William Blake's "Female Will" and Its Biographical Context

Author(s): Robert N. Essick

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Autumn, 1991, Vol. 31, No. 4,
Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1991), pp. 615-630
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/450820

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 SEL 31 (1991)
ISSN 0039-3657

William Blake's "Female Will" and its

Biographical Context

ROBERT N. ESSICK

William Blake's complex and shifting attitudes toward women

have received considerable attention from his legion of modern
critics. A related issue, the connections (if any) between actual
women Blake knew and his presentation of females in his poetry,
is an even more speculative, if less active, arena for critical debate.
In this essay I will focus on Blake's relationships with women
friends and rivals, including the engraver Caroline Watson. To
understand how Blake's interactions with them influenced his po-
etic representations of women, I need first to review the critical
history of gender-related themes in Blake's art.
Blake's habit of constructing his thought through bipolar
contraries-innocence/experience, heaven/hell, prolific/
devourer-finds a ready-made pair in the male/female division.
He extends this binary model to his characterization of the latter
sex, breaking it roughly along a split between passive and active
females. The passive type, subservient to the masculine in all
matters, is generally presented as virtuous, or at least benign,
within personal relationships and more general cultural
configurations. Active females are typically evil, a threat to the
(masculine) imagination in its progress through art toward
apocalyptic transformation. Figures such as Enitharmon and Vala
take on the traditional trappings of nature goddesses whose

Robert N. Essick is Professor of English, University of California, River-

side, and is the author of William Blake and the Language of Adam (1989) and
William Blake's Commercial Book Illustrations (1991). The present essay is part
of his on-going study of Blake's life and works in a variety of historical and
intellectual contexts.

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616 B L A K E ' S "F E M A L E WILL"

independent existence, not just their seductive or manipulative

actions, is a lamentable alterity blocking the realization of vision.
In Blake's later writings, his misogyny sharpens and finds its
epitome in the "Female Will," an aggressive force in Jerusalem
thwarting Los, the artist-hero, and perverting the proper hegemony
of masculine over feminine principles. Such at least are some
representative views of Blake's more persuasive feminist readers.'
Those who defend Blake against the charge that he was unable
to rise above the patriarchal sexism of his era generally begin their
arguments with a straightforward reading of Visions of the Daugh-
ters of Albion (1793).2 Oothoon, the young woman at the center of
the poem, is both active and heroic, a victim of male tyrannies.
Her struggle for self-expression and freedom from repression
would seem a precursor to modern feminism. Blake's later criti-
cism of the feminine must be understood in light of this ideal of
female liberation, a necessary companion to his calls for male
liberation. He is not attacking women, but rather the oppositions
within all humans between male and female principles that result-
ed from the fall. These divisions both reinforce and are reinforced
by social codes-chastity, marriage, courtly love-that pervert sex-
ual relations.3 The "Female Will" is created by the fallen Albion;
thus, it represents only the reification of erroneous masculine
perceptions. Females in Blake's allegorical poetry must be under-
stood metaphorically. They are the representatives of otherness
within the human psyche and its projection into an alienated
nature. He is making use of sexual division to figure forth more
fundamental psychological and metaphysical problems. Blake's
post-apocalyptic ideal of a human androgyne elevates the tempo-
rary and flawed union of coitus into a permanent oneness in
which all divisions, including sexual, disappear.
Feminist critics have offered forceful rebuttals to such a de-
fense, finding the prelude to misogyny in Visions of the Daughters of
Albion.4 Oothoon's failure to extend personal awakening into so-
cial action is but the first step toward the internalization of the
very tyranny she initially struggles against. In Blake's later poetry,
that internalization is not presented as the aberrant product of
cultural malfunction, but rather as an inevitable result of female
separateness. Even the ideal condition imagined by Oothoon is
marked by a typically male sexual fantasy: she will spread "nets
and traps . . . / And catch for" her beloved "girls of mild silver"
and "view their wanton play / In lovely copulation."5 Her revolt
will harden into revenge, the latter most fully dramatized in Albi-
on's evisceration by females pictured on plate 25 of Jerusalem. The
positive contrary to such motifs, the androgynous human form, is

