In Search Of The Lost Goddess

A.S. Byatt, one of the distinguished contemporary women writers, is an academic critic as well as a novelist with an international reputation. Possession: A Romance, which is acknowledged to be the most impressive achievement of Byatt, was published in 1990 and won that year's Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain's highest literary award. This novel tells of how two contemporary literary scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, unwittingly stumble upon evidence that links two Victorian poets in a passionate love affair, and in the process of unearthing the mysteries, how they get to know each other and ultimately fall in love. In Possession, Byatt creatively reworks multitude of old legends, myths, and fairy tales, presents a vivid and fantastic ancient world, and by using these archetypes in Victorian and modern stories, she has successfully applied the theory of feminist myth criticism to organizing and portraying the characters and theme of the novel.Possession is an attractive and complicated fiction including poems, letters, and journals within the narrative construct as well as allusions to art, philosophy, religion, and literary theory. By utilizing a number of voices and genres, Byatt scrutinizes the nature of love and desire, and advocates the importance and necessity of studying the past for the present people, especially for the female, for looking into the past and recovering the power of the lost"Goddess"is a kind of root-seeking for women.In terms of the themes, styles, literary genres and writing techniques the novel has involved, quite a lot of critics and scholars have made comparatively thorough and in-depth researches, but no one has really interpreted the novel in the perspective of feminist myth criticism theory, and studied almost all the female characters in light of the modern Goddess-rebirth movement. This paper is intended to systematically analyze the particular archetypes and images appearing in different temporal layers of the text on the basis of the feminist myth criticism theory and connecting it with the modern Goddess-rebirth movement so as to have a better understanding of Byatt's writing purpose and her unique and insightful contemplation upon history, society, love and marriage.The paper begins with a brief introduction to the author A.S. Byatt, including her life experience, her major works and the people who have great influence upon her writing. In addition, this chapter also involves an introduction to the novel Possession, and summarizes literary review on Possession from both home and abroad. The second chapter is an introduction of the theory of feminist myth criticism and the modern Goddess-rebirth movement. The third chapter is intended to concentrate on the analysis of the mythical stories and archetypes in the novel, which come from the French, Roman, Greek and Norse myths or legends. The emphasis in this chapter will be put on the introduction and analysis of the story of Demeter and Proserpina, the myth of the fairy Melusina, and that of the Lady of Shallot and The City of Is. The sources and the stories of the myths will be introduced in this chapter.The fourth chapter is the most important part of the thesis which explains how the archetypes of those mythical stories are employed in the novel Possession. The character archetype follows a falling type revolution according to Frye's theory. In this part, three parallel sets of female characters will be studied, especially the mythical character Melusina, the Victorian poetess LaMotte and the modern female scholar Maud, whose stories typically represent women's social lives of different ages. And also in analyzing other female characters'respective story, the female's existence of being suppressed and distorted in the male-dominated society, and their dilemma of enclosed space, their conflict of love and career, will be explored. In explaining the specific archetype in the novel, Byatt's creative use of images and symbols, such as glass, water and color will be further analyzed, thus we can see the ways Byatt uses to connect women in general and the three heroines in particular, to unify women's awareness and experience as a collective one.Chapter five will discuss the recovering of the power of the Goddess. Byatt's female characters, both Victorian and modern, are closely connected in their attitude towards writing, by which Byatt retrieves the long lost female voice as an integral part to tell the whole truth, and in this way reconstructs the female narrative tradition. With Maud's root seeking, the three women Melusina, LaMotte and Maud in three periods of history are connected and proved to be of the same origin. In the process of finding the lost Goddess, women finally find a source of immeasurable feminine power, with which they learn to recognize the capability and power they possess.Chapter six is the conclusion. First, it summarizes the previous chapters, and analyzes that by applying the theory of feminist myth criticism, Byatt shows her deep concerns over women's existential situation and the awakening of women's subjective consciousness through shaping the images of women. Finally, by digging out and evaluating Byatt's distinctive feminist views presented in the novel, we are able to have a better insight into her unique thinking about history, society, love and marriage.