G.R. Thompson designates the "high Gothic . . . [as] the embodiment of demonic-quest-romance, in which a lonely, self-divided hero embarks on insane pursuit of the Absolute . . . [which] is metaphysical, mythic, and religious, defining the hero's dark or equivocal relationship to the universe" (2). Thus, Thompson here identifies the three most common archetypal Gothic motifs which assume various forms in literature: narcissism or self-isolation, the Doppelganger (a doubled or divided self), and the quest. The alienated protagonist usually rejects some aspect of society, and his "insane pursuit" implies that he, too, will be somehow rejected.

Furthermore, the critical tendency, in recent years, has been to view the Gothic as that mode of writing most fitting for a female writer who can subvert patriarchal discourse and express the repressed female voice. A problem, however, arises because of the nature of language itself as Susan Wolstenholme asks: "But if the gaze is male, what happens when the writer is female? If she can speak only from a masculine-coded perspective, where (if anywhere) is there room for subversion, for alterity?" (Wolstenholme 7). Likewise, if the law of language is determined by patriarchy, then what happens when the writer is a male who recognizes the "prison-house of language" (Jameson's term) and wishes to subvert and overthrow androcentricity? I contend, then, that Blake is such a writer, and that the Gothic tradition offers him that same avenue for exploring human sexuality and gender roles. He remains trapped in patriarchal discourse, but his heroic gesture as an artist lies in his attempt to destroy the patriarchal tyranny alive and well in Blake's time. Specifically, in The (First) Book of Urizen, Blake incorporates the Gothic features of a confining narcissism in an estranged self, a quest for identity marked by violence and chaos, and the Doppelganger motif. Most importantly, though, Blake does not merely assimilate these modes into his illuminated works as a clearly defined use of the Gothic tradition (which helps explain the lack of critical attention to this topic because his poetry eludes placement in any particular Gothic category). Rather, Blake alters and transmutes these conventions in his effort to reject and then re-create the limiting aspects of discourse which illustrates his abnegation of traditional, masculine law.

Blake's Urizen, at first glance, does not seem "Gothic" at all: there is no insane priest or monk, no virgin fleeing for her life or attempting to maintain her sexual purity, no winding staircases, ghosts, or haunted castles with secret corridors. Eugenia DeLamotte asks if those traditional conventions we so readily associate with the Gothic can be missing in a work for it to still be considered Gothic (6) and I find that Tzvetan Todorov's concept of "the fantastic" provides a way of seeing Blake's poetry as Gothic. The "fantastic" is specifically a genre which, in fiction alone, never resolves that uncertainty existing in a world viewed as nightmare. This break between illusion and reality ends either with a reinstatement of reality (the genre of the uncanny) or a suggestion that the supernatural does exist (the genre of the marvelous). However, we can apply the fantastic to Blake's poetry not as a genre but, rather, as a characteristic which exists as an uncertainty: "In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, . . . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this ame familiar world" (Todorov 25). In Urizen Blake creates a world which he intends to represent as "reality," but he also forces us beyond "the laws of reality" which we already know to "new laws of nature [which] must be entertained to account for the phenomena" (Todorov 41). Todorov further posits that we observe both of these genres or themes in the Gothic tradition, and that the notion of anxiety underlies them both. In Gothic, this anxiety revolves around boundaries of existence in a genre which, according to DeLamotte, "offers a symbolic language congenial to the expression of . . . a concern about the boundaries of the self" (DeLamotte 14).

