Abstract
Of all the partial readings of Blake’s works available to students of his poetry, the most censurable appear in the now bulky corpus of criticism concerned with The Book of Thel (1789). Taking Blake’s dictum ‘Severity of judgment is a great virtue’ (Lav, 36; E.585) as my guiding principle I will, by looking at the criticism ensnaring the poem, demonstrate that patriarchal critics have got away with numerous unchastised interpretative transgressions, whilst simultaneously working to reveal the historically specific proto-feminist aspects of the poem suppressed by this patriarchal orthodoxy.
I do not want to make you any thing: I want to know what Nature has made you, and to perfect you on her plan.
Dr John Gregory
I complain, and no one hears my voice.
(Thel, 3:4; E.4)1
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Notes and References
On the importance of the poem see, The Book of Thel, A Facsimile and Critical Text, ed. by Nancy Bogan (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971), pp. xiii–xiv
and W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 78.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. fp. 1947), p. 233;
David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. fp. 1954), pp. 130, 132;
S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (New England: Brown University Press, revised ed. 1988, fp. 1965), p. 401. Special attention is given to these three critics because of the authority they continue to exercise over Blake studies. For example in his foreword to the 1988 edition of Damon’s Dictionary, Morris Eaves declared, ‘if Blake is where you’re going, Frye, Erdman, and Damon should be your guides. As an introductory offer they remain unbeatable’, p. ix.
Brian Wilkie, Blake’s Thel and Oothoon (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria, 1990), ELS Monograph Series, No. 48, p. 64. Martin K. Nurmi calls Thel ‘completely accessible to anyone’, William Blake (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 69; Raymond Lister speaks of it as ‘the simplest’ of Blake’s prophetic works, William Blake (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1968), p. 35 and as recently as 1988 (when the sheer volume of past readings must have cast doubt upon its transparency and lightness) David Fuller was still suggesting that, ‘perhaps ultimately the most valuable qualities of Thel are not thematic but tonal — its delicacy and gentleness’, Blake’s heroic argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 33. The poem is, in the words of Eugenie R. Freed, simply ‘charming’, ‘“Sun-Clad Chastity” and Blake’s “Maiden Queens”: Comus, Thel and “The Angel”’, BQ, 25, 3 (Winter 1991/1992), 104–16, (p. 106).
Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 116. He would have done well to digest E.B. Murray’s explanation of why, ‘the only apposite meaning Blake could have supposed his prospective contemporary audience to associate with the word “Thel” was the word female”’, ‘Thel, Thelyphthora, and the Daughters of Albion’, SiR, 20 (1981), 275–97, (p. 276).
See Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1959), pp. 157–74 (pp. 168; 171) and ‘Blake’s Thel and the Bible’, BNYPL, 64 (1960), 574–80, (p. 579).
Gleckner, ‘Bible’, p. 578. The importance of Gleckner’s censorious work has been noted by Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘Together […] Gleckner and Tolley shifted critical attention from the metaphysical to the moral sphere, where it now rests’, The English Romantic Poets, A Review of Research and Criticism Fourth Edition, ed. by Frank Jordan (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1985), p. 215.
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Form of Innocence: Poetic and Pictorial Design in The Book of Thel’, in his Blake’s Composite Art, pp. 78–106, (pp. 80; 81). Other humanists include, Steven Cox, Love and Logic (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 61–7, (p. 65)
and Elaine Kauver, ‘The Sorrows of Thel: A Freudian Interpretation of The Book of Thel’, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 3–4 (1984), 210–22/6, 3–4 (1985), 174–88, (p. 185).
See too, A.G. Den Otter, ‘Thel: The Lover’, English Studies in Canada, 16, 4 (Dec. 1990), 385–402, (p. 385)
and James King, William Blake: His Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 66–7, (p. 67).
