In this thesis I discussed feministic attitudes in the works of three writers:William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Butler Yeats’ A WomanYoung and Old, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching(道德經). Blake and Yeats wereEnglish visionary poets and Lao Tzu was an Old Master who lived in the 2ndcentury B.C. in Han Dynasty China.
In Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake is not only concerned with therights of women but also with the slavery systems and freedom. The heroine iscalled ‘soft soul of America.’ Blake knew the first radical feminist MaryWollstonecraft and may be responding to her enthusiasm for the emancipation ofwomen. Moreover, the oppression of Oothoon is bound up with the campaign of theearly 1790s against both the slave trade and the nearer cruelties in the exploitation ofchild labour.
The heroine Oothoon is raped by Bromion and abandoned by her lover,Theotormon. Theotormon’s jealousy binds them, back to back in a cave. Bromion’sviolence and Theotomon’s jealousy and oppression cause her woe. She is trying tojustify the innocence of love, the joy in the making of love and delight in life, thebeautiful in every life. Her long outburst against hypocrisy in marriage and restraintin love in the third section of the poem is for women repressed by men intraditional and Christian society. She wants to be a human, not a servant of man.
In A Woman Young and Old the woman speaks first in youth, then in age. Thisseries of poems are companion poems to those of A Man Young and Old. Thesepoetic sequences have an identical structure of eleven poems, ending with a section from Yeats’ translation of the Oedipus cycle. The first poem, “Father and Child”opens with an image of a young woman leaving the conventional world and thejudgment of other people for an attractive life and her own opinions. In the sixthpoem in the central position, “Chosen” the woman takes for her theme the theme ofthe poem. The young woman compares the peace and feeling of completeness afterlovemaking to the perfect moment when the “Zodiac is changed into a sphere,” theThirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone in A Vision. It is that cycle which may deliverus from the twelve cycles of time and space. In the last poem, “From the‘Antigone’” the old woman, now a tragic heroine, narrates her descent “into theloveless dust.” The heroine in A Woman Young and Old tries to find her own voiceand life.
In the first chapter of Tao Te Ching the nameless Tao is the origin of heaven andearth which grows the myriad things. Thus these two are the same. Upon appearing, theyare named differently. Their sameness is the mystery, mystery within mystery. Heaven isthe symbol of man; earth is the symbol of woman. Man and woman have the same root,and their union makes the myriad things. In the sixth chapter of the book Lao Tzupraises feminity, called ‘the valley spirit,’ the root of heaven and earth. The valley isused metaphorically as a symbol of ‘emptiness’ or ‘vacancy;’ ‘the spirit of the valley’ issomething invisible, yet almost personal, belonging to the Tao. ‘The female mystery’ isthe name of chapter 1, or the Tao which is ‘the Mother of all things.’ All living beingshave a father and a mother.
Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching could be translated as The Law (or Canon) of Virtueand its Way. He thought that all straining, all striving is not only vain but counterproductive.One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). It means not to doanything literally, but to discern and follow the natural forces-to flow with eventsand not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. In this way Taoistphilosophy reached out to council rulers and advised them how to govern theirdomains.
Blake and Yeats insist women’s human rights and the union of man and womancan give us the perfect moment in this life. Lao Tzu teaches us feministic Tao andthe harmony of man and woman. The three share great wisdom about the order ofthe nature and can elucidate the way of Feminism.