How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
Poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking up every recipe for gooseberry gam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no one wanted self-denial and dedication anymore, they wanted proof that Ellen was raging with rebellion and pain and untapped talent. Poor Beatrice. One publication to her name, and a slim book called Helpmeets without irony doesn't go down well with today's feminists. (3.42)
Among other things, Possession is a comedic critique of academic politics and fashions in the 1980s. Although James Blackadder's perspective on feminist scholarship is biased, his words help us to imagine some of the issues surrounding women's scholarship during second-wave feminism.
Quote #2
Thirty years later the feminists saw Christabel LaMotte as distraught and enraged. They wrote on 'Ariachne's Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.' Or 'Melusina and the Daemonic Double: Good Mother, Bad Serpent.' 'A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte's Ambivalent Domesticity.' 'White Gloves: Blanche Glover: occluded Lesbian sexuality in LaMotte.' (4.9)
Like many other passages in Possession, this one emphasizes how our present-day politics and ideologies help to shape our perceptions and interpretations of the past. As the novel goes on to suggest, its twentieth-century feminist scholars get a lot of things right about Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover, but they also get a few things really wrong.
Quote #3
If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will. (4.31)
Given what we know about Christabel LaMotte by the end of the novel, how might we interpret these words of hers, written to one of her nieces in a letter? Why would she advise against "morbid Self-examination" in women?
Quote #4
They sat down at a low table in the corner, under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service—'A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first'—and a Feminist Revue: Come and see the Sorcieres, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae. We'll make your blood run cold and make you laugh on the Sinister side of your face at Women's Wit and Wickedness. (4.85)
Possession is set during the heady years of second-wave feminism, and this passage—which is set in the Women's Studies Centre at Lincoln University—really helps to bring the period to life.
Quote #5
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows, 'This is I.' An ugly woman knows, with equal certainty, 'This is not I.' Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing. (4.164)
For Maud, her overt physical beauty is a source of discomfort, and it also misrepresents her inner self as she sees it. Thanks to it, she feels she needs to guard against being seen, and treated as, an object to be possessed.
Quote #6
The feminists had divined that, who once, when she rose to speak at a meeting, had hissed and cat-called, assuming her crowning glory to be the seductive and marketable product of an inhumanely tested bottle. (4.164)
Here, Possession offers a not-so-subtle critique of prejudice within second-wave feminism. Although the novel on the whole is sympathetic to the movement, or at least to feminism in general if not to second-wave feminism specifically, its narrator doesn't hesitate to criticize where criticism is due.
Quote #7
Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognizing its genius, because it makes no concession to the vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader's sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. (7.68)
Ellen Ash's review of Christabel LaMotte's epic poem The Fairy Melusine gives us a window into the public reception that a woman writer like LaMotte could have expected in the nineteenth century. As Ellen's words make clear, the "force and vigour" of LaMotte's writing would have been considered unusual—maybe even unnatural—for a woman.
Quote #8
Here is a Riddle, Sir, and old Riddle, an easy Riddle—hardly worth your thinking about—a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight—see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind's fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its own crystalline casket, a casket translucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it […].(8.45)
In one of her early letters to Randolph Henry Ash, Christabel LaMotte uses this metaphoric riddle (the answer is "an egg") to describe her solitude. As she tells him, her seclusion is necessary for her artistic and intellectual freedom. If it's cracked or intruded upon, it will, like an egg, be ruined.
Quote #9
We were to Renounce. Not the lives that then encompassed us—cramped Daughterly Devotion to a worldly mother—nor the genteel Slavery of governessing—those were no loss—those were gleefully fled and opposition staunchly met. But we were to renounce the outside World—and the usual female Hopes (and with them the usual Female Fears) in exchange for—dare I say Art—a daily duty of crafting—from exquisite curtains to Mystical Paintings, from biscuits with sugar roses to the Epic of Melusina. (15.154)
In a much later letter to Randolph Henry Ash—written once she begins to feel that their correspondence is crossing the line from friendship into something more dangerous—Christabel LaMotte expands on her early riddle of the egg, and explains exactly what she and Blanche Glover were trying to achieve in their shared solitude.
Quote #10
I have tried, initially with MISS LAMOTTE, and also alone in this little house, to live according to certain beliefs about the possibility, for independent single women, of living useful and fully human lives, in each other's company, and without recourse to help from the outside world, or men. We believed it was possible to live frugally, charitably, philosophically, artistically, and in harmony with each other and Nature. Regrettably, it was not. (18.4)
Blanche Glover's tragic suicide note helps to complete our picture of the vision that she and Christabel LaMotte shared. Christabel wasn't wrong about the risks of cracking their carefully constructed "egg."