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| British Romantic Poetry(2018) |
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I. Harold Bloom's reading of Visions of Daughters of Albion 1. Main Action At the opening of Blake's poem the Daughters of
Albion weep, and their lamentation sighs toward America, where their sister,
"the soft soul of America, Oothoon," wanders in unhappy isolation
seeking a flower to comfort her loneliness. She plucks not a golden apple but a
golden flower, a bright Marygold of Leutha's vale. At this point in Blake's work,
Leutha is only a representative of sexual potentiality. Like the apples of the
Hesperides, the Marygold represents an Innocence to be recovered through
sensual fulfillment. Placing the flower between her breasts, the virgin Oothoon
flies east across the Atlantic, which is the realm of her lover, Theotormon, hoping
to find him and present him with her love. But Theotormon, an ocean Titan, is
an agent of division. As the Atlantic he separates Oothoon from her sisters.
Within himself he is a sick and divided soul, tormented by his conception of
God (hence his name). Before the awakened Oothoon can reach this unworthy
lover, she is evidently raped by a thunder Titan, Bromion (whose name is Greek
for "roaring"). Bromion has not the moral courage of his own lust,
and proceeds to classify his victim as a harlot. As befits a thunder deity he
is a slave-driver, and ironically offers Oothoon to Theotormon as a more
valuable property now that she carries a thunderer's child.
2. A dialectical interplay between three characters.
The remainder of the poem consists in a fierce
dialectical interplay between the three demigods. Theotormon, consumed by
jealousy, is too divided either to accept Oothoon's love or to reject her
entirely. Bromion is desperately concerned to demonstrate that his mad morality
is a natural necessity, by insisting that Experience must be either uniform or
chaotic. He is, as Frye observes, more a Deist or natural religionist than he
is a Puritan, for he associates morality and nature as binding codes. But
Oothoon, though she has entered into sexual reality through the wrong agent,
has been liberated by it from the negations of natural morality. She denounces
Urizen, the god of restraint worshiped by both her ravisher and her beloved,
and asserts against the oppression of his reasonable uniformity the holy
individuality of each moment of desire:
3. A quotation showing Oothoon's final assertion in the text
"The moment of desire! the moment of desire!
The virgin
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber: the youth shut up from
The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence,
The self enjoyings of self denial? why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of
desire?"
4. Solipsism, an imaginative crippling as Blake's diagnosis of the contemporary Britain
This remarkable passage is more than an
anticipation of contemporary theories of psychic repression. Oothoon states the
dark dialectic that makes man fall from a divine image to a human abstract. Sexual
hindrance of oneself leads to imaginative crippling, and at last to the Ulro of
solipsism, "the self enjoyings of self denial," here equated both
with masturbation and Urizenic, that is, conventionally orthodox religion.
Supreme embodiment of energy as she now is, the exultant Oothoon is all but
trapped between the negations of her profoundly stupid males. The frontispiece
of Visions shows Oothoon and Bromion chained back to back in a cave, while the
oceanic Theotormon weeps outside. The binding is what Theotormon sees, not what
is, for Oothoon cries out that love is as free as the mountain wind.
II. Helen Bruder's Feminist Reading
1. Oothoon's rebellious actions against the contemporary female sexuality
First, Oothoon rejects the
idea that she should be the passive object of male desire and instead claims
the right to be the subject of her own libidinous inclination: 'I loved
Theotormon/ And I was not ashamed' (VDA, iii:l-2; E.45). It is easy to neglect
how radical the poem's first two lines are, and we should therefore remember
that the late-eighteenth-century's obsession with distinctions between virtuous
and non-virtuous females left women, as Patricia Meyer Spacks notes, with
'virtually no freedom of emotional expression'...Second, and perhaps even more offensively,
Oothoon offers a direct affront to the idea that a woman's sexuality is only
activated by the presence of a man and his, to use one of Cleland's abundantly
self-flattering metaphors, 'wonderful machine'.
