A. S. Byatt's Possession exposes rather than portrays the fragility of female sexuality. Byatt's voice is a decidedly feminine voice; she wields the Victorian past to uncover transcendent truths of women and female sexuality. Juxtaposed with the twentieth century, Byatt creates mirrored tendencies in both time periods. Although her novel appears, from the beginning, to chronicle the male scholar Roland's experience, her sympathies lie more directly with the female characters who are less one-dimensional than the male characters. It is the women, then, who we remember: Val, Ellen Ash, Beatrice Nest, Leonora Stern, Maud Bailey, and Christabel LaMotte.
Possession opens much like E.M. Forster's Howard's End ; a poor scholar who begins, at least psychologically, to move beyond his relationship with a woman named Val, out of a damp basement apartment, and into a finer world, in this case, one of literary pursuits. Byatt, unlike Forster, obliquely tells Val's story. Although Byatt recounts Val's history early in the novel, she weaves it into Roland's history. Possession demonstrates that personal histories are linked, sometimes very complexly, to others. Byatt depicts Val through her history with Roland, and therefore exemplifies "the kind of woman" who leaves her own life dreams in order to accommodate a man's. But Byatt begins to complicate Val; she did leave her dreams, but only after she had poured them all into Roland:
Val had been, Roland was sure, partly responsible for his First. She simply expected it of him, she always made him say what he thought, she argued points, she worried constantly about whether she was, whether they both were, working hard enough. (15)
Later, Roland noticed, as he himself had his successes, Val said less and less, and when she argued, offered him increasingly his own ideas, sometimes the reverse of the knitting, but essentially his. (16)
For a brief four pages Byatt allows the reader a window into the combined history of Roland and Val; the dingy apartment with the cat urine stained ceilings, the loveless sexuality which diffuses emotional emptiness and frustration, and their family histories. Byatt explains the union of Val and Roland by creating similarities between their mothers, and then, inevitably, Val mirrors Roland's mother, her own mother, and consequently, the type of woman Roland tries to evade. Roland's mother, like Val "was disappointed. In herself, in his father, in him." (14) Val, we learn, is disappointed in herself, in Roland, in their relationship.
Val's attention shifts subtly, from Randolph Ash who Roland studies, to women. She, like the later characters Beatrice Nest, Maud Bailey, and Leonora Stern, tries to find a feminine space within the male dominated literary canon. Her "Required Essay," concentrates on "The Women of Randolph Henry Ash." Although Ash is who Roland studies; Val strays from focusing on Ash, and tries to include his women into his literary reality. The absence of a place for women in the literary canon is reiterated by the reaction to Val's essay; it was disregarded by the examiners "as probably largely [written] by Roland." (16) If Val had been a stronger, more sure of herself character, Byatt intimates, she might have challenged the literary patriarchy. But, Byatt appears to want the reader to decide that Val is crippled by her past, and more specifically, by her mother, and therefore cannot challenge the system. This is problematic because this decision does not allow the reader to extrapolate from Val's past to any other more implicit reasons for her "disappointment." If Byatt didn't reduce Val, and then virtually ignore her for the greater part of the novel, it would have been harder for the reader to lodge her sympathies with Roland.
Byatt loses Val in the shuffle as soon as Roland meets Maud. The reader wonders where she went, why Roland isn't at least calling her to tell her where he is, or does Val care? Byatt simplifies Val and leaves her one dimensional, whereas at the beginning of the novel she had great potential as an interesting, if even pathetic, character. It is not until over four hundred pages later that Byatt returns to Val.
By the end of the novel, Val has abandoned literary pursuits, except in the adjunct position of helper during the final episodes, and is happy in a sexual, fulfilling relationship where her realm is reduced to "adoring," Euan MacIntyre. Technically, Val's progression is problematic. The reader has not had enough information to understand her newly contended life.
Byatt's Ellen Ash, Randolph Ash's husband mirrors Val in the Victorian Past. Ellen, like Val, is only given attention for a short period in the novel. Her role, however, is pivotal. Where Byatt obliquely explains Roland's desire for the equal relationship he foresees with Maud as a result of his unsatisfactory relationship with Val, Byatt uncovers, late in the novel, the root of Ash's desire for the young poet, Christabel LaMotte.
