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OOTHOON, FAILED PROPHET

MARK ANDERSON

L
Ln 1798, Blake defined the prophet
as one who "utters his opinion both of private & public matters"
(Annotations to An Apology for the Bible, C 617).l Before 1793,
though, most of his poems had focused on private matters; it was in
the works of that year—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions
of the Daughters of Albion, America, and Songs of Experience1—
that he concentrated his efforts to develop a prophetic stance capa-
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ble of fusing the private and public realms. Three of those works
also contain explicit characterizations of prophets: the Bards of
America and Experience, and the flctive author of the Marriage.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion contains no such figure; its
closest formal affinity is to The Book of Thel, in which there is no
address from fictive author to fictive reader, and no characterization
of the author as either Piper or Bard. Its focus, like that of Thel, is on
the response of its central character, Oothoon, to a vital dilemma:
she is raped and then held responsible for her own victimization
according to a Urizenic code of morality. But Oothoon's response to
her situation, unlike Thel's, is to move from victimization and pow-
erlessness toward inspired prophecy (although, as I will be arguing
later, she does not quite fulfill that movement); and because she
develops in such a way—even because she ultimately fails to be-
come a prophet—she helps one to focus Blake's evolving definition
of prophetic poetry in ways that the fully fledged Bards of the other
works of 1793 cannot.3
The structure of Visions is unusual; like the Marriage, it is an
experiment in the use of several genres within a single work.4 Di-
vided into three parts by the choric line, "The Daughters of Albion
hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs (2:20, 5:2, 8:13; C 46, 48, 51),
it begins as a narrative reminiscent of that of Thel, but virtually all
of the action to be narrated is presented in the first plate and a half of
the eight plates of text. Then the poem begins to establish itself
within the prophetic tradition in the somewhat longer second part,
where all three of the major characters attempt the prophetic lamen-

Romanticism Past and Present, 8:2 (Summer 1984)


2 , Mark Anderson

tation. The third part, fully half of the text, is Oothoon's condem-
nation of Urizen—another lamentation, and also something of an
anti-hymn and a revision of Milton (specifically, of Comus). It is in
the lamentations that Oothoon first fails and then almost succeeds
at prophecy, illustrating in the process what it is not and pointing to
what it might be. In the brief narrative, however, she undergoes a
series of experiences which bear a general resemblance to those of
Thel: in a state of "woe" (1:1, C 44) as the poem opens, she meets a
talking flower who gives her some ambiguous.advice. Acting on
that advice, she leaves a pastoral realm in order to enter a new
world, which turns out to be one of brutal oppression and repres-
sion, utterly different from what she had expected. The similarity
has led many readersjo view Visions as a continuation of Thel,5 and
in a sense it is one, as Oothoon's story continues past the point
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where Thel's ends. While The Book of Thel concludes by shifting


the burden of Thel's problem—and any possible solution—to the
reader, Visions goes on to dramatize Oothoon's struggle toward a
consciousness that contains her problem's solution. But Oothoon's
story is unlike Thel's in that it takes place in an explicitly public
context.6 It is the identification of rape, imprisonment, and slavery
as manifestations of a single mental state—a state characterized by
both the repressive private "morality" that poisons desire, familiar
from Thel, and an oppressive public order—that makes Visions dif-
ferent in kind from its predecessor and establishes its kinship with
the Maniage, America, and Songs of Experience.
The opening, narrative section of Visions serves chiefly to estab-
lish a private, sadomasochistic hierarchy of dominance and submis-
sion, and to fuse it with a public, authoritarian one.7 The virginal
Oothoon raped by Bromion—or "rent" by "his thunders" (1:16, C
46)—is also the "soft American plains" claimed as property by Euro-
pean kings and slaveholders (1:20-23, C 46); and the kingly slave-
holder Bromiori is also a priestly moralizer, branding his victim a
"harlot" and granting Theotormon his permission to marry her (2:1,
C 46). With Bromion at the top and Oothoon at the bottom of this
hierarchy of oppressive power, Theotormon is inserted in the mid-
dle: he is "rent" by "storms" just as Oothoon is rent by thunders—
that is, his relation to Bromion is not really different from hers—but
he also sends his eagles to rend her once again: his relation to Oo-
thoon is only superficially different from Bromion's.8 That differ-
ence affects Oothoon, who sees Theotormon as the beloved whom
her "whole soul seeks" (1:13, C 46) and asks to be rent by him:
Romanticism Past and Present 3
Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up;
But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs.
And calling Theotormons Eagles to prey upon her flesh.
I call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air,
Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect,
The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.
The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey;
Theotormon severely smiles, her soul reflects the smile;
As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles (2:11-19, C 46).

Thus Oothoon arrives at the spiritual nadir from which her lamen-
tations originate: she no longer has any existence except as a reflec-
tion of Theotormon—that is, his refusal to accept her protestations
of love has driven her to offer herself to him as a masochistic object
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for his sadism9—and she has now acquiesced in the moral code and
the power hierarchy of her two tormentors, as the banal, Urizenic
righteousness of the final simile makes plain. Reduced to a condi-
tion of utter powerlessness by Bromion and Theotormon, she des-
perately tries to make sense of her situation in their terms, those of
dominance and submission. She fails, of course: Bromion and Theo-
tormon will have none of it—will not even respond to her pleas to
be seen as "pure." And so she begins her first attempt at prophetic
lamentation.
The second part of Visions can be seen as a sort of rhetorical
contest between the three characters: each attempts a lamentation,
and each fails to achieve the true prophetic stance. The analysis of
Bromion's and Theotormon's efforts, however, is beyond the scope
of this essay. For reasons inherent in their mental states, they do not
come as close to success as does Oothoon and therefore delineate
the figure of the prophet in only negative ways. Oothoon, although
she too fails, is at least on the right track as she opens her lamenta-
tion with the myth of imprisonment of and by the senses that will
reappear throughout Blake's later work:
They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.
And they inclos'd my infinite brain into a narrow circle.
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased (2:30-34, C 47).
The enclosing of the senses is of course one of Blake's metaphors for
the fall from eternity into the material world, but Oothoon's re-
peated phrase, "they told me," points to a psychological rather than
4 , Mark Anderson

