critique of Lockean education:

“They told me that the night & day were all that I could see:

They told me I had five senses to inclose me up.

And they inclos’d 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.  (2.30-34)

Oothoon rejects the reductive binaries she has been made to see and taught to see, describing an engagement with only the empirical “five senses” in claustrophobic terms of imprisonment. This circumscription, by the repeated forces of “They,” has injured the eye’s ability to integrate knowledge beyond the intake of sense-data, meaning that the Heart is “sunk...into the Abyss,” like an apocalyptic sunset. Oothoon frames this constrained vision as a kind of death in life, a loss not only of the perception of life outside the self, but of the experience of being alive itself, with only “single vision” left as a substitute. Within this passage, she does not reject the senses, only the way they have been used to “inclose [her] up” into an uncreative, dead materialism, which is sensory engagement without embodied participation. The violence of being “obliterated and erased” reveals Blake’s insistent connection between coercive ways of seeing and their expression. Like Bourdieu’s account of education as “the process through which a cultural arbitrary is historically reproduced,” Oothoon realises the extent to which her education has served to perpetuate an ideology rather than teach her anything (32).[11] As Larrissy notes, for Blake “[t]he world is not only described mechanistically for the purposes of science. It is experienced thus” (81). Yet the question arises, what is there to see beyond “the night & day”? Where else is her “infinite brain” to go? Her engagement with the contrasting, related perspectives of Theotormon and Bromion helps to answer this, as she searches for a position beyond binaries, rejecting both Lockean empiricism and mystic idealism.

V

Oothoon’s insight invites an examination of the specific forms of “they” in Visions. It is by understanding these embodiments of what Blake calls “Falshood” that we can unravel the contradictions in human reality they create. Visions engages with specific contested ideologies, not an abstract and eternal psychological pitfall—“The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity,” the “voices of the Living Creatures” tell the abstract “Reasoner” in Jerusalem (E205). “By mapping the various relations and voices that produce the fallen world,” Otto writes in relation to The Four Zoas, “Blake hopes his readers will recover the threads of the conversation of which they are part and, in so doing, gain the power to change it” (33). This is equally true of Visions, and the first and oft-noted connection is to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). It is beyond my scope in this thesis to summarise Locke’s thought or track the full extent of Blake’s productive skirmishes with the philosopher, but I will trace several key ideas that relate to Visions.

Firstly, the Essay rejects innate ideas and describes the human mind as a tabula rasa wherein “simple ideas” are supplied by the senses and are made into knowledge by the mind. The mind stands apart and superior to the material world, meaning that in the Essay, paradoxically, “Locke directs attention to an internal reality” (Otto 41). Despite appearing to valorise the material at the expense of the ideal, Locke’s thought is rather a permutation of the familiar dynamic that posits “an autonomous power” above and in charge of the chaotic raw material of reality (Otto 41). Blake’s work challenges such a conception, not least because it negates the antinomian intuitions of the enthusiast. Locke attacked the “firmness of Perswasion” in those of “enthusiasm,” who “feel the hand of GOD moving within, and the impulses of the spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel” (4.19.8, 12). Blake’s Isaiah responds in the Marriage to this attack on “firm perswasion” (E38), and Blake elsewhere objects to Locke’s tabula rasa because it conflicts with his belief that all knowledge worth having is available to “the Child & to the Poor & Unlearned” regardless of formal education: “The Man who says we have No Innate Ideas must be a Fool & Knave. Having No Con-Science or Innate Science” (E664, 648).

Secondly, Locke uses the metaphor of a “dark room” or cavern with apertures where light comes through to describe the operation of the mind and senses (2.11.17). Blake’s works suggest agreement: the fairy narrator of Europe opens the poem with the diagnosis that “Five windows light the cavern’d Man” (E60), and Blake repeats a similar figure in the Marriage, and in Visions where Oothoon is “inclos’d” (2.32). The difference is in whether this state of affairs is inevitable or conditional. Locke’s Essay  reads as a theory of the true foundations of reality, rather than as a diagnosis of current delusions. Blake’s works reject “[t]he universe of rational thought built on this foundation” as it “provides the dogma used to circumscribe existence” (Otto 43). In other words, Blake’s poetry can be seen as an “attempt to historicize” Locke’s thought (Otto 43). Visions does not imply Locke’s claim are wrong, but places them as specific conditioned relations between human bodies at a specific point in time. This is why we must view Bromion and Theotormon’s speeches as indivisible from their actions, and the centre of the poem as inextricably continuous with the beginning and end.

Thirdly, Locke suggests that anything beyond direct sensory data is unknowable. He refers to the “supposed, but unknown” substance or essence of a thing and compares this to “those Qualities, we find existing” in observable phenomena (2.32.2). Locke does posit an abstract underlying essence, but famously calls it “something we know not what,” emphasising the unknowability of anything beyond “qualities” or sense-data (2.23.2).

