How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
Later, Maud stood in there, turning her long body under the hot hiss of the shower. Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of Fergus Wolff, this empty battlefield was what she saw. […] Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. (4.163)
Throughout Possession, whenever Maud thinks of her brief affair with Fergus, she gets disgusted by this image of the rumpled "battlefield" bed. For her, it represents so much of what she fears in romantic love: disorderliness, chaos, and lack of self-possession and control.
Quote #2
We may imagine her sitting there, smiling demurely under her bonnet, holding her skirts away from the wet, whilst Randolph contemplated his possession, so unlike Petrarch's, of the lady he had worshipped from afar, through so many hindrances and difficulties, for almost as long as the earlier poet's sixteen-year sojourn of hopeless devotion in this very spot. (6.43)
It should come as no surprise that this passage is an excerpt from Mortimer Cropper's biography of Randolph Henry Ash. Cropper—the "great collector"—sees no problem with thinking of Ellen Ash as her husband's "possession," and in this passage he represents her as an object that Randolph acquired after years of patient waiting.
Quote #3
'I was thinking last night—about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. […] We know we are driven by desire, but we can't see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we—we know it's a suspect ideological construct—especially Romantic Love—so we have to make a real effort of the imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things—Love—themselves—that what they did mattered—' (14.23)
As Maud and Roland tour North Yorkshire together, following in the long-vanished footsteps of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, Possession prompts us to think about the ways in which romantic love has been imagined and understood throughout history. As Maud and Roland realize, "Love" meant something very different to Christabel and Randolph from what it does to them. But here's the million-dollar question: which couple does Possession's narrator think is closer to the mark? Or is it also possible that each couple feels the same thing, but they have different ways of talking about it?