Such a state of affairs would, at any rate, help to account for the disconcertingly problematic scenario Oothoon imagines as a viable alternative to Theotormon's "hypocrite modesty," the "self-love that envies all" (6:16; 7:21): While this passage is syntactically ambivalent and therefore difficult to interpret with precision,18 it nevertheless seems very much at odds with the emancipatory politics Oothoon articulates earlier in the poem. They were . (Visions of the Daughters of Albion Research Paper, n.d.), (Visions of the Daughters of Albion Research Paper). "'Base Trade': Theatre as Prostitution." Ed. Haigwood, Laura. In other words, the controversy boils down to the contrast between essence (i.e., Oothoon's identity or that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and constitutive of her) and the constructed male world she occupies (i.e., the attitudes, behaviors, and impositions of those who oppress and try to define her). As for locations inaccessible to European navigation, they are quite simply "of little consequence to Europeans" (1796; 1.35)—or downright harmful to colonial interests (as in the case of heavily forested wilderness areas, which provided both real and potential sanctuary for escaped rebel slaves [1796; 1.3-4]). By examining parallels between human and environmental subjugation in Visions, I do not mean to efface crucial differences, nor do I wish to suggest that human slavery is a mere aspect of our treatment of nature (especially since colonialist discourses have often aligned non-European peoples with a "degenerate" nature in order morally to justify the subjugation of the former as an integral part of an ostensibly benevolent "civilizing mission"). Gillham, D. G. William Blake. ��C*�+�U� Ed. True Christian Religion; Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church. Merchant, Carolyn. *   An earlier version of this paper was presented in April, 2000, at the annual meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association (Buffalo, New York). On the other hand, insofar as the near-horizontal form of the blighted tree in turn mirrors the prostrate form of the slave, the tree can be seen to represent a natural world that has, like the African laborer, been destructively enslaved. But he achieves this self-mastery at a significant price. 37-248. Like Blake's Bromion, Stedman implicitly values "newly discovered" lands only for their potential to increase the personal wealth, and to gratify the material desires, of their European masters. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1969. 2. This paper explores the issues and concerns confronted by single fathers in raising their children. Certainly Oothoon finds it impossible in Visions to convince her beloved Theotormon that the physical body—or the natural world of which it is a material part—can be "pure." In its careful taxonomy of nature, Stedman's published text participates in the expansion of European naturalistic empire by extending knowledge of, and thus a certain mastery over, the terrains and topographies of the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Vol. "'That Mild Beam': Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion." Eds. Indeed, such an aesthetic would help to explain how poetic sensibility comes to anthropomorphize beautiful animals as "philanthropists"; for in contexts where non-human creatures inspire "joy and ... delight," they may be regarded quite logically as agents of human well-being. ©2000-2020 ITHAKA. To seek an answer to this question, it will be helpful to return to Stedman's Narrative. Ring. Furthermore, the narcissistic aspect of her fantasy not only servilely defers or denies the gratification of her own sexual desire; by foregoing her own participatory touch in the encounter, Oothoon's narcissism also contradicts her earlier synaesthetic ideal of visual-tactile copulation. Given the overt violence of his imperialist rapacity, however, we must see in Bromion's self-aggrandizing myth of total mastery an underlying element of fear and paranoia; for, to revisit Griffin's discussion of rape in its sexual and environmental significations, "why does one have to conquer what is not challenging, fearsome, and in some way, wild, falling as it does outside the idea of mastery and control?" Journals Moreover, as Mark Bracher observes, Bromion's figurative gesture toward "another kind of seas" seems "on the verge of escaping the empiricist bias for the manifest and tangible" (173). ��X��P�3� B �X�p�CI�. Raine, Kathleen. Romanticism Past and Present 9.1 (1985): 1-33. Romanticism Past and Present 8.2 (1984): 1-21. Please click the button below to reload the page. Nichols, "The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature", Fulford, "Wordsworth's 'The Haunted Tree' and the Sexual Politics of Landscape", Fosso, "'Sweet Influences': Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794-1806", Hutchings, "Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion", Morton, "'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' as an Ambient Poem", Selected Bibliography of Henry Stephens Salt, On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred: Commemorative Essays, Romanticism and the Rights of the Negative, Percy Shelley and the Delimitation of the Gothic, The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form, Tragedy, Translation, and Theory: In Honor of Thomas J. McCall, Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism, Romanticism, Forgery, and the Credit Crunch, Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters, Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic, Secularism, Cosmopolitanism, and Romanticism, “Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era, Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom: Two Interviews, Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric, Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era, Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn': Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy, Romanticism and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Finding Romantic Commonplaces: A Dialogue with Jerome Christensen, Reading Shelley's Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820, The Containment and Re-deployment of English India, Re-reading Box Hill: Reading the Practice of Reading Everyday Life, The 'Honourable Characteristic of Poetry': Two Hundred Years of Lyrical Ballads, Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age, The Last Formalist, or W.J.T. 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Hence, in the design to plate 9, Theotormon flagellates his body with a three-thonged whip, whose knots, as Erdman has noted, "look uncannily like the heads of the Marygold flowers" in the design to plate 3 (Illuminated 134)—iconographic evidence that the natural forms inspiring multiplicitous vision in Oothoon (see 1:6-7) can only be vehicles of self-torment for Theotormon. The Journals Division publishes 85 journals in the arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. (Blake further emphasizes this process of "othering" by depicting the slave's arms in such a manner that they appear to be rooted, like tree limbs, to the ground.) The article offers poetry criticism of the book "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" by William Blake. 49 Issue 1, p105 . Our website is a unique platform where students can share their papers in a matter of giving an example of the work to be done. institution. Stedman, John Gabriel. See also Donald Worster's Nature's Economy, Chapter Two. Howard, John. As Leopold Damrosch, Jr., observes (198), Oothoon's "silken nets and traps of adamant" troublingly recall the religious "nets & gins & traps" (5:18) she so emphatically denounces earlier in the poem, mechanisms used "to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore" (6:11-12). The following pages show that the deepest and most pervasive systems of tyranny Oothoon resists are philosophical--in particular the appropriative, possessive, and proprietary consciousness of the Lockean self and those aspects of British empiricism that valorize the external and accidental over the internal and essential. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973. According to Helen Bruder, Bromion's treatment of Oothoon as an "enslaved sexual possession ... enables the imprinting of notions of essential sexual and racial character" ("Blake and Gender Studies" 142). New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Subsequently, Oothoon proceeds to defend herself from the accusation of "impurity" by marshalling numerous rhetorically powerful arguments from nature; but, as readers have often noted, this strategy of argumentation is decidedly perilous.