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 617

always for Blake an absorption of th

by canceling her independent presence, never the man's. The
result is less an androgyne than a male freed from the anxieties
associated with females outside his willful control. As Blake states
in propria persona in A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810), "In
Eternity Woman is the Emanation of Man she has No Will of her
own There is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will" (E 562).
Finally, the argument that females are the metaphoric vehicles for
genderless meanings is blind to how tropes, and a poet's choice of
the lingual signs he manipulates into tropes, carry unavoidable
ideological orientations, in part through their non-metaphoric ref-
erences.6 Blake's own tendency to literalize the figural, and hence
reify the linguistic into a reality, stresses the metaphysical conse-
quences of what is always more than merely metaphoric.7 Male/
female is not the only binary division Blake could (or did) deploy.
To idealize the latter gender when in a subordinate position and
criticize it when dominant bespeaks an attitude toward the sexes
which cannot be divorced from their lexical categories and cultur-
al constructs, even if these do not constitute the primary thrust of
Blake's allegory.
The debate will no doubt continue, but there are a few points
on which both parties might be brought to provisional agreement.
Blake was deeply ambivalent about female sexuality. Attitudes that
we now tend to label feminist or anti-feminist jostle together
disconcertingly in his writings. In Blake's later works, however, the
evidence for misogyny increases, the active/evil and passive/good
categories for females become more apparent, and there is no
liberationist voice like Oothoon's. Why these shifts? Morris Dick-
stein has suggested one possible answer: Blake's "stunning change"
from Oothoon to the later "portraits of feminine jealousy and
possessiveness" seems "rooted less in politics than in the nearly
unknown terrain of Blake's personal life."8 My purpose here is to
make that terra a little less incognita than it was for Dickstein.
Although a naive assumption that Blake's mythopoeic females are
portraits of real people would surely prove misleading, a consider-
ation of some of the women Blake knew may illuminate the com-
plex interconnections between his life and art.
By far the most important woman in Blake's life about whom
we have any information was his wife Catherine (nee Boucher).
She was five years younger than Blake, her family was poorer and
of slightly lower social standing, and she may have been illiterate,
or only partly literate, at the time of their marriage in 1782.9 Their
relative stations in life seem ideally suited for a marriage in which
the wife assumes a clearly subordinate role. All early witnesses

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618 BLAKE'S "FEMALE WILL"

indicate that this was indeed the case, at least after c. 1800.10
Alexander Gilchrist, however, describes one incident suggesting
that Catherine did not always play the submissive wife in the early
years of her marriage and had to be taught. A dispute arose
between Catherine and William's younger brother Robert, and
the husband forced the wife to "kneel down and beg Robert's
pardon." She, "being a duteous, devoted wife, though by nature
nowise tame or dull of spirit, . . . did kneel down and meekly
murmur, 'Robert, I beg your pardon, I am in the wrong'."l' The story
presents almost too neatly an emergence of an independent Fe-
male Will and its quick submission to male authority that reestab-
lishes domestic tranquility on its own terms.
Further complexities in Blake's attitude towards his wife, and
even a glimpse into how their relationship may have influenced
his writings, are provided by Frederick Tatham's oft-repeated ac-
count of their courtship. Tatham, who knew the Blakes in their
later years and with whom Catherine lived after her husband's
death in 1827, claimed that Blake told his future wife that another
girl had rejected his affections. Catherine sympathized, and Blake
"immediately said with the suddenness peculiar to him 'Do you
pity me?' 'Yes indeed I do' answered she. 'Then I love you' said
he again. Such was their courtship."12 The way this tale echoes
Othello's words ("I loved her [Desdemona] that she did pity" the
"dangers I had passed" ) makes one suspicious that it is a literary
invention. But if pity was indeed a significant ingredient at the
beginning of Blake's feelings for Catherine, then it may have
influenced his curious treatment of the emotion in The Book of
Urizen (1794). From Los's compassion for Urizen's plight we learn
that "pity divides the soul" (E 77). This internal bifurcation leads
to the creation of "the first female now separate" who "they call'd
. . . Pity" (E 78). Thus the emotion that in eighteenth-century
theories of moral sensibility,13 and in Blake's and Othello's wooing
of their wives, results in a union is transformed in Blake's myth
into a divisive force connected with the primal creation of the
female-as-other. Her presence as a personification of pity suggests
that the roles played by Desdemona and Catherine are in Blake's
view intrinsic to the female psyche and potentially imprisoning or
destructive for the male. To take these observations a step further
and assert that Blake's marriage included anything resembling the
tragic results of pity played out in either The Book of Urizen or
Othello would be to mistake poetic extrapolations of personal ex-
perience for autobiography. Nonetheless, if we can take Tatham's
account at face value, it suggests some intriguing connections
among Blake's life, precursor texts, and his own writings.

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 619

Catherine's subservience to her husband extended to her role

within Blake's professional activities as an artist and printmaker
John Thomas Smith's claim, first published in 1828, that Cather
ine helped her husband color the pages of his illuminated books
has been generally accepted by later biographers and critics.14 We
know from Blake's letter of 30 January 1803 that Catherine, under
her husband's supervision, printed the intaglio plates he executed
for William Hayley's Life of William Cowper (E 726-27). She very
probably also assisted with the presswork on the illuminated books,
especially since both relief and intaglio printing can be most effi-
ciently accomplished by a two-person team, one to ink the plates
and one to keep clean hands for managing the paper. All these
tasks taken on by Mrs. Blake, although clearly important and
requiring artisanal skills, are subordinate to the primary activities
of literary and graphic invention and their execution in metal.
This division of labor parallels, and may even have helped moti-
vate, Blake's general aesthetic theories on the superiority of line
over color.'5 As Blake states in the "Preface" to his Descriptive
Catalogue of 1809, "Colouring does not depend on where the
Colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all
depends on Form or Outline. On where that is put; where that is
wrong, the Colouring never can be right" (E 529-30). The lan-
guage Blake deploys to express the subordination of color to line
sometimes implies the same gender divisions determining artistic
activities in the Blake household. These male/primary and fe-
male/secondary associations find expression in Jerusalem, for when
the blacksmith-artist Los hammers into shape the outline of being,
his wife Enitharmon "like a faint rainbow waved before him" (E
245). Near the end of the poem, the "Male" principle is character-
ized as a "Furnace," perhaps reflecting Blake's own activities when
heating and etching metal plates, while the "Female is a golden
Loom" weaving colors to clothe the manis productions (E 250).
The line/male and color/female identifications also parallel the
gendered distinction of (male) intellect vs. (female) nature in eigh-
teenth-century epistemology.'6 The femininity of color adheres
even to male artists of the painterly Venetian school who, in
Blake's view, perversely allowed tone to dominate line in their art.
Thus, Blake calls Correggio "a soft and effeminate and conse-
quently a most cruel demon" in the Descriptive Catalogue (E 548).
Such artists are not just mistaken, for like the Female Will they
pose a demonic threat to Blake's linearism-and hence his mascu-
linity.
By the late 1780s, Blake became associated with the publisher
Joseph Johnson and his circle of liberal artists and writers. The

