Possession: Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman

1
Possession Melusine or the Writer as Serpent
Woman

• By Christien Franken
• In A.S. Byatt Art, Authorship, Creativity. New
  York Palgrave, 2001. 83-108.
• Presented by Amy Yang

2
Introducing Possession

• In the context of this study Possession is a
  crucial book, because it imagines models of
  female artistic subjectivity and thoughts about
  art and authorship.
• The serpent woman-- Melusine

3
Nostalgia and the nineteenth-century male genius
(p. 86)

• Two related subjects dominate the reviews
• 1. qualitative differences between the
  Victorian Ash-
• LaMotte story and the twentieth-century
  Maud-
• Roland plot
• 2. Byatts love of the nineteenth-century
  and its history, culture and literature.
• According to reviews, the novels main character
  is the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash who is
  modeled on the artist as a genius.
• To challenge a modern view of Victorian poets

4
Feminist literary theory and parrot writing (p.
89)

• Leonoras portrait is satirized
• Luce Irigarays theorysexual differences
• Melusine and LaMottes female roles and
  identities
• LaMotte is a figure of artistic female
  subjectivity

5
La serpentine victime (p. 93)

• As Byatt said of Victorian women the problem of
  the fact that sex for woman leads to childbearing
  iscentral to the whole question of sexual
  equality and womens freedom.
• The narrator presents LaMotte as a victim of
  social circumstances and, thus, writes beyond
  Melusines fate as an evil woman in charge of her
  own fate.
• Luce Irigarays Divine Woman motherhood
• (Melusine and LaMotte lack of a female
  genealogy between woman the triple identity
  daughter-woman-mother)? a tragic figure

6
The nineteenth-century artist-novel plot (p. 98)

• Males fear of unnatural side of womanmotherly
  power and a desire to master
• Possession opens up the Melusine paradigm by
  constructing a relationship between Melusine and
  LaMotte.
• Autonomy and creativity
• A symbol of female creative subjectivity

7
Female genealogies the twentieth-century
artist-novel (p. 104)

• Possession takes up the mother-daughter
  relationship and constructs a female genealogy
  between Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey, using
  the Melusine to do so.
• The connection between feminism, the mythic
  figure of Melusine and art