Fire

Fire imagery isn't as common in Possession as water and ice imagery, but it makes a few important appearances all the same. When it does show up, we're presented with two conflicting visions of it. On the one hand, we see it as a warm, sustaining source of heat and light, and on the other hand, we see it as a dangerous, all-consuming force that can burn its victims to ashes.

Possession's images of fire as a warm, sustaining source tend to appear in scenes where characters have gathered around hearths or candles to read and share stories. The novel includes three crucial moments (or sets of moments) where this happens:

• The moment when Roland Mitchell, Maud Bailey, and Sir George and Lady Joan Bailey gather around one of the fireplaces in Seal Court to take their first look at the Ash-LaMotte correspondence.
• The moments when Christabel LaMotte sits around a fireplace with the de Kercoz household in Finistère, Brittany, to listen to stories being told on dark November nights.
• The moment when Possession's twentieth-century characters gather together at the Rowan Tree Inn (where the power just happens to be out) and read Christabel LaMotte's final letter to Randolph Henry Ash by the light of flickering candles.

If you've ever experienced the magic of listening to stories told around a campfire, you'll understand the vibe that A. S. Byatt is going for here. In these scenes, characters gather around hearths and candles—communal sources of heat and light—to engage in age-old customs of talking, listening, and sharing stories.

On the opposite end of the fire spectrum is the burning, all-consuming passion that sweeps into R. H. Ash's and Christabel LaMotte's lives. Throughout her letters to Randolph, Christabel often describes that passion using fire imagery and symbolism. Check out her final letter to her former lover:

"I have been so angry for so long—with all of us, with you, with Blanche, with my poor self. And now near the end 'in calm of mind all passion spent' I think of you again with clear love. I have been reading Samson Agonistes and came upon the dragon I always thought you were—as I was the 'tame villatic fowl'—

His fiery virtue roused
From under the ashes into sudden flame
And as an evening dragon came
Assailant on the perched roosts
And rusts in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl –

Is not that fine? Did we not—did you not flame, and I catch fire? Shall we survive and rise from our ashes? Like Milton's Phoenix?" (28.118-20)

Even at its most destructive, as Christabel's poem shows us, the all-consuming power of fire eventually causes growth and renewal. Christabel didn't necessarily see it happen in her own life, but we as readers know that it did actually happen, whether she was aware of it or not.