Blake’s Critique of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden
2019; Temple University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702583
ISSN2640-7310
Autores Tópico(s)Moravian Church and William Blake
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBlake’s Critique of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic GardenYa-feng WuYa-feng WuNational Taiwan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreErasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791),1 with its two parts, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, explains the sexual life of plants by analogy to human relations and thus envisions the world as an intricate network between sentient life and nonliving things. Darwin explicates and vindicates Linnaeus’s taxonomy, which is centered on the sexuality of plants, and furthermore he gives a more active role to the female part of the plants to characterize their specific mode of procreation. Darwin’s all-encompassing view of the world incorporating natural science and human civilization inspires an outlook of progress but also triggers concerns about individual trepidations. Blake understands Darwin’s emphasis on female sexuality as essential to the progress of both nature and society, but he is more concerned with the possible implications of Darwin’s botanic economy on individual human beings. In The Book of Thel (1789) and the Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793),2 Blake focuses on the “use” and “joy” as two of the governing ideas of Darwin’s system and calls attention to the affective consequences wrought by this cosmology especially on women. Their shock and grief inhibit them from obtaining true self-knowledge and freeze them either in the act of “shriek[ing]” (Thel, 6.21; E 6), or in the stasis of “lamentation” (Visions, 3.1, E 47; 4.12, E 48; 5.1, E 48). Thel refuses to take her fate as implicated in the natural cycle of nourishment and degeneration by recoiling from further involvement with the world. Oothoon, though able to raise questions about the obliteration of “different joys” (5.5; E 48), insists on her purity in reflecting Theotormon’s “image pure” (3.16; E 47), rather than in her own value. Their stunted development results from self-delusion: neither Thel’s retreat back to her vales nor Oothoon’s collusion with men can make them truly useful or bring real joy. Delusion also afflicts men. Theotormon condemns Oothoon and Bromion as the “adulterate pair” (2.4; E 46) and ties himself with them in a deadlock. With these deluded characters, Blake disrupts the analogy of nature and society that is the backbone of Darwin’s cosmology and reveals both men and women to be victims of what Kevin Hutchings calls the “masculinist instrumentalism” that is disguised within the notion of “natural economy” (25). This essay brings Blake and Darwin into a dialectical relationship and seeks to illustrate the way in which Blake pries open Darwin’s botanic economy in order to expose the patriarchal preoccupations that underlie its stringent requirements on women.In Thel, Blake casts Thel as a virgin who is skeptical about her “use” (3.22; E 5) and her “place” (2.12; E 4). Eventually, she takes flight from the system, which is modeled on a cyclic view of nature. Moreover, in the Visions, Blake has Oothoon grow into an adult version of Thel, carrying out Thel’s desire only to be subdued by Bromion’s rape and Theotormon’s scorn. Oothoon initially sets out to seek “vigorous joys of morning light” (6.6; E 49). But Theotormon’s doctrine of “hypocrite modesty” instructs her to “capture virgin joy” “[i]n silence” (6.11, 13; E 49). In the end, she could only “wail”: “sing your infant joy!” meanwhile, the daughters of Albion “eccho [sic] back her sighs” (8.11, 9, 13; E 51). The various transformation of “joy” indicates stages of Oothoon’s fall. With these two women characters, Blake exposes Darwin’s scheme of nature as being governed by forced coherence between use and joy—your use is destined to be your joy. In revaluating the connection between use and joy, Blake proclaims the inherent value of every being as their “blessing,” which ought to be independent of their function. In other words, joy ought to be the use.Darwin’s botanic poetry was written in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. It reflects the Zeitgeist characterized by Martin Priestman as “guileless libertarianism” (74). It was first received favorably for breaking new grounds but gradually became a target of satire for its radical ramifications as the initial permissive atmosphere gave way to conservative backlash in the second stage of the French Revolution (Priestman; King-Hele; Bewell). The point of contention lies in Darwin’s emphasis on female sexuality, especially as depicted in LP. LP provides a series of vignettes of the sexual life of plants, which give expression to various forms of human desire and suggest new models of sexual relations, ranging from “the virtuous