a mythological past—to upbringing, education, socialization. Her


imprisonment may be that of the human race in general, but it is
also specifically that of the "genteel women" described by Mary
Wollstonecraft who, educated on "artificial notions of beauty, and
false descriptions of sensibility," become "slaves to their bodies,
and glory in their subjection."10 Or not quite that: Oothoon's en-
slavement is real enough, yet she has sufficient strength not to glory
in it and even rebels against it. And yet her rebellion itself is largely
motivated by her inability to free herself from a form of false sensi-
bility: her infatuation with Theotormon, and what she perceives as
her dependency on him. Her great complaint is "That Theotormon
hears me not!" (2:38, C 47), and it is as much a plea to him as an
assertion of her own liberation when she argues that there is some-
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thing more important than the senses:


Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek camel
Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin
Or breathing nostrils? No, for these the wolf and tyger have (3:7-9, C 47).

The motto of Visions is "The Eye sees more than the Heart knows"
(ii, C 45), and while Oothoon may see that one law for the camel and
the tyger is oppression, what her heart knows is only that she wants
Theotormon to accept her plea of innocence: if she is not just her
body, her five senses, then Bromion has not "defiled" her by raping
her. And if Theotormon would only listen to her, then she could live
with her oppression:
Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent.
If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;
How can I be defUd when I reflect thy image pure?
Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul prey'd on by woe
The new wash'd lamb ting'd with the village smoke & the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings.
And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormons breast (3:14-20, C 47).
Because she cannot know what her eye sees as long as her heart
knows only Theotormon, Oothoon cannot know her own situation,
and lapses back into her masochistic role as his reflection. She may
seem to be making a Blakean attack .on the demand for outward,
superficial "purity" in the last four lines of her lamentation, but
those lines are more important in revealing the flaw in her percep-
tion. Nowhere does Blake celebrate "woe" as a spiritual virtue,-
most often, he sees it as a symptom of an imprisoned imagination.
Romanticism Past and Present 5
Oothoon is imprisoned by her perception of herself as an extension
of Theotonnon, and therefore cannot escape his oppressive percep-
tion of her. In his eyes, and Bromion's, she is "ting'd," and by com-
paring herself to "the fruit that the worm feeds on," she only
strengthens his perception and reveals that she is not free of it her-
self. The worm-eaten fruit may be no more "defild" than she is, but
as Theotormon sees it, both are—and Oothoon cannot help but see
herself as defiled as long as she sees him, and his view of her, as
"pure."
Two things should be noted about this first lamentation of Oo-
thoon's. The first is that her insights can be read as sufficient; the
text does not demand that the reader question her as I have done
here. Her account of the closing up of the five senses and her argu-
ment against the Ldckean reduction of all mental life to sense per-
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ception are standard Blake, and a metaphor such as that of the swan
tinged "with the red earth of our immortal river" can be seen as
figuring a new baptism just as well as betraying Oothoon's accep-
tance of her oppressors' perspective. The effect of such a reading—
one that takes the political as a metaphor for the psychological,
converting the public problem of oppression into a personal problem
that can be solved by a renewal of perception11—is to make the
poem more tragic than prophetic, a distinction which will be dis-
cussed below. But from the prophet's point of view, the public and
private cannot be separated: the political is a metaphor for the psy-
chological, but the psychological is also a metaphor for the political,
because both are expressions of a single spiritual condition. All
problems, both public and private, have their source in a mistaken
or perverted relation between the human and the divine. Oothoon's
preoccupation with her private problem, her alleged defilement, has
so far prevented her from connecting it to the analogous public
problems of economic, political, and sexual slavery; only after mak-
ing that connection will she be able to get at the real problem, the
mental state named Urizen. And only by means of that connection
can the poem be true prophecy, challenging the reader's visions of
self and responsibility rather than pointing at isolated political or
moral issues.
The second point has to do with the genre of prophetic lamenta-
tion, the great exemplar of which is the Lamentations of Jeremiah.12
A prophet generally speaks to a nation in the voice of a god; in
Lamentations, Jeremiah speaks to God in the voice of Jerusalem,
giving the grievances of his nation their strongest possible utter-
6 Mark Anderson
ance—and, importantly for Visions, identifying the prophet with
powerless victims of oppression rather than with a powerful god.
Oothoon's lamentation (as well as those of Theotormon and Bro-
mion) fails as prophecy for two reasons. First of all, her inability to
connect the public and private realms means that she cannot speak
on behalf of anyone but herself. She laments generalized conditions
but does not transcend her own voice. More importantly, she is
speaking to a false god, Theotormon; her infatuation with him pre-
vents her from seeing beyond him to the true god, or spiritual state,
which he embodies—the god of this world, Urizen, whom she must
identify before she can connect her private condition with the
public one and thus make possible a prophetic perspective. The
result is that she fails to get through either to Theotormon, who
simply ignores her, or to Bromion, who lectures her on the supreme
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importance of "one law for both die lion and the o x . . . eternal fire,
and eternal chains" (4:22-23, C 48).
In her second lamentation, the final part of the poem, Oothoon
does achieve the prophetic stance, but is unable to follow it to its
consequences. She identifies the god responsible for her private situ-
ation, addressing herself to "Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken De-
mon of heaven" (5:3, C 48), and realizes the connection between the
sexual slavery that has been imposed on her and other forms of
Urizenic oppression: the parson lays claim to the farmer's labor in
order to build
. . . castles and high spires, where kings & priests may dwell.
Till she who bums with youth, and knows no fixed lot; is bound
In spells of law to one she loaths... (5:20-22, C 49).

