Love Relationships: a Comparison Between the Victorian and the Contemporary Couple in A.S Byatt's Possession

Love Relationships: a Comparison Between the Victorian and the Contemporary Couple in A.S Byatt’s Possession

Possession contains two love stories: a contemporary one and a Victorian one whose plots are interlaced, and not as its subtitle suggests a single one: “A Romance”. It is a novel about a pair of young scholars who trace the correspondence between two Victorian poets. The contemporary love story between Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey develops in parallel with and is intermingled with the story of the Victorian lovers, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, since the modern academics’ quest for knowledge of the past drives the modern romance. While the Victorian love affair is characterized by its passionate intensity, the other relation develops slowly compared to the customs of late twentieth century with its sexual freedom. Sexuality is another major concern treated in these relationships. In order to examine sexuality in this novel, it is necessary to analyse the relationships between the characters. Indeed, the sexual act is linked to romance. Byatt draws obvious parallels between the modern characters’ need to distance themselves from sexuality and Victorian repression of sexuality. This essay will thus show how love and sexuality are conceptualised, represented and dramatised in the Victorian and in the twentieth-century couple and society. Indeed, these two relationships escape from the norms of their respective epochs.

Ash and Ellen are a traditional Victorian couple. He is a typical nineteenth-century gentleman and she represents the “Angel in the House”, a retiring figure with no proper life of her own beside her diary. They appear to have had no luck with nature since they could not have children, but nobody imagines there could be another reason for it. They seem to fit the norms. However, in private, their couple is really different. Ellen actually never managed to have a sexual relationship with her husband. She simply could not bear it, since her, the sexual act is a brutal experience incompatible with marriage. And against all expectations, her husband understood her refusal by accepting “her love” (p.459). This acceptance of lack of sexual intimacy is really unusual in the nineteenth-century; it was a woman’s duty to make love with her husband even though she was not supposed to enjoy it. Most men probably expected their wives to do their duty, and would not endure any privation of that kind. Ash seems to live with it and feels tenderness, friendship, complicity and love for his wife. They remain married, but it should not be forgotten that at that time any other alternative would have been unacceptable in their society. Moreover, after his death many years later, Ellen Ash realizes that she had spent all her time and energy during her married life trying to compensate her husband for the lack of sex. She thinks even that “she became his slave” (p.459). Both the male and female characters suffer from their society's attitude toward sexuality.

On the contrary, Ash’s liaison with Christabel is characterised by their mutual satisfaction in love and in sexuality. Their relationship is not based on the constraints of marriage and society. Publicly, that is officially, this couple does not exist. They have no public relationship but just an encounter, the first time they met, when they exchanged a few words. Their relationship is not only private but also – and more importantly - transgressive. In this affair, we discover Ash’s modern and yet romantic personality: he praises Christabel’s poetry, recognizes her as a poet, congratulates her for her wit and skill and really shares his passion for Art with her. Thus, he is really modern because he recognizes women’s ability to write and have opinions, which was not usual at the time. Women were not supposed to write or express their ideas. Indeed, he says: “You are a Poet and in the end must care only for your own views” (p.165). Ash establishes a real complicity around Art: Christabel is his partner before she becomes his lover. Moreover, Ash, as a “devoted knight”, behaves really romantically. He wants her to wear a ring, symbol of their union (p.276) and he actually waits a long time again (like he did with his wife) before they make love. Ash is the ‘real’ poet, considering and praising Christabel as his muse. He really belongs to a romance story, unlike what appears in his public life.

