Subjectivity, Mutuality and Masochism: Ahania in The Book of Ahania and The Four Zoas

Abstract

The problematic portrayal of women, or ‘emanations,’ in Blake’s prophetic works has long been noted. In particular, the interplay of female sexuality and personal agency tends to produce negative results, resolving into a dichotomy in which womanhood is seen as either strong and destructive or weak and self-abnegating. However, given that individual characters in Blake’s mythopoeic universe often perform less as discrete subjects than as embodiments of psychic or emotional states, can his female emanations be said to reveal anything of female subjectivity as such? In her influential article, ‘The Female as Metaphor’, Susan Fox tries to disentangle the metaphorical meanings of femininity from its individual manifestations in Blake’s work. Fox notes that, as his cosmology develops, both negative and positive images of womanhood gain their significance via their effect on their male counterparts (512-14). Ahania, the anodyne female consort to the despotic Urizen, certainly appears to conform to this schema. In The Book of Ahania (1795), Urizen hypocritically labels her the embodiment of sinful sexual temptation, leaving her to wander alone forever grieving for him. She displays no sense of herself as an independent being and her very existence as a subject unto herself is open to question, given that she dissipates into ‘non-entity’ in Urizen’s absence. Yet she is motivated by desire — at first simply an urge to reunite with Urizen, but later, in a lament that constitutes the final section of the poem, this evolves into a yearning for a lost sexual unity.