Androgyny In William Blake's The Four Zoas

As a great poet and painter, William Blake is largely unknown in his lifetime but is gradually taken up by many scholars from different perspectives. The most focused works of Blake are his early works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, etc. His later works such as Milton, Jerusalem, and especially The Four Zoas, are thought to be highly mysterious and complex, and thus receive less critical attention.Feminists have been interested in Blake's attitude towards women, and quite a few critics have proposed different statements ever since. However, it seems that they can never come to a common agreement. Feminist scholars at home and abroad have made various interpretations about Blake's attitude towards women. Critics mainly fall into two different catalogues: one group argues that Blake, being affected by the dominating patriarchy culture, depicts woman as subordinate to man; the other says that although Blake might show some prejudice in his early days, he becomes more and more sympathetic to woman in his later years. Although feminists studied Blake's many early works, his later epic The Four Zoas is rarely touched. Besides, The Four Zoas is approached from different perspectives but an androgynous one.