From: blake-d-request@albion.com Sent: Friday, November 01, 1996 3:18 PM To: blake-d@albion.com Subject: blake-d Digest V1996 #123 ------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 123 Today's Topics: Bluestockings behind Blake's antifeminist passages Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Blake's Characters Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Re: Blake's Characters Re: Blake's Characters Re: Bluestockings behind Blake's antifeminist passages ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 11:47:10 -0600 (CST) From: Suzanne Araas Vesely To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Bluestockings behind Blake's antifeminist passages Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII There have been some postings along the lines of bluestockings and Blake that tried to "point out" that there were educated women in the eighteenth century, and that Blake passed such people over for an unlettered woman. Considering that he once congratulated himself on not getting an education in rational materialistic views, which is the education that the Bluestockings had and urged for others, and considering that he believed his vision to be intact because he was an autodidact, I think that Blake was seeking out an equal, whom he tried to educate (with some success) in vision. This is not to say that the rationalists do not have their great contribution, sometimes underrated by Blake, but Blake is Blake. I can't imagine him marrying such an "educated" woman, nor can I imagine a Hannah More, for instance, taking any interest in Blake except of the sort that his patron and "spiritual enemy" Hayley took in him, or that sort of interest that Harriet Mathews may have had in him as an interesting addition to a tea. She was the woman whose gatherings he attended when he was writing An Island in the Moon (so-called) as a satire on such salons. Since I'm doing some work on More at this moment, unfinished and without strong conclusions, I'd like to suggest what these kinds of women meant to Blake. Other ideas are welcome. Hannah More inveighs against those who protest poverty (Rousseau): "...poverty is represented as merely a political evil, and the restraints which keep the poor honest, are painted as the most flagrant injustice." ("Strictures on the Education of Women," 331 of the _Works of Hannah More_ vol. I (Goodrich: Boston: 1827; originally written in 1799, five years before Blake dated _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_ title pages, two years after Blake titled _Vala, or, The Four Zoas_. Probably no influence there, but More often sounds like Vala, or like Enitharmon at her worst. Also try this: "Propriety is to a woman what tegreat Roman critic says action is to an orator: it is the first, the second, the third requisite...It shows itself by a regular, orderly, undeviating course; and never starts from its sober orbit into any eccentricities..."(Strictures, 326). Blake's regular orbits are all sinister. Also: "..If I were asked what quality is most important in an instructor of youth, I should not hesitate to reply, _such a strong impression of the corruption of our nature, as should insure a disposition to counteract it; together with such a deep view and thorough knowledge of the human heart, as should be necessary for dveloping and controlling its most secrret and complicated workings._" (Strictures, 336). For More, human nature is basically evil, and yet-- The news of More is not all dismal. "There is, happily, an active spring in the mind of youth which bounds with fresh vigour and uninjured elasticity from any temporary depression" caused by her pedagogy (356). Belief in the visionary fire, in Woman, yet a fear of it in More. But perhaps that is preferable to Locke's genteel dismissal of the human psyche as having a blankness filled with vague tendencies, readily manipulated in innocent youths. At the end of _Jerusalem,_ Blake seems to me to unite Vala and Jerusalem in Britannia. This is another approach to my argument that the later Blake treats women more symbolically than he does Thel or Oothoon--I believe that, if anything, Blake is being more realistic, more willing to reflect the realities of women's contributions as popularizers to rationalist agendas--that is, willing to acknowledge that the complicity of women in antivisionary agendas required more than just using them as foils for the male perpetrators of evil. Oothoon is more of an innocent, hamstrung victim of the system, vainly resisting it. A Vala or an Ololon knows what she is doing--so does a Rahab, who stands with Blake in the bosom of Satan, showing that Blake does not excuse even himself from a role in the creation of the age insofar as he reasons at women instead of granting them their own access to vision. Because they have access to their own guilt, they all, even Vala, can enter the visionary fires of transformed. It is only the elect, smug in their self-enclosed purity and blamelessness, who cannot gain the transformation of vision. It is in this light that I understand Blake's considerable use of Western negations of the female in his late work. It goes beyond "felix culpa" to a recognition