|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
Christopher Z. Hobson. Blake and Homosexuality. New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave [division of St. Martin's Press], 2000. Pp. xxii+249. Illustrated. $49.95.
Though there has been much random speculation about homosexual innuendo and illustration in Blake's works, this is the first amply detailed study of the issue (Warren Stevenson's Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime [1996] overlaps to a minor degree). Hobson's approach is passionately tendentious throughout, hoping as he says in the Preface to counteract earlier commentaries which tended to identify Blake's references as homophobic (for Hobson--especially in late Blake--they on the contrary promote tolerance), but many readers, prepared to be cheered by his "positive" attitude, will find it in certain respects paradoxical. Although he begins by bravely invoking W.J.T. Mitchell's remarks in SiR in 1982 that it was high time to turn attention to a "dangerous Blake," insisting among other things on his "obscenity," on detailing his interest in "abnormal sexuality" and on the fact that he "was not a nice man," Hobson never budges from his contention that Blake's evocation of minority sex was entirely at the behest of "niceness." He would have us believe that Blake's obscene drawings have nothing to do with his own propensities (he states flat-footedly that Blake was not himself homosexual, and--more remarkably--refuses absolutely to entertain psychological speculation about his personality), and he reads all of an increasingly rich record of perverse interest in Blake's works as progress towards toleration. For Hobson, it would seem, Blake was increasingly engaged by issues of homosexuality, masturbation, lesbianism and hermaphroditism only as he increasingly understood hostility towards these activities/preferences/conditions (at times frenzied in Blake's time) to be in league with hypocrisy, philistine understanding of Moral Law, and imperial aggression. In short, Blake, hardly gay himself, indulged in a record of interest Hobson would considerably enlarge only as a kind of politically-correct liberal. For Hobson, in other words, sex in Blake seems to be almost exclusively political/cultural. He will bravely discuss all the versions, and even relatively invisible details (speculatively), of the great plate in Milton where Blake turns to find Los behind him in the blazing sun, "sucking [his] penis, as the source of...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
