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Possession

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... the world proves poisonous, and as she floats 'down to Camelot,' the Lady dies. ... As she floats down the river toward Camelot, she sings a song. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: 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
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