INTRODUCTION: NAKED HISTORY DISPLAYED

Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne J. Connolly

Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed (E275)

Blake has the power to get under peoples skin. His passionately expressed sensual aesthetics guarantee it, whilst his still-growing cultural presence ensures that we often witness that provocative afterlife. Blake returns. The temperature rises. Take, as a striking example, the widely-read review of Tate Britains recent restaging of Blakes 1809 exhibition, by Brian Sewell, in the Evening Standard.1 This quintessential connoisseur, enraged by Blakes vicious, ignorant and silly artistic judgements, lays into him cod-philosopher, cod-poet and cod-painter with gusto, tellingly singling out the sexual aspect of Blakes aesthetic for especial censure:
The nude and semi-nude figures to which Blake was devoted were never, after his student years (and very rarely then), drawn from the live model, but were developed at an extreme remove from reality, creatures of mannerism inspired by fancy, their musculature as schematic and preposterous as that of notorious late 20th-century draughtsmen whose work is based on and encourages erotic fantasy. When so many of his visions force nude figures into oddly sexual conjunctions and almost pornographic attitudes, the sceptical enquirer is perhaps allowed to question the mask of innocence.

Copyright

Sexually knowing, coercive; enticing, inventive Sewell, albeit with glorious disdain, homes in on just the hypnotic Blakean eroticism we have hotly pursued before2 and our contributors now chase through the halls of history, revealed to be far from dry and dusty. Historicist Blake criticism, of course, enjoys a long and vibrant life, represented in monumental figures such as David Erdman and G. E. Bentley Jr who place him in his radical context and bring the minute particulars of his surroundings into view. Such loving detail still comes under criticism for getting away from poetry and art, and losing the big picture. A contemporary historico-archival Blakescholar recalls ruefullythat his (ex-)partneronce mocked, What are you working onnow? Blakes doorknob?It is our contention that a knob can be significant and sexy. Lifting the veil from the secrets of the past has a frisson that can eroticize the archives. Naked history displayed is
1

Blake, Gender and Culture

Copyright

Naked Beauty displayed. And with Blakes own erotically charged attitude to history and its transformation (one need only mention the fiery Orc and the harlot Jerusalem) it is no wonder that every new historical revelation carries a new sexual illumination. The exuberance of historygendersexuality combinations is vivid in the work of Blake critics ranging from Christopher Hobson to Susan Matthews, where documentary rigour brings to light sexual realms in Blakes world which had been obscured but were there for the discovery.3 This collection aims to show the richness that combinations of Blake, gender and culture are bringing forth in the early twenty-first century. Another recent event testifies to the burning passions that arise when history forcefully returns. The 400th anniversary celebrations of the King James Bible saw linguistic wizard Phillip Pullman resort to single, virile words in order to capture Blake inexhaustible, mysterious, enthralling and his own intense response absorbed, fascinated, obsessed.4 Blakes glow is supercharged for those who choose to encounter and explore his verbal and visual universes of desire. The Sexy Blake conference (Oxford, July 2010) from which much of the current volume grows, definitively showed this.5 It seems that every time we learn something new about, and from, Blake, sex and sexuality, gender and love are his hottest topics. Three recent examples a new letter, a new piece of biographical detail and a new collection of designs and verses wonderfully illustrate this, and a brief account of these discoveries serves as a fitting frame to a summary of our contents. In late 2009 a Blake letter came to light which had been lost for 124 years.6 It was written to William Hayley in August 1804 and, as might at this point be expected, brims with sexual playfulness and gender significance.7 Theres just so much here: convivial comment on female friends and acquaintances; diplomatic praise for the talents of a woman artist; even aesthetic discussion of just the kind of image Sewell disparaged for the newly identified Sketch of a Shipwreck after Romney8 is littered with unnatural nudes and features in the foreground an awesomely muscled male rescuer whose wave-parting steed rears out of the sea with flambuoyantly enormous erectile suggestion. As mariners and mothers look on in wonder, we clearly see Naked Beauty displayed, and this is just one of the ways this letter is ripe with returned potential. Another example is the incomparable sexual inventiveness at work in what might have been just obligatory praise for Hayleys renewed poetic productivity: I also rejoice to hear that your Muse is rocking the Cradle Pray take care of both Mother & Child & suffer not the wicked harlot Prose to ingross too much of your precious time.9 Hayleys aesthetic is feminized and becomes maternal, yet he is also a doting father in danger of low-down seduction by the wicked harlot Prose. Could there be a more suggestive way to commend diligent devotion to the composition of verse? In addition, reciprocated appreciation of Hayleys habitual gallantry has the effect of bringing Catherine Blake out of the shadows too.10 We get a response from Catherine to