Byatt shows the reader a window into Ellen's past, of which all trace has been destroyed, and is therefore inaccessible to the scholars Maud Bailey and Roland Michell. Ellen Ash, on Randolph's death bed, remembers their honeymoon, and from this point, painfully retraces the steps in their marriage which led to his passionate affair with Christabel. Delicately, Ellen Ash travels back into her mind and uncovers her own sexual fear, and consequent untouched virginity. Interestingly, Byatt's words which describe Ellen's first of many sexual rejections, this one on her wedding night, echo the very same words used in a similar fashion to describe Chritabel's first sexual encounter with Randolph Ash. Christabel is shrouded in a high collar white night dress, over which she holds white crocheted blanket which she peers over. Similarly, Ellen wears a white nightgown: "The nightdress embroidered for these nights, white cambric, all spattered with lovers' knots and forget-me-nots and roses, white on white. "(498) Ellen is further described as "A thin white animal, herself, trembling." (498) The Victorian white, pristine, nightgowns, worn by both women, is emblematic of a shield which protects them both from their bodies, and their impending sexuality. Ellen's shielded sexuality is her most vulnerable point. It is also the part of her which try as she might have, she could not change; she could not have sexually kept her husband. She understands that Christabel knew her husband better than she, " that other woman was in one sense his true wife. Mother, at least briefly, of his child..." (499) Byatt's Ellen is probably her most successful character. This may be primarily because of the short, condensed space she in which she gives her life. Furthermore, Ellen Ash transcends the novel because of her poignant situation. Byatt is very successful with her portrayal of Ellen's Victorian, vulnerable and repressed sexuality; she becomes therefore the antithesis of Carol Doda who cannot hide from her twentieth century inflated sexuality.
Byatt's twentiet- century Beatrice Nest is another intriguing character. Byatt's Beatrice Nest is very similar to Wolfe's Carol Doda: Nest tries to hide herself, and her breasts beneath her clothes: " Beatrice Nest bundledthem into a drooping, grandmotherly bust-bodice and stretched over them hand-knitted jumpers decorated with lines of little tear drop shaped holes, which gaped a little, pouted a little, over her contours." (130) Furthermore, akin to Doda, Byatt's Beatrice Nest is eclipsed by her huge breasts: "In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive unacceptable bulk of her breasts." (130)
Unlike Doda, however, Nest is given the "rapid stereotypic reading," of motherliness. Like Val, Nest found importance in the wives of the male genius, and published some time before a critical text entitled Helpmeets. Nest finds comfort in studying Ellen Ash, who she says she had "a sort of sympathy for the--helpmeet aspect of her--and to be truthful...[because] of a real admiration for him, Randolph Ash." (240) Her referral to Ash as him imitates Ellen Ash who also in her journals referred to Ash as the "him" who she constantly has to write letters for, copy out his poems for, and like Val, concentrate her own possible genius on his. Nest, who lives alone, is similar to Ellen in that she is virtually sexless. Her students presumed because she lived alone that she was a lesbian, but in fact, Nest, overwhelmed by her breasts, is not able to create any sort of partnership. Nest might consider herself, like Ellen, to be a sort of "helpmeet" scholar to men like Ash, who she truly admires.
Beatrice Nest's opposite can be found in the sexually overflowing Leonora Stern. Leonora, dissimilar from Nest, is confident with her sexuality to the point of being an aggressive bisexual. Leonora is related to the "temptress sun, " with her "promise of darkness, thickness, flesh," and her "naked expanse of shoulders and bound breasts. her skin close up, had very fine wrinkles all over its dark gold, wrinkles not of old age but of a mixture of earlier softening sun-toughening." (461) Although Leonora also binds her breasts, her sexuality emanates from every pore of her body. Not surprisingly, the imagery Byatt uses to describe Stern's body, resonates with La Motte's "Fairy Melusine," which Stern describes at great length as metaphorically sexual.
Stern furthermore uncovers what she believes to be decidedly sexual imagery in Christabel LaMotte's poetry, and consequently, life. Where Carol Doda tries to evade the sexual in her daylight garb, Beatrice Nest shrouds her sexuality, Ellen Ash is robbed of her sexuality, and Val's sexuality is lifeless; Leonora finds sexuality everywhere.
If any of the women Byatt depicted could have been described as mimetic, her two main female characters Maud Bailey and Christabel LaMotte surely mirror each other. Byatt succeeds in her constructions of Maud and Christabel, to both recreate the Victorian past in the twentieth century, therefore giving it transcendence, and to create through disparity with the twentieth century, the Victorian past.