Christabel LaMotte, on the other hand, is less romantic and does not behave like a Victorian woman-wife at all, and that is what Ash loves her for. She is not a woman who is easily seduced. On the contrary, first, she refuses this relationship because it goes against her convictions as a feminist: “I am threatened in that Autonomy for which I have so struggled” (p.170). This opposition seems not to be a conventional rejection of infidelity in Victorian society, but rather a conscious refusal of love and romance in support of a female domestic life with Blanche in which artistic creation is valorised. Nevertheless, little by little the poetess begins to trust Ash as a man that accepts her ideals, her not being conventional, so she can love him. Her first resistance and desire for solitude is overcome by his epistolary court. However, she will never love him like a Victorian woman will do, that is, she does not respect the Victorian code of submission, but, quite the opposite, behaves like her equal. This rebelliousness is illustrated in her behaviour during their first night together, when Ash invites her to go up first and “she stood looking at him, strained but mocking, and smiled. “If you wish”, she said, not submissively, not at all submissively, but with some amusement” (p.281; my italics). In this scene, Byatt stresses the non-submission of Christabel by repeating twice the negation of the adverb ‘submissively’. LaMotte is depicted as an unconventional Victorian woman, not only in her relation to men, but also in her sexuality. In her act of love, “she met him with passion, fierce as his own, […] with short animal cries” (p.283). In Victorian times, it was not obvious for a woman to feel desire and pleasure, whereas Christabel expresses them openly and intensely. Moreover, the fact that she is not a submissive woman is increased by her presence as the subject of the sentences describing their love act. She is involved actively in their relationship.

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In general, Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash represent a modern kind of couple, where both the man and the woman feel pleasure, where they are equals, and where love governs, not conventions like in most marriages of interest. As a matter of fact, this liaison, although totally sinful and outcast, paradoxically is the only “productive”, “fertile” relationship of the past-section of the book: both Ash’s and Christabel’s lives were sterile until they met and thanks to it, they gave a meaning to their lives and a child has come to life. Indeed, as Ellen understands it, “that other woman was in one sense his true wife. Mother, at least briefly, of his child, it seemed.” (p.460). Here Christabel can be identified as a Melusina figure: she gives Ash a posterity, although secret, but still a descendant. In other words, she succeeds where Ellen has failed. Thus, although forbidden by all the rules, this love has a positive consequence. In this relationship, they can really be themselves and Nature agrees with it since a child is born from it. The key of this “fulfilling relationship” resides in the fact that it remains absolutely secret. Christabel’s maternity does not stigmatise her as a Fallen Woman because nobody knows about it but her family that does not judge her. In this perspective, Christabel and her family are extremely modern: she keeps her child instead of abandoning it; she makes sure that her child has a happy life, sacrificing her maternity, so that both of them can escape shame. Ash and Christabel’s love relationship is thus definitely modern and in total contradiction with the rules of their time.

Another major concern in their relationship is the way they live their sexuality. Since the Victorians were not expected to discuss sexuality within the context of marriage, Byatt must locate Randolph Ash’s sexual encounter outside matrimony. Moreover, in deliberate contrast to Victorian conventions, Byatt describes sexual intimacy. Indeed, the sexual act between Christabel and Ash is depicted in details:

That was the first of those long strange nights. She met him with passion, fierce as is own, and knowing too, for she exacted her pleasure from him, opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries. She stroked his hair and kissed his blind eyes, but made not more specific move to pleasure him, the male – nor did she come to that, all those nights. […] ‘Don’t fight me,’ he said once, and ‘I must,’ said she, intent, and he thought, ‘No more speech’, and held her down and caressed her till she cried out . (283-4)

They succumb to their passion for each other and let the physical act of love guide them. The terms used in this passage highlight the intensity of Christabel’s pleasure, which is given much more importance in comparison to the male’s satisfaction. Indeed, she “made not more specific move to pleasure him”, what is a contradiction for a Victorian scene. In a society where women are normally submitted to men, Christabel’s rebellion reaches all fields even her sexuality. On another level, if we want to relate their passion to romance, their relationship can be defined as based on intellectual as well as physical pleasure. In Ash and Christabel’s love story, romance and sexuality exist together since the term ‘pleasure’ may also undermine physical pleasure and desire, whereas in the relation between Ash and Ellen, romance completely excludes sexuality.