The power of Oothopn's second lamentation is in its conflations of


the institutions that arise from Urizenic consciousness: the separate
instruments of oppression—economic, political, religious, legal,
sexual—are revealed as one at their source. Oothoon no longer
speaks only for herself, but for all oppressed classes, and particularly
for the Daughters of Albion, the women of eighteenth-century En-
gland, compelled by those spells of law
. . . to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv'n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night
To turn the wheel of false desire: and longings that wake her womb
To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form
That live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more (5:24-29, C 49).
Romanticism Past and Present 7
In opposition to that bleak vision, Oothoon sings of an "Innocence
... open to virgin bliss" (6:5-6, C 49), but her own story is one of the
corruption of Innocence, from within as well as without, under the
rule of Urizenic law; knowing that, the "fallen woman" Oothoon,
victim of die Urizenic categorizing under which she must be virgin,
wife, or whore, now turns those categories against Urizen himself.
She takes up Wollstonecraft's argument about the primary result of
the patriarchal elevation of chastity as the chief indicator of a wom-
an's character. Chastity serves as the criterion for the consequent
segregation of a class of women as "slaves of casual lust," and dic-
tates that "the chaster part of the sex" must "assume in some degree
the same character themselves."13
Then com'st them forth a modest virgin knowing to dissemble
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With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch virgin joy,
And brand it with the name of whore; & sell it in the night,
In silence, ev'n without a whisper, and in seeming sleep:
Religious dreams and holy vespers, light thy smoky fires:
Once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn (6:10—15, C 49).

Modest virgin, virtuous wife, and whore are all victims of the Uri-
zenic order, which creates the role of whore by confusing the cor-
poreal and the spiritual in one way and by separating them in
another—rby viewing the body and sexuality as distinct from and
contrary to the spirit, and by literalizing the metaphor of chastity
and mistaking virginity for virtue.14 Oothoon's prophetic task is to
sort out the metaphors: to rejoin body and soul as equivalent
metaphors for the "Eternal Image & Individuality" that "never dies"
[A Vision of the Last Judgment, C 555), just as she joined the various
forms of oppressive power as metaphors for Urizen, and to dissolve
the metaphorical bond between physical chastity and spiritual pu-
rity.15 In order to accomplish that, she must confront the symbolism
of chastity in the prophetic tradition—and particularly in Comus,
both because Blake saw Milton as his immediate precursor, and
because that work focuses the issue with such great intensity.
Visions is not primarily a reply to Milton's masque, but Blake did
emphasize the connection between the two works—most grace-
fully, perhaps, on the title page (TIB 127),16 which shows four "gay
creatures of the element / That in the colours of the Rainbow live /
And play i'th plighted clouds" [Comus, 11. 298-300)17 engaged in
joyous dance.18 A more pointed reference to Milton's work is the
Marygold that Oothoon plucks in Leutha's vale: along with other of
8 Mark Anderson
Blake's flowers, it has been identified by Irene Tayler as a descen-
dant of the haemony brought by Milton's Attendant Spirit to defend
the Lady and her brothers, which Comus describes as "a small un-
sightly root" that "in another Countrey," but not in England, bears
"a bright golden flowre" [Comus, 11. 628-32)—but which Blake pic-
tures in his illustrations for Comus always as a golden flower (this
association between Comus and Visions must be taken as sugges-
tive only, since the Comus illustrations date from 1801 and 1809;
my reasons for pursuing its suggestions will be apparent shortly).19
There is a clear difference between the two flowers: the haemony
seems to do its job, while Oothoon's Marygold has no discernible
influence on the action of Visions. But Oothoon sees her flower in
twofold vision—"Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph! I see thee
now a flower; / Now a nymph!" (1:6-7, C 46)—and I would argue
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that its influence on Oothoon's story is twofold, half beneficial and


half pernicious. It is significant that the flower comes from Leutha's
vale, although the Leutha of Visions is almost certainly not the
queen of sexual delusions familiar from Europe and later works. The
name, like many others in Visions, has its source in Ossian, where it
is a place, Lutha ("swift stream," according to MacPherson's notes)20
in Berrathon. The poem opens with Ossian lamenting the death of
Malvina, "first of the maids of Lutha," and crying, "Then come
thou, O Malvina! with all thy music, come! Lay Ossian in the plain
of Lutha: let his tomb rise in the lovely field."21 It ends with further
meditations on his own death.22 It is easy to see how the plain of
Lutha could come to represent for Blake a state of unfulfilled or
misplaced desire, of longing for what does not exist, where desire
and death come to be identified. A rejected fragment from America,
etched in the same year as Visions, gives some substance to the
supposition that the Leutha of Visions is not a character but a place
analogous to the vale of Har in The Book of Thel:
As when a dream of Thiralatha flies the midnight hour:
In vain the dreamer grasps the joyful images, they fly
Seen in obscured traces in the Vale of Leutha, So
The British Colonies beneath the woful Princes fade.
And so the Princes fade from earth, scarce seen by souls of men
But tho' obscur'd, this is the form of the Angelic land (C 59).

