Erotic Possession, the “Phantasm,” and Platonic Love in Two Neo-Victorian Novels

Abstract

Employing the Greek concept of eros, as well as medieval and Renaissance notions of sexual possession by the “phantasm,” I consider the ways in which the erotic is represented in A. S. Byatt's Possession and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Both novels suggest that erotic love can lead to possessive madness. In addition, Byatt also represents the original idea of Platonic love as a possible antidote to acquisitive, destructive love.

Keywords::

• eros
• neo-Victorian fiction
• Platonic love
• Victorian fiction

Notes

Notes

¹ I agree with Kaplan that Faber's novel verges on the type of fiction that Steven Marcus describes in The Other Victorians (91), at times mimicking what Marcus calls “porntopia” (268).

² Kaplan notes that “sex as a described event is barely present in The French Lieutenant's Woman—what the novel has instead is sex as fantasy, sex as unanswered and impeded desire” (89).

³ Vlastos reminds us that, even though current usage describes Platonic love as “purely spiritual love for one of the opposite sex,” Platonic love, during Plato's time, was not asexual love nor was it directed at the opposite sex (124–25). Women in ancient Greece were little more than slaves in their husband's households; they were not citizens, and they generally were undereducated and therefore were considered “servile and uninteresting” (Agonito 23). Free males were citizens and were considered superior; therefore, the highest love would be attained through same-sex relationships, which ultimately mixed erotic desire with intellectual interest and often ideally paired an older male with a young man whom the older man mentored (Gill xv).

⁴ Byatt deliberately set out in Possession to revise Fowles's approach to the Victorians. In her essay, “Ancestors,” she states: “My own intentions, as I recollect them, were more to do with rescuing the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies like those of Fowles” (79).

⁵ Kohlke notes that in Possession, “not a breast, buttock, clitoris, vagina or penis [are] in sight” (63).

⁶ I take issue with the idea of applying orientalism to these texts, since the original notion of orientalism suggests that Europeans orientalized the other by seeing themselves as asexual and chaste. Our era does not make this claim; if anything, we see ourselves as sexually free.

⁷ The origins of the god Eros are ambiguous and contradictory. Hesiod “places the birth of Eros […] early in the story of creation,” essentially arriving with Tartarus and Earth “out of Chaos” (Thornton 13). In The Symposium, Phaedrus agrees, calling him one of “our most ancient gods” (10), while Agathon conceives him as one of the youngest gods, since “the gods would not have castrated or imprisoned each other or done those many other acts of violence if Love had been among them” (29). Plato, as we will see, relates another version of Eros's birth.

⁸ The various participants in The Symposium endeavor to eulogize Eros. After the participants speak, Socrates elicits a dialogue with Agathon, which refutes much of what the previous speakers have argued.

⁹ One could argue that the erotic is present in varying degrees in Victorian fiction, particularly in the sensation novels of the 1860s and certainly in Thomas Hardy's late Victorian novels, which Fowles frequently alludes to in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Even so, no Victorian novel graphically displays sexual activities in the way that some neo-Victorian novels do.

¹⁰ Eliot added this passage to George Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind, which she prepared for publication after his death (Trotter 44).

¹¹ It should be noted that Ellen Ash's view of sexuality is skewed since she is depicted as lacking sexual experience and knowledge. She thwarts Ash's carnal embrace out of fear, and the couple never sexually consummates their marriage. In some ways, she is the female counterpart to John Ruskin, who did not sexually consummate his marriage to Effie Grey (Rose 91).

¹² E. Sidney Hartland tells us that the “earliest mention [of Melusina] is by Gervase of Tilbury” and is “found among other stories entitled Otio Imperialia” (187). Two hundred years later, in 1393, Jean d'Arras, “a courtier of the Duke of Bar, worked [the tale] up into a political romance in honour of his patron” (187). Interestingly, Melusina is transformed into a serpent woman by her mother, who curses her for taking revenge against her father for his transgression in watching his wife bathe their daughters (189). Therefore, Melusina's power inadvertently comes from her mother's condemnation of her. Hartland also relates that the original story is of Celtic origin, which coincides with Byatt's rendering of Christabel's father as a Celtic folklorist in Brittany.

¹³ Kaplan underscores that neo-Victorian fiction, “with the exception of Faber,” contains a “hint of nostalgia for a less sexually knowing and brazenly expressive society” (95).

¹⁴ The plethora of criticism of Fowles's novel can largely be broken down into several camps: one focusing on the existentialism portrayed in the novel (see Stevenson; Lynch); one concerned with the novel's metafictional form and its multiple endings (see Hadley); another dealing with Fowles's use of Darwin as it relates to orthodox Christianity (see Pesso-Miquel); others focusing on Fowles's allusions to and use of Karl Marx (see Landrum); another detailing its filmic adaptation (see Pieldner). Of particular salience to my argument is M. Keith Booker's “What We Have Instead of God: Sexuality, Textuality and Infinity in The French Lieutenant's Woman,” which argues via Michel Foucault that our era substitutes the female “sublime” and secularized femininity for the sacred infinite. Sarah Woodruff embodies this new version of the infinite (180). This secularized “infinity” still alludes back to the mythic.

¹⁵ Kaplan concludes that the novel “libidinizes longing and frustration,” much in the same way as Victorian writers did (89).

¹⁶ In writing about the film based on the novel, Alison McKee notes that it is the “female rather than the male protagonist who is associated with the active, desiring look […] and who functions as the controlling force in the narrative” (146).

¹⁷ In The Symposium, Socrates relates that Diotima indicates that this erotic desire to possess the beloved and thus to perhaps reproduce biologically is one way that humans attempt to attain immortality (43).

¹⁸ Van Dyke mistakenly claims that while LaMotte is involved with Ash, she writes her best poetry (Possession 156) and that she “ceases writing” after the birth of the child. Christabel tells us, though, that her “Muse has forsaken” her while writing to Ash, and Sabine relates that Christabel told her that “she wants to write a Fairy epic” (404). Clearly, Christabel does not write the fairy epic until after she gives birth to Maia.

¹⁹ Carroll employs Terry Castle's notion of the “apparitionalized” lesbian to Possession, in particular to Blanche Glover. Castle argues that the lesbian figure is often “rendered spectral or ghostly” (Carroll 359) in Western discourse and, therefore, lacks, according to Castle, “sensual or moral authority” (Castle 6).

²⁰ Carroll notes that Byatt was teaching Henry James's The Bostonians and decided to base Christabel and Blanche's relationship on Bostonian marriages between women (360).

²¹ In alluding to Tennyson's “The Princess” with Blanche's moniker for Christabel as the “Princess,” Byatt seems to be deliberately underscoring how Ash is like the Prince in Tennyson's poem who intrudes on Princess Ida's all-female utopian world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Renk

Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, Kathleen Renk is the author of Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women's Writing and Decolonization (UP of Virginia, 1999) and critical essays on the work of A. S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Peter Carey, Pauline Melville, Dionne Brand, and other British and postcolonial writers; she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, postcolonial, and women's literatures. Her latest book, Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature: The Alchemical Literary Imagination, was published by Routledge in 2012.