By contrast to the secret and taboo sexuality with which the Victorian characters are confronted, the modern protagonists enjoy far greater sexual freedom. This liberty is due to both their society's tolerance and the fact that sex no longer leads unavoidably to childbirth. However, this greater freedom has not always resulted in greater happiness and in more fulfilling relationships. Actually, the two scholars Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey have had meaningless, unsatisfactory sexual relationships. Byatt shows Victorian characters unable to find happiness because their society seeks to maintain the institution of marriage at all cost. Love and sex are unacceptable outside of marriage. On the contrary, the twentieth-century characters are free to establish personal relationships on whatever basis they choose.

The relationship between Roland and Maud begins in a professional background. Their quest to discover the Victorian poets’ romance involves them little by little in their own romance. The evolution of their relation goes very slowly. It is only when they meet for the second time in the library at Seal Court, after the discovery of the “dolly” letters that the romantic potential of their collaboration appears. Indeed, in spite of a cold atmosphere and a frosty Maud, Roland feels that Maud has emitted an “electric shock” which has passed between her and him, when Maud emerges from the bathroom, all silky and wet (p.147). From this scene on, the two characters will change their behaviour towards each other but also towards themselves. If we analyse Maud’s development throughout the novel, we realize that she changes a lot. First, she is represented as “repressive and cold” (p.74). Then, she goes through a kind of transition, during which she is not sure whether she wants Roland to be with her, or whether she prefers to be alone. When Maud is back in Lincoln and Roland is with her because he has not returned to work with Blackadder or to see his girlfriend, the presence of Roland becomes problematic for her: “If he [goes] out of the room it [will] be grey and empty. If he [does] not go out, how [can] she concentrate?” (p.430). But at the end of the novel, she has overcome her original resistance and she has enough trust in Roland to tell him her very private thoughts. Maud gives up her strict and inflexible position, and she becomes open-minded for new experiences and for showing more femininity.

As far as Roland is concerned, this relation with Maud will also transform him. At the beginning, he has little self-confidence. He thinks of himself as an “application form, for a job, a degree, a life” (p.10) and “as a failure” (p.11). He has done what was expected of him and appears to have no personal desires and aims. This lack of self-confidence is increased by his physical appearance that underlines the anti-heroic image of him: “He was a small man, with very soft, startling black hair and regular features. Val called him a Mole, which he disliked. He had never told her so” (p.11). However, even if Roland seems to be paralysed in his personal choice of living, he is developing throughout the work or the cooperation with Maud. He progresses in emotional and professional respects. He finds a woman with whom he can live a deep and satisfying relation, much more than that between him and Val. At the end, he gets a better job and in this way he leaves his limitations and this new profession gives him and Maud the possibility to have a relation without overwhelming the other. To sum up, the progression of Maud and Roland’s affair is slower than the one between Ash and LaMotte, but they still manage to reach a kind of happiness at the end of the novel. The arrangement that Roland suggests is for him to take a job out of the country and leave Maud, at least part of the time, a solution to their common need for both independence and love.

Nevertheless, this arrangement is not so easy to find and Roland and Maud will have to face various problems before. Throughout the novel, the reader might think on various occasions that Maud and Roland will succumb to their desire for each other but each time, they retire. This abstinence is due to many different reasons. First, at the beginning, the two scholars are more worried about fulfilling their narrative curiosity than starting a love relationship. After finding out the letters of the two Victorian poets and making several links between their works, they are filled with enthusiasm over the possibility of a secret affair between these two writers. They are so obsessed to uncover this relationship that they do not pay attention to their own feelings. Secondly, they are afraid of romantic investment because of their previous relationships. On the one hand, Roland has experienced a closed and unpleasant relationship with the depressed and bad-tempered Val, from whom he is unable to free himself. On the other hand, Maud has lived a similarly turbulent affair with the attractive Fergus Wolff. She “had a bad time, with Fergus. [They] tormented each other” (p.270). The memory of this relation is illustrated in frequent flashbacks of a bed like “whipped-up dirty egg white”. Thirdly, as we have seen, Maud is very cold at the beginning, which will not help the insecure Roland to approach her. Indeed, she has problems with her personal integrity. She is afraid of opening up her private sphere to others. Moreover, Maud’s hair, which is most of the time covered, is a strong indicator for her fear of public judgements. She has to protect her privacy from the outside world, because only in doing that she can keep her autonomy but on the other hand, she wants to develop her emotional side. It seems as if she cannot resolve that problem on her own. Just like in a fairy tale, she needs a very special prince to save her. And that prince is Roland, because he will find a solution.

