Introduction: the birth of sexuality

The aim of this book is to trace Blake’s relationship to a pro-sex culture that seemed under threat at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Although I expect ‘Blake and sexuality’ to seem a familiar topic, ‘Blake and bourgeois politeness’ may appear to some readers to be either counter-intuitive or plain misguided. If this is so, it is the result of decades of powerful and convincing scholarship that have established both the extent to which Blake draws on antinomian, enthusiastic and other subcultural movements and the ways in which these cultures are fascinated by sexual freedom. Yet while Blake has stood for a prophet of sexual freedom in popular culture in the latter part of the twentieth century (and for some before this), his verbal and (to a lesser extent) visual representations of both women and sexuality have long been seen as characterised by ambiguity at best, ambivalence, contradiction and even misogyny at worst. In the wake of a decade of feminist critique, the only consensus that Robert Essick could report was that ‘Blake was deeply ambivalent about female sexuality’. Not only did ‘attitudes that we now tend to label feminist and antifeminist jostle together disconcertingly in his writings’ but in the later work, Essick concluded, ‘the evidence for misogyny increases’. Blake is typically seen not only as turning against women but as moving towards a mythic system in which ‘sexuality’ must ultimately be discarded. Since Blake’s invented land of ‘Beulah’, the ‘married land’ of Isaiah 52, is a place where the sexes are separate, S. Foster Damon assumed that this land was also the place of ‘sexual pleasure’. Eternity, where ‘Humanity is far above sexual organization’ (E236), is a place which transcends sex. Blake’s underlying model is easily read as a version of epic myth in which a male world of energetic conflict, of ‘War & Hunting’ (E135), is ultimately superior to a feminine pastoral idyll that offers the hero not only a vacation but also the dangerous distraction of a slide into sensual pleasure (a version of the familiar story of Dido and Aeneas). ‘In Eternity they