Introduction

the man who described her to Lady Hesketh, and to posterity as it turns out, as an excellent Wife (a true Helpmate!).11 Here Hayley, in a lost letter, apparently addressed such a compliment to her directly in the form of a comparison to exemplary wife Margaret Klopstock, who herself claimed beeing always present at the birth of her husbands young verses.12 Catherine desires Blake to assure Hayley that She thinks herself Quite as happy in every respect. Wishes she was as worthy. But of this return gallantry Blake evocatively insists, accenting his position as amanuensis, This she makes me write. The letter ends with him, a little bizarrely, flirting on his wifes behalf and using a phrase of significant interest to those wanting to track Williams dynamic relationship with his to us elusive spouse: I obey her injunction merely because it is a Wifes regard to her Husband to which every one allows a Great deal of Latitude.13 Another tiny linguistic gem that, a Wifes regard to her Husband, a female gaze pregnant with potential, and one which again underscores how much even the random good fortune of a returned letter brings to those investigating Blake, gender and culture. Deliberate archival digging delivers treasure too. Throughout the noughties, fresh revelations about Blakes mothers erotic spirituality inspired much debate14 debate which continues in the present volume and other fascinating work like Angus Whiteheads Blakes French Fellow Inhabitants at 17 South Molton Street, 1805182115 also reveals the power of biographical discoveries to spark critics sexual imaginations. The first two decades of the nineteenth century, Whitehead reminds us, are a period for which records relating to the Blakes are virtually nonexistent;16 but his labours prove that Catherine and William lived above some very intriguing business premises, for many years sharing a house with a Mayfair staymaker. Whitehead vividly conveys a fine historical sense of this bustling trade and the fashionable clientele who beat a path to the Blakes doorstep. He also identifies poetic references to restrictive underwear and speculates that the perpetual presence of stays, instruments which for Blake hid and distorted the naked female form, may have served as a regular reminder of the seducing qualities and Vulgar Stupidity of the Venetian school.17 Other conclusions are, of course, possible, but what is undeniable is the evocative force of such historical revelations the ripples run far and wide, perhaps even infusing comments from the nakedness-commending Laocon: For every Pleasure Money Is Useless (E275). In addition, Whiteheads research into those individuals who peopled the Blakes domestic universe naturally brings Catherine into the limelight and, rather less predictably, throws helpful new light on her amazing claim that but a Woman she would rather fight for Buonaparte than for the English cause an impassioned utterance Whitehead thinks should be viewed in the context of the Blakes having lodged for the past decade in the house of a couple of French descent in a neighbourhood with a significant

