Book Review: Why Mrs Blake Cried.

The literary critic Niall Griffiths has protested that Marsha Keith Schuchard’s Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination (2006) dwells too much on the mystics and spiritualists who apparently influenced William Blake, and not enough on the prophet himself. Griffiths quips that, “It’s like being cornered at a dull party by a succession of people who insist on telling you about their interests in reiki, psychic healing, chakra control or something while the one person you really want to talk to won’t come out of the kitchen.” This is a good line, but there is actually little truth to it. Why Mrs Blake Cried resembles a fantastic party full of tremendous characters, and one only wishes that the dull fellow who got you into the party could be discarded. William Blake – the bore at the partygoer’s elbow – becomes a distraction from an otherwise intriuging study.

As noted previously on Tychy, G.E. Bentley’s biography of Blake, The Stranger from Paradise (2001) despaired that “Blake has been variously claimed as an Irishman and a Cockney, a Marxist and a mystic, a Mason and a neo-Platonist and a Gnostic – and even as a conventional believer in the Church of England.” Bentley evoked the need for a “narrative incorporating all the significant surviving evidence about the life of William Blake,” and one which includes various new insights into Blake’s life gleaned from modern research. Unfortunately for Bentley, Why Mrs Blake Cried convincingly establishes that Blake’s parents were Moravians rather than Dissenters and it thus renders Bentley’s own biography outdated a mere five years after it was published. Yet one may equally add Schuchard’s particular label for Blake – possibly, “sexual-spiritualist” – to Bentley’s list of the “variously claimed” identities attributed to the prophet.

Schuchard’s forthright but objective account of kooky sexual practices is very much of its time. Whilst twentieth century writers considered Blake’s nationality, religion, or politics, Schuchard places him upon a frontier of fucking rather than ideas, and she contends that Blake’s intellect was largely consumed with his own sexual development. Apparently, Mr and Mrs Blake found that they were not sexually compatible after their marriage. Mr Blake, it seems, wanted to experiment with prolonged erections, threesomes, and nudism, but these merry suggestions would only reduce his prudish wife to tears. Yet after reading a few more mystical books, Mr. Blake “seemed to recognise that his marital problems – his deficiencies in conjugial love – were as much his as his wife’s fault” and that what was required was an “equal balancing of male and female energies.” This is a splendidly neat conclusion, and one only wonders how Schuchard has got away with implying that a figure who is often considered a towering Romantic prophet was actually an insensitive chauvinist pig who was too stupid to appreciate his wife.

Any approach which considers Blake’s poetry to be straightforwardly autobiographical is as fucked as a virgin at a Moravian prayer evening, and a lot of the evidence which Schuchard cites does not, so to speak, stand up. Schuchard’s book, from the very title, infantilises Mrs. Blake and suggests that she was frightened of her husband’s sexual desire. Very little is known about Blake’s wife, but Schuchard overlooks some essential facts and it clearly does not suit her argument to mention, for example, that Mrs Blake managed her husband’s finances, or that Mr Blake trained his wife as a professional engraver and printer. Blake’s nineteenth-century admirers tended to insist that a respectable domestic harmony prevailed within the Blake household, but whilst this is patently Victorian propaganda Schuchard cannot command the evidence to argue otherwise. There are several accounts of painfully thwarted desire in Blake’s poetry, most strikingly in the poem “I saw a chapel all of gold” (of which Schuchard provides an excellent interpretation), but these lines are concerned with desire in general rather than with the Blakes’ marriage in particular. Blake once professed (possibly ironically) to hear “mind forg’d manacles” rattling in “every voice,” and not merely in that of his wife. Schuchard’s analysis is elsewhere more tenuous: she proposes, for example, that the Blakean proverb “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity” explicitly describes Mrs Blake’s “sexual inhibitions and pious timidity.”

Many of Blake’s erotic images ended up in the hands of the zealous Irvingite Frederick Tatham, who incinerated them, believing that they were inspired by Satan. Although this holocaust has impaired all subsequent interpretations of Blake’s work, Schuchard is sometimes too eager to compensate for the gaps in the Blake canon. The “erect, blackened or charred penis” in Blake’s Milton self-portrait, for instance, is clearly just a shadow. The “menorah” in Blake’s (alleged) “symbolic self-portrait” of 1820 looks more like locks of hair. Moreover Schuchard uncritically repeats what Bentley has described as the “silly story about the Blakes sitting naked in their Lambeth garden… [which was] recognised as an apocryphal student tale as early as 1816.”

