William Blake's Gothic imagination

Bodies of horror

Chris Bundock, Elizabeth Effinger, Chris Bundock, Elizabeth Effinger

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526121943
• eBook ISBN: 9781526121967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's 'dark visions of torment'.

Part I
The bounding line of Blake's Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts

1
‘Living Form’: William Blake's Gothic relations

David Baulch

We enter William Blake's Jerusalem (1804–c.20) through a distinctly Gothic doorway, yet the word ‘Gothic’ never makes an appearance throughout the 100 plates of Blake's longest work of illuminated printing. To grasp the importance of the Gothic for Blake's late work, we might turn to the 1822 broadsheet entitled On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. This text ends by declaring that ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270).¹ Although the ‘Gothic’ is accorded the highest value here, it is not clear what ‘Living Form’ is. The ‘Gothic’, we are told, is opposed to the ‘Grecian’, which ‘is Mathematic Form’ (E 270). Aristotelian unity, moral certainty, and war are the epistemological, spiritual, and political characteristics of Grecian Form: ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’ (On Homers; E 270). As a polemic against classical thought, and especially its neo-classical revival, On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil finds the stasis and mathematical abstraction of Grecian form inimical to the Gothic as Living Form. At stake in these opposing conceptions of forms are the politics of geopolitical struggle. The path of Grecian form is embodied in the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. By contrast, the Living Form of the Gothic provides an alternative that remains obscure in the broadsheet, for we never receive an example of Living Form or an explicit sense of its potential political efficacy.² Rather, I argue, we must turn back to Blake's figure of Jerusalem in order to grasp the ontological difference and revolutionary politics implicit in Living Form. In Jerusalem, the production of ontological difference is the necessary condition of revolution.

Admittedly, my claim seems to place a lot of weight on a single term: the ‘Gothic’. It appears in Blake's work only once in the eighteenth century.³ In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Gothic’ makes just ten appearances in Blake's work – only six of which provide any insight into the political and ontological difference expressed as Living Form. Often seen as Blake's major artistic statement in his nineteenth-century career, Jerusalem is conspicuously free of the terms ‘Gothic’, ‘Classic’, or ‘classical’. Nonetheless, Jerusalem is an epic of resistance to classical culture, and its web of associated phenomena include neo-classical art, rational thought, empirical epistemology, corporeal war, and state religion. While the connection between Jerusalem and the Gothic as Living Form in Jerusalem is not immediately evident, the assumption that the Gothic does matter for understanding Blake and his work has a long critical history, one that has done more to distort than to clarify the matter. Under the aegis of the Gothic, Blake has been presented either as a naïve artist whose visual aesthetic is always looking backward and/or as an artist who retreats politically from his late eighteenth-century radicalism to embrace conservative ideology and an apocalyptic Christian mysticism. Recognising the political import in Living Form makes visible Blake's dynamic conception of the Gothic, his most radical conception of being and its attendant potential for unprecedented difference. Turning the frontispiece to enter Blake's Jerusalem signifies a passage through its Gothic doorway. This passage offers nothing less than a sustained engagement with the potentiality of the Gothic as Living Form: a future that is not a repetition of the past. It is this potential that Blake's work attributes to the Gothic as Living Form.⁴

Malkin's A Father's Memoirs and Blake's Gothicism

Blake's association with the Gothic form finds its critical touchstone in Benjamin Heath Malkin's influential biographical account of the artist in his introduction to A Father's Memoirs of His Child (1806), a text that features a title page that Blake designed and engraved. Malkin's introduction to his A Father's Memoirs of His Child takes the form of a letter to ‘Thomas Johnes, of Hafod, ESQ. M. P.’.⁵ The letter is not about Blake as such, but a remarkable amount of Malkin's epistle introduces Blake as a designer, engraver, and poet to Johnes. Perhaps it was Malkin's intention to help find a new patron for Blake, but it seems more likely that its purpose is to rehabilitate Blake's faltering career and to soften his reputation as a madman. For our subsequent understanding of Blake, Malkin's account has been widely influential, largely because it is the only biographical portrait that Blake himself influenced. Malkin's brief biography is built on Blake's presentation of himself to Malkin in the early nineteenth century. While less than strictly accurate in some respects, Malkin's account nonetheless provides significant insight into Blake's nineteenth-century period when the term ‘Gothic’ emerges and takes on a particular range of meanings in Blake's lexicon.

