Blake and Homosexuality - Book Review

Criticism, Spring, 2002 by Harriet Kramer Linkin

In chapter three, "Homosexuality, Resistance, and Apocalypse: The Four Zoas," Hobson pushes forward with his primary contention: that from The Four Zoas on, Blake makes discrete references to homosexuality that are positive and part of his larger visionary campaign against state cruelty, moral hypocrisy, and aggressive male sexuality. Hobson sees the text and designs of The Four Zoas containing a critique of "predatory masculinity" (49), especially the designs other critics see depicting a "degraded sexuality" in images of "masturbation, fellation, winged penises, giant phalluses, many-breasted dragon women, and more" (50). His case rests on the design on page 78, "the poem's only direct illustration of male homosexuality" (50-51), a key moment in the struggle between Urizen and Orc. Hobson speculates that this case of presumed fellation (much erased and shaded over) illuminates the mode of Orc's resistance, because although Urizen taunts Orc's efforts to resist tyranny by "feeding thyself / With visions of sweet bliss far other than this burning clime" (The Four Zoas 78:34-35), Hobson believes Orc resists Urizen by locating strength in visions of "male-male devotion, with homoerotic undertones" (53), visions Hobson unpacks as allusions to other texts that show males being tortured but bonding with other males (William Robertson's 1777 History of the Americas, John Stedman's 1796 Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam). Here and elsewhere Hobson works hard to present ingenious, innovative approaches that offer new ways to view Blake's complex representations, but he works so hard to support his own interpretation that he leaves little room for alternate interpretations or the multiple perspectives that make Blake's texts so complex, including less generous depictions of homosexuality. Thus one appreciates his rare admission that the depictions of lesbianism in The Four Zoas "can be viewed as negative" before he suggests that "other meanings emerge once we consider what these designs have in common: All show an awareness of lesbian relations as an alternative to heterosexual gratification" (73).

Chapters four and five gamely tackle Blake's mature engagement with Milton to analyze Blake's intermittent references to homosexuality in the text and designs of Milton and illustrations to Comus, Il Penseroso, and Paradise Regained. In chapter four, "History, Homosexuality, and Milton's Legacy," Hobson insists on the need for historical rather than biographical or symbolic readings of the Bard's Song to appreciate the extent to which the bard speaks to the repression of homosexuality, and, through a series of historical twists and turns that take up James II, Charles I, and Charles II, and notably William III (rumored to be and satirized as homosexual), reads the Satan-Leutha episode as demonstrating how "homosexual desire is driven into hiding and ultimately cast out by the masculine entity that has harbored it, with evil consequences" (93). Satan becomes a "Sick-one" (Milton 12:48) when he expels Leutha because the expulsion represses homosexuality and produces a "rigid, exclusively heterosexual masculinity" (94). Although it would seem logical to take up the Milton designs that prompt Mitchell's looming question at this point, Hobson looks instead at Blake's designs for Comus, Il Penseroso, and Paradise Regained to argue for instances that support a liberal reading of homosexuality. Discussion of the Milton designs is reserved for the latter half of chapter five, "The Cruelties of Moral Law: Homosexuality and the Revision of Milton," which begins with an extended discussion of Blake's potential allusions to contemporary antihomosexual campaigns in the "Calvary's foot" lines he added to copies C and D (Milton 4:21-28). When Hobson does turn to close analysis of four Milton illuminations that present "strongly homoerotic overtones" (130)--the full plate designs for William (pl. 29), Robert (pl. 33), Milton supporting a swooning figure (pl. 41), and Blake kneeling before Los in a sunburst (pl. 43)--the analysis is oddly clinical in explicating when and where there is a visible "penis-form" (138) rather than Hobson's overall thesis, which mostly emerges as a refutation of Marc Kaplan's arguments ("Blake's Milton: The Metaphysics of Gender," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 [1995]: 151-78).