William Blake and the Body

Always the critical late-bloomer, William Blake has been the subject of an array of new approaches in recent years, opening up his work for perspectives driven by concerns about gender (both feminist and queer), politics, and physical space. Scholars have also focused on situating Blake’s work and philosophy more squarely in his historical era. In William Blake and the Body, Tristianne Connolly mingles these perspectives to offer something of a survey of the poet’s ideas about human physicality.

The title of the study points both to its strengths and to its weaknesses. The centrality of the body, particularly the human body, to Blake’s mythos is obvious even to the casual reader and viewer of his work. Yet the use of the body as a central organizing element for a study on Blake’s work does not offer the clear-cut opportunities for analysis that it might for a study of, say, Sterne: Blake’s bodies are simultaneously flesh and spirit, mundane and transcendent—in other words, difficult to define as a starting point for comparison. As Connolly attempts to corral Blake’s sprawling vision of the body into neat subcategories, the reader is likely to be reminded of the poet’s insistence that he must create his own system “or be enslaved by another Man’s”: Generally thorough and thoughtful, she also occasionally overlooks tangents or shoehorns Blake’s expansive visions into overburdened categories.

Connolly shines in her close and careful readings of Blake’s writings, with a sharp eye for allusions to the foundational roots in other texts (the Bible, Blake’s “Great Code of Art,” in particular). The early chapters, “Textual Bodies” and “Graphic Bodies,” present many fresh observations of Blake’s texts, sometimes formed into startling and agile analyses. For instance, the “transparency” of Blake’s illustrations of the human body reflects both his awareness of anatomical theory and his poetic philosophy, which preaches that the soul is integral to the physical being. In her comparisons between Blake and his contemporaries, Connolly’s patient and perceptive approach bolsters the position—not necessarily popular among post-modernists—that Blake was a product of his age, intricately interwoven with contemporary currents of thought from sources as diverse as the aestheticians William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, cultural philosophers John Locke, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, scientists John and William Hunter, and the surgeon William Cowper. (Strangely, though, George Cheyne receives short shrift.)

The concept of the body is stretched more thinly in discussions like the one addressing the recent electronic versions of Blake’s verbal-visual texts, the burgeoning treasures offered online by the Blake Trust. Here, viewing text-as-body, Connolly weighs the not-being of the onscreen images against the palpability of the paper originals, which, she notes, have become themselves difficult to access due to their rarity and physical fragility. Tangents such as these are diversionary, revealing much about our (and in particular Connolly’s) attitudes toward Blake’s polymorphous texts, but little about the texts themselves.

Critical discussion in this study is sometimes spotty in its foundational incorporation with the arguments. Northrop Frye, whose iconic approach to Blake would seem to be fundamental here, garners only a handful of mentions; other critical pioneers, like David V. Erdman (who repeatedly considers the trope of the body) and Kathleen Raine, do not fare better. Theoretical methodologies from Julia Kristeva, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and, perhaps least surprisingly, Jacques Lacan, adorn rather than support Connolly’s assertions.

This study is well-intentioned and often useful, but becomes a victim of its own overly embracing (one might say dissertational) focus. Gathered under broad thematic headings, discussions often do not link decisively with other material in the same chapter, much less in the book as a whole. The chameleon-like texture of the discourse shifts as the critical emphasis moves from ideological to historical, creating further disunity. In all, William Blake and the Body is less than the sum of its parts, though some of the parts are themselves worth the price of admission.