pair” (1.41), that is, the monogamous Canna, to the incestuous Ninon who “in her wane of beauty” “won / With fatal smiles her gay unconscious son” (1.125–26), and culminating in “the meretricious bands” of a hundred virgins and swains joined by “Licentious Hymen” and led by Adonis (4.466–84). Such a catalogue of desires and forms of association encourages the reader to speculate beyond the existent social mores. This catalogue provides a basis of modern revaluation of Darwin’s depiction of sexuality, which might be said to be brought about by Janet Browne’s precise historical account (1989) and culminate with Tristanne J. Connolly’s almost queer reading (2016). Browne points out that Linnaeus gives primacy to sexuality in his taxonomy (597) and that Darwin prioritizes the behavior of the plant-woman in characterizing each partnership (607). The final vignette of Polyandria, based on reports about South Sea Island and steeped in a tradition of seeing Tahitians as natural beings, does not aim to “prescribe a sexual free-for-all” in England, but to explain the “materialist” view that human love and sexual relations were “ultimately rooted in physiology” (614). Browne stresses on Darwin’s Enlightenment ethos, which helps him create a harmonious picture of nature and society with no violence of the kind found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (615). But I beg to differ from this benign view of Darwin.Connolly reads Darwin’s botanic poetry in parallel with eighteenth-century pornography and notices an emphasis on anomaly, such as the “illicit loves” (4.302) of cross-fertilized plants, crossbred animals, and mixed-race humans (Connolly 604). Connolly argues that the heights of the perversity are not about same-sex desire, but about extremes of “alterity” (in other words, exotic practice) as presented in the final vignette (607). For Connolly, Darwin also entertains cross-species connections, such as in the account of Nightingale and the Rose (4.305–16). Connolly sees it as an example of a progressive idea of morphology, which seeks to explain the resemblance between two species (611). Connolly maintains a cross-boundary vitality in Darwin’s poetry, which contains potential to challenge constricting status quo. My reading of Darwin is built upon these revaluations featuring a liberal view of sexuality but takes into account the questions raised by Blake about the position of women in Darwin’s holistic albeit fluid system. Blake was fully aware of Darwin’s project in promulgating Linnaeus’s view of nature.3 Thel and the Visions are both set in a landscape charged with sexual excess and depletion, which evokes the keynote of Darwin’s poetry, only to bring to a sharper relief the impasse especially afflicting women.Thel and the Visions have aroused conflicting criticisms. Supporters of patriarchal dominance felt their authority being challenged; whereas feminist critics felt they could not wholeheartedly countenance Blake’s portrayal of these two women. Neither side can remain complacent. Criticism of Thel mostly blames Thel’s failure to act out her desire. For example, Robert F. Gleckner criticizes Thel’s unwillingness to accept the lessons of love and sacrifice (574–75). On the contrary, Helen Bruder contends that criticism of this kind takes on the quality of the “dictatorial conduct book” whose sinister motivations Blake sets out to expose (38–40). I agree with Bruder that blaming Thel for small-minded inaction only reveals the critics’ own male-centered prejudice as they ask women to unthinkingly submit to a cosmology that is unfair to them. Furthermore, I contend a dialectical reading of Blake with Darwin will break out of this impasse.The reviews of the Visions are even more drastically varied. Harold Bloom, in his commentary in Erdman’s edition, characterizes the poem as a “hymn to free love” (E 900), whereas Ann Mellor judges that Oothoon endeavors to fulfill “a male fantasy that serves the interests only of the male libertine” (367). Some critics wish to reinstate the agency of Oothoon. For example, Nicholas Williams emphasizes her shift “from being the object of desire to becoming a subject who envisions a utopian eroticism” (94). Daniela Garofalo maintains that Oothoon defeats the capitalist-cum-psychotic logic of Urizen by watching the girls in “lovely copulation” with Theotormon (7.24–26; E 50), while demanding no sacrifice, deferral, or self-denial from others (Garofalo 71–73). Tilottama Rajan is more judicious in pointing out the paradox in Oothoon’s offer of virgins: even if she has entered the gift economy of feminists, she still “en-genders” it within a male discourse (86). Adopting Rajan’s opinion, I would stress that Oothoon is bound to the sadistic pleasure of men, denying free will to other girls, making “joy” out of watching their “wanton play” and convincing herself she has created a “heaven of generous love” (7.25, 29; E 50). This sense of irony is palpable to the reader, but not to her. In my view, she is a