Past And Present: Possessing And Knowing

Antonia Susan Byatt's Possession won Britain's highest literary award, the Booker prize in 1990. Subtitled"A Romance,"it is in fact a novel far beyond merely a love story. With two love stories, one contemporary and one Victorian, whose plots are interwoven together as its main thread, it contains large numbers of poems, fairy tales, extracts from biography and literary criticism. Byatt makes use of various possible forms to write history which challenges the idea of a simple and unchangeable historical truth. The paper aims to expound the relationship between the past and the present. Byatt's historical consciousness is reflected in her juxtapositions of many plots displaying analogies between modern women and their ancient female counterparts, relations between the Victorian romance and the modern romance, relations between dead artists and modern scholars.The common hardship with which women of three different historical times are confronted is discussed in Chapter One. Byatt juxtaposes their stories in order to let us see clearly women's common dilemma when they are confronted with family and career, and how these women, from ancient time to the present, struggle to deal with this dilemma. Through rewriting many old tales and uniting the fragmental texts written by Victorian women, Byatt makes the female voices and their mind reappear in our present times. And this chapter makes clear how Byatt reinvests the old tales with contemporary significance.Chapter Two mainly clarifies how the Victorian past has an effect on the present and how the present mirrors the past. It is aimed to the problem of how men and women can live together in harmony. As Roland and Maud attempt to uncover the truth about the two Victorian poets, they learn important truths about themselves as well. Being enlightened by the past, both of them gain a new understanding of human relationship. This part also contains discussion about relationships beyond gender, including relationships between colleagues, between friends in the modern world.The historical past indeed guides the present characters. Yet Byatt makes it only available to readers outside the novel. Chapter three thus raises a question of whether a historical past is known or unknown to us, and discusses what the history means to the present and the future.