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Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and the Biopolitical Unconscious
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Abstract
Alan Bewell identifies a newly globalized, consumerist nature in the Romantic period, one aspect of a larger context in which Michel Foucault observed the “dawn of biopolitics.” This historical context, along with Erasmus Darwin's best-selling poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), is brought to bear here on William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and on traditional readings of it that manifest nostalgia for an idealized past, a past predating enclosure's separation of population and environment, of human being and nature. Correcting the prevalent misidentification of the marigold that Oothoon plucks in Visions, my reading newly envisions an Oothoon whose relation to the life-forms around her replicates the modes of domination and exploitation inherent in capitalist ideology. What have seemed to be anomalies in Oothoon, her curious connections to Bromion and her offer to procure girls for Theotormon, instead reflect central character traits. In the end, a reaccounting of the historicity of Blake's poetic text yields a heroine and a reading population struggling to view themselves as at the center of a reflexive system that governs and exploits the mutual relations of natural and social surroundings but that also is governed and exploited by the same biopolitical apparatus.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018
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