a) Possession - Byatt (1 Viewer)

[uh_huh2]

hey everyone.
Does anyone know who Mary Wollstonecraft was and why hey position is important in this romance?

 

[absolution*]

She is most famous for writing Frankenstein. I dont think she is really important to what you should be discussing though.

 

[hasterz]

then why is she mentioned in the book?

 

[absolution*]

then why is she mentioned in the book?

Thats not the point. The point is that you have to write an essay in the HSC in one hour. Youll sooner or later find that you have to check useless info in at the door if you want to stick to your time limit. Stick to the basics: techniques, paradigms, style etc.

 

[uh_huh2]

Mary Woolstonecraft is Mary Sheelley's mother (the author of Frankestein). SHe is "important" beacuse her life was used as an approproation for Blanche. --- look Blanche's suicide note. I agree with absolution in that it isnt something important to write in ur essay, but it was good just to know it. ---- and becausewe had to reasearch one real person which Possession uses for our E1 class

 

[Persephone87]

Mary Wollstonecraft was also one of the fore runners to the feminism movement, if that helps.

 

[hasterz]

ive got another question fpor possession

it occurs to me that the novel imo is more of a victorian novel and byatt's intended purpose was not to create a postmodernist text ( which i dont think it is at all) instead i think its just a book which has a few postmodern qualities..... what do you guys think.

And is the book really that "multifaceted"? Many books link the past with the present (ie arcadia by stoppard) what do you guys think makes this book different

 

[uh_huh2]

hey.. acardia is a postmodern text (considered one) but i know what you mean .... like Possession finshes with a the "grandnarrative" of a happy ending anyways .....

 

[absolution*]

ive got another question fpor possession

it occurs to me that the novel imo is more of a victorian novel and byatt's intended purpose was not to create a postmodernist text ( which i dont think it is at all) instead i think its just a book which has a few postmodern qualities..... what do you guys think.

And is the book really that "multifaceted"? Many books link the past with the present (ie arcadia by stoppard) what do you guys think makes this book different

Heres some random lifted info that might be useful.
It can be found within my notes
http://www.boredofstudies.org/community/showthread.php?t=49943

