Possession: Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman By Christien Franken In A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. New York: Palgrave, Presented by Amy Yang

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

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. Byatt’s love of the nineteenth-century and its history, culture and literature. According to reviews, the novel’s 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

Feminist literary theory and ‘parrot writing’ (p. 89) Leonora’s portrait is satirized Luce Irigaray’s theory—sexual differences Melusine and LaMotte’s female roles and identities LaMotte is a figure of artistic female subjectivity

‘La serpentine victime’ (p. 93) As Byatt said of Victorian women: “the problem of the fact that sex for woman leads to childbearing is…central to the whole question of sexual equality and women’s freedom.” The narrator presents LaMotte as a victim of social circumstances and, thus, writes beyond Melusine’s fate as an evil woman in charge of her own fate. Luce Irigaray’s “Divine Woman”– motherhood a tragic figure (Melusine and LaMotte: lack of a female genealogy between woman: the triple identity ‘daughter-woman- mother’)→ a tragic figure

The nineteenth-century artist- novel plot (p. 98) Male’s fear of ‘unnatural’ side of woman— motherly 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

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