foiled revolutionary, who is not only bound to both her violator and persecutor, but also to male psychological dominance. Blake exposes the patriarchal ideology behind the progressive façade of Darwin’s poetry in having Thel flinch from fulfilling her “use,” which is prescribed in Darwin’s cosmic exposition, and having Oothoon endeavor to sanctify a doctrine of “joy” akin to Darwin’s principle of fertility at the expense of her self-value. But Blake still could not envisage a true emancipation for both men and women. The “Visions” of the Daughters of Albion are still about bondage and despair.Darwin’s cosmic view is built upon an intricate relationship between nature and society. His ornate poetry in LP presents the realm of plants as a rococo court of sexual intrigue and suggests nature as a potential model for new modes of sexual relations, whereas his magisterial verse in EV maps out the interrelated development of nature and society. Together, BG demonstrates a microcosm of the economy of nature. Three aspects of Darwin’s cosmology prompt Blake’s response: the specularity of female subjectivity; the porousness between humans, animals, plants, and materials; and its socio-psycho-sexual ramifications. With these three foci in mind, Blake weaves his questions about the role of women implied in Darwin’s cosmology into the thematic and visual texture of Thel and the Visions.The tension between woman as the subject or object of gaze is highlighted in the framing device of BG. In the Proem to LP, Darwin invites the reader to enter his “Inchanted Garden” (vii) to appreciate the vignettes of plant life “as diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady’s dressing room” (vii). The lighthearted Proem is in keeping with the frontispiece to the whole volume, Flora Attired by the Elements, which features Flora being equipped by the elemental genii, with a view to enlisting poetry and art under the “banner of science” (The Advertisement to LP). The toilette of Flora emblematizes Darwin’s poetic attempt to present the vegetable world in an extended address to Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders. The Proem and the frontispiece together put forward botany, in Asia Haut’s words, as at once the subject for study and the student, the text and its reader, the product and its consumer (245). Luisa Calè further points out that this painting visualizes the dynamism of the poem, that is, the “specularity” between Flora and the garden, which suggests an act of autoeroticism both alluring and alarming to male readers (par. 9). The framing device makes plain one contention: botany has enabled women to explore the natural world and their own bodies. I argue that Flora represents a rarefied version of Thel and Oothoon. They are subjects with agency to explore their sexuality, only to end up in retreat and enslavement.In the 1790s, botany ignited a heated debate about science and female education. On the one hand, William Smellie strongly opposes Linnaeus’s “disgusting strokes of obscenity” (cited in King 18). On the other hand, Mary Wollstonecraft encourages women to take up botany as an intellectual pursuit. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft resorts to Milton’s theodicy, “knowing good by knowing evil,” in order to argue against the “immodesty of affected modesty,” which bars women from learning physiological and natural sciences (127n2). Botany for her is like a portal to “the fair book of knowledge” that should not be shut to women (123). Wollstonecraft’s campaign provokes Richard Polwhele in The Unsex’d Females (1800) to ascribe the following view to her: “in order to lay the axe at the root of corruption, … that it would be right to speak of the organs of generation as freely as we mention our eyes or our hand” (11n). In Polwhele’s view, Darwin’s passage on Collinsonias offers perfect ammunition with which to lampoon Wollstonecraft. Darwin describes the flower embroiled in a ménage à trois: “Two brother swains, … / … / With rival love for fair Collinia sigh, / … / With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns, / And soothes with smiles the jealous pair by turns” (1.51–56). In the note, Darwin provides his observation: the female of this flower “bends herself into contact” first with one of the two males, and “after some time leaves this, and applies herself to the other. It is probable one of the anthers may be mature before the other?” (1.51n). In the poem, Darwin entices his readers with a scenario of an active female “sooth[ing]” “the jealous pair by turns” (1.56), whereas in the note he explains it as a mechanism of fertility to enhance pollination. Polwhele reads this as a parable of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with Henry Fuseli, Gilbert Imlay, and William Godwin (31–34). In his own note (33n), he quotes verbatim from Darwin’s later note on the same plant, which calls this behavior “manifest adultery” (EV 4.456n). Polwhele further sees Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth, “a