Copyright

Blake, Gender and Culture

Copyright

French presence.18 Yet again, history returns, provoking exciting, fresh thought about sexual politics, on both personal and cultural fronts. In 2007, Tate Britain revealed nine new Blake images and thirteen new lines of poetry a discovery so awesome that Blake supremos Martin Butlin and Robin Hamlyn believed it could make a collector lose his head entirely19 and such a reaction is understandable, especially when we note that this trove lay tucked inside a Victorian train timetable for the best part of a century. All the verses and all but one of the images are almost certainly pages from the second copy of Blakes Small Book of Designs, first printed in 1796 and returned to by him in 1818. Unusually, and very usefully, we have Blakes own account of how the original copy was composed and, significantly, we know first-hand about some of his dissatisfactions with it, being a selection from the different Books of such as could be Printed without the Writing tho to the Loss of some of the best things For they when Printed perfect accompany Poetical Personifications & Acts without which Poems they never could have been executed (E771). The 1796 volume was marred by the absence of Blakes beloved verbal visual dynamic but in the rediscovered works he achieved, as Butlin and Hamlyn observe, a completely new solution. By the addition of firm, boxlike framing lines around the images, and lines of verse enclosed within very rarely deployed double quotation marks, a new form of creativity was born.20 Here, then, is a marvellous double return the 1796 book is returned to by Blake to recreate, and a great hunk of the 1818 version returns to us to be savoured and for those interested in Blakes sexual preoccupations, this is a very rich feast. It was particularly relished at a workshop accompanying the Sexy Blake conference (thanks to the admirable efforts of curator Philippa Simpson)21 where a group of experts and devotees, including a number of contributors to this volume, enjoyed the privilege of examining the plates up close and indulged in some fiery discussion about how these new forms of familiar images might change our understanding of Blakean sexuality and spirituality, medium and meaning. It seems especially fitting, in light of their role in the formation of this volume, to dwell on these designs as showing an altered perspective Blake took on his work, as our contributors in turn attempt to read Blake, gender and history in new ways. Butlin and Hamlyn contend that the verses can be seen as captions to the designs, appropriate solely to the illustrations they accompany and that they are like a series of emblems which do not appear to form part of a single consecutive narrative22 sensible enough deductions, and yet those fascinated by displays of Naked Beauty will spy, we think, both more coherence and fluidity. Leaving aside the verses for a moment, it is apparent that viewers are drawn into an intense, if non-linear, sexual narrative, aglow with Blakes erotic meditations. Few of the many lucky enough to see this stunningly coloured series hanging on a single wall at Tate Britain will have missed it. Arguably this sex-

Introduction

ualized thematic unity could simply result from the fact that six of the eight images originate in The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), yet that is a notoriously, deliberately incoherent text. When extracted from it and placed within a spartan lexical context, the meaning of these visualized and interrelated human dramas, which lay bare the challenge to create and/or reproduce, nurture/destroy, connect/recoil, have courage or despair, feel pleasure or pain, and so on, becomes clearer. The beauty which returns here is largely naked (in five scenes fully so, while the others feature figure-hugging drapery) and the male and female bodies Blake fashions speak in a bold gestural language which could easily be termed universal. It is certainly elemental. Take his Adam and Eve Is the Female Death / Become new Life a stark picture of tragically stagnant heterosexual communication. The only shared or mutual aspect of the couples physicality is their head-clutching gesture of despair and, though David Erdman ingeniously contends that they cooperate in the perversity of separation,23 he speaks from hope, not observation. Unlike many creation stories, this tells the womans story: she faces us, he hides, and the powerful swerve of her rangy body curves the site of sexual difference smack between the mans eyes, if only he would look up. Natural sexual attraction is wholly lacking between this primal pair. The male opts for Theotormon-like self-closure (see the frontispiece and plate four of Visions of the Daughters of Albion), weeping upon the threshold of heterosexual life (2:21, E47, see also 2:67, E46). It is a scene that sings with pathos, and its brilliantly titled counterpart, Every thing is an attempt / To be Human, raises that lament to a roar. The elemental force at work here is fire, as we see two males connected by licking, leaping flames, and though they do not touch, a strong sense of relationship is created by their twin upturned gazes and the exquisitely agonized look the human casts at his semi-skeletal partner. It is possible that this is essentially an internal drama: a man confronts his mortality; and yet the colossal phallic column which shoots from his groin, through the hot flames, towards the skeletons face injects more than a tang of urgent homoeroticism. At the very least this attempt / To be Human is inescapably erotic work. Both of the mens hands are poignantly rendered and we are led to ponder whether the humans huge manly tool-gripping paw can deliver a liberating whack to the serpentine chain which binds his skeleton partners still fleshy legs: perhaps the answer to the silent prayer he seems to send heavenward? Like all the images in the series, this one is both potent and enigmatic, and a queer spin by no means exhausts its meanings. It does, though, usefully foreground the often present but much neglected Blakean tendency to bring fierce humour into the most serious scenarios. For sexy Blake, grins and gravitas are bosom buddies24 and here the outrageous yet sublimely humane conviction that waving a massive knob under a bony nose is as much an attempt / To be Human as anything else may also involve cartoon comedy to critique a society

