final paper - myth criticism class

Heather Beatty
Hennelly – Engl. 260A
Myth Criticism
05/15/08


Maya’s Legacy: Return to the Great Mother in A.S. Byatt’s Possession

According to Erich Neumann, the Great Mother functions as one of the most powerful archetypes in the human psyche, emerging from the primordial Feminine and handed down through time from ancient history, exhibited in multiple human expressions. Neumann writes that the transformative power of the Great Mother serves as “mankind’s instinctive experience of the world’s depth and beauty, of the goodness and graciousness of Mother Nature who daily fulfills the promise of redemption and resurrection, of new life and new birth” (Origins 40). Throughout A.S. Byatt’s mythically rich novel Possession, the developing characters must renew themselves through symbolic encounters with the Great Mother in order to achieve integration between their conscious and unconscious selves. Roland Michell, postmodern scholar of Victorian poetry, in particular must find his way back to the nurturing and creative expression of the Great Mother, with the help of feminist scholar Maud Bailey (who undergoes her own transformation as well) in order to fully complete a personal cycle of individuation and rebirth. Byatt uses imagery of sexuality and the body, nature and gardens, and poetry and language to follow Roland’s journey along with other characters in the text as they return to the inherent power and energy of the Great Mother. The novel culminates with a return to origins in Maya, a daughter of great love and sacrifice whose name resonates with the power of the Great Mother.
In her psychoanalytic studies involving women and language, Julia Kristeva has also written on aspects of the Great Mother or maternal connection in human development. She sees the maternal realm or chora as pre-Oedipal and pre-verbal, opposing Lacan’s symbolic order with the semiotic modality. The semiotic may be expressed in poetic language; it is tonal and rhythmic and sensual, suggesting the mother’s heartbeat, rocking motion, breastfeeding, song, and bodily movement. Kristeva’s theories relate to Roland’s ultimate reconnection with maternal principles through language. He learns to write, and even think and dream, with a return to the semiotic, in a way that combines both male and female in a great continuum. This oneness, Kristeva would assert, is found in the domain of the expansive maternal, or, in Neumann’s term, the Great Mother. Separation or differentiation is no longer valid or possible in the maternal realm of understanding Kristeva calls the chora, in which one enters a cosmic time of joy and ecstatic creativity.
In Possession, Roland begins his mythic journey utterly disconnected from the mysterious Great Mother in his conscious academic life. His first encounter with the fecundity of the Great Mother actually begins with his growing romantic interest in the beautifully cool Maud, who, as a feminist scholar, appears self-possessed, confident and brilliant. Significantly, she is a woman constantly surrounded and accompanied by verdant shades of green; she wears “shining green shoes” and smells of “something ferny and sharp” (44). Even her car, “a glossy green Beetle” gives a nod to the Victorian poet Ash’s lush living world of insects and suggesting Neumann’s assertion that the Great Mother presides as “mother of all vegetation” (Great 48). But despite all this apparent signification of the color green as the living earth, fertility and growth, both Maud and Roland are hopelessly distanced from their bodies and sexuality: Maud is “a most untouchable woman,” and for Roland, “sexuality was like thick smoked glass” inscrutable and off-putting (55).
This inability to recognize, accept, and exuberantly embrace the sensual body initially reveals a deep rift between these postmodern scholars and the physical embodiment of the Great Mother. As the two delve into the unfolding stories of the discovered letters, they must begin to experience the human body, the realm of the maternal, earthy and redolent. Roland fears the physical presence of Maud, with its “down,” “hair,” “narrow haunch” and the smell of “wet freshness” (162). When they meet accidentally outside the bathroom he is initially resistant to the physical energy between them and he cannot connect with Maud in any profound sense. “He did not trust his body,” Byatt writes, placing Roland in the role of frustrated youth still differentiated in his selfhood who retreats to his own “clean white bed,” a recurring symbol that illustrates both Roland and Maud’s inherent detachment from the sexual fecundity of the Great Mother. This episode is followed by a sensual dream in which Roland is “hopelessly entwined” with “twisted rope” and “running water” and covered in “every kind of flower.” A mysterious “something” slides around him, alternatively “clutching” and “evading” his touch and smelling “dank…yet also rich and warm.” Most importantly, “something struggled to get out” and the language of his dream asserts that “It is wringing wet” (165). As Neumann points out, archetypes are demonstrated in “dreams, fantasies and creative works” (Great 3) and Roland’s dream life, so closely following his ineffectual encounter with Maud, clearly signifies an urgent need to return to the passionate preverbal expression of the Great Mother by acknowledging the physical body’s rhythms and desires.
