VERBAL AND VISUAL LANGUAGE 
AND THE QUESTION OF FAITH 
IN THE FICTION OF A. S. BYATT 

by 

SUSAN D. SORENSEN 

B.A., University of Regina, 1985 
M.A., University of British Columbia, 1993 

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF 
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

in 

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES 

Department of English 

We accept this thesis as conforming 
to the required standard 

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 

July 1999 

© Susan D. Sorensen, 1999 



In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced 

degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it 

freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive 

copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my 

department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or 

publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written 

permission. 

S u s a n D . S o r e n s e n 

Department of E n g l i s h 

The University of British Columbia 
Vancouver, Canada 

D a t e 12 October 19 99 

DE-6 (2/88) 



Abstract 

This study investigates the relation between faith in a transcendent reality and 

faith in language, both verbal and visual, in the work of English novelist and critic 

Antonia Byatt. Her ideal conception of communication combines the immediacy and 

primal vigour of the visual with the methodical pragmatism of words. However, Byatt's 

characters who exemplify this effort at double vision - in particular Stephanie Potter 

Orton in the 1985 novel Still Life - find in their quests frustration and even death rather 

than fulfillment. 

M y investigation focuses on A. S. Byatt's presentation of the way language 

attempts to represent and interact with three particular areas: fundamental personal 

experiences (childbirth, death, love), perceptual and aesthetic experiences (colour and 

form, painting), and transcendent experiences (supernaturalism and Christian religion). I 

consider all stages of her career to date - from her first novel The Shadow of the Sun 

(1964) to Babel Tower (1996). Although Possession: A Romance (1990) has garnered 

most of the critical attention accorded to Byatt, I argue that this novel is not generally 

representative of her principles or style. A neo-Victorian romance, part parodic and part 

nostalgic, combined with an academic comedy, Possession shares neither the sombre 

mythological and psychological fatalism of her 1960s fiction nor the modified realism of 

her middle-period fiction. Still Life and The Matisse Stories (1993) are the works that 

best elucidate Byatt's major preoccupations; they intently strive to combine the most 

powerful aspects of verbal and visual knowledge. 



I l l 

The methodological basis for this study is pluralist; it emphasizes close reading, 

combined with phenomenological, biographical, and thematic criticism. As Byatt does, I 

rely principally on the ideas of writers and artists rather than theorists; she cannot be 

understood without specific reference to George Eliot, Donne, Forster, Murdoch, Van 

Gogh, and Matisse (among others). 

Byatt's quest for truth and transcendent meaning and her investigation of the 

trustworthiness of words have undergone recent changes; she seems more sharply aware 

of the limitations of language and the unattainability of absolute truth. Her writings in the 

1990s about paintings and colour emphasize their intrinsic value rather than their ability 

either to revitalize the word or suggest the numinous. 



iv 

T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s 
Abstract ii 

Table of Contents iv 

Acknowledgements v 

Dedication vi 

Introduction 

Overview 1 
A. S. Byatt: Life, Works, and Reception 4 
Major Themes 12 
Methodology 22 

Part I The Language of Fundamental Personal Experience 

Chapter 1 Childbirth 32 
Chapter 2 Death 59 
Chapter 3 Love 85 

Part II The Language of Perceptual and Aesthetic Experience 

Chapter 4 Form and Colour 115 
Chapter 5 Visual Art: Van Gogh and Matisse 160 

Part III The Language of Spiritual Experience 

Chapter 6 The Supernatural 216 
Chapter 7 Religion 265 

Conclusion 320 

Bibliography 333 



Acknowledgements 

v 

Instead of mentioning him last, I will thank my best reader first. Michael Kurtz 

has given me his time and help most generously, and I am very grateful. M y supervisor 

Keith Alldritt has treated me with friendly respect and has let me go my own way, which 

I appreciated. I welcomed his idea that I look more closely at Byatt's archetypal trees in 

comparison with Sartre's. Mark Morton has been a valuable resource and a firm friend, as 

has Ken Probert, who read a draft and offered good suggestions. Ruth Baldwin and 

Maurice Yacowar provided welcome encouragement along the way. The Sorensen family 

has been supportive throughout; I especially thank Sandra Sorensen, for being a 

Sustaining Sister, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness, and 

my mother Phyllis Sorensen, for her unflagging cheerfulness and optimism. 

I would have been unable to research this study without the resources of many 

excellent libraries: the libraries at University of British Columbia, University of Regina, 

University of Minnesota, University of Alberta, and University of Toronto, in addition to 

Regina Public Library, Vancouver Public Library, Metro Toronto Reference Library, and 

Ramsey County Public Library in Roseville, Minnesota. 

I did not consider advanced academic study until my son Peter Sorensen was 

born. His presence in the world galvanized me to try harder. I have learned much from 

him, and daily he reveals to me the wonders of the mind and the capabilities of the human 

spirit. Thank you. 



vi 

Dedication 

F o r m y son Peter, who teaches me how to live, and for my husband M i c h a e l , who 

is written on my heart. W i t h love. 



1 

Introduction 

I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which 
the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual 
radiance and vibration of our coloring. 

Vincent Van Gogh, letter 531 (September 1888) 

A N O V E R V I E W 

A. S. Byatt has always had a tenacious and increasingly unfashionable interest in 

truth. The first three chapters of this thesis study her quest to capture the reality of what I 

have designated as the three fundamental human experiences (birth, death, and love). 

Chapters 4 and 5 comprise some observations on Byatt's presentation of perceptual and 

aesthetic experiences, especially visual ones (colour, geometric form, painting), 

experiences which hold great significance for her. Finally, the last chapters canvass her 

writings on supernatural and religious experience. In all of these areas, Byatt's respectful 

insistence on finding precise means to capture these experiences has led her to 

experiment with a mixture of verbal and visual modes of language. She has an ideal 

conception of communication that combines the immediacy and primal vigour of the 

visual with the methodical pragmatism of words. But her professed lack of religious faith 

has meant that some of the seemingly transcendent revelations her characters encounter 

are short-lived and, indeed, have tragic conclusions. 

By "verbal language" I mean both the written and spoken word, although Byatt 

always emphasizes reading and writing over speech. "Visual language" includes graphic 

communications and visual art, in addition to internal imagery. I take internal visual 



2 

imagery to mean the use of mental pictures to understand and communicate, even though 

the origin or independence of these images may be in question. 

In chapters 1 and 2, Byatt's treatment of childbirth (from the woman's point of 

view) and death (from the viewpoint of the dying consciousness) emphasizes the 

importance of the individual experience. For Byatt, the conventions of represented birth 

and death (in everyday parlance and in literature) are inadequate to the power of the 

event. She searches for original formulations and for ways of demonstrating that the 

unique personality of the character undergoing the event can be conveyed without 

resorting to stereotypical ways of classification. For example, Byatt disputes the 

expectation that women in childbirth are undergoing a primitive or animalistic event, or 

that words and memory necessarily fail in the extremities of childbirth. In chapter 3, 

Byatt's view of love (mainly erotic) is similar: she rejects many of the classic notions of 

love (its fusion with death, its links to spiritual fulfillment). But about love she is 

especially wary; instead of seeing in it a potential realization of individuality, she 

concentrates on the sacrifice of individuality entailed in being part of a couple. 

In chapter 4,1 discuss a very individual part of Byatt's thinking - her 

determination that visual phenomena such as colour and geometric form can provide a 

kind of order that allows for the possibility of expressing essential truths. The visionary 

experiences involving geometry that several of her characters achieve are startlingly 

successful; however, as in love, they risk losing what is, for Byatt, the all-important sense 

of self. They are also, usually, unable to transfer their visions into the verbal language 

that most people use to communicate. In chapter 5, Byatt's aesthetic explorations 

continue as she immerses herself in the creative processes of Vincent Van Gogh and 



3 

Henri Matisse. In each case, Byatt inverts the expected views of the painters: she 

emphasizes the realist, not the expressionist in Van Gogh, and the potency and 

profundity, rather than the decorative quality of Matisse. Overall, Byatt's portrayal of 

their contributions concedes the mastery of the visual sphere; she attempts to find ways of 

fusing the power of their visual art with written language, but her successes are 

intermittent and transient. 

