How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
Poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking up every recipe for gooseberry gam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no one wanted self-denial and dedication anymore, they wanted proof that Ellen was raging with rebellion and pain and untapped talent. Poor Beatrice. One publication to her name, and a slim book called Helpmeets without irony doesn't go down well with today's feminists. (3.42)
Among other things, Possession is a comedic critique of academic politics and fashions in the 1980s. Although James Blackadder's perspective on feminist scholarship is biased, his words help us to imagine some of the issues surrounding women's scholarship during second-wave feminism.
Quote #2
Thirty years later the feminists saw Christabel LaMotte as distraught and enraged. They wrote on 'Ariachne's Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.' Or 'Melusina and the Daemonic Double: Good Mother, Bad Serpent.' 'A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte's Ambivalent Domesticity.' 'White Gloves: Blanche Glover: occluded Lesbian sexuality in LaMotte.' (4.9)
Like many other passages in Possession, this one emphasizes how our present-day politics and ideologies help to shape our perceptions and interpretations of the past. As the novel goes on to suggest, its twentieth-century feminist scholars get a lot of things right about Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover, but they also get a few things really wrong.
Quote #3
If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will. (4.31)
Given what we know about Christabel LaMotte by the end of the novel, how might we interpret these words of hers, written to one of her nieces in a letter? Why would she advise against "morbid Self-examination" in women?