ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with Blake’s ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, printed in 1793. Blake registers the fact that in such a society sexual energy is a threat to all ‘fixed’ boundaries and conventional order. Blake makes a connection between the wider structures of domination and the more intimate sphere of sexuality. In the world that Blake examines, sexual activity is itself absorbed into the nexus of social controls and containment. The chapter looks at Blake’s continuing development of the aspects of sexual dialectic he had forged in 1793–4. Blake’s sexual dialectic is indeed grounded in a profound realism, alert to the dynamic movement and complex contradictions of human consciousness. The chapter focuses on Blake’s dialectical presentation of sexual conflicts in his culture and his critical penetration of conventional ideologies and their psychic effects. The survival of a traditional sexist hierarchy of values in Blake’s psychological symbolism and his vision of female roles turns out to be quite visible.
