How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
This Peeping Tom has put his eye to the nick or cranny in our walls and peers shamelessly in. She laughs and says he means no harm, and is incapable of seeing the essential things we know and keep safe, and so it is, so it must be, so it must always be. But it amuses her to hear him lolloping and panting round our solid walls, she thinks he will always be Tame, as he is now. (4.73)
This excerpt from Blanche Glover's journal is like all of her journal entries: so intensely metaphoric that it's difficult to know just how she understood her relationship with Christabel LaMotte. What exactly are the "essential things" that Blanche and Christabel "know and keep safe"?
Quote #2
She came in to me as I knelt there and raised me up, and said we must never quarrel and that she would never, ever, give me cause to doubt her, and I must not suppose she could. I am sure she meant what she said. She was agitated; there were a few tears. We were quiet together, in our special ways, for a long time. (4.73)
This is another excerpt from Blanche Glover's journal, and one that leaves us with just as many questions as the last one we saw. What exactly were Blanche and Christabel's "special ways" of being quiet together? Were they romantically intimate or not?
Quote #3
He opened his locked case, putting away Randolph Ash's letters to his godchild, or anyway the stolen images, and drew out those other photographs of which he had a large and varied collection—as far as it was possible to vary, in flesh or tone or angle or close detail, so essentially simple an activity, a preoccupation. He had his own ways of sublimation. (6.51)
For some characters in Possession,sexual desires and orientations are basic tools of characterization. Mortimer Cropper is one of those characters. In keeping with the rest of his personality, his sexuality is represented as an obsession with "collecting."
Quote #4
Those girls in the 1950s and 1960s had thought of her as motherly. Later generations had assumed she was lesbian, even, ideologically, that she was a repressed and unregenerate lesbian. (7.12)
One of the fascinating things about this passage is the way it captures the historical and cultural changes that prompt Beatrice's students to interpret her character—and her sexuality—in vastly different ways.
Quote #5
In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. […] She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one's eye. (7.12)
Although Possession's narrator doesn't say so explicitly, Beatrice Nest seems to have been celibate all her life—in part because of the discomfort that she feels in her own body, and in part because she's never found the kind of ideal relationship she's always dreamed of having. This celibacy is one of the characteristics that connects her to Ellen Ash.
Quote #6
They undressed and cuddled together for cold comfort. At first Roland thought it was not going to work after all. There are certain things that cannot be done only on will power. […] He lit on an image, a woman in a library, a woman not naked but voluminously clothed, concealed in rustling silk and petticoats, fingers folded over the place where the tight black silk bodice met the springing skirts, a woman whose face was sweet and sad, a stiff bonnet framing loops of thick hair. (7.114)
This passage is a curious one, and it raises some fascinating questions about Roland Mitchell's sexual desires and needs. Why is it that this fantasy of Ellen Ash, "voluminously clothed" in a library, turns him on in a moment when nothing else will?
Quote #7
He stood sponge in hand, and puzzled over her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought about it with determination, interesting too. He could never ask. To show speculation, or even curiosity, would be to lose her. Then and there. He knew that, without thinking. (15.87)
This passage gives us strong reason to believe that Randolph Henry Ash suspected that Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover were lovers. Slowly but surely, the novel seems to be confirming the beliefs of the twentieth-century scholars who believe that the two women lived together romantically.
Quote #8
'Touché. I do go on. But that suits you fine, you're all uptight about your own sexuality. You were hurt by that bastard, Fergus Wolff, but you shouldn't have gotten so annihilated, it's letting the side down. You should branch out. Try other sweet things.'
'You mean women. Just at the moment, I'm trying celibacy. I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.' (17.59-60)
Although Maud Bailey, like Roland Mitchell, is attracted by the idea of being celibate, in the end the novel brings the two of them together. Why?
Quote #9
I asked her about the curious name of Dog Tray and she began to tell me that he had been named as a joke, for a line in Wm Shakespeare's King Lear—'The little dogs and all—Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see they bark at me.' She said, 'He used to live in a house where there was a Blanche and where I was jokingly called Sweetheart'—and then she turned her face away and would say no more, as though she choked. (19.131)
This excerpt from Sabine de Kercoz's journal gives us another clue into the domestic life of Blanche Glover and Christabel LaMotte, but it leaves us with questions, too. Was Christabel actually called "sweetheart" jokingly, as she says, or was that one of Blanche's genuine terms of endearment for her?
Quote #10
The nightdress embroidered for these nights, white cambric, all spattered with lovers' knots and forget-me-nots and roses, white on white.
A thin white animal, herself, trembling.
A complex thing, the naked male, curly hairs and shining wet, at once bovine and dolphin-like, its scent feral and overwhelming.
A large hand, held out in kindness, not once, but many times, slapped away, pushed away, slapped away. (25.162-66)
As Ellen Ash remembers her honeymoon, she (or the novel's narrator) reflects that "[a] young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait for marriage until she is thirty-six and her flowering long over" (25.181). What should we readers take from this? Is Possession suggesting that Ellen's visceral fear of sex with Randolph Henry Ash was the result of being made to wait too long? If so, does this shut down other possible interpretations of her sexuality and sexual identity?