Byatt has written frequently of supernatural experiences, as a way of coming at 

transcendence or religion in a circuitous way. Byatt's ghosts, described in chapter 6, have 

a visual and linguistic solidity which makes them very believable; the ghost of Hallam in 

"The Conjugial Angel" is a significant person, not merely an idea. However, the 

individualistic nature of the quasi-religious exploration of the afterlife which her 

characters undertake severely limits the possibilities of comfort and illumination. Isolated 

spirituality seems doomed to misinterpretation and malnourishment. The conventional 

religious ideas explored in chapter 7 are again coloured by the stubborn individualism of 

her characters. Byatt and her characters are suspicious of religious institutions, but are 

clearly fascinated by religious ideas; several of her people are sincere Christians, and 

even Christian ministers. (It is religion, and not ethics, by the way, which appears in her 

fiction. Her mentor, Iris Murdoch, explicitly concerned herself with ethical problems, but 

for Byatt these do not loom so large.) Byatt experiments with ways in which language 

and art can take over incarnational ideas from Christianity, but the goal is overly 

ambitious and, perhaps - although her intentions are earnest - ultimately irreverent. 

M y methods of discussing these various aspects of Byatt's work result in some 

overlap between chapters. For example, in chapter 4 on form and colour there is a good 



deal of discussion of transcendence and the numinous, which will return in chapter 7. 

Chapter 1 includes a certain amount of analysis of colour imagery in birth accounts, 

although the main portion of the discussion of colour is found in chapter 4. Each of these 

experiences described by Byatt emphasizes a different balance of the potential fusion of 

verbal and visual ways of knowing (and a shifting confidence in what possibilities of 

transcendence this balance exemplifies) and so certain chapters feature visual 

explorations or verbal or religious ones more emphatically. The visual representation of 

love, for example, is not prominent in Byatt's fiction, and the religious questions 

permeating most of her thinking about reality and language are less obvious in her 

portrayal of childbirth. 

A. S. B Y A T T : LIFE, W O R K S , A N D R E C E P T I O N 

Antonia Susan Byatt was born in Yorkshire in 1936, the eldest daughter of the 

intellectually formidable Drabble family, which includes the novelist Margaret Drabble 

among the four children. Byatt's mother studied literature at Cambridge and her father 

was a judge. Byatt in childhood attended a Quaker school, although she has sometimes 

downplayed the family's Quakerism. She received a first class B A in English from 

Newnham College, Cambridge in 1957 and later began doctoral research at Oxford on 

religious metaphor in Renaissance poetry. Her studies ended when she married economist 

Ian Byatt in 1959. 

With Byatt she had two children, daughter Antonia (born 1960) and son Charles 

(born 1961). During the 1950s and 1960s, she began to write fiction, and in 1964, 

Shadow of a Sun, her first novel, was published. (When it was re-issued in 1991, Byatt 



5 

restored her preferred title, The Shadow of the Sun.) During this time, she also taught 

English at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design, and wrote 

book reviews and critical essays. Her second novel, The Game, appeared in 1967. 

In 1969, the Byatts were amicably divorced, and Antonia married Peter Duffy, 

variously described in different news articles as a stockbroker and the manager of a 

property investment trust. Their first daughter, Isabel, was born in 1970. In 1972, the 

central tragedy of Byatt's life occurred. Pregnant with another child, she received the 

news that her 11-year-old son Charles had been killed by a drunk driver. The Duffys' 

daughter Miranda was born in 1973. 

A. S. Byatt did not publish another novel until 1978, when The Virgin in the 

Garden was released. It is the first of a projected tetralogy about the members of the 

Potter family, with a major focus on the sisters Stephanie and Frederica. Kathleen Coyne 

Kelly calls these novels the "Powerhouse Quartet," apparently following the lead of Byatt 

herself (A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 63). Kelly cites a section of Still Life 

describing the "powerhouse" family structure in psychoanalysis as one "in which the 

principles and even practice of the parents are so liberal, so rational, so acceptable that 

any necessary rebellion against their authority must take the form of absurd gestures, 

petulant or violent" (122). In this study, however, I simply call these the Potter books. 

The second volume of the series, Still Life, was published in 1985. In 1987, Byatt 

published her first collection of short fiction, Sugar, which included a number of semi-

autobiographical stories. 

The major event of Byatt's career to date was the success of her 1990 novel, 

Possession: A Romance, which won the Booker Prize. It was an international bestseller 



and the first of Byatt's novels to make an impact outside Britain. The film rights of this 

novel were reputedly sold for a large sum, although no film has been released. However, 

a film was made of one of the two novellas in Byatt's 1991 book Angels and Insects. 

American director Philip Haas adapted the novella "Morpho Eugenia"; the film was 

called Angels and Insects and appeared in 1995, enjoying moderate success. Byatt was 

closely involved in the adaptation and casting process. Two short fiction collections 

followed: The Matisse Stories (1993) and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy 

Stories (1994). The third novel in the Potter series was released in 1996, entitled Babel 

Tower. Another collection of short fiction, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, appeared 

in 1998. 

Byatt has also written several works of criticism: Degrees of Freedom: The 

Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965; re-issued 1994), Unruly Times: Wordsworth and 

Coleridge in Their Time (1970; re-issued 1989), Iris Murdoch (British Council Writers 

and their Work series, 1976), Passions of the Mind (selected critical writings, 1991), and 

Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers, with Ignes Sodre 

(1995). 

No major study of A . S. Byatt's work has yet appeared. Two short critical studies 

in book form have been published, Kathleen Coyne Kelly's A . S. Byatt in the Twayne's 

English Authors Series (1996) and Richard Todd's A. S. Byatt in the British Council 

Writers and their Work series (1997). O f the two, Todd's is slightly more ambitious, 

although his emphases are sometimes decidedly odd. One of his preoccupations is the 

"retrieval of unheard voices" in Byatt's fiction (particularly Possession); he details this in 

a 1994 article about Byatt and Marina Warner and again in his study Consuming Fictions: 



7 

The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (1996). The twentieth-century characters 

in Possession "can be said to owe their existence to their attempts to reconstruct their 

various nineteenth-century counterparts," he writes in the latter book (49), and he 

connects the minor characters Blanche and Val in a dubious design which has Blanche's 

unhappiness functioning as part of an "enabling" scheme for Val. Todd also attempts to 

get at Byatt's interest in language and reality in his version of 

her poetics of fiction: that is, her conviction that forms, patterns, and 
connections exist at such profound levels in strong yet fragile and finely 
drawn work that the writer may not even realize she has 'put' those 
elements into that work. (A. S. Byatt: Writers and their Work 5) 

Here, as elsewhere, Todd's analysis is muddled. His decision to include a chapter on 

menopausal characters in Byatt is puzzling, as is his insistence in bringing in new texts to 

explicate Byatt rather than using the hundreds of texts she mentions herself. Why use 

Charles Davy rather than Mallarme, for example? Why focus on Greek myths and ignore 

the Norse myths prevalent in Possession? More importantly, Todd makes too much of 

"opacity" in Byatt's aesthetic; while she certainly has allied herself with Iris Murdoch in 

calling for fiction which honours the opacity and complexity of persons (see my 

discussion in chapters 1,4, and 7), Todd sees a principle of "inscrutability" (22, 75) at 

work which does not bear up under examination. He believes, for example, that it is 

impossible to say whether Byatt makes claims for the "authenticity" of the experience of 

love described in The Virgin in the Garden; in my reading, Byatt's intentions are not so 

mysterious. 