When considering the story-telling style of Possession in light of Lucinda and Waterland, it becomes immediately evident that Byatt employs few of the tropes that fall under the heading of postmodern. The past occasionally exists on the same plane as the present, hinting at synchronicity. For example, both couples, Maud and Roland and LaMotte and Ash, have matched fast paces where few others walk to suit their step. Yet the events of the past and present are firmly linked in cause and effect, showing the narrative to be not fully synchronic at all.
The characters even declare the importance of the Here and Now. Christabel tells Ash after they have first made love, "'This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint...we are here, we are now...other times are running elsewhere" (309). We see a similar instance in which Maud and Roland discover that they have the same ideal: "'...a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked'" (290). Roland comments, "'How funny -- how very funny -- that we should have come here, for this purpose, and discover -- that -- about each other'" (291). In Possession, there is hardly an event in the past that does not later play an integral part in a specific and glorious future.
Possession does allow for the fact that historical inquiry can't clear away all the dust of the past. The novel's final pages, entitled "Postscript 1868", tell us of a meeting between Ash and his daughter Maïa. On this "hot May day...in a meadow" (552), Ash tells Maïa to give a message to her so-called Aunt Christabel that she "'met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends her his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new'" (555). However, Maïa, forgets the message, neither Christabel nor the present-day scholars ever know that Maïa once met her real father. Byatt shows how no amount of literary analysis or letter-stealing can disclose every truth -- but we can certainly come within an impressive distance.
In Possession, then, the metanarrative of history is still powerfully intact. Not only is the past an integral part of the present, but an otherworldly force seems to propel the present-day characters toward uncovering the past. In retracing the Yorkshire trip of their Victorian counterparts, Maud and Roland decide to visit a place called the Boggle Hole solely because they like the name, not realizing that Ash and LaMotte walked the same stones; their trip to a jewelry shop to buy a present brings the discovery that Maud's brooch once belonged to Christabel. Roland expresses suspicion about this, wondering
partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by some plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others... [C]onnections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the 'free' structuring, but controlling, but driving -- to what end? Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. (456)
Roland's ruminations are extremely revealing of the goal behind Byatt's narrative strategy. Roland (through the voice of the narrator) concludes that "[f]inding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot" (456). He is saying, in essence, to hell with postmodernism and all its theories. After all, Roland
"had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. (459).
This thought is echoed by Maud throughout the novel, and is certainly in the style of postmodern theorists, Jameson, Lyotard and McHale inclusive. Byatt rebels against this, showing that Roland realizes that "[h]e was in a Romance" (460, italics mine) -- a double entendre on the part of the author, whose novel's full title is Possession: A Romance. Byatt's quote-page at the beginning of the novel bears a lengthy quotation from Hawthorne's Preface to The House of Seven Gables, which states that the label of Romance (as opposed to novel) allows the author to "attempt to connect with a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us" (xi).
Byatt's own era -- our era -- is full of challenges to the individual, in which not only the subject is in question, but, as Maud observes, "all the possible thoughts about literary subjectivity [have] recently and strenuously been explored" (272). Cropper concludes that, having reconciled himself with the truth of man's insignificance, Ash
turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies...It was a kind of Romanticism reborn...intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe. (272).
Could this possibly be a more exact description of Byatt's own strategy? Like Ash, Byatt revives an older literary form, and incorporates "new mechanistic analysis" with "new optimism" not about individuals, but about the necessity of metanarratives of history and subjectivity. Possession's final sentence -- excluding the post-script -- describes the morning after Maud and Roland have consummated their relationship as full of "the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful" (551). This death and destruction could be that of the bounds of self that have inhibited Maud and Roland for so long; and equally, the death and destruction of the yoke of postmodern literary theory upon narrative form.
Byatt's revolt against Lyotard's refutation of metanarrative in fact goes beyond simple reactionarism. Rather, it points to a loophole in Lyotard's argument, one also seized upon by Jameson in his introduction to Lyotard's text. That is, that we tend to doubt metanarrative structures specifically during scientific periods of history, such as capitalism, that of the present day. The so-called revolution of our present-day storytelling modes are thus perhaps nothing more than a predictable phenomenon, and not a departure from previous of narrative form. Further, that we can document the so-called retreat of diachronic narrative turns this phenomenon itself into a narrative one. As such, this aspect of postmodernism "becomes itself a symptom of the state if seeks to diagnose" (Jameson xi). In light of this, Possession represents not a throwback to earlier (or even outdated) narrative form, but a progression along a line of narrative theory that, like all other philosophies across time, shift and evolve and incorporate the old with the new. Jameson asserts what Lyotard is unwilling to, which is that masternarratives do not evaporate but go underground, and continue to impact our thoughts and actions (xii). Possession is clearly an example of this.
The way in which these three novels reference and solve the problems of the past in fact tells us a great deal about the present. What is still left to be told, however, is the future. Will the next great wave of literary or cultural theory portray our subjectivity in an ever more fragmented manner? Or will it attempt, like Byatt, to assert that we are, instead, more sewn up than we could ever imagine? Recent developments in computer technology have brought us to hypertext, a veritable road-trip of the fictional form with multiple possibilities for readership. Perhaps, in a step toward both the past and the future, the A.S. Byatt of hypertext will incorporate the sweeping hand of metanarrative into this new mechanistic analysis.