that freedom, a free will, is the divine spark in all--opposed to the artifically manufactured "Female Will" of social mores--or "Mores"--pun intended. Whether Blake knew of Hannah More's work is not important; he had a taste of More's ideas in Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which accepted the Lockean view of humanity. Despite More's horrified repudiation of Wollstonecraft'sLockean democratizing and egalitarian implications, early and late. I think of Blake as a part of a web of women's concerns, a tangled golden string that may lead to Jerusalem's wall. Suzanne Araas Vesely ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 01 Nov 1996 13:30:05 -0500 (EST) From: WC449298@HOPE.CIT.HOPE.EDU To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Message-Id: <01IBC0344G1U8XKVO7@HOPE.CIT.HOPE.EDU> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT I do remember the post someone wrote in comparing Blake to Nietzsche, and I replied, saying that I also saw striking parallels, but striking differences too. I could be totally misreading Blake's proverbs of Hell, but I always took them as an excessive rebellion against the moralism of both the Puritans and the Deists, the two groups who "crucified Christ upside down", however he put it. The fact is, Blake did not want anybody to be oppressed by deities that are abstracted from the self and thus continually demanding actions from us that may be counterintuitive--Urizen tyrannizing the other Zoas. Of course the road of excess is self-destructive and possibly destructive to others, but for another to draw boundaries for another, as Urizen does, is loveless and tyrannical. Love, not moralism! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 14:36:18 -0500 From: TomD3456@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake's Characters Message-Id: <961101143617_1747043131@emout02.mail.aol.com> Jennifer's remarks about Blake's characters and their shifting attributes, encompassing of each other, leads me to ask a basic question about Blake's characters (Los and Enitharmon, the Zoas and their emanations, the spectres, etc.): What ARE they? I have always thought that Blake's characters are archetypes of some kind, not corporeal men and women (and therefore we shouldn't view their relations as necessarily indicating misogyny, etc. on Blake's part). If they're internal figures, like Jung's anima, wise old man, etc., or representations of mental states and spiritual vs. material principles, as Izak Bouwer persuasively argues, then they're in each of us, man or woman. But it's hard to pin down just WHAT they are, and their enigmatic nature is at the core of Blake's essential difficulty, for me. Sometimes Los and Enitharmon seem to represent parts of Blake's own psyche, or Everyman's; sometimes they seem very close to representing William and Catherine Blake ("a vegetated mortal Wife of Los, his Emanation, yet his Wife till the sleep of Death is past," J 14:13)); sometimes they seem to be forces operating in history, shaping it for their own ends, as in "Europe". So what are they? Blake seems to confound any distinction between "inner" and "outer" worlds, spiritual and corporeal, psychology and history. Before we go off on another wild chase down the rat hole of Blake's purported madness, let me say No, I don't think this indicates insanity--I think this confusion or melding of inner and outer is inherent in Blake's essential view of existence, which is alchemical in nature (that's as close a term as I can find, anyway). In alchemical work, as I understand it, the alchemist's outer, "chemical," work is invested with psychological/spiritual meaning, and the inner and outer work become a single "masa confusa," where transformations begin to take place. I think an attempt to describe something like that process is at the core of Blake's project. I think that sort of process takes place all the time -- working on the inner by working on the outer. For example: I believe that for many of us who study literature, our initial choice of an author to study is largely (and often unconsciously) guided by the problems we experience in our inner lives, and our sense that THIS author understands the problem we are experiencing and has some insights into its solution. I know that is true of my own work with Blake. And I have seen women with family-of-origin issues do marvelously intense work on King Lear, etc. While we are doing this kind of work, we often are only vaguely conscious of its connections with our own issues, but a kind of self-healing or transformation takes place through our grappling with the subject of our study. Is this inner or outer work? Are we working on King Lear or on our problems with our fathers? I think it's both, and it's a mysterious process. And the problems are seldom "solved" in the way we might have hoped at the start, but we are transformed in the process of working on them, and "The Eye altering alters All." So I believe that what Blake is describing, this merging or melding of inner and outer worlds, is "for real," and pretty common. But it's damned hard to understand or write about -- whenever I think I've pinned them down, the figures keep changing form and wriggling away. And perhaps that's why Blake doesn't seem clear about it: he's portraying a situation that is inherently confusing, constantly transgressing the conceptual boundaries that words create. What do others think? How would you describe these figures -- the Zoas and their emanations, etc? What ARE they? --Tom Devine ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 12:24:27 -0800 From: "Joseph W. Murray" To: Subject: Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Message-Id: <199611012124.NAA02326@post.everett.