Urizen's journey through Chaos marks him as a self-isolated character who is "self-closed, all-repelling . . . a self-contemplating shadow" (3:3 21) whose only quest is for defining and controlling the external world around him. His name, most Blake critics agree, "indicates his tendency to self-limitation and introspection, his urge to impose boundaries, and to reduce in order to define" (Kittel 33). The separation of Urizen's mind from Eternity into materiality shows the passivity of Urizen's self-possession: "The eternal mind bounded began to roll/Eddies of wrath ceaseless round & round,/And the sulphurous foam surgeing thick/ Settled, a lake, bright, & shining clear;/White as the snow on the mountains cold" (10. 19-23). Here, then, the lake serves as a mirror image of Urizen's mind which reflects only himself and his narcissism, and thus signifies his fall from an imaginative state. This narcissism, read in Lacanian terms, signifies "an infant's own image encountered in a mirror" (Ragland-Sullivan 2) and suggests that the mirror "serves as a metaphor and a structural concept at the same time that it points to a crucial experience in psychic development" (29). This development of his self-consciousness alienates and divides Urizen from the Eternals as well as himself. In Blake's world, the human being cannot be whole when the Four Zoas are separated from Eternity; therefore, this split between Urizen and Eternity establishes Blake's Gothic world, which does not require an ancient castle dwelling. Instead, Urizen's world presents itself as alienated from Eternity and consequently depicts "everyday reality as experienced by the mind obsessed" (DeLamotte 18) and estranged: "First I fought with the fire; consum'd/Inwards, into a deep world within:/A void immense, wild dark & deep,/Where nothing was; Natures wide womb/And self balanc'd stretch'd o'er the void/I alone, even I!" (II, 5: 14-19).

Harald Alfred Kittel argues that Urizen "is not a creator but a 'primeval Priest' who retires from Eternity into 'the depths of dark solitude'" (32), but the kind of creation Blake depicts is better described as an anti-creation (Tannenbaum 224) that enfolds rather than unfolds. Urizen's role as a demonic creator parodies and reverses both Biblical and Miltonic creation myths because, as Cantor points out, he "reminds us of Milton's Satan . . . But [he] is doing the work of Milton's God, dividing things into categories, establishing time and space, and thus creating the world as we know it" (Cantor 30). Similarly, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake reveals his theory of "contraries" as forces "necessary to Human existence" (Plate 3) which Milton's religion separates as the polar opposites "good" and "evil." Blake's Miltonic characterization in this poem blurs the identity between God-the-creator as good and Satan as evil: "But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call'd Satan" (Plate 5), which reinforces Blake's admonition that the real Fall from Eternity is not, as Milton believes, caused by the libido but rather by "the self and a drive toward tyranny, . . . to create a self-loving narcissistic isolation that is 'unprolific,' 'clos'd,' and 'unknown'" (Hagstrum 120).

In Blake's universe, Urizen is also "the creator of language. . . [and his] principle action is a speech from his 'dark solitude'" (Cantor 38). His central activity is that of naming himself and the objects around him which associates Urizen with the Biblical figure of Adam. For Lacan, "the Symbolic Order is that realm into which the child emerges, out of a biological namelessness, when he gradually acquires language. . . . [and] is also that which permits the very sense of identity" (Jameson 130). Paul Cantor identifies the significance of Urizen's learning to say "I" as "embod[ying] a profound understanding of how the emergence of language is bound up with the emergence of humanity as we know it" (Cantor 38). Cantor further posits that, when Urizen develops a self-consciousness by giving himself the name-of-Urizen, he thereby "articulate[s] consciousness into words" and "interpos[es] a set of symbols between himself and reality, thus . . . giving him a sense of himself as a separate being, and freeing him to gain control over his environment" (Cantor 38-39).

Urizen's anti-creationism exemplifies how the advent of language misrepresents the nature of humanity, an activity emphasized on the title page. Blake pictures Urizen "transcribing the names of the saved and the damned into the Book of Life and the Book of Death" which asserts that Urizen's assurance of "future reward for the obedient and damnation for the recalcitrant [is] a sham that actually creates and preserves the fallen world" (Tannenbaum 222-223). Books are made of written words, or of pieces of written language, and Blake illustrates here that language itself, the fall into words and dictation, is THE Fall in his reworking of the Genesis creation myth. In fact, we do not see the Eternals at all, and their voices fade by the end of chapter five because Urizen's severance from Eternity "is such a radical departure from the known that the Eternals hardly know how to account for it" (Tannenbaum 220). Thus, we realize that Urizen's existence in Eternity must be incorporeal and (at least to human ears) unrecognizable: ". . . what Demon/ Hath form'dthis abominable void/ This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said/ 'It is Urizen,' But unknown, abstracted/ Brooding secret, the dark power hid" (I, 1:3-7). Consequently, we meet Urizen only in his fallen state, sealed off from Eternity's presence.

What Urizen seeks is codification of his identity as separate from the Eternals so that he can establish control over the external world. As a result, Urizen ruptures Humanity by imprisoning the divine substance in the physical body, and this illustrates Stuart Curran's assertion that "Blake's outlook is fundamentally Gnostic" (Horn 270). In Blake, Gothic and Gnostic converge, and this shows that Urizen's is an "activity unknown and horrible" (3:20) because, in keeping with Gothic discourse and Gnostic thought, the world Urizen creates must remain hidden and secret because it is evil. The product of Urizen's so-called creation closes with the direct opposite or "passive" creation which becomes a "void" and "chaos": "Urizen brings his world into being, not by creating something out of nothing, but by staking out boundaries in what had been an undifferentiated unity" (Cantor 31). Instead of depicting a hero embarking on the Gothic journey through chaos in "insane pursuit" of the Absolute, Blake transmutes the Gothic tradition by having Urizen formulate chaos, the "eternal Abyss," itself: "Sund'ring, dark'ning, thund'ring!/Rent away with a terrible crash/ Eternity roll'd wide apart/Wide asunder rolling/Mountainous all around/Departing; departing; departing:/Leaving ruinous fragments of life/Hanging frowning cliffs & all between/An ocean of voidness unfathomable" (5:3-11). In addition, Urizen's narcissistic impulses as a "self-contemplating shadow," then, cause him to desire stamping out a part of the world to control and call his own as he arrogantly assumes the role of the Absolute. This is an act of power and, in Lacanian terms, Urizen represents the Phallus, or patriarchal Law which brings disharmony and imbalance by forcing Humanity into a physical imprisonment controlled under "One King, one God, one Law" (II, 4:40). The real evil, therefore, in Blake's Gothic world exists in the form of an imposing patriarchy which entraps unwilling participants socially, culturally, and psychologically into a death-like existence.

Urizen's forced entrapment continues with the emergence of Los, Blake's first depiction in Urizen of the Doppelganger motif, a theme common to the Gothic. Various critics regard the Doppelganger as doubled and/or divided characters or, as Clifford Hallam contends, as an "inner being [who] has in fact made its escape and [now] exists without" (Hallam 7). Consequently the Gothic tradition is filled with images of twins, ghosts, and mirrors. The Eternals send Los to guard Urizen but, as Paul Mann points out, Los actually becomes "Urizen's unwilling agent" (Mann 54) in further causing Humanity's fall. The cycle of division in Blake's myth begins when Urizen is rent from Los's side, reminiscent of Eve's creation from Adam's rib, and both exist in isolation as Mann further explains: "Since separation, isolation of selfhood, and containment were invented by Urizen, [Los's] binding of Urizen is Urizenic" (Mann 54). The subversion on Blake's part rests in the physical body representing "sinister emblems of man's entrapment in this world" (Cantor 46), and in Los's creating our sensual perception of the human body as limited, degraded, and damned: "Los wept howling around the dark Demon:/And cursing his lot; for in anguish,/Urizen was rent from his side;/And a fathomless void for his feet;/And intense fires for his dwelling" (6: 2-6). In helping give Urizen physical form, Los consequently further seals man's fallen state: for "if Los had not ended Urizen's agony by giving him a body, Urizen might have been forced to find a way back to Eternity" (Cantor 45). Los's recognition of the confining "horror-zone of selfhood" represented by the physical body also offers simultaneously, "the hope or potential for progress toward Eternity or Organized Innocence" (Mann 58). Los, then, functions as Urizen's Doppelganger both as another creator (by providing Urizen with materiality) and by entrapping himself, as Urizen has done, in a fallen state. The price for sensual existence, for both, is that they can no longer see Eternity:"And now his eternal life/Like a dream was obliterated" (13: 33-34). Because Los erects a boundary of self around Urizen, he ends up "collaborating with Urizen rather than opposing him" (Hall 33) and their identities fuse: "The Eternal Prophet & Urizen clos'd" (V, 4:40).