A. S. Byatt's Possession takes place in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and seeks to reconcile the nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of the nature of narrative. Byatt's own "People in Paper Houses," quotes B. S. Johnson's claim that "'the nineteenth-century novel' was finished by the outbreak of the First World War...Its wrongness is that it tells a story -- and 'telling stories is telling lies'" (19-20). In the nineteenth century, Romanticism celebrates the wholeness of vision gained by exploring the fantastic and the supernatural; in the twentieth century, postmodernism insists upon the fragmented narrative as a more accurate reflection of unruly life. Byatt, Carey, and Swift compare these two narrative traditions in light of one enduring archetypal narrative: the fall from innocence to knowledge.
A. S. Byatt's Possession considers the fall from innocence as a state of imaginative possession. In this moment of possession, the writer's imagination becomes other by fusing with the world exterior to the writer: "No longer a feature of the passive mind, the tabula rasa of Locke and Hartley, the imagination is here the active agent, shaping the world as it finds it, creating it anew with each vision" (Miyoshi 47). According to Jill Clayt0on, the nineteenth-century Romantic writer understood this moment as crucial to creativity but also acknowledged its destructive, demonic aspect:
As Coleridge puts it, the imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create" (Biographia Literaria1:304)...In its disruptive phase the Romantic imagination can usurp all the other elements of the poet's world, but such moments are necessarily brief. The "light of sense / Goes out," Wordsworth writes in his most important comment on the visionary power of the imagination; "but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world." (Prelude 6.600-2). (Clayton 5)
This flash illuminates narrative: "when a narrative becomes 'other,' it grows vivid, concrete" (13). This incarnation of the imaginative idea is Byatt's chief objective in Possession.
Byatt depicts the imaginative possession of two university scholars like herself, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, who uncover the secret love affair between two Victorian poets (Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte) whom they eventually imitate by falling in love themselves and in Roland's case, by beginning to write poetry. Byatt becomes the last link in a chain along which the act of creative possession is enacted and deferred. Byatt initiates this series in the distant past of pagan myth: Possessionbegins with Randolph Ash's "The Garden of Proserpina," the first of Byatt's ventriloquist acts within the text.
Byatt inflects the myth of Proserpina with a dual symbolism. Intellectually, the instant of imaginative possession enables a creative synthesis; physically, the instant of sexual possession incarnates the idea of simultaneous destruction and regeneration. In "The Garden of Proserpina," Randolph Ash sets the stage for both of these moments:
At the old world's rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero, Heracles,
Came to his dispossession and the theft. (4)
Byatt dispossesses the past and blends it with the present in her novel, thus creating a cyclical time scheme. Like Proserpina, Byatt rises from the "old world's rim," the garden of the underworld, to the present, only to descend once more (Proserpina rises from the underworld every six months and therefore she is associated with springtime and regeneration).
In Possession, the cyclical exchange of past and present and generation and destruction represents a fall from the Victorian conception of linear time:
[Michael] Young argues that Western ideology has shaped a "metronomic society," stubbornly linear and perceiving cyclical time as a threat which robs us of our sense of progress and individuality...This linear bias, as Walter Houghton recognizes in The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830 to 1870, particularly emerges in the metronomic narrowness of the Victorian age: never before had men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future. (Shinn 1)
Darwin's theory of evolution and Auguste Comte's philosophy of Positivism "rang the death knell to the ages of theology and metaphysics and proclaimed scientific sequential order as the new religion of humanity" (168). The Victorian rise of the scientific sequential order causes a fall in the individual's conception of life: the "linear certainty of death as our 'real' future overshadows the cyclical, thereby hiding the vital, iterative part of its own constitution (Young 5)" (Shinn 167). Byatt conflates this Victorian moment of fragmentation with contemporary postmodern conceptions of narrative.
At risk of losing "our sense of progress and individuality," Byatt renews the cyclical conception of time and thus renders the conflation of past and present a positive moment instead of a negative one. Randolph Ash's view of his time is indeed postmodern in its "linear exhaustion" and its lack of a unifying grand narrative:
The truth is -- my dear Miss LaMotte -- that we live in an old world -- a tired world -- a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning...are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision...The scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur -- in some sense -- to good. To good and evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents. (Byatt 181)
In Possession Byatt downplays Ash's perception of the "smutty" accretion of knowledge and instead emphasizes his sense of the enduring dual nature of knowledge ("our greatest spur...To good and evil"). To accommodate this dual nature of knowledge within her text, Byatt resurrects the Romantic narrativity of Coleridge.
Coleridge's poem Christabel, which gives Byatt's Christabel her name, appropriately unites the creative and sexual moments of possession. Christabel casts the moment of possession as an instance of discursive paralysis. Although "Coleridge defines the imagination as a power that blends and unifies discordant qualities" (Clayton 5).
the balance is a delicate one: the more baffled the poet, the more desperately he reaches for oneness, and the tighter he holds to his vision, the greater his awareness of discrepant reality. In an unfortunate irony, it is this Romantic atmosphere of apparent fusion of all being that refracts the poet's vision and breaks his self-image in two. (Miyoshi 49)
These moments are "necessarily brief," but they represent the ability of idea and incarnation to cancel each other out at the height of their powers.
In Christabel this ability has important ramifications for narrative. "In extreme cases, the connection between visibility and otherness can make the world of a novel seem not merely visible but opaque" (Clayton 13). In Coleridge's poem, Christabel is possessed of the spirit of Geraldine, who symbolizes the destructive and regenerative power of knowledge (and hence the idea) and momentarily erases Christabel's power of utterance. Geraldine's presence usurps Christabel's narrative space. At the same time, Coleridge portrays Geraldine as a nurturing presence, "a mother with her child" (Coleridge ll. 298-301). After the moment of self-obliteration has passed, Christabel finds that she has acquired the knowledge of wholeness. She has encountered the power of imagination and understands it as good and evil: "Such giddiness of heart and brain / Come seldom save from rage and pain" (ll. 675-6). The union of opposite forces carries the promise of wholeness and the threat of self-effacement. Incarnated on a sexual level, the ambiguity of this union accounts for Roland's and Maud's fear of possession.
Like Alfred Lord Tennyson's Maud, Byatt's Maud is "icily regular, splendidly null." Although "sexual encounter is the traditional metaphor for knowledge" and "the apprehension of unity is the act of imagination" (Watson 189), Maud stubbornly separates sexuality and knowledge. In Roland's and Maud's study of Ash and LaMotte, Maud also feels "urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity -- ...curiosity, more fundamental even than sex, the desire for knowledge" (Byatt 92). In one scene before Roland and Maud fall in love, Roland proves the intensity of this desire. In order to prime himself for conciliatory sex with his girlfriend at the time, Roland fantasizes about Randolph Ash's wife Ellen. Thinking about her own last lover, Maud recalls their unmade bed as an "empty battlefield" and agrees with Freud that "desire lies on the other side of repugnance" (63). At the price of her own wholeness, unwittingly rendering herself "null," Maud only acknowledges the self-obliterating aspect of sexuality and fiercely dissociates her physical attractiveness from her intelligence: "She considered her perfectly regular features in the mirror...The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing" (64). Like her ancestor Christabel, Maud's character is possessed of the fairy Melusine and the goddess Diana, both of whom are commonly considered as emblems of female self-sufficiency.
Yet Byatt interrogates this self-sufficiency. Forever aware of her own fictiveness, Byatt parodizes the moment when both Melusine and Diana strike down men who have seen them in their bath. As Maud comes out of the shower, she catches Roland peeping in the keyhole. As a postmodern re-visioning of Melusine and Diana, Maud represents her society's eagerness to "possess the Past, while the contemporary level of Byatt's novel reveals that instead we are possessed by that Past" (Shinn 177). Like postmodern society itself, Maud meditates on her own fragmentation:
Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I?...It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist. (Byatt 273)
Maud realizes eventually that she must consent to a mutual possession in which her past and present assert equal claims to each other, as do she and Roland.
As Byatt restores the cyclical conception of time to her narrative at the cost of the narcissistic linear conception, she risks and enriches her characters's selves by transforming "dialogic confrontations [with the past] into conversations which expand the understanding of each participant by exposure to the 'other' perspective" (Shinn 181). Interestingly, Beatrice Nest, one of the most self-effacing characters in the text, uses this word as well: "Beatrice hated writing. The only word she was proud of in this correct and dull disquisition was 'conversation,' which she had chosen in preference to the more obvious 'dialogue.' For such conversation Beatrice would have given everything, in those days" (Byatt 127). Maud finally participates in sexual conversation with Roland. Byatt conflates their lovemaking with Heracles's theft of the apples from the Garden of Proserpina, thus cyclically ending the novel where it began:
In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath...a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitter apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful. ( 551)
Byatt follows this sexual possession with a postscript: Randolph's and Christabel's illegitimate child Maya (the name of the Hindu goddess of illusion) ironically represents the shattering of her parents's enchanted world. Maya (who prefers to be called the more down-to-earth May) unwittingly meets her father in a cornfield and forgets to relay her father's poetic message to her mother (whom she believes is her aunt). Byatt's postscript shows this symbolic Persephone in her cornfield. May represents springtime and the starting and ending of Byatt's cycle -- the reversion to innocence after the fall.

