William Blake and the Body (review)

Anyone familiar with the works of William Blake, particularly his later epic poetry, must be aware of the centrality of the body in both his engraved and poetic images. Bodies and parts of bodies are displayed in a variety of grotesque manners throughout the illuminated texts. However, this area of Blake's aesthetic has been, for the most part, relatively glossed over or simply ignored. In 1974, Anne K. Mellor published Blake's Human Form Divine, and that text remained the first and last word on the subject, until now. Tristanne J. Connolly provides a valuable and long overdue service to Blake scholarship in her aptly named book, William Blake and the Body.

By reexamining Blake's corpus under the light of more recent theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Mary Douglas, Alicia Ostriker, Elaine Scarry and Barbara Stafford, Connolly identifies the cultural influences that shaped Blake's conception of the body and examines his dialectic with the body over the course of his career, focusing primarily on the later epics. The task of explicating any subject of Blake's can be daunting, in part because of the notorious difficulty and obscurity of much of Blake's work, but also because he had a very ambiguous attitude towards the human body. He saw the body as simultaneously liberating and enslaving and, instead of attempting to reconcile these contradictions, he reveled in the paradoxes and complexities of embodiment throughout his artistic career. In her preface, Connolly writes, "The body is Blake's preoccupation not because of a confident admiration of it, but rather a troubled obsession. He has a love/hate relationship with his favourite image; he at once reviles and glorifies the human body" (2002, vii). At the root of this ambiguity is the core of Blake's philosophical and aesthetic thought; and it is because of this complex multiplicity that the body is such an important, yet thorny, subject in understanding Blake.

Connolly's book is divided into seven chapters that trace the roots of Blake's anatomical knowledge and follow its threads through his most complicated works. The first two look at textual and graphic depictions of bodies and the metaphor of the body as text and graph. The next two analyze the problem of embodiment in Blake's illuminated texts, particularly focusing on the birth and miscarriage imagery that dominates The First Book of Urizen (1795) (Connolly's close reading of this poem is enlightening in its own right) and Blake's magnum opus, Jerusalem (c.1804-1820). The following two chapters examine the proliferation of dividing and commingling bodies in Blake's texts and negotiate the boundaries of the body while elucidating such problematic Blakean terms as "emanation" and "spectre."The final chapter outlines and theorizes the lineaments of the eternal body from which all other bodies flow. Thus, Connolly's book moves concentrically outward from the minute particulars of individual embodiment to the universalizations of the eternal body, highlighting their continuity and illustrating Blake's lifelong project of reconciling the individual with the larger community.

By contextualizing Blake's work within the tradition of anatomy and engraving (practiced by some of Blake's contemporaries and friends such as William Cowper and John and William Hunter) and by placing him—as an engraver—within the parameters of the ongoing debate on theories of the artistic representation of nature, Connolly provides a strong historical foundation to Blake's aesthetic theory and method. This offers another, fresh historical perspective from which to examine Blake's texts. Connolly also convincingly points to the mixture of images and text in anatomical books of the time as a possible source for the arrangement of text and images in Blake's own illuminated works. Supporting her argument with several illustrations from Cowper's anatomies, Connolly writes, "Cowper's book, like Blake's, takes advantage of the relationship between text and picture" (2002, 48). This leads to a valuable...