death that strongly marked by the distinction of the sexes” (39n), as a cautionary tale to those who indulged in the “bliss botanic” (10). As Sam George points out, Polwhele characterizes botanic exploration as an uneasy mix of science and voyeurism and especially problematizes the “scrutinizing gaze” of the female botanist for polluting the female mind and “unhing[ing]” the nation as a whole (3). Polwhele’s satire on the “bliss botanic” encapsulates the conservative alarm about Darwin’s endeavor. Blake is aware of this radical potential of Darwin’s poetry and science, but what distresses him more is not the awakening of female sexual consciousness that seems to be encouraged by Darwin’s poetry but Darwin’s implicit connivance at exploitation that afflicts both women and men.Darwin sees the porousness between life and its environment as one sign of the ingenious resourcefulness of life. His poetry suggests an expansive cosmos interwoven down to a minute scale with plants, animals, and minerals. The passage on Lichen in Snowden, which “climbs the topmost stone, / And ‘mid the airy ocean dwells alone” (LP 1.349–50), provides the story of how tiny mosses transform into larger vegetables. In the note, Darwin calls Lichen the first plant to vegetate on naked rocks: “after it perishes, earth enough is left for other mosses to root themselves; and after some ages a soil is produced sufficient for the growth of more succulent and large vegetables. In this manner perhaps the whole earth has been gradually covered with vegetation, after it was raised out of the primeval ocean by subterraneous fires” (1.349n). Lichen’s transformation into different forms of life and materials thus serves as a model for the formation of forest and landmass.The process of transformation and dissemination then expands to include nonliving matter. In his note on coal, he observes that coal has probably been “sublimed” from the clay, with which it was “at first formed in decomposing morasses” (EV, 2.353n). He then elucidates the notion of interchangeability between life and material as the cause of landscape shift: “For the solid parts of the earth consisting chiefly of animal and vegetable recrements must have originally been formed or produced from the water by animal and vegetable processes; … At the same time we acquire the knowledge of one of the uses or final causes of the organized world, … that it converts water into earth, forming islands and continents by its recrements or exuviae” (Additional Note XXIII). Darwin builds a doctrine evocative of Pythagorean metempsychosis in order to explain “one of the uses or the final causes of the organized world.” Darwin notices that the process of change is reversible, for the use may become the cause of change.Furthermore, Darwin demonstrates his insight into the interdependence between material change and social development, which is best presented in the passage on clay. In EV, clay is mentioned prior to the passage on coal (2.349–60), and in connection with porcelain (2.281–90), Wedgwood’s factory Etruria (2.291–310), the abolition of the slave trade (2.311–18), and finally the Portland vase (2.319–48). Clay, with its elasticity and strength, is shown to be vital for civilization. This broad historical context provides background information for the Clod of Clay in Blake’s Thel.The note on clay as a vital material for civilization enables Darwin to explore the psychosexual dimensions underlying human development through an exposition of Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781). The painting is discussed in the context of intoxication-inducing plants, such as Circaea (Enchanter’s Nightshade) and Laura (Prunus. Lauro-cerasus) (LP 3.51–78). The pretext of a dream allows him to probe into the human mind in the same way as he probes into the composition of the earth. Darwin identifies the “nightmare” as the horse on which the “squab Fiend” rides to seek for some “love-wilder’d Maid with sleep oppress’d” (LP 3.53–54). The Maid experiences a “dread succession” of visions (LP 3.68), which includes “shrieks of captured towns, and widows’ tears, / Pale lovers stretch’d upon their blood-stain’d biers” (LP 3.63–64). No escape is possible, for there is a “headlong precipice that thwarts her flight” (LP 3.65). She could not even move because “[t]he Will presides not in the bower of sleep” (LP 3.74) and also because the Incubus sits on her breast: the “Demon-Ape / Erect, and balances his bloated shape; / Rolls in their marble orbs his Gorgon-eyes, / And drinks with leathern ears her tender cries” (LP 3.75–78). And as if to calm the excitement produced by the verse, Darwin explains in the note that our external movements are suspended in sleep, but “many of our muscular motions, and many of our ideas, continue to be excited into action in consequence of internal irritations and of internal sensations” (3.74n). As Patricia Fara explains, the vital force runs in parallel in sleep as well as