Possession

1
Possession

• A.S.Byatt
• Prepared by Cecilia Liu

2
A. S. Byatt

• English novelist Antonia Susan Byatt has been
  described as a "postmodern Victorian."
• Educated at York and at Newnham College,
  Cambridge. She taught at the Central School of
  Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English
  and American Literature at University College,
  London, before returning to full-time writing in
  1983. A distinguished critic as well as a
  novelist, she was appointed a C.B.E. in 1990.

3
A. S. Byatt

• Her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and
  Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction
  Prize in 1990. Her other fiction includes Babel
  Tower, Angels and Insects, and The Djinn in the
  Nightingale's Eye. Her critical works include
  Degrees of Freedom, a study of the novels of Iris
  Murdoch, and Passions of the Mind (selected
  essays).

4

Fictional Realism Parallel
Narrations

• The reader as character
• Two literary historians
• --Roland Michell and Maud Baily
• Two Victorian poets' relationship
• -- Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte
• Christabel Maud
• Randolph Roland
• Randolph Ellen Roland Val
• Christabel Blanche Maud Leonora

5
Mirror-games and Plot-coils

• the modern day plot
• the plot of the Victorian poets
• the two modern day literature historians unearth
  the secret passion between Ash and LaMotte, their
  own lives begin more and more to mirror the plot
  of the Ash/LaMotte correspondence.

6
Posession and Seeing Double

• Possession is a work of double vision, telling a
  story within a story, as well as being in itself
  a book about books.
• Byatt thus refers in her work to three
  non-intersecting worldsthat of the reader
  reading the book, that of Roland and Maud
  researching Ash, and that of Ash falling in love
  with Miss Lamotteasking us, even if only
  implicitly, to find the parallels between them.
• Scholarship and art

7
Solitude and Secrecy

• A journey of discovery
• Solitude plays a substantial role not only
  between Roland and Maud, Ash and LaMotte.
• the connections between various documents and
  characters suggest that isolation and solitude
  which is often desired by Christabel and Roland
  is difficult to obtain and maintain. (Ch 11, 196
  Ch12, 215)

8
"Follow the Path" obsessive investigation

• Maud and Roland spontaneously decide to recreate
  Ash and LaMotte's trip to Yorkshire.
• They "follow the path" (238) of the Victorian
  poets in three ways. They retrace the steps of
  Ash and LaMotte's trip, intentionally, and, when
  they visit a place called Boggle Hole,
  unintentionally. They continue along the trail of
  clues that suggests an affair between the poets.
  And Maud and Ronald move closer to a romance as
  brash as that between Ash and LaMotte.

9
Gold and Green The Colors of Beauty and Desire

• Maud Bailey a serious scholar dedicated to the
  study, particularly from a feminist perspective,
  of the fictional poetess Christabel LaMotte.
• Roland Michell, a literary scholar and the
  protagonist of Possession, discovers that
  Randolph Henry Ash, the poet of his interest.
• Roland Mauds first meeting (38-39)

10
"An Empty Clean Bed " Whiteness, Desire and
Fear

• Whiteness signifies both purity and desire, a
  paradox the novel both struggles with and values.
  
• Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, find a common
  desire in the absence of desire the image of a
  clean, empty white bed. Ch14, 267

11
Possession and The Lady of Shalott

• LaMotte compares herself to the Lady of Shalott
  in Chapter 10 (187)
• The Lady of Shalott sits perpetually with her
  back turned to the world, weaving the reflections
  of the outside world she sees in her mirror.
  Becoming "half sick of shadows" the Lady of
  Shalott "left the web, left the loom" and embarks
  upon a journey into the world. But going out into
  the world proves poisonous, and as she floats
  "down to Camelot," the Lady dies. (As a poem
  coming out of Victorian England, her death speaks
  what might happen to the angel in the house if it
  decides to spread its wings.)

12
'I am Half-Sick of Shadows' The Lady of Shalott,
painted by John William WaterhouseThe Lady of
Shalott was a favorite subject of many
Pre-Raphaelite artists. Written by Alfred Lord
Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott is a story where
passion for life evokes death. The the poor Lady
of Shallot is cursed to never look directly out
of her window. She may, however, view the world
by looking into a mirror.