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620 B L A K E 'S "F E M A L E WI L L

group included Mary Wollstonecraft, for whose translation of C.G.

Salzmann's Elements of Morality Blake engraved forty-five plates in
1790-91. At about the same time, Blake both designed and execut-
ed six illustrations for Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real
Life (1791). Although there is no documentary record of the two
having met, their paths surely must have crossed. But speculations
about a friendship between Wollstonecraft and Blake are less sig-
nificant than the intertextual relations of their works. The author
of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) has seemed to man
critics an obvious model for Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of
Albion, while the story of Wollstonecraft's life-probably known to
Blake through mutual friends, but also available in William God-
win's 1798 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of
Woman-may lie behind Blake's lyric of about 1803, "Mary."17
Wollstonecraft's description, in the Vindication, of the lot of wom-
en in a patriarchal world and how the relations between the sexes
are warped into jealousy and combat finds several striking paral-
lels with Blake's descriptions of the fallen world in The Four Zoas.18
These passages provide a transitional mode of gendered discourse
between Oothoon's feminism in the early 1790s and Blake's later
denunciations of the Female Will.
The interchanges between Wollstonecraft's texts (including the
"text" of her life story) and Blake's poetry have been granted
considerable attention by modern scholars and need no further
treatment here. Just the reverse pertains to two women, Elizabeth
Butts and Caroline Watson, whose relationships with Blake offer
some ways of augmenting our sense of the biographical matrix
shaping his ideas about women.
By 1799 Thomas Butts had become Blake's major patron for his
water colors and paintings. Although no record of a commission
exists prior to that year, the two men may have met as early as
1793-94.19 Blake's letters indicate that he considered Butts a per-
sonal friend, not just a purchaser of his works. Greetings to the
patron's wife, Elizabeth (nee Cooper), in those letters may be little
more than an epistolary convention, but on at least two occasions
Blake dined with Mrs. Butts, apparently in the absence of her
husband.20 Blake may have drawn a curious picture of two hares
which Elizabeth executed as a needlepoint panel,21 thereby repeat-
ing the same relationship between masculine conception and fem-
inine execution that held sway in the Blake household. Elizabeth's
interest in the artistic productions of that household is also hinted
at by the gift, in about 1800, of a painting inscribed on the reverse
by William Blake, "Agnes from the Novel of The Monk Designed
& Painted by Catherine Blake & Presented by her in Gratitude &

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 621

Friendship to MrS Butts."22 Perh

of a considerable proportion of his income on Blake's art would
not have been possible without his wife's support. She had been
previously married,23 and may have brought to her new family
financial resources that helped maintain her husband's collecting
activities.
The regrettably thin documentary record summarized above
provides little evidence of what Blake may have thought of Mrs.
Butts beyond the friendly courtesies normally granted to the wife
of a major customer. Two works from Blake's own hands are more
revelatory. In 1809 Blake painted a miniature portrait of Elizabeth
Butts (Butlin 1:316, no. 377, and vol. 2, P1. 477). His interest in
physiognomy as the embodiment of character, evinced in the same
year as the portrait by the description of his painting of Chaucer's
Canterbury pilgrims in the Descriptive Catalogue, provides a meth-
od for learning something about Blake's concept of the woman's
character from his rendering of her visage. She is shown as a
domineering and fleshy woman, perhaps just aging into corpu-
lence. Her face expresses sensuality more than intellect (to repeat
a sexist division not unknown to Blake's thought), with heavy
eyelids, a long nose, small rosebud mouth, a rounded and reces-
sive chin (almost doubled), and a thick neck. The low decollete of
her dress exposes rounded shoulders and a considerable expanse
of soft flesh. She holds a closed fan and wears a tear-drop ear-
ring-clearly, a lady of fashion or pretensions thereto. The gener-
al impression is of a woman similar to, albeit less vigorous and
exaggerated than, Blake's portrayal of the Wife of Bath in his c.
1808 painting of the Canterbury pilgrims (Butlin no. 653, P1. 878)
and the 1810 engraving based on it. In the Descriptive Catalogue,
Blake states that "the characters of Women Chaucer has divided
into two classes, the Lady Prioress and the Wife of Bath." The
latter is "a scourge and a blight. . . . There are of such characters
born too many for the peace of the world" (E 537). There is no
basis for a simple transposition of such criticism to Mrs. Butts, but
within the harsh categorizations of females in Blake's writings she
falls into the same class as the Wife of Bath. Elizabeth Butts's
physicality, sexuality, and haughty demeanor in Blake's miniature
project the same threat to masculine dominance epitomized by his
characterizations of Vala and the Female Will in Jerusalem.
Further insights into Blake's view of Mrs. Butts, and how his
opinion may have influenced the treatment of females in his writ-
ings, are provided by the recently discovered poem "The Phoenix
/ To M"S Butts."24 Through imagery evocative of the Songs of
Innocence and The Book of Thel, Blake gently chides the poem's

