Slavery and Sexual Character

Both the date engraved on the title page of Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion-1793, that tumultuous year for the French Revolution-and the first word of its narrative two pages laterEnslaved urge us to consider political contexts for its mythic narrative. In that narrative a woman leaves the vale of her adolescent virginity to meet the man she loves. Intercepted and raped by a second man, who is identified by his own exultant rhetoric as a slave-master, she is then rejected by her would-be lover as damaged goods. Rapist and victim are bound together back-to-back, and the lover in whose eyes they are bound crouches beside them wrapped in his own rage and sorrow. Blake frames this configuration with a full-plate illumination, which appears in some copies as a frontispiece, and in others as the final plate. After the initial action of the journey interrupted by rape, each figure in this triangle of thwarted desire speaks in turn; but as Mary Lynn Johnson and John Grant point out, the middle section of the poem slides away from the protest against racial and sexual enslavement dramatized in the first, to a metaphysical discussion of perception, particularly on the part of the male speakers.' In a third section, the woman moves past this analysis to accuse a patriarchal god of creating the religious and social hypocrisy that oppresses all sexual desire by oppressing women s desire. Yet the oppression she attacks binds the daughters of Albion, not the daughters of Africa or Antigua. Has she forgotten the horrors of black slavery in challenging the economics of the European marriage-market? Has Blake made use of the rhetoric of the anti-slavery movement only in order to make it a special and hence subordinate case of the oppression of women by male physical and institutional power? Has the discussion of visionary perception in the middle of the poem shown the female victim a way out of her feelings of worthlessness after the rape-or has it only confirmed that trap by blurring together the specific problems of race and gender, by subordinating them to a paradoxically universal metaphysical perspective

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