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Most recent gender research has its main focus on the social construction of gender, rather than bodily differences. A review of the commentary on Visions of the Daughters of Albion shows that writers have usually focused on the figure of Oothoon as, at one extreme, a pathetically subservient female uncomprehendingly reflecting male domination, and, at the other, an avatar of twentieth-century sexual liberation punished for her forwardness. Also tending to read this poem ahistorically in light of Blake’s later works and expecting to find clear references in the poem to twentieth-century attitudes toward social roles, recent critics have been troubled about what Oothoon howls to post- moderns. This poem demonstrates the state of the dis-union among men and women in his time. In terms of literary convention, it follows and in many ways subverts the pastoral tradition of the male lover who idealize the female loved. Oothoon exchanges the position of observed for observer, the direct subject of power and surveillance for surveiller of power and reminds of the bitter import of the motto “The Eye sees more than the Heart knows. In her speech, Oothoon follows the male equations and thus ends her final attempt at changing men’s perspectives. She will accede to their traditions but will also try to use them as a wede into a position of power. She is now not merely the “seen” but also the “seeing.” Oothoon has thus run the gamut of roles: suffered rape and captivity and rejection by her beloved, expressed anger and offered appeasement, exhausted for now her strategy of exploration and retreat, offered her sisters up as means to a power position, and tried to use what she knew to observe women’s roles from a shared perspective of power.