William Blake’s Pestilence, Sympathy, and the Politics of Feeling

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pestilence has often been encountered as an “invisible enemy.” What happens when we give it visual form? This essay examines the dynamics of sympathy, spectatorship, and the politics of feeling activated in William Blake’s watercolor Pestilence: The Death of the First-Born (c. 1805). While the Exodus narrative controls fear of the plagues by encouraging reader identification with the chosen people protected by providence, Blake’s visual invention articulates an alternative politics of feeling. Drawing on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s theories of sympathy, I demonstrate how Blake’s composition invites the viewer to engage with the Egyptian plagues through a dynamic of divided attention, alternating between different points of view, identifying with the position of the destroying angel, the chosen, and the victims. This dynamic contrasts the gigantic figure of the pestilential destroyer, which initially arrests the eye, with the miniaturized figures of the victims. By giving the tenth plague of Egypt an imposing physical form, and a face and reciprocating gaze to a child threatened by it, Blake’s scene of pestilence becomes a virtual test of moral sentiments in which viewers confront an ethics of freedom built on sacrifice.