Gardens

These ain't your mama's gladiolas.

Garden imagery abounds in Possession, and depending on the context, it symbolizes knowledge, understanding, revelation, love, paradise, and the never-ending cycles of life and death.

The "Garden" of Proserpina

Our first introduction to garden imagery appears within the first few pages of the novel, as Roland Mitchell sits in the London Library reading up on possible sources for Randolph Henry Ash's poem The Garden of Proserpina. We'll give you a rundown of the story, just in case it's unfamiliar.

Proserpina was the daughter of the Roman goddess Ceres. (If you're into Greek mythology, you'll know these characters as Persephone and Demeter.) Pluto (Hades in Greek), the god of the underworld, abducted Proserpina and brought her to his subterranean kingdom to be his queen. After holding out stubbornly for days, she eventually ate a few pomegranate seeds, and when other gods arrived to rescue her, Pluto insisted that she couldn't go back to the land of the living after eating food from the realm of the dead.

Eventually, Pluto and Proserpine were able to strike a deal. He allowed her to leave, but she had to promise to return to the underworld each year, and to spend one month for every pomegranate seed she ate.

This story has dozens of versions, but, at heart, all of them are about the seasonal cycles that shaped agriculture in the Mediterranean: spring (thaw), summer (planting), autumn (harvest), and winter (frozen, barren earth). The story also shares certain similarities with the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, because in both narratives, women are tempted by forbidden food that promises death to those who eat it.

And, in both narratives, the women succumb. Remind you of anyone in Possession?

The Garden of Eden

Speaking of the Garden of Eden, Possession is definitely throwing some shout-outs in that story's general direction. The biggest and most playful of these is the setting that A. S. Byatt creates for Roland and Val's apartment. The two of them live "in the basement of a decaying Victorian house" (1.24), and although the apartment had been advertised as "a garden flat," their landlady refuses to let them enter the garden itself (2.18).

Like Adam and Eve after the Fall, Roland and Val are barred from the beautiful, paradisiacal garden that lies just outside their door. For us, it's a wonderful literary joke. For them, it's a cruel twist of fate that may well be the novel's way of punishing them for being in such a dull and loveless relationship.

We do also see other garden imagery and symbolism throughout Possession. There's the winter garden at Seal Court (which just so happens to tie the novel's ice and garden imagery together); there are the fertile, flowering hedgerows of North Yorkshire; and, there's the "language of flowers" that appears on one of the jet brooches that Roland and Maud examine in Whitby (13.102). There's even Randolph Henry Ash's fantasy of Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover living in a "rose bower."

Although the novel's garden imagery and symbolism tend to mean different things at different times, all of their examples add to the rich, complex tapestry that Byatt's writing weaves.