Copyright

Blake, Gender and Culture

Copyright

which punished sodomy with death. Some of the single-figure pictures appear to flesh out sexual back-stories. In the related image, I sought Pleasure & found Pain / Unutterable, gesturally expressive hands and facial features arrest our eyes and lead our gaze over yet another beefy and fearfully contorted male nude, whose crossed muscular forearms create an almost heart-shaped frame for the pictures hypnotic vacant centre: an unnaturally large, circular mouth which seems to serve as the end of a human kaleidoscope, through which we could view his organs and, suggestively, his equally gaping anus. The posture of the figure, unseen derriere in the air, suggests attempting the unutterable crime. While the look on his face may be agony or ecstasy, it is hilarious that, apparently, the figures bum is on fire. This is slapstick at least as old as The Millers Tale. Is Blakes open-mouthed figure, similarly scalded in the towte by some kind of hot poker, crying Water! like Chaucers Nicholas? There, his wail for relief is tragicomically misunderstood as the approach of another flood of divine vengeance on sinners.25 Here, the flames of infernal punishment for sodomites are turned by Inflammable Gass (E449) into a gargantuan fart joke (silent but deadly). Force and farce are tightly bound together and they are signalled by that newly-returned caption, which is interpretative gold, allowing us to muse over unspeakable pain-delivering pleasures of many kinds: is he skewered by suffering that is literal or legal? Physical or psychological? Exquisitely erotic or more violently visceral? Whatever one concludes, it is clear this character is an object of both sympathy and spectacle, like so many in Blakes sexual stories. Take the comic terror of the traveller in Fearless tho in pain / I travel on. The scariest thing his epically elongated stride carries him towards is a squat blue-eyed lion, whose humanized face and droopy mane create a lopsided symmetry with the richly bearded explorer which is far from fearful. Such dubious woes also seem to be the theme of The floods overwhelmed me, in which his comically long limbs are foreshortened and folded into an emblem of naked surrender. The only elegant physical characteristic this now bulky traveller has left are his delicate hands that wave above his head in a fey gesture of bird-like abandon, further echoed by flowing and fingery hair and whiskers. All this is not to say that the image lacks pathos. Sharply drawn toes with only water beneath them are moving to observe. Rather, this heavy dive-bomb into up-rushing waters may wink at male pains and pleasures which must be born together. Another possible pair, Vegetating in fibres of Blood and Doth God take Care of these, also hints at dubiously dualistic pains, in this instance with a female flavour. Vegetating is one of the craziest birth images conceivable. An awesome agony of expulsion is most vividly rendered. Yet there is dark comedy too, as the seeming mother is herself simultaneously birthed from some elemental vaginal maw, and still attached though by the head to an enormous placenta. Small wonder her palms stop her ears so emphatically: the duet

Introduction

of birth cries must be deafening. No one could securely fix firm meanings to this extraordinary image, but if it is reasonable to claim that it is concerned with reproduction and nurture, then it is in some kind of dialogue with Doth God . In contrast to the giant pains of Vegetating where the surrounding darkness of a sublimely endless womb provides no measurable perspective, the scale of the surrounding plants suggests this scene may be faerie-sized. Akin to the flower-dwelling motherwinged creaturechild family of Infant Joy, the grouping here could be read as harmoniously all-female, dispelling both of Eves curses, of desire and submission to her husband and pain in childbirth, in this different garden (Genesis 4:16). The shift from one image to the other involves a wry slide from vegetating fibres to vibrant vegetation, a move into an environment where growth is a much easier business: blossoming flowers bow over a billowing robe from which toddlers and infants seem effortlessly to issue. The pacific figure inside the garment crosses her hands over her heart in maternal benediction and her naked babe beams back with an open-armed gesture of ecstatic infant joy. God may well take Care of these but his nurture, or approval, hardly seem needed: these children grow like hardy weeds. And so we could go on. The return of this treasure not only transforms perception of images long familiar from Blakes illuminated books but their location within a loose-leafed volume with no set page order also ensures that sexual meanings proliferate rampantly. There could, for instance, be important erotic narratives residing within the new verses. Consider these possible sequences:
The floods overwhelmed me Who Shall set The Prisoners Free Fearless tho in pain I travel on Vegetating in fibres of Blood I sought Pleasure & found Pain Unutterable Is the Female death Become new Life Every thing is an attempt To be Human Doth God take Care of these

