1. Possession: Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman By Christien Franken In A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 83-108. Presented by Amy Yang

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. ‘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

6. 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

7. 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