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622 BLAKE'S "F E M A L E W I L L

addressee (figured as a "Fairy gay") to cease her pursuit of the

Phoenix and return to the loving care of her children. Geoffrey
Keynes has suggested that the Phoenix is Blake who, through the
delicate allegory of the poem, is rejecting Mrs. Butts's sexual ad-
vances.25 The poem itself cannot sustain such a reading in the
absence of independent documentation, but "The Phoenix" does
indicate close personal ties between Blake and Mrs. Butts. Some
desire had led the woman away from her family, and Blake was
evidently on terms of sufficient familiarity to know of her feelings
and suggest a change of heart. The advice given in the poem
implies the fundamental split between aggressive/evil and pas-
sive/good in Blake's characterizations of females beginning in the
later 1790s. Since "The Phoenix" probably dates from about 1794,
only one year after Blake's creation of Oothoon in Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, the poem to Mrs. Butts records an early shift
away from the celebration of female sexual liberty. The brief lyric
also suggests that an incident in Blake's life, or at least in the life
of his patron's wife, influenced the development of his aggressive
vs. passive paradigm of the feminine.
The historical women considered to this point were all known
to Blake by the mid-1790s. The recorded incidents that may have
shaped his portrayals of females also date no later than that peri-
od and thus are not helpful in providing a contemporary bio-
graphical context for the misogyny of Milton and Jerusalem, both
begun about 1804 but completed some years later. Blake's rela-
tionship with Caroline Watson dates from this later time. As far as
we know, that relationship was purely professional, yet may have
been fraught with the very sort of psychological tensions produc-
tive of Blake's most intense poetic expressions. We must delve
into Blake's role as a commercial copy engraver and into his
friendship with William Hayley to understand Watson's impor-
tance to Blake's life and art.
In 1800 Blake moved from London to the village of Felpham to
work under the patronage of the popular writer William Hayley.
Blake's initial hopes for this arrangement, followed by disappoint-
ment, anguish, and a return to London in 1803, comprise the best
documented chapter in his life. Although Blake may have thought
differently, Hayley states in his Memoirs that Blake settled in Felp-
ham "to execute various works of art, & particularly the prints,
with which He [Hayley] hoped to decorate the projected Life of
Cowper" (BR 74). In September 1801 Blake reported in a letter to
Thomas Butts that "Engraving Plates for Cowpers Life" was his
"Principal labour" (E 716). The project, not completed until 1804,
proved an arduous one, in part because of continual criticisms of

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 623

Blake's work by Hayley and his friends. Several of the plates are
over-labored, including the frontispiece to volume one, a portrait
of Cowper based on a drawing by George Romney. Blake had to
please not only Hayley but also Lady Hesketh, Cowper's cousin,
who was always on guard against portraits of the dead poet that
gave any hint of his fatal insanity. In a letter of 29 December 1802
she confessed to Hayley that she was now satisfied with Blake's
frontispiece because it had been "softened" (BR 113). But howev-
er burdensome the task, the project was crucial for Blake's liveli-
hood and for establishing a productive relationship with the chief
employer of his graver.
By 1806 Hayley had completed a revised edition of his Life of
Cowper for publication in four octavo volumes. Blake's frontis-
piece after Romney for volume one of the first edition, published
as a quarto, had to be re-engraved on a reduced scale for the new
edition. Blake would have legitimately expected to receive the
commission for this work, not just as a matter of professional
courtesy, but because the original engraver of a plate is usually the
most adept at copying it on a new copperplate. Blake probably
had similar expectations for the frontispiece picturing "Judith, or
Cowper's Oak" for Hayley's Supplementary Pages to the Life of Cow-
per (1806), a slim quarto volume issued to owners of the first
edition of the Life to bring that work up to date. Although Blake
was back in London and his friendship with Hayley had been
strained, he continued to correspond with and work for the man.
Certainly Blake needed the commission, for he is known to have
engraved only one commercial book illustration published in 1806.
As he told Hayley soon after his return to London, "Art in Lon-
don flourishes. Engravers in particular are wanted. Every Engraver
turns away work that he cannot Execute from his superabundant
Employment. Yet no one brings work to me" (E 736). In spite of
all these reasons for Hayley to employ Blake for both the octavo
Life and the Supplementary Pages, their author hired Caroline Wat-
son to engrave their only illustrations.
Watson was born in 1760 or 1761, the daughter of James Wat-
son, one of England's leading mezzotint engravers.26 She studied
under his direction, but rather than exclusively following his craft
of mezzotint, a profession distinct from engraving, she also devel-
oped a refined style of stipple engraving that imitated the rich
chiaroscuro of mezzotint but no doubt held up better under mul-
tiple printings. By 1785 she had become England's leading woman
engraver and was appointed "Engraver to Her Majesty" Queen
Charlotte, an honorific inscribed after her signature on the plates
she executed for Hayley.27 Watson's graphic method was particu-

