Is Blake unconsciously patriarchal?

In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, we learned that Blake takes similar stand with feminist at his time. However, Blake still stayed within a restricted feminism. His feministic arguments are more inclined to free women from the traditional moral cage rather than treating men and women equally. In Milton, Milton was freed by his “Sixfold Emanation”, his three wives and three daughters (p. 149). These six women symbolize Milton’s suppressed feminine desire and his spiritual form of self.

On one hand, women are powerless victims and forced to reluctantly reproduce. Oothoon reproduces Leutha’s trap to the girls while being a victim herself (p.64). The shadowy female in Europe a Prophecy is powerless and can only complain about the vicious reproduction she has to take on doing (p.98-99). Enitharmon, the character that suppress Orc and Los, put men into her eighteen hundred years of female dream (p.101). On the other hand, women are symbols of sexual liberation and free desire. Oothoon calls for “free love” constantly in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. In Moravian tradition, Jesus is feminine. In the image of Milton strangling Urizen, we also see his Sixfold Emanation above him. His Sixfold Emanation is artistic and joyful. These are all images that Blake truly praises.

Nevertheless, women are never the revolutionary in Blake’s work. They don’t strangle Urizen. They don’t bring revolution like Orc and Los. One can definitely argue that Blake portrays the oppressed situation of female to call for changes. But can we also argue that Blake never put female as revolutionary characters in the center of his system is being unconsciously patriarchal? In the New Jerusalem, what will the gender system be?

The Nightmare of Female Power

Enitharmon’s “female dream” is not the first mention of the goddess’s eighteen-hundred-year reign on the earth: a few stanzas previously, Enitharmon expresses her intent to have “dominion” over “the human race”: “Who shall I call? Who shall I send? / That Woman, lovely Woman! May have dominion?” (Plate 8, line 3; Plate 8, line 5; Plate 8, lines 2-3) Her plan to dominate mankind is clearly premeditated and involves summoning two of her sons, as well as their nameless female counterparts, to carry out her plot on the earth. A definite method of dominance exists in the “spread[ing] of nets in every secret path” by “the little female”: from their youth, women are to serve as the forbidden objects of desire by men, for Enitharmon’s plan of conquest rightly perceives that men are easily ensnared by sexual attraction that is denied consummation (Plate 8, line 9; Plate 8, line 8). For in Blake’s worldview, suppressed desire (particularly sexual desire) is the ultimate means by which humanity’s imaginative link to the divine is controlled and repressed.

Enitharmon’s plan is evidently successful, for an eighteen-hundred-year period passes in which “Man was a Dream” (Plate 12, line 2). The end of this tyrannical period is marked by Orc’s successful bid for revolution on the earth, and thus we may equate man with freedom of desire and woman with desire’s repression. Openness and liberty in desire are termed a “Dream” because they exist only in the imagination during the period in which false chastity, counterfeit modesty, and the tenet that “Woman’s love is Sin” reign over humanity (Plate 8, line 5). According to Blake, it is this imagination, associated with the figure of Orc, that eventually overcomes woman’s rule and allows for the freedoms of desiring, creating, and acting that, to Blake, are the ultimate marks of mankind’s “poetic genius.”

The “female dream,” then, is the antithesis of Man’s Dream: it represents the exploitation and control of desire perpetuated by Enitharmon’s system. Unlike the male “Dream,” the female “dream” is not capitalized and is thus symbolic of systematic, repressive traits and actions associated with created society rather than the natural, creative elements that exist because of the divine. It is not a positive, imaginative state of mind like that Blake advocates; rather, it is the hazy existence under authority that is much like the literal dreams one has during sleep. Such dreams are without meaning and, unlike the Dreams produced by desire, contain no implications for one’s mortal or immortal life. Clearly life under the influence of the female dream is, according to the poem, a fuzzy and unreal experience in which the manipulative power of women dominates. Freedom occurs when woman’s authority is revoked and the Dream of man is restored: in this sense “Europe a Prophecy” is a strikingly anti-feminist vision of how the world should look.

Tearing the Virgin Mantle in Two: The Cherubim and the Ark

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split (Matthew 27: 50-51).

As we discussed in class last Friday, I think these lines from Matthew are central to the allegorical “Argument” that prefaces “Visions of the Daughter of Albion,” particularly the last two lines “But the terrible thunders tore / My virgin mantle in twain.” In order understand the significance of this biblical allusion for Blake’s sexual politics, we need to discover how and why this moment of vaginal penetration as rape (why rape?) is ironically related to the holy place of the tabernacle: an inner room called the holy of holies, or the most holy place.

As decribed in the Old Testament, this inner room of the temple was a most sacred room, because it was God’s special dwelling place in the midst of His people during the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness. The Holy of Holies was a perfect cube separated by a thick curtain, known as the “veil” (in Hebrew means a screen, divider or separator that hides). What was this curtain hiding? It was shielding a holy God from sinful man. Whoever entered into the holy of holies was entering the very presence of God and anyone other than the high priest who entered the holy of holies would die. Even the high priest, God’s chosen mediator with His people, could only pass through the veil and enter this sacred dwelling once a year, on a prescribed day called the Day of Atonement. “But only the high priest entered the inner room, and that only once a year, and never without blood, which he offered for himself and for the sins the people had committed in ignorance.” (Hebrews 9:7). So the presence of God remained shielded from man behind a thick curtain during the history of Israel. However, Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross made direct access to God available to all people–not just the priests. When Jesus died the curtain in the Jerusalem temple was torn in half, performing the sacrificial atonement that could finally unveil the holy of holies.

But what exact does the holy of holies look like? To answer this question, we need to know about the figure of cherubim (plural term for hybrid lion/human angels) that were embroidered onto this curtain. They were spirits who serve God, and God was thought to be present in between these two spirits. The cherubim serves as a reminder of what use to be housed in this inner room: the Ark of the Covenant. This transportable ark was said to contain the testimony of the people of Israel, or the Law of the original Ten Commandandments written on stone tablets. A special lid or “mercy seat” covered the top of the ark and was ornamented with two cherubs whose outspread wings overarched the cover and touched one another (see image below).

illustration from the 1728 Figures de la Bible; illustrated by Gerard Hoet (1648–1733) and others, and published by P. de Hondt in The Hague; image courtesy Bizzell Bible Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries

According to Kabbalists, Moravians, and Swedenborgians, the golden sculpture of male and female cherubs that guarded the Ark were entwined in the act of marital intercourse, thus forming an emblem of God’s joyful marriage with his female counterpart, Jerusalem. When the Temple was sacked by pagans, the erotic statuary was paraded through the streets in order to embarress the Israelites. In other words, God manifests through sexual union and guides those who work with this holy mystery.

This indicates a profound relationship with Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, as displayed in the santuaries of their temples:

So to return to Blake’s image of virginal penetration as rape. Oothoon, in picking the ideal feminine flower of beauty from Leutha’s vale, or sex regulated under the law, has freely choosen the joys of sexuality but also, ironically, the very patriarchal law that probits womem’s full enjoyment of sexuality: Bromion’s “terrible thunders” of reason, acting on behalf of Urizen (“your reason”). In other words, the holy of holies–sexual union of the cherubim–is violated by reason’s violent penetration (rape). Hence, the holy of holies cannot be made universal until humanity is free from sex under the law, especially for women, as revealed in Christ’s bodily crucifixtion (for Moravians, Christ’s death wound/womb). This allegorical argument, I believe, aligns Blake’s sexual (Moravian) theology with his feminist politics, which is clearly very different from Mary Wollstonecraft’s more secular feminism.

I’m offerring a provisional reading here…any other thoughts?