Blake and Women

Abstract

William Blake is the bête noire of feminist reappropriation, the great English poet of unleashed sexual energy, who reduced his wife to tears by suggestions of extra-marital sex (probably backed up by the ‘sexual magic’ of the Swedenborgian church). He is the contradictory decrier of women’s sexual repression – ‘The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion? / Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude, / Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire’ (VDA 7:9–11, E50) – who also insisted that Catherine got down on her knees and begged his brother Robert’s forgiveness in an argument between the two (Life, pp. 50–1). Similarly, a celebrator of the human form divine – almost never missing an opportunity to sneak in a gargantuan penis or macro-clitoris – Blake portrayed the female as a conniving knitter of veils and gossamer chains, poised to entrap the naked male psyche: