Desejo & Violência: a personagem Oothoon sob o enfoque dos pensamentos de William Blake e Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

The research theme came out from my admiration for William Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft, two authors at the margins of their similar. Even when put apart because of their particularities, jobs and gender, they manage to be in 1790s London’s intellectual centre and kept in flesh timeless debates about many of the endless human questioning. Betwteen 1792-1793, these two young authors published two works that bring forth reflections about sexuality, marriage and young women’s education. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) – an illuminated poem in blank verse and continuous time, made by eleven blades, three characters and a rape – the voice that narrates all the conflict is from a woman, Oothoon. In Reivindicação dos Direitos das Mulheres: o Primeiro Grito Feminista (1792), a woman in an English patriarchal society claims her gender’s emancipation. I became interested about not only the collective atmosphere, but also poignantly about two individual beings that, even forged by pain, circumstances and theirs’ time conflicts, could subvert their class’ expectations, gender, religion and political system. With this research, we intend to analyze, under a feminist perspective, which happenings, influences and “social energies” made the life and atmosphere of the period between 1790 and 1793, gap in which Visions of the Daughters of Albion was written and published by William Blake – following Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism tradition. We intend to discover how the author deals and presents the female sexuality’s issue, education and marriage, through Oothoon character’s construction, in this illuminated work – it is visually and textually, because this Blake’s work are made by twelve engravings followed by poems, in the composite work that qualifies him as a visionary artist. Also, we pretend to remark the importance of the Reivindicação dos Direitos das Mulheres: o Primeiro Grito Feminista (1792) of Mary Wollstonecraft (one of the first English feminists) over Blake, during the poem’s writing. We try to identify the way these questionings and references are placed and what is the nature and the consequences of these representations in text and image. Therefore, W. J. T. Mitchel, Peter Ackroyd and David V. Erdman’s readings became essential, as well as a large critical fortune about Blake and his work. Among these authors, we can mention Anne K. Mellor, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Robert Essick and Susan Fox. And those that see a closeness between artist and Wollstonecraft, as Mary Poovey, Thomas Vogler and P. Abbasi, too.