Liminality and Intertextuality as Functions of the Nonlinear Narrative in A.S. Byatt's Possession
Sarah Eron '05, English 156, "Victorians and Moderns," Brown University, 2004
Thus far in this class, we have encountered a number of novels, both Victorian and modern, which can be read as prime examples of non-linear narratives. Certainly, A.S. Byatt's Possession is not exempt from this structural tradition. In many senses, Possession is simply another coincidental Dickensian novel, or perhaps a Bronte-esque Bildungsroman. In fact, Roland's discovery of Ash's first letter to LaMotte is something like a boy's threatening encounter with a convict who ultimately will make his fortune, and Maud's experience in the broach shop or with the opening of the final letter is, perhaps, akin to the experience of a young girl, who having escaped from her only shelter, happens upon a little place called Marsh End, which houses not only her long-lost cousins but ultimately a sizeable inheritance as well. Filled with coincidence and littered with subplots, Possession is in essence a Victorian text.
Nevertheless, there are ways, of course, in which this novel establishes itself within a Modern tradition by reworking and expanding off of the narrative skeletons of its Victorian predecessors. For one, Byatt plays with a kind of intertextuality similar to that of books like Jack Maggs, in which the subgenres embedded within the text function in a manner akin to Suzanne Keene's narrative annex. Here, the letter or the poem not only diverges from the general forward progression of the text, but it also establishes a tangent both in the narrative and, more importantly, in time. As Byatt's reader happens upon the texts within the text, he or she is cast out of a more immediate present only to find him or herself in the subsurface of the novel, that is in the storyline and the atmosphere of the past. This type of tangential structure is one which is dependent upon certain disjunctures in time and, therefore, reveals the ruptures and fragments characteristic of Modernist narratives. The subtext thus functions in the same way as does coincidence in the novel, moving the reader from the plot into subplot, from the present into past. Ultimately, Byatt allows us to draw a connection between Victorian conceptions of narrative and modern conceptions of time; the two, at least in Possession if not in literature as a whole, are practically equivalents in terms of their shared nonlinearity.
Furthermore, there is a sense in which this structural trend is indicative of a larger theme within Possession. We now realize that the subtexts in the narrative along with the novel's moments of coincidence lie on the fringe of two worlds, or rather, of two spheres of time. This unstable physical position and this constant experience of the in-between bring us back to Maud's dissertation and the thematic presence of liminality. Possession is essentially about the sensation of a liminal existence, the experience of being caught between two time periods, two lives, and two worlds. Of course, Maud and Roland become the primary examples of liminal figures in the text as they search the present for wormholes into the past. However, this theme of liminality also exists on a metaphorical level in the novel as Byatt plays with constant attempts to uncover or reawaken the dead. Apart from Cristabel's routine séances, we see this theme most clearly in Cropper's literal attempt to unbury the dead at the end of the novel. Here, however, Byatt places a moral forewarning on this perilous desire to loophole into the past. Turning to the natural world as a place of symbolic premonitions and ghostly terror, Byatt calls upon the image of the yew in order to restrain Cropper from his unnatural disturbance of the dead:
He came back towards Ash's grave, pushing against a howling tide of air, hearing other trees crash all around. As he came to the knoll and turned his storm lantern on it, he saw the yew tree throw up its arms and a huge gaping white mouth appeared briefly in the reddish trunk, close to the thick base of the tree, which leaned giddily over, and went on cracking slowly, slowly, descending in a burst of needle-leaves, and finally snapping and shuddering to rest across the grave, obscuring it utterly. He could now go neither forwards or backwards. He cried out "Hildebrand!" and his own voice seemed to curl uselessly back like smoke in his face. Was he safer near the church? Could he get there? Where was Hildebrand? There was a momentary lull and he called again. [Chapter 28, p. 495]
A Hermes-like figure, the yew tree in this passage acts not only as a creature of distinct liminality, but also as a guard who watches over the borders between the realms of the living and the dead. As Tennyson states of this tree most typically found in graveyards, it is like the "Old warder of these buried bones" who feeds death with life and life with death, both blurring and establishing the line between the opposite worlds of the living and the dead. It is possible that Byatt wants us to recall here the entire first stanza of Section 39 of Tennyson's In Memoriam, which reads:
Old warder of these buried bones,
And answering now my random stroke
With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
Dark yew, that graspest at the stones.
There is a sense in which Cropper becomes a liminal figure in the above passage as he is suddenly trapped, unable to move "neither forwards nor backwards." However, when Byatt writes that Cropper's voice seemed to "curl uselessly back like smoke into his face," she may very well be pointing to Tennyson's poem and the smoke from the yews. Is this a viable connection, and if so, what are other reasons for Byatt's comparison between Cropper and Tennyson's yews? Also, the "smoke" from Tennyson's poem is, we must note, a mere metaphor for the tree's pollen, which thus for Tennyson is almost emblematic of the spreading, or fertilization, of both life and death. What is Byatt's reason for using this image, and how do cycles become linked to the theme of liminality in the above passage from Possession?
Finally, although Cropper is forewarned by nature and nearly prevented by the yews in his attempts to uncover the possessions of the dead, he ultimately succeeds in his endeavors. Why then does Byatt insinuate that this digging up of the past is unnatural and then never attribute any consequences to the characters' actions? Can we go so far as to say that Byatt strays from the novels of the middle Victorian period in which actions normally have moral consequences, or is this inconsistency a mere function of her more or less comedic novel?
The final section, or postscript, to the work could possibly be seen as a sort of consequence to these actions and certainly reveals the impossibility of a complete knowledge of, or return to, the past. Does this ending mark a paralysis in the novels tangential or spiral-like structure? That is to say, can we sufficiently see the end as the missing piece which prevents the characters from regressing into the past and then leaves the reader once again in the progress of linear time? Or is the life of Roland and Maud, of the two academics, always dependent on a kind of liminality and intertextuality that places them forever on the cusp of story and sub-story, reality and text?

