Blake and Homosexuality (review)

In Blake and Homosexuality Christopher Z. Hobson sets out to champion Blake's verbal and visual references to homosexuality as "a compact, flexible way to refer to the brutality and hypocrisy of conventional morality, defiance of its strictures, and the possibility of alternative, mutualistic forms of love" (3). Positioning his project as a response to W. J. T. Mitchell's 1982 call for Blakeans to contemplate "'the dangerous Blake,'" the Blake who presents "'images of rape, lust, sado-masochism, and other scenes of abnormal sexuality,'" including "scenes of homosexual fellatio in Milton" (xii; see "Inside the Blake Industry: Past, Present, and Future," Studies in Romanticism 21:3 [1982]: 410-16), Hobson makes two large claims: first, that Blake's "hatred of state cruelty, moral hypocrisy, and possessive male sexuality increasingly leads him to sympathize with and defend both female and male homosexuality" (3); and second, that feminist critics who see Blake as ultimately "antifeminine" or "enduringly masculinist" are "unaware of the importance of homosexuality and its persecution in Blake's culture" and thus "believe he firmly subordinated women to men" (xiii). Large claims, to be sure, that require far more evidence and sustained discussion than Hobson provides in his bold study, which focuses primarily on carefully selected plates from The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. But Blake and Homosexuality is not so much a comprehensive overview of Blake's representation of homosexuality (or gender) as it is a determined effort to locate a Blake accepting of homosexuality, which Hobson manages with élan through a series of prophetic, energetic, often ingenious and historically dense readings. In seven evenly-paced chapters Hobson maps contemporary cultural positions on homosexuality (chapter 1), traces the emergence of Blake's accepting view of homosexuality in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas (chapters 2 and 3), considers how Blake's view of homosexuality intersects with his assessment of Milton (chapters 4 and 5), and argues that Blake's view of homosexuality is crucial to comprehending the liberatory Jerusalem (chapter 6) as well as current critical perspectives on Romanticism and sexuality (conclusion).

Unfortunately Hobson begins the first chapter of his study with an overly subtle example of Blake's representation of homosexuality, in that neither the text nor the design clearly depict the homosexual moment Hobson invokes but does not discuss until chapter three (and then with insight): page 78 of The Four Zoas, whose text voices Orc's rejection of Urizen's offer to relieve his sufferings, and whose design pictures a supine figure usually identified as Orc. Hobson points to the "heavily erased and penciled over" area above Orc's genitals to observe there "a kneeling figure with head above Orc's groin" (1), following the lead of Martin Butlin (The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981]). However neither Butlin nor Cettina Magno and David Erdman "see traces of what may be erect penises both between the kneeling figure's legs and above Orc's belly (the latter almost fully effaced)" (1), effaced traces that are very difficult to see in the figure Hobson reproduces (2) or Magno and Erdman (The Four Zoas [Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987]). Without further ado Hobson concludes "Most probably, then, the image shows two men in position for an act of fellation" (1). Readers who want more evidence or analysis of the claims made in this opening paragraph will have to wait another fifty pages. The rest of chapter one turns instead to an excellent social history of "homosexuality in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London culture, including the repression of homosexuals and their vilification in sexual polemic; the considerable contribution to antihomosexual ideology made by the republican tradition in letters, Blake's own tradition; and the alternatives possible within the thought of the time" (3). Crucial to Hobson's mode of argumentation is the paucity of alternatives to the intensely antihomosexual rhetoric of...