Reconstruction Of Female History

A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt , one of England's foremost writers, is a distinguished critic as well as a novelist with an international reputation. She is commented as one of the most ambitious and intellectual of contemporary novelists. Her most successful book, Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the U.K.'s highest literary award, and continues to enjoy enormous critical and popular success, and has been called "the most dazzling novel of the year" by U.S.A.Today, and "an ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel" by Publishers Weekly.This novel is a multifaceted narrative, illustrating a variety of themes and perceptions of the human life, among which the feminist consciousness is the most prominent one. As a modern feminist and writer, Byatt is greatly concerned with the female existence, actively advocates the improvement of women's lives. She always sets the present in the past in her novels, aiming at a two – way communication of novel and history in order to find a historical formula for the contemporary situation. So Byatt shows an intensely historical concern for the female existence and tradition in Possession, using a multiple narrative strategy to construct the novel on a grand scale, unfolding a picture of females' existence from ancient to the present. Then how does Byatt illustrate her feminist perceptions in the novel? This paper attempts to approach this question from the perspective of female history, showing how Byatt unifies women's fragmented experiences of different ages and reconstructs female history, in order to form a more comprehensive and profound understanding of the rich feminist indication in the novel. Since female characters are at the center of this novel, it's necessary that we make a thorough analysis of their experience in order to show what their existence is like and what predicaments they are confronted in their search for identity and freedom. Therefore, the paper begins with an examination of the existential condition of the female characters in the novel. Analysis is given to the affluent images Byatt uses alluding to female existence, to show the paradoxical situation of women living in the patriarchal society. In Possession, Byatt effectively draws on the traditional images of enclosed space in women writings, and develops them to the full both in revealing women's living circumstances and their conflicting desires for enclosure and freedom, thus constructs a major conflict between men and women. Women both in myth and real life have chosen enclosed space to protect themselves from the hostile outside world and enjoy a relative autonomy and freedom. While in pursuit of their ambition, they have suffered severe pain brought about by their conflicting desires. In addition, Byatt also uses the images of iciness, such as snow, icy water and glass etc, to symbolize the tough condition of female living as "the marginalized" in the patriarchal society. Women choose to live in the enclosed and frozen places as a way of preserving their dignity and life, yet this paradox of life badly restricts their development. Then what caused women's underprivileged position? What injustice have women encountered in history? I have probed into the causes of women's harsh existence, and the author's purpose to intertwine into her narrative so many seemingly fragmented inter-texts in the second chapter. This chapter focuses on the unique narrative technique of Possession in deconstructing the Western patriarchal narrative tradition through hypertexts, and in revealing the historical truth of female life through female perspective and voice. In part one, by analyzing the rewritten myths and fairy tales, especially the archetypal figure Melusina and her variants in myths and fairytales, we come to realize that since the beginning of the patriarchy, women have been traditionally distorted in the male-centered culture. Women have been defined solely by the male perspective and discourse, shaped by the patriarchal ideology, and almos...