The reader as character in A.S. Byatt's Possession
Tommy Burns '05, English 156, "Victorians and Moderns," Brown University, 2004
A romance develops between literary historians Roland Michell and Maud Baily as they research two Victorian poets' relationship. Roland first discovers signs of an unknown liaison between Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. While traveling to discuss such findings with Maud, a fellow academic, he comes across a photograph of Christabel. Immediately after describing her physicality, the narrator goes on to depict Randolph and Maud's first meeting in person. The proximity of such descriptions quickly unites the characters of Christabel and Maud; their characterizations are separated only by a paragraph's break. Maud goes on to describe her familial relation with Christabel and therefore connects their characters even further. About to become engrossed with two parallel narrations, the reader must question their distance from the modern literary detectives.
When stories fail to be disparately separate, can the reader ever be removed from what he or she reads? In other words, is it possible to the reader to ever not be considered a character? When a narrative becomes more complex, it is very difficult for the reader to not engage in a more active role:
Miss Honiton's book contained, as a frontispiece, the first image he had seen of Christabel, a brownish, very early photograph, veiled under a crackling, protective translucent page. She was dressed in a large triangular mantle and a small bonnet, frilled inside its rim, tied with a large bow under her chin. Her clothes were more prominent than she was; she retreated into them, her head, perhaps quizzically, perhaps considering itself "birdlike," held on one side. She had pale crimped hair over her temples, and her lips were parted to reveal large, even teeth. The picture gave no clear impression of anyone in particular; it was generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess.
At first he did not identify Maud Bailey, and he himself was not in any way remarkable, so that they were almost the last pair at the wicket gate. She would be hard to miss, if not to recognise. She was tall, tall enough to meet Fergus Wolff's eye on the level, much taller than Roland. She was dressed with unusual coherence for an academic, Roland thought, rejecting several other ways of describing her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes. Through the stocking veiled flesh diffused a pink gold, almost. He could not see her hear, which was wound tightly into a turban of peacock feather painted silk, low on her brow. Her brows and lashes were blond; he observed so much. She had a clean, milky skin, unpainted lips, clearcut features, largely composed. She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag, which he refused to allow. She drove an immaculately glossy green Beetle. [pp. 43-44]


