1. Possession: A Romance
by A.S. Byatt
Prepared by Sarita Chuang

2. Love and Romance
The postmodern lovers, Roland and Maud, have an intellectual suspicion of the very idea of love.
“They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, ‘in love’, romantic love, romance in toto …” (423).

3. For most of the novel’s action, Roland and Maud are more eager to satisfy their narrative curiosity than any libidinous urges because they have a fear of romantic entanglement.
Roland & Val
Maud & Fergus

4. Their mutual attraction is, paradoxically, a shared desire for solitude. They both have a vision of a solitary white bed. They are resistant to any aspect of love, including sexual involvement, which threatens autonomy.

5. the physical symbols of Maud’s effort of self-restraint:
- the neatness of her flat / the confinement of her hair (a symbol of sexual availability)
Even in France, when they join each other in a white bed, “They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression” (423).

6. The Victorian love affair is characterized by its passionate intensity
The Victorian love affair is characterized by its passionate intensity.  Randolph Henry Ash appears to have a predilection for the state of being possessed.  in his courtship letter to Ellen: “…whose most ardent desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you” (460).

7. Ash’s marriage is never consummated.
Ash’s failure to achieve the state of being possessed in his marriage.
Ash’s marriage is never consummated.
Ellen’s memory of their honeymoon indicates her repulsion of her husband, “not once, but over and over and over” (459).

8. Ash achieves the desired condition in his attraction to Christabel.
Christabel’s initial resistance and objection
Her letters protest the threat of their relationship to her autonomy.

9. romantic possession  Ash’s forcible dispossession  supernatural possession
Christabel teaches Ash that she is not his possession when she flees to Brittany, France, even though she is pregnant with his child.

10. supernatural possession
* Ash describes his love for Christabel to Ellen as “a possession, as by daemons” (453).
* At the séance of Hella Lees, Ash is tormented by not knowing whether his child has lived or died (397).

11. Christabel retrieves her self-possession at the cost of giving up her daughter. She and Ash are linked in their lifetimes through their child, whom neither of them can publicly possess.

12. Biography an analogous double aspect of possession:
* the biographer  his subject
* the obsession with his subject 
the biographer
“hunters”: Cropper, Fergus, & Leonora Stern
“sympathisers”: Roland, Maud, & Beatrice Nest

13. Parallel Plots: Self-reflexive
Ch. 13, 14, & 15 : the lives of the protagonists mimic each other.
The contemporary characters feel haunted by past lives.
Roland: “… that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, as least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others” (421).

14. Different Endings
Roland and Maud finally get together; Val finds a more suitable mate in Euan MacIntyre.
Faced with the box stolen from Ash’s grave, they assume Ash never met his daughter.
The Postscript reveals a different ending (508). Ash did meet his daughter.

15. References:
Burgass, Catherine. A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage, 1991.