ABSTRACT
Late in his career, Blake looked at the political, economic, social, and linguistic processes that had shaped “Albion,” Blake’s personification of England, into “his” current nation state and body politic and named what he saw “a Sexual Machine: an Aged Virgin Form” (J 39[44]:25). The sexual machine is a relative of the “mind-forg’d manacles” that Blake found everywhere in London in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Both images suggest that to be “born” as an individual or a nation into an existing culture is to be inserted into a pre-existing process of social construction that resists interrogation or change: to become a product of a cultural machinery. The seeming contrast between machine and “Aged Virgin” fades quickly. Albion is a “virgin” form, despite his “masculine” identity, because “he” mechanically and jealously guards “his” preeminence as a nation and empire against all change and successfully fends off all attempts at revolution or even reform by the ruling class at home; he is “aged” because he struggles to prevent change or growth by clinging to institutions and traditions formed far in the past. Albion’s success in subverting revolutionary energies and in quashing actual revolution, as in the Irish rebellion of 1798, accounts for the location of the sexual machine “In Erins Land” (line 26).