An extended use of the Doppelganger motif resides in the division of distinct sexual roles, illustrating the dichotomy which exists between male and female gender distinctions. Mary K. Thornburg categorizes the Gothic as writing which reveals human "truths" that are horrifying because, like human beings, they have been "rejected, denigrated, cast into darkness, repressed within the unconscious . . . [such as] chaos, murder, despair, unholy madness, death, and the dead" (38). These "truths" can only be revealed in a patriarchal language which serves as the starting point of the separation of the Self from the Other, and Todorov acknowledges that the themes of the Other allow repressed sexuality to come to the surface, usually in depictions of rape and incest. In addition, a central component of Blake's mythology is his "idea of humanity as originally and ultimately androgynous" in which he "depict[s] a fallen state in which sexual division -- lapse of unity between male and female as one being -- is the prototype of division within the self, between self and other, and between humanity and God" (Ostriker 217). Thus, female and male divide into two figures, or doubles both incomplete and opposed in a "dramatization of conflicting desires" (Thornburg 52) with no clear boundaries of self. Blake's Zoa/Emanation dichotomy, then, reverses and refutes traditional patriarchal definitions of masculine and feminine roles. The male's double exists, in the Gothic tradition, to complement and/or complete the male identity (to fuse the psychic split), and many writers of the Gothic tend to depict an inferior feminine character as that double. In Blake's mythology, ths doubling and dividing aspect takes on a four-fold vision of Humanity which involves the male Zoa, its female Emanation, the Spectre, and the Shadow.

In Urizen, once Los splits, we meet his Emanation, Enitharmon, and sexuality becomes an issue. The first instance of human copulation could be read as a rape: "But Los saw the Female & pitied/He embrac'd her, she wept she refus'd/In perverse and cruel delight/She fled from his arms, yet he followed" (VI, i: 10-13). Because Enitharmon delights in her refusal of Los, there exists a hint of some sort of pleasure in these lines. However the next scene depicts Eternity watching the sexual act: "Eternity shuddered when they saw/Man, begetting his likeness/On his own, divided image" (VI, ii: 14-16). Blake offers no indication that Enitharmon yielded to Los: the key words here are that Enitharmon first "refus'd" and then "fled" Los's advances, and immediately following her act of rejection is a sexual act which horrifies the Eternals. Blake's depiction of sexua interaction involves "not a giving of the self but rather, the act of possessing the other" (Hall 34) which entails a power struggle for male domination and female submission.

Eternity reacts in terror because this sexual union should indicate a desire to return to the unfallen state, but instead designates copulation as exploitation and is yet another false union. Enitharmon's "delight" could be read as enjoyment in saying "No" to conjugal duty, which patriarchal Law refuses, as well as a hint of sexual gratification which a "proper lady" would never admit. Uninhibited sexuality in women would undercut the conventions of the patriarchal society which uses the female body to dictate definitions of "proper lady" sexual conduct. Because rape is about power and control and not sex, Blake's ambivalence in Urizen shows how reductive he finds patriarchal determinations of feminine sexuality.

The many instances of rape, incest, and violent sex in the Gothic help free repressed sexual desire, but also represent cultural taboos as determined by Phallic Law. Blake represents these hidden and socially forbidden urges in the figure of Orc in Urizen. Brenda Webster details Blake's anticipation of Freud's Oedipal Conflict and incest taboo, focusing on plate 21 which illustrates this theme. Afterwards, Los and Enitharmon chain Orc to a mountain with that same chain of jealousy, and this reverses the usual revenge cycle of the child destroying the father. Once again Blake manages to subvert patriarchal texts, such as the ones describing Oedipus's plight, by reversing and fusing roles. The incest taboo depicted so often in the Gothic tradition, "in dissolving the usual familial as well as extrafamilial bonds between individuals, finally dissolves the identifying masks distinguishing on individual from another" (Miyoshi 11). Los, the prophet-poet we thought would bring salvation, becomes Urizen when he "is absorbed into that world [of his fallen self] as a jealous father" (Price 256), and the psychic split begun in Urizen continues as an insane rate of character divisions throughout Blake's canon. As some feminists like to point out, the feminine in Blake's world exists as a shadow of the masculine, but neither is complete without the other. As a consequence of Blake's four-fold existence, the divided Zoas and Emanations all behave badly which reinforces Blake's desire to create an equitable state, and the Gothic tradition allows Blake to examine those restrictive and submissive roles patriarchal society assigns women. Even though anti-feminist strains exist in Blake's mythology (on which some feminist critics, notably Brenda Webster and Susan Fox, like to concentrate), I must still agree with Karleen Middleton Murphy that "we cannot accuse Blake of ignoring the female or minimizing her importance" ("All the Lovely Sex," 273), and we need to also recognize that Blake's use of the Gothic implies his wish to subvert and overthrow patriarchal conventions.

