Melusina and A. S. Byatt's Alchemical Imagination in Possession: A Romance

ABSTRACT

The Fairy Melusine is a fictional literary text incorporated in A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession: A Romance, which is a retelling by the fictional poet LaMotte of Jean d’Arras's tale of the fairy, Melusina. This paper examines four of LaMotte's short poems, both texts and subtexts of the Melusina story, and explores how Paracelsus's definition of the snake-woman determines the alchemical imagery in LaMotte's literary texts. LaMotte artfully weaves narratives around both the snake-woman and alchemy out of recurrent images in Byatt's canon and uses them ingeniously to indicate the alchemical nature of Melusina as well as the nature and conditions of LaMotte's own long period of isolation and motherhood. Melusina becomes an alchemical symbol of the philosopher's stone, a symbol of LaMotte's long seclusion and an enactment of a recurrent motif in Byatt's works that isolation is a sine qua non of literary creation.

KEYWORDS:

• Byatt
• Possession
• Melusina
• alchemy
• Paracelsus
• symbol

Acknowledgements

I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to Mrs. Penelope Coggill who proofread this article and without whose work the completion of this article was almost impossible. I especially appreciate her patience. The first draft of this article was written when I was an academic visitor at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and I got almost all the reference materials from the English Faculty Library as well as the Cambridge University Library. My thanks go to the two libraries, and I appreciate very much the help of the staff working there.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Byatt, Possession, 290.

2 Ibid., 291.

3 Cieniuch, 25.

4 Alban, 47.

5 Ibid., 47–8.

6 Maddox and Sturm-Maddox, 1.

7 In Possession, it is spelt as “Raimondin”.

8 D’Arras, 191.

9 Byatt, Possession, 33–4.

10 Sigerist, vii.

11 Paracelsus, “A Book on Nymphs”, 226.

12 Ibid., 231.

13 Ibid., 238.

14 Ibid., 245.

15 Byatt, Possession, 171–2.

16 Ibid., 291

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 293.

19 Zhang, 401.

20 Jung, Alchemical Studies, 144.

21 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 52–3.

22 Ibid., 304.

23 Ibid., 126.

24 Byatt, Possession, 34.

25 Ibid., 37.

26 Ibid., 292.

27 Paracelsus, “Of the Secrets of Alchemy”, 3–7.

28 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 3.

29 Paracelsus, “Of the Secrets of Alchemy”, 26.

30 Byatt, Possession, 296.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 295–6.

36 Ibid., 296.

37 Ibid., 297.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 298.

40 Ibid., 297.

41 Ibid., 298.

42 Ibid.

43 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 425.

44 MacKillop, 431–2.

45 Byatt, Possession, 133.

46 Ibid., 134.

47 Byatt, On Histories, 151–2.

48 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 232.

49 Paracelsus, “Of the Secrets of Alchemy”, 26–7.

50 Ibid., 27.

51 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 238.

52 Ibid., 238–9.

53 Jung, Aion, 90.

54 Byatt, Possession, 141.

55 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 231–2.

56 Byatt, Possession, 142.

57 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 3.

58 Byatt, Possession, 266.

59 Ibid.

60 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 3.

61 Jung, Aion, 236.

62 Ibid., 235.

63 Byatt, Possession, 509.

64 Ibid., 135.

65 Ibid., 134–5.

66 Ibid., 134.

67 Jung, Alchemical Studies, 286.

68 Jung, Aion, 236.

69 Ziolkowski, 188–228.

70 Ibid., 227.

71 Ibid., 227–8.

72 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 458.

73 Byatt, Possession, 174.

74 Byatt, Possession, 502–3.

75 Ibid., 501.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Byatt, The Shadow, xv.

79 Byatt, Possession, 500.