MARKING GRID FOR LITERATURE & CULTURE ESSAYS ON THE

BA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE & CULTURE AT UTRECHT UNIVERSITY

To be completed by student and stapled, this side up, to the front of the essay:

Name Annemiek Blaauwgeers

Student number 5519950

Address Fregatstraat 157, 3534RD Utrecht

Essay title A.S. Byatt’s Possession Not Just Possessed

The Importance and Different Usages of the Word ‘Possession’
Word count 804
(excl. quotations)
Course The Writers’ Lab

Date 25 October 2015

Signature*

*signifying you have read & understood the plagiarism declaration overleaf.

To be completed by examiner (name):

Category [ Code] Description Comments (if appropriate) Mark

Content quality, argumentation,
(60%) scope & reading, response x6=
to assignment, elegance
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(10%) main claim & topic
sentences, cohesion
[ MLA ] parenthetical references
(10%) works cited, layout &
word count
[G] grammatical accuracy &
(10%) use of complex structures
[RSVP] register, repetition &
(10%) redundancy,
spelling, vocabulary &
punctuation
Final Mark

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in the appropriate Blackboard folder. If you have questions, make an appointment with the
examiner & bring with you both the version you handed in & the corrected version.
 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY STATEMENT

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 Blaauwgeers 1

Annemiek Blaauwgeers

5519950

Fregatstraat 157, 3534 RD Utrecht

The Writers’ Lab

British English

25 October 2015

804 Words

A.S. Byatt’s Possession Not Just Possessed

the Importance and Different Usages of the Word ‘Possession’

“I don’t know why I feel so possessive about the damned things” (A.S. Byatt 91), are the

words Roland sighs when he realizes how obsessed he has become with the letters

written by Ash, and he is not the only one, nor is it the only thing he is possessed by.

Love, the past, different objects and their careers are all holding the main characters of

A.S. Byatt’s Possession in their grasp. It drives them forward, influences their decisions

and makes up the flow of the story. Aside from being the title, the word possession recurs

often in Possession and has many different usages which are important for the story.

From all these different usages, three are the most prominent and could be considered the

most important for the novel: materialistic possessions, being possessed by love and

being possessed by one’s career and the past.

The most obvious and important usage of ‘possession’ is the possession of materials.

Similar to how “the tricksy hero Herakles / Came to his dispossession and the theft” (Byatt 3)

of the golden fruit in Ash’s The Garden of Proserpina, Roland steals the drafts of Ash’s
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letters to Christabel, which is the beginning of his and Maud’s quest for knowledge. The

letters between the two Victorian poets are the central point of the story, as the main modern

characters are possessed by the contents of the letters while vying to possess them. Roland

and Maud, for example, are both deeply possessed by the answers the letters hold about Ash

and Christabel’s relationship, whereas Cropper merely wants to possess these relics of the

past which once belonged to the man he greatly admires. Aside from the letters many other

materialistic possessions are important for the story, another being, for example, the jet hair

brooch of Maud which she inherited from Christabel. It is only because of these materials the

truth about Ash and Christabel’s secret relationship finds the light and the fight to possess

these materials brings tension to the story. Thus materialistic possession is one of the most

important usages of the word ‘possession.’

Another reading of ‘possession’ which plays a big part in the novel is being possessed

by love. It is love which drives Ash to cheat on his wife, it is love which finally convinces

Christabel to leave her refuge, and while discovering and studying this love Roland and Maud

fall under the other’s spell themselves. Ash describes his love for Christabel as “a sort of

madness. A possession, as by daemons” (Byatt 453) to his wife Ellen, while Christabel tries to

resist this mad love initially. This rejection of falling in love with another is an important

aspect of this usage of ‘possession,’ as it is an essential part of both Christabel and Maud’s

personalities. The two female protagonists deflect the love of Ash and Roland at first because

they fear the loss of autonomy which comes with tying yourself to a man. They value first and

foremost their self-possession, detest the confining social roles of women and dislike the idea

of being possessed by a man. Contrary to Ash, Maud says “love is terrible, it is a wrecker”

(Byatt 507). Because it drives and defines both the Victorian and modern main characters,

being possessed by love or rejecting this possession is an important usage of ‘possession’ for

the novel.
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While self-possession is important for Maud, it is her career she values even more. All

the modern main characters are possessed by their careers, and all being scholars studying the

lives of past poets and writers, the past is what drives them the most. As Cropper says in his

fictional autobiography: “my passion was for the past / the dead man had touched me from the

past” (Byatt 101, 103), the dead man referring to Ash. It is because he and Roland are

possessed by knowing all about this man from the past they are so interested in the letters

written by him. They both want to expand their collection of the relics he left behind, just as

Maud is obsessed by Christabel LaMotte’s life. On their quest, Roland and Maud are not only

deciphering the past, but also retracing it and following in the dead poets’ footsteps. However,

because Roland is completely possessed by his career and a past man’s life, he gradually loses

Val. This shows this possession by their careers and the past is the cause of many twists in

the novel, but more importantly, without this obsession Roland and Maud would not have

embarked upon their quest or fallen in love, thus making this usage of ‘possession’ essential

for the novel too.

The three most important usages of ‘possession’ used in A.S. Byatt’s Possession are

the materialistic possessions, mainly the letters between Ash and Christabel, being possessed

by love, which drives the characters to do or not do certain things, and being possessed by

one’s career and the past, which sets in motion the main storyline. There are many more

different readings and usages of ‘possession,’ but it are these three which truly make up the

story of Possession.
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Works Cited

Adams, Ann Marie. “Dead Authors, Born Readers, and Defunct Critics: Investigating

Ambiguous Critical Identities in A. S. Byatt’s Possession.” The Journal of the

Midwest Modern Language Association 36.1 (2003): 107-124. Web. 13 Sept. 2015

Byatt, A.S. Possession. London: Vintage, 1991. Print.

Heilman, Robert B. “A. S. Byatt’s Possession Observed.” The Sewanee Review 103.4

(1995): 605-612. Web. 12 Sept. 2015

Hennelly, Mark M. Jr. ““Repeating Patterns” and Textual Pleasures: Reading (In) A. S.

Byatt’s Possession: A Romance.” Contemporary Literature 44.3 (2003): 442-471.

Web. 13 Sept. 2015

Shinn, Thelma J. ““What’s in a word?” Possessing A.S. Byatt’s meronymic novel.” Papers

on

Language & Literature 31.2 (1995): 164-172. Web. 27 Sept. 2015