Throughout Possession, A. S. Byatt riffs so hard on that title word it's like she's writing a Jason Mraz song instead of a Booker-Prize-winning novel. The word "possession" refers to So Many Things throughout the novel, like:
- Maud Bailey's fear that her good looks tempt lovers (and potential lovers) to see her as a kind of object or "possession" (28.171)
- The self-"possession" that both Maud Bailey and Christabel LaMotte value so highly (28.177)
- The kind of spiritual "possession" that the novel's nineteenth-century spiritualists invite during their séances
- The kind of "daemonic" "possession" that Maud Bailey describes when she tells Roland Mitchell that she feels as if Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash have "taken [her] over" (28.150)
- The kind of "possession" that Mortimer Cropper values above all else—that is, the actual material possession of objects like Randolph Henry Ash's pocket watch or Ellen Ash's jet brooch
- The kind of Old-Testament sexual "possession" that Roland experiences at the end of the novel (28.201)
- The kind of "possession" that seizes all of the novel's characters as they find themselves driven to solve the mystery of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte's love affair, come hell or high water (27.89)
Whew! You tell us, Shmoopers! Did we leave anything out?