Kathleen Coyne Kelly's study of A. S. Byatt resembles Richard Todd's in its lack 

of attention to irony, to religion, and to the field of visual art. Like Todd, she emphasizes 

Byatt's use of myth, going further by offering lengthy excurses on Byatt's character 



8 

names and book titles. (As a medievalist, Kelly's analysis of The Game - a story steeped 

in medieval influences - is perhaps the most useful chapter.) Her generally satisfactory 

readings of Byatt's plots are less contentious than Todd's and often lean toward the 

biographical, although she admits that "Byatt is doing more than simply working the stuff 

of autobiography into fiction" (9). One of Kelly's major objectives is to offer a feminist 

analysis of Byatt's work, but many of her conclusions are strident and overstated. Does 

Randolph Henry Ash truly "steal" Christabel LaMotte's virginity in Possession (94) and 

is Bill Potter in The Virgin in the Garden and its sequels really just a "despot" whose 

wife Winifred has been "beaten down by life" with him (69,125)? Male characters for 

whom Byatt has affection are demonized in Kelly's readings, while female characters are 

accorded complementary oversimplifications as victims. Kelly does not notice, for 

example, that Stephanie Potter Orton in Still Life (one of Byatt's most important 

characters) valiantly attempts to combine intellectual work with her work as a wife and 

mother. And Kelly chooses, among the multiple themes of Possession, to emphasize the 

myth of the "chained, imprisoned, or entowered woman" (89), never mentioning Byatt's 

ironic uses of the myth and the fact that many of the women in the novel are responsible 

for their own "imprisonment." This misapplication of feminist energy is a frequent 

occurrence in Byatt criticism; in 1996 Byatt reacted strongly against a particular feminist 

reading of The Matisse Stories by Michele Roberts, saying in an interview that Roberts 

"was looking for a particular feminist message and missed the feminist message which 

was there" (Miller). 

Much of the information available about Byatt has appeared in journalistic 

accounts, of which some of the best are by Valerie Grove, Kate Kellaway, Mira Stout, 



Sally Vincent, Richard Rosenfeld, D. J. Taylor, and Marianne Brace, all written since 

1990. Several interviews with Byatt are helpful, especially Juliet Dusinberre's in Janet 

Todd's Women Writers Talking, Olga Kenyon's in The Writer's Imagination, and 

Eleanor Wachtel's two excellent interviews on C B C Radio's Writers & Company, one 

published in book form in 1993 and the other broadcast in 1996. The best interview by 

far was conducted by Nicolas Tredell and collected in his book Conversations With 

Critics. Another valuable resource is a series of films in the Writers Talk: Ideas of Our 

Time collection. In 1984, Byatt was interviewed by Iris Murdoch for this series; in 1989 

she interviewed Anthony Burgess and Toni Morrison for the same series. 

The majority of the critical discussions about A. S. Byatt's fiction concern 

Possession, and particularly focus on Byatt's use of postmodernism, ventriloquism, 

Romance, fairy-tale, and Victorian history. The apparent need of critics to ally her with 

particular genres or techniques has not resulted in analysis of much insight, particularly 

as Byatt's fiction traverses a number of styles. Prior to 1990, there are, I believe, fewer 

than ten scholarly articles devoted to Byatt's fiction, and reference to her can be found 

within only a few general studies. Typical of this early analysis are the conclusions of 

Allan Massie (The Novel Today) and Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own) who 

categorize Byatt, briefly, as a moral novelist. Massie additionally sees her as having 

"little sense of structure and no elegance" (19). D. J. Taylor has written more extensively 

and appreciatively about Byatt, but his contribution is strictly bounded by his belief that 

she is plainly a social realist, in line with E . M . Forster and George Eliot. Those who 

delve into the matter of Byatt's realism more rigorously present her as a realist exploring 

the limits of imagination and language (Dusinberre), or as a writer fusing realism with 



10 

modernism (Kenyon, Women Novelists Today). In the field of thematic criticism, Tess 

Cosslett has analysed Byatt's depiction of childbirth, and Joanne Creighton and others 

have studied Byatt's and Drabble's use of sisters. 

Some of the scholarly writing about Byatt is misleading, especially that which has 

appeared in the wake of Possession. Louise Yelin and Olga Kenyon take Byatt to task for 

her supposed anti-feminism, while Janice Rossen (The University in Modern Fiction) and 

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (No Man's Land) focus almost exclusively on Byatt's 

feminist convictions. The latter study claims that Possession, in its portrayal of Christabel 

LaMotte, presents "a fully creative mother and a fully empowering literary matrilineage" 

(386), a conclusion that is surely overstated. Caroline Webb describes Byatt's "distrust of 

the metaphoric" (183), a decidedly problematic judgement. The sources of Possession are 

worked over incessantly. No clear picture of Byatt emerges from the majority of the 

critical work to date, except that Byatt is, supposedly, a postmodern game-player, an 

ironic neo-Victorian with a penchant for heavy use of allusion and intertext. Kathleen 

Coyne Kelly borrows the term "ficticism" from Marilyn Butler's review of Possession in 

the Times Literary Supplement and proposes that its combination of fiction and criticism 

is a neat summation of Byatt. Nearly all the graduate theses that have been written about 

Byatt in the past few years have been by women and have concerned feminist issues; the 

rest engage with various matters of postmodern style and form; nearly all of them are M A 

theses. 

There are, however, recent signs of improvement. Jean-Louis Chevalier is a lively 

and intelligent reader with a real understanding of Possession's provocative ending(s); he 

considers both the "ethics of conclusion" and the "aesthetics of conclusion" (110). Jane 



11 

Campbell has written several good articles on Byatt, including a piece on The Game 

which rightly underlines the irreducibility of Byatt's symbols and the devouring power of 

failed imagination in her world. She makes a convincing case for "Precipice-Encurled" as 

a story about the inadequacy of language and truth. Julian Gitzen has recognized that 

Byatt and her characters are "tirelessly alive to both the bond and the gap between words 

and their referents and between art and its subject" (84). Michael Westlake correctly sees 

that Still Life is not only "about truth but it is about looking; or rather looking, in its 

various and complex modalities, is the chosen metaphor for the articulation of truth" (33); 

he additionally notes that "an abandonment of correspondence between language and 

reality doesn't rule out the possibility of truth" (35), which I agree is key to an 

understanding of Byatt. 

Flora Alexander, in Contemporary Women Novelists, corrects some of the 

misguided attempts to place Byatt within particular feminist categories. She writes that 

Byatt has a "gender-neutral approach to the life of the mind" combined with "a 

breathtaking ability to conceptualize things about the life of the female body that have 

been almost inexpressible" (13). Alexander also observes clearly Byatt's obsession with 

perception and expression. 

She subjects realist writing to careful critical enquiry, thus developing it 
for her own artistic purpose. A foundation in realist procedures allows her 
to exercise remarkable powers of perception, in creating a verbal version 
of the material world. A complex discussion of the limitations of words, 
and a penetrating analysis of the emotional and the moral life, are placed 
within this setting, producing fiction characterized by a combination of 
intellectual rigour and a passionate interest in the depth and richness of 
human experience. (41) 

Like most Byatt commentary, Alexander's is limited to a few hundred words; this 

promising beginning is actually the conclusion of her short section about Byatt. 



12 

MAJOR THEMES 

The aspects I have chosen to emphasize in my study of A. S. Byatt are not the 

usual ones. Much of the work being done on her emphasizes her attitudes toward 

feminism, or treats her as an erudite postmodern Romantic of the "maximalist" type; 

there are critics who are studying her via genre, attempting to establish whether she is a 

realist, an ironist, an authority on nostalgic pastiche. Is she a fabulist? A psychological, 

historical, symbolic, or mythological writer? These are valid questions. There are several 

other fields of inquiry that would also be rewarding, and which have so far been 

neglected: her enthusiastic contemplation of themes from biology, physics, and 

mathematics; her presentation of illness, especially autism and asthma; her dialectical 

models of reality; and her status as a moral writer. On this last she says, "My early novels 

are in one aspect a sort of questioning quarrel with [F. R.] Leavis's vision and values [of 

moral seriousness], which nevertheless I inherit and share" (Passions of the Mind 2). 

Additionally, it should not be forgotten that Byatt is in mid-career, and that any analysis 

of her themes, ideology, or style must be provisional - indeed in the past decade her style 

has shown great variety and unpredictability. 

My interest is language and faith. Byatt is fascinated by language, both verbal and 

visual, and is always pushing at the boundaries of possibility to ascertain what words and 

pictures are capable of expressing, and whether they might not be fused in order that a 

superior mode of communication be created. This conception makes her sound perhaps 

like an idealist or a Utopian fantasist, but she is far from that. She is an empiricist and 



13 

emphasizes the importance of physical experience, of sensory data, of the concrete, 

individual response to the world. 