Thel's vale of Har was a place of unsustainable Innocence, the Inno-


cence that cannot exist with the knowledge of the dying selfhood;
Leutha's vale is a place of desire projected as fantasy, "the Angelic
Romanticism Past and Present 9
land" that Enitharmon will later call an "allegorical abode where
existence hath never come" [Europe 6:7, C 62). Oothoon's wander-
ing there is a wandering in innocent sexual fantasy, and not neces-
sarily what Harold Bloom characterizes as "hiding in the valley of
sexual evasiveness and denial."23 Bloom's characterization seems
more appropriate to the Leutha of the later works. And if Leutha's
vale is the place of virginal fantasy, the flower is likely to be Oo-
thoon's particular fantasy of bliss with Theotormon—at least that
seems to be what she thinks it is when, on the Marygold-nymph's
advice, she plucks the Marygold-flower, places it between her
breasts, and sets out for "Theotormons reign" (1:15, C 46). The
nymph speaks of "sweet delight" (1:9, C 46), and Oothoon does
eventually find it. But what she finds, after much suffering, is the
delight of the visionary, not the happiness with Theotormon that
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she expected. Her carrying of the flower, or the fantasy of Leutha,


into the realm of Bromion and Theotormon suggests that she con-
fronts that realm with precisely the wrong expectations. And yet
the flower, her haemony, does protect her in a sense: if her clinging
to virginal fantasy is not "realistic" in the world of rape and slavery
that she enters, it is still the one thing that allows her, by the sheer
persistence of her clinging to it, to see through the moral code and
power structure that she finds there. So the Marygold can be seen as
Oothoon's Attendant Spirit; the other—and more important—of its
two roles will be apparent shortly.
Revisions of Comus more explicit than those imagistic ones of
rainbow and flower occur in Oothoon's reimagining of virginity, and
the reevaluation of Milton's metaphors that arises from it. Her situ-
ation is more complicated than that of the Lady under Comus's
spell, but it is not essentially different:
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde
With all thy charms, although this corporal rinde
Thou haste immanacl'd (Comus, 11. 662-64),
says the Lady, and that is certainly what Oothoon is trying to tell
Theotormon in her lamentations and what we see her trying to
show him in the illumination to plate 4 (TIB 132), where she hovers
over him in a watery flame or fiery wave, her corporal rind fastened
to a rock with a leg-iron, while he huddles in self-pitying grief,
oblivious to the rising sun behind him. But Oothoon is not as eager
as. the Lady is to separate mind and body. She knows that bodily
slavery enslaves the mind as well—as in the case of the "modest
10 Mark Anderson
virgin knowing to dissemble." Thus, when she dissociates physical
chastity from spiritual purity in order to assert her own virginity,
she presents that virginity as an intellectual freedom metaphori-
cally united with sexual freedom instead of restraint:
And does my Theotonnon seek this hypocrite modesty!
This knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling hypocrite.
Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! and all the virgin joys
Of life are harlots: and Theotonnon is a sick mans dream
And Oothoon is the crafty slave of selfish holiness.
But Oothoon is not so, a virgin fill'd with virgin fancies
Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears
If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix'd
In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work;
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Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free bom joy (6:16-7:2, C 49-50).
Oothoon's explicit definition of a mental virginity compatible with
sexuality is directly opposed to the refusal of Milton's Lady to speak
to Comus of
The sublime notion, and high mystery
That must be utter'd to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of Virginity [Comus, 11. 784-86),

which Comus would be unable to comprehend even if he were


worthy to hear it. Milton considered his reader more worthy than
Comus, however, and he did utter that sublime notion and high
mystery in An Apology for Smectymnuus:
having had the doctrine of holy Scripture unfolding those chaste and high mysteries
with timeliest care infus'd, that the body is foz the Lord and the Lord jot the body,
thus also I argu'd to my selfe; that if unchastity in a woman whom Saint Paul termes
the glory of man, be such a scandall and dishonour, then certainly in a man who is
both the image and glory of Cod, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much
more deflouring and dishonourable. In that he sins both against his owne body which
is the perfeter sex, and his own glory which is in the.woman, and that which is worst,
against the image and glory of Cod which is in himselfe. Nor did I slumber over that
place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lambe, with those
celestiall songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defil'd with
women, which doubtlesse meanes fornication: For manage must not ~be call'd a
defilement24

Blake would agree that the body is sacred as an image of God, if God
is Imagination. But the God in Milton's passage, creator of the
hierarchy of power expressed through the metaphors of image and
Romanticism Past and Present 11
glory, is Urizen the authoritarian. Thus the relations between Bro-
mion, Theotormon, and Oothoon are a Blakean revision of those
between Milton's God, man, and woman. Bromion, moralizing on
behalf of Urizen, declares the "rent" Oothoon a harlot. Theotormon
accepts that declaration and is in his turn "rent"—raped mentally as
Oothoon has been physically—himself. What "defilement" there is
in such a state of things flows from above, from a god already defiled
who must necessarily see defilement in the body that is his mirror.
The defilement, in other words, is in the relations of dominance and
submission: Bromion is defiled by his tyranny, Theotormon by his
acceptance of it (and his reflection of it, as he takes his turn at
"rending" Oothoon), and Oothoon by her perception of herself as a
reflection of Theotormon. Such a hierarchy offers only two options
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to the individual: one is either a tyrant or a slave—or may, like


Theotormon, alternate between the two roles. In specifically sexual
terms, women can only be slaves, whether obedient (the virtuous
wife) or cunning (the coy virgin, the seductive harlot), and men can
only be vitiated tyrants, whether brutal like Bromion the rapist or
enervated like Theotormon the sick man's dream. The patriarchal
demand for female chastity is at bottom a declaration of the power
of ownership, a representation of Urizen's urge to control all things
(especially sense perception and desire and, thus, human beings)
through codification and hierarchical ordering.
Oothoon can see that such high mysteries of legalized passion
hold no hope for her,- her response is to revise one of the arguments
with which Comus tries to seduce the Lady:
Beauty is natures coyn, must not be hoorded,
But must be cuirant, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partak'n bliss,
Unsavoury in th' injoyment of it self.
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languish't head [Comus, 11. 738-43).
Oothoon has already transferred the commercial metaphor to Uri-
zen's side of the debate by connecting England's economic order to
various forms of slavery (5:7-32, C 48-49) and by defining "mod-
esty" and "mystery" as the selling points of prostitution, "virgin
joy" caught and named "whore" that it may be more effectively
marketed (6:7-12, C 49). Now she revises the terms of mutual bliss
and self-enjoyment, and substitutes her own imagination of time for
Comus's:
12 Mark Anderson
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 (7:3-11, C 50).