in awakening, for in sleep muscular motions (or contractions) and ideas are generated in response to internal irritations and sensations (26). Browne further explicates that Darwin in Zoonomia (1794) classifies the bodily actions into four classes—the properties of irritation, sensation, volition, and association—and that these properties are displayed in plants only to a lesser degree than in animals or humans (602–4). Roy Porter maintains that in Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature (1803) Darwin regards “irritation” as the initial trigger of the life forces, unlocking the potentialities of animated power (56). This model indicates that Darwin attempts to combine the Hallerian physiology of nervous stimulus and response with the associationism of Locke, Hartley, and Priestley in order to formulate his model of the vital force (Porter 46). Darwin employs Fuseli’s picture to illustrate two ideas: the affinity between human physiology and psychology, and the human psyche as a microcosm of the external world. However, this cool-headed observation shows that Darwin attempts to explain away the gratuitous violence inflicted upon the “love-wilder’d Maid,” as if all this is simply part of a natural process, almost like a rite of initiation into the vital force of life. The contrast between the turgid verse and the calm note discloses a whiff of male insensitivity to women’s suffering.Darwin’s cosmic view, in which humans are enmeshed within the scheme of nature, provides the platform for Blake to present the implications for women in Thel and the Visions. These two poems respond to Darwin’s BG thematically and visually. On the one hand, Thel is set in a pastoral landscape evocative of the teeming nature presented in LP. The initial place from which Oothoon ventures out also suggests a garden scene. Both Thel and Oothoon are prompted by a similar excessive self-regard to undertake the quest, but their exploration in the world is fraught. Their fates dramatize the plight of women in general. On the other hand, the visual connection between The Nightmare, the frontispiece of Thel, and the final plate of the Visions reinforces Blake’s challenge to Darwin.Thel, the youngest daughter of Mne Seraphim (1.1–2; E 3), sets out to experience the world in flux. In the end, she rejects the lessons of her interlocutors and flees back to the vales of Har. With this foiled quest, Blake explores the effects, at the scale of the individual female subject, wrought by the politico-sexual cosmology expounded in Darwin’s poetry. The name “Thel” suggests “to desire,” but also “to flourish, abound, [and] bloom,” as in the context of what the biologist Edward O. Wilson terms “biophilia”—“the deep-seated human desire to understand, support, and be a part of nature’s flourishing vitality” (cited in Hutchings 109). Wilson’s notion enlarges the interpretation of Thel’s venture as not only driven by her sexual awakening but also prompted by a desire to find her place and discover her use. Thel goes on a quest to know her role in this biosphere: “O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water? / Why fade these children of the spring?” (1.6–7; E 3). She meets four characters on a descending scale. First, Thel’s lament ushers in the Lily of the valley who tries to console her: “I am a watery weed, / … / Yet I am visited from heaven” (1.16–19; E 4). Thel insists on revealing the actual condition of the Lily to her:… O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley.Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless of the o’ertired.Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb; …He crops thy flowers. while thou sittest smiling in his faceWiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.(2.3–7; E 4)Thus the relationship between Lily the producer and lamb the consumer is presented in terms of female submission to satisfy male needs. In Thel’s mind, the economy between the “innocent lamb” and Lily the “little virgin” simply produces “contagious taints” (2.3, 5, 7; E 4). She thus identifies the relationship as sexual predation and refuses to take the fate ordained to her.Thel then meets the Cloud, who describes his life in a cycle of condensation and rarefaction (3.10–15; E 5). The Cloud sees the goal of his life as achieving “raptures holy” (3.11; E 5). With this reward in sight, he gladly accepts his fate of “pass[ing] away” (3.10; E 5). But the “raptures” are achieved through a forced union with the “fair eyed dew” (3.13; E 5). This scenario echoes back to the illustration on the title plate, which features Thel as a shepherdess watching over a male leaping out of a flower to ravish a horrified female. The Cloud then explains Thel’s “use” in the cycle of life: “Then if thou art the food of worms, … / How great thy use. how great thy blessing; every thing that lives, / Lives not alone, nor for itself” (3.25–27; E 5). Thel remains skeptical of this patriarchal narrative of “use,” which subsumes her individuality