Blake's Sex III

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 85

What Blake hated was not monogamy but jealousy and the idea of a lover or spouse as a possession:

"He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sun rise."
(Eternity, in Songs and Ballards; Erdman 474 )

We have a story to the effect that early in his marriage Blake proposed to bring home a concubine (sneaking around was futhest from his thoughts!) His young wife cried at the idea, and he dropped it. In all likelihood the concubine notion came from Blake's friend, Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest of liberated women.

Blake had illustrated two of this lady's works shortly before she wrote a sensational essay called "Vindication of the Rights of Women". Mary Wollstonecraft advocated the radical equality of the sexes, which Blake endorsed. She tried to live in the freedom generally reserved for men (and claimed by few even of them!) Blake was among those who supported her in this endeavor. She lived an adventurous and tragic life and died giving birth to another Mary, who became the wife of the poet, Shelley.

Blake had a very complex psyche; one could discuss to exhaustion his various sexual attitudes and points of view. According to Damon, who wrote A Blake Dictionary, Blake believed that "the domination of woman is one of the greatest forces corrupting society" (page 447); he quoted as follows:

"What may Woman be?
To have power over Man from cradle to corruptible grave.
There's a throne in every man; it's the throne of God;
This Woman has claimed as her own & Man is no more!"
(Jerusalem plate 30 [34], lines 25-28, (E 176 )