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Default Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit What I think Shattuck is saying(though he is very articulate and needs no village explainer), whatever Blake's intention-(which no doubt was a rebellion against Puitanism and the "sin of the Pharisees" as Jesus called it)-when writings such as the PROVERBS OF HELL are taken as maxims to live by today (with no historical context-How many readers today are aware of the times Blake lived in) and applied to life as lived on this earth now, that the result is many times a path of destruction. The dicta of the 60's "Do your own thing" which incidentally sounds much like Aleister Crowley's credo "Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law" (Crowley who self-destructed and left a wake of destruction to others in his path) has for the most part left many broken, destroyed lives. I don't believe Blake is/was any pied piper to the young as many of the icons of the 60's were. Blake was a hard working artist craftsman and poet and certainly not a self-destructive man. He was an immensly disciplined man also. In popular culture today sayings from the PROVERBS OF HELL abound. I've heard the palace of wisdom saying on television dramas . Its an easy saying to take out of context and use as a justification for any reprehensible behavior. I've done it myself being one who as a youngster was influenced by PROVERBS OF HELL, Rimbaud's "systematic derangement of the senses" and other credo's. Adolesence can be a time of absolute rebellion against "the way things are', and there is a hard core of truth to this rebellion. But one must move on from this. Today we find Rimbauds on every streetcorner, Wanna-be Blakes fascinated by his visions, and with no understanding of the man or what Blake was rebelling against. Rebellion today is a fashion industry. We know what Blake was rebelling against and we can understand why. We recognize him as a passionate prophetic voice intensely involved with his times.Passionate against injustice and raging against his times. That is what I find similar between Shattuck and Blake. Shattuck is also raging against the "spirit of the times" we live in. The misapplication of writers like Blake to justify reprehensible, destructive, heartless,loveless behavior. There is positive evil in this world. When faced with the greater good and the lesser good men don't necessarily choose the greater good. When faced with positive Good and positive Evil- Some will deliberatley and conciously choose the Evil. Many Innocents never realize this and some are destroyed by the realization. . And what is evil? I hear the question asked. A most unhip and "judgemental" word. Serial killers are evil. Murder is evil. What we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia in the last 20 years is evil. The systematic destruction of the enviorment is evil. Deception, slander, betrayal- are all evil. This century is a roller coaster ride thru a blood bath.Evil.To say that good and evil are mind-constructs and that we can transcend this archaic construct and be beyond good and evil, may be intellectually comforting in a remote study but don't take it out on the street and don't bring it to my neighborhood. Because the streets are already full of those who are "beyond good and evil". They are 14 years old and carry guns . And using them without regret.Conciously. When it comes to Love(What is Love?)The Greeks had anumber of words for love. Storge love-the natural love one feels for one's children,family.Philia love-the old brotherly love.Eros-sexual,romantic love. All of these are essential-but none of them stops one from murdering necessarily. We love our families-and we would kill those who try to harm them. We love our fellows(brothers/sisters), and we would go to war to kill those of another ethnic group/ nation if the trumpet is sounded. We love our lovers with intense sexuality and romance and in a jealous rage we may kill our lover. The other love the Greeks talked about was Agape love which was love based on principle. The kind of love that prevents us from going to war,taking vengeance for our family , killing or betraying our lover. Doing your own thing is selfish.Agape love is selfless,principled-not always passionate and intense-but real nonetheless. Same love Jesus talked about I believe. Anyway enough preaching. If one is in revolt one must ask What am I revolting against? True revolt has nothing to do with fashion and is often carried on silently, unnoticed and with principled love. Joe Murray ftsm ---------- > From: WC449298@HOPE.CIT.HOPE.EDU > To: blake@albion.com > Subject: Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply > Date: Friday, November 01, 1996 10:30 AM > > I do remember the post someone wrote in comparing Blake to > Nietzsche, and I replied, saying that I also saw striking > parallels, but striking differences too. I could be totally > misreading Blake's proverbs of Hell, but I always took them as > an excessive rebellion against the moralism of both the Puritans > and the Deists, the two groups who "crucified Christ upside > down", however he put it. The fact is, Blake did not want > anybody to be oppressed by deities that are abstracted from the > self and thus continually demanding actions from us that may be > counterintuitive--Urizen tyrannizing the other Zoas. Of course > the road of excess is self-destructive and possibly destructive > to others, but for another to draw boundaries for another, as > Urizen does, is loveless and tyrannical. Love, not moralism! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 12:31:47 -0800 From: "Joseph W. Murray" To: "P Van Schaik" , Subject: Re: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply Message-Id: <199611012124.NAA02328@post.everett.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Pam, I read a book a few years back- in fact it bothered me so much I've read it 3 times and may read it again. Your comments brought the book to mind. It was by R.C Zaehner, called OUR SAVAGE GOD. Zaehner, as you probably know , is a Catholic scholar who specializes in Comparative Religon-primarily Hinduism, I believe. Have you ever read the book? Your comments about the state of flux and no permanent selfhood being formed brought it to mind.Zaehner also wrote DRUGS, MYSTICISM AND MAKEBELIEVE which I found not as interesting. All the best, Joe Murray ---------- > From: P Van Schaik > To: blake@albion.com; aeolian@everett.com > Subject: Forbidden Knowledge and Innocence -Reply > Date: Friday, November 01, 1996 1:26 AM > > Joseph, Being present at the point of focus of the most vital energies and > so perpetually in flux that habit does not form, sounds very like Blake's > vision of Innocence in Eternity - which is, I suppose, why instinctively > you go on to quote `The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'. > For Blake, the continual flux and mingling of one's spiritual essences with > that of others sustained spirits in Innocence because it prevented a > permanent Selfhood from developing - the equivalent of the restraints > imposed by habit. > > On earth, intensity , as you point out, can lead to good or bad. The > same intensity in a world governed by selfless love, as is Blake's Eden > and Beulah when spirits are fully expanded into god's light, leads to > ecstasy. Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 16:20:28 -0500 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Characters Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Jennifer's remarks about Blake's characters and their shifting attributes, >encompassing of each other, leads me to ask a basic question about Blake's >characters (Los and Enitharmon, the Zoas and their emanations, the spectres, >etc.): What ARE they? Hi, Tom. Long time, no see. Actually, I've been trying to breathe life into a D.H. Lawrence group... he deserves as much as good old William Blake. What ARE they? Well, Lawrence said that his own characters aren't stable... they move through what he called "allotropic" states. So maybe when you're first born, like Los, you're a jerk and you tie up your first-born, Orc, because you're too much under your Father/Emanation's influence. I truly hate Los in "The Book of Urizen", for example. And then, I don't see how Jennifer can call Orc "Jesus", except in Blake's mind recalling the Temple scene where he overthrew the money changers' table. Orc in "America" and "Europe" is a mere fiery anarchist. Then he gets kind of sidelined for those final epics, doesn't he? And it's Los/Blake that is more aligned with Jesus. So what are they? To me, they are what they are at a certain time. That's why I always have been baffled by Pam's "all in one" theory-- hi, Pam! still believe that?-- because Blake doesn't package things that simplistically. Characters? Well... at one point Hugh Walthall's idea of them as cartoons sounded about right. -Randall Albright http://world.std.com/~albright/ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 13:35:29 -0800 From: "Joseph W. Murray" To: Subject: Re: Blake's Characters Message-Id: <199611012227.OAA03029@post.everett.