“Composite Gender” as the Book of Oothoon: Dress, Drag, and the Transgender Marygold Flower-Nymph

Examining the historically documented transgender phenomenon of “Molly Houses” and the cross-dressing Chevalier D’Éon as well as fashion styles post-French Revolution, I establish a background that supports a drag/trans- reading of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Traditionally, commentators on Blake’s illuminated poems dismiss female characters as “emanations”—but what if Blake’s “ego” figure is neither Albion nor Los, but Oothoon? Blake’s illuminated poems, Robert Essick has suggested, can be themselves considered manuscripts in their hand-touched variations; correspondingly, Blake’s mythic characters are not fixed, and their gender is perhaps more fluid than traditional critics like to think. Oothoon and Theotormon, I argue, already are a couple at the outset of the poem, and they are and must be at this outset a semiotic homosexual male-male couple: Theotormon knows and loves Oothoon as a man before her transition through her clothing and her body, and Oothoon’s “whole soul” exalts and delights as she flies in drag, with that marigold glowing there between her breasts, to(ward) Theotormon. She is exhilarated, she is happy, she is complete—that is, her soul is whole in realizing, accepting, and embracing who she is. (Theotormon, of course, is not: while his reactions through this new reading may become somewhat more understandable, they are still not, as with any reading of his tantrum, warranted or ethically just to Oothoon.) Building on work by critics like Bruder, Connolly, Schuchard, and Hobson, I establish this drag/trans- interpretation of Blake’s important poem and consider together the various copies in their totality as not just Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion but as Blake’s composite Book of Oothoon that takes Oothoon from the early 1790s with/as Blake and keeps her present and prescient right up to the/Blake’s end.