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624 B L A K E S "F EM A L E W I L L"

larly suitable for the reproduction of oil paintings and pastels, for
it could replicate their continuous tonal gradations without linear
boundaries between them. While Blake was himself a skilled stip-
ple engraver, the strongly linear technique he used for almost all
of his original intaglio graphics and reproductive book illustra-
tions was the very antithesis of Watson's. Blake's opinion of her
style is indirectly indicated by his comments on Francesco Bar-
tolozzi, one of Watson's predecessors in the development of paint-
erly graphic effects. With bitter sarcasm, Blake wrote in his Note-
book that he would attempt to please the public by writing "Verse
as soft as Bartolloze" (E 505). "Soft" has feminine implications
throughout Blake's writings,28 but even without this adjective it
would be clear that, in terms of Blake's gendered aesthetics of line
vs. color, both Bartolozzi and Watson practiced a feminized ver-
sion of Blake's own craft.
Whatever disappointments Blake suffered over Watson's role in
the production of the 1806 Cowper volumes must have been
sharpened by events surrounding the preparation of illustrations
for Hayley's Life of George Romney. Shortly after his return to
London in the autumn of 1803, Blake began to help Hayley with
his biography by locating Romney's paintings and drawings. When
still in the early planning stages of the project, Hayley intended to
have Blake engrave at least two plates for the volume (BR 121). In
May of 1804 Blake proposed to "etch" an unstated number of the
plates "in a rapid but firm manner" (E 749). One month later,
Blake (probably at Hayley's behest) contacted his former partner
James Parker about engraving some of the designs. In his letter to
Hayley about the matter, Blake points out that Parker was swamped
with work, that the engravings should not "be done in a careless
or too hasty manner" (with the implication that Parker would
indeed rush the job), and that Parker's fee would be "Exactly" the
same as what Blake had requested (E 752). Blake clearly wanted a
major portion of the commission for himself. The sculptor John
Flaxman, a long-time friend to both the author and the engraver,
acted as an artistic advisor on the project. In January 1805 he
recommended to Hayley that his book should include illustrations
of several of Romney's more dramatic compositions, for they are
"well worth etching in a bold manner which I think Blake is likely
to do with great success" (BR 138). Flaxman's language, like Blake's
own description of his "rapid but firm manner," implies the mas-
culinity of Blake's graphic style. When the biography finally ap-
peared in 1809, it contained twelve plates-only one from Blake's
hand, but seven by Watson. Her work dominates the visual deco-
ration of the volume, lending to Romney's designs a feminine

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 625

softness that apparently pleased Ha

As his young admirer Edward Garr
Hayley ofJanuary 1810, "Caroline W
ful in the extreme; and you never made a happier exchange than
when you employed her instead of Blake."29
Blake's public reactions to the substitution of Watson's graver
for his own have all the signs of containing more tact than truth.
According to John Carr, who employed Watson on Hayley's be-
half to engrave the Cowper portrait, Blake "observed that his
feelings were not wounded, & that he was completely satisfied
with your [Hayley's] wishes" with "respect to Caroline Watson's
engravings" (letter of 28 March 1805, BR 161). A few days earlier,
Blake had written to Hayley that the "Idea of Seeing an Engraving
of Cowper by the hand of Caroline Watson is I assure you a
pleasing one to me it will be highly gratifying to see another Copy
by another hand & not only gratifying but Improving" (E 764).
This is just the sort of politeness that prompted Blake to write
more privately and honestly in his Notebook, "I write the Rascal
[Hayley] Thanks till he & I / With Thanks & Compliments are
quite drawn dry" (E 506). That Hayley and his circle would prefer
Watson's soft, indefinite, illusionistic style to Blake's masculine
linearism could only have been a professional and personal blow
to Blake and a historical manifestation of the "feminine indefinite
cruel delusion . . . intricately winding / Over Albions mountains"
in Jerusalem (E 217). If "there is a Throne in every man," as Los
claims in Jerusalem, that throne for Blake was his art, and this a
"Woman has claimd as her own & Man is no more!" It was enough
to bring Blake to ask with Los, "0 Albion why wilt thou Create a
Female Will?" (E 176).
Like the female Leutha in Milton, who "entering the doors of
Satans brain night after night / Like sweet perfumes . . . stupified
the masculine perceptions / and kept only the feminine awake" (E
105), Watson and her crepuscular graphic style- "the shadows of
a Woman" (E 177)-had feminized Hayley's aesthetic perceptions.30
His tastes in art, so clearly indicated by his preference for Wat-
son's engravings, very probably contributed to Blake's sense that
the feminine dominated the masculine in Hayley's psycho-sexual
orientation. Thus he embodied what Blake in Milton calls a "Two-
fold form Hermaphroditic" (E 113), a fallen parody of divine
androgyny. As Blake jotted in his Notebook c. 1808-11, "Of
H[ayley']s birth this was the happy lot / His Mother on his Father
him begot" (E 506).
While Hayley's character was in Blake's view dominated by the
feminine, the actual relationship between the engraver and his