Byatt creates parallel sexualities of the two women to illustrate, as did Wolfe, static female sexual growth. Both women, like the other women describes thus far, are extremely vulnerable in their sexual spaces. Maud has just ended an over sexed relationship with the dashing Fergus Wolfe, and Christabel is escaping the confines of a specifically female sexual space with her lover, Blanche Glover. Both Maud and Christabel begin relationships with Roland and Ash; Roland flees his loveless exhausting relationship with Val, and Ash escapes his abstinent relationship with Ellen. Furthermore, Maud and Christabel guard their vulnerabilities with cold, prim demeanors. In the center of the novel Byatt's Maud and Christabel, in mirrored chapters, open up the fragility of their sexual spaces and let in their men.
Maud Bailey, interestingly, is described much more sparingly than Christabel in the climactic moment of the novel. Her sexuality is unleashed when she lets down her hair. Byatt uses hair to obviously echo the fairy tale of Rapunzel, the story of Samson whose power was in his hair, and the popular notion that when women undo their hair, they submit themselves. Maud's hair, slowly unwound, is like a strip tease:
She began to slowly undo, with unweaving fingers, the long, thick braids. Roland watched, intently.There was a final moment when six thick strands, twice three, lay still and formed over her shoulders. And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes and saw scarlet blood. (296)
If this quotation were displaced, Maud's ecstatic shiver could be misconstrued as Carol Doda's dance.This description is the step by step account of Maud uncovering her sexuality. Byatt finds the erotic more in intimation rather than description. Byatt furthers the resounding climactic moment with the satisfied dialogue which ensues:
Roland felt as thoguh something had been loosed in himself, that had been gripping him.
He said, "That feels better."
Maud pushed aside her hair and looked out at him, a little flushed.
"All right. That feels better." (296)
Byatt's implicit message seems to be that the twentieth century over sexualizes; real eroticism is found in subtlety. Byatt's recreation of the Victorian past, however, reveals a conflicted, hungry, bestial sexuality.
What is curious when examining Maud's sexual curtsey, is the contrarily powerful way in which Christabel unfolds. Maud simply lets down her hair, and submits. Christabel, on the other hand, guards her body like with layers of clothing, but then relinquishes all and aggressively dominates her lovemaking with Ash.
Similar to her later chapter which went back into the past and unfolded Ellen Ash's reality without the scholars participating, Byatt creates a window into Christabel and Randolph's first sexual encounter. Christabel is extremely guarded, perched on a mountain of mattresses like " the princess and the pea," with a highly ornamented nightgown which opens only at the neck and wrists, and a bedspread held up to her chin. Her face peaks out of the crocheted cover like a frail bird from its nest: "Her face was white and sharp and slightly gleaming in the candlelight, like bone." Christabel's hair is already let down:
And the hair. So fine, so pale, so much, crimped by its plaiting into springy zigzag tresses, clouding neck and shoulders, shining metallic in the candlelight... (307)
Christabel's hair, described with a metallic sheen, does not recreate the life Maud's hair, a chapter earlier, was given.
Christabel has not strewn the room with "female things, " and so she sits, escaped from her symbolic cage: "On one chair stood a kind of trembling collapsed cage, the crinoline, with its steel hoops and straps. " Her dismantled crinoline, like Maud's hair, when cast away unleashes her body, and her sexuality. Unlike Ellen Ash, she is not afraid: " She might have lain with her face turned away, but did not." (308) Christabel differs most significantly from Maud and Ellen in her powerful role; she, rather than Ash, the man, asks, " Are you afraid? " Her sexuality, furthermore, matches his in its strength: " She met him with passion, fierce as his own, and knowing it too, for she exacted her pleasure from him, opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries." In the morning, for all her fierceness, Randolph finds blood on his thighs, her virgin-like shield, he realizes has been shattered. But, the reader is left to speculate along with Randolph at her relationship with Blanche Glover: "Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin." (309) Here Byatt knits her web even tighter; Christabel, the pivotal character in the novel, resonates with Ellen, with Maud, and even Leonora. Christabel culminates in this one scene all of the sexual repression and passionless love traced throughout the other female characters.
A.S. Byatt achieves her novel through her patchwork of women; their resonances, and their integrity. Possession can be described as a series of cameos in the Victorian past, and the twentieth century present, transposed, like images on microfilm, one on top of the other. What lasts in Byatt's text is the transcendence of female sexuality. Women, we learn, are vulnerable, complicated, powerful, pathetic, cold, and passionate. Twentieth Century female sexuality, in Carey, Wolfe, and Byatt, echoes itself and mirrors the Victorian Past.