2. Oothoon's response to the rape: her capitulation to the male dominating sexual politics.
So, from the moment of Oothoon's immodest flight, her behaviour must be, and is, described by a narrator sensitive to the multiple, and starkly oppositional, significances of her actions. This slippery speaker makes his/her/its first multivocal statement(s) with this conflictual assessment of that flight, 'Over the waves she went in wing'd exulting swift delight/ And over Theotormons reign, took her impetuous course' (VDA, 1:14-15; E.46). To Oothoon her journey is one of ecstatic joy, to the men who witness her it is one of impudent sexual usurpation... Rather Bromion is a frightened policeman of a paranoid patriarchy, insisting (in by now predictable terms) that women, like slaves, are naturally masochistic (VDA, 1:22-3; E.46) and, more significantly, wanting as quickly as possible to remove from his presence the appalling (VDA, 1:17; E.46) thought of a sexually active woman. Bromion might insistently declare the reified and tradable article Oothoon 'mine' (VDA, 1:20; E.46)... but he is also desperate to pass responsibility for her containment over to Theotormon. Theotormon however, is in no way able to deal with Oothoon's sexual gesture (let alone the punitive response it provoked). Capable only of evincing a rather flimsy jealousy he prefers to weep into a sea of misery at the enormity of the problem caused by Oothoon's 'innocent' statement of desire - though not before imprisoning her and Bromion in a union of hateful bondage...What it is most important to note is that Blake appears to have taken this form of assault seriously. Unlike his contemporaries, who turned 'ravishment' into entertainment and put the abused woman on trial, Blake suggests here that this kind of violence has profound effects. It certainly does on Oothoon, for no amount of critical apology can erase the fact that she entirely loses her sexual vision as a result of Bromion's rape, and consequently capitulates to the value system of her oppressors. This is where she begins to slip and slide, as her language - in Stephen Vine's words - 'explodes under the pressure of the contradictions that inhabit it'. And Oothoon's assimilation not only perverts her consciousness, and underlines her powerlessness, but it also turns her into the material for voyeuristic sexual fantasies. The very physical agony of her 'purification' transforms Oothoon into a vehicle of sadistic stimulation - as the 'writhing [of] her soft snowy limbs' (VDA 2:12 E.46, and see PL 3, Illuminated; E.131) under the eagles' talons produces the only response to her bodily existence which Theotormon makes (VDA, 2:18; E.46). A 'sick mans dream' (VDA, 6:19; E.50) indeed, though as we've seen not an uncommon one. The masculine sexual imagination current at this time was ailing, and Blake himself can hardly have been beyond infection - in fact it is worth noting that (male) critics still claim that the ravening birds 'represent Oothoon's ideal of her lover'. |
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I. Harold Bloom's reading of Visions of Daughters of Albion 1. Main Action At the opening of Blake's poem the Daughters of
Albion weep, and their lamentation sighs toward America, where their sister,
"the soft soul of America, Oothoon," wanders in unhappy isolation
seeking a flower to comfort her loneliness. She plucks not a golden apple but a
golden flower, a bright Marygold of Leutha's vale. At this point in Blake's work,
Leutha is only a representative of sexual potentiality. Like the apples of the
Hesperides, the Marygold represents an Innocence to be recovered through
sensual fulfillment. Placing the flower between her breasts, the virgin Oothoon
flies east across the Atlantic, which is the realm of her lover, Theotormon, hoping
to find him and present him with her love. But Theotormon, an ocean Titan, is
an agent of division. As the Atlantic he separates Oothoon from her sisters.
Within himself he is a sick and divided soul, tormented by his conception of
God (hence his name). Before the awakened Oothoon can reach this unworthy
lover, she is evidently raped by a thunder Titan, Bromion (whose name is Greek
for "roaring"). Bromion has not the moral courage of his own lust,
and proceeds to classify his victim as a harlot. As befits a thunder deity he
is a slave-driver, and ironically offers Oothoon to Theotormon as a more
valuable property now that she carries a thunderer's child.
2. A dialectical interplay between three characters.
The remainder of the poem consists in a fierce
dialectical interplay between the three demigods. Theotormon, consumed by
jealousy, is too divided either to accept Oothoon's love or to reject her
entirely. Bromion is desperately concerned to demonstrate that his mad morality
is a natural necessity, by insisting that Experience must be either uniform or
chaotic. He is, as Frye observes, more a Deist or natural religionist than he
is a Puritan, for he associates morality and nature as binding codes. But
Oothoon, though she has entered into sexual reality through the wrong agent,
has been liberated by it from the negations of natural morality. She denounces
Urizen, the god of restraint worshiped by both her ravisher and her beloved,
and asserts against the oppression of his reasonable uniformity the holy
individuality of each moment of desire:
3. A quotation showing Oothoon's final assertion in the text
"The moment of desire! the moment of desire!