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626 BLAKE'S "F E M A L E W I L L"

patron placed Blake in the subordinate-feminine-role. Engrav-

ing the designs of Maria Flaxman illustrating the twelfth edition of
Hayley's Triumphs of Temper (1803) even more clearly situated
Blake within the conception/execution, designer/copier relation-
ship equivalent to the man's position in Blake's doggerel on Hay-
ley's conception. To create the "softened" appearance of his Cow-
per portrait necessary for gaining Lady Hesketh's approval, Blake
had to feminize his own graphic techniques. To be replaced by a
woman in his role as Hayley's principal engraver, and then to
write a letter to Hayley submissively accepting this "exchange,"
could only have increased Blake's anxieties about his own mascu-
linity. Such a compound of feminization and rejection frequently
expresses itself through an attack on women as ajealous or threat-
ening enemy and an attempt to negate the feminine aspects of the
self. This syndrome can account for the characterization of fe-
males and their sexuality in Milton andJerusalem.
Shifting gender roles in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries included the entry of women into traditionally
male-dominated professions and trades.31' Blake may not have been
fully conscious of this large-scale but gradual social movement,
but he could not have avoided an acute awareness of its exempli-
fication by the career of Caroline Watson. Her precise influence
on Blake's misogyny is impossible to determine, but there is
enough circumstantial evidence, corresponding to imagery in his
poetry, to suggest that Hayley and Watson made Blake feel him-
self "under the dominion of a jealous Female" (Jerusalem, E 247).
Blake's delineation of space with masculine line on copperplates
had been rejected in favor of the "Female Space" (E 104) created
by Watson's tonal engravings. Her professional sponsorship by the
Queen added a political note to the female threat, heightening its
hegemonic potential. Taken together, the two women joined a
sense of professional domination by a female with the more pub-
lic dangers of matriarchy, and both in turn contributed to Blake's
delineation of the Female Will as a universal enemy of the male
self and its cultural ideals.32 Further assessments of the links be-
tween historical women and Blake's representations of the femi-
nine, and more generally between his views and changing cultural
configurations, must consider the role played by Caroline Watson
in shaping some of the more difficult and disturbing features of
Blake's poetry.

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 627

NOTES

lSee particularly Susan Fox, "The Female as Metaphor in William Blak

Poetry," CritI 3,3 (Spring 1977): 507-19, rpt. in Nelson Hilton, ed., Esse
Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970-1984 (Hamden: Archon Books,
1986), pp. 75-90; Anne K. Mellor, "Blake's Portrayal of Women" and Alicia
Ostriker, "Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,"
Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16, 3 (Winter 1982-83): 148-65; Brenda S.
Webster, Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983);
Webster, "Blake, Women, and Sexuality," in Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and
Donald Ault, eds., Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 204-24; Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic An-
drogyny: The Woman Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,
1990), pp. 34-50, 125-39, 210-25; and Margaret Storch, Sons and Adversaries:
Women in William Blake and D.H. Lawrence (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee
Press, 1990).
2Some of the defenses were published before the feminist critiques and
are generally couched within commendatory treatments of Blake's concepts
of sexuality, both male and female. For an early example see Bernard
Blackstone, English Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 288-
99. For positive assessments of Blake's ideas about sexual liberation and the
integration of male and female in eternity, see Irene Tayler, "The Woman
Scaly," Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 6, 1 (Spring 1973):
74-87, rpt. in Mary LynnJohnson and John E. Grant, eds., Blake's Poetry and
Designs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp. 539-53; Karleen Middleton
Murphy, "'All the Lovely Sex': Blake and the Woman Question," in James
Bogan and Fred Goss, eds., Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age (Richmond:
North Atlantic Books, 1982), pp. 272-75; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Romantic
Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake (Knoxville: Univ. of
Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 10945; and Brian Wilkie, Blake's Thel and Oothoon
(Victoria: Univ. of Victoria, 1990), pp. 73-84.
3In "Notes for a Commentary on Milton," in Vivian de Sola Pinto, ed.,
The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake (London: Vic-
tor Gollancz, 1957), pp. 115-16, Northrop Frye argues that the "human be-
ing" for whom "female will" is the "separated objective world" may "be a man
or a woman-in other words Blake's 'female will' has nothing to do with
human women except when women dramatize it in their sexual rituals, as they
do, for instance, in the Courtly Love convention." One might ask in what
sense courtly love is "their" (women's) ritual and not a male invention im-
posed on women.
4See particularly Fox, Mellor, and Webster (note 1); Jane E. Peterson,
"The Visions of the Daughters of Albion: A Problem in Perception," PQ 52, 2
(April 1973): 252-64; David Aers, "Blake: Sex, Society and Ideology," in David
Aers, Jonathan Cook, and David Punter, Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in
English Writing 1765-1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp.
2743; Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 197-201; and Laura Ellen Haigwood,
"Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion: Revising an Interpretive Tradition,"
SJS 11, 2 (Spring 1985): 77-94. For a spirited defense of Oothoon that takes
into account these critiques, yet still finds that Blake had an "historical in-
ability to see beyond fundamental inequalities in his system" (p. 188), see
Harriet Kramer Linkin, "Revisioning Blake's Oothoon," Blake: An Illustrated
Quarterly 23, 4 (Spring 1990): 184-94.

