Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 10 of Sexual Personae

[Note 1] 

Like the other Romantic authors, Blake is a follower of Rousseau and takes a strong anti-institution stance. Paglia says, "Prophet and radical, Blake denounces all social forms. He takes Rousseau's hostility to civilization farther than Rousseau himself. [...] he follows and extends Rousseau's politics..." (pp. 270-271) Blake's early poems are an indictment of society's oppression of the vulnerable: Child laborers, soldiers sent off to war, prostitutes who "sop up the male run-off from 'decent' middle-class marriage" (p. 280), etc. Paglia says, "Blake attacks all hierarchies. There is no great chain of being in his poetry; nothing is holier than anything else." (p. 297)

 

On the other hand, in a departure from the sentimental narratives of Rousseau Blake sees relations between the sexes as a war; and in portraying the war Blake becomes "the British Sade." (p. 270) For example Paglia says: "'The Sick Rose' is Spenser’s Bower of Bliss destroyed by sex war. The literary convention of female flight and male pursuit, satirized by Spenser in the ever-fleeing Florimell, reveals its innate hostility. Woman’s flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man’s approach must take the form of rape. The phallus becomes the conquerer worm, death’s agent." (p. 276) And "The Mental Traveller is a cycle of sexual cannibalism enacted by a male and a female figure, who attack and retreat in obsessive rhythms of victory and defeat." (p. 281) Blake sees men and women as living in a cycle of mutual torment and destruction.

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As a result, Blake wants to regulate sexuality and the relations between the sexes. So Blake devises a scheme of shared power via Apollonian and Dionysian energy flows: Emanations and Spectres. The energies must be in balance and interacting, and Blake considers any deviation from that interaction (such as chastity, androgyny, or solitude) to be an abomination. Paglia notes that as a Romantic Blake is against institutionalized religion, but she nonetheless finds Blake's scheme to be very "Old Testament" in nature. She says, "Blake rejects Judeo-Christian morality. Nevertheless, he wants to integrate sexuality with right action." (p. 287) "Of the English Romantics, Blake is the most oriented toward the patriarchal Old Testament, which purges femaleness out of God." (p. 292) She also notes Apollonian traits in Blake, contrary to his Romantic pedigree: "Blake wants nature bound but sex unbound. Sex is chthonian, but as artist and man Blake seeks the Apollonian." (p. 295) She notes that "Blake has a male Muse, an extraordinary aberration in the history of poetry. [...] Blake will not let femaleness touch him on any side." (p. 297) She concludes that "Blake’s eccentric psychology comes from the fact that he is a strange combination of artist and Hebrew prophet." (p. 298)

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Ultimately, however, Paglia concludes that Blake's "Old Testament" and Apollonian philosophies are "propaganda, not reality" (p. 296); they are undermined by Blake's voyeurism and fascination with sadism as evidenced in his poetry. Paglia finds Blake to be one more in a growing line of Romantic passive or masochistic males who delight in sexual thrall to an Androgyne or Femme fatale. Paglia says, "Masochistic male sufferers, whom we saw in Rousseau, Goethe, and Kleist, are profuse in Romanticism." (p. 281) Elsewhere she says, "The unfixable theme is universal female power. Sade and Blake’s sadomasochistic systems are rebuttals of Rousseau’s maternal naturism. The awful energy of Blake’s sinister females is equivalent to the eerie stillness of Goethe’s brooding Mothers. Nineteenth-century Romantic literature and art are dominated by the femme fatale." (p. 283)

 

Paglia notes the cycle of mutual rape and destruction occurring between the sexes in many of Blake's poems, but she says that the descriptions of females dominating and torturing males in particular suggest a masochistic pleasure (a "delectation") on the part of Blake. For example, Paglia notes this theme in the poem "The Crystal Cabinet": "The maiden’s calculation is decadent. [...] The male is martyred, a lamb led to slaughter. The vagina is a sexual crematorium. The crystal cabinet destroys by miniaturizing (cutting an erection down to size)." [...] His pleasant fear is his masochistic delectation at female dominance. The male willfully prolonging his sexual subordination makes his own hell. The crystal cabinet requires man’s voluptuous self-surrender. When he asserts himself, the illusion falls to pieces." (p. 284)

 

Similarly, describing a poem about the Daughters of Albion torturing a prostrate male, Paglia says, "The Daughters of Albion are so superbly glamourous and the whole terrifying scene so astoundingly visualized that we must ask whether such things in Blake really come from militant resistance to the femme fatale. I fail to see significant differences between this passage and the erotic vampire poems of Baudelaire. Surely there is secret delectation in Blake’s vivid detailing of each step of the prostrate male’s torture. This is a great flight of sadomasochistic poetry. I feel very strongly in it Blake’s shiver of voluptuous identification with the humiliated victim. [...] The latent content is that Blake’s excess of opposition to the “Female Will” springs from his attraction to her and from the danger of his imminent surrender." (p. 296)

 

Paglia suggests that Blake has a love-hate relationship with the Great Mother: The murderous fertility goddess of the ancients, the daemonic side of nature, motherhood, and femininity. "Blake revives the bloodthirsty goddess of ancient mystery religion, sensational with Asiatic barbarism. He longs to defeat her. But by attacking her, he creates her and confirms her power. Ironically, he becomes her slave and emissary, a voice crying in the wilderness. Nowhere else in literature is the Great Mother as massively, violently eloquent as she is in Blake." (p. 271)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted October 4, 2024