As I studied her reflections on this theme, I noticed that religious faith seemed to 

hover nearby. This is nothing new, of course. Christianity (my main framework of 

religious reference, and Byatt's) has been deeply involved in debates about language, 

truth, and authority for centuries, since the writer of the Gospel of John said, "In the 

beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 

1.1)1 and reported Christ as saying, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 

14.6). And long before that, it was written that God created the world just by saying it, in 

Genesis. Furthermore, it is not accidental that vision has come to have two meanings: the 

faculty of sight and that which is apprehended in a supernatural trance. But what did, 

initially, seem odd was that A. S. Byatt should be so involved in questions of religious 

faith, since she declares herself to be an agnostic. 

It seemed appropriate to me that an investigation of Byatt's religious faith (or lack 

of it) should be yoked to a study of her faith in language and her faith in art. It is there in 

her books, although few critics have commented on it. It is a familiar theme; Matthew 

Arnold is only one of the most obvious examples of a secular writer who attempted to 

transfer allegiance from God to art. Byatt, as it happens, has little patience for Arnold; 

many Victorian writers claim her sympathetic attention (Browning, Tennyson, George 

Eliot) but Arnold is not among them. A clue to Byatt's dismissal of Arnold is found in the 

contemptuous remarks about him made by her supervisor at Oxford, Helen Gardner, who 

saw Arnold's misapplication of scriptural attributes as "grotesque" and "fantastic" (The 

1 Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted. 



14 

Limits of Literary Criticism 7). As I investigated Byatt further, I discovered in her writing 

a surprising and sometimes unsettling passion when considering Christianity. She has 

said that, for her, God is "an omni-present absentee whose linguistic essence is reduced to 

traces of moral and cultural nostalgia, touched with savagery" (Passions of the Mind 5) 

and that she has "absolutely no religious beliefs although I think I have a religious 

temperament" (Byatt/Murdoch video interview)2 - statements that yoke paradoxical 

sentiments. In an argumentative essay about Van Gogh and religion, she reports: "I baulk 

at the words, 'religious,' 'spiritual,' even 'contemplative,' so what is left?" (Passions of 

the Mind 321). Yet she clearly wants to find the right word for her kind of "religious 

temperament." 

Byatt's education as a Quaker is particularly illuminating when we turn our 

attention to the question of why both written/oral language and visual language are 

important for her. For the Quakers, an "Inner Light" ideally reveals God's message; 

Meetings of the Society of Friends stress silence and simplicity. There is no emphasis on 

sacrament, priestly authority, creeds, or sermons. Instead, Quakers wait for individuals to 

spontaneously recognize the Spirit. The Word is important, but so is the recognition or 

perception (I emphasize the visual origin of the terms) of another form of message, one 

heralded by "light." The fact that Byatt is no longer a Quaker, however, is equally 

revealing; the bare, icon-free space of the Meeting House must have been stark to a 

person with such strong feelings about colour and paintings, the confidence placed in the 

Word inadequate, placed next to the complexities of the world. 

2 Interviews are cited by the interviewer's name, not Byatt's. Audio and video interviews are, of 
course, unpaginated. The conversations in the Writers Talk: Ideas of our Time video series are cited by 
Byatt and the writer she is in conversation with, as in "Byatt/Burgess." 



15 

Byatt's expectation that language and truth are compatible is tempered, then, by 

her empiricism and by a strain of scepticism. The cautiously hopeful aspect of her 

philosophy allies her with the metaphysical poets and the Romantics; she has said that her 

"lost paradise was [T. S.] Eliot's elegant fiction of [Donne's] undissociated sensibility" 

(Passions of the Mind 2). She is a fervent admirer of Coleridge who, like Byatt, could see 

his thoughts and metaphors. On the composition of "Kubla Khan" Coleridge wrote that 

"all the images rose up before [the Author] as things, with a parallel production of the 

correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort" (Selected 

Poetry and Prose 114). For herself, Byatt says, "I see any projected piece of writing or 

work as a geometric structure: various colours and patterns. I see other people's 

metaphors" (Passions of the Mind 14). 

She is also a professed follower of William Carlos Williams, attempting to 

describe the "thing itself in plain and exact language (Passions of the Mind 11). She 

acknowledges the importance of other modernists: 

I derive my sense of an order behind things from T. S. Eliot and Pound. I 
write the way I do from [Henry] James via T. S. Eliot rather than from a 
line of women writers. (Dusinberre interview 183) 

Postmodernists can claim her as well, because of her use of the term "self-conscious 

realism" (Passions of the Mind 4) to describe the style of some of her fiction. (I see this 

self-consciousness as exceeding even the considerable self-consciousness of modernism.) 

This last classification is accurate for her middle-period fiction (The Virgin in the 

Garden. Still Life, and Sugar) but less so for her first two novels. It can be used, but in a 

different way, for her fiction since Possession (1990), which has become more ironic and 

parodic. 



16 

There is an embarrassment of riches in any consideration of Byatt's literary 

lineage and her generic and stylistic transformations. These play a part in my study, 

because no one can properly interpret Byatt without grasping at least some of the 

complex network of allusions and deeply-felt loyalties she feels to other writers, past and 

present. But my primary interest is thematic: I want to know what she believes about the 

words and pictures we use to represent existence and knowledge. 

There is more than enough material to do a study solely of Byatt's philosophy of 

verbal language. The power of words is at the heart of Possession, where it is possible to 

find love through reading, and reading can actually change one's personality and entire 

life. Her excitement about words is palpable in the detailed interview Nicolas Tredell 

conducted with her in 1990: 

Well, Coleridge wonderfully said that he was sure that words were things 
like other things in the world. And the truth is that if you're standing on 
Jugger Howe or you're at the Boggle Hole [places in North Yorkshire she 
loves], all those things are there together, the spiders and the stones and 
the sea and the words Boggle and Hole, and you're there and they're there 
and they're not separate systems. I know that Iris Murdoch is right and 
that Wittgenstein is right, to say that, however much we may try to get at 
what is under the net, we're only ever describing the net. But if you make 
the meshes fine enough, the net is so beautiful that all the bumps and 
humps of things under it are so, yes, so accessible, you can actually sort of 
see them under the net. (Conversations with Critics 66, emphasis mine) 

If Still Life did not exist, it probably would not have occurred to me that there was a rival 

for Byatt's intense affection for words. But in that novel she dedicates herself to using 

seeing, rather than writing or reading or speaking, as her main epistemological approach. 

And furthermore, one notices, she has used the verb to see even when describing the 

power of verbal language, above. Using Van Gogh's paintings and Williams's creed "No 

ideas but in things," Byatt attempted a "bare book, my still life" (Passions of the Mind 



17 

12). Trying to write without metaphor, she soon concedes her failure, but the resulting 

meditation on writing like a painter is moving and profoundly original. 

At this point, I would like to clarify several concepts. One is the manner I use the 

terms "language" and "knowledge"; another is the way I separate internal and external 

visual imagery; the last is an attempt at explaining Byatt's particular use of the term 

"metaphor." 

First, my use of "language" and "knowledge" may seem, occasionally, blurred. 

Clearly these are quite different things: why do I appear to use them almost 

interchangeably? As with many of my approaches, I do this because it is appropriate for a 

study of Byatt. She herself assumes an intimate connection between knowledge and 

language, although it may be troubled; she is not an advocate of the gap between them. 

She has little enthusiasm for sceptical theories that signification is arbitrary and that there 

is no possibility of capturing our knowledge of reality (if such exists) in accurate 

language (if such exists). Byatt is well aware of the currency of such theories, and to 

some extent has modified, as a result, her initial faith in realism. But overall, it is clear 

from her essays and interviews that she believes in the strong possibility that knowledge 

and language can fruitfully coincide, and, more importantly, that abandoning the quest to 

find and articulate Meaning is an unjustifiable capitulation to the forces of pessimism. 