By transforming Milton's "injoyment of it self" into the more ex-


plicit "self enjoyings of self denial"—or masturbation with its asso-
ciated secrecy and guilt—Oothoon shifts the terms of the argument.
One is no longer asked to choose between "mutual and partak'n
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bliss" and the pleasures of personal integrity, but between fantasy


and reality. The moment of desire cannot be declined, only sub-
limated. But because it is a moment—a discrete unit of time that
opens on eternity, rather than a bit of an endlessly receding con-
tinuum—Oothoon does not fall into the trap that Comus sets for
himself with his vision of time as the slipping away of life, which
makes his sexuality a desperate gesture, a futile clinging to what
cannot last; instead, she is free to envision desire and sexuality as
expansive, as ways of growing out of one's solitude in time and
space.25
Oothoon appropriates Comus's argument primarily to show that
he himself does not understand sexuality and is not a legitimate
spokesman for desire, that he is in fact an ally of Urizen and Bro-
mion: the spell with which he binds the Lady is related to the
"spells of law" with which Urizen would bind all women (and all
humans), and the sexuality he advocates is opposed to the Urizenic
morality that brands virgin joys as whores only in the sense that it is
the hidden, Bacchic side of that morality, wedding sexuality to vio-
lence and death. Like Urizen, he sees sexual relations as power
relations, and the false opposition between the two of them—
between abstract good and bodily evil, as it were—sustains the
equation of chastity with virtue that renders absurd Milton's "sage /
And serious doctrine of Virginity." Blake's aim is not to subvert that
doctrine, but to free it from its wrongheaded literalism. Once "vir-
ginity" is defined in the way that Oothoon has done, as spiritual
openness rather than bodily restraint, she is willing to join Milton's
Lady in placing great confidence in its power.
But virginity, however defined, does not save Oothoon; unlike the
Lady, she has no rescuers. The dancing fairies on the title page seem
Romanticism Past and Present 13
oblivious to her plight as she flees from a flaming Urizen, and no
brothers come looking for her in the poem—although the Lady's
brothers are not much help in Comus, either. Oothoon does have
the Marygold, which protects her in a paradoxical way—as paradox-
ical as Blake must have found the Attendant Spirit's protection of
the Lady, for while he does help her to escape Comus's spell, he also
denies her sexuality. He protects her on Urizen's terms, through the
virtue-chastity metaphor. Similarly, Leutha's flower, the innocent
sexual fantasy that allows Oothoon to see through the morality of
Bromion and Theotormon to the authoritarian hierarchy it both
masks and supports, still leaves her dependent on Theotormon for
her own fulfillment. Her infatuation with him will not let her ac-
cept what Bromion does to her, but makes it impossible for her to
escape what Theotormon does to her. In other words, she can resist
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Bromion's and Urizen's (and Milton's) literalization of the chastity


metaphor, as the Lady can resist Comus's appeals to unreason. But
Oothoon needs a Sabrina to do for her what her attendant spirit, the
flower, cannot: to free her from a self-imposed bondage. Tayler ar-
gues that Blake's illustrations for Comus suggest that he read Mil-
ton's work as a drama taking place entirely in the Lady's mind.26
The frontispiece to Visions, which places the three main characters
in a cave that appears to be the inside of a human skull, makes a
similar suggestion about Blake's poem.27 Oothoon does not merely
fantasize her rape and enslavement, or Theotormon's rejection of
her. The point, rather, is that although she can escape from Bro-
mion, she cannot escape her own mind, her own perception of her-
self. Her consciousness as well as Bromion's and Theotormon's is a
prison.
When Blake made his illustrations for Comus, he regarded it as a
flawed prophecy, not a false one. Its flaw was the literalization of the
chastity metaphor; its true prophecy, or at least a large part of it, was
in Sabrina. The Lady's reasonings cannot liberate her from Comus's
magic, nor can the Attendant Spirit or Virginity itself. Sabrina can
do so, because she is—in Blake's reimagining—the Lady's vision of
herself as a free woman. In the picture Sabiina Disenchants the
Lady, she appears as a figure of fluid grace, dressed in loose, trans-
parent drapery (in contrast to the Lady's rigid postures and heavy
garments throughout the illustrations), as her left hand, like the
Spirit's right, directs the Lady's attention to the morning sky.28 But
the Lady does not seem to recognize Sabrina as her liberator; she
looks toward her brothers instead,29 and the result is that she is
returned in the following illustration, The Lady Restored to Her
14 Mark Anderson
Parents, to the arms of a Urizenic paterfamilias—returned, that is,
to a state of dependency—while her brothers look away from her
and their parents, toward the ascending Spirit who seems to repre-
sent freedom to them. I stress again that the connection between
these illustrations and Visions must be regarded as no more than
suggestive; what it suggests here is fruitful, though, because the
Daughters of Albion have their vision of freedom, seen by the eye
but not known by the heart, in Oothoon (as America), and Oothoon
too ends by seeing her freedom but failing to know it: she sees
through Urizen's morality to the potential eternity in the moment
of desire, but cannot realize it while she continues to depend on
Theotormon rather than on herself for her liberation, even as Blake
shows the Lady, free pf the spell, looking to her brothers rather than
Sabrina. If Oothoon's attendant spirit is the Marygold-flower, her
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potential Sabrina is the Marygold-nymph, whose exuberant leap


