Essence, Gender, Race: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Abstract

Essence, Gender, Race: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion Dennis M. Welch (bio) Dennis M. Welch Virginia Tech Dennis M. Welch Dennis M. Welch is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. He has published 40 articles, many of them on Blake, in such journals as Mosaic, Philological Quarterly, and European Romantic Review. Footnotes 1. While these interpretive approaches are not mutually exclusive, most of the studies that are cited below tend to emphasize one particular approach over the others. Probably the best overall historical study of Visions, placing it largely in the context of late eighteenth-century parliamentary debate over the slave trade, remains David V. Erdman’s essay “Blake’s Vision of Slavery,” Journal of the Warburg and Court auld Institutes 15.2 (1952): 242–52; rpt. in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) 88–103. Other scholars focusing on the historical in the prophecy include: Steven Vine, “‘that mild beam’: Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” The Discourse of Slavery, ed. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring (London: Routledge, 1994) 44–63; and David Blake and Elliott Gruner, “Redeeming Captivity: The Negative Revolution of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, ” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Relations 1.1 (1997): 21–34. For studies of the poem in relation to such historical figures as Mary Wollstonecraft and Henry Fuseli, see Henry H. Wasser, “Notes on the Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Modern Language Quarterly 9.2 (1948): 292–97; Nelson Hilton, “An Original Story,” Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 69–104; and Wes Chapman, “Blake, Wollstonecraft, and the Inconsistency of Oothoon,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 31.1 (1997): 4–17. Scholars who examine the rhetorical and figurative include: Hilton, “Original Story”; Thomas A. Vogler, “ ‘in vain the Eloquent tongue’: An Un-Reading of visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (Durham: Duke UP, 1987) 271–309; Nancy Moore Goslee, “Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” ELM 57.1 (1990): 101–28; James A. W. Heffernan, “Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality,” SiR 30.1 (1991): 3–18; Fred Hoerner, “Prolific Reflections: Blake’s Contortion of Surveillance in Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” SiR 35.1 (1996): 119–50; and Vine. The psycho-sexual and the feminist readings are by far the most in number. See, for example: Irene Tayler, “The Woman Scaly,” Midwest Modern Language Association Bulletin 6.1 (1973): 74– 87; Jane E. Peterson, “The Visions of the Daughters of Albion: A Problem in Perception,” Philological Quarterly 52.2 (1973): 252–64; Susan Fox, “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1976–77): 507–19; David Aers, “William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex,” ELH 44.3 (1977): 500–514; Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980) 126–44; Robert P. Waxier, “The Virgin Mantle Displaced: Blake’s Early Attempt,” Modern Language Studies 12.1 (1982): 45–53; Anne K. Mellor, “Blake’s Portrayal of Women,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16.3 (1982–83): 148–55; Alicia Ostriker, “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16.3 (1982–83): 156–65; David Punter, “Blake, Trauma and the Female,” New Literary History 15.3 (1984): 475–90; Laura Ellen Haigwood, “Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion: Revising an Interpretive Tradition,” San José Studies 11.1 (1989): 77–94; Harriet Kramer Linkin, “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 23.4 (1990): 184–94; Goslee, “Slavery and Sexual Character”; and Helen P. Bruder, “Blake and Gender Studies,” Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicholas M. Williams (New York: Palgrave, 2006) 132–66, especially 142–45. Perhaps the most comprehensive examination of the prophecy thus far, treating it from various critical perspectives, is by Goslee, “Slavery and Sexual Character.” Her concerns about Blake “blurring together the...