Welch argues that Locke’s emphasis on the tangibility of observable qualities “valoris[es] the external,” “rendering essence… incomprehensible,” in an “attack on immaterial essence” (Welch 112). However this assumed opposition between “external” and “essence” indicates how “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul” distorts Welch’s elucidation of Locke and Blake (Marriage E39). A discussion of Visions, Welch argues, “boils down to the contrast between essence (i.e., Oothoon’s identity or that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and constitutive of her) and the constructed male world she occupies” (106). Using “essence” as an argument for the soul, he claims that the focus on “accidental properties” in Locke and others enabled racism and sexism, as concepts of the soul were universals, allowing people to rise above physical difference. This recalls the argument that Wollstonecraft deployed in favour of the sexless soul. We might call this approach ‘strategic dualism.’ In this analysis, Blake joins ranks with Berkeley and Isaac Watts to contest Locke’s epistemological challenge. Yet Blake is not the idealist that Welch wants him to be. Welch describes “Blake’s understanding of individual human identity” as “the union of spirit and body in the imaginative body,” but this is an ideal rather than an imaginative body, the latter of which would have included the physical as well (108). Instead, the body disappears.

The distortion caused by Welch’s idealism can be seen when he cites Blake’s verdict that “Accident being formed | Into Substance & Principle, by the cruelties of Demonstration | It became Opake & Indefinite…” (Jerusalem 29.35-37, E128). Welch explicates, quoting Locke: “it became only ‘the supposed, but unknown’,” aligning Locke’s unknowable essence with Blake’s “It” (Accident), which is the opposite (112). Blake is asserting that perception is constrained by a devitalised mechanistic ideology: Welch’s Locke is implying that knowledge beyond this reduced perception is incomprehensible.

Welch cannot admit that Visions suggests agreement with Locke’s abandonment of the unknowable “essence” side of the dualism, on the basis that it was made up anyway – an “imaginary heaven into which [a person] projects the divided state of [their] own soul” (Larrissy 128). Blake’s poetry challenges the parameters of Locke’s divided and conquered empirical world, rather than abandoning that world for a waffly and insubstantial “essence”. This will not do for Visions: I am with Otto when he argues that “Blake… directs us to a human rather than transcendent reality” (33). If we are going to criticise Locke, we must do so without fleeing to the opposite side of the division he draws.

Welch invokes late-twentieth-century arguments to justify the “resistive potential” of essentialism (108). However “essentialism” means something very different in 1970 than it does in an eighteenth-century epistemological debate. Welch cites Stephen Heath, Alice Jardine and Gayatri Spivak as endorsing “a reconsideration of essentialism” (107). Yet reading these critics’ ‘endorsements’ undermines Welch’s project: Jardine and Heath discuss the case for strategic essentialism in group collectivity, and Spivak mentions “strategic use of a positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest,” followed by the observation that “the strategic use of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms,” which is what Welch seems to invoke her for (Spivak 3-4).

Thus Welch uses Blake in order to express his own dissatisfaction with “those aspects of British empiricism that valorize the external and accidental over the internal and essential,” arguing that “the deepest and most pervasive systems of tyranny Oothoon resists are philosophical” (108). We need to question what “deepest” refers to or is compared with. Oothoon encounters philosophical positions only as they are embodied in the practices of Theotormon and Bromion, therefore it is pointless to say that a philosophy is ‘more’ tyrannical than the way in which it finds expression. As Plumwood writes: “we do have to understand philosophy in social terms, not as a collection of individual philosophical ideas” (4). Welch’s ideological distinction between spirit and matter causes him to argue that Blake “remained a dualist,” who separated “essence (spiritual substances) [and] accident (diverse embodiments...)” (119n32).

Bracher argues that “each character [in Visions] represents a metaphysical perspective”—Bromion empiricism, Theotormon “the metaphysics which valorizes the pure essence or ideal of a being in separation from the being’s actual existence...the type of Platonic and also Christian idealism which demands that actual existence conform to a pure, abstract ideal” (165-66). Welch disagrees, arguing that Theotormon’s questions reveal “an empiricist perspective” (118). This disagreement arises because Theotormon functions as an extreme version of the kind of idealism that Welch practices. In order to refute Welch’s essential argument, we must turn attention to Visions itself. 