from the plant contrasts as sharply with Oothoon's closed posture
(iii, TIB 128) as Sabrina's fluidity does with the Lady's rigidity. The
twofold vision that allows Oothoon to see the nymph in the first
place is also what gives her a chance at freedom, and sets her on the
path toward prophecy, by enabling her to identify the human form
of Urizen behind the external appearances of enslaving institutions.
But her continuing dependence on Theotormon suggests that she is
unable to take the further step of distinguishing vision from nature,
or separating her visionary self, the nymph, from her infatuation
with Theotormon, the natural flower. She cannot realize her pro-
phetic vision because she fails to do for it what she has done for
Comus, to distinguish between inspired metaphors and dead ones.
Because Oothoon cannot free herself from dependency, her pro-
phetic vision begins to fall apart. She knows what is wrong with
"the self enjoyings of self denial," but she has not convinced
Theotormon, who continues to ignore her and to flagellate himself
as in the illumination to plate 6 [TIB 134). Without him, she is
unable to fulfill her moment of desire, and so falls into Comus's
perception of time as the slipping away of life; all she can do is
complain to Urizen about Theotormon's sadomasochistic self-
enjoyings and her own sad plight:

Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth!


Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?
Till beauty fades from off my shoulders darken'd and cast out,
A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity (7:12—15, C 50).
Romanticism Past and Present 15
She is aware that her dependency is a problem and collects herself
long enough to ask, "Can that be Love, that drinks another as a
sponge drinks water?" and to answer, "Such is self-love that envies
all! a creeping skeleton / With lamp-like eyes watching around the
frozen marriage bed" (7:17, 21-22; C 50). But even though she sees
that Theotormon cannot or will not love her, she refuses to give him
up and now makes one of the most disturbing speeches in the poem:
But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,
And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold;
I'll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play
In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon:
Red as the rosy morn, lustful as the first bom beam,
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e'er with jealous cloud
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Come in the heaven of generous love, nor selfish blightings bring (7:23-39, C 50).
Oothoon means all that as a profession of selflessness and a procla-
mation of free love, of course. But she is desperate for Theotormon's
attention, and her promise to catch girls for him in nets and traps is
more than desperate; it is a surrender to Urizen. Earlier in the poem,
when she offered herself to Theotormon as a masochistic object and
a reflection, she was a pathetic victim of the Urizenic hierarchy,-
now she becomes an active accomplice, "a modest virgin knowing
to dissemble / With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch
virgin joy," as she herself phrased it. Because she has been denied
the power to deal with Theotormon on an equal footing, she tries to
gain an indirect power over him, becoming the "crafty slave of
selfish holiness" that she earlier protested against, and falling into
the trap that Wollstonecraft warned against:
Women . . . sometimes boast of their weakness, cunningly obtaining power by play-
ing on the weakness of men; and they may well glory in their illicit sway, for, like
Turkish bashaws, they have more real power than their masters: but virtue is
sacrificed to temporary gratifications, and the respectability of life to the triumph of
an hour.
Women, as well as despots, have now, perhaps, more power than they would if the
world, divided and subdivided into kingdoms and families, were governed by laws
deduced from the exercise of reason,- but in obtaining it, to carry on the comparison,
their character is degraded, and licentiousness spread throughout the whole aggregate
of society. The many become pedestal to the few.30

It seems evident that Oothoon's character must be degraded by


her offer to become Theotormon's procurer, but I do not mean to
imply that she is utterly compromised by this. She means to declare
16 Mark Anderson
her unselfish love, and her offer, taken in context, is an act of despair
to which she has been driven by Theotormon's own moral code and
social order. But the reader still must question Oothoon's perspec-
tive, just as she has questioned those of her oppressors. She is in-
spired, and she does see a great deal, but as long as she cannot free
herself from dependency on Theotormon—as long as all her desire is
focused on him and not on the infinite—her heart cannot know
what her eye has seen. Unable to apply her prophetic vision to
herself, she continues to call all life to a freedom inaccessible to her:
Arise you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!
Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits
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Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire (8:9-12, C 51).

The tailpiece (TIB 136) shows her flying toward the reader in flames,
like Urizen on the title page, but with arms extended—perhaps the
cruciform position is sacrificial—and the flames apparently sup-
porting rather than consuming her. The ambiguity is pointed; she is
caught between Urizenic and visionary perception, and conse-
quently resembles both Urizen, as she too is engulfed in the flames
of repressed desire, and his antithesis, as her cruciform position
contrasts with his closed one. She can neither accept slavery nor
gain her freedom.31
The reader's problem with Oothoon is in choosing to accept or
reject her vision of things. Almost everything in Visions makes one
want to accept it, and that can certainly be done—perhaps this is
what the enslaved Daughters of Albion do, echoing back Oothoon's
sighs but not acting. The effect of such a reading is to make the
poem a tragedy, the story of Oothoon's rise to prophetic stature and
her fall into the condition of slavery from which she so nearly es-
caped. In other words, Visions is a tragedy as long as the reader
perceives Oothoon as the heroine whose story the poem dramatizes:
she becomes a helpless victim of the Urizenic state of things. Her
sufferings bring her to a deeper understanding of that state, but her
new awareness does not empower her to free herself or to alter
Urizen's order. So Susan Fox has seen her:
Blake made the chief character of Visions of the Daughters of Albion female not just
because he admired Mary Wollstonecraft and thought women at least potentially
men's equals, but also because he needed a chief character who could be raped and
tied down and suppressed without recourse—or rather, with the single recourse of
giving birth to the revolutionary male force which can end the victimization. Visions
Romanticism Past and Present 17
of the Daughters of Albion has a heroine and not a hero partly because one of the
points of the poem is that its central figure, "the soft soul of America," is a slave.
Oothoon was chosen for her part not just because she was wise and brave, but also
because she was female and thus powerless. Her gender is a trap—just the trap the
symbolism of the poem demands. Blake rails against her being trapped, of course—he
was never not libertarian. But it is one thing to despise oppression, and another to
envision the means of the oppressed to end it.32