The first solution is that Roland and Maud find a mutual desire in the absence of desire. The shared image of a clean empty white bed demonstrates this well:

‘Sometimes I feel’, said Roland carefully, ‘that the best state is to be without desire. When I really look at myself –’ ‘If you have a self –’ ‘At my life, at the way it is – what I really want is to – to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. Some of that is to do with – my personal circumstances. But some of it's general. I think.’ ‘I know what you mean. No, that's a feeble thing to say. It's a much more powerful coincidence than that. That's what I think about, when I'm alone. How good it would be to have nothing. How good it would be to desire nothing. And the same image. An empty bed in an empty room. White.’ (p.267; my italics)

Here, for Roland living “without desire” is the ideal “state” in life. This lack of desire is pushed until nothingness. Indeed, he claims that what he “really want[s] is to have nothing”. This nothingness is increased by the motif of emptiness, which is highlighted by the frequent recurrence of the term ‘empty’ that appears five times in this passage. This shows Roland and Maud’s desire to be alone. Moreover, this solitude is linked to sexuality, since the words ‘bed’ and ‘room’ are also mentioned several times. What they privilege is the state of celibacy. They are both reluctant to any aspect of love, that is the physical act itself and romantic love. However, even in France, when they “had separate rooms – with the requisite white beds –”, their desire for solitude is not so clear. Actually, “there was no doubt that there was a marital, or honeymooning aspect to their lingering. Both of them were profoundly confused and very ambivalent about this. […] They had run away together, and were sharply aware of the usual connotations of this act” (p.421). Their romance will progress in spite of their inhibitions. They join each other in Maud’s white bed, where “they [touch] each other without comment and without progression” (p.423). This touching might involve that they will succumb to their desire, but in fact, “they felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins” (p.424). This is quite a paradoxical feeling, since even when they are very close to each other, they manage to keep their autonomy and seem distant. However, what they are living resembles the beginning of a love story and Roland is conscious of it: “He was in a romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously, a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him” (p.425).

Maud and Roland experiment their own developing relation. The love affair between Ash and Christabel will help them to deal with reality, thus the past affects the present. Despite their closeness, the novel depicts them as frightened of emotional attachment. However, the Victorian poets’ plot enables Roland and Maud finally to admit their love for each other. Maud is still fearful to begin a love affair but the story of the past has shown her the meaning that love gives to life. Moreover, throughout the novel their mutual desire increases. Already when they go to the Yorkshire seaside, Roland looks at Maud with desire. He describes her as “almost […] naked, like a denuded window-doll” (p.259). Later on, in another scene, Roland asks Maud to let her hair down and she does it. This act can be seen as having a sexual significance. Finally, in the last chapter, Roland and Maud consume their relationship. Incidentally, they begin a relationship based on love and not only on sexuality, like it is the case in their society. Their sexual encounter is a significant image of the novel:

‘Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I’d rather I didn’t.’ ‘I love you’, said Roland. […] And very slowly and the infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph. (p.506-7)

Here, Byatt offers a valorisation of the sexual act on its own terms. Maud and Roland have lost their shame and coldness to each other. They seem to be in perfect fusion, since “there seemed to be no boundaries”. Their intimacy and their relation have reached the climax point. They share a mutual satisfaction. Conversely, this scene is not only valorised, since Byatt ridicules their love behaviour, by making them use a clichéd vocabulary: “‘Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I’d rather I didn’t’”. Then, she makes a link with the past by introducing the Victorian concept of ‘possession’ which is related to sexuality and possessive love. We see this when Roland “took possession of all [Maud’s] white coolness”. The author puts together the Victorian past’s omission of sexual discourse with modern speech on sexuality only to undermine them both, since it is not logical to use the poor Victorian sexual vocabulary to describe sexuality in the twentieth-century, an age of sexual freedom.

