Bochum, Universiẗat, Diss., 2002.

Beneath the rather comical-looking serpent slithering across the bottom of plate 72 of Jerusalem, William Blake has engraved in mirror-writing the cryptic but decidedly bitter sentiment, “Women the comforters of Men become the Tormenters & Punishers.” If this were not misogynist enough, later in the poem Blake's Spectre warns someone (it is difficult to say exactly who) that “you are under the dominion of a jealous Female” (J88:41), and that “The Man who respects Woman shall be despised by Woman” (J88:37). Meanwhile, the female Enitharmon justifies the Spectre's sexual paranoia by mocking the male Los's loss of liberty through feminine entrapment, telling him, “You are Albions Victim, he has set his Daughter in your path” (J87:24). “This is Womans World,” Enitharmon triumphantly concludes, warning Los “in scorn & jealousy” (J88:22) that she “will Create secret places / And the masculine names of the places Merlin & Arthur” (J88:17–18). Such pieces of textual evidence have convinced a good many Blake critics that the poet, psychologically shaky at best, really did fear and loathe women—at least when he was not veering to the other extreme and idolizing them. But other critics, aware of the forked tongue with which Blake’s “Serpent Reasonings” (KG) typically express themselves, suspect that something more subtle is going on beneath the surface of these undulating lines. It is one thing, for example, to create secret places bearing the masculine names “Merlin” and “Arthur,” quite another to create the places by creating the names. This dissertation argues that Blake suffered from a misogyny not literal but allegorical, a misogyny better understood as logolatry—that is, the unreasonable worship of words and an excessive regard for verbal truth. Casting himself in the role of a heroic “Soldier who fights for Truth” (J38:41) and yet haunted by the fear of seeing his thoughts betrayed by the words to which they have been entrusted, Blake takes up arms in an “Intellectual Battle” (FZ3:3) or “Mental Fight” (M1:13) against a dark sea of metaphysical and epistemological troubles, fiercely determined to protect his mind from being read and perverted in its intentions by his intellectual enemies, those whose ignorance of the holy human spirit (particularly its sense of humour) doom them to membership in what Milton would call an unfit audience. Chief among Blake's defensive weapons is his “Code of War” (SL3:30), a secret method of writing erected upon a misused and badly abused body of English nouns. The “stubborn structure of th[is] Language” (J36:59), likely worked out before 1785, has remained intact ever since Blake began imposing his beliefs on the largely indifferent world, beginning with the publication of There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One in 1788. Looking back at the Jerusalem passages, we ought to see the dazzling names Albion, Los, Spectre, and Enitharmon as what Enitharmon herself says they are: “secret places” for Blake's thoughts, always vulnerable to misinterpretation, to go and hide. But so too are the plain English words woman and man, daughter and female—in Blake's hands, even these are transformed into code names, redefined in obedience to the fearful structural symmetry of his code of war. In Blake a “woman”' is not a woman, and a “man” is not a man (but there is a male character named “Antamon” who would tell us, if we would only rearrange his letters, that indeed he is “not a man”). Blake's Human Form Divine is the personification of something other than what it appears to be, and this fact has rendered his poetry virtually unintelligible to generations of readers, with the exception of those hardened sufferers who manage to find even provisional ways of turning their verbal tormentors and punishers back into the comforters they were originally intended to be. / Graduate

The uniqueness of Blake's engraved or illuminated books derives from their effective union of poetry and painting, calligraphy and drawing. Blake created his composite art form because, consisting as it does of the contraries of text and design, it enabled him to present two perspectives simultaneously. Depending upon the divergence of the perspectives, the interaction of poem and picture ranges from embellishment to satire. This dissertation examines the interrelationships of text and design in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Urizen, and Jerusalem, representing the early, middle, and late stages of Blake's myth, respectively. In Songs of Innocence, text and design tend to be synergetic, reinforcing one another to establish the harmony and integrity typical of Innocence. In Songs of Experience, there is a tension between the two art forms, reflecting the uncertainties of the fragmented state of Experience. Because of the logical structure of language and the spontaneous appeal of design, the text usually presents the experienced vision and the illustration an innocent overview. The Book of Urizen and Jerusalem, being narrative in nature, demand a continuous, linear movement of the text. The designs of these works counteract this progression, acting as epiphanic moments, or eternal spots of time. The designs also function structurally, suggesting the mirror symmetry of Urizen, and presenting, in the chapter frontispieces of Jerusalem, the characters that will act as blocking forces for each chapter. In the prophecies, the interactions of text and design may extend to widely separated plates, and thus help unify the work. As Blake's myth develops, the motifs presented in both art forms evolve from the pastoral and anti-pastoral imagery of the Songs, to the elemental environments and the giant human forms of Urizen, to the complete mythological universe of Jerusalem. This dissertation follows a number of crucial motifs (such as trees, vines, serpents, "tygers," lions, sheep, the four elements, the circle, wings, clothing, veils, the city, the ark, the priest [Urizen] and the prophet [Los]) as they occur in the three works. Finally, it gives a broad interpretation of each work, based on a study of the composite art form, plus a detailed analysis of several Songs, and of selected designs and passages of text from the later works. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1924. / Bibliography: p. 246-264.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1990. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2847. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 298-299).

Texte remanié de: Th. D.--University of Birmingham, 1995. / Bibliogr. p. 202-210. Index.

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Thesis (PH. D.)--New York University. / Bibliography: 2 p. at end. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thèse - Bordeaux. / Bibliography: p. [263]-269.