The virgin
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber: the youth shut up from
The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence,
The self enjoyings of self denial? why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of
desire?"
4. Solipsism, an imaginative crippling as Blake's diagnosis of the contemporary Britain
This remarkable passage is more than an
anticipation of contemporary theories of psychic repression. Oothoon states the
dark dialectic that makes man fall from a divine image to a human abstract. Sexual
hindrance of oneself leads to imaginative crippling, and at last to the Ulro of
solipsism, "the self enjoyings of self denial," here equated both
with masturbation and Urizenic, that is, conventionally orthodox religion.
Supreme embodiment of energy as she now is, the exultant Oothoon is all but
trapped between the negations of her profoundly stupid males. The frontispiece
of Visions shows Oothoon and Bromion chained back to back in a cave, while the
oceanic Theotormon weeps outside. The binding is what Theotormon sees, not what
is, for Oothoon cries out that love is as free as the mountain wind.
II. Helen Bruder's Feminist Reading
1. Oothoon's rebellious actions against the contemporary female sexuality
First, Oothoon rejects the
idea that she should be the passive object of male desire and instead claims
the right to be the subject of her own libidinous inclination: 'I loved
Theotormon/ And I was not ashamed' (VDA, iii:l-2; E.45). It is easy to neglect
how radical the poem's first two lines are, and we should therefore remember
that the late-eighteenth-century's obsession with distinctions between virtuous
and non-virtuous females left women, as Patricia Meyer Spacks notes, with
'virtually no freedom of emotional expression'...Second, and perhaps even more offensively,
Oothoon offers a direct affront to the idea that a woman's sexuality is only
activated by the presence of a man and his, to use one of Cleland's abundantly
self-flattering metaphors, 'wonderful machine'.
2. Oothoon's response to the rape: her capitulation to the male dominating sexual politics.
So, from the moment of Oothoon's immodest flight, her behaviour must be, and is, described by a narrator sensitive to the multiple, and starkly oppositional, significances of her actions. This slippery speaker makes his/her/its first multivocal statement(s) with this conflictual assessment of that flight, 'Over the waves she went in wing'd exulting swift delight/ And over Theotormons reign, took her impetuous course' (VDA, 1:14-15; E.46). To Oothoon her journey is one of ecstatic joy, to the men who witness her it is one of impudent sexual usurpation... Rather Bromion is a frightened policeman of a paranoid patriarchy, insisting (in by now predictable terms) that women, like slaves, are naturally masochistic (VDA, 1:22-3; E.46) and, more significantly, wanting as quickly as possible to remove from his presence the appalling (VDA, 1:17; E.46) thought of a sexually active woman. Bromion might insistently declare the reified and tradable article Oothoon 'mine' (VDA, 1:20; E.46)... but he is also desperate to pass responsibility for her containment over to Theotormon. Theotormon however, is in no way able to deal with Oothoon's sexual gesture (let alone the punitive response it provoked). Capable only of evincing a rather flimsy jealousy he prefers to weep into a sea of misery at the enormity of the problem caused by Oothoon's 'innocent' statement of desire - though not before imprisoning her and Bromion in a union of hateful bondage...What it is most important to note is that Blake appears to have taken this form of assault seriously. Unlike his contemporaries, who turned 'ravishment' into entertainment and put the abused woman on trial, Blake suggests here that this kind of violence has profound effects. It certainly does on Oothoon, for no amount of critical apology can erase the fact that she entirely loses her sexual vision as a result of Bromion's rape, and consequently capitulates to the value system of her oppressors. This is where she begins to slip and slide, as her language - in Stephen Vine's words - 'explodes under the pressure of the contradictions that inhabit it'. And Oothoon's assimilation not only perverts her consciousness, and underlines her powerlessness, but it also turns her into the material for voyeuristic sexual fantasies. The very physical agony of her 'purification' transforms Oothoon into a vehicle of sadistic stimulation - as the 'writhing [of] her soft snowy limbs' (VDA 2:12 E.46, and see PL 3, Illuminated; E.131) under the eagles' talons produces the only response to her bodily existence which Theotormon makes (VDA, 2:18; E.46). A 'sick mans dream' (VDA, 6:19; E.50) indeed, though as we've seen not an uncommon one. The masculine sexual imagination current at this time was ailing, and Blake himself can hardly have been beyond infection - in fact it is worth noting that (male) critics still claim that the ravening birds 'represent Oothoon's ideal of her lover'.
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