Abstract
With a few notable exceptions, modern-day scholars have agreed that William Blake was an anti-empiricist who rejected the material world of nature in favor of spiritualized abstractions like “imagination” and “eternity.” But this implicitly dualistic reading of the Blakean universe is difficult to reconcile with the poet’s celebrated tendency to denounce oppositional models of the relationship between body and soul. Moreover, it does not adequately account for Blake’s exuberant celebration of the naked human form in its pursuit of sensual pleasure and “The lineaments of Gratified Desire.” The very idea that Blake regarded the physical world of nature as “no more than the Mundane Shell or Vegetative Universe that was the vesture of Satan” (Ackroyd 328) raises some serious questions. How could Blake celebrate human sensual experience while at the same time denouncing the material contexts in which sensuality is expressed and explored? If the body is indeed a “portion of Soul,” as Blake claims in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (4; E34), then its pleasure-seeking physical impulses presumably have a spiritual basis. When in The Four Zoas Blake asks “where are human feet for Lo our eyes are in the heavens” (FZ Night 9, 122.25; E391), his question gestures toward the potential perils of a dualistic distinction between spirit and materiality, which threatens to devalue and even lose sight of the body and its environment, the physical Earth upon which the body stands.
What is it men in women do require The lineaments of Gratified Desire What is it women do in men require The lineaments of Gratified Desire
—William Blake E474-751
[T]he body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.
—Homi K. Bhabha 67
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© 2010 Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert
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Hutchings, K. (2010). Nature, Ideology, and the Prohibition of Pleasure in Blake’s “Garden of Love”. In: Schmid, T.H., Faubert, M. (eds) Romanticism and Pleasure. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117471_10
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