Abstract
In a letter to Alexander Gilchrist, dated 23 August 1855, Samuel Palmer recalled the political inflection of Blake’s religion: ‘The Bible, he said, was the book of liberty and Christianity the sole regenerator of nations.’1 Blake’s Christianity tended to sound a political note, while his distinctive version of liberty was made up of many strains. His notion of freedom, as I hope to show in this essay, also carried a debt to the ideas and language that constituted traditional republican discourse. Central to Blake’s pursuit of political liberty was an attempt to marry a rejection of the ineffectual ‘Yea Nay Creeping Jesus’ with a rhetoric of classical, republican masculinism, albeit with increasing qualification of the latter in his later work. His texts recurrently stage a complex conflict between this republican discourse and Christian principles. These tensions are present throughout Blake’s oeuvre, but here I will focus on Europe, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Jerusalem, in which clashes and overlaps between republican and Christian values also have implications for Blake’s treatment of gender. I wish to trace in Blake’s texts a developing transformation of gendered republican rhetoric, including his attempts to open positive, active spaces for women, in which stereotypically ‘feminine’ characteristics come to assume public significance and the vigour traditionally claimed as the preserve of the male.
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Notes
The letter was reproduced in Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1863), i, 303. Quoted in BR, p. 57.
Ann Mellor’s account of ‘Blake’s consistently sexist portrayal of women’ has been challenged by critics including Helen Bruder who, without simply offering apologia, have situated Blake’s contradictory treatment of gender within wider contexts. See Mellor, ‘Blake’s Portrayal of Women’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 16 (1982–3), 148–55 (p. 148),
and Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), as well as her survey essay ‘Blake and Gender Studies’, in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. by Nicholas M. Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 132–66.
The historian Hans Baron coined the phrase ‘civic humanism’ as early as 1925. Much subsequent work on the concept has been concerned with challenging and developing his argument, from J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) onwards.
For more comprehensive expositions, see: Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 49–80; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 41–8, 69–112;
and John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 3–13.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. by Bernard Crick, trans. by Leslie J. Walker (Society of Jesus) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 277–8.
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).
See G. E. Bentley, Jr, Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 341–2.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. by Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 213.
Andrew Lincoln, ‘Blake and the “Reasoning Historian”’, in Historicizing Blake, ed. by Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 73–85, and Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), especially pp. 161–85.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 170, 136, 165.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in Political Writings ed. by Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 48–9.
G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecralt: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), 95–115.
For example Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), in The Basic Political Writings, ed. by Peter Gay, trans. by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 1–21.
Blake shares affinities with those American republicans who sought to construct a modern republicanism in which the softened manners associated with commerce could fulfil a positive social role. See Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 249–59.
Writing in 1644, Milton believed that ‘the time seems come […] when not only our sev’nty Elders, but all the Lords people are become Prophets’. See The Riverside Milton, ed. by Roy Flanagan (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 1019.
The lines from 3: 9–4: 14 lack clear attribution. For a summary of different approaches to this textual issue, see The Continental Prophecies, ed. by Detlef W. Dörrbecker, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, 4 (London: Tate Gallery/William Blake Trust, 1995), pp. 145, 268–9. I agree with Erdman’s attribution of 3: 9–14 to Los, 4: 1–2 to a description of the effect of his call, 4: 3–9 to the sons of Urizen and 10–14 to Enitharmon. See Blake, Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 266.
Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), II, plate no. 247.
For the former, see John Beer, Blake’s Humanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 132,
and Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (New York: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 160–1. Jon Mee has recently discussed Blakean metaphors of blood and circulation in his essay ‘Bloody Blake: Nation and Circulation’, in Blake, Nation and Empire, ed. by Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 63–82.
Writings questioning the extent to which republicanism constitutes ‘the good life’ in itself include Quentin Skinner, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’, in Liberty, ed. by David Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 183–205,
and Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially pp. 171–205.
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Fallon, D. (2009). ‘She Cuts his Heart Out at his Side’: Blake, Christianity and Political Virtue. In: Haggarty, S., Mee, J. (eds) Blake and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584280_6
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