How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
This Peeping Tom has put his eye to the nick or cranny in our walls and peers shamelessly in. She laughs and says he means no harm, and is incapable of seeing the essential things we know and keep safe, and so it is, so it must be, so it must always be. But it amuses her to hear him lolloping and panting round our solid walls, she thinks he will always be Tame, as he is now. (4.73)
This excerpt from Blanche Glover's journal is like all of her journal entries: so intensely metaphoric that it's difficult to know just how she understood her relationship with Christabel LaMotte. What exactly are the "essential things" that Blanche and Christabel "know and keep safe"?
Quote #2
She came in to me as I knelt there and raised me up, and said we must never quarrel and that she would never, ever, give me cause to doubt her, and I must not suppose she could. I am sure she meant what she said. She was agitated; there were a few tears. We were quiet together, in our special ways, for a long time. (4.73)
This is another excerpt from Blanche Glover's journal, and one that leaves us with just as many questions as the last one we saw. What exactly were Blanche and Christabel's "special ways" of being quiet together? Were they romantically intimate or not?
Quote #3
He opened his locked case, putting away Randolph Ash's letters to his godchild, or anyway the stolen images, and drew out those other photographs of which he had a large and varied collection—as far as it was possible to vary, in flesh or tone or angle or close detail, so essentially simple an activity, a preoccupation. He had his own ways of sublimation. (6.51)
For some characters in Possession,sexual desires and orientations are basic tools of characterization. Mortimer Cropper is one of those characters. In keeping with the rest of his personality, his sexuality is represented as an obsession with "collecting."