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628 BLAKE'S "F E M A L E W I L L"

5David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Be
keley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), p. 50. All further quotations of Blak
writings are taken from this edition, hereafter cited as E followed by page
number.
6Aers (note 4) describes this process as one that "both discloses and af-
firms dominant male ideology which inevitably feeds back into the realm of
human interrelations from which it has been derived" (p. 37). See also Fox
(note 1), p. 88 of the reprint; and Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), who discusses how Blake's "problems with
portrayals of sexuality and of women . . . are problems of symbol formation
that express themselves in the limitations of language" (p. 199).
70n Blake's "literalization of figuration," see Robert N. Essick, William
Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 224-30.
8"The Price of Experience: Blake's Reading of Freud," inJoseph H. Smith,
ed., The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, Psychiatry and
the Humanities, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 77-78. See also
George (note 6), p. 198: "It is improbable that [Blake] could so clearly have
understood the process by which men project women as the elusive other,
and spend their lives pursuing and attempting to appropriate women, unless
he had been the victim of that process himself. Blake resented nature and
what he called the Female Will, and he probably also resented real women as
embodiments of those forces."
9G.E. Bentley,Jr., Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 5-6,
23-24, hereafter cited as BR followed by page number. Catherine Boucher's
father was a "market Gardener" whose "large family was declining in fortune,"
while Blake's father was a reasonably prosperous hosier (BR 2, 6). Catherine
signed her marriage register with an X, but Bentley comments that this was
"by no means uncommon" for women at the time and "did not necessarily
denote illiteracy" (BR 24). Some of Blake's biographers, however, have taken
Catherine's illiteracy as virtually certain-see Alexander Gilchrist, Life of
William Blake, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1863), 1:38, and Michael Davis,
William Blake: A New Kind of Man (London: Paul Elek, 1977), p. 28. For later
evidence of Catherine's inability (or at least unwillingness) to write, see note
22.
"'See the accounts by Allan Cunningham (BR 481-82), Henry Crabb
Robinson (BR 542-43), and Gilchrist, 1:38, 118, 315-17. Most later critics
repeat the general conclusion, if not the sanctimonious tone, of Herbert Ives,
"The Most Perfect Wife on Record," The Bibliophile 3, 14 (April 1909): 91-98
("She sank her life in that of the man into whose hands she had entrusted
her all," p. 98). For a rare dissenting view, but with an equal measure of male
sexism, see Blackstone (note 2), p. 7: "Probably no man has regretted his mar-
riage more. ... A man who was a 'mental prince' had to live hour in hour
out with a woman who could not sign her name when she married him and
never came to show signs of developing intelligence."
"Gilchrist, 1:58-59. The argument must have taken place no later than
1787, the year of Robert's death. Perhaps it was this incident that led Gilchrist
to claim that "there had indeed at one time been a struggle of wills" (1:118)
between husband and wife; but some other such struggle, not described by
Gilchrist, may have prompted his comment that there had once been "jeal-
ousy on her side, not wholly unprovoked" (1:316). For some speculations on
how Blake's marriage may have influenced his concepts of love in his poetry
after about 1800, see John Sutherland, "Blake: A Crisis of Love andJealousy,"
PMLA 87, 3 (May 1972): 424-31.

