"Soul" in Blake's writing: redeeming the word

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Nancy Moore Goslee

Although Descartes' hypothetical doubt of all but his own cogito seemed to disconnect thinking mind from body, his attempt to reunite the two led not only to further metaphysical debate but also to physiological and artistic explorations of "sensibility," of the senses responding to the external world and expressing the internal world of the mind (Privateer 65, Reed xiii-xv, 5-6). in his essay The Passions of the Soul, "ame" or "soul" becomes the locus for emotions and desires and thus, Descartes argues, a way to make consciousness and will a bridge between reason and body (Descartes 1.342, 345). As shown in G.S. Rousseau's The Languages of Psyche and in Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism, anatomy and psychology developed together from the late seventeenth century in a search for material explanations of such a bridge. Blake was well acquainted with these materialist theories, particularly David Hartley's associationism and Joseph Priestley's further materialist interpretation of "soul"--an interpretation I wi ll consider in more detail a little later.

He was also surely familiar with the seventeenth-century artist Charles Le Brun's treatise illustrating Descartes' Passions de l'Ame and with its English translations and re-illustrations. In his Method to ... Design the Passions, le Brun writes: "Passion is an emotion of the Soul, residing in the sensitive part, either upon her pursuing, what she judges to be for her good, or shunning what she thinks hurtful to her; and, commonly, whatever causes Passion in the soul, creates also some Action in the Body" (Le Brun 12). Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1788-92), including illustrations by Fuseli and Blake, does not talk about an inner "soul" but about "personality" (2.21), "internal qualities" (2.34), and "situations of mind" (8.205). His essays even assert, in language close to Blake's Tractates, that "Our imagination operates upon our physiognomy" (Lavater 1. 182, 2.21, 2.34, 4.205). These situations and qualities are, as Lavater classifies and illustrates them, often emotions or "passions" (St afford 84-103). (3) As a number of critics have carefully shown, Blake employs a semiotic code of bodily gestures in his visual art to express internal dispositions or attitudes, expressions of an individual subject paradoxically based on such visual rhetorics as le Brun's and Lavater's and on verbal rhetorics that recommend performative physical gestures (Mellor, Human Form; Warner; Eaves 47, 49).

Similar semiotic codes of affect appear in the eighteenth-century literature of sensibility in which the body--usually the female body--involuntarily expresses its feelings to the astute observer's gaze and is subjected to interpretation, a version of the examination to which Tharmas and Jerusalem object (Markley, Hagstrum, Todd, Mullan). Language surprisingly close to this literature of a passive, involuntary and yet passionate sensibility, which an observer can "read" also con textualizes the word "soul" in a substantial group of Blake's early texts.