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Possession : Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman

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. Introducing Possession.

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Possession : Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman

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  1. Possession: Melusine or the Writer as Serpent Woman By Christien Franken InA.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 (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

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