278
PARTISAN REVIEW
even than
Clarissa.
The opening voyage of
Gulliver's Travels,
to take
one instance, presents a moment of extraordinary tension. Who can
forget Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, restrained by their
hundreds of ropes and stakes, yet capable, if he chooses, of immense
violence and destruction? Will he rise up, bursting the bonds and
scattering his captors? The ropes that hold Gulliver down are meta–
phorical as well as real, all the ties of social responsibility and decency,
societal chains. But this image of potential violence restrained is clearly
related to that of incarceration, and also to that pervasive Augustan
image of chains and padlocks that appears so dramatically from
Johnson to Blake. And indeed Blake's poetry is suffused with moments
of entombment or imprisonment like those we have seen. But the
difference is one of radical emphasis: the novel of incarceration is
interested in the locking away of the irrational heroine, and it nearly
always fails to render an effective picture of life after release. The
artifacts of urbanity, the gates and bars and restraining walls of the
Augustan setting, are soon to be forsaken, replaced by the forests and
fields of a nature presumed free. That the trees of a forest may also grow
into walls, into " shades of the prison house," would be considered in
the fullness of time. But as the Gothic convents burst into flame, Blake
and the next generation celebrate the releasing, the moment when the
chains are broken and the energy of life blazes forth from its prison like
the sun, or like Persephone.
