A Study Of Women's Individual Space In A.S. Byatt's Possession

A. S. Byatt is still active in contemporary British literature arena as a distinguished female novelist, scholar and respected critic as well. She has a good reputation for creating profound and complicated tomes with superb talent. Possession: A Romance, which won the Booker Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1990, is her representative book and establishes her firm status in British literature. Most of the existing researches at home and abroad focus on various perspectives such as archetypal criticism, intertextuality, the myth and repeating mode of the novel, artistic feature of postmodernism, history, Byatt's critical thinking and its application to her works etc. Some comments interpret the text simply from the perspective of feminism to celebrate the great power of women or reveal the living dilemma of women.In the light of space theory promoted by the human geographer Kelleman, this thesis explores the three different individual spaces of three woman characters separately. Individual space is divided into macrospace, mesospace and microspace by Kelleman. Macrospace refers to the human activities in social life. Mesospace refers to the place where one lives with others like family members and neighbors. Microspace is in a sense of psychology and consciousness. Research on Possession from the perspective of space will help us fully understand the author's love view and female consciousness.To begin with, the confined individual space of the three women who live in different times is represented in the first chapter. The three women belong to three different spaces resulting from different historical background and different characters, but they are facing the same limitation of their individual space. Then, because of this limitation, they spare no efforts to enlarge the confined space and to search for self. They adopt different ways to achieve this goal, the ways such as maintaining absolutely independent spirit, turning to sisterhood, feminine writing or cooperating with men etc. Afterwards, different destinies of the three women are compared in chapter three. Thus space plays a double role to each female character and we draw a conclusion that Byatt has her particular feminist thought. She holds a dialectical attitude towards females'independent space which is a self-protective house as well as a self-detained chain for woman. Therefore females should actively carry out dialogues and cooperation with males while they are in the journey on searching for independence and self identity. This dialectical thinking of Byatt deconstructs the stereotype of binary opposition, advocating a harmonious relationship between women and men.