Gradually throughout the course of the novel and the scholars’ adventurous project and joint quest, they begin to touch. After a separation, Roland meets up with Maud again and their relationship suddenly evolves past the purely intellectual stage and into that of passion: “they rushed into each other’s arms” (360). This initial mutual transformative touch allows them to eventually reach out further: “a hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle” (458). They are beginning to enter the territory of the semiotic, bodies touching, nonverbal communication suggesting a previously-inaccessible openness. Their growing physicality allows them to access the Great Mother archetype latent inside themselves. Especially for Roland, possession of his physical self and sexuality will eventually allow for a fullness of individuation, but the fully transformative sexual experience comes later.
For now, Roland must not only draw closer to his own earthy bodily presence, he must also forge a living relationship with the earthly maternal realm in nature. He has been “forbidden” from the garden at his own home in London, where his landlady allows “no right of entry” (22). So distanced is Roland from the natural world that while reading Leonora’s review of LaMotte’s poetry, at first Roland “could not imagine a pool with stones and water” (268). Failing to imaginatively connect with the mythical world of the Great Mother offered in the text, he is cut off from the vegetative earth and his own physical presence in it. Reading alone will not initiate his true experience with the Great Mother, he cannot fully engage until he acts. He must immerse himself physically in the growing natural world; he must retrace the Victorian poets’ excursion a hundred years previous, traveling with Maud to Yorkshire in order to begin to connect with archetypes of the Great Earth Mother.
In Yorkshire, Roland is able to finally experience the wild landscape of the garden that had been forbidden in London. He now finds himself in a land of stone and water, “river paths above the running peaty water,” “patches of greensward between rocks,” “standing stones and mysterious clumps of spotted purple foxgloves” (287). Insects, frogs, marshland, peat bogs: the countryside visibly drips and throbs with the life force that Neumann considers essential “vessel symbolism” of the Great Mother, in which “the primordial womb of life” is found in “the realm of the earth water” (Great 48). Here Roland truly begins his own transformation: he “discovered…the lairs of tunnel spiders,” “looked at the greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall,” and “observed a curious natural phenomenon…flames of white light appeared to be striving and moving upwards.” Roland is finally able to engage in the natural world of this strange, enchanted place and thereby begin to feel his way back to the Great Mother: he sits, watches, contemplates, imagines. Naturally, it is here that he first truly connects with Maud, envisioning the intimacies of love and desire that both they and the Victorian couple faced and thus beginning to comprehend the scope of the Great Mother’s loving power.
Here in the fertile mother-land of Yorkshire, the scholars begin to trust their unconscious selves and drives. They leave their books and pens behind when they go to Boggle Hole, a place they choose to visit simply because they like the sound of its name, significantly rejecting the implements of their conscious existence for a reconnection with a dreamy otherworld in which the Great Mother reigns. A “cove tucked beneath cliffs,” its very form suggests the curvature of the female body. It is a place of abundance and fertility, with an “extravagance of wildflowers,” softened by “warm air” and “gleaming scented life.” Roland and Maud pass “shelf after shelf of wet stone,” “violently coloured: pink stone, silvery sand under water, violent green mossy weed” (292). Colorful and sensual, wet and growing, the place is alive with “the highest and most essential mysteries of the Feminine,” which Neumann asserts are “symbolized by the earth and its transformations” (Great 51).
In this primordial setting Roland is on the path to both internal and external self-fulfillment. He is able to open up to Maud, persuading her to take down her mysterious masses of pinned-up hair. The letting-down of hair is mythically symbolic: ancient priestesses “needed their hair to work magic spells,” and Isis recreated Osiris’s life with her hair (Walker 367). Later, elderly and oft-ignored Ash scholar, Beatrice Nest, a sort of real-world mother figure for Roland, emerges to battle for her scholarly territory with “streaming white wooly hair descended…like a witch or prophetess” (539). In this text and mythologically, a woman’s hair serves as a striking indication of female power. In Yorkshire, Roland’s experience with Maud’s hair, “the whirling mass;” a “sea of gold lines, waving,” and this moment’s transformative effect on the relationship, represents the power of Kristeva’s chora. The light and fluidity of both the hair and the water in the Yorkshire setting suggests water in motion that is “undifferentiated and elementary,” according to Neumann, a symbol that is “uroboric,” “containing male elements side by side with the maternal” (48).
Later, deeply ensconced in their journey of textual understanding, Roland and Maud again follow the century old path of Christabel LaMotte to an enchanted region: this time to Brittany in France. This journey is even longer, the destination more remote; they drive “through Brittany, to the ends of the earth…through the forests of Paimpont and Broceliande…to the quiet enclosed bay of Fouesnant” (363). A land of “wind-battered ruggedness,” it is nevertheless “dreamier and softer” than the north; Brittany is a place of wind and stone and ancient secrets. Here Roland and Maud read the story of LaMotte’s hideaway here in France, her pregnancy and the ensuing deepening of the Victorian story’s mysteries that also correspond to an urge toward the Great Mother through actual human fertility: pregnancy and childbirth. Meanwhile they immerse themselves in a physical landscape rich with mythical symbolism and stories that link them to the ancient secrets of this fairy-land region that suggests the archetypal maternal imagination. Here Roland admittedly finds his own deep joy in the presence of Maud, poetry, and the mysteries of the Great Mother, becoming wary of returning to the “unenchanted” region of his “thinking” life, away from “the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue” (454). Entering the realm of the unconscious, and discovering the power of the Great Mother has had its narcotic effect. Now he must learn to reconcile this new grasp of integration with his real life. This he intuitively learns to do through language, through poetry, which Kristeva claims has the power of transformative revolution.
