Abstract
Possession: A Romance is a novel in which old stories echo. It is a tapestry of different times, genres and voices. Within the frame of a realist novel, Byatt invokes the narrative forms of myth and fairy tale to pare back individual consciousness and focus more upon story: ‘the archaic — and religious — power of tales in which individual consciousness is not the important thing’ (Byatt, 2000, 134). Byatt is more interested in ‘the Fate of consecutive events’ (131), in drawing ‘characterless persons’ (131) and interweaving stories within stories, in resisting the inference of identity from activity and allowing actions and events to stand as they are. For Byatt ‘to feel and analyse less, to tell more flatly’ is to tell ‘more mysteriously’ (131). What Byatt is describing here is very medieval. Medieval romances tend to be a serial representation of events, protagonists are more appropriately thought of as ‘figures’ rather than fully developed characters, and individual consciousness is not described, although it can sometimes be inferred from words and gesture. Actions and events dominate. Byatt invokes the medieval explicitly in Possession, celebrating particularly Victorian medievalism through the characters Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and their poetry.
I began to think myself about storytelling, about the irrepressible life of old stories.
(Byatt, 2000, 124)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Boje, David M. (2001) Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (London: Sage).
Brownlee, Kevin (1996) ‘Melusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis’ in Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (eds) Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press), pp. 76–99.
Byatt, A. S. (1990) Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage).
Byatt, A. S. (2000) On Histories and Stories (London: Vintage).
Cavarero, Adriana (2000) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London: Routledge).
Couldrette (1866) The Romans of Partenay; W. W. Skeat (ed.), Early English Text Society OS 22 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co).
D’Arras, Jean (1895) Melusine; A. K. Donald (ed.), Early English Text Society ES 68 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co).
Franken, Christien (2001) A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
Harf-Lancner, Laurence (1995) ‘La serpente et le sanglier: Les manuscrits enluminés des deux romans français de Melusine’, Le Moyen-Age 101, 65–87.
Le Goff, Jacques (1980) ‘Melusina: Mother and Pioneer’ in Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 205–22.
Martyniuk, Irene (2004) ‘“This Is Not science. This Is storytelling”: The Place of the Individual and the Community in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’, Clio 3.3, 265–86.
Nichols, Stephen G. (1996) ‘Melusine between Myth and History: Profile of a Female Demon’ in Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (eds) Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press), pp. 137–64.
Nolan, Robert J. (1974) ‘The Origin of the Roman de Mélusine: A New Interpretation’, Fabula 15, 193–201.
Rigsby, Roberta Kay (1979) ‘“In Fourme of a Serpent fro the Nauel Dounward”: The Literary Function of the Anima in Melusine’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Indiana University.
Roach, Eleanor (ed.) (1982) Le Roman de Melusine ou Histoire de Lusignan par Coudrette (Paris: Klinchsieck).
Saunders, Corinne (2010) Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer).
Shiffman, Adriene (2001) ‘“Burn What They Should Not See”: The Private Journal as Public Text in A.S. Byatt’s Possession’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20.1, 93–106.
Skeat, W. W. (1866) ‘Introduction’ in The Romans of Partenay, Early English Text Society OS 22 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.).
Spiegel, Gabriel M. (1996) ‘Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine’ in Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (eds) Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press), pp. 100–24.
Wade, James (2011) Fairies in Medieval Romance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Walker, Jonathan (2006) ‘An interview with A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk’, Contemporary Literature 47.3, 319–42.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Jan Shaw
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shaw, J. (2013). The Tale of Melusine in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: Retelling Medieval Stories. In: Shaw, J., Kelly, P., Semler, L.E. (eds) Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349958_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349958_17
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46820-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34995-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)