Postmodern Elements in A. S.

Byatt’s Possession

Since its first edition in 1990, Antonia Byatt’s Possession has been considered one of the

greatest novels in postmodern narrative. There are many reasons for this achievement: firstly, Byatt

managed to create a complex storyline intertwined between two centuries, the 19th and the 20th, full

of characters who are mirrored in each other due to the similarities of the events that occur in both

ages and to their personalities. Secondly, the themes of the Victorian cultural movements are

rewritten to deal with modern aspects of literature, resulting in a mix of old and new topoi. This

essay wants to highlight the postmodern elements traceable in Byatt’s romance and how the author

re-elaborated the themes of Victorian literature, adapting them to modern issues and problems, thus

creating a Neo-Victorian novel.

1. Romance and pastiche

Postmodernism tends to deconstruct the absolute certainties of the reader, so there is no surprise

in finding the subtitle A Romance in Byatt’s book. By using this term in the title and Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s definition of romance in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables as the first

quotation in the book, followed by Robert Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge – “The Medium”’, the author

wants to encapsulate her work in a specific genre. Her choice for Hawthorne’s epigraph, as

Rudaityté points out, “highlights the creative powers of the genre of the Romance, its inherent

potential to transform reality, the writer’s freedom to construct the world according to his wish and

fancy, as well as the attempt to connect the past”1. Originally associated with the heroic poems of

the Middle Ages as a drama of self-identification, including a hero’s triumph over evil (a quest into

the self which has always a happy ending), the term romance acquired a wider meaning, later

1
Regina Rudaityté, (De)construction of the Postmodern in A. S. Byatt’s Novel Possession, LITERATÛRA, 49 (5), 2007,
p. 117.
referring to all those stories focused on a quest made by the characters, usually kings and knights.

This structure of the plot is the same described by Christopher Vogler in The Hero’s Journey

(2010), based on the studies made by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). These texts describe the different

phases that form a story and the typologies of characters involved, all derived from ancient myths

and fairy tales.

The quest started by Roland Michell, contains, in fact, all the traditional elements of the

Romance. When the reader first meets Roland, the protagonist is living an ordinary life as an

academic scholar in an ordinary world, dragging around in a sort of vegetative state, until he finds

the drafts of the letters written by Randolph Henry Ash, a fictitious Victorian poet, to a mysterious

woman. This event represents the “call for adventure”, the beginning of Roland’s quest to solve the

mystery, as Dominguez states “This first transgression expels Roland from the secure world of the

"Ash factory" where he works, and sends him out into the wider world […]. Campbell identifies

this as the starting point for a quest: willingly or not, the hero must leave the original setting”.2

From now on, Roland will be joined in his quest by Maud Bailey, and their adventure will be

intertwined by the events of the lives of Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, his correspondent.

The reader, just like the characters, progressively discovers the love affair of the two Victorian

poets by reconstructing what is narrated in the letters they sent to each other, kept by LaMotte’s

descendant, Sir George Bailey, and by analysing their poems, which contained indications about the

places and the mythological references mentioned in their correspondence: this is the epitome of a

non-omniscient narrator, which prevails in Byatt’s story. We lack further knowledge of the events

that happened in the 19th century, just as Roland and Maud do. The two academics take the role of

modern detectives trying to reconstruct the lives of the Victorian poets by using their wit,

assumptions, deductions, taking nothing for granted and considering even the most, apparently,

insignificant detail. This metanarrative feature projects us into the story, allowing us to see the
2
Pilar Cuder Domínguez, Romance Forms in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, No. 8,
1995, pp. 79-80.
development of the facts in real time, as if we were a third person reading those papers with Roland

and Maud. In these occasions the time of the narration and the time of action seems to coincide.

