Blake and the Evolution of Same-Sex Subjectivity

Abstract

Blake has much to teach about culturally possible conceptualizations of same-sex relations in the early nineteenth century. In earlier work, I examined what I thought were relatively sympathetic portraits of these relations in some Blake poems and designs.¹ I did not, however, focus on what these portrayals implied about subjectivity or about recent theorizations of how homosexual subjectivity evolved— theorizations I think largely wrong. Here I examine implied ideas of same-sex subjectivity in Blake— including an element of self-repression rather than external repression that I did not originally see— and I compare these ideas to recent theorizations by Michel Foucault and his followers, by Stephen O. Murray, and by Randolph Trum- bach. The comparison makes clear that Blake’s implied conceptions were more heterogeneous and more ‘modern’— a term I want to deconstruct - than these theorizations’ rigid periodizations would allow.

[S]elf-condemn’d to eternal tears

(Milton 12[13]:47, E106)