Because Orc's cries signify "the voice of repressed sexuality" (Webster 166), he awakens Urizen who then explores his world and "form's" a net of religion around his children. Sexual repression belongs in Blake's fallen world of materiality and he makes it clear that this is the modern world: despite the revolutionary fervor of Blake's time, these taboos must still remain hidden, marginalized, and subversive in order to even be spoken about. As an unconventional mode but still a socially cceptable one, the Gothic tradition provides for Blake auseful strategy for unmasking aspects of humanity the-name-of-the-Father wishes to keep hidden. Blake's universe includes the concepts of "androgyny and the blurring of gender distinctions" (Murphy, "All the Lovely Sex," 275) but these notions remain "expressed in manmade language and also put into a narrative form which is conventionally conveyed through characters . . . [who] may be men or women or they may represent psychological aspects of one individual, male or female" (275). Blake's attempt to rewrite history does not have to completely obliterate the world we know because, like Los, we need to first recognize our fallen state in order to move, hopefully, beyond. Blake himself recognized that any system of language creates a prison, and his impulse is to break free of that entrapment and separation. Established methods of writing would defeat Blake's purpose of "recover[ing] our original state, not by returning to it but by recreating it" (Frye 254). Therefore, the Gothic tradition's motifs of alienated and doubled figures, repressed sexuality and gender roles, and the separative role which language plays, gives Blake a new strategy for expressing his ultimate vision of the liberation of social, cultural, and psychological (sexual) repression as his prophet expresses in Jerusalem: "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans/ I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create" (J, 10: 20-21).

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Works Cited

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DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

De Luca, V.A. "A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text." Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley: The Univ. of California Press, 1986. pp. 218-241.

----------. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Erdman, David A. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Revised ed. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Frye, Northrop. "The Keys to the Gates." Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: WW Norton, 1970. pp. 233-254.

Hagstrum, Jean H. The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake. Knoxville: The Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1985.

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Hall, Jean. A Mind That Feeds Upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Hallam, Clifford. "The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger." Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film. Ed. Eugene J. Cook. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981. pp. 1-31.

Horn, William Dennis. "William Blake and the Problematic of the Self." William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1982. pp. 260-285.

Jameson, Frederic. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Kittel, Harald Alfred. "Perception and Reflection: The Text and Title-page Design of William Blake's The Book of Urizen." Poetic Knowledge: Circumference and Center. Eds. Roland Hagenbuchle and Joseph T. Swann. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1980. pp. 30-41.

Mann, Paul. "The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book." Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986. pp. 49-68.

Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Murphy, Karleen Middleton. " 'All the Lovely Sex': Blake and the Woman Question." Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age. Eds. James Bogan and Fred Goss. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1982. pp. 272-275.

Ostriker, Alicia. "Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality." Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970-1984. Ed. Nelson Hilton. Hamden, Conn: The Shoe String Press, 1986. pp. 102-120.

Price, Martin. "The Standard of Energy." Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: WW Norton, 1970. pp. 255-273.

Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987.

Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton: Princeton UP: 1982.

Thompson, G.R. "Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition." The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Washington State UP, 1974. pp. 1-10.

Thornburg, Mary K. The Monster in the Mirror: Gender and the Sentimental/Gothic Myth in Frankenstein. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. research Press, 1984,

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1975.

Webster, Brenda. Blake's Prophetic Psychology. London: The MacMillan Press LTD, 1983.

Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Woman as Readers. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993.