Abstract
With the centrality of the figure of the tiger both as literal and symbolic entity to The Whole Amour, Harris chooses to quote the opening lines of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” as an epigraph to Book Three of the novel. Much has been written about the meaning of Blake’s “Tyger” and some scholars have sought linkages between aspects of Blake’s poem and Harris’s novel. This essay hopes to contribute to this discussion by drawing a relation between two possible demiurgic creations of the tiger in Blake’s wider cosmology, which depicts the creature either as a fallen, degenerated entity that symbolises death or one that symbolises redemption. This conception of dual possibility permits a reinterpretation of the tiger’s role and meaning in The Whole Amour with regard to the notions of death and rebirth, and the ways in which the existence of the novel’s characters are determined by their subjective perception of it.