William Blake’s defiance against his society’s traditional, orthodox ideals concerning sex and sexuality are seen throughout many of his poems, and even his artworks. The poem in which Blake most extensively elaborates his celebration of love, and his critique of sexual repression is Visions of the Daughters of Albion (here on shortened to Visions). Visions centers around the rape of the main character, Oothoon. Oothoon, a virginal girl who is deeply in love with her partner Theotormon, has an immensely violent encounter with Bromion on the way to visit her partner. Bromion during this encounter rapes Oothoon, and Theotormon, unable to cope with the situation that has occurred, chains Oothoon and Bromion together. Theotormon then laments over the loss of his partner and lover. Meanwhile, Oothoon sits within a cave literally and figuratively chained to her rapist, Bromion, she cries over her situation. The poem then moves on to discuss the causes and consequences that surround her rape. Through several passages, readers discover that all three characters are, in their own ways, imprisoned by social, political, and religious ideals that have been thrust upon them through paradigms that existed during the time of Blake’s writings. Through intricate psychological conflicts created through the trinity of characters within Visions, Blake weaves a pointed social commentary. This commentary notes the ways in which social and religious repression negatively affect both sexes within the poem. Visions is also one of Blake’s poems that distinctively delineate male sexual aggressiveness as a component of “Urizenic” patriarchy, and thus illustrates the kinds of damage it does to all peoples as a whole. Through the main character’s (Oothoon) exploration of these traumatic events and consequences, Blake ultimately advocates for an open expression of sexuality, while also condemning aggressive sexual violence perpetrated by men. This essay will discuss the ways in which sex, and sexual violence are framed within the lens of religious and social repression within the poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The intention of this will be to showcase the ways in which Blake advocates for victims of sexual violence through the denunciation of society’s obsession with the chaste and virginal.
First of all, Bromion is a study in the pathology of violence and the ways in which sexual violence is linked to all kinds of cultural exploitation. As Alicia Ostriker states, “Bromion is a number of things which to Blake are one thing. He is the slave owner who converts humans into private property and confirms his possession by impregnating the females, the racist who rationalizes racism by insisting that the subordinate race is sexually promiscuous, the rapist who honestly believes that his victim was asking for it; and, withal, he does not actually experience ‘sensual enjoyment.’” (Ostriker pg. 3). Bromion essentially enacts such violence not because he enjoys the sensuality of the acts, but instead it is the power over the submissive, the frail, and the sexually vulnerable that he enjoys. Bromion is in this way a character who thrives on violence, particularly that of the sexual variety. However, if Bromion represents the social and psychological pathology of sexual violence, Theotormon must represent its contemptible underbelly—sexual impotence. “Oerflowd with woe,” asking unanswerable questions, weeping incessantly, Theotormon does not respond to Bromion’s insults to his masculinity “Now thou maist marry Bromion’s harlot,” (Visions pg. 59). Playing the role of intimidated slave to coarse slave-master, Theotormon has been victimized by an ideology that glorifies male aggressiveness and requires complete purity of the feminine. Dejected and repentant to the utmost extreme, he cannot look Oothoon in her eyes. Theotormon through the violation of his lover, has been sexually dominated by Bromion in a way that is entirely based upon a system of beliefs that maintains that the man in a relationship has the control, and that if he cannot control his lover, that man is not a “true” patriarchal figure. Theotormon thus, has in his mind lost the very object within his possession that defined his masculinity. Even though Oothoon calls out for her lover, maintains her spiritual virginity, and offers Theotormon her love, he cannot accept her as this systemic belief in female purity is stronger than the reality of the situation that has taken place. Only with incredulity and grief does Oothoon herself then realize that not only is she “damaged goods”, but through her taking sexual initiative in her identification as spiritually virginal instead of being “modest”, Theotormon will never accept her. Whether celibacy or death, the link between celibacy and death in both females is telling as to the sort of society Blake is taking arms against through the humanization and defences of Oothoon’s victimization as unjust.
Throughout the poem both male characters fail to understand Oothoon’s rape in any ways other than their own, and so “their apparent plurality— the difference between Theotormon’s and Bromion’s views— is only apparent, since each believes in a single vision, a single standard” (Goslee pg.115). Both men are incredibly absorbed in their own perspectives, and themselves to such a degree that they cannot begin to acknowledge the fact that they themselves are not the true victims here. They hear no one’s lamentations but their own. Both Theotormon and Bromion, “allow their epistemology to be dictated by a version of religious law” (Goslee pg.116). This religious law is that of female chastity, ownership and purity. The daughters of Albion in Visions are enslaved by “restrictive laws of virginity, chastity, and female ownership” (Persyn pg.64). This argument manifests into a larger issue when one notices that the “metaphorical links between female chastity, human form, and sacrifice . . . demonstrate that for Blake the law of chastity is dehumanizing and destructive” (Persyn pg.53). Thus, in order to fully realize the issue surrounding sex and sexuality within Blake’s text there must be a discourse on sexual sacrifice. This is especially key as shown through Oothoon’s rape and her treatment throughout Visions. This suggests that the discourse of sacrifice is a necessary subtext for study of Blake’s treatment of gender especially within the poem. The poem through its use of the rape that occurs to Oothoon, represents the female body as a site of sacrifice and positions readers for this spectacle of virginity and violence. Either way, the virgin body becomes an offering. As readers we become exemplary of the targeted hypocrisy in Blake’s proverb “Brothels are built with the bricks of Religion” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell pg.72). It makes the entire culture complicit here. As readers we are just as guilty in watching, and doing nothing in terms of simply being observers of violent sexual spectacle. As a consequence the female chorus that introduces readers to Visions becomes in Blake’s text the daughters of Albion, who with “trembling lamentation . . . echo back [Oothoon’s] sighs” (Blake Visions pg.65). The female heroine in the texts occupy a site of sacrifice in the narrative— as constructs of virginity.