Why Mrs Blake Cried is on a surer foot, however, when portraying the Moravian and Swedenborgian milieu which undoubtedly influenced Blake’s art, poetry, and prophesies. Blake’s parents were members of the Moravian congregation lead by the fantastic Count Zinzendorf, a German scholar and theologian who “daringly merged Kabbalistic sexual theosophy with Christian wound mysticism.” Zinzendorf urged his followers to mediate on Christ’s first and last wounds, which were, namely, the first circumcision cut on Christ’s penis and the final spear cut in his side. The “Sidehole” was regarded as the androgynous Christ’s (or Christel’s) symbolic virgina, and the early Moravians fantasised about licking, sucking, and penetrating this gory opening. Emanuel Swedenborg, a sort of Swedish Benjamin Franklin, was inspired by the Moravians to embark on a sexual-visionary journey (although his nervous collapse also pushed him in this direction). The “pacifist sexologist” James Graham introduced London to the “spectacular “Celestial Bed,” twelve feet by nine feet, which was infused with electromagnetic currents, perfumed with Oriental incense, rhythmically rocked to ethereal music, and decorated with paintings and sculptures of Cupid, Psyche and Hymen.” Graham charged couples £50 a night to attempt congress upon this contraption, and one only wishes that more accounts survived of love upon the Celestial Bed. Schuchard further proposes that Blake encountered the Polish Kabbalist, Count Grabianka, who practised a sort of erotic animal magnetism; and that he attended the soirees of the French spy and transvestite Chevalier d’Eon.

Schuchard neglects to note the disparity between Blake’s failure to travel sixty miles from London throughout his entire life and the striking cosmopolitanism of the spiritualists whom inspired his work. Although of varied nationalities, Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, et al regarded London as a port for Christian-mystical, Kabbalist, Masonic, Tantric, and Yogic ideas, as well as disciplines such as animal-magnetism and alchemy. Faiths such as the Moravian church had deep allegiances with multinational secret societies such as Kabbalism and Freemasonry, and the same cosmopolitan figures often peopled these movements. Presumably the relative freedoms within a city the size of London licensed the advance of this sexual-spiritualism, and certainly Zinzendorf and his followers suffered more ridicule from the radical press than active persecution by the British government. The Moravians styled themselves as a revolutionary substitute for the old certainties of church and state; they appealed to educated petit-bourgeois artisans such as Blake’s parents, who presumably took heart from the Moravian church and resorted to it as a sort of proto-welfare (the Moravian congregation assisted Blake’s mother after she was widowed); and the church equally attracted aristocratic or wealthy men with few social obligations and a quintessentially cosmopolitan detachment from the cultures and laws which they encountered (both Swedenborg and d‘Eon had spied for their governments).

The sexual exploits of these characters were ultimately rather tiresome. Swedenborg aspired to delay his own ejaculation for long, blissful periods (although he seemed to be less concerned with pleasuring his partner). The Moravians’ communal discussions of marital problems and their group-therapy approach to conquering sexual inhibition may strike the modern reader as remarkably progressive, but churchmen who police the marriage bed seem just as awful as those who prescribe celibacy, and perhaps the religious should particularly avoid concerning themselves with human intimacy.

Tychy has previously observed that a lot of the scholarship which feeds off the figure of William Blake is inappropriately objective and dispassionate in tone, and that it is thus somewhat alienated from its literary source. Despite its colourful subject matter, Why Mrs Blake Cried, as our opening quotation from Niall Griffiths suggested, is generally a dull read, and the narrative frequently assumes a peculiarly grinding quality. Schuchard’s writing is often entirely descriptive, with little imaginative analysis, and in providing account after account of obscure eighteenth century spiritualists, Why Mrs Blake Cried at times resembles little more than a compendium of footnotes.

Tags: Book review., Books, Catherine Blake, Christianity, Count Zinzendorf, Emanuel Swedenborg, G.E. Bentley, History, London, Marsha Keith Schuchard, Moravians, William Blake