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 Sc)(ual M achine: 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 L ondon in Ihc late 17805 and early 17905. 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 machi nery. 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 successfu lly fends off all attempts at revolution or even reform by the ruli ng class at home; he is "aged" because he struggles to prevent change or growth by cli nging 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).