Next, I do not always separate internal imaging from the concrete representations 

that result from it. M y pursuit of information about visual knowledge has been general, 

rather than narrowing the field only to the creation of mental images, sometimes called 

eidetic images, the kind that Byatt says she experiences. To stop there seemed foolish, 

although many studies do - there is a clear line of demarcation between the philosophers, 



18 

neurologists and New Age practitioners considering internal imaging, and the 

aestheticians and art analysts whose field is (actual) visual representation. For Byatt these 

are connected: her imaginative ability to "see" metaphors in her mind and her fascination 

with colour and geometric form, with Van Gogh and Matisse, are clearly of a piece. 

Despite the fact that how we see has been researched and debated for thousands of years, 

I found that the conclusions in this area are still tentative. There is still no definite model 

of precisely how, for example, colours are perceived by the eye and brain. For my 

purposes, it was best to use a generous definition of visual language - encompassing both 

what Byatt's characters see in their minds and what they think about concrete visual 

representations and phenomena. 

Earlier, I quoted Byatt's remarks about her determination in Still Life to write 

without metaphor. A n entire study could be done on Byatt's treatment of metaphor and, 

although metaphor, with its close ties both to visual knowledge and written language, 

often appears in my remarks, I have decided not to delve extensively into its nature. 

Again, this is an investigation with a long history, but I restrict my remarks here to the 

following explanation of Byatt's particular attitude to metaphor. Although metaphor in 

literary scholarship is usually assumed to be a linguistic designation with visual (and 

other sensory) aspects, Byatt sometimes (though not always) uses metaphor as if it were 

wholly visual. When she says she wanted to write Still Life without metaphor, she was 

using the word in its conventional sense. But when she says, in a consideration of Van 

Gogh's paintings, "Both metaphor and naming in paint were different from these things 

[plums] in language" (Still Life 165), she hints that this metaphor is not really a word at 

all, but is closely related to picture, to thing. Anyone who would follow up on these 



1 9 

initial remarks of mine would do a valuable service; I, on the other hand, have decided to 

steer clear of the thorny history of metaphor theory and have concentrated instead on 

creating a broader model of Byatt's verbal/visual analysis. 

§ § § 

Byatt puts her visual tendencies to various uses: she revitalizes written language, 

she explores whether the visual can make a more substantial attempt at achieving 

meaning (which I designate as "Meaning" if it is meant in an ultimate sense), she 

wonders whether these ways of knowing and articulating can be combined to make a 

truly superior, and even transcendent, kind of communication. These last two goals, one 

immediately notices, court danger and irreverence: if the searcher refuses to believe in a 

higher power, what does a quest for transcendent knowledge really mean? In using words 

like "transcendence," "numinous," and "faith," I intend for them to be invested with their 

full power; although it may be common to assign "epiphanies" to all sorts of minor 

experiences in literary criticism, I use religious terms conservatively and with sincerity. 

My "transcendence" draws on William James's "the reality of the unseen" (The Varieties 

of Religious Experience 53), but transcendence as I use it not only refers to that which is 

beyond the material world. Transcendent reality is vastly superior to physical reality and 

by my definition is so much more than what we are that we will never be capable of 

grasping it fully. It is holy. Similarly God is not a concept or an abstraction in this study, 

but is presented as a full and meaningful holy presence, powerful and actual. 

There is currently an absence of literary criticism that takes religion seriously. I 

find disturbing the assumptions that nearly everyone believes that God is dead, and that 

religion is an inappropriate element in intellectual work. Although statistics on religious 



20 

adherence must be considered with care, and a statistical snapshot can only be a first step 

in a much-needed analysis of world faith as we enter the twenty-first century, it is 

worthwhile noting that fewer than four percent of the world's people actually call 

themselves "atheists." Another 15 percent are "non-religious," a term that I assume is 

more-or-less equivalent to "agnostic." One-third of the world's population is termed 

Christian, with Muslims at 20 percent and experiencing rapid growth. Even taking into 

consideration the possibility that the statistical apparatus may have flaws, and the 

likelihood that sizeable portions of the Christian group are believers in name only, even 

the remaining adherents of the Christian tradition (which is only one creed) are still likely 

to constitute a larger group than atheists and agnostics combined ("Worldwide Adherents 

of A l l Religions " 1997 Britannica Book of the Year). 

I have been seeking a way to broaden literary study in a way that reflects religious 

faith as it still exists. Religion itself is the recognition that there is a higher power, usually 

a deity, who is the source of existence, and reading a literary text in the light of that 

recognition - or even reading out of profound curiosity about that recognition - is a very 

different act from the one which most literary scholars practice. Assuredly religious 

institutions crumble, and deceitful and hypocritical church leaders contaminate 

perceptions of faith itself. A. S. Byatt does not believe in God, and yet her desire for 

something very like God reverberates through her works. This situation recurs again and 

again in twentieth-century letters, but our intellectual scrutiny of this manifestation is 

inadequate and timorous. One of the basic problems is that people confuse faith, belief, 

and institutional practices. I find it helpful to employ Wilfred Cantwell Smith's definition 

of "faith" as characterized by a very personal recognition of and response to a 



21 

~> 

transcendent reality, while "beliefs" are the intellectual and verbal doctrines and 

propositions that build upon and ideally buttress that individual's faith (Faith and Belief 

passim). The sometimes hollow institutional practices which are the reason that so many 

people in the twentieth century have abandoned religion must be seen as distinct from 

religious faith itself. 

A. S. Byatt is searching for systems of orderly belief that can replace a reliance on 

Christianity: she examines written language (rarely oral - she seems to have no interest in 

the discussion, taken up by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, for example, about 

which mode has primacy), visual art, colour, and geometry for evidence of certainty, 

purity, even holiness. She also has thought fiercely about science, a topic beyond the 

scope of my study. She has written extensively on subjects which can be termed religious 

but (in her treatment) remain on the outskirts of a fully-committed discussion of faith: 

ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, ministers, myth. And she has wrestled with 

incarnational ideas of character development and language theory borrowed from 

Christianity. One of the few articles on Byatt which deals with her religious character is 

"The Religion of Fiction" by Michael Levenson, which states, in part, that 
her point is not to confirm religious truth, but to enlarge the religious 
sense, which locates value not in the infinite but in the yearning for the 
infinite, not in God but in the search for God. (43) 

These searches encompass the occasional ecstatic success (in Marcus Potter's 

visions, in Stephanie Potter's experience of giving birth) but often end in frustration. It is 

particularly this conjunction of glimpsed Meaning and painful disappointment in her 

fiction that I explore in this thesis. Sometimes the glimmer of faith I see in Byatt reminds 

me of James Blackadder's PhD thesis topic in Possession: "Conscious Argument and 



22 

Unconscious Bias: A Source of Tension in the Dramatic Poems of Randolph Henry Ash." 

Byatt, like Ash, is disappointed with the trappings of conventional religion; in Possession 

Ash says that truth has been obscured by "palimpsest upon palimpsest" (181) until it may 

no longer be within our grasp. Intriguingly, the concept of the palimpsest so often seen as 

felicitous and creative in postmodern literature here is used with negative and destructive 

force. The palimpsests are the mistakes, false turnings, and obsolescences of religious 

traditions. 

Yet the moral centre of Byatt's Potter novels is an Anglican priest. Daniel Orton, 

in the Potter novels, has a sincere faith, even if his attitude to the church and some of its 

doctrines is uncertain. Daniel saves lives; he changes people. He is also, significantly, 

adept neither with words nor images. Daniel just "is." He represents being and doing at 

its most solid, and is almost completely unrelated to the quests for accurate ways of 

seeing and saying that other characters embark upon. Along with Vincent Van Gogh and 

Randolph Henry Ash (exemplary characters who for Byatt represent fulfillment in, 

respectively, visual and linguistic terms), Daniel (silently representing existence, love, 

and service) provides a model for the fully inhabited life. Unlike the other two, Daniel 

has no profound interest in or ability with language - and he provides an impressive 

notion of what can be gained by faith alone - which causes considerable trouble for 

Byatt's linguistic quest for truth. 

M E T H O D O L O G Y 

I am a pluralist and synthesist in methodology, but not in ideology (I am a 

Christian, a socialist, and a feminist). Whenever possible I work from the "text up" to 



23 

find my method, rather than from the "theory down." I noticed recently that the entry for 

Walter Benjamin in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defined him as 

a practitioner of "immanent criticism": theoretical principles are to emerge 
from the work studied, not brought to it from the outside. 

