Transfigured Maternity in Blake's Songs of Innocence: Inverting the “Maternity Plot” in “A Dream”

The impetus for this discussion of Blake’s depiction of maternity derives from the work of social historians and cultural literary critics who document the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of a domestic ideology that idealizes the mother as self-sacrificing savior of hearth and home. Idealized maternity offers a figure of easy familiarity to readers of Blake’s Songs of Innocence—or at least Blake’s critics—given the still extant commonplace that views Innocence as a site infused with the benign presence of nurturing, protective mothers, valorized in their caring concern by the corresponding absence of victimizing fathers. Standard critical approaches typically identify mothers in Innocence as benevolent if limited and limiting; while some accept the representation of the mother’s goodness at face value, others question her actual benevolence from the perspective of the child, whose visionary growth is thought to depend on transgressing her projection of the domestic ideal. ¹ Even feminist critics describe the representation of mothers as protective nurturers in pointing to the limiting roles Blake generally assigns women, although a subset of feminist psychoanalytic critics locate rudimentary elements of Blake’s pernicious female in the mother’s dominant position as sole nurturer of the child. ² All these critical responses share the basic premise that Blake’s mothers do embody the forms of idealized maternity prescribed by contemporary domestic ideology as they proceed to analyze the positive or negative consequences of that enacted maternal ideal. Certainly Blake probes the ideality of the ideal, but I believe he does so at the earliest possible stage, by resisting uniform representation of the good mother; his Songs of Innocence contain important instances that undermine the seeming pervasiveness of the domestic ideal to disrupt ideology’s efforts to recode reality in its image. Perhaps the most evident instance of such disruption occurs in the appropriately titled lyric “A Dream,” where the surprising inversion of a popular narrative of idealized maternity pointedly suggests that the domestic ideology is nothing more than a fantasy of Generation.