ABSTRACT
Vala, Rahab and Tirzah, Tirzah with her four sisters, the twelve daughters of Albion: all these female figures are interchangeable at various stages of Blake's Jerusalem. Blake exploits certain aspects of the familiar forms of nightmare in the figures of Vala, Rahab, Tirzah, and the daughters of Albion, but his monstrous females differ from the revolutionary maenads in two important respects. The twelve sons of Albion are particular and localized historical manifestations and bear versions of the names of those of Blake's contemporaries who obstructed his life in various ways. The daughters of Albion "controll our Vegetative powers"; in the narrative their material control is manifested variously as direct violence and as provocation to violence. The daughters of Albion in the 1790s were in fact unmistakably and repeatedly instructed to "frown and refuse''. The complex of qualities Armstrong examines corresponds to those Blake imagines in the daughters of Albion.