I like this idea, and would not be displeased to be described in such a manner. I am 

always on the lookout for practical working models of literary criticism, with an 

emphasis on working. 

By nature I am a close reader and a concrete thinker. It is difficult, however, to do 

close reading on nearly 3000 pages of fiction, so I combine this tendency with several 

other approaches. I am a thematic critic; in this study of Byatt my thematic interests are, 

obviously, religion, visual art, and the primary human experiences of birth, love, and 

death. I have found phenomenology, as scholars of religion like Huston Smith formulate 

it, useful as a critical tool. Smith's phenomenology is an attempt to understand another's 

experience from the inside. In my chapters about Byatt's presentation of birth, death, and 

love I have made particular use of a phenomenological approach, as, I think, does Byatt. 

The thoughts and feelings of Daniel, Stephanie, Marcus, Ash, and even the narrators (the 

narrator of Still Life has an imposing personality, for example) are presented by Byatt in 

all their variety, abundance, and self-conscious complexity for a reason. I take her 

characters seriously as indicators of meaning. There are exceptions: some of the fairy 

stories in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye use stock characters, and some aspects of 

Angels and Insects and Possession are too ironic to be trusted in this way. In addition to 

trusting Byatt's characters and narrators as phenomenological guides, I have found it 

beneficial not to use technical or dictionary definitions of my subjects ("love" in my 

Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English starts out unpromisingly with "warm 



24 

affection, attachment, liking, or fondness") but, for comparative purposes, to use literary 

descriptions of the events under scrutiny, accounts by Donne, Julian Barnes, and 

Wordsworth, for example. 

I respect the author's intentions and feel particularly strongly that an investigation 

of authorial intention is overdue for Byatt, who has been somewhat mauled by inaccurate 

critics and about whose writing there is little agreement and much misplaced emphasis. 

Thus, I have looked closely at her critical and autobiographical writings and at interviews 

(many which have never, to my knowledge, been considered by critics). I have found 

these to be revealing; they clarify important aspects of her thinking that critics have 

mishandled or ignored. In a 1987 article about Willa Cather, Byatt writes: 

Criticism used to look for "influences" and now seeks to place author and 
text in one theoretical framework or another. Either way, the critics are 
looking for similarities, rather than the qualities which might be thought to 
make a work individual or even unique. ("Hearths in the Wilderness" 508) 

She is somewhat cranky about critics who obsessively sexualize or anthropomorphize or 

who collapse categories. She herself is precise. In a televised interview with Michael 

Ignatieff in 1996 she said: 

Part of my subject matter as a novelist is the danger of endlessly arguing 
by analogy. I know an awful lot of people who are making paintings and 
writing poems because they think they understand chaos theory. They're 
addicted to the word 'chaos,' they think it's beautiful, a religious word. 
But if you're a really good writer, you can take both the way the word has 
been and some understanding of the way the word is now newly used and 
make a modern vision. 

Byatt's belief in the unique individual and in the possibility of original and 

independent thought has been a contributing factor in her difficult relations with feminist 

movements. 



25 

What I don't like is people with very strong beliefs that cause them not to 
look. I'm a political feminist. I think women's lives need quite a lot of 
improving, some of which has now happened. I'm interested in women's 
themes, women's freedom. Literary feminism is a much more dubious 
t h i n g . . . . It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting 
other women's imaginations. (Miller interview) 

The importance of personality and the subjective outlook and her keenness to combine 

these with principles of realism, her insistence that signification is not arbitrary but 

meaningful - these are elements that have made her an object of suspicion for certain 

feminist critics who have been strongly influenced by the sceptical mainstream of post-

structural thought. I read Byatt as a feminist reading a feminist, noting the salient feminist 

themes in her work. (My own definition of feminism is simple: I believe in the equal 

worth of women and men.) But these themes are not the mainspring of her fiction. 

Women in Byatt's work make choices, just as the men do, and some choices are better 

than others. Anna in The Shadow of the Sun appears trapped, but she has refused to learn 

the intellectual discipline that might have liberated her; Frederica Potter is a free and 

independent woman, and makes a number of bad choices, as do Maud Bailey and 

Christabel LaMotte in Possession. Byatt's women are individuals who must live (and die) 

by the decisions they make for themselves. They are not products of a system, or symbols 

of repression. 

I take into account when I write whether other methods are appropriate to the 

subject. For example, Catherine Belsey claims that Possession is a "profoundly Lacanian 

novel" (Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture 87), which I think is an irresponsible 

misreading. There is little convincing textual evidence for such an interpretation and 

Byatt displays little sympathy for Lacan's ideas. She certainly is not craven in her 

approach to difficult psychological or cultural theories (see her readings of Foucault, 



26 

Derrida, and Wittgenstein in Passions of the Mind), so it is doubtful that she can be 

accused of avoiding Lacan. It is, more likely, that his thinking is not pertinent for her 

world view. Byatt knows the work of various post-structuralist and feminist theorists 

well, but is often critical of it, especially when it overutilizes abstraction and intimidating 

jargon. I myself have no patience for vocabulary that erects barriers between the 

academic and general reader, and am drawn to thinkers who invite comprehension (Iris 

Murdoch, Edward Said, Oliver Sacks, Roland Barthes, and William James are variously 

placed along the critical spectrum but are all excellent stylists). 

In allowing my methods to arise from the text, I have been able to discover some 

surprising and gratifying particulars. For example, although I usually use biographical 

explanations sparingly, several aspects of Byatt's life demand attention and provide 

powerful explanations of, for example, the prominence of Stephanie Potter's death in Still 

Life. Byatt herself underwent a partial accidental electrocution by an ungrounded 

refrigerator in the 1960s, which explains the viscerality of that scene. Additionally, one 

cannot underestimate the importance of the accidental death of her son Charles in 1972. 

Byatt's writing stopped almost entirely for a number of years; after she was finally able 

to confront that death in fiction by transforming it into Stephanie Potter's death in 1985, 

her writing changed profoundly, in style, theme, and tone. Charles Byatt's death is, in 

large part, responsible for his mother's lack of faith and her obsession with accident. She 

has said, "Chance operates in the world in this terrifying way and can change things 

overnight. A l l our best endeavours are subject to it" (Byatt/Murdoch video interview). 

In using a synthesis of analytical methods, but especially close reading, I also 

came to realize how important is Byatt's insistence on the experience of the individual, 



27 

something I have already touched on briefly. A recognition of the place of individualism 

in her philosophy allows one to formulate theories of Byatt's political ideas, which are at 

first glance difficult to establish and contradictory. If I had not been open to a number of 

ways of reading, I doubt that I would have noticed her stance on individualism. Reading 

Byatt is a daunting task. As The New Yorker review of Possession said, somewhat 

caustically, in 1990: 

Possession is so enormous that it can't be maneuvered into the studio 
apartment of a review without a great deal of grunting and swearing - and 
of metaphor. It's a Niagara of allusions. It's a rope of pearls grossly 
disparate in lustre and value. It's a one-woman variety show of literary 
styles and types. It's a high-tech handbook of professional thought tools 
adapted for the consumer. (Thurman 153) 

The sheer abundance of Byatt makes a nimble and varied theoretical outlook advisable: 

those who assume that the postmodern literary detective story of Possession classes her 

with Eco and Borges find themselves perplexed when faced with the "self-conscious 

realism" of the Potter novels or the slightly morose fatalism of the 1960s fiction. In 1967, 

a journalist in the Guardian had the foresight to see this: 

For whereas Margaret Drabble writes (and talks) on double levels -
offering soft options to the lazy and the dim - her sister has less patience. 
Her style is rarefied. She assumes complete attention, enormous breadth of 
reading, and an acrobatic mind. (MacCarthy 8) 

Another way of describing my methods would be to give them a contrapuntal 

designation. In his book Musical Elaborations. Edward Said has noted that certain 

composers and musicians overcome some of classical music's authoritative tendencies by 

using strategies of counterpoint - empowering several voices to sing at once - and 

variation - allowing melodic themes to be open-endedly elaborative and diverse. I find 

Said's musicological idea happily adaptable to other disciplines. 



