낭만주의 시대의 급진적 성담론과 블레이크

Abstract

Malthus, in his famous Essay that triggered nationwide sex panic, suggested moral virtue and the restraint from marriages as a powerful check on increasing population. He even denies the poor the right to subsistence, blaming their poverty on their moral laxity. Francis Place, severely attacking his prejudice, contradicts all of his assertions in detail from the view point of the poor laboring class. In Every Woman’s Book Richard Carlile, on the other hand, positively asserts the value and importance of sexual love. Then he turns his attack on the prohibitive moral code of Christianity that has denigrated love into a fancied sin. He attributes prostitution and other sexual perversions to the mistaken notions of chastity and its hypocrisies. As is manifest in his view of “Society for the Suppression of Vice”, his argument took on an aspect of class strife against aristocracy. Blake seems to have alluded to these contemporary discourses on sex, which not only provide a perspective from which his advocacy of free love should be read, but a clue to his ambivalent attitude to sex. As their assertions on sex implied protest against the ruling class, Blake’s indignation over sexual repression should not be taken literally but as a way of expressing his outcry for political emancipation.