• Image http//www.nouveaunet.com/prbpassion/med1.c
  fm

13
In her passion, she forgets the curse and looks
down toward Camelot to catch a glimpse of
Lancelot. The mirror cracks and the curse comes
upon her.

• The Lady of Shalott goes down to the riverside
  and finds a boat. She unties the boat and lies
  down. As she floats down the river toward
  Camelot, she sings a song. Her blood freezes to
  her cold death.

14
Possession and Aurora Leigh

• Similarly, in the first part of Aurora Leigh,
  Aurora insists on being left alone to her
  writing, and cannot be bothered with her suitor,
  Romney Leigh. She does not, however, maintain
  this conviction, and in the end of the lengthy
  poem believes in the power of love as much as the
  power of her own writing. In this particular
  letter written by LaMotte, she seems to regard
  Ash, and the outside world entire, as a threat to
  her poetry. Yet in Possession, like in Aurora
  Leigh and The Lady of Shalott, LaMotte does not
  remain shut up, but continues a correspondence
  and relationship with Ash.

15
Aurora Leigh (1856)

• A novel-poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  (1806-1861)
• Aurora "the dawn"
• It describes Aurora's successful rebellion
  against her conventional Victorian English
  childhood to travel in Italy, find love, and
  pursue her career as a writer.
• She rejects her cousin, Romney Leigh, in favor of
  her own vocation as a poet. Romney then decides
  to marry a lower-class woman, Marian Earle.
• But Marian is sent away to France. Trapped and
  raped, she becomes pregnant. She and her child
  are later rescued by Aurora. The three set up a
  home together in Italy, where Romney later
  appears.

16
Aurora Leigh (1856)

• He had been blinded by an accident and has become
  somewhat softened by experience. Meanwhile,
  Aurora has learned the value of love from living
  with Marian and her child. She marries Romney in
  a new spirit of modest self-effacement. While not
  giving up poetry, she will write in service to
  the ideas of her husband.
• Browning closes with a compromise between the
  artist's drive for self-expression and the
  Victorian wife's role of submissive service.
• Source http//www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/Eng
  lish151W-03/auroraleigh.htm

17
Aurora Leighs Dismissal of Romney- (The
Tryst)by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) Oil on
canvas (1860) Tate Gallery

• The subject of this picture is taken from
  Elizabeth Barret Browning's poem Aurora Leigh,
  which was first published in 1856. The scene
  depicted is the moment at which Aurora, who
  aspires to be a poet, is courted with a marriage
  proposal by her cousin Romney. Rejecting his
  offer she proclaims her own vocation'.
• Image http//freespace.virgin.net/k.peart/Victori
  an/hugheslove.htm

18
Christabel as Melusina

• In French mythology, Melusina, or Melusine, was a
  water-sprite related to the Dames Blanches (the
  white ladies). The Melusina legend became
  extremely popular during the middle-ages,
  especially in the northern regions of France. In
  the early 1500s, Jean d'Arras, a French
  historian, received orders from the Duke of Berry
  to record all the information he could gather on
  Melusina. Jean d'Arras spent a number of years
  researching and collecting material for his major
  work, Chronique de Melusine. Much of his research
  was indebted to William de Portenach's previous
  chronicles on the history of Melusina.
• Source http//www2.sjsu.edu/depts/jwss.old/poss
  ession/fr-essay.html

19
The Framework of the Melusina Myth

• According to Baring-Gould, the structure or the
  framework of the Melusina story is based on a
  mythical archetype involving mortal men and
  supernatural women. The general framework can be
  broken down as such
• A mortal man falls in love with a woman of
  supernatural contest.
• She consents to live with him, subject to one
  condition.
• He breaks the vow and loses her.
• He seeks her, and a) recovers her or b) never
  recovers her.
• The Melusina myth fits this model with one
  exception Raymond never recovers Melusina.