Oothoon's tragedy is undeniably the most prominent element of


Visions. As long as her perspective on her story is taken as defini-
tive, it is also the conclusive element. But the poem, as a prophecy,
can contain her tragedy while moving beyond it. The fact that she
cannot end her own oppression does not necessarily mean that
Blake has failed to envision the means by which she might have
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been able to do so. My purpose here is not to argue that Blake was a
feminist; he did, however, consistently see women as an oppressed
class, and he understood very well that oppression, or at least the
form of it that we know the best, is patriarchal. The point is not that
Oothoon fails to free herself, but that she could have done so—if she
had read her own prophecy well enough.
One distinction between prophecy and tragedy, as well as most
other dramatic and narrative forms, is paramount here. La prophecy,
attention must eventually move away from the characters and their
situations in order to focus on the audience, for prophecy opposes a
fallen perception of reality with a divine one in order to show that
each member of the audience is implicated in the world's evil—that
one cannot address that evil without recognizing and altering one's
own perception or spiritual state. What Blake valued in literary
characters, whether biblical or secular, was their utility as "exam-
ples" of spiritual states:
I cannot concieve the Divinity of the (books in the) Bible to consist either in who
they were written by or at what time or in the historical evidence which may be all
false in the eyes of one man & true in the eyes of another but in the Sentiments &
Examples which whether true or Parabolic are Equally useful as Examples given to us
of the perverseness of some & its consequent evil & the honesty of others & its
consequent good This sense of the Bible is equally true to all & equally plain to all.
none can doubt the impression which he recieves from a book of Examples. If he is
good he will abhor wickedness in David or Abraham if he is wicked he will make
their wickedness an excuse for his & so he would do by any other book (Annotations
to An Apology for the Bible, C 618).

The purpose of such characters, in other words, is to reflect, and


thus to reveal, the spiritual or imaginative condition of the reader,-
18 Mark Anderson
that is one of the principal ways in which prophecy would move its
audience from passive contemplation toward action. Thus Oothoon
attains prophetic stature when she reimagines the metaphors that
make up her reality or identify the spiritual causes of its natural
effects: when she literalizes the metaphor that identifies the spiri-
tual state of Urizen by connecting economic, political, and sexual
hierarchies with literal slavery—that is, by uniting the outward
manifestations of that state—and when she deliteralizes the false
metaphor of chastity, which attempts to bind contradictory states
together by linking intellectual freedom with sexual repression. She
ultimately fails as a prophet because she fails to perceive her own
reflected state, and therefore cannot change herself in response to
her prophecy. She cannot give up Leutha's flower, her infatuation
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with Theotormon. Her vision of the Urizenic order reaches her eye
but not her heart. A reading of the poem that fails to go beyond
Oothoon's tragedy—one that takes her as heroine rather than ex-
ample—repeats her mistake. It is impossible not to admire her and
impossible not to sympathize with her, but in order to read Blake's
prophecy instead of her tragedy, one must give her up—or renounce
one's dependency on her perspective—as she ought to have given up
Theotormon. The heart that can turn from her, in search of itself,
has learned what the eye sees.

Emory University

NOTES
1
All references to Blake's writings are from C: The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, newly revised edition, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold
Bloom (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982).
2
Songs of Experience is, of course, dated 1794; I include it here because it is likely
that Blake worked on it over a period of years, and because it is closer in its themes
and rhetoric to the works dated 1793 than it is to Europe and The Book of Urizen, the
other works etched in 1794.
3
In the first four chapters of Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies: The
Great Code of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), Leslie Tannen-
baum shows how eighteenth-century and earlier readings of biblical prophecy led to
Blake's conception of prophecy as a literary form--one that includes all genres, and
makes distinctive use of typology and of a synesthesia intended to figure or to facili-
tate the incarnation of the Word (pp. 8-123). In speaking of "Blake's evolving
definition of prophecy," I do not mean to question that fixed background of biblical
tradition. As will soon be evident, the definition of prophecy that concerns me here is
Romanticism Past and Present 19
functional rather than formal, based on the purpose of the genre (to move its audience
to act, to change themselves) as well as on the relation of the prophet or fictive author
to a vision of God on the one hand, and to the implied reader on the other.
4
For a discussion of the epic and prophetic traditions of mixing different genres
together, see Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of
Milton (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 168-69, 235-36.
5
See, for example, Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. 101-2.
6
It could be argued that the "voice of sorrow" (Thel 6:10, C 6), which concludes
Thel with dark visions of human life as hell, moves the poem into the public realm;
however, even those visions are put in terms of repression rather than oppression, of
sense perception and psychology rather than politics or history.
7
See Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, CT:
Fawcett Publications, 1975), p. 326, for a good discussion of the linkage between
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sadomasochism and authoritarianism, both of which arise from "the sense of vital
impotence" and express themselves in terms of hierarchical order, or "control of
those below and submission to those above."
8
The names of Bromion and Theotormon are of some significance here. Bromion's
name is usually taken as coming from the Greek adjective bromios, "roaring or
boisterous"; but it is also connected to the noun Bromios, "the boisterous god,"
another name for Bacchus. Blake had no more use for the Bacchic eros, linking
sexuality, violence, and death, than he did for the Platonic one (for more on this, see
my discussion of Comus's character below). The name of Bromion also has an Os-
sianic connection (as does that of Oothoon, which comes from Oithona, heroine of
the poem named after her, which provided some of the plot of Visions as well): Brumo
is described in MacPherson's notes as "a place of worship" of which it was thought
"that the spirits of the deceased haunted it, by night. . ." (Ossian [James MacPherson],
Morison's Edition of the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal, 2 vols. [Perth: R. Mori-
son and Son, 1795], II, 126-27). Thus Bromion is further connected to the dark,
Bacchic sort of religion. Bloom, in Blake's Apocalypse, p. 102, gives the generally
accepted definition of Theotormon's name as meaning "the man tormented by his
own idea of God"; but there is a character in Ossian named Torman, who is the son of
the lord of "one of the western isles"--that might help to explain Blake's phrase
"Theotormons reign" (1:15, E 46)--and whose name means "thunder" (Ossian, I,
261). "Theotormon" might then mean "god's thunder"--which raises the interesting
possibility that Theotormon is the thunder with which Bromion rends Oothoon in
the first place. In any case, it strongly emphasizes the affinity between the two male
characters.
9
Oothoon offers herself to Theotormon not only as a masochistic object, but as a
slave. Her reflecting of his image on her breast--like Bromion's boast, "Stampt with
my signet are the swarthy children of the sun" (1:21, E 46)--alludes to the branding of
slaves in Surinam as it was described by Blake's acquaintance J. G. Stedman in a book
for which Blake engraved a number of illustrations: "the new-bought negroes are
immediately branded on the breast or the thick part of the shoulder, by a stamp made
of silver, with the initials of the new master's name, as we mark furniture or any
thing else to authenticate them properly." See Captain J[ohn] G[abriel] Stedman,
20 Mark Anderson
Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam on the
Wild Coast of South America from the Years 1772 to 1777 (1796; rpt. Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 114.
10
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W.
Hagelman, Jr. (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 81-82.
11
Bloom gives such a reading, in Blake's Apocalypse, p. 106, admitting that "the
political allegory of the Visions seems to me to be of secondary importance in reading
the work."
12
It is worth noting here, though there is no way to tell whether or not Blake might
have known it, that Jeremiah felt himself to have been raped by God. Abraham J.
Heschel, in The Prophets: An Introduction (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p.
113, points out that Jeremiah 20:7, rendered in the Authorized Version as "O Lord,
thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast pre-
vailed," could be more accurately translated:
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O Lord, thou hast seduced me,


