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영어

“Visions of the Daughters of Albion” works out a dramatized discussion of Blake’s radical challenge to the dualism and its abstract philosophy. He suggests that the human imagination should disrupt the inveterate error in metaphysical dualism, primarily of the soul and the body. This thesis argues that at the core of the poem, the questions of sense, sense-experience and perception are closely related with the criticism of the dominant sexual ideology. In the context of an argument of the creative human perception, Blake continues the exploration of sexual freedom, which leads to the liberation of both body and women. This radical approaches enable him at once to fully criticize the oppression of women and to examine the mechanism of internalization of the oppression under the political, social and religious systems. With the reflection of her own bitter experience, Oothoon comes to win the recognition that the female sexuality is socially made and both man and woman are victims of the oppression of desire. Her creative expansion of perception is bound up with the critical examination of the working principles of the sexual ideology. In pursuit of “an improvement of sensual enjoyment”, she reconfigures the innocence of desire as “Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy”, which overwhelms the conventional dichotomy between ‘body-energy-evil’ and ‘soul-reason- good.. It is the basis of the “happy copulation” of eyes and heart. This envisions the creative relationships in redeemed world in which ‘the minute particulars’ could love fully without possessive jealousy. Echoes of the daughters of Albion (who, enslaved, hear Oothoon’s woes) raise the issue of the strategic status of this poem. And the title with a grammatical ambiguity emphasizes the plurality of “Visions” and overrides the distinction between subject and object of them. After many years, in the last poem, Jerusalem, Blake sings that he who finds a Grain of sand which is translucent and has many angles will find Oothoon’s palace. This indicates that always, now, here, Oothoon’s vision and Daughters’ echoes are created for us to open our eyes and heart so as to find ‘a lovely heaven’ within a Grain of sand.