VI

Discussion of Bromion depends considerably upon one’s view of transcendental dualism. For example, Kathleen Raine relates Bromion’s speech to Locke, condemning Bromion’s and Locke’s “materialist… philosophies” (2.124), but does not explore how, in Otto’s words, “Locke directs attention to an internal reality” that scorns the body much as her own Platonist approach does (41). Clark, by contrast, finds Bromion’s “sensible” words to have “specificity,” and “a certain elegance” that Oothoon lacks (167). Bromion has been described as “a Puritan” (Larrissy 122); a “lustful tyrant” (John Beer, Life 45); “reasoning, restraining, dogmatic” (Duerkson 187); “a sensationalist” (Gillham 52); “not a Puritan but a Deist” (Frye 241); “a thunder Titan” (Bloom 103); the “moral law” (Hinkel 286); an “arch-rapist” (Cooke 107); “a Blakean experiment in reductive monism” (Cox 115); “patriarchal law” (George 127); a “materialist” (Raine 2.124); a capitalist (Punter 484); “on the verge of enlightenment” (Wagenknecht 208); and a “slave-driver” analogous to pro-slavery Parliamentarians (Erdman 228, 237). These characterisations are often presented as if they are self-evident, but the contradictions in this array merits further investigation.

Although he speaks after Theotormon, it is useful to examine Bromion’s “lamentation” first (4.12):

Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit;

But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth

To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown:

Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope,

In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds

Over another kind of seas. and in atmospheres unknown:

Ah! are there other wars. beside the wars of sword and fire!

And are there other sorrows, beside the sorrows of poverty?

And are there other joys, beside the joys of riches and ease?

And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?

And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains?

To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?  (4.13-25)

This speech parodies Locke’s Essay  through the motto’s opposition of quantity and quality. As Anne Mellor notes, this speech has been read as a “sincere if futile attempt to understand Oothoon’s world through rational categories. But these are rhetorical questions” (Form 59). Bromion’s interest in the “infinite” and the “unknown” has led critics to suggest he “would appear to be questioning Lockean limits” (Essick 51). Matthews refers to “the ability of Bromion to sense the infinite nature of the world” (148). But on closer inspection, his speech aligns very closely with Locke’s position, and in doing so reveals contradictions in Locke’s thought.

Bromion’s enquiry is driven by a spirit of progressive discovery. He refers to Theotormon’s vague longings for the past as “ancient trees” which once had “fruit,” but directs attention to new potential forms of gratification—“trees beasts and birds unknown.” Bromion assumes that “trees and fruits flourish upon the earth” in order to “gratify senses”—resources to be appropriated for his exclusive use. We saw this earlier in his repetition of “mine” to justify the appropriation of Oothoon, the American land, and other humans as slaves (1:20). Like Bromion’s earlier speech (1.18-2.2), his words here are addressed to Theotormon, repeating Theotormon’s concern with “ancient,” “joys,” and “sorrow.” Bromion does not address Oothoon, as she is not recognised as an agential subject, only as a resource. He tells Theotormon to forget his “ancient loves” (3.4) for Oothoon, and seek out new forms of gratifying “fruit.” Plumwood describes such a relation to the world, ascendant in Blake’s time, as inventing “a mindless meaningless materialist universe open to endless unrestricted manipulation and appropriation: nature is the suppressed slave collaborator—a mere resource, or transparent enabler of projects” (par. 27). Bromion describes other beings as “unknown, not unpercievd,” recalling the dichotomy in the motto: his “Eye sees” them, but because of his appropriative gaze, the “Heart knows” very little. He can only conceive of both known and unknown beings instrumentally, in terms of how they might give him “the joys of riches and ease.” Bromion “sees the Ratio only,” and thus “sees himself only,” by relating to everything outside the self as mindless resources (E3). As Locke writes: “whilst I know, by seeing or hearing, etc. that there is some Corporeal Being without me, the Object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is some Spiritual Being within me, that sees and hears[,]… an immaterial thinking Being” (2.23.5). By embodying Locke’s theory in Bromion’s practice, Blake dramatises the effects of dualising mind and matter into active self and objectified world. This further suggests that the hostile references to “Corporeal” elsewhere in Blake’s works attack this Lockean relation to matter, rather than material reality itself.

