Visions of the Daughters of Albion: The Ultimate Song of Innocence and Experience

I’m sorry this is not about Beethoven! I thought Tuesday’s class was wonderful but I just couldn’t resist Blake…

I feel that Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a fitting pen-ultimate work for our studies of Blake. Visions of the Daughters of Albion contains numerous rhetorical and symbolic devices that allude to works we have read thus far such as The Sick Rose, London, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, published three years after the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and one year after Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” relates the plight of the late 18^th and early 19^th century female experience through an allegorical/pseudo-mythological narrative.

As in The Sick Rose, Blake’s phallic, penetrating worm rears its head in Visions of the Daughters of Albion to feed on the sweetest (virgin) fruit of Oothoon (plate 3, line 17). I read this boring worm to be a euphemism for penetration or rape, as Oothoon gets raped by Bromion the worm’s “dark secret love” defiles the sick rose. At this time rape and sexual violence or transgression was seen to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s and as a result women who were raped were seen as defiled and dishonorable, often necessitating prostitution as the only means of support for a undesirable woman. Blake references this caustic mentality in London, stating, “…the youthful harlot’s curse; Blasts the newborn Infants tear; and blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.” If the “Infants tear” refers to prenatal blindness caused by sexually transmitted diseases as the footnote suggests, then this might be another relation to Visions of the Daughters of Albion in that Theotormon blinds both Oothoon and Bromion for their transgressions. This cursing of “the Marriage hearse” denotes a similar undertone to that of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, as in the latter Blake bemoans the stringent constrictions placed on women’s sexual activity and the obligatory normative trajectory of a woman’s life from birth to marriage to childbirth to death. This circumscribed path, which was disrupted by rape in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, was dictated by a dichotomous Christian ideology of righteousness (Adam) and sin (Eve). It is this ideology that Blake calls into question in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as well. On plate seven, lines three through eleven, Blake problematizes the idea of sex as sin, asking:

…In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow
Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence,
The self-enjoyings of self-denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude,
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?

Here Blake seems to be mocking the predominant Victorian era silence in discussing sex and the Christian values of chastity that so often resulted in harmful repression. As in The Marriage of Haven and Hell Blake supports an expression of these desires, sexual and otherwise, as a means to forge a humanist as opposed to a religion or reason based order for society that might free slaves, “children bought with money”, and women alike from the “mind forged manacles” (London, line 8) of oppression.