Michael Ferber, ‘The Book of Thel’, in his The Poetry of William Blake (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 52–63, (pp. 52; 58; 62) and Stephen C. Behrendt, Reading William Blake (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 78. Sadly this didactic urge has found its way into the usually more enlightened realm of unpublished doctoral writing on Blake, where Alexander Gourlay asserts, ‘Throughout most of the poem […] she is an ignorant theologian, a bad rather than a good shepherdess, an uninspired poet, and an immature bride; her virginity signifies her ignorance’, ‘Blake’s Sisters: A Critical Edition, with commentary, of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ (University of Iowa, 1985), p. 31.
William St Clair, ‘Women: the evidence of the advice books’, in his The Godwins and the Shelleys (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 504–11, (p. 505).
Useful discussions of conduct literature are provided by Joyce Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney and The Courtesy Books’, PMLA, 65 (1950), 732–61;
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. ix–xix; 3–47;
Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 15–18;
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Ideology of Conduct (New York and London: Methuen, 1987) and ‘Conduct’ in, Women in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Vivian Jones (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 14–56. The collection of microfilms entitled ‘Women Advising Women’ (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Publications, 1992) is also invaluable.
Catherine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education (London: C. Dilly, 1790), pp. 207; 47 and see, too, ‘Amusement and Instruction of Boys and Girls to be the Same’, pp. 45–50. Of importance here is the tradition of liberal educationalists which begins with Vicesimus Knox, James Burgh and Thomas Day, and continues in the later writings of Erasmus Darwin and the Edgeworths. A useful summary of some of their ideas is provided by Barbara Branden Schnorrenberg, ‘Education for Women in the Eighteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography’, Women and Literature, 4, 1 (1976), 49–55.
The other locus of productive ideas about women’s intellect and education was the Bluestocking circle, a group discussed by Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp Part IV;
Marilyn L. Williamson, ‘Who’s Afraid of Mrs Barbauld? The Bluestockings and Feminism’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 3, 1 (1980), 89–102
and Evelyn Gordon Bodek, ‘Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 3 (1976), 185–99.
Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain In Behalf of Women (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1974. fp. 1798), p. 106. It should be noted that although this work was published late in the 1790s, Hays actually began work on it at the start of the decade.
Gleckner, The Piper, pp. 162–3; Michael Ferber, ‘Blake’s Thel and The Bride of Christ’, BS, 9 (1980), 45–56, (p. 49). The idea that a male sun-god is situated at the heart of the poem is also advanced by Eugenie R. Freed, ‘“Sun-Clad Chastity”’, p. 109. Alternatively the positivity of the realm of the Seraphim is questioned by a few writers including W.J.T. Mitchell, ibid., p. 83 and Margaret Hood and Marilyn Bohnsack, who both sense some kind of female rebellion in Thel’s refusal to tend her flocks. See ‘Thel — Daughter of Beauty’, in Hood’s ‘The Pleasant Charge: William Blake’s Multiple Roles for Women’ (University of Adelaide, 1987), pp. 39–44, (p. 41) and ‘Ambiguity in The Book of Thel, in Bohnsack’s, ‘William Blake and the Social Construct of Female Metaphors’ (University of Miami, 1988), pp. 51–103, (p. 65).
David Wagenknecht, Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 155 and Robert Gleckner speaks of ‘Thel’s persistant whining’, Blake and Spenser, p. 230.
See, too, John Howard, Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies (Toronto and London: Associated University Presses, 1984), p. 52; Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination, p. 31 and Alexander Gourlay who complains about Thel’s ‘foolish prating’, ‘Blake’s Sisters’, p. 59. An interpretation closer to my own is offered by Marilyn Bohnsack who notes how the poem ‘mimics the most limiting and trivial kind of female experience dictated by the social world of eighteenth century privileged classes’, ‘Ambiguity in The Book of Thel’, p. 95.
On exploding feminine stereotypes see Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (London: Virago, 1979), pp. 55–147. Jon Mee usefully points to the ‘overload of sensibility’ evident in this passage in Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 153.
Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 7–8.
Marjorie Levinson, ‘The Book of Thel by William Blake: A Critical Reading’, ELH, 47 (1980), 287–303, (p. 289, and passim). Levinson goes on to contend, ‘it is her own words, her own identity, herself as craving or Desire that furnishes the content of the creatures’ speeches’, p. 290 and Wagenknecht agrees that Thel is engaged in ‘self-communication’, Blake’s Night, p. 152, as does Christopher Heppner: ‘the whole process of the poem is really self-interpretation […] it is herself that she questions in her encounters with the “Representatives” of her feelings as they are called into existence by her own words’, ‘“A Desire of Being”: Identity and The Book of Thel’, CLQ, 13 (1977), 79–98, (p. 86).
For examples of critics who have tried to turn Blake into a worshipper of nature, and a refutation of their arguments, see Donald R. Pearce, ‘Natural Religion and the Plight of Thel’, BS, 8 (1978), 23–35. Andrew J. Welburn has also offered a gnostic Blake who has very little time for the wisdom of nature: ‘Blake, Initiation and The Book of Thel’, in his The Truth of the Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 99–122. The best clue, however, is given by Tilottama Rajan, ‘the book of nature is a reversible trope […] the natural may be something written’, The Supplement of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 197–274, (p. 244).
Though David Erdman made the important point that Erasmus Darwin’s emphasis on aggressive masculinity is particularly relevant to Thel, The Illuminated Blake (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974), p. 33, most writers have chosen to ignore this in favour of enthusing over the positivity of the sexual encounter depicted on the title page. For example, W.J.T. Mitchell claims, ‘The title page depicts the courting dance of the Cloud and Dew as a whirling vortex of pleasure’, Composite Art, p. 105. It is strange that a writer so conversant with the corpus of Blake’s visual art should fail to note the distress of the female figure in this encounter, especially since her stance of upreaching arms is a gesture Blake repeatedly used to indicate female sexual distress. See, for example, the cancelled Plate c of America: A Prophecy (Illuminated; E.394) and Janet Warner, Blake and the Language Art (Kingston and Montreal/Gloucester: McGill-Queen’s University Press/Alan Sutton, 1986), p. 105.
On the problematic penis see David G. Reide, ‘The Symbolism of the loins in Blake’s Jerusalem’, SEL, 21 (1981), 547–61.
John E. Grant, ‘Two Flowers in the Garden of Experience’, in William Blake, Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969), pp. 333–67, (p. 342); Brian Wilkie, Thel and Oothoon, p. 76. Thel’s behaviour is often set in antithesis to that of the Clod and always with negative implications.
See for example Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘Beulah, “Mne Seraphim”’, p. 269 and Nelson Hilton who claims that ‘the Clod of Clay points up Thel’s inability and erroneous vision’, Literal Imagination, p. 30. The same kind of censure of Thel’s meanness in refusing to become a mother, though transmitted at a more subliminal level, is contained in Alexander Gourlay and John E. Grant’s, ‘The Melancholy Shepherdess in Prospect of Love and Death in Reynolds and Blake’, BRH, 85 (1981), p. 169–89.
Pamela Dunbar, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 11 and Zachary Leader declares, ‘the world [Thel’s voice] speaks of is a projection of her own fears and limitations rather than any objective or independent reality’, Reading Blake’s Songs (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 94. See, too, Lattin’s comments on Plate 6 and Thel’s, ‘perverted understanding of sexual existence’, ‘Sexual Awakening’, p. 21. Other views have been offered: Elaine Kauver contends that the voice Thel hears is her superego, ‘The Sorrows of Thel’, pp. 182–3, whilst John Howard claims that, ‘This vision is the true perspective of her earlier moans, revealing to Thel her former delusion’, Infernal Poetics, p. 52.