Most of Visions is Oothoon’s opera of trauma. Raped, enslaved, imprisoned, rejected, the main character’s agonized rhapsody of self-offering rushes from insight to insight. Though she begins by focusing on her individual condition, her vision rapidly expands outward. She analyzes the enchainment of begin in a loveless marriage, and the unhappy children it must produce. She praises the value of infant sexuality, and attacks the logical process which brands joy whoredom and sublimates its sexuality in twisted religiosity. She also laments other ramifications of the tyranny of reason over desire, such as the abuse of peasant by landlord, of worker by factory owner, of the faithful by their churches. For Oothoon life means being able to be “open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears,” and the perception of any beauty is an erotic activity in which eye and object join “in happy copulation” (Visions pg.64). Oothoon not only defines and defends her own sexuality rather than waiting for “Prince Charming” to come and save her from her tormentors, and not only attacks patriarchal ideology root and branch, but outflanks everyone in her poem intellectuality and spirituality—and is intellectual and spiritual precisely because she is sexual. Blake’s culturally-targeted creation of this character of Oothoon is defiant in the face of eighteenth-century British cultural structures about female purity and marital customs; in other words, Blake transforms and reverses, the virgin’s lament at not being able to marry, into Oothoon’s depiction of marriage as a “servile slavery” and her redefinition of sexual purity. Vision’s representation of virginity, culturally-endorsed violence, and female sacrifice, ultimately is reshaped through the reclamation of oneself and one’s own sexuality— a move that is fundamentally empowering for the victim.
The intention of this essay was to discuss the numerous ways Blake throughout Visions advocates for victims of sexual violence through the denunciation of society’s obsession with the chaste and virginal. Ultimately through this obsession, Visions becomes a poem based around a sort of battle of the sexes through violence and sexual violence. Bromion is subjected to the desire to acquire sex through any means necessary, regardless of the fact that he finds no pleasure in the activity. There is a major contrast between Oothoon as victim and slave, and her male tormentors. There is no true winner, as seen through the societal structures each character must contend with in order to define themselves as a part of their role in society. The sex in which they must reside within, chains them to each other, the trauma of sexual violence, and to the ideals that they as individuals are supposed to hold themselves up to. As discussed previously, Oothoon by the end of the poem reforms her identity into one that is in possession of spiritual virginity, and free from the obligation to be married into servile slavery. In a way through this feminist re-identification, Oothoon transcended the sexual roles in which she must be a victim and compliant to. For Oothoon within Visions, her sex is not determined by outside forces, instead it has become a thing that is formed and manifested internally through her own determination. Meanwhile both Theotormon and Bromion remain in a state of tension, as their identities are intrinsically tied to the oppression, and submission of female sex. Unable to control or violently manipulate Oothoon’s sex the two men devour themselves into masses that, for Blake, represent everything wrong with a society built upon sexual repression. Through several passages, readers discover that all the characters are, chained to social, political, and religious ideals. Through intricate psychological conflicts created through the trinity of characters within Visions, Blake weaves a pointed social commentary. Through the main character’s exploration of her own trauma and the consequences that arise from it, Blake ultimately advocates for an open expression of sexuality, while also condemning aggressive sexual violence perpetrated by men. This notion that a women’s sex is inherently tied to something that must be controlled and oppressed is in of itself wrong (as demonstrated through Theotormon and Bromion). The effects of continuing to perpetuate this sort of thinking is a plague that destroys men and women alike, Blake was very much so aware of this. But, as seen throughout the poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake attempts to speak out against this sort of belief system, and thus create a better environment for sexual discourse and expressions.
Works Cited:
Persyn, Mary-Kelly. “‘No Human form but Sexual’: Sensibility, Chastity, and Sacrifice in Blake’s Jerusalem.” European Romantic Review 10.1 (1999): 53-83.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Volume 16 · Issue 3.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Department of English, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM, USA, 1982, bq.blakearchive.org/16.3.ostriker.
Goslee, Nancy Moore. “Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” ELH 57.1 (1990): 101-128.
Blake, William. “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Norton, W.W., and Co., 2007.
Blake, William. “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Norton, W.W., and Co., 2007.
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