Focusing on his early volume Poetical Sketches and later book Milton, my goal with this project is to visualize William Blake’s hermaphroditic and androgynous characters by drawing them, and, in doing so, come to better understand the role such characters take on in Blake’s work. I will compare these depictions to those in more academic texts published during Blake’s lifetime, including James Parsons’ Mechanical and Critical Enquiry Into the Nature of Hermaphrodites (1741), George Arnaud’s A Dissertation on Hermaphrodites (1750), and Giles Jacob’s Tractatus de Hermaphroditis (1818), in addition to looking at Blake’s androgynous figures alongside other depictions of such people in art—for instance, Roman sculptures of hermaphrodites.
Scholars like Diane Hoeveler and Tom Hayes have pointed out a dichotomy in Blake’s work between androgynes and hermaphrodites: the former are untouched by sin and not yet divided by sex—prelapsarian—whereas the latter are symbolic of failed, postlapsarian attempts to achieve an original, androgynous state of being. Both figures read now, however, as similarly transgender or gender nonconforming. As a trans person and artist, I see myself in the bodies of Blake’s androgynes and hermaphrodites, depicted in his work not only textually but visually, as well. People we’d now often call intersex are referred to in texts from Blake’s period as monstrous, but not only that. Depictions of such people vary from joking but beautiful (in Roman sculpture) to sketches in medical books that leave even me unsure of their being more natural or unnatural. Looking at that art, I think, forces me to face that uncertainty constructively. It’s my hope that, by producing such art myself, I’ll be able to continue to rethink Blake’s depictions of gender and sex in his work, as well as my own. Constance Bougie has their bachelor’s in English with focuses in creative writing and LGBTQ+ studies. They are currently a graduate instructor at the University of Missouri in Columbia with focuses in Modernist literatures and asexuality studies. You can find their visual art portfolio here.
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