The Construction of a Cyclical Time in Possession
Maya Rao '97 (English 168, 1996)
Like Waterland, Possession establishes a cyclical narrative structure by interweaving the past and present storylines. As in Waterland, this "alternating temporal structure reveals the continual domination of the past" (Shinn, 178) over the present. Rather than presenting the cyclical time frame didactically, Byatt makes the connection between the past and present by setting up two parallel sets of characters in both time periods. The force of the past on the present becomes so strong that the reader often cannot tell to which couple the narrative refers. Using the pronoun "they" (229, 360) and "the man and the woman" (297), Byatt self-consciously introduces this confusion into the narrative to forge this strong connection between the past and present. Moreover, similarly to Waterland, Byatt also uses objects such as Christabel's brooch, which Maud wears, and Ash's pocketwatch, which Cropper owns, to weave together the two time periods.
Whereas Waterland makes past connections to the present by referring to former events in Crick's life, Possession constructs the human past as a force that affects present life. Following the mystery of Christabel and Ash's love affair, Roland and Maud trace the Victorian lovers' path while the text makes connections between the two couples. The narrator explains that Roland and Maud "paced well together" (273), and then later in the Victorian narrative, suggesting a strong parallel between the two couples, Randolph tells Christabel, " 'We walk well together. Our paces suit' " (304). Similarly, Roland refers to Maud as a "princess suffering the muffled pea" (65) and in the Victorian narrative Randolph refers to the mattresses upon which Christabel sleeps as "separating a princess from a pea" (307). Realizing the connection between the two couples, Roland, while thinking about the fate that drove Ash and LaMotte, suggests that "he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others" (456). The parallel of the two couples and Roland's portrayal of the past as a present-day force construct a cyclical time frame that opposes the stifling linear time frame.