Blake’s repetition of “unknown” in Bromion’s speech mocks Locke’s theory of unknowable essence and knowable properties. By positing essence “within me,” the properties which Locke observes are stripped of life, enabling things to be treated exploitatively as “bare insensible matter” (Locke 2.23.5). The appearance of enquiry that has impressed some critics seeks quantity of stimulation, not quality of mutual engagement. The concern with new “places...worlds...seas. and...atmospheres” privileges an empirical accumulation of resources, not a qualitative expansion of relationship with the world. Locke writes: “For how much would that Man exceed all others in Knowledge, who had but the Faculty so to alter the Structure of Eyes... as to make it capable of all the several degrees of Vision, which the assistance of Glasses... has taught us to conceive? (2.23.13). For Locke “Vision” and “Knowledge” are achieved through an increase in sensory information. Bromion’s “infinite microscope” is a Blakean mockery of Locke’s faith in increased knowledge from accumulated data about “visible tangible Qualities” (2.2.3). Blake creates a generic travesty of his own prophetic mode in Bromion’s infinite yet misguided desire. In a passage that Visions seems to directly reference, Locke posits the possibility of “a Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth Sense”—Bromion’s “senses unknown”—and speculates that “there may be other and different intelligent beings, of whose faculties [one] has as little knowledge or apprehension as a worm shut up in one drawer of a cabinet hath of the senses or understanding of a man” (2.2.3). At first glance this may seem to reinforce Oothoon’s subsequent argument that the world appears differently to different subjectivities. However, Locke’s interest, like Bromion’s, is in an expansion of the amount of sensory data one might catalogue, with a simultaneous insistence upon its unknowability, because “the Understanding is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in… Ideas of things without” (2.12.17). The similarity of this figure to Blake’s “cavern’d Man” emphasises once again that Blake’s conversation with Locke is more complex than simple opposition (Europe iii.1, E60).

W.H. Stevenson notes that “[d]iscovery, by travel or by microscope, was part of the texture of the age,” and Blake’s portrayal of Bromion is a portrait of an empire bent on acquisitive discovery (187). In all his multiple personae—slave owner, rapist, colonial appropriator of land—Bromion relates to things outside himself in a way that justifies active violence. There is No Natural Religion [b] claims that “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man” (E2). We can read this as an indication that Bromion’s desire for more of “the joys of riches and ease” is misguided, as it still reduces everything outside the self to a resource, rather than the “All” which recognises the world as rich and mindful in its own right. Bromion’s impoverished knowledge leads him to seek ‘quantitative easing,’ yet his approach is a “lamentation” and doomed to failure, as it is founded upon the sense of lack it seeks to assuage (4.12).

Bromion’s concluding questions confirm this impoverished vision: he can conceive only of literal wars “of sword and fire,” suffering through lack of material wealth, and happiness in terms of “riches and ease”. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Blake denies that war and poverty create suffering, which further shows that we need to pursue an expansion of Bromion’s categories and not reject the literal for Raine’s “immaterialist” realm (2.214). Bromion’s speech reveals the contradiction in Locke’s thought whereby the focus appears to be on the physical, whilst making the physical subservient to the organising activities of the mind, which “hath no other immediate object but its own ideas” (4.1.1). Hence why critics have labelled Bromion both lustful and Puritan, rationalist and sensationalist. His confident rhetorical question “is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?” demonstrates this contradiction, as one might think that a focus on the physical would result in an emphasis, like Oothoon’s, on the unique quality of every creature. Instead, Bromion states a position already characterised by Blake as “Oppression” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Locke’s focus on the understanding as a predictable “internal reality” (Otto 41) and characterization of things outside the self as data, result in a theory of stable essence that functions in a similar way to theories of the soul. As Otto writes, “Locke’s understanding is paradoxically turned towards a transcendental realm while being bound to a physical body” (191). Locke and Bromion can be seen to state a position of liberal ‘sameness’ that argues for “one law” regardless of the characteristics of each embodied being. Blake’s critique of this universal self confronts not only the dominant culture of the Enlightenment, but also the ascendant ‘natural rights’ radicalism of revolutionaries such as Paine. “[S]ince the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another,” wrote Blake in an 1827 letter, “Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree” (E783). Welch argued that it was Locke’s emphasis on externals that enabled a sexist or racist position, but Bromion’s words suggest that it is the inability to cope with physical difference, and the need to efface it in favour of an eternal and stable realm, which enables and justifies violence.

Finally, Bromion turns to those aspects of existence that the understanding struggles to control—desire, the emotions—calling them the “phantoms of existence.” Otto argues that Lockean understanding is “threatened by the active powers of the body” which have, however, “for the most part been disciplined” (42-43). Bromion’s ordered universe is revealed to rely upon the same pious dualism Blake deconstructs in the Marriage, between angelic order and control, and demonised energy. He invokes “eternal fire, and eternal chains” to suppress the bodily energies from the “eternal life” promised by Locke’s “universal and certain” knowledge (4.12.13). The purpose of Bromion’s “infinite microscope” is to confine the chaos of reality to an orderly series of empirical data. In a similar scenario in The Four Zoas, Urizen uses “vast instruments… to measure out the immense & fix | The whole into another world better suited to obey | His will” (73.17-19, E350). Yet his efforts will turn out to be fruitless—“Nor could he calm the Elements because himself was Subject” (71.3, E348).