In every epoch, love relationships reflect women’s conditions. The role of women is one of the major social concerns in Possession. Very few options are available to the female characters in the Victorian society, only some of them choose to live outside of those restrictions. Chirstabel is one of those women who defy all the conventions of the nineteenth century. Indeed, she is an outcast. Even if she appears to be a secluded poetess, she is actually a ‘real’ woman, a Fallen woman. The modern female characters, on the other hand, generally have far more choices than Victorian women. Byatt shows a curious parallel between modern women and their Victorian counterparts. Through Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey, she suggests that, while the Victorian woman was trapped by the notion that her proper place was only to raise children and nurture and support men, the modern woman may be equally trapped by the opposite notion, that she must live free of this female world. Maud represents a feminist woman, who gives priority to her work in her life. But she is not totally happy in this function. She is an important woman, but for this she hides her femininity and beauty, by concealing her long blond hair under a scarf. In other words, to become more important, the woman has to be more masculine. Maud is obviously an emancipated woman. This fact is demonstrated during the first contact between Maud and Roland: “She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag, which he refused to allow” (p.39). The fact that she tries to take his bag can be understood as a sign of the inversion of traditional gender roles. She is gentlemanlike and demonstrates to Roland her strength and her emancipation. Finally, although these two women are and live in a very different epoch, by the end of the novel they are able to free themselves and to establish relationships in which they are loved and their equality and individuality are acknowledged.

Both societies are opposed in their approach to sexuality. As we have seen, the Victorians considered sexuality as a taboo subject. It was seen as obvious and compulsory inside marriage but nobody could speak about it freely. On the contrary, this theme becomes in the twentieth-century a common subject of conversation. Roland and Maud speak about their generation and sex. They explain that sex is “everywhere” and that everyone knows a lot of theories about it, but in practice things are not so easy. Even if they know that they “are driven by desire”, they cannot see it as the Victorians did and they “never say the word Love” (p.267). The contemporary characters seem to miss the romantic aspect of relationships. Indeed, “they were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, ‘in love’, romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure” (p.423). As far as the two main couples of Possession are concerned, it can be noticed that both male characters escape from a typical relationship in their society. Actually, Ash had a marriage full of love with Ellen but deprived of sexuality. Conversely, Roland was sexually satisfied with Val but love was lacking in their couple. By beginning a new affair, both Ash and Roland will fulfil their respective lack finding a harmonious relationship with love and sexuality next to LaMotte and Maud. Other similarities between these two couples can be distinguished throughout the novel. Firstly, at the beginning both women are reticent to get involved in an emotional affair but little by little, they let themselves be seduced. Secondly, so as to make this coldness disappear, the lovers need to escape from their society. In fact, Ash and LaMotte travel to Yorkshire where their love can exist and the contemporary couple will do the same trip. Finally, these two relationships are not only balanced because of their harmony between sex and love, but also because man and woman share the same passion: Ash and LaMotte are fervent Victorian poets and Roland and Maud are passionate critics.

In conclusion, Byatt really turns all the expectations up side down. With Ash and Christabel, she criticizes the conventions that being so strict and counter-nature destroyed people’s life. These rules force society into hypocrisy because people then behave “normally” in public, but exteriorize themselves, their true nature and pulsions in private, hiding for fear of the condemnation they would suffer. With Roland and Maud, she also condemns the ideas of her own society about sexuality. She draws, thus, a comparison of the two epochs, analyzing both the problem of the nineteenth century and of the twentieth century. She also demonstrates how in all times women have fought against the rules of society. In the nineteenth century the lack of women’s freedom was a true difficulty for man-woman relationships. In the twentieth century, the extreme freedom in sexuality, the need for women to equal men is a new trouble for relationships. Thus, Byatt really proposes a serious analysis observing that there are problems in all societies and denouncing them.

Bibliography:

Byatt, A.S. Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage, 1990.