When Thel’s voice exclaims against that, ‘little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire’ she is not protesting at the physical existence of the hymen (in itself a diminutive membrane of ‘little’ importance) but rather, as Hilton says, against ‘the significance invested in it’, Literal Imagination, pp. 130–32, (p. 130). (Michael Ferber, therefore, is deeply misguided in his claim that, ‘Thel has made a fetish of genital sex’, ‘The Book of Thel’, p. 61). For an account of some eighteenth-century significances see Paul Gabriel Bouce, ‘Some Sexual Beliefs and Myths in Eighteenth Century Britain’, in, Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain, ed. by Bouce (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 28–46, (pp. 33–5)
and, Roy Porter, ‘“The Secrets of Generation Display’d”: Aristotle’s Masterpiece in Eighteenth Century England’, in, ‘Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. by Robert Purks MacCubbin (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), pp. 1–21, (p. 12).
Wagenknecht suggests that these lines are, ‘perhaps dramatically inappropriate to [Thel’s] consciousness’, Blake’s Night, p. 162 and most critics simply refuse to acknowledge that Thel could have any sexually radical ideas or desires. For example Levitt claims that Thel flees because she cannot bear to hear her future self rejecting restraints on sex, ‘Cloud, Comus’, p. 81. See also George, Blake and Freud, p. 94; 97; Janet Warner, Blake and the Language of Art, p. 34; Margaret Storch, Sons and Adversaries (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 86 and S. Foster Damon, who rather than accepting the dynamism of female sexuality speaks misogynistically of, ‘the girl’s natural revulsion from the impulses of her maturing flesh’, Dictionary, p. 400.
Jay Parini, ‘Blake and Roethke: When Everything Comes to One’, in, William Blake and the Moderns, ed. by Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt (Albany, New York: University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 73–91, (p. 77).
The two key writers in this important tradition are, Anne K. Mellor, ‘Blake’s Designs for The Book of Thel: An Affirmation of Innocence’, PQ, 50 (1971), 193–207, (p. 205) and Nancy Bogan, ‘A New Interpretation’ in Thel, A Facsimile, pp. 21–31, (p. 31).
Everest, ‘Thel’s Dilemma’, Essays in Criticism, 37, 3 (1987), 193–208. The studies of Thel which have emerged since Everest’s article show very little interest in the pressing historical and political issues he raises. See, for example, Scott Simpkins, ‘The Book of Thel and the Romantic Lament’, South Central Review, 5, 1 (1988), 25–39;
James E. Swearingen, ‘Will and Desire in Blake’s Thel’, ECS, 23, 2 (1989–90), 123–39; A.G. Den Otter, ‘Thel: The Lover’ and ‘The Question’; Eugenie R. Freed, ‘“Sun-Clad Chastity”‘; Brian Wilkie, Thel and Oothoon, and Michael Ferber, ‘The Book of Thel’. Even when awareness is expressed it seems to have little impact upon critical interpretations, see especially the incongruous remarks which conclude Stephen Behrendt’s censorious offering, Reading William Blake, pp. 74–84.
Sadder still is Gerda S. Norvig’s, ‘Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading In (to) Blake’s Book of Thel’, SiR, 34 (Summer 1995), 255–71, which contains the vital but far too short section, ‘Identification and Empathy: Thel’s Feminism and Blake’s Cultural Critique’ (pp. 270–71) — as she admits, ‘I do not have space here to do more than hint at this line of argument’ (p. 271). As ever, the only works which have treated issues of gender and sexual politics seriously and at length are unpublished theses and dissertations. As my discussion has made clear the most outstanding readings of Thel are provided by Margaret Hood, ‘Thel-Daughter of Beauty’ and, especially, Marilyn Bohnsack, ‘Ambiguity in The Book of Thel’. Jackie Labbe is also working on an article which promises to compliment these valuable works.
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© 1997 Helen P. Bruder
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Bruder, H.P. (1997). The Sins of the Fathers: Patriarchal Criticism and The Book of Thel . In: William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379572_2
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