Blake and Homosexuality - Book Review

In chapter six, "Blake's Synthesis: Jerusalem," Hobson suggests "Blake's concern with homosexuality broadens in Jerusalem to include and even emphasize lesbian relations" (145), notably in chapter 1 when Albion faints after he sees Jerusalem "soft repos'd / In the arms of Vala, assimilating in one with Vala / The Lilly of Havilah" (Jerusalem 19:40-42), a scene Hobson sees as "remarkable for its frank depiction of lesbian relations" (151), and a revision of Blake's earlier view of lesbian relations. Instead of Oothoon's being prepared for heterosexual relations through her interaction with Leutha in Visions, "the heterosexual factor in the riverbank encounter is Albion's seizure of Vala, whose consequences, we shall see, are negative" (153). Negative because rather than accept the lesbian relations Albion rejects them (he faints) and the women internalize that repressive view of their relations, Vala more so than Jerusalem, whose internalized guilt and shame becomes the external veil she weaves, a veil that appears as social oppression and war (157). As Hobson persuasively argues,

   The implications of the veil's transmutation are profound. If its sinister
   development is a direct manifestation of Vala's sexual guilt over the
   riverfront scene, a guilt that makes her accept her seizure by Albion
   (20:32-37), then she becomes the Vala familiar to us elsewhere in Blake--a
   deeply deceptive sexual mystifier of war and delusive religion--by
   acceptance of coercive male love, Albion's "furious love" (20:37), and by
   denial of her own homosexual aspect. Here, as in Milton's Leutha episode,
   Blake implies that repression of homosexuality is one of the psychic
   constituents of social repression and war. This would be a remarkable
   conception in any time and place, and is particularly remarkable amid the
   deep hatred of homosexuality in Blake's England. (158)

In such moments Hobson's book becomes remarkable, but these moments are minute particulars that would be more persuasive were they woven into a larger system. Perhaps that is not possible for the work Hobson wants to do here, and does well: Blake and Homosexuality effectively shows how, in a culture whose overt and dominant discussion is militantly antihomosexual, Blake offers periodic expressions of liberal acceptance, the moments in the day Satan cannot find.

In the concluding chapter, Hobson neatly consolidates his overall argument: while early poems such as Songs and Visions express empathy for female desire, they show desire brought to fruition through male attention and even male aggression. But Visions begins to exhibit Blake's interest in exploring and accommodating sexual perversion which extends to masturbation and homosexuality. Male homosexuality serves as an emblem of political resistance in The Four Zoas and Milton, and lesbianism offers an alternative to male-dominated sexual relations in Jerusalem. Although Hobson notes that Blake's positive visual and textual references to homosexuality are relatively few in number and deeply encoded, he attributes Blake's "reticence" to the climate of the times and insists that "If relatively few, the homosexual elements in these poems are placed at moments of central significance" (177). To Hobson's credit, he makes his discussion of those moments resonate with central significance. While he is not entirely successful in demonstrating that Blake's periodic references to homosexuality generally indict "the brutality and hypocrisy of conventional morality" (3), or in claiming that positive references to homosexuality indicate that Blake was not "enduringly masculinist" (xiii), Blake and Homosexuality offers a rich investigation and image of a Blake that many readers will want.