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Blake’s Critique of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden

ErasmusDarwin’sBotanicGarden (1791), with its two parts,TheEconomy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, explains the sexual life of plants by analogy to human relations and thus envisions the world as an intricate network between sentient life and nonliving things. Darwin explicates and vindicates Linnaeus’s taxonomy, which is centered on the sexuality of plants, and furthermore he gives a more active role to the female part of the plants to characterize their specific mode of procreation. Darwin’s allencompassing view of the world incorporating natural science and human civilization inspires an outlook of progress but also triggers concerns about individual trepidations. Blake understands Darwin’s emphasis on female sexuality as essential to the progress of both nature and society, but he is more concerned with the possible implications of Darwin’s botanic economy on individual human beings. In The Book of Thel (1789) and the Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Blake focuses on the “use” and “joy” as two of the governing ideas of Darwin’s system and calls attention to the affective consequences wrought by this cosmology especially on women. Their shock and grief inhibit them from obtaining true selfknowledge and freeze them either in the act of “shriek[ing]” (Thel, 6.21; E 6), or in the stasis of “lamentation” (Visions, 3.1, E 47; 4.12, E 48; 5.1, E 48). Thel refuses to take her fate as implicated in the natural cycle of nourishment and degeneration by recoiling from further involvement with the world. Oothoon, though able to raise questions about the obliteration of “different joys” (5.5; E 48), insists on her purity in reflecting