Abstract

Visions of Vala: Female Shapes in Blake's Encounter with Enlightenment Ethics, by Pamela K. Beal and directed by Professor Diane Christian, addresses the intersection of Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic poetry in the relation between Albion, the Enlightenment subject suffering in relation to the object of its desire, and Vala, a femme fatale who represents the eighteenth-century's empirical concept of the object. Tempted into empiricism, Albion ceases relations with Jerusalem, the keeper of a transcendental space. Blake, no less than Kant, saw the dangers latent in empiricism and demonstrated the need for a transcendental sphere, what he calls "Eternity," to guard against them. Blake argues that because empirical moral systems and theories of causality neglect this non-empirical order, they fuel eighteenth-century Europe's rising imperialism and myriad wars of aggression. In a world reduced to the colonized empirical reality of Locke or the unbounded skepticism of Hume, Blake warns that man will destroy others out of claustrophobia or perish from lack of meaning. To rescue Albion from the impossible choice of destroying either himself or others, Los, the artist, works to forge a non-empirical space in order that Albion cease "sacrifice of miscall'd enemies" and learn that Vala is neither his enemy nor his complement: no empirical body has caused his torment and no empirical object can stop it. Jerusalem, freedom, must be restored so that Albion can break the "web of desire" that enslaves him to cycles of violence and take up his position as a subject in community