Blood in Blake’s Poetry of Gender Struggle

Abstract

Blood takes many forms and has many meanings. The blood I wish to focus on appears in William Blake’s The Book of Urizen as ‘a round globe’ (13:58, E77), which is deeply connected to his idea of sexuality. The first female separates from the male and materializes into that ‘round globe of blood’ (13:58, E77). This birth of the female is repeatedly depicted in Blake’s poems, and every time it is repeated, blood gains new meanings and roles. I will explore the ways in which Blake’s blood becomes sexu-alized and gains multiple meanings, sometimes conflicting, in gender-struggle scenes in The Book of Urizen, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. At the end of this chapter I draw attention to the fact that a similar kind of blood appears in examples of Japanese film and literature, perhaps with connections to Blake through his appreciation during the era of Japanese Romanticism that came much later than its European predecessor and thrived in the 1920s and 30s.