28 

§ § § 

Part of my goal has been to place Byatt in an accurate context for fruitful 

discussion, because so many of the comparisons being made are not useful. For example, 

consider the common procedure of contrasting Byatt's writing with that of her sister, 

Margaret Drabble, or her mentor, Iris Murdoch. I do find that Drabble's and Byatt's 

portrayals of childbirth are worth comparing (with Byatt offering a sharply dissenting 

point of view to her sister's apparently effortless fictional deliveries), but otherwise the 

connections are dubious. Byatt's first two novels bear certain resemblances to Murdoch's 

fiction, in their use of character to represent idea and their often heavily fatalistic plot 

structures. Since the 1970s, however, Byatt has experimented with a much wider variety 

of forms than she previously used. 

Byatt has written profusely on the writers she admires, and these antecedents and 

loyalties are a tremendous help in explicating her work. Although she claims Proust and 

Mann among her favourite writers, their influence is less visible than that of other 

favourites: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, George Eliot, and Henry 

James. She has admiring quarrels with E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence. These are the 

writers who have shaped her thinking, more than any theorists of literature or culture 

(Bakhtin, Lukacs, Derrida), and so I have used the words of literary writers extensively, 

as part of the structure of my argument. I have done the same with a few contemporary 

writers who can profitably be set side by side with her: Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, 

Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood. Byatt has noticed some of these texts, but others are 

accidents of my own reading. 



29 

My mixture of poetry, fiction, philosophy, painting (and so on) may strike the 

reader as arbitrary, but I find this a useful way to approach Byatt, whose methods are 

much the same. I must also acknowledge the sometimes casual manner I have quoted 

from complex texts, for example when I have mentioned the work of Donne, 

Wordsworth, and Lawrence. My readings of specific and limited elements in their work 

should not be mistaken for full interpretations. I also think that, while this work on 

Byatt's sources, biography, and literary antecedents is necessary now - to situate Byatt 

accurately - in the coming years it will be more meaningful to employ historical and 

cultural analysis and more rigorous linguistic methods. 

The themes and forms I perceive in Byatt's work are functional, not decorative. 

My work on love, for instance, does not present that experience in Byatt's fiction as 

prettifying gloss, window-dressing, or some hazy change-of-pace stratagem in an 

otherwise cerebral undertaking. Love is a fundamental human experience to which Byatt 

gives her full attention. Similarly, death in Byatt is not meant to "stand for" something 

else, or to be a mere plot element, but takes centre stage and is resolutely itself. Nor is her 

investigation of Matisse intended just to brighten things up. 

A related point about my own method is that my work is rooted in experience and 

not abstraction: when I discuss Byatt's use of triangles or spirals or birth, I mean just that. 

The triangle that Marcus Potter sees as a mental image is not a diagram, but is real and 

literal. It naturally has symbolic and psychological (and sometimes religious) 

significance, but it also is, actually, a triangle. I also discuss Byatt's characters as if, in a 

way, they were real, and I do not always emphasize divisions between the novels 

(treating the characters as if they were, perhaps, members of one family): again this is a 



30 

helpful method Byatt has used herself, in her semi-psychoanalytical book Imagining 

Characters. 

§ § § 

Theorizing the visual is currently experiencing one of its periods in vogue. 

Following Michel Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975) 

- "Visibility is a trap" (200) - some theorists are labouring at models of repressive visual 

technologies. As interdisciplinary study and popular culture analysis gain status, scholars 

are turning their attention to such things as the comic strip form and to Victorian 

illustrated novels. And the influence of computers in conceptual thinking has led to a 

lively growth in studies of visual communication theories of the utilitarian sort: the 

importance of iconic information on the Internet, of graphic presentation of data in 

business. Edward R. Tufte's Visual Explanations (1997) is indicative of this trend: 

This book describes design strategies - the proper arrangement of space 
and time of images, words, and numbers - for presenting information 
about motion, process, mechanism, cause and effect. (9) 

None of these current uses of visual thinking contributes much to an 

understanding of Byatt's fiction. These theorists usually emphasize how, not what. It is 

not the content of the information conveyed by way of the eye that is being theorized, but 

the form, as well as the ramifications (pedagogical, neurological, political, economic) of 

that transfer from brain to eye, from eye to brain. Foucault's discourse analysis as it 

touches on sight is pessimistic; it has no useful point of contact with Byatt's trust in 

visual reality. I have used instead the writings of aesthetic theorists and art critics like 

E . H . Gombrich and Lawrence Gowing to guide me and, especially, the writings of artists 

themselves. 



31 

If one can say that a study of an author is "needed" (and I am not sure that this is 

ever really the case), a thorough investigation of A. S. Byatt's writing is due. Possession: 

A Romance is the only Byatt novel which many readers know, and I cannot emphasize 

enough that Possession is not typical, but only one phase of her work. As one of the first 

to do a full-length analysis of Byatt's fiction, I am aware that I may have emphasized too 

strongly her quest for truth and transcendent Meaning, as well as her faith in the power of 

language to represent reality. Byatt is, after all, not an idealist, but an empiricist: she is 

aware of the limitations of language and the unattainability of absolute truth. In my 

conclusion, I will return to Byatt's failures of faith and hope and attempt some 

provisional summaries. The collapse of several of her investigations has not made her a 

cynic, although it has noticeably changed the scope of her ambitions. 



32 

Part I: The Language of Fundamental Personal Experience 

Chapter 1: Childbirth 

Suddenly she [Orlando] started - and here we could only wish that, as on a 
former occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar 
and provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to 
wrap up what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But 
no! . . . Is nothing then, going to happen this pale March morning to 
mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to shroud this undeniable event 
whatever it may be? 

Virginia Woolf Orlando (1928) 

I played the lead, and it was big stuff; supporting roles are less rewarding. 

Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove (1953) 

Scenes of childbirth in literature are rare, and told from the perspective of the 

woman giving birth they are even rarer. Children are frequently represented in poetry and 

fiction, both as individuals and as metaphors, but birth itself is common only in 

metaphoric use, where it has even become banal. The Bible is replete with such 

references: Zion is often in labour, bringing forth her sons (see, for example, Isaiah 66.8), 

and Paul appeals to the Galatians as if he were their mother: "My little children, with 

whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!" (4.19). Shelley's "Ode to the 

West Wind" (1820) associates birth with his own poetic inventiveness. Childbirth as 

metaphor, however, is not the subject of this discussion; there is a good deal of criticism 

on this topic to which the reader can be referred.1 But the actual story of the woman 

giving birth is uncommon, and if written at all - especially before this century - it has 

1 See Ellmann, Curtius, Ghiselin, Nelson, E. Sacks. For feminist views, see Friedman, Stone, and 
Gubar. Tess Cosslett in "Childbirth from the Woman's Point of View" criticizes these latter studies as 
privileging "childbirth as metaphor for other kinds of female creativity" (283 n. 3), as opposed to dealing 
with childbirth per se. 



33 

usually been told from an external point of view, often male.2 To underscore the 

strangeness of this situation, critic Carol H. Poston says that it is "as if a kiss were 

constantly described from the viewpoint of someone watching rather than from the 

perspective of those kissing" (25). 

One of the most famous descriptions of childbirth in fiction is found in Anna 

Karenin (1878). Levin looks on, horrified as "what had once been Kitty" utters in labour 

"terrible screams . . . [that] seemed to reach the utmost limit of horror" (748). Tolstoy 

captures powerfully the long hours of childbirth and the helplessness of a 19th century 

father, who finds, after the fact, that "the significance of a woman's life . . . now rose so 

high in his estimation that his imagination could not grasp it" (750). Despite this apparent 

reverence for female fortitude, however, the majority of the extended birth scene in Anna 

Karenin concerns the impact on the man: 

But after that hour another passed, a second, a third, and the full five hours 
he had fixed upon as the longest possible term of endurance, and still the 
situation was unchanged; and he went on enduring because there was 
nothing else to do but endure, every moment feeling that he had reached 
the utmost limits of endurance and that his heart would burst with 
compassion and pain. (745) 

This particular male viewpoint - glorifying and awestruck, apprehensive and alienated -

is found again in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915): "She knew she was winning, 

winning, she was always winning, with each onset of pain she was nearer to victory. . . . 