Roland has struggled with his own relationship with language and reading throughout the novel, trapped by his scholarly one-sidedness, but his experiences with Maud and in the great fertile regions of England and France open the door that allows his understanding of the Great Mother and her restorative creative powers to bloom. He finds himself constructing “lists of words that resisted arrangement” and begins to experience “intimations of imminence” that he shall write poems. The listed words flow from his chora with the expressive power that defies symbolic orderliness: words like “blood, clay, terracotta, carnation.” The words he lists reflect motifs of the archetype of the Great Mother, her bodily cyclicality (blood) and her earthy rootedness (clay) as well as her power of growth and fertility (carnation). He is now accessing Kristeva’s semiotic phase of expression, foregrounding the rhythmic and intuitive language of the mother’s embracing touch. He even significantly considers this a “primitive language,” one that “circles and loops” (467) as it allows him imaginative play in the wild unknown territory of the Great Mother’s psychic realm.
Ultimately, all of Byatt’s chosen modes of expression of the Great Mother: sexuality, garden, and language must fully flourish in Roland’s transformative experience of full integration. In a chapter preceded by Ash’s poem “The Garden of Proserpina” itself rife with mythic imagery of the archetypal feminine, “The garden and the tree/The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold,” Roland eventually returns to his flat in London and finally enters the forbidden garden (503). He heads “up the stone steps, and round the wall, beyond the extent of his confined view” until he finally “stood in the narrow garden under the trees” (514). Here he connects with his own internal understanding of the Great Mother, on his own terms in the place that he has grown beyond. His previous vantage point was “confined” because he lacked union with the maternal aspects of his own unconscious.
Roland is now able to appreciate the garden fully, with its complexities and colors: “some of the trees were still green…They held up their complicated arms, black against the pink haze” (515). He admits to himself that “in his imagination, when he could not get into the garden, it had seemed a large space of breathing leaves and real earth. Now he was out, it seemed smaller, but still mysterious, because of the earth, in which things were growing.” Roland is able to acknowledge, grasp and respect the true nature of the garden, both physically and mythically, now open enough to his unconscious to embrace the mysteries of the archetypal mother in the “growing” earth. He further connects to the natural environment of this garden by recognizing the cats with their “snaking bodies” which shine “glossy in the light” and “velvet black in the dark” (515). The cats, both feline and serpentine, represent symbolic aspects of the archetypal feminine and it is significant that Roland assumes care for these creatures of the garden.
This transformative moment in the once-forbidden garden allows Roland to finally securely embrace his new role as poet. As night falls, “he began to think of words, words that came from some well within him.” This unnameable “well” within him corresponds with the chora, providing words that keep him in touch with his own unconscious with the semiotic and symbolic union allowed by the artistic expression of poetry. The words come to him in “patterns made by a voice he didn’t yet know, but which was his own” (515). Roland is finally accessing the Great Mother buried in his own unconscious that allows for juicy, creative flow. Her symbolism haunts the words as many of the poems he invents take the shape of cats, mirroring his interest and care for the feminine feline garden inhabitants. Neumann writes that the “poetry of the world might be classified according to the archetype it expresses” (53) and here Roland happily expresses Kristeva’s jouissance of the continuum present in the maternal realm of the chora. He is finally self-regenerative, and his renewal is nearly complete as the poems that were not there an hour before now “came like rain and were real” (515-516).
In the final chapter of the book, Roland is able to at last unite sexually with Maud Bailey indicating a complete realization of the oneness possible with a full acceptance of the power of the Great Mother. He takes on the nurturing role: “I’ll take care of you Maud,” and his full embrace of the female physicality takes place with feminine attention and care, with “gentle delays and delicate diversions” but also with an “indirect assault” hinting at masculine aggression. Byatt’s terminology here is notable in that it illustrates Roland’s full integration of the male and female, the maternal and paternal, semiotic and symbolic realms. Finally there are “no boundaries” and the two find joyful fulfillment in their lovemaking. In the morning they are confronted with a particular odor:
a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful (551).

