The Force of Tenderness: The Union of Spirit and Soul

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In The Force of Tendernes, Dorothy Avery sets out Williiam Blake’s vision of the sexes, and then applies it as a template to Western theories of women and men from the beginning. She is concerned with matriarchy and patriarchy in our own earliest history and pre-history. In Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’ Oresteia she examines how far the theories of Blake and of the anthropologists are realized there. Avery has no axe to grind in the gender wars, except the notion that the touch of tenderness opens heaven. This excellent text is a valuable, and frequently ingenious, contribution to a field where testiness appears all too often in lieu balanced and wide-ranging testimony.

These days in the West, the relations between women and men are even more difficult than usual. They have been growing worse for at least two centuries. According to William Blake, this estrangement was the ultimate cause of the imperialism, industrialism, and false science all around him. The reunion of man and women, of Zoa and Emanation, was itself spiritual fulfillment. Certainly, Blake’s own long marriage was exceptionally harmonious after the first years.

Roger Sworder, author of A Contrary History of the West, The Romantic Attack on Modern Science, etc.