The Muses In Confinement A Feminist Study Of Possession By A. S . Byatt

A. S. Byatt, as one of the most famous contemporary novelists in Britain, is regarded as the most consciously intellectual woman writer since George Eliot and her erudition is equaled by her deep understanding of human passion. As a feminist writer, she is deeply concerned about women's existential situation in the modern society, especially the pressure and predicament that intellectual women have been suffering in career and marriage.Possession, Byatt's fifth novel, is acknowledged to be her most impressive achievement, which was published in 1990 and won that year's Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain's highest literary award. In this novel, with her amazing mastery of literary language and techniques, Byatt truthfully yet vividly presents the unique female experience of talented female intellectuals being confined at the margin of the society throughout the history—from the fairy deity-roaming primordial time to the repressing Victorian Age, then to the modern industrial era, by adding a variety of wonderfully fabricated fairy tales, myths, Victorian poetry and correspondence to the story-telling.Byatt uses a lot of symbolic images that are associated with women's life in various forms of physical and psychological confinement in the patriarchal society, to reveal that the living condition of women is harsh, and under male oppression, they tend to exhibit a paradoxical desire for freedom and enclosure. In the novel, the major female characters, no matter in fairy tales or in reality, invariably choose to live in confinement. For them, an enclosed private place can be a refuge from the hostile outside world, where they enjoy self-autonomy and the freedom to pursue artistic dreams. However, such physical confinement, though seemingly protective, in fact greatly restrains women's true self-fulfillment.This thesis mainly focuses on the analysis of the life and plights of the intellectual female characters in Possession and the exploration into the author's insightful feminist propositions, in order to gain a better understanding of women's existential situation and further think about the possibility of women's total emancipation.