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. 1 All are violent, threatening, powerful—inescapably disturbing qualities especially when they are embodied in female forms. 2 While other poets of the period associate the female with the numinous (like Lucy) or even the demonic (like Lamia, Geraldine, or the Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH), none imagines such wild power in female form. Yet certain contemporary representations of the female, both visual and verbal, do in fact evoke the ferocious and the uncontrollable just as surely as others evoke the meek, the passive, and the controlled—extremes of both types are characteristic. On the one hand in various kinds of political discourse of the period revolutionary energy is represented by the licentious, manic, and blood-drunk maenad; on the other hand in domestic novels and conduct books feminine identity requires an apparent abdication of freedom and power. When the bloody women of Jerusalem are observed in such implicitly and explicitly political contexts—the context of studied propriety as well as the context of abandoned frenzy—they take on new political implications so that Jerusalem itself assumes a greater political resonance: Blake’s manipulations of contemporary constructions of femininity are directed against a growing and potent means of social control.