Pastiche within the Victorian style in Possession
Maya Rao '97 (English 168, 1996)
Possession develops the human need to believe in stories by portraying Roland's and Maud's desire to put together the story of Ash and LaMotte. The cyclical time frame which the Ash-LaMotte correspondence establishes rejects the construction of a dead past and instead provides "the stimulus of the 'living past' " which encourages Maud and Roland "to act" (Shinn, 179). Explaining to Maud that he took the letters from the library "because they were alive" (56), Roland introduces the idea of a living past. The desire to construct Ash's and LaMotte's story gives Roland and Maud a purpose in their present life. Despite Roland's and Maud's desire to discover the truth about the Victorian poets' love affair, Byatt, by privileging the reader to the Victorian past, suggests that the truth of the story does not matter. Roland and Maud believe they know the full truth when they open Ash's coffin, but in the postscript the reader discovers a scene that is lost to everyone but Ash, Maia, and the reader. Though Roland's and Maud's story does not involve the whole truth, it still serves a purpose by changing their present reality. The truth, however, is important because though
there are things that happen and leave no discernable trace, are not spoken or written of,...it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. (552)
The fiction Maud and Roland create helps them cope with reality but the truth of the past, though unknown, still affects the present.
Roland's and Maud's development exemplifies the effect the past has on the present. Their desire to sleep alone in "white beds" (455) symbolizes their desire for simple order, but even though they live in a "time and culture that mistrust love" (458), their trip together begins to take on a "marital or honeymooning aspect" (455). Despite this closeness, the text portrays them as fearful of emotional attachment because they keep "separate lives inside their separate skins" (459). The final letter from the past, which for them finishes the Victorian poets' story, allows Roland and Maud finally to admit their love for each other. Reading Christabel's letter, Maud realizes her descent from the two poets, identifies with Christabel, and emotionally attaches herself to Roland. Maud still feels "afraid" (550) to begin an intimate relationship but the story of the past has shown her the meaning that love gives to life. Though Christabel ends her life dependant and dejected she still feels "clear love" (545) for Ash and thanks "God for" (546) him. Roland's journey through the past excites him about writing again and gives him the strength to leave safety with Val for the more uncertain love with Maud. Addressing the scholars' development and its connection to their journey through the past, Giobbi comments that "through a literary discovery, Roland finds his poetic vein and a satisfying job, while Maud retraces her roots and abandons her frigid detachment" (52). Finally consummating their relationship in the white bed that each of them had slept in separately, Roland and Maud enter the orderly world they desire but with the chance to love and give meaning to both of their lives.
Addressing Victorian conceptions of linear time, Possession suggests that they obscure truth and cause anguish and doubt in its holders. Intimating his weariness, Ash tells Christabel that
the truth is -- my dear Miss LaMotte -- that we live in an old world -- a tired world -- a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning are now obscured. (181)
Ash suggests that by complicating simple truths, progress can have adverse effects. The linear view of progress, which disregards the past, can cause the inhabitants of the present to feel uncertainty. Calling Ash's feelings "linear exhaustion," Thelma Shinn's article "What's in a Word?" suggests that Byatt consciously introduces this despair into the novel's Victorian period to connect with "the despair which nearly paralyzes her contemporary characters" (168). Inheriting this Victorian view of time, Roland and Maud attempt to escape this despair and rediscover the basic truths that the technological age has obscured.
In addition to using Ash and LaMotte's correspondence to produce Victorian progress linearly, Byatt also uses the letters to portray Victorian doubt. Depicting Ash's scientific, dissection experiments, the text portrays the Victorians as living in the age of Darwinism which had the effect of removing "the transcendent, designing, purposive Mind of God from the universe" (Hart). Showing how a scientific view of the world leads to religious doubt, Ash tells LaMotte that they "live in an age of scientific history" (185) and
the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now, I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world. (181)
Ash suggests that scientific and technological progress have obscured religious faith. Though he ends his sentence affirming God as the creator, he reveals his own religious doubt by wondering "if" God exists. Responding to his letter, Christabel specifically attributes this religious uncertainty to the Victorian period: "doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time" (182). Without faith in God, the characters must turn elsewhere to find meaning in life. Randolph searches for answers in his experiments and his writing, and Roland and Maud, the inheritors of this Victorian doubt, turn to the past to find meaning in the present.

Postmodern Commentary on Victorian Romance
Sarah Barrett '04, English 156, "Victorians and Moderns," Brown University, 2004
A. S. Byatt's romance, Possession, is a multi-leveled postmodernist commentary on the Victorian romance and the study of Victorian literature in general. The author makes up two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and creates a hidden romance between the two that two young literature researchers discover. By learning more and more about the romance between Randolph and Christabel, Roland and Maud begin a romance themselves. Because they are both students of postmodernism and deconstruction, they notice the irony of such a romance. In this passage, Roland wonders to himself whether his and Maud's romance is their own or not.
Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate that seemed to hold of drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of others. He tried to extend this apercu. Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognizes that it has got out of hand? [p.456]


