Recording Another Voice-Interpreting A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance From The Perspective Of Feminist Narratology

A. S. Byatt is one of the most famous and intellectual contemporary womennovelists. Many of her novels are learned ones, in which the subject matters are alwaysabout literary and academic activities and the characters are usually intellectuals.Meanwhile Byatt is an effective imitator of different styles and genres, and her worksalways contain a multitude of allusions. As a result, most of her works are rarely easyfor reading. For the width of the contents, the diversity of the characters and thecomplexity of the psychological situations, Byatt’s novels are unanimously consideredowning the magic power of enlightenment.The novel Possession, which is acknowledged to be Byatt’s most substantialachievement, proves to be a great masterpiece in contemporary literary history. Theprevious studies have explored this novel from feminist, archetypal, new historical andnarrative approaches, but few interpreted the text from the perspective of feministnarratology which combines the investigation of narrative form with gender politics,offering survey of the ideological meaning of surface narrative strategies. So it could betaken as a perspective as good as expected to interpret the novel Possession. The thesisattempts to make a study of the female narrative in Byatt’s Possession by means ofinterpreting the feminist implications of three narrative strategies: narrative voice,narrative time and narrative rhetoric, which challenges and deconstructs the westernpatriarchal narrative conventions with a view to expose the novelist’s implicit intentionof spotlighting and constructing the female narrative authority. Thus it could provide thereaders with a fresh interpretation and appreciation of the novel.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one provides an overview of A. S.Byatt’s life and her literary achievements; it gives a brief introduction of the story ofPossession, presenting the existing study on her works at home and broad and bringingforward the significance and necessity in carrying out the research. In Chapter two, thedevelopment and main points of feminist narratology is concisely expounded, since it isthe theoretical framework for the analysis. The third chapter focuses on how Byattadopts such narrative strategies as the personal voice and the communal voice to makefemale’s inner voice heard by the public, which is conductive to establish the femalenarrative authority. Through recording the authentic voices of the Victorian women whotell their personal stories by means of diary or letter, Byatt presents us a panoramic view of the female experience in a patriarchal society, especially their quest for autonomy andthe frustrated experience they suffer. In Victoria historical narrative level, Byatt createdfour vivid female characters: LaMotte, Sabine, Blanche and Ellen. Each character inturn utters the words on behalf of Victorian female group, and then different voicescombine to form polyphonic female communal voice. The little-known past events wererepresented through women’s own voice. Chapter four discusses how Byatt employs theexplicit repeating narrative and implicit repeating narrative pattern to subvert thepatriarchal discourse hegemony. The narrative temporality of the novel is cyclical withthe past and present integrated with each other, which deconstructs the linearity ofmasculine narrative. The explicit repeating narrative is displayed by a variety ofsymbols and images that appear throughout the novel. Depicting the cycling female fateembedded in the novel could be regarded as an implicit repeating narrative. ChapterFive analyzes Byatt’s parody of the classical myths and fairy tales from the femaleperspective to expose the oppression of the female vitality and the distortion of thefemale image and highlight the marginalized feminine presence and experience. Theparody of the myth and the fairy tale plays a very important role in reshaping genderstereotype through comparing the differences between the original version and theadaptation. Chapter Six is the conclusion part, which summarizes the previous chapters.