Turning from the text to the illuminations, Bromion’s form in the frontispiece can be seen to be almost as tightly self-bound as Theotormon’s, revealing his rule of bodily discipline (see image). The over-muscled caricature of masculinity is combined with an expression of terror, focused outside of the visual field. This demonstrates Bromion’s failure to engage with Oothoon or Theotormon, and perhaps also his turn from the material reality of the image towards an abstract realm outside of the frame. Blake’s placement of the frontispiece at the end of the poem in one copy causes Bromion’s shock to appear to be in response to Oothoon’s freed form on the final plate. The effect is to connect the poem’s beginning and end into a cyclical repetition, emphasising both the repetition of Oothoon’s cry “every morning,” and suggesting the continual possibility of transformation, incomprehensible to Bromion’s Lockean understanding. Bromion’s manacles are, after all, more visible than Oothoon’s in this image.

VII

Because Blake’s presentation of Theotormon indicts the kind of idealism that has often been imposed upon the poem, and because Bromion appears more obviously and actively pernicious, Theotormon has been glossed even more variously than his counterpart. There are some knotty contradictions within Theotormon, hence the decision to discuss Bromion first. Just as Bromion seems to be a materialist who upon closer inspection depends upon the manipulation of the material by the mind, so conversely Theotormon’s apparent idealism can be seen to rely upon the material reality he disdains.

His name is often glossed as tortured by god (theo), or the law (torah) (Essick 36). If so, it is the God of his own conception, the God of the Moral Law that Blake refers to in a wide variety of hostile terminology, such as “Antichrist” in his annotations to Watson (E612). This system of morality assumes an opposition between ideal spirit and chaotic body.  Watson, for example, thinks Paine’s writings have “corrupted morals” by “giv[ing] the reins to the domination of every passion” (qtd. E612). Like the Angel of the Marriage, who in speaking with the energetic Devil “became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling,” Theotormon restrains and controls the body (E43). His response to Bromion’s goads reveals how “the self enjoyings of self denial” (7.9) leave him with either elemental outbursts—“storms rent Theotormon’s limbs”—or hypercontrolled “secret tears,” (2.3, 7). Blake frames Theotormon’s moral stance in opposition and antagonistic relation to the impulses of the body, demonstrating the effects of the imposition of the moral law as opposed to the antinomian belief in the availability of inspiration to the enthusiastic body. This moralistic self-control is then imposed upon Oothoon, whose “tears are locked up” also (2.11). Theotormon’s asceticism leaves him as dry and lifeless as a “desart shore,” enacting self-harm at a bodily level. His replacement of reality with moral ideals creates specifically “religious caves,” where the injustices that his narcissistic search for transcendence avoids “shiver” (2.9-10). These “slaves beneath the sun,” and “children bought with money” are shown to be the material ground that such idealistic stances avoid. The repetition of “beneath” presents Theotormon himself as comprised of “the burning fires | Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth” (2.8-10). The combination of words evokes Hell, yet this is inverted from the depths to the summits, revealed as a result of Theotormon’s repression. Heaven is his perfectly controlled body, whereas Hell is the bodily energies Heaven is invoked to suppress. Blake suggests that both are “alienated and projected portions of our earthly psyches” (Otto 40). In this short passage, Blake intertwines economic, political, psychological and religious forms of alienation. The society from which Theotormon takes his moral laws is based upon slavery and child labour: the polite “white pink & smiling” angel of the Marriage similarly denies the energetic bodily basis of his existence. Theotormon’s lust is his search for transcendence of the despised body, a search that denies and controls the disorderly material, which ironically further fuels “the burning fires.” The alienated aspects are not discarded but become “a furnace of dire flames | Quenchless unceasing,” as phrased in The Four Zoas (74.14-15, E351). Otto argues that Blake indicts religious practices designed to achieve transcendence, and rationalising practices such as Locke’s philosophy, as different forms of the same impulse (35). In both cases Blake wants to bring our attention back to “the repressed and mutilated physical body that is the hidden referent of the disciplined body and of... heavenly bodies” (Otto 40).

In contrast to this denial of the body, Oothoon celebrates the unique embodiment of various creatures. This has been understood as an appeal to a supersensuous essence, once again an abstract ideal beyond the material world, but perhaps we can better understand this passage with reference to Roland Barthes’ concept of J’aime, je n’aime pas. Here he lists his idiosyncratic likes and dislikes in great detail, before observing:                 

this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distates, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasure or rejections which they do not share.  (117)

Barthes’ understanding of the body as a collection of idiosyncratic impulses helps explain how Oothoon’s argument is for particularity, not liberalism or what Thompson called “supercelestial visionary mystery” (46)

This gives a context to Theotormon’s contribution to the poem’s discussion of the senses. At the end of Oothoon’s enquiry into these different “forms and...joys” (3.6), she says “And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old” (3.13). The suggestion is that the indoctrination of the “infinite brain” obscures human intuitions, which are potentially available, just as the diverse intuitions she details are part of the other creatures’ embodiments (2:32). Yet Theotormon takes this question both literally and personally:

Tell me what is the night or day to one o’erflowd with woe?

Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?

Tell me what is a joy? & in what gardens do joys grow?

And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains

Wave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretched

Drunken with woe forgotten. and shut up from cold despair,

Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth

Tell me where dwell the joys of old? & where the ancient loves?

And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past?

That I might traverse times & spaces far remote and bring

Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain

Where goest thou O thought! to what remote land is thy flight?

If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction

Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings. and dews and honey and balm;

Or poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier. (3:22 - 4:11)

Firstly we could note the inadequacy of this speech to deal in any way with either Bromion’s violence or Oothoon’s challenge to the dogma that holds her to be eternally ruined. This indicates that his “woe” is not sympathetic, but, as Oothoon soon realises, an expression of self-pity caused by “self-love that envies all!” (7:21). In The Four Zoas Urizen’s “Wisdom” is to “let Moral Duty tune your tongue | But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone” (E80). Moralistic Theotormon “sees more” than his “Heart knows,” as is heart is similarly hard. His demanding monologue registers some key words from Oothoon’s entreaties, but only as abstractions that mocks the relevance of her original enquiry. He is unable to bear the bodily experience of jealousy, as the loss of Oothoon as commodity signifies a loss of self. If Bromion is obsessed with a future of exploration and progress, Theotormon takes the same approach to the mental realms of the past.

He asks “what is the night or day to one o’erflowd with woe,” indicating how concern for his own sense of loss silences Oothoon’s crucial insight into her dualistic education. Blurring night and day together, his subsequent questions refer to meaningless abstractions, demanding to know locations for “thought,” or “joy,” which reveals his distance from the body in which these are experienced. Yet his questions also evoke Locke’s negation of the insubstantial, leaving him without either side of the division. This shows the split between what he appeared to value (a religious essence which he has now misplaced), and what he actually values (a conventionally ‘pure’ female possession to enhance his status, also misplaced). To demonstrate this, we can consider Cox’s claim that Theotormon “has difficulty distinguishing [Oothoon’s] defiled body from her undefiled soul” (115). This has a certain logic to it. But it is insufficiently self-critical, as it is Theotormon’s belief in a separate body and soul that causes his difficulty to begin with. Where is this soul? Theotormon is looking for it and unable to find it. All he can find is what he wants to find: the confirmation of his assumption that her body is defiled already. The whole point of Blake’s elision of the dualism is that the body is not defiled. What about it is ‘defiled’? And yet Oothoon experiences it as “defiled,” he shows (2.15). Why? Because she was taught to reflect Theotormon’s code, the code that Cox now serves to further disseminate.

Theotormon’s hypocrisy is his reliance on the material possession of Oothoon for his emotional wellbeing. His supposed idealism is revealed to be a made-up abstraction, his apparent religiosity an avoidance strategy. Oothoon exposed this doctrine of purity, revealing its contradictions in lived experience. As Welch argues, Theotormon’s questions do apparently take an empirical bent, as he demands to know information about insubstantial feelings, demanding material proof for their existence. Yet this does not negate his idealism: rather, his irrelevant inquiries, himself “shut up from cold despair,” demonstrate his allegiance to “cold floods of abstraction” over lived reality (4.2, 5.19). The series of narcissistic questions appeal to memories of the past as a way of avoiding engagement with the present. Living in mental constructs, he looks to the “remote land” his thought flies to, hoping for non-existent comforts, frightened of more poisonous thoughts. The more he rejects the body and instead attempts to mentally “traverse times & spaces far remote,” the more he creates his “night of pain” which prompted the departure in the first place.

Blake’s visual depiction of Theotormon supports this analysis. On the frontispiece, his body is barely human in its condensed negation of the sensory (see figure 19). He is “closd up in Moral Pride,” clenching the body against reality (E211). This stance is echoed in the Urizenic, bearded figure of the title page, who is also “self-closd,” in contrast to Oothoon’s gestures of openness (E70, figure 20). Similarly, on Plate 4, where Oothoon “hovers by his side, perswading him in vain” (2.22), Theotormon’s head is buried in his knees, encircled by his arms wrapped over the knees, and only one foot is visible: his body is again contracted into the smallest possible shape. His inability to engage with Oothoon confirms his rejection of the material world for an attempted transcendence.

