Possession: A Romance

1
Possession A Romance

• by A.S. Byatt
• Prepared by Sarita Chuang

2
Love and Romance

• The postmodern lovers, Roland and Maud, have
  an intellectual suspicion of the very idea of
  love.
• They were children of a time and culture which
  mistrusted love, in love, romantic love,
  romance in toto (423).

3

• For most of the novels action, Roland and Maud
  are more eager to satisfy their narrative
  curiosity than any libidinous urges because they
  have a fear of romantic entanglement.
• Roland Val
• Maud Fergus

4

• Their mutual attraction is, paradoxically, a
  shared desire for solitude. They both have a
  vision of a solitary white bed. They are
  resistant to any aspect of love, including sexual
  involvement, which threatens autonomy.

5

• the physical symbols of Mauds effort of
  self-restraint
• - the neatness of her flat / the confinement of
  her hair (a symbol of sexual availability)
• Even in France, when they join each other in a
  white bed, They took to silence. They touched
  each other without comment and without
  progression (423).

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The Victorian love affair is
characterized by its passionate intensity.?
Randolph Henry Ash appears to have a predilection
for the state of being possessed.? in his
courtship letter to Ellen whose most ardent
desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure
thought of you (460).
7

• Ashs failure to achieve the state of being
  possessed in his marriage.
• Ashs marriage is never consummated.
• ?Ellens memory of their honeymoon indicates her
  repulsion of her husband, not once, but over and
  over and over (459).

8

• Ash achieves the desired condition in his
  attraction to Christabel.
• Christabels initial resistance and objection
• Her letters protest the threat of their
  relationship to her autonomy.

9

• romantic possession ? Ashs forcible
  dispossession ? supernatural possession
• Christabel teaches Ash that she is not his
  possession when she flees to Brittany, France,
  even though she is pregnant with his child.

10

• supernatural possession
• Ash describes his love for Christabel to Ellen
  as a possession, as by daemons (453).
• At the séance of Hella Lees, Ash is tormented
  by not knowing whether his child has lived or
  died (397).

11

• Christabel retrieves her self-possession at the
  cost of giving up her daughter. She and Ash are
  linked in their lifetimes through their child,
  whom neither of them can publicly possess.

12
Biography

• an analogous double aspect of possession
• the biographer ? his subject
• the obsession with his subject ?
• the biographer
• hunters Cropper, Fergus, Leonora Stern
• sympathisers Roland, Maud, Beatrice Nest

13
Parallel Plots Self-reflexive

• Ch. 13, 14, 15 the lives of the protagonists
  mimic each other.
• The contemporary characters feel haunted by past
  lives.
• Roland that he and Maud were being driven by
  a plot or fate that seemed, as least possibly, to
  be not their plot or fate but that of those
  others (421).

14
Different Endings

• Roland and Maud finally get together Val finds a
  more suitable mate in Euan MacIntyre.
• Faced with the box stolen from Ashs grave, they
  assume Ash never met his daughter.
• The Postscript reveals a different ending (508).
  Ash did meet his daughter.

15
References

• Burgass, Catherine. A. S. Byatts Possession
  A Readers Guide. New York Continuum, 2002.
• Byatt, A. S. Possession A Romance. London
  Vintage, 1991.