‘Yet I am an identity/I wish & feel & weep & groan’: Blake’s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative

Abstract

One recurrent motif of the essays in Helen Bruder’s Women Reading William Blake (2007a) is the re-evaluation of sentimentalism. Blake’s verbal and con- ceptual indebtedness to the movement has been established as far back as the lexicographical studies of Josephine Miles (1957), with an intellec- tual genealogy economically sketched by Stephen Cox (1980). This has not prevented the routine identification of Blake’s poetry with masculin- ist prophetic and sublime modes (as Tilottama Rajan demonstrates) to be safeguarded at all costs from the contamination of a feminized sen- sibility. (One symptom is the reflex vilification of the much-maligned William Hayley.)¹ Once this stark dichotomy is challenged, it becomes possible to situate Blake’s poetry within the milieu of female contem- poraries, opening up tantalizing possibilities of more specific reciprocal influences, moving away from the separate-spheres model of gender in the period.