FOUR ZOAS II / 34:39-100


The substitutional rela-
tionship between named
 females





 The fantasy of an
ontological existence for
 the characters prior to
The Four Zoas is revealed
as a defense mechanism
by means of the contrast
 between Enitharmon's
 and Los's statements.













 Via Los/Enitharmon,
 Enion replaces Luvah/
Vala as the expression of
 Urizen's oppression.

 Enitharmon's song
 about death in Night II
 inverts details of her
 "Song of Death" in
 Night I.


(10:20-25). In feeding the fires of Luvah with cruelty, Vala embodied a
distortion of sexual and social oppression; by excluding Vala and substitut-
ing Ahania and Enion in her place, Enitharmon reveals implicitly that the
connection between Ahania and Enion equals the role of Vala. Since this
interchange is preceded by the narrator's assertion that Los and Enithar-
mon's goal is to conduct Enion's voice to Ahania's pillow (34:4), this
subplot featuring Enitharmon's sexual virtuosity reveals that Ahania and
Enion's meeting at the end of Night II will bear on Vala's sexuality, though
it does not seem to.
 Enitharmon's variable sexual form forces Los to re-enact Urizen's
defensive longing for "times of old" (30:48): "I know thee not as once I
knew thee in those blessed fields / Where memory wishes to repose
among the flocks of Tharmas" (34:39-40). In response, Enitharmon says:
"Wherefore didst thou throw thine arms around / Ahanias Image I decievd
thee & will still decieve / Urizen saw thy sin & hid his beams in darkning
Clouds" (34:41-43). This point of recognition suddenly brings the subor-
dinate plot and the central plot of Night II into alignment.
 The structural burden of the verbal interchange between Los and Eni-
tharmon is to transport the "revival" of paling Ahania (by sacrificing
victims) into the context of a one-to-one sexual confrontation. The great
multitudes of slaves "without number" (30:12) working in agony but
ignored by Urizen (because their sheer numbers make them seem
unfathomable and unquantifiable) remain excluded from this vision and
re-surface only indirectly in the voice of Enion. Though Luvah and Vala
connect the social and sexual consequences of Urizen's creation, their total
subservience at this point renders their plight only indirectly visible. As
Los and Enitharmon play out the sexual consequences of Urizen's world,
they directly cause the reappearance (through Enion's voice) of the politi-
cal and social dimensions.
 Enitharmon's song makes the emphasis on dominance and submission
in sexual relationships the standard of behavior. The cyclic life and death
of males and females expressed through the verbal exchange between Los
and Enitharmon in Night II re-enacts two competing prior accounts from
Night I: the male dominant sexual relationship associated with Eden in the
Tharmas/Enion confrontation (5:1-4) and the female dominant sexual
model in Enitharmon's Song of Death (10:17-25). When Los and Enithar-
mon confront each other in the same way that Tharmas confronted Enion
in Night I (i.e., directly, without the aid of visionary parables), the myth
of the Tharmas plot that females die for males is temporarily reversed,
replaced by a complex approximation of the female dominance Enithar-
mon previously desired. This emergent (though, as Blake is about to
reveal, incomplete) female dominance is facilitated by the fiction that
Urizen has assumed masculine control of his universe, inadvertently dis-
torting and potentially amplifying female power by driving it to the
fringes of his consciousness.
 Enitharmon's song analyzes and partially inverts the verbal conversa-