A Study Of A.S.Byatt’s Possession In The Perspective Of Empathy

As an erudite and prolific novelist,biographer,critic,A·S· Byatt has authored ten novels,five short story collections,several essays and biographies.The Booker-prize winning novel Possession: A Romance published in 1990 established Byatt’s position of a preeminent novelist in British literatus.Like her previous fictions,Possession continues her obsessions with history,literatus and intellectuals’ mental states.It is worth noting that Byatt hails emotional connection as well as intellectual affinity,and affection rather than rationality,as essential to the establishment of rewarding intersubjective relationships and the access to knowledge of historical truths.Empathy,the core of morality and humanity,is the essential human capacity that renders possible altruism and reciprocal benefaction.Derived from the German word Einfühlung("feeling into"),empathy has been defined as the process to stand in another’s shoes,look from the other’s perspective to understand,feel and identify(if only temporarily)with this person.Modern studies on empathy are abundant.The importance of empathy in intersubjective relationships and social morality has been deeply probed into,and empathic reading into literature has also been extensively exercised: a major approach is to explore authorial strategies and readers’ dispositions of narrative empathy.This thesis studies Possession: A Romance in the light of the current theories of empathy and practices of empathetic reading,focusing on empathic behavior in gender relationship,historical retrospection and the novel-reading process.The “romance” not only imaginatively captures passionate love based on emotional and intellectual empathy but also represents estranged relationships caused by deficit empathy leading to erosion of tolerance and mutual understanding which,in turn,results in irreconcilable contradictions and gradually destroys relationships.This thesis takes three alienated couples for example to examine how respective barriers to empathy--self-imposed isolation,divergent values and gender opposition--lead to respective irreversible situations of estrangement,the final points of no return.This paper also explores the intellectual reward of empathy by examining how the author’s juxtaposition of present and past induces,in both the characters and the reader,reflection on text,literary criticism,and the pursuit of historical truth.Suffering from empathetic deficiency,the other modern scholars are “possessed” by dominant discourses and consequently miss the opportunity of securing the precious “possession” and the historical truth the “possession” possesses.In contrast,the male and female protagonists,in(the)possession of the least eroded capacity for empathy,prove to be successful in historical retrieving(intellectual reward)and self-improvement(emotional reward).The narration of the romance about empathy is also most empathetically constructed to arouse the reader’s empathy.The exquisite construction of the fictional background improves the effect of immersive reading,contributes to the familiarity between readers and the characters,also calls for identifying with the author as well as the characters.Techniques to set situational empathy and character identification also have been elaborately used to arouse the reader’s empathy for the imperfect protagonist Roland whose act of theft motivates the whole story.