| Due to the way past poets and writers (who were mostly male before the nineteenth century) perpetuate gender stereotypes, their female characters as well as their relationships with the women in their lives are often scrutinized in modern literary and cultural studies. William Blake and his predecessor, John Milton, are often targets for postmodernist critics because of their treatment of women. Blake's women, especially female emanations, must fall under two categories: good and pure (passive) or evil and sinful (active). In Milton, a Poem, Blake attempts to correct Milton's relationships with his wives and daughters in the form of his female emanation, Ololon. However, through the use of female characters, Blake may have attempted to bring attention to the plight of real life women. Besides Leutha, who may fit the "active and evil" binary, Blake gives us not only the virginal Ololon, who represents Milton's actual three wives and three daughters, but his own wife, Catherine, an unusual woman for her time period, both of whom, I argue, transcend the simple binaries to be both "good" and "active." Through a survey of feminist critics of both Blake and Milton, close analysis of Blake's poem Milton (with reference to Milton's poetry), and examination of prose works by contemporaries of Blake like Mary Wollstonecraft and William Hayley, Blake emerges as less misogynistic than some critics assert. Blake created female characters who are given very little room to act on their own free will. However, because Blake's mythology is very fluid, he occasionally manipulates stereotypes to fit his needs within a given poem and between poems. In the end, Blake's characters, consisting of paired opposites (the male persona with a female emanation), are prescient, anticipating Jung's notion of anima/animus and Virginia Woolf's assertion that the artist must be androgynous. Blake's characters also suggest new forms of gender identity, which have only become allowable in western society quite recently. Although eighteenth century novels like Pamela, Clarissa, and Moll Flanders had made their (predominantly female) readers aware of the actual oppression of women as well as new possibilities for them, only Blake as Bard, through his poetry, was able to begin to include women as important actors in a modern English epic. Blake's women go beyond stereotypical roles as wives and mothers, as, ironically William Hayley, Blake's oppressive patron, had advised the modern English poet generally to do. Keywords: William Blake, William Hayley, John Milton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminism, Androgyny. |