In characterising Blake's poetry and visual art, Malkin freely uses the term ‘Gothic’, yet the Gothicism Malkin finds in Blake is significantly different from Blake's sense of the Gothic as Living Form. Malkin's account of Blake's Gothicism has a mixed legacy, for it has significantly confused our present understanding of Blake in two ways. By presenting Blake as an artist whose creative consciousness has always been dominated by the Gothic, Malkin has invited the critics to conclude that Blake's affinity for the Gothic marks a life-long opposition to neo-classical style in art and poetry. As a result, Blake emerges from Malkin's description as an ‘untutored proficient’, an artist out of time, ensconced in a Gothic past that for him is an ever-present reality.⁶ This treatment omits Blake's own understanding of the Gothic and the range of idiosyncratic associations germane to the complexities of his later work. Malkin describes Blake as Gothic in three distinct ways. He claims that Blake's poetry is Gothic, that the foundational influence on Blake's visual art is Gothic, and that Blake himself has become a Gothic phenomenon.

While Blake's poetry seems almost incidental to his purpose of introducing Blake to Johnes as a commercial designer and engraver, the poetry gets more attention than his visual art does in Malkin's brief biography. The importance of Malkin's interest is not to be underestimated, since it gave Blake's poetry its greatest public exposure to date.⁷ For Malkin, Gothic poetry is a style, one Blake takes almost unconsciously from a simpler past that communicated its emotions more directly than the discourse offered by ‘the polished phraseology’ and ‘just, but subdued thought of the eighteenth [century]’.⁸ Blake's poetry is Gothic because it reflects a personal innocence and lack of literary sophistication expressed through its formal simplicity. Blake is a charming amateur who has ‘made several irregular and unfinished attempts at poetry … [that have] dared to venture on the ancient simplicity’.⁹ For this reason it seems, Malkin refers to Blake as ‘Our Gothic Songster’.¹⁰ The implication is that Blake's sensibilities were formed in a past that is no longer accessible to a contemporary writer; it is as if his poetry appears in the present as the ghost of a simpler past.

For Malkin, Blake's poetry is not simply out of fashion; it is from a different era. Of necessity, then, Blake's Gothicism is immune from the influence of the literature generically identified as Gothic in Blake's historical moment.¹¹ Hence, Malkin fails to include any of the instances of Blake's work that might actually qualify as Gothic in the literary sense of the term. Absent is ‘Fair Elenor’ unwrapping her husband's severed head, for example.¹² Manifestly absent too is the fiery dragon form of ‘Albion's Angel’ in America a Prophecy, a figure not too far removed from the pyrotechnic horrors of Monk Lewis’ pages. Celebrating Blake's Gothic songs of ‘ancient simplicity’, Malkin condemns Blake's poor prosody and imaginative excesses. Malkin thus chastises the prophecies for ‘so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave unregarded harmony, and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of imagination’.¹³ In essence, Malkin nonetheless recommends that these poems submit to Alexander Pope's neo-classical advice that a poet must ‘Hear how learned Greece her useful rules indites, / When to repress, and when indulge our flights.’¹⁴ Ultimately then, Malkin's idea of Gothic poetry has a great deal of the Grecian in it. For Malkin, the Gothic, in fact, describes a style of neo-classical visual art that looks as much to the Renaissance as it does to the medieval period for its inspiration.

The neo-classical emphasis of Malkin's criteria for Gothic poetry is reflected in his view of Gothic art as favouring clear and distinct outlines, a criterion that lends itself to Blake's view of art as an engraver and painter.¹⁵ Emphasising Blake's work as an apprentice, Malkin asserts that Blake's experience drawing the medieval monuments in Westminster Abbey was crucial for the aesthetic development of his visual art. These drawings, Malkin reports, ‘led him to an acquaintance with those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments. There he found a treasure he knew how to value’.¹⁶ Blake's apparently precocious valuation of medieval art produced in him what Malkin memorably calls a ‘Gothicised imagination’, a characterisation so provocative as to impress numerous critics to view the Gothic as a guiding force throughout Blake's career.¹⁷ These writers include such influential Blake scholars as Alexander Gilchrist, Roger Easson, E. J. Rose, David Bindman, Robert Gleckner, and Northrop Frye.¹⁸ Gilchrist quotes Malkin as evidence for Blake's ‘fervent love of the Gothic’ as an expression of his ‘natural affinities for the spiritual in art’.¹⁹ By contrast, Frye's Fearful Symmetry cites Malkin's account as the basis for his claims about the consistency of Blake's intellectual and artistic opposition to classicism and neo-classicism. Following Malkin, Frye asserts that after copying the Gothic monuments of Westminster Abbey, Blake, ‘emerged from this training a full-fledged member of the Gothic school; and his pro-Hebraic and anti-Classical bias is equally typical of this period’.²⁰ Frye conflates Malkin's claims for the aesthetic form Blake discovers in Gothic art with the ideational content of Blake's later opposition to classical and neo-classical art and thought expressed in On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. Here, it is instructive to look specifically at what Malkin writes. Malkin states that Blake found in the Gothic monuments he copie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The bounding line of Blake's Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts
• Part II: The misbegotten
• Part III: Female space and the image
• Part IV: Sex, desire, perversion
• Bibliography
• Index