VIII

A close examination of Bromion and Theotormon illuminates how reductive materialism and idealist religiosity rely on the same perceived split between matter and spirit. It is a trap to perceive Blake’s “Contempt and Abhorrence” (E660) for Locke’s work as evidence of allegiance to Welch’s conventional Christian dualism between soul and body. Against accounts that suggest that the theories of Locke and other thinkers of the Enlightenment erased and replaced older religious beliefs, the similarity of Visions’ two male characters suggests their basis in similar assumptions. “Reductionism,” writes Plumwood, “actually relies on a reified separation that took place a lot early, through a process of splitting and a hegemonic construction of agency and identity” (par. 23). The reductive materialism of modernity is revealed as only a truncated version of the older mind-body dualism, one that preserves the distinction between inert matter and the creative, animating spirit, intelligence or reason, whilst abandoning the latter as incoherent or irrational. This separation is Descartes’ “empire of man over mere things,” as everything outside the self is stripped of agency and autonomy, available to be possessed or exploited (Plumwood par. 22). Thus Bromion and Theotormon are flipsides of the same exploitative coin. Theotormon believes in moralistic ideals, yet he is constrained by his physical inability to achieve full disciplinary control over the material body or world. Bromion believes in empirical facts, yet privileges the mind as reality, and treats the world as the data with which it can be filled. Theotormon looks for the tangible in the abstract, whereas Bromion looks for the abstract in the tangible. Both are unable to accept reality as it is, subsuming it to a controlling and transcendent power. Thus Oothoon identifies “Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven” as the ideological father of both Theotormon and Bromion. Urizen reveals that rather than opposites, Reason and Faith are equally suitable vehicles for his project of creating an eternal world. He is both the moralistic force mistaken for God, and the rationalising force mistaken for truth. Either way “the head governs and controuls the Body under it,” as Swedenborg wrote in The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, for “the body is nothing but obedience” (14). Yet Oothoon reveals the violence that such a project inflicts, in its attempt to shape human bodies into the ideal bodies of “thine image” (5.4). Why do they need to be all the same, she asks—“How can one joy absorb another” (5.5). Blake’s immanent stance finds the “Holy, eternal, [and] infinite!” nowhere but in diverse, tangible, finite bodies (5.6). Oothoon’s insight is to see that, despite seeming to embody opposite epistemologies, Bromion and Theotormon both depend on the same dualism, which reduces everything outside the self to a lifeless commodity. In addition, it also fuels the impulse to use everything so, because a “heart [sunk] into the Abyss” will continue, like Theotormon’s “burning fires | Of lust,” to seek more and more at this level of the commodity, in an attempt to satisfy its impoverished relation with the world (2.33, 9-10).

Oothoon’s alternative to this kind of Urizenic relation to the world is an erotic vision: “where ever beauty appears | If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d | In happy copulation” (6.22-7.1). Instead of a possessive hoarding of sense-data, or rejection of the senses outright, Oothoon envisions a procreative relationship with what she sees, thus returning agency and animation to the world beyond herself. This is how Blake imagines expansion from “Single vision &  Newtons sleep” (E722). Fourfold Vision is not so much an argument for pluralism calling for further debate between the extremes of a hypocritical idealism and a denuded materialism, as it is Blake’s solution to his motto’s diagnosis: the reintroduction of the heart’s knowledge into what the eye sees.

IX

The narrative movement of the poem indicates both how epistemologies cause certain actions, and how actions shape and use epistemologies. It “is no coincidence of course,” Plumwood writes, that “[b]y consolidating the narratives of the empire of man over mere things, reductionist rationality removes key constraints at the dawn of commoditisation and capitalism” (par. 25). Neither empiricism, idealism nor Urizenic perception exist, except as they are enacted in human practices. Just as Blake comments that “God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men” (Marriage, E40), the philosophies of Bromion and Theotormon cannot be considered apart from their actions. Oothoon’s turn to indict Urizen is, like her identification of “they” as the instillers of some of her ideas, a recognition that “human beings are constrained by ideologies and projections which, as individuals, they are not responsible for” (Larrissy 4). The distortion of Blake’s version of freedom into an autonomy of the sovereign individual can be seen in the poem “London,” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (E26-27). The “mind-forg’d manacles” of this poem are often cited, but it is useful to remember that these occur within the shaping forces of “London” itself—the poem and the city. At no point does Blake’s work suggest that the manacles are a result of an unfortunate and isolated individual choice. In his notebook Blake frames freedom from these manacles in terms of the removal of hierarchal, coercive structures:

Remove away that blackning church

Remove away that marriage hearse

Remove away that ––– of blood

You’ll quite remove the ancient curse  (E475)

It is not a coincidence that Visions simultaneously analyses multiple forms of domination, both within and without the human body, as the politics and structures are made by humans in what Blake sees as a fallen, fragmented state, which meanwhile craft more humans into that state.

