After the playfulness (or was it?) of the previous plate (showing an angel breaking from a shell) we are back to the fearfully contingent. This image shows a wild-eyed male figure in tight breeches, waving his hat behind him, as if preparing to swat the wingless angel hovering in front of him.
Why a wingless angel? Again, as mentioned in my previous post about Plate 8, sometimes Blake's angels are not what they seem. The Songs of Innocence and of Experience are full of them (in fact, this angel seems a quotation of the wingless angel in the frontispiece of The Songs of Innocence), some representing compassion and goodness, others, such as "the covering cherub," representing the dominant and dominating systems, acting as tiny, hovering policemen. I would like to think that Blake plucks the wings of his angel here as a way of unmasking ideological mystification, but then perhaps this is how Blake truly saw his little visitants.
And I haven't mentioned the dead or injured baby, lying face-first at the feet of hat-waving man, his eyes filled with horror, and right below the wingless angel. Are we to think that the angel has killed the child, and the man is trying to swat the little assassin, trying to drive him off? That would seem to be the logic of the composition.
This is yet another example, in The Gates of Paradise, of what we might acronymize as WWHT ("What was he thinking?"). This design, with the dead or injured child, was originally part of his emblem book for children, For Children: The Gates of Paradise. Most children would be quite disturbed by this image I would think. I mean, a child seemingly murdered by an angel-figure? It's he stuff of childhood nightmares.
When I looked at the older image (For Children, I noticed that the inscription was only one word: "Alas!" But then he added text to the later version (For the Sexes, the version I've been reading here), which goes as follows: "What are these? Alas! the Female Martyr Is She also the Divine Image?" If we read any thing that Blake is creating at this time (1793), we can assume that he meant this rhetorical question to be answered in the affirmative. In later books, such as Jerusalem, he might hedge his answer a little bit. But it seems clear here that Blake includes women as reflections of God and as recipients and agents of liberation. But at what cost?
This is perhaps the most idiosyncratic plate I've looked at so far, once again undercutting any sense of a comforting religion, or a comforting anything. In a spiritual sense, the viewer is tried as in fire, leaving off all certainty. It is, as many of Blake's plates are, almost more Buddhist than Christian.
Posted by jeb at January 13, 2005 7:15 PM | TrackBack