Copyright

or
Vegetating in fibres of Blood Is the Female death Become new Life I sought Pleasure and found Pain Unutterable Every thing is an attempt

Blake, Gender and Culture To be human Who shall set The Prisoners Free Doth God take Care of these Fearless tho in pain I travel on The Floods overwhelmed me

Copyright

Is either more obscure or perplexing than the equally provocative, and clearly related, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (E25969), or The Mental Traveller (E4836), or My Spectre around me night & day (E4757)? Moreover, since the captions could conceivably point forward to the subsequent picture, as well as upward to the image directly above them, the sexual possibilities of the unbound book from which they come are manifold. Elsewhere we have written about Blakes teeming erotic abundance26 and this collection of nakedly beautiful images, tensely married to a selection of open questions and daring statements, is yet more evidence of his inexhaustible bounty. Indeed, splendid serendipity has returned to us a sexy gift from history and also a firm assurance that we will never lack naked beauty to pursue. Our contributors begin this quest with the spiritual. Opening with two essays on Religion and Gender, Mark Crosby and G. A. Rosso look at the controversial and indubitably sexy biblical figures Eve and Rahab in Blakes art and verse. Crosby traces Blakes engagement with the contending accounts of Eves creation throughout his visual and verbal work, with special attention to his Paradise Lost illustrations and his Genesis manuscript, and finds that they form progressive stages in a narrative trajectory that internalizes the concept of divine agency (p. 23, below). Rosso focuses on the concept of hermaphroditism as a way to think through the intertwining of liberation with violence and sexism that coheres in Blakes Rahab. Delving into the feminist critique of biblical anti-harlot polemic, alongside the medical and mythological history of hermaphrodites, Rosso teases out the misogyny, and the radical power, of Blakes gendering of Mystery and Empire. The following section, Sex and Spirit, moves to less orthodox religious contexts. Peter Otto reads Blakes illustrations to The Book of Enoch through Swedenborgs sexual religion as a way of examining the relation of sexuality and gender to creation and transcendence. In terms of Blakes own creation, he sees the Enoch designs as Blakes return to an ongoing fascination, spawned by the first English translation of selections of this previously lost tome in 1801 and then revived by the first full translation in 1821. Keri Davies pursues Blakes connection to Moravian erotic mysticism, with attention to the churchs marriage guidance records. While these archives are a testimony to the faiths reverence of sexual intercourse between husband and wife as an act of religious worship,