And I am seduced;
Thou hast raped me
And I am overcome.
13
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 208.
14
For accounts of the psychological and social consequences of Urizen's confusion
of virginity with virtue, see Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 133-34, and Diane Christian, "Inversion and the
Erotic: The Case of William Blake," in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in
Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978),
117-28.
15
Ronald Schleifer, in "Simile, Metaphor, and Vision: Blake's Narration of
Prophecy in America," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 19 (1979), 569-88,
argues that "the central device in Blake's prophecy is the articulation of the transfor-
mation of simile to metaphor" (p. 569), and that fourfold vision is the "realization"--
what I have been calling "literalization"--of metaphor (p. 577). But all metaphors are
clearly not equal. Oothoon identifies Urizen by transforming simile--the condition
of slaves is like those of women, farmers, and so on--to metaphor. We are all slaves,
and Urizen has made us so. Her realization of that metaphor is visionary. But there
are also metaphors that must be deliteralized, unrealized, such as the one that
equates physical virginity with personal integrity and spiritual innocence, which
Oothoon attacks so vigorously: that deliteralizing is also visionary. The difference
between the two kinds of metaphor is that the first reveals the spiritual state of
Urizen by uniting what seem to be disparate manifestations of that state, while the
second attempts to bind incompatible states (in this case, freedom and repression)
together.
16
All references to the illuminations to Visions are from TIB: The Illuminated
Blake, annotated by David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974).
17
All references to Comus are from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen
Patterson et al., 18 vols. in 21 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), I, 85-
123.
Romanticism Past and Present 21
18
Erdman makes the connection between the dancers and Milton's "creatures of
the element" through one of Blake's notebook inscriptions [TIB 126).
19
Irene Tayler, "Say First! What Mov'd Blake? Blake's Comus Designs and Milton,"
in Blake's Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, ed. Stuart
Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1973), p . 242. For an account of the changes in the illustrations between 1801
and 1809, see Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, pp. 80-88.
20
Ossian, I, 3 2 1 .
21
Ossian, I, 3 1 4 - 1 5 .
22
The narrative of Berrathon, it is worth noting, casts Ossian as a major character
in a story remarkably similar to that of Oithona.
" B l o o m , Blake's Apocalypse, p. 102.
24
An Apology against a Pamphlet call'd A Modest Confutation of the Animadver-
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sions of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus, The Works of John Milton, III, p.
306, 11. 6-19.
25
Howard H. Hinkel, "From Energy and Desire to Eternity: Blake's Visions of the
Daughters of Albion," Papers on Language and Literature 15 (1979), 278-89, argues
persuasively that Oothoon's "moment of desire" is an anticipation of Blake's later
concept of the creative moment.
26
Tayler, "Say First!" p. 235.
27
The skull-cave may also indicate that Bromion, Theotormon, and Oothoon repre-
sent a tripartite division of the psyche and that their story is a psychodrama. That line
of interpretation raises a number of intriguing possibilities, but it cannot be pursued
in this essay.
28
A reproduction of the Comus illustrations, along with Blake's other illustrations
of Milton's works, is available in John Milton: Poems in English with Illustrations by
William Blake, ed. Canon Beeching, pictures chosen and titled by Geoffrey Keynes, 2
vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1926).
29
For an opposing view, see Tayler, "Say First!" pp. 247-48, arguing that the
brothers are more important than Sabrina to the Lady's liberation.
30
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 77.
31
According to S. Foster Damon, Oothoon "has reached the stage of spiritual rebel-
lion" but "not yet. . . the stage of out-and-out Revolution." See A Blake Dictionary
(1965; rpt. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1971), p. 438.
32
Susan Fox, "The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry," Critical In-
quiry, 3 (1977), 513.

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