At the same time, however, we do know more than the two protagonists about the events

happening in the 20th-century storyline. While they are investigating, travelling across the English

countryside and Brittany, tracing back the same steps made by their 19 th century counterparts, we

can see what the other characters, such as Mortimer Cropper, James Blackadder, and Leonora Stern,

are planning, as they slowly discover that Roland and Maud are hiding something from the

academic world. This is possible thanks to the change of points of view, a strategy widely used in

postmodern narrative. Thanks to this feature we are now projected into the thoughts of the

secondary characters, observing their moves that will, eventually, come across Roland and Maud’s

quest. This strategy is useful as it focuses not only on the plot-related events, but also allows us to

know the character’s personality. In this way, we realize that Mortimer Cropper represents the

unscrupulous scholar, who is willing to do anything in order to increase his personal collection of

historical artifacts; Val, Roland’s girlfriend at the beginning of the story, gets more and more

detached from her lover since his absence from home and his closeness to Maud; Leonora Stern is a

strong woman with her own beliefs and that, just as Blanche was extremely involved in Christabel’s

life in the 19th-century storyline, she is very fond of her friend.

Furthermore, the narration focused on Roland and Maud is put on hold several times, due not

only to the change of points of view, but also to the different contents which are offered the reader

in many ways: pages of lost diaries, letters, articles, poems; these different styles of transmission

convey useful information to reconstruct the main storyline. The parts dedicated to the 19 th-century

poetry focus on the various fictitious texts written by Ash and LaMotte, such as Ragnarok or The

Fairy Melusine, the main works of their production. These poems contain references previously

quoted by the authors in their love letters, such as geographical clues or mythological denotations,

adding additional pieces to the complex puzzle represented by their clandestine affair. The letters

and the diaries found within the text are manifold: besides the massive correspondence that
describes the liaison between Ash and LaMotte, we have also letters sent by the 80s characters

involved in academic research, in which they express their doubts about Roland and Maud’s secret

quest; this represents the first step of their direct intervention in the final act. As far as the diaries

are concerned, the most important ones that are taken into account belong to the women of the past:

Blanche, who expressed her disapproval of the love affair between Ash and LaMotte which,

probably, led to her suicide; Ellen, Ash’s wife, who suspected there was something strange in her

husband’s behaviour and who, later, forgave him, taking care of him on his deathbed; Sabine, a

French relative of LaMotte, to whom the poetess went after Blanche’s death, bringing in her womb

the illegitimate daughter of her lover. Finally, the articles that deal with the academic reviews and

studies of the lives and works of the Victorian poets involved in the story, fictitious and not. These

sections reveal more than a biographical analysis made by scholars, as they seem to convey the

ironic point of view of the author herself. Byatt, in the Introduction to the 2009 edition, affirms that

“The ‘idea’ of the novel was that poems have more life than poets, and poems and poets are more

lively than literary theorists or biographers living their lives at second hand”3; furthermore,

Rudaityté specifies that

The “forged” literary and scholarly discourse in Possession turns into a parody of modern

critical theories. Byatt’s irony is directed particularly at poststructuralism and feminist criticism.

The evidence of it is satirically described modern critics Leonora Stern and Fergus Wolff, as

well as the parody of deconstruction and feminist criticism’s texts. 4

Thus, we can assume that, by mocking modern criticism, Byatt wants to highlight how it became a

mere biography of those authors, not considering the importance of their poetry and the impact

those themes had in their lives. At the same time, it is impossible to analyse the works of those

3
A. S. Byatt, Possession – A Romance (1990), Vintage, London, 2009
4
Rudaityté, op. cit., p. 121.
authors not considering their lives’ events; they influence each other and, for this reason, are

essential to fully describe the life of an author.

As we have seen so far, the story mixes up elements from the Detective Story (the progressive

discovery of clues which will give us the task of putting together the missing pieces of the complex

plot), the Epistolary Novel (the correspondence between Ash and LaMotte is a distinct type of

narration inside the bigger storyline), the Romance (the quest for the truth, undertaken by Roland

and Maud with all the symbolic steps of the hero’s journey), the Postmodern Historical Novel

(dealing with the past in an original way, focusing not on great figures of history, but on common

people, as Roland, or those shadowed by others, as Christabel LaMotte), and all the particular

aspects associated with the narrator, as the change of points of view, the lack of an omniscient

narrator, and so on. All these features are put together resulting in a perfect pastiche, a topical

element of the postmodern literature; Byatt blends together aspects from both high and low culture,

creating a hybrid work, contaminated by different cultures, styles of narration, genres, etc. By

giving the subtitle “A Romance”, she gives unity to the core text, but, in fact, it is hard to define this

novel with a specific genre. It is noteworthy that Roland himself thinks that

“All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance

simultaneously, a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of

Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse at some point or

another.

