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55 The New Collection
were opposed to the virility and productivity of masculinity. Other critics in
‘Poetess’ studies further argue that the specifically gendered figure of the Poetess
was marked by ‘an absence of self’, endowing this feminine – not to be confused
with ‘female’ – figure and her poetry with impersonal cultural mobility. 5
In this paper, I suggest that Byatt’s novel participates in generic critical
discourse about the role of the Poetess and subverts patriarchal structures by
fashioning a Poetess, Christabel LaMotte, whose attempts to write around malecentered
language showcase her distinct poetic voice. I examine excerpts from
correspondence in the novel to demonstrate how Byatt engages the Poetess’
tenuous role and her gendered creative output. Thus we come to recognize the
repetition of romance inherent in Poetess poetics and in Byatt’s representation of
Victorian men’s and women’s differential experiences of romance.
The second half of this paper addresses LaMotte’s ambiguous identification
with the mythic Fairy Melusine, and how her failed attempt to write an epic
poem about this creature reinforces the Poetess’ indeterminate relationship to
writing and femininity. 6 My goal is to demonstrate that Randolph Henry Ash’s
encouragement of LaMotte’s writing is both progressive and naively optimistic.
Byatt exploits the romantic impossibility of women’s conflicting desires by
distilling them in the person of LaMotte, the Poetess, emblematic of all poetesses
whose internal Melusines disturb the silence of night and veil themselves in ‘wise
utterance’ and ‘safe conduct’ during the day (293). 7
That Poor, Impersonal Poetess
Christabel LaMotte embodies romance’s negative impact on female creativity and
laments the loss of autonomy that accompanies love. In a letter to Ash, LaMotte
indicates how sentimentality directed toward a single object of desire – a man –
curtails female agency. She writes,
In faith I know not why I am so sad. No – I know – it is that
you take me out of myself and give me back – diminished – I am
wet eyes – and touched hands – and lips am I too – a very present –
famished – fragment of a woman – who has not her desire in truth –
5 Virginia Jackson and Eliza Richards, “‘The Poetess” and Nineteenth-Century American Women
Poets’, Poetess Archive Journal 1:1 (2007), 4, Web, 1 Feb. 2009.
6 See Roberta White, A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction
(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), esp. 19, 21; White’s argument about the
depiction of women artists and their work as ‘liminal . . . suspended . . . and unfinished’ is relevant to
genre’s gendered nature in Possession.
7 LaMotte writes, ‘O thou, the source of speech / Give me wise utterance and safe conduct’.