William Blake Gender Roles

Many literary critics of William Blake find that the sexual politics of his poetry are shadowed by a misogynistic attitude towards. It is argued that Blake’s representation of gender glorifies woman’s inferiority to man as their use are only as objects of sexual gratification. This essay, however, demonstrates how the representations of gender within his 1793 poem ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ contest these cynical criticisms of Blake’s work, and in their place we discover what Blakean critic Fox defines as “a richly developed anti-patriarchal and proto-feminist sensibility.”