Visions2011: [Re]solving the Rebus of William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Abstract

<p>Lost-and-found purity is central to William Blake’s illuminated book <em>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</em> (1793). In <em>Visions</em>, Blake’s central character Oothoon embraces the otherness of her sexual desires, flies off to be with her lover Theotormon, but not before being brutally raped and impregnated by Bromion. The assault leads to Theotormon’s refusal to be with Oothoon because of her putatively compromised state. Today, in the shadow of queer conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and virginity, how do we understand Blake’s narrative of loss and rejection, of injurious force and sexual violence? This thesis lays the critical groundwork for a queer reading of the text that is more than critical – i.e. that is a re-visioning of the text’s details, and is re-writing of its narrative premise.</p> <p>Through unconventional scholarly approaches, this thesis tackles issues of identity in Blake’s <em>Visions</em> from three separate vanguards that each further break open the heuristic and speculative possibilities in Blake’s work. Approaching Blake’s <em>Visions</em> from a Numerological perspective via deconstructing the central characters’ names and explicating the poem through their respective algorithms, the first section examines eighteenth century conceptions of the soul and its place within literature through locating and recognizing the souls of Blake’s poetry of lost souls. Considering sexual essentiality and the potential recovering of virginity, the second section reads <em>Visions</em> from the vantage of Schizosexuality (a fourth component to the hetero-/homo-/bisexual paradigm) to liberate Oothoon from both literal and metaphorical chains. From these critical approaches of Numerology and Schizosexuality, the thesis concludes with a visual book. Through inverting the gender axes of the love triangle central to Blake’s <em>Visions</em>, the visual book queerly re-visions <em>Visions</em> by following a male-Oothoon (Oathe13) flying off to be with his male lover (a homo-oriented Theotormon – Zucchicarro34) but not before being accosted by a female-Bromion (Aquabolt21). The critical chapters together with the visual book complete this thesis’ queer re-vision of Blake’s <em>Visions of the Daughters of Albion. </em></p>