How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
Later, Maud stood in there, turning her long body under the hot hiss of the shower. Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of Fergus Wolff, this empty battlefield was what she saw. […] Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. (4.163)
Throughout Possession, whenever Maud thinks of her brief affair with Fergus, she gets disgusted by this image of the rumpled "battlefield" bed. For her, it represents so much of what she fears in romantic love: disorderliness, chaos, and lack of self-possession and control.
Quote #2
We may imagine her sitting there, smiling demurely under her bonnet, holding her skirts away from the wet, whilst Randolph contemplated his possession, so unlike Petrarch's, of the lady he had worshipped from afar, through so many hindrances and difficulties, for almost as long as the earlier poet's sixteen-year sojourn of hopeless devotion in this very spot. (6.43)
It should come as no surprise that this passage is an excerpt from Mortimer Cropper's biography of Randolph Henry Ash. Cropper—the "great collector"—sees no problem with thinking of Ellen Ash as her husband's "possession," and in this passage he represents her as an object that Randolph acquired after years of patient waiting.
Quote #3
'I was thinking last night—about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. […] We know we are driven by desire, but we can't see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we—we know it's a suspect ideological construct—especially Romantic Love—so we have to make a real effort of the imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things—Love—themselves—that what they did mattered—' (14.23)
As Maud and Roland tour North Yorkshire together, following in the long-vanished footsteps of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, Possession prompts us to think about the ways in which romantic love has been imagined and understood throughout history. As Maud and Roland realize, "Love" meant something very different to Christabel and Randolph from what it does to them. But here's the million-dollar question: which couple does Possession's narrator think is closer to the mark? Or is it also possible that each couple feels the same thing, but they have different ways of talking about it?
Quote #4
He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her that she was free, he would see her flash her wings. (15.36)
On the first evening of their trip to North Yorkshire, Randolph Henry Ash imagines that Christabel LaMotte is looking at him like a captive bird. Unlike Mortimer Cropper, Randolph doesn't think of love as a form of possession: he values Christabel in freedom, not in captivity.
Quote #5
He thought of the Princess on her glass hill, of Maud's faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. In the real world—that was, for one should not privilege one world above another, in the social world to which they both must return from these white nights and sunny days—there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. (23.65)
It might come as some surprise to us as readers that Roland thinks in terms of "possessing" Maud as a lover. Among other things, this characteristic sets him apart from Randolph Henry Ash, who makes a conscious effort to convince Christabel LaMotte that he doesn't want to possess her.
Quote #6
He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously, a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another. (23.66)
When the novel speaks of Roland being in both a "vulgar" and a "high" Romance, it's pointing to the difference between the intensely idealistic conventions that we see in the romance of, say, Aragorn and Arwen in the The Lord of the Rings and the more sensational narratives that drive rom-coms like Bridget Jones's Diary.
Quote #7
For the last year perhaps I have been in love with another woman. I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding. At first it was only letters—and then—in Yorkshire—I was not alone.
When Randolph Henry Ash tells his wife, Ellen Ash, about his affair with Christabel LaMotte, he speaks of his love for Christabel as a kind of demonic possession. Luckily for us, it didn't involve any pea soup explosions or terrifying crab-walks down the stairs. But the point is that it is something inexplicable, at least partly beyond human control.
Quote #8
I have been so angry for so long—with all of us, with you, with Blanche, with my poor self. And now near the end 'in calm state of mind all passion spent' I think of you again with clear love. I have been reading Samson Agonistes and came upon the dragon I always thought you were—as I was the 'tame villatic fowl'—
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame
And as an evening dragon came
Assailant on the perched roosts
And rusts in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl—Is not that fine? Did we not—did you not flame, and I catch fire? Shall we survive and rise from our ashes? Like Milton's Phoenix? (28.118-20)
In her final letter to Randolph Henry Ash, Christabel LaMotte describes the two of them as having been consumed and burned up in the fire of their love. What do you think, Shmoopers? Did their brief affair produce a phoenix in the end, or not?
Quote #9
When I feel—anything—I go cold all over. I freeze. I can't—speak out. I'm—I'm—not good at relationships. […] I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doing my work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand? (28.168-77)
In their final scene together Maud Bailey tells Roland Mitchell why she shies away from romantic relationships. Like Christabel LaMotte, Maud is worried about losing her "self-possession," and about being perceived as someone else's "possession" instead.
Quote #10
In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful. (28.202)
Like Christabel LaMotte before her, Maud Bailey puts aside her fears of losing her autonomy and gives in to her desire to be with the man she loves. Christabel's choice resulted in death and some degree of unhappiness, but it also produced new life. What'll become of Maud and Roland?