Blake, Hayley and the History of Sexuality

Abstract

Rape is a familiar part of mythic accounts of the origins of nations, from the conception of Romulus and Remus onwards; Sylvana Tomaselli has recently pointed to ‘the overwhelming presence of rape in the birthplace of our civilization, in Ancient Greece and Rome’.1 The role of rape in imagined histories was equally obvious to William Hayley in 1785. In his Essay on Old Maids he reminds his readers that ‘the Roman empire was founded on a rape, and no less than six hundred and eighty-three Sabine virgins were forcibly converted into wives...’ (p. 84).2 But rape as myth is hard to read because rape is also a fact in the histories of nations and nationalism — outside the realm of storytelling and mythmaking. Many of Blake’s readers have assumed that the stories told in the Visions and in the Preludium to America are stories of rape, and have seen these narratives as part of Blake’s accounts of (or attacks on) the sexual ideology that is a part of national ideology.