Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (review)

Julia Wright’s study of Blake focuses on nationalism and attends to formal questions within a consistent ideological framework that privileges social heterogeneity and freedom. Starting with the largely neglected but fascinating text Laocoön, she concludes with the great final epics, Milton and Jerusalem; in between she engages the Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth prophecies. It is, then, a wide-ranging study that makes large claims about the meaning of Blake’s intellectual project.

The first chapter, “Blake’s Laocoön and Classicist Theories of Art,” situates Blake’s innovative text persuasively within the German discussion of the Laocoön statue by Winckelmann and Lessing as it was mediated by Fuseli. Wright’s commentary is strongest when she develops the “nonlinear” dimensions of Blake’s Laocoön that complicate the stable points of reference in the ut pictura poesis discussion. Here and in other illuminated texts, Blake mixes image and writing to play them against one another both ironically and emphatically, creating multiple centres from which the reader can produce multiple narratives. Blake’s opposition to classical notions of art such as Lessing’s is hardly news, especially as Laocoön is a late text (1815–26), but Wright makes Lessing’s aesthetic views paradigmatic of a nationalism which Blake contests. Critics like David Erdman and E. P. Thompson established that Blake associated aesthetic classicism with empire and class privilege. Wright’s argument is that Blake’s text even at a formal level defamiliarizes nationalism.

The second chapter, “Contesting National Narrative,” locates the Poetical Sketches in the context of the antiquarian and nationalist inventions of the Gothic, northern European past to displace a classically centred national narrative. Blake’s stories about the nation—”iterative, nonlinear, and antigeneric”—position the individual aslant the national plot of progressive development (33). His pseudoantiquarian poems with Nordic themes construct a prelapsarian nation victimized by repressive tyrants, while his biblically inspired Lambeth texts also invent a past for the national myth. The parody and rewriting of Genesis that is the Book of Urizen structures chronology in wholly nonlinear ways, decentring the nationalist myth of progressive development. Milton takes up the nationalist theme with the representative national figure who struggles against the dominant culture (55).

The third chapter, “Revolutionary Heterogeneity and Alienation,” comments on Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Europe, and America, all illuminated works from the early 1790s. This chapter highlights alienation from community, illustrated most effectively by the extensive treatment of the flawed feminist heroine Oothoon. Wright reads Visions as a poem in which the reader cannot find an adequate figure with which to identify, as even the most sympathetic character, Oothoon, falls short of expectations: “In Europe, there is no figure with whom to identify” (87). America’s Orc, allegedly the symbol of and agent for revolutionary change, is a rapist. Thus Blake’s work refuses to conform to a “system of simple binaries” (88).

The next chapter continues to work on America and Europe, focusing on the childbirth metaphor as a way of examining the embodiment of voice and gender in these poems. Voice, in Wright’s reading, is how the female characters resist their reduction to birth machines, mere instrumental means to a greater end. As biological reproduction evokes individualistic protest, it also is a way for Blake’s texts to represent commercial print culture. Rape, etching, stamping, reproducing—mechanically and biologically—are all woven into a web of association that provides readers with ways of generating opposition to hegemonic power. The lack of a centre is a virtue, for there are instead multiple sites from which oppositional heterogeneity can be produced.

The chapter on Milton is for the most part operating within the same interpretive territory claimed by historicist critics of the past; Blake is still largely the prophet against empire (Erdman) and the witness against the beast (Thompson). Milton is a poem that attacks classical nationalism at the formal and conceptual levels. The final chapter on Jerusalem, however, accents the ideological...