Introduction

they are as potentially revealing about the quarrels between Los and Enitharmon as the quotidian domestic difficulties of congregation members. Davies also documents the influence on Blake of Moravian hymns, including those praising Christs circumcision, the holy wound that sanctifies the penis. Marsha Keith Schuchard then brings the historical context forward to the twentieth century, with Mary Butts, the great-granddaughter of Blakes patron Thomas Butts, and her adventures in sexual enlightenment. Seeing herself, like her friend H. D., as carrying on an esoteric tradition inherited from the Moravian and Swedenborgian associations of her ancestors, Buttss Blake-inspired activities range from rewriting Marys virginity to participating in Aleister Crowleys obscene mystic rituals, which she witnessed with a sharp and independent scepticism. Catherine McClenahan attests to the value of Blakes work not so much as a guide to sexual liberation but as offering material for exploring exactly how imagination and the flexible senses might regenerate sexuality and redefine gender. Through a close reading of Jerusalem and Valas intimacy (and Albions reactions to it) in Jerusalem, in the context of the history of sexuality and what it reveals about changes in sexual identity in the eighteenth century, and through an impassioned reading of the poems concluding plates, her essay envisions a subjectivity that can be mutual, plural and human. Next, three essays take up a crucial topic for Blakes bodies, Reproduction, in three different contexts. David Fallon historicizes Blakean sexuality and birth against a neglected but eminently appropriate background, the population debate, which he traces through many manifestations, noting how many of them (such as those of heavy-hitters Malthus and Godwin) were published by Joseph Johnson. The plaints of characters from Urizen to Oothoon about birth into a world of need and restraint take on new resonance, while a wonderful (fictitious) example from Benjamin Franklin of a woman who defends birthing bastards as a service to the state calls for rethinking Blakes sexual antinomianism Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires (MHH 10, E38) as much as his sexual politics. Fruition has a different definition for Elizabeth Bernath, looking through a queer botanical lens (p. 112, below). For Wollstonecraft, it is the full cultivation of reason that allows femininity to partake of masculinity, while Erasmus Darwins loving plants include virgin males uninterested in female adoration, plus a whole class of masculine ladies. Visions of the Daughters of Albion flowers in this light, as Bernath argues that Oothoons pleas are as much for womens sexual and scientific education as for sexual liberation. Oothoons sustained woman-centred desire begins and ends the poem, since the marygold nymph is re-echoed in the girls of gold, plucked as floral specimens: in effect, Oothoon invites Theotormon to the pleasures of botany, but only the Daughters of Albion hear the call. Elizabeth Effinger in turn sees The Book of Thel as, simultaneously, a poem about natural history and a poem

Copyright

10

Blake, Gender and Culture

Copyright

about the unborn, and goes to ask the Mole about intrauterine experience, seeking what (inter)subjectivity could exist where the separate human self is not at the centre. Combining the medical perspective on moles as abnormal growths in the uterus, and Thel as foetus, with Bracha Ettingers post-Lacanian concept of matrixial borderspace, Effinger sees Thel as a figure for theory, in Gerda Norvigs suggestive words, and as a model for thinking our co-existences (pp. 125, 130, below). The volume closes with three essays on Gender and Genre. Luisa Cal takes flight on Blakes swans, reading plates from America and Visions of the Daughters of Albion through his title-page illustration of the poems of Gray. She goes on to focus on the Ganymede figure accompanying the swan, exploring the rich records of recipient Ann Flaxmans Italian travels in order to consider the contemporary taste for Cupids and other classical boys, and to ask, what then did Blake invite Ann to dream among his leaves but an erotic alternative to the muscular body types Ann flirted with in Flaxmans studio (p. 142, below)? Bethan Stevens also ponders masculine size to show how Blakes Virgil woodcuts defamiliarize scale, confusing giants and boys, birds and stars (p. 145, below). Again, the materiality of visual culture is revealing since the sublime and the masculine gigantic are essentially unframeable (p. 146, below), but Robert Thorntons attempt to impose scale by framing and cropping Blakes designs contains, even castrates them; the resulting tangible lack stands as a disavowal (by its commissioner and its critics) of the homoeroticism of the illustrations. The final essay departs from the standard Blakean genres of text and image as Steve Clark considers what Blakes works would look like as theatre. The essay takes on the concept of closet drama to offer a reading of Blake alongside Joanna Baillies Plays on the Passions. A queer interpretation of Baillies tragedy De Monfort illustrates her clinical taxonomy of closeted desire, then Blakes poetry as psychodrama is juxtaposed with Baillies theorization, in her Introductory Discourse, of how interiority can become an arresting and edifying spectacle, and even a kind of empirical diagnosis. As the corpse remains a sign of the bodys pathological processes in her brother Williams treatise on morbid anatomy, Baillies, and Blakes, performative bodies are signs of emotions and identities whose originary life is elusive.