The Representation of the Female in William Blake

The Representation of the Female in William Blake

If William Blake was, as Northrop Frye described him in his prominent book

Fearful Symmetry, "a mystic enraptured with incommunicable visions, standing

apart, a lonely and isolated figure, out of touch with his own age and without

influence on the following one" (3), time has proved to be the visionary's most

celebrated ally, making him one of the most frequently written about poets of

the English language. William Blake has become, in a sense, an institution.

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and

Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence," wrote Blake in The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Perhaps his most famous line, these words are the

connecting thread through all of Blake's work, from The Songs of Innocence and

Experience to Jerusalem. But what those words mean has been a point of

contention throughout the years. What does that mean for the Male and the Female

who are at the center of his work? If they are Contraries, then what does the

Female in Blake's work represent? Just what did Blake mean? And from where did

his ideas and perceptions spring?

In 1977 Susan Fox addressed these questions in her well-renowned essay "The

Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry." As the first literary critic to

comment on Blake's inconsistencies in his treatment of the Female, Fox explores

the progression of the extended metaphor throughout the course of his career.

She explains that Blake's vision of the Contraries became more clear to him as

time went on; therefore, the contradiction lies in his earlier views of the

Female, identified with weakness and failure, and his later attempt to rescu...

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