20

• Melusina (33, 116-17, 333) In Breton mythology,
  a lamia, one of the legendary White Women (Dames
  Blanches), having the upper body of a human
  female and the lower body of a serpent.
  Magically masking her true form, Melusina married
  the wandering knight Raimondin under the
  prohibition that he never view her on Saturdays.
  Raimondin broke the taboo and witnessed his wife
  bathing in her snake-form. He confronted her and
  she fled after transforming herself into a
  dragon. In later myths, this same dragon became a
  harbinger of doom for the Bretonnian nobility,
  haunting castles wherein someone was doomed to
  die.
• Christabel LaMotte's The Fairy Melusine (Ch
  16, 289-98)

21
http//www.lincolnshirelife.co.uk/PAGES/BACK_OCT_2
002/POSS.html No Discernible Trace

• Love letters, poetry, journal entries, and other
  written forms further the story along throughout
  the novel to its very end.

22
Critiques of Romantic Inspiration in the Poetic
Form

• Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Victorian novel
  in verse, Aurora Leigh, A.S. Byatt addresses the
  role of the poet, using references both to the
  nature of love and the essence of creative
  inspiration itself, in her work, Possession.

23

• Utilizing the context of letters between a
  renowned 19th century poet and his lover, a
  lesser known female poet, Byatt examines the
  substance of poetry in a non-poetic form. As a
  modern author, Byatt places this narrative in the
  Victorian time period in order to legitimize a
  critique of Victorian notions of poetry, artistic
  philosophies that are espoused in Barrett
  Browning's work.

24
Idea of poetry as an expression of generalized
love

• Ash depicts the contemporary trend of viewing
  poetic inspiration as originating from the state
  of general human love, where all-encompassing
  passion is "masked" by the particular intercourse
  of a lover and his love. Ch8, 132

25

• In his critique of the forms of poetry in his
  time, Randolph Henry Ash presents Christabel with
  a divergent notion of the relationship between
  love and poetry and additionally, suggests that
  love is in and of itself a less admirable form of
  inspiration than another type of human
  relationship, the rapport of friendship

26
A Critique of the Victorian Omission of Sexuality

• In her depiction of the Victorian past, Byatt
  recognizes Victorian culture's elision of all
  discourse surrounding sexuality. Byatt depicts
  Victorian marriage--represented by the poet
  Randolph Ash and his wife Ellen--in the same way
  a Victorian would have represented it, as
  evacuated of sexuality. Yet one of Byatts
  projects in Possession is to examine the sexual
  act in Victorian marriage. 458-59, 460

27
Marriage between Randolph and Ellen

• characterized by its lack of sexual intimacy
• Ellen the sexual act is a brutal experience,
  incompatible with marriage. Marriage, according
  to Ellen Ash's construction of it, is
  frightening, close to a master-slave
  relationship.
• typical Victorian notions of female sexuality and
  marriage.

28
A critique on the utility of modern theories of
sexuality

• In contrast to the Victorians omission of
  discourse concerning sexuality is the
  twentieth-centurys hyper-theorization and
  discussion of it. Maud and Roland recognize this
  as they search for clues together. 253
• Byatt twentieth-century fascination with
  sexuality and sexual theorizing is equally
  limited.
• critiquing both the Victorian system, with its
  omission of sexuality, and the modern one, with
  its intense analysis of sexuality.

29
ImperialismCultural and Otherwisein Possession

• Possession engages in various questions of
  ownership Who is entitled to Roland's initial
  discovery and its aftermath? What does it mean to
  possess another person in a romantic
  relationship? Do Roland and Maud have a right to
  enter Mrs. Irving's so-called private garden in
  their own backyard? and so forth.

30
Cultural Imperialism

• One of the most important issues throughout the
  novel is the idea of cultural imperialism, as
  Leonora Stern and others term it, and the
  disputes which arise over whether the
  correspondence should remain in Britain based on
  the fact that its authors were British. (Ch 20,
  403-4)

31
References

• A. S. Byatt's Possession
• http//www2.sjsu.edu/depts/jwss.old/possession/
• Byatt, A. S. Possession A Romance. London
  Vintage,
• 1991.
• Color and Identity in A. S. Byatts Possession by
  Stephen Dondershin
• http//www2.sjsu.edu/depts/jwss.old/possession/fr-
  essay.html
• Aurora Leigh (1856)
• http//www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-
  03/auroraleigh.htm
• MELUSINA myth Origins of Christabel LaMotte's
  "The Fairy Melusine"
• http//www2.sjsu.edu/depts/jwss.old/possession/fr-
  essay.html