within the universal system of nature.The third interlocutor, the Worm, comes to Thel as a voiceless weakling and suggests that life is a multifaceted paradox. The Worm, though fragile, possesses latent threat for its being associated with the phallus. Its “infant”-like (4.3; E 5) state prods Thel to admit that her knowledge is partial: “That God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil foot / That willful, bruis’d its helpless form: but that he cherish’d it / With milk and oil, I never knew; and therefore did I weep” (5.9–11; E 6). The desire to know more propels her to take the invitation of the Clod of Clay to “enter” (5.16; E 6) the latter’s house. But what she discovers there exposes the dark dimensions of the knowledge of life that shall overwhelm her.Under the guidance of the Clod of Clay, Thel comes to her own grave and hears “this voice of sorrow” (6.10; E 6):Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!……Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek.Fled back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har.(6.11–22; E 6)Thel realizes that even if she decides to endure the trials of life, she would still be plagued by incessant questions concerning truth and falsehood, attraction and destruction, desire and restraint. Frightened, she flees back to where she comes from.Thel’s visit to her grave evokes Fuseli’s The Nightmare as it is presented in LP. Thel is like the “love-wilder’d Maid” (LP 3.53), tortured by visions beyond her understanding. Thel’s questions provide comments on Darwin’s rendition of Fuseli’s painting. Darwin identifies the agent of torture as the Incubus. But for Blake there is a deeper cause of torment, that is, the restraint that the society imposes on both man and woman, implied in the image of the “curb” and the “curtain.” Thel’s visit to the underworld presents Blake’s macabre mirror image to Darwin’s LP, which offers a glimpse of some lady’s dressing room. Blake has Thel peep at her grave, fulfilling a darkest version of voyeurism. Thel’s flight eventually breaks out of the impasse of Fuseli’s nightmare into a larger unknown.The questions from her grave present an echo to the Motto:Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?Or Love in a golden bowl?(i.1–4; E 3)The first two lines suggest competition between the two modes of knowledge formation: sight versus touch; the human poetic insight versus the animal blindness (Hutchings 76). I agree with Rajan that the Motto encapsulates the “perspectivism” of the poem (77). Neither perspective is privileged. The last two lines draw on the “silver cord” and the “golden bowl” in Ecclesiastes (12.1; 6–8), which admonishes humans to fear God when young. The two objects serve as metaphors for our physical condition, representing male and female sexual organs. Blake replaces the “cord” with the “rod” to make explicit the suggestion of patriarchal authority, evoking Moses’s or Aaron’s rod. On the whole, the Motto crystallizes the two issues—epistemology and naturalized dichotomy of a gendered economy—as the dynamism of the poem. These two issues are enshrined as it were in a question mode, with no answer forthcoming. The Motto foretells and also confirms Thel’s refusal to adopt stance from any perspective.The different sequencings of the poem, six plates preceding or following the Motto, frame the poem into an ouroboric shape, with the Motto serving as the point of departure or the journey’s end. But the questions on both ends of the poem dismantle the ouroboric shape and place highlight on Thel’s frightful flight from the patriarchal paradigm, which claims to be holistic and “natural.” Hutchings thus points out that by making the Lily, the Cloud, and the Clay the “mouthpieces of an asymmetrical interlocking model of human gender relations,” Blake exposes the ways in which a systematic view of nature can serve to “naturalize” the ideological interests of the status quo (99). For Hutchings, Blake endeavors to advocate vigilance regarding the ways “nature” is constructed in, and produced by, social discourse (101). I further argue that the best vigilance is done by raising questions that thrust open the analogy between nature and society.There is a connection between Thel’s Motto and Darwin’s poetry. In EV, Darwin uses Aaron’s “mystic rod,” which is like the “living wand” in a “holy triumph” (4.485–90), to explain the work of “ingrafting” (4.483n). Darwin might regard the biblical anecdote as an allegory of the modern innovation. In the Exodus, God commands Aaron to cast down his rod in front of the pharaoh, and the rod turns into a serpent, a transformation showing that true authority lies with God (7.10). The rod-serpent association is appropriated by Blake in the Motto and the tailpiece of Thel. The latter depicts a young girl riding a serpent with two cherubim playing around it. Rather than upholding the rod as a symbol of male authority, Blake develops Darwin’s irony
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