A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Post-modern critique of the Victorian Omission of Sexuality
Timothy Farrell '97 (English 168, 1996)
Like the narratives of Graham Swift and Peter Carey that function to subvert Victorian notions of progress and religion, A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance questions a dominant Victorian construction--female sexuality. Possession is a novel about a pair of young scholars who trace the correspondence between a well-known male Victorian poet and a lesser-known female poet. The novel is a patchwork of letters, poetry, and narrative. 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 Byatt's projects in Possession is to valorize the sexual act itself. To accomplish this, she must look outside of Victorian culture to find a way of representing the sexual act.
In her representation of Randolph Ash's marriage to Ellen, Byatt follows the Victorian tradition of displacing the sexual act from the marriage relationship. We learn that Ellen Ash marries Randolph after she has already lost her youth, implying that she has also lost her sexual attractiveness. She thinks back on her life, "A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait for marriage until she is thirty-six and her flowering is over" (499). Her memory of her wedding night reveals her terror over the sexual act.
She did not remember it in words. There were no words attached to it, that was part of the horror. She had never spoken of it to anyone, not even to Randolph, precisely not to Randolph. . . An attempt. A hand not pushed away. Tendons like steel, teeth in pain, clenched, clenched. The approach, the locked gateway, the panic, the wimpering flight. Not once, but over and over and over. When did he begin to know that however gentle he was, however patient, it was no good, it would never be any good?. . . The eagerness, the terrible love, with which she had made it up to him, his abstinence, making him a thousand small comforts, cakes and tidbits. She became his slave. [498-499]
The marriage between Randolph and Ellen is thus characterized by its lack of sexual intimacy. Ellen, the quintessential Victorian woman, does not enjoy the sexual act itself. For her, 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. By removing sexual intimacy from the marriage of Ellen and Randolph, Byatt is drawing on typical Victorian notions of female sexuality and marriage.
Victorian writers often depict the marriage relationship in the same terms as Byatt in Possession. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her novel-poem Aurora Leigh, likewise evacuates the relationship between Aurora and Romney of all sexual interest. For Aurora, marriage has very little to do with sexuality or desire. She imagines marriage as the final step in becoming a complete woman and a complete artist. Whereas in Book II, Aurora refuses Romney's marriage proposal because she cannot imagine herself dependent on a man, in Book IX she changes her mind.
Passioned to exalt
The artist's instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman's, I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman.
. . . Art is much, but love is more.
O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more!
Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God
And makes heaven. [645-649; 656-659]
Aurora claims that, because she is not a wife, she is not a perfect artist. She beliefvesthat love must inform the artist, since love finds its origin in God and the artist's task is to create an art that is infused with spirituality. The defining characteristic of Aurora's marriage to Romney, therefore, is their love, which has its roots in the divine love of God. Barrett Browning's text elides any discussion of sexuality. We can infer from this omission that, for Barrett Browning at least, the sexual act itself is subordinate to the sublime love the husband and wife feel for one another.
Since the Victorians did not have a way of discussing sexuality within the context of marriage, Byatt must locate Randolph Ash's sexual encounter outside of marriage. Likewise, since Victorian culture presumed sexual activity outside of marriage was sinful, Byatt is forced to look to other traditions to describe Randolph's sexual encounter with Christabel LaMotte. Byatt draws on the medieval courtly love tradition in her depiction of Ash's affair with LaMotte. That the relationship between the two poets develops by way of their written correspondence is one characteristic of the courtly love tradition. In this tradition, literature often has the power to seduce the (usually female) individual. A second characteristic of the courtly romance is the furtiveness of the relationship. The novel revolves around the secrecy of the poets' relationship and around Maud's and Roland's attempt to figure out precisely what went on between them. Third, Randolph's imagining of LaMotte as the hidden princess connects Byatt's description of their relationship with the courtly love tradition. Byatt describes Ash's thoughts as he and LaMotte travel together on the train. "All the way from London, he had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination's work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses." (301) Byatt is clearly drawing from a pre-Victorian tradition in her description of the affair, since Victorian culture cannot give her the terms to discuss sexual intimacy in an affirming way./P>
In contrast to the Victorians' omission of discourse concerning sexuality is the twentieth-century's hyper-theorization and discussion of it. Maud and Roland recognize this as they search for clues together. Maud says to Roland,
"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects. . . I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes--mediaeval gloves, gaints' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries--and it all reduced like boiling jam to--human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body--and language--all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair." Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness." [275-276]
As much as Byatt finds Victorian constructions of human sexuality limited, she suggests that twentieth-century fascination with sexuality and sexual theorizing is equally limited. We come to find out that Leonora Stern, who reads LaMotte's poetry as a mapping of the female body, has in fact misread LaMotte's texts. Her training in French feminism has limited her ability to read texts accurately. Byatt's text thus casts a critical eye on the utility of modern theories of sexuality. We can read Possession as critiquing both the Victorian system, with its omission of sexuality, and the modern one, with its intense analysis of sexuality. Significantly, one of the final images of the novel is the sexual encounter between Maud and Roland. Here Byatt offers a valorization of the sexual act on its own terms. Byatt's Possession thus conflates the Victorian past's omission of sexual discourse with modern discourse on sexuality only to subvert them both and to claim the significance of the sexual act itself.

 

[uh_huh2]

Thanks absolution, it really helped