The scholar’s journey of integration ends with this exceptionally vital motif. Neumann notes the transformative nature of the elements of the Great Mother, the “perpetual transformation” and “the humble rotting” as the “seed lengthens into stalk and sprouting leaves” (Great 51). The Great Mother is hard at work here with all her regenerative power of abundance, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. The odor of renewal cannot be ignored, and its hopeful quality lends a spirit of new life to these new lovers. Ultimately, in Byatt’s poignant “Postscript,” the appearance of Maya, the product of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Ash’s love, adds an evocative scene to that renewing presence of the Great Mother. As Maud’s ancestor, Maya, whose name rings with profound mythic associations as the mother of Buddha and the mother of Hermes the Enlightened One, holds the key to the perseverance of the story. It is through Maya, this dynamic symbol of the Great Mother, that rebirth is possible and the story continues.

Works Consulted

Byatt, A.S. Possession. Vintage International: New York, NY. 1990.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed.
Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press: New York, NY. 1980.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Kristeva Reader. Columbia University Press:
New York, NY. 1986. 187-213.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Pantheon Books,
Bollingen Foundation Inc.: New York, NY. 1955.

Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton University Press,
Bollingen Series XLII: Princeton, NJ. 1970.

Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper and Row
Publishers: San Francisco, CA. 1983.