Father of jealousy! Be thou accursed from the earth!” Is this not a place of religion, the rewards of continence? Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake can be seen as a collection of love stories. Blake may have used his own personal disagreement towards raped girls as a broken human being where, they’re unable to find love. There is also a sense of jealousy coming from Blake because he consider woman to be property, which is surprisingly common in this century.
There is a great sense of thoughts and feelings in terms of relationships between man and woman. “With what sense does the parson labour of the farmer? What are his nets & gins and traps; & how does he surround him with cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude, to build him castles and high spires”. Oothoon can be seen as a typical person in America where his life goal is to find her true love and staring up a new life. But that was never the case because, Theotormon is raped by Bromion, where he represents law; making slavery illegal. Even though slavery is illegal is there happening in this world. In the beginning of the story Blake states, “Enslav’ed, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs towards America”. Blake, who had a daughter and decided to move her to America because he believed there was a better a better life without any discrimination. There was a sense of false misrepresentation how we see America as a great country with freedoms. For example we can relate this to many immigrants that left their homelands because they thought there was a better life was waiting for them in America but turns out to be false for some immigrants.
It comes down to the question are we surrounded by evil or just Bromion as an individual. There was also a sense of false religion in the poem. What I mean by that is, does having a moral value promote religion? For example, during Oothoon’s lament, there was a long series of questions from, “with what sense does the parson clamin the labour…etc”
“Take thy bliss, O man! And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!” I think Blake is trying to explain that we viewed sex as a hidden and forbidden place where no one can intervene. Also Blake also asked, “A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of nonentity?” There was some jealousy going on within the poem. For example, Theotormon’s jealousy caused Oothoon out from the shadow where she cries for non-existent.
Another question came to my mind while I was reading the poem is that do we perceive our lover or spouse as a possession? In the poem Oothoon indicates she was ready to have experience with men. But was that the case? Bromion raped Oothook and he later stated he impregnated her, making her his possession.
Bromion stated the following when he was raping Oothoon. “Thy soft American plains are mine, and min thy north and south: Stamp’d with my signet are they swarthy children of the sun”. They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge. The “soft American” is Oothoon body and the physical land where he shows no sympathy over it. While the “swarthy child of the sun” is the slaves he has control over. Not only Bromion took Oothoon virginity, but acquires her identity. Losing your virginity is seen as the end of innocence, integrity, and purity for Oothoon.
I agree with some of your critical analysis of women representation and roles back in the old days, like when you described “woman as a property” and “discrimination”. You also managed to point out interesting ideas that I never thought before, “there was also a sense of false religion.(par.2)” However, I don’t think Blake really emphasized on a raped girl as “a broken human being where they are unable to find love,” since Oothoon herself did not encounter trauma or phobia. Her life goes on, and she even pretends that she is pure, even though she had lost her virginity and identity. It was not meant to be an usual love affairs. It looks more like an allegorical expression of how rape related to colony, and women were like slaves (servant of their husband) in the old British kingdom. In fact, Blake tried to show how oppressed women were in the men’s world and how injustice it was for a society to blame on Oothoon. I once read a book “Beauty Myth” by Virginia Woolf, and her writing looked so much like a response to Blake’s work. She wrote how feminist had revolutionized and how a rape woman could influence the society. As for me, the three characters in the story looked peculiar to how the society were that day (in opposition to the nature of reality).