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Tom, Very insightful comments as to why we choose to study certain artists,poets,writers. And I agree with your assessment of Blake's characters.Perhaps the grappling with our inner issues, and our choosing of blake is reflected in the sometimes contentious nature of this mailing group. I've been pretty irate at times at the way people relate to one another on this list, but in reading some of their postings (when they aren't busy putting an individual on the list down) I find that I'm probably closer in thought and inclinations than I might have beleived to the individuals who offend me at times. I find Blake's intense , passionate dislike of injustice, his dedication to his work in a society that offered him little encouragement, and his workingclass and craftsman background and lack of formal academic training or schooling and how he dealt with his times of the utmost interest to me. Some of the same issues I've dealt with in my life. And the question of Madness that surrounds discussions of Blake. Joe Murray ---------- > From: TomD3456@aol.com > To: blake@albion.com > Subject: Blake's Characters > Date: Friday, November 01, 1996 11:36 AM > > Jennifer's remarks about Blake's characters and their shifting attributes, > encompassing of each other, leads me to ask a basic question about Blake's > characters (Los and Enitharmon, the Zoas and their emanations, the spectres, > etc.): What ARE they? > > I have always thought that Blake's characters are archetypes of some kind, > not corporeal men and women (and therefore we shouldn't view their relations > as necessarily indicating misogyny, etc. on Blake's part). If they're > internal figures, like Jung's anima, wise old man, etc., or representations > of mental states and spiritual vs. material principles, as Izak Bouwer > persuasively argues, then they're in each of us, man or woman. > > But it's hard to pin down just WHAT they are, and their enigmatic nature is > at the core of Blake's essential difficulty, for me. Sometimes Los and > Enitharmon seem to represent parts of Blake's own psyche, or Everyman's; > sometimes they seem very close to representing William and Catherine Blake > ("a vegetated mortal Wife of Los, his Emanation, yet his Wife till the sleep > of Death is past," J 14:13)); sometimes they seem to be forces operating in > history, shaping it for their own ends, as in "Europe". So what are they? > Blake seems to confound any distinction between "inner" and "outer" worlds, > spiritual and corporeal, psychology and history. > > Before we go off on another wild chase down the rat hole of Blake's purported > madness, let me say No, I don't think this indicates insanity--I think this > confusion or melding of inner and outer is inherent in Blake's essential view > of existence, which is alchemical in nature (that's as close a term as I can > find, anyway). > > In alchemical work, as I understand it, the alchemist's outer, "chemical," > work is invested with psychological/spiritual meaning, and the inner and > outer work become a single "masa confusa," where transformations begin to > take place. I think an attempt to describe something like that process is at > the core of Blake's project. > > I think that sort of process takes place all the time -- working on the inner > by working on the outer. For example: I believe that for many of us who > study literature, our initial choice of an author to study is largely (and > often unconsciously) guided by the problems we experience in our inner lives, > and our sense that THIS author understands the problem we are experiencing > and has some insights into its solution. I know that is true of my own work > with Blake. And I have seen women with family-of-origin issues do > marvelously intense work on King Lear, etc. > > While we are doing this kind of work, we often are only vaguely conscious of > its connections with our own issues, but a kind of self-healing or > transformation takes place through our grappling with the subject of our > study. Is this inner or outer work? Are we working on King Lear or on our > problems with our fathers? I think it's both, and it's a mysterious process. > And the problems are seldom "solved" in the way we might have hoped at the > start, but we are transformed in the process of working on them, and "The Eye > altering alters All." > > So I believe that what Blake is describing, this merging or melding of inner > and outer worlds, is "for real," and pretty common. But it's damned hard to > understand or write about -- whenever I think I've pinned them down, the > figures keep changing form and wriggling away. And perhaps that's why Blake > doesn't seem clear about it: he's portraying a situation that is inherently > confusing, constantly transgressing the conceptual boundaries that words > create. > > What do others think? How would you describe these figures -- the Zoas and > their emanations, etc? What ARE they? > > --Tom Devine ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 14:08:44 -0800 From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Bluestockings behind Blake's antifeminist passages Message-Id: <199611012208.OAA24918@dfw-ix6.ix.netcom.com> You wrote: > > >There have been some postings along the lines of bluestockings and Blake >that tried to "point out" that there were educated women in the eighteenth >century, and that Blake passed such people over for an unlettered woman. >Considering that he once congratulated himself on not getting an education >in rational materialistic views, which is the education that the >Bluestockings had and urged for others, and considering that he believed >his vision to be intact because he was an autodidact, I think that Blake >was seeking out an equal, whom he tried to educate (with some success) in >vision. This is not to say that the rationalists do not have their great >contribution, sometimes underrated by Blake, but Blake is Blake. I can't >imagine him marrying such an "educated" woman, nor can I imagine a Hannah >More, for instance, taking any interest in Blake except of the sort that >his patron and "spiritual enemy" Hayley took in him, or that sort of >interest that Harriet Mathews may have had in him as an interesting >addition to a tea. She was the woman whose gatherings he attended when he >was writing An Island in the Moon (so-called) as a satire on such salons. > >Since I'm doing some work on More at this moment, unfinished and without >strong conclusions, I'd like to suggest what these kinds of women meant to >Blake. Other ideas are welcome. > >Hannah More inveighs against those who protest poverty (Rousseau): >"...poverty is represented as merely a political evil, and the restraints >which keep the poor honest, are painted as the most flagrant injustice." >("Strictures on the Education of Women," 331 of the _Works of Hannah More_ >vol. I (Goodrich: Boston: 1827; originally written in 1799, five years >before Blake dated _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_ title pages, two years after >Blake titled _Vala, or, The Four Zoas_. Probably no influence there, but >More often sounds like Vala, or like Enitharmon at her worst. > >Also try this: "Propriety is to a woman what tegreat Roman critic says >action is to an orator: it is the first, the second, the third >requisite...It shows itself by a regular, orderly, undeviating course; and >never starts from its sober orbit into any eccentricities..."(Strictures, >326). Blake's regular orbits are all sinister. Also: "..If I were asked >what quality is most important in an instructor of youth, I should not >hesitate to reply, _such a strong impression of the corruption of our >nature, as should insure a disposition to counteract it; together with >such a deep view and thorough knowledge of the human heart, as should be >necessary for dveloping and controlling its most secrret and complicated >workings._" (Strictures, 336). For More, human nature is basically evil, >and yet-- > >The news of More is not all dismal. "There is, happily, an active spring >in the mind of youth which bounds with fresh vigour and uninjured >elasticity from any temporary depression" caused by her pedagogy (356). >Belief in the visionary fire, in Woman, yet a fear of it in More. But >perhaps that is preferable to Locke's genteel dismissal of the human >psyche as having a blankness filled with vague tendencies, readily >manipulated in innocent youths. > >At the end of _Jerusalem,_ Blake seems to me to unite Vala and Jerusalem >in Britannia. This is another approach to my argument that the later >Blake treats women more symbolically than he does Thel or Oothoon--I >believe that, if anything, Blake is being more realistic, more willing to >reflect the realities of women's contributions as popularizers to >rationalist agendas--that is, willing to acknowledge that the complicity >of women in antivisionary agendas required more than just using them as >foils for the male perpetrators of evil. Oothoon is more of an innocent, >hamstrung victim of the system, vainly resisting it. A Vala or an Ololon >knows what she is doing--so does a Rahab, who stands with Blake in the >bosom of Satan, showing that Blake does not excuse even himself from a >role in the creation of the age insofar as he reasons at women instead of >granting them their own access to vision. Because they have access to >their own guilt, they all, even Vala, can enter the visionary fires of >transformed. It is only the elect, smug in their self-enclosed purity and >blamelessness, who cannot gain the transformation of vision. > >It is in this light that I understand Blake's considerable use of Western >negations of the female in his late work. It goes beyond "felix culpa" to >a recognition that freedom, a free will, is the divine spark in >all--opposed to the artifically manufactured "Female Will" of social >mores--or "Mores"--pun intended. Whether Blake knew of Hannah More's work >is not important; he had a taste of More's ideas in Wollstonecraft's _A >Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which accepted the Lockean view of >humanity. Despite More's horrified repudiation of Wollstonecraft'sLockean >democratizing and egalitarian implications, early and late. I think of >Blake as a part of a web of women's concerns, a tangled golden string >that may lead to Jerusalem's wall. > >Suzanne Araas Vesely > > > Suzanne--- We've already been around the argument you raise in the beginning of your note, (for wch I thank you) but perhaps you missed that exchange. It was never my intention nor anyone else's to suggest that Blake should or should not have married anyone other than he did---this thing started when I pointed out that there WERE educated women around in Blake's day (in response to someone's suggestion [?] that he had no choice but to married an uneducated one...) and that was all. But I'm glad the subject has generated some good talk--especially around the satire in _Island in the Moon_. Susan -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #123 **************************************