He supposed the Romance must give way to social realism, even if the aesthetic temper of the

time was against it.”5

This metanarrative reflection allows us to understand the point of view of the character about

romance, which was the same thought of the academic community of that time.

5
A. S. Byatt, op. cit., p. 508.
 We may describe Possession as a postmodern novel as it “aims at similitude by applying

scepticism to assumptions, tropes and generic conventions in literature” 6, although not all the critics

agree with this definition. The features of Romance find their full realization in the postscript

chapter, within which an omniscient narrator appear, telling us a last event happened in the life of

Randolph Ash. If the 20th-century storyline ends with a sort of happy ending, with Maud

discovering that she is a descendant from Christabel LaMotte and finally accepting the love affair

between her and Roland, the 19th-century storyline finale is bittersweet: Ash will meet his

illegitimate daughter, who is raised by LaMotte’s sister as her own, thinking that her real mother is

her spinster aunt, and will ask her to give Christabel a message; then, he will ask the child for a lock

of her hair, which, in the 20th century storyline, will be thought to be Christabel’s. The

contemporary characters will never know of this event, as it is something not traceable in any

written document; the reader, though, is able to know about this events thanks to the author, who

by conveying this information through the use of an omniscient narrator, and positing the use of

that narrator and the transmission of that information to the reader as necessary, Byatt shifts her

text away from categorization as a postmodern novel and into the realm of Romance. 7

Therefore, using an omniscient narrator in the last chapter, Byatt chooses to give importance to

the truth, as our doubts, which remained unsolved in the last 20 th century storyline chapter, finally

find answers. As Parey highlights

The storyteller is here the detainer of a truth forever out of the reach of literary historians, a

truth that the narrative instance chooses to share with the reader. It is indeed significant of the

supremacy of the storyteller that, for lack of information, the reader should fall prey to the same

6
Jordana Ashman Long, “The Romance and Real”, Mythlore, Vo. 37, No. 1 (133), Fall/Winter 2018, p. 154.
7
Ibidem, p. 155
 type of mistake as the twentieth-century characters when deducing that Ash refers to Christabel

in his last days.8

Due to the complexity of her style, Byatt can respect the traditional motifs of the Romance and,

at the same time, break them. The author plays with her reader in the same way she plays with the

themes dealt with in the 19th century storyline, reinventing them, as we shall see in the next section.

2. Re-elaboration of Victorian Themes

The Victorian Age was the era of scientific and religious doubts, mainly due to the publication

of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and the technological development of society. The old

world was being destroyed by new theories and assumptions, which writers and poets dealt with in

their literary production. At the same time, archaeology was in development, which brought to a

major interest in Britain’s ancestors, their culture, and beliefs. Moreover, the Middle Ages were

losing their definition of “Dark Ages” and, consequently, Medieval literature and history were

acquiring notoriety among scholars.

All of this is analysed by Byatt through the words written in the fictitious works of Ash and

LaMotte. In Possession, the author re-elaborates the works of the main Victorians writers, such as

Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti, connecting them with modern

themes and attributing them to her Victorian characters. In this way, we have Christabel LaMotte’s

The Fairy Melusine “as narrated by the medieval poet Jean D’Arras, […] a retelling of the old tale

of the magical half-woman, half-snake”.9 The Fairy Melusine is the main work of LaMotte’s

production, constantly praised by Randolph Ash in his love letters, but forgotten by the critics, until

the rise of feminist criticism. It is itself a pastiche, as it contains references to religion, mythology,

and literary movements, such as Romanticism. As Rudaityté maintains, the poem

8
Armelle Parey, “Unsettling postscripts and epilogues in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Ian McEwan’s Atonement”,
Sillages critiques [En ligne], 24, 2018, last visited on 02/02/2021, http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/5751
9
Rudaityté, op. cit., p. 118
 “is a rewriting of Christina Rossetti’s poem Eve, [it] contains the image of a serpent which is

the central symbol of Possession. In the first place, it stands for Christabel, “half-woman, half-

snake”, who casts a magic spell on Ash, charms him and even becomes an influence on his

writing. […] This symbol can be also interpreted through the dialogue with the Romantic

poetry. In Keats’s poem Lamia (1820) a serpent is transformed into a beautiful girl who

fascinates a young Corinthian, Lycius. In ancient myth a lamia was a female demon, enticing

young men in order to devour them. In Keats, Lamia, a serpent, stands for imagination and love.

In Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) which is echoed in Byatt’s text the Serpent is the

symbol of imagination.10

As a result, Christabel is a complex character associated with the metaphor of the serpent,

constantly used in Romanticism and Victorian literature: she is a temptress, the Lamia who will

seduce Ash and, eventually, bring him to destruction, but at the same time, she is the symbol of

imagination, and their love is the result of a four-handed written story; she is like a fire, that heats

and bring light, but, if not controlled, can turn into a conflagration. It is interesting to note that in

the postscript Ash makes another reference to one of Keats’s poems, when he tells his daughter

“Tell your aunt […] that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci” 11,

highlighting, again, the double nature of Christabel.

On the other hand, Ash’s poem, Ragnarok (which is the title of one of Byatt’s own later

productions) evokes Norse mythology, quoting the ancient pagan gods, such as Thor or Odin, and

their related stories. The meaning for this Nordic word is “the final destruction of the world in the

conflict between the Aesir and the powers of Hel led by Loki— called also Twilight of the

Gods”12 and is the Norse equivalent of our biblical Apocalypse, in which the forces of light will

fight against darkness, granting salvation for the pure of heart and damnation for the sinners.
10
Ibidem, p. 119
11
A. S. Byatt, op. cit., p. 606.
12
“Ragnarok.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster,
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ragnarok. Accessed 3 Feb. 2021.
This reflects the predominant fear in the Victorian panorama: “the death of religion in their time

and its replacement with new views of science and humanism” 13. Ash’s writing power consists in

his dealing with both the past and the present by evoking those images from his ancestors’

culture14.

By creating two extensions of herself, in the mind and bodies of Randolph Ash and Christabel

LaMotte, Byatt brings to its apex the Neo-Victorian experimentation: playing with the topoi of

that time and connecting them to contemporary themes, “allows readers to appreciate their

multivalent function as both parts of the novel’s Victorian microcosm, and indicators of its Neo-

Victorian concerns” 15.

Conclusion

Considering all the features of Possession analysed so far, comes as no surprise that the novel

won the Booker Prize in 1990. The author entrusts the reader to project himself into two storylines

separated by a hundred-year hiatus and challenges him in reconstructing the mystery of love that

involves the two couples of main characters. The themes and the storytelling allow us to keep up

with the pace of thinking of Roland and Maud, and to immerse ourselves into Randolph and

Christabel fantasies. Just like them, while reading this book, we feel possessed by a primeval

feeling.

13
Jordana Ashman Long, op. cit., p.156.
14
Elisavet Ioannidou, Indispensable Redundancy: The Poetic Abscesses of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance
(1990), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 61:4, 2020, 416.
15
Ibidem, p. 420.
Bibliography

 Byatt, A. S., Possession – A Romance (1990), Vintage, London, 2009

 Domínguez, Pilar Cuder, Romance Forms in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Revista Alicantina de

Estudios Ingleses, No. 8, 1995, pp. 79-89.

 Ioannidou, Elisavet, Indispensable Redundancy: The Poetic Abscesses of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A

Romance (1990), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 61:4, 2020, pp. 412-422.

 Long, Jordana Ashman, “The Romance and Real”, Mythlore, Vo. 37, No. 1 (133), Fall/Winter

2018, pp. 147-164.

 Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/.

 Parey, Armelle “Unsettling postscripts and epilogues in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Ian

McEwan’s Atonement”, Sillages critiques [En ligne], 24, 2018,

http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/5751.

 Rudaityté, Regina, (De)construction of the Postmodern in A. S. Byatt’s Novel Possession,

LITERATÛRA, 49 (5), 2007, p. 116-122.