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6 Possession: A Romance With Possession, Byatt moved into a new mode. Always fascinated by the impingement of the past on the present—as well as by the impossibility of reconstructing the past—she set out, she says, “to find a narrative shape which would explore the continuities and discontinuities between the forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and thought” (Introduction, Passions 6). The shape she found enabled her to combine in a new way the issues and preoccupations of her earlier work, and at the same time to move further away from the use of autobiographical material. Byatt’s enduring concern with moral goodness is implicit in her analysis of “possession”: the novel looks at right and wrong ways to possess, in personal relationships and in learning. Understanding that romance is both a method of defamiliarization and, in Rachel Blau Du Plessis’s words,“a trope for the sex-gender system” (ix), Byatt uses the form to explore continuity and discontinuity in women’s lives over the two centuries. Her creation of a series of literary works purportedly by her two main nineteenth-century characters enables her to show, as well, both the process of demythologization and the power and attraction of myth (including, especially, myths about women). Metafictionally, her romance reflects upon its own methods and those of all fiction, particularly that which charts women’s lives. It returns to the subject of “Precipice-Encurled”: the imagination’s manipulation of its historical material, of the “something else” that “proves good yet seems untrue,” the invention that “makes fact alive.” Within the romance framework, Byatt encloses a mix of other genres, among them mystery, detective story, aca107 demic satire,Victorian novel of ideas, contemporary feminist novel, epistolary fiction, diary, and fairy tale. The result is a book that constantly shifts its shape and that, despite being tightly plotted, remains open ended in structure. Byatt both uses and subverts romance; she uses the genre to suggest ways of transcending the assumptions of patriarchy. As Linda Anderson asserts, “Juxtaposing stories with other stories or opening up the potentiality for multiple stories … frees the woman writer from the coercive fictions of her culture that pass as truth” (vii). In Possession , Byatt uses both these techniques, freeing both herself and each of the women writers in her text and completing the work begun in The Shadow of the Sun. In Possession there are two sets of characters, one in the Victorian period and one in the late twentieth century. Byatt’s Victorian figures, both poets, are Randolph Henry Ash, well known in the twentieth century and believed to have enjoyed an exemplary, monogamous married life with his wife, Ellen, and Christabel LaMotte, a more obscure figure assumed to have lived in a lesbian relationship with the painter Blanche Glover. In the late twentieth century, there are two British scholars, Roland Michell, an Ash scholar, and Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar. Their predictable love story begins with texts, as Roland discovers drafts of a letter from Randolph to Christabel and Maud finds, hidden in a doll’s bed at Seal Court where Christabel spent the last part of her life, what they—mistakenly—take to be the entire correspondence. Reinterpreting the now defamiliarized biographies, they uncover a Victorian love story that produced a daughter, Maia. An American Ash scholar, Mortimer Cropper, hears about the letters and embarks, with Ash’s heir, on a scheme to rob Ash and Ellen’s grave where, it is suspected, crucial documents are buried. Roland, Maud, and a group of friends and fellow scholars interrupt him, and the final letter from Christabel to Ash is found. The letter proves that Christabel is Maud’s great-great-greatgrandmother , not her great-great-great-great aunt as she had believed; Maia was brought up at Seal Court by Christabel’s sister, Sophia Bailey, and her husband, and became Maud’s great-great-grandmother. The story ends happily: Roland and Maud declare their love for each other, and Val, with whom Roland had been living in an increasingly unsatisfying partnership, is paired with a young lawyer, Euan, who, we hope, will also help Maud establish ownership of the papers and keep them in England. The book has two epigraphs. The first is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s distinction , in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, between novel and romance. Insisting that romance is not lawless, that it must be faithful % 108 [3.17.184.90] Project MUSE (2024...

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