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 ROBERT N. ESSICK 629

'2BR 517-18. See also the advice to "Seek

in Blake's lyric of about 1803, "William Bond" (E 498).
1SThe tradition in British philosophy that pity or sympathy was the basis
for moral action was initiated by the Earl of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning
Virtue (1699) and continued in the work of Francis Hutcheson (An Inquiry
into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725) and Adam Smith (Theory
of Moral Sentiments, 1759).
"BR 460. Gilchrist 1:70 makes the same claim and adds that the volumes
"were done up in boards by Mrs. Blake's hand."
'5The best overview and analysis of Blake's linearism and its important epis-
temological implications is Morris Eaves, William Blake's Theory of Art
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), esp. pp. 11-20. Although most of
the printing done by the Blakes was in monochrome, inking and printing cop-
perplates bear much the same relationship to line as does their method of
hand coloring impressions. The application of ink or water colors follows and
is directed (albeit not absolutely delimited) by lines etched or engraved on
the plate. See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti
to Emily Dickinson (London and New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 292-
94, for an attempt to link Blake's aesthetics and his anxieties about sexual
definition.
"Pointed out by Eaves (note 15), pp. 12, 17-18.
'7E 487-88. I believe the first to suggest an association between
Wollstonecraft and Blake's "Mary" is S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His
Philosophy and Symbols (London: Constable, 1924), pp. 100-101, 298. J.
Middleton Murry, William Blake (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), p. 109, is
probably the first to suggest that "the personal story of Mary Wollstonecraft"
lies "behind" Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The best and most recent study
of this thesis, as well as verbal echoes between Blake's poem and the Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Woman, is Nelson Hilton, "An Original Story," in Nelson
Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler, eds., Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality (Ber-
keley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 69-104.
"Persuasively argued in Michael Ackland, "The Embattled Sexes: Blake's
Debt to Wollstonecraft in The Four Zoas," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16, 3
(Winter 1982-83): 172-83.
"Ada E. Briggs, "Mr. Butts, the Friend and Patron of Blake," The Connois-
seur 19 (September-December 1907): 93 (the men met "about the year 1793");
G.E. Bentley, Jr., "Thomas Butts, White Collar Maecenas," PMLA 71, 5 (De-
cember 1956): 1054-55 ("the generally accepted date is 1794").
20According to the diary kept by Butts's son, "Mr. and Mrs. Blake and Mr.
T. James drank tea with mama" on 13 May 1800 and "Mr. Blake had break-
fast with mama" on 16 September 1800 (BR 67, 74).
21For the tentative attribution to Blake and a reproduction of the panel,
see Martin Butlin, William Blake (London: Tate Gallery, 1978), p. 82.
^Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New
Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 1:625, no. Cl, and vol. 2, P1. 1191
(hereafter cited as Butlin). The fact that Blake wrote the presentation inscrip-
tion on his wife's behalf suggests that she might have been illiterate. For other
evidence of Mrs. Blake's inability, or at least hesitancy, to write in her own
hand, see note 9 and Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake, with
Related Documents, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. xvii. It is of
course possible that William's hand was more elegant for the purposes of
inscriptions or even letter writing; but in two instances noted by Keynes,
Catherine used an amanuensis after her husband's death.

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630 BLAKE'S "F E M A L E WILL"

25Bentley (note 19), p. 1053, n. 7.

24For text, reproduction of the manuscript, dating, and arguments
thenticity, see Robert N. Essick, "William Blake's 'The Phoenix': A Pr
in Attribution," PQ 67, 3 (Summer 1988): 365-85. The poem also appe
the New York 1988 printing of E, p. 517.
25Geoffrey Keynes, "An Unpublished Poem by William Blake," TL
September 1984): 1021-22.
26The basic facts about Watson's career are taken from Samuel Redgrave,
A Dictionary of Artists of the English School (London: Longman, Green, 1874),
p. 437; and Freeman Marius O'Donoghue's article in The Dictionary of National
Biography, 20:921. Comments on Watson's engraving technique are based on
my study of her prints.
27Redgrave (note 26) states that Watson was engraver to Queen Caroline,
but Caroline (wife of George IV) did not become "Her Majesty" until 1820.
The Royal sponsor must have been Charlotte Sophia, wife of George III from
1761 to 1818.
28See Blake's comment on the "effeminate" Correggio, quoted earlier, and
the description of Beulah as "a Soft Moony Universe feminine lovely" in The
Four Zoas (E 303).
29G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), p. 60. It is unlikely that Flaxman agreed with such praise, as evinced
by his recommendation of Blake (quoted above) and his criticism of Watson's
style in a letter to Hayley of 18 June 1804 (quoted in Mona Wilson, The Life
of William Blake, 3rd edn., ed. Geoffrey Keynes [London and New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], p. 222).
OS. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, rev. edn. (Hanover: Univ. Press o
New England, 1988), pp. 178, 238, contends that Blake believed that "Hayl
was unconsciously a homosexual" and that Leutha is "the personification of
Hayley's unconscious homosexuality." According to Morchard Bishop, Blake's
Hayley: The Life, Works, and Friendships of William Hayley (London: Gollancz,
1951), p. 305, Hayley's selection of Watson was prompted by Lady Hesketh's
continued complaints about Blake's engraved portrait of Cowper. I am un-
able to confirm this, but if true, and if known to Blake, it would have sup-
ported his belief that Hayley was dominated by feminine sensibilities.
3'See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Vintage Books, 1966), p. 248 ("Manufacturers in the first half of the 19th
century pressed forward each innovation which enabled them to dispense with
adult male craftsmen and to replace them with women or juvenile labour");
and Patricia Branca, Women in Europe since 1750 (London: Croom Helm,
1978), pp. 25-31. This general shift in gendered labor roles is briefly related
to Blake's ambivalence toward women in David Punter, "Blake, Trauma and
the Female," NLH 15, 3 (Spring 1984): 475-90.
32My thesis here concerning Blake's reaction against the feminizing of his
craft, and his conversion of this challenge into general aesthetic positions,
supplements Marlon B. Ross's more ambitious thesis about the masculine
response to the feminization of poetry-its production, sensibilities, and au-
dience-in the romantic period. See Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire:
Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1989).

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