X

Visions could be described as prophetic in that it can be seen to anticipate the conditions of its own critical reception. Blake engages in productive battle with those of his contemporaries he sees as shaping the dominant culture, giving bodies to their doctrines to reveal their lived effects. Visions dramatises the patterns of the logic of domination, revealing the violence caused by the impulse towards transcendence. As inheritors of the liberal legacy of Locke’s Enlightenment, we have, generally speaking, “go[ne] on So,” and played out the very tensions dramatised within the poem itself. It is in this sense that the poem can be seen to predict its own reception. Thus the strategic omissions and distortions of some approaches within the critical tradition have the effect of elucidating the poem with their actions, even as they obscure it with their words. In giving bodies to doctrines that dualise mind/soul and body, Blake gives us a bodily, anatomy of criticism. You could say that the best analysis of Visions’ reception history comes from the poem itself.

Oothoon is made to live within these divisive contradictions and by giving them form, she moves towards an enriched, not transcended, human relationship with the material world. By reading the epistemological sections of Visions as part of the continuous whole of the poem, we regain Blake’s poetic, political representation of the relationship between perception and action. This has the potential to reconcile the ‘mental’ and ‘corporeal’ strains of Blake criticism, and suggests that Visions, at least, both analyses the specifics of historical reality, and works towards a millenarian expansion of the body’s perception through desire. As Theodor Adorno wrote of Marx, Blake is the “enem[y] of utopia for the sake of its realization” (322). Rereading Blake’s works as non-didactic exhortations to perceive a more agential, lively, mindful world, and to remember we are part of it, could enrich our relationships with both his poetry and the world.

XI

 “The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act,” Blake wrote (E702). The provocations of Blake’s poetry, including Visions, have inevitably led to divergent interpretations. Our desire for mastery over a text is thwarted by Blake’s open-ended conceptions. Binary reductions cannot harness the body of the poem, but nor is it indescribable. An affirmation of the body of the poem can enrich our reading of Visions. Oothoon’s position outside of night and day, and Blake’s project, allows for engagement with a reality that is neither transcended nor mechanically reduced—“not Abstracted nor Compounded from Nature” (E648). What does it mean, to be governed by creative desire rather than reason? Blake seems to invite the reader not just to “Reason and Compare,” as I am doing even now (E153). A thesis about embodied vision in Blake’s work still entails an abstraction from the world it describes. Yet freeing Visions from binary impositions facilitates richly incomplete, embodied encounters with this poem and others, acknowledging Blake’s conviction that “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences” (E1).

This essay is (barely) adapted from the final chapter in ‘Embodied Visions,’ a thesis submitted in fulfulment of the requirements for a Master’s of Arts in English Literature and published in 2015 through Victoria University of Wellington, Te Whare Wanaga o te Upoko o te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa / New Zealand.

[1] The misreading is the same whether the boy’s words are taken as a positive call to “ignore colour differences” (Erdman “Slavery” 249) or criticized as “colonialist discourse” (Mellor “Sex” 358-359; Bindman 374).

[2] For a history of this consensus and early exceptions such as J.J. Garth Wilkinson in 1839 and Mark Schorer in 1946, see Hutchings Imagining Nature 37-44.

[3] Ackroyd’s turn of phrase and its critical acceptance are noted by Hutchings Imagining Nature 38.

[4] For analysis of the latter, see Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, Preface i-ix and Introduction 4-7.

[5] Including those, such as Blake and Gruner, who criticise what they see as Blake’s causal connection between suffering and vision, but nevertheless accept the causality (27).

[6] Such accounts include: Arthur Symonds 95-96; Frye 239; Bernard Blackstone 291-3; H.M. Margoliouth 93-4; George Mills Harper 257; Bloom Blake’s Apocalypse 101-116, commentary in E900-901, and introduction to Romantic Poetry and Prose 44-45; D.G. Gillham 42; David Wagenknecht 206; Duerkson 186-194; Cooke 107-14; Howard H. Hinkel 285-289; Diana Hume George 127-44; Robert P. Waxler 48-52; Jean Hagstrum 114-15; Raine 1.166; W.H. Stevenson 180-81; Cox 113-35; Essick 43; Welch 109. For objections similar to Goslee’s, see Vogler 273.

[7] See for example Butler 45; Lattin 12, 14; Haigwood 98, 102-3; Cox 119.

[8] This distinction is emphasised by Makdisi 95 and Hill 214-226, 329-332.

[9] See Bruder 55; Haigwood 95-98; to some degree Linkin 194; Vogler 271-273; Lattin 17; Punter 475; Blake and Gruner 31; Butler 39-43.

[10] Recent discussion continues to promote forms of the beliefs charted above—for example Cooper in 2013 refers to “Blake’s powerful abstractions from physical reality” and “the romance of Oothoon’s… self-awakening” (2, 102-3).

[11] Nicholas Williams compares Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Bourdieu’s study of education, but does not discuss in relation to Visions (32-70).