The Victorians Write Back

As one of the leading contemporary British writers, A.S. Byatt has demonstrated in her works a prevailing concern for Victorian history, traditions and the meanings people derive from it. Possession: A Romance, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, generally considered to be her masterpiece and the focus of critics'studies, is again partly set in the Victorian times. The previous studies have explored this novel from feministic and narratological perspectives, but few have been directed towards it as neo-Victorian fiction. This thesis, based on the present research of neo-Victorian fiction and Byatt's view of history and historicity, aims to explore Byatt's reconstruction of the Victorian past in Possession through textual analysis.The introduction briefly reviews the rising trend of neo-Victorian novels that has become increasingly visible in the past four decades, and discusses the importance to study Possession among this group. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments and suggests what this study might have contributed to our present experience.The main body of this thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One highlights Possession as a neo-Victorian novel by examining its impulses to revisit the Victorian past and what it has achieved through proper (re)reading of the past. In re-examining the past, the novel takes upon itself a task in retrieving what has been lost in or suppressed by history to make important revisions.Chapter Two and Chapter Three focus on how Byatt has honored the Victorian past through a celebration of the past life and a recreation of Victorian texts, how she has reinvented Victorian figures by rejecting common stereotypes of Victorian men and women and endowed them with enduring humanistic values such as love, passion, and creativity.In stressing the fact that our assumptions about the Victorian past are based on insufficient knowledge and faulty conclusions, Byatt demonstrates a yearning to recapture what she perceives as the vitality and assuredness of the Victorian past and its people.Chapter Four discusses how Possession presents the contemporary academic world as a foil to the more desirable past. The author makes parodies of a whole flock of scholars and theorists exhausted by modern and postmodern theories and discourses. Their lack of passion and intuitive faculties has rendered modern scholarship as exhausted and sterile as themselves. Through the presentation of these scholars frustrated and lost in the postmodern reality as compared with the stability and substantiality of the nineteenth-century life and its people, Byatt again pays her tribute to the Victorian past.In recapturing and reclaiming the past life and lives in Possession, Byatt pays her homage to the Victorian past. And this homage is both a quest for historical truth and concern for contemporary experience. To acknowledge our ties with the Victorian past and derive power from it can be a proper path that leads us out of the present predicament.