11

In their first study of The Four Zoas, Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson acknowledge the influence of McNeil's insights as the basis for their reading of the poem as a dream:

Two different kinds of evidence in support of a subjective reading of the poem seem relevant here. One is a recent essay by Helen T. McNeil on the form of The Four Zoas, which makes several incisive points: that, unlike most of Blake's works, the poem exists without a context, even such a personally Blakean one as that given in the expository parts of, say, Milton; that the mythology of the poem is offered to the reader bluntly, as a fait accompli without explanation or justification; that the poem's meaning can be derived only from its hectic and disruptive scenes themselves; that the form of The Four Zoas threatens the mimetic mode as such and offers either a return to pre-Homeric primitivism or a sophisticated advance in literary form; that the poem has some affinity with dream narrative. The last of these points is made briefly and in passing;

but it is a telltale, for all the characteristics just summarized--especially the arbitrariness-are typical of dream structure.34

Thus, Wilkie and Johnson, reasoning from McNeil's hypothesis, advance the view that the work is ordered by psychological principles "typical of dream structure." Their methodology in their second study of The Four Zoas is consistent:

we hope also to show that individual experience recapitulates collective human experience, as the Romantics seem to have assumed. As a corollary, we hope to show that the poem has a demonstrable pattern of continuity, though this artistic pattern depends significantly on patterns in the psyche that we can arrive at only through introspection.35

They assume no mythology in their interpretation, for a mythology is not compatible with the principles of dream structure. The work's uniqueness

34

Wilkie and Johnson, "On Reading The Four Zoas: Inscape and

Analogy," Blake's Sublime Allegory, p. 204.

35 Wilkie and Johnson, The Design of a Dream, p. 3.