But he was screwed very tight in the vice of suffering" (192). 

It is not at all unusual for the observer in fiction to be just plain horrified, even 

when she is a woman. Kate Chopin, herself the mother of six children, ascribes this view 

to Edna, the protagonist of The Awakening (1899), who witnesses the "scene of torture" 

at the birthbed of her friend Adele "with an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken 

revolt against the ways of Nature" (146). Chopin is aligned with the traditional opinion 

2 See Poston for her discussion of childbirth in the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, 
and Emile Zola; Kreppel for Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams. 



34 

that childbirth involves unbearable pain, a view going back to Genesis and a view which 

has shown surprising, even alarming, resilience in the work of contemporary writers. 

I wish to examine some of the common methods, usually metaphorical, used by 

literary writers to describe childbirth, and compare these to the descriptions of birth used 

by A . S. Byatt, whose 1985 novel Still Life contains some of the most moving birth 

writing I have ever encountered. Critic Flora Alexander has written that this novel 

presents the "momentous experience of childbirth" with "insight and power" (38). The 

reader will note that, in my analysis, I have deliberately scattered the positive and 

negative metaphors used by Byatt and other writers. This is my small attempt to break the 

hero/victim dichotomy which characterizes so much of this literature. In addition to 

metaphor, Antonia Byatt's birth stories make use of language that she calls, in Passions 

of the Mind, "plain and exact" (11). Here the grounds for comparison, at least in literary 

terms, are relatively unpopulated, with the limited exception of the novels of Byatt's 

sister, Margaret Drabble. The obvious means for comparison in this case might have been 

medical texts, anthropological studies, or natural childbirth manuals, but I leave that work 

to other scholars. 

Before I go further, I offer a note on my terminology. I have attempted to steer 

clear of the usual rhetoric of pain in this chapter, and also particularly wish to avoid 

passive or past-tense formulations about birth: "was born," "confined," "with child." The 

ideas of "bearing children" and even of "delivery" are dangerous ones, depicting 

childbirth as punishment or imprisonment. See, for example, Kate Chopin's "hour of 

trial" (127) and the fact that she never mentions pregnancy in a straightforward, specific 

way. Even Carol Poston, a feminist critic, uses the Gothic-flavoured phrase "stricken 

with labour" (21). A. S. Byatt would not agree with my avoidance of the word "pain"; in 

the major birth chapter of Still Life (chapter 7) she uses the word at least 20 times. In 

Possession (1990) Christabel LaMotte states that "the greater part of suffering in this 

world is ours" (543) and is obsessed, before giving birth, with the pains of the Little 



35 

Mermaid in Hans Andersen's story (404). The knowledge is implicit that LaMotte is 

discussing childbirth pain. However, in most instances I find in Byatt an earnest attempt 

to capture the subtlety and intricacy of the event; where most writers might stop at the 

word "pain," Byatt goes beyond it to analyse the fuller ramifications of the experience. 

Questionable but influential translations from the Hebrew of Genesis 3.16-17 (c. 

10th century BC) may be the origin of the rhetoric of childbirth pain. The original 

Hebrew punishment applied to Eve for her disobedience, roughly transliterated as 

"becetsev," may mean either pain or toil, and the word for Adam's punishment is closely 

related to the root of Eve's word.3 The King James Version (1611) proffers the term 

"sorrow" for both Adam and Eve; the tone is pessimistic but more equitable than it 

becomes in later translations. According to the most commonly used translations of this 

century, the American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version (1952), 

and the New Revised Standard Version (1989), Eve is cursed with "pain in childbearing" 

while Adam is sentenced to "toil" on the land. Some recent translations, such as the 

Revised English Bible (1989), return to the emphasis on the similarity in Adam's and 

Eve's situations, and now cast them both in terms of the more neutral "labour." However, 

the R S V has been the most influential translation of this century, and it makes Eve's 

punishment the harsher. 

I prefer the term "labour." For me, labour is an excellent description of childbirth. 

The idea of hard work has often lost out to exaggerated descriptions of agony used, by 

men and by women, to terrify and to valorize. I have also attempted to describe childbirth 

in terms of "event" and "experience," an act in which a woman, a baby, and others are 

present and creative. The degrees of pain and risk involved are widely variable. 

3 1 am grateful to Michael Kurtz for his advice on Biblical translation. 



36 

§ § § 

Critic Tess Cosslett reports that the mother's version of the birth event was more 

or less absent from literature until Enid Bagnold's The Squire in 1938 and Doris 

Lessing's A Proper Marriage in 1956 (Women Writing Childbirth 1). There are many 

reasons for this absence in literary practice. As Virginia Woolf ironically points out in the 

passage from Orlando which introduces this chapter, birth scenes are not matters to be 

discussed in polite society. Furthermore it is, plainly, difficult for women to remember 

something as strenuous and complex as childbirth; this amnesia is frequently iterated in 

discussions of childbirth. One important dissenting voice, however, is Sheila Kitzinger, 

who says, "Years after the baby has been born [the mother] remembers acutely the details 

of her labour and her feelings as the child was delivered" (18). (Perhaps women do lean 

too heavily on birth amnesia; surely the ability to remember childbirth could be 

developed.) American poet and novelist Louise Erdrich speaks of her fear before 

childbirth and the feeling of being displaced from her own body, and is ambivalently 

grateful about "the merciful wash of endorphins that precludes any thought from 

occupying [my brain] too long" (Blue Jay's Dance 9). There are few literary models to 

follow; childbirth anecdotes are usually oral, and attempts to collect them have been rare. 

Additionally, the oral tradition has often been mistrusted for its exaggerated and negative 

qualities, and Cosslett notes that the "unstructured, ghoulish horror stories [which] 

challenge the simple, optimistic structures of our modern myths of birth" (Women 

Writing Childbirth 4) are reviled by both the medical establishment and by natural 

childbirth proponents. 

The consequence is a paradigmatic gap, a blank space where representations of 

birth ought to be. Erdrich, writing in 1995 of the births of her own children, wondered: 

Why is no woman's labor as famous as the death of Socrates? Over all of 
the millennia that women have endured and suffered and died during 
childbirth, we have no one story that comes down to us with attendant 



37 

reverence, or that exists in pictures - a cultural icon, like that of Socrates 
holding forth to his companions as he raises the cup of hemlock. (Blue 
Jay's Dance 35) 

We might, initially, think to point to the most famous birth, that of Christ in the New 

Testament, to refute Erdrich's argument. But we remember that Mary's personal 

experience is not recounted in the gospels. The exception is the Magnificat which she 

utters, after conception, in Luke 1.46-55, rejoicing in the blessings the Lord has conferred 

on her and on others "of low degree." 

Significantly, there is a feeling among most of the writers under scrutiny in this 

chapter that, in any case, birth is indescribable, that language is inadequate, or that a new 

language, a wordless or intuitive one perhaps, should be developed to communicate the 

truths of birth. In Margaret Drabble's 1965 novel The Millstone, the new mother says 

"what I felt it is pointless to try to describe" (114). Margaret Atwood, in her 1977 story 

"Giving Birth," puzzles over the meaning of the title phrase. "But who gives it? And to 

whom is it given?" she asks (225). Jeanie, Atwood's protagonist, examines and rejects 

other terms she has been given. The words don't match the experience. 

Atwood's narrator, unlike Drabble's, is critical of language and imagery 

contaminated by male conventions. But Atwood and Erdrich are cautious about diverting 

creative energies away from the physical and spiritual contemplation of birth itself 

toward linguistic issues they see as less primary. Atwood's Jeanie writes of "language, 

muttering in its archaic tongues of something, yet one more thing that needs to be re-

named" and then retorts: "It won't be by me, though. These are the only words I have, 

I'm stuck with them, stuck in t h e m . . . . So we will go ahead as if there were no problem 

about language" (225-6). 

A. S. Byatt, in Still Life, approaches the problem of childbirth and language in a 

similar way. Clearly the available words are inadequate, but there are issues immediately, 

and even perhaps ultimately (although this is less certain) more demanding than linguistic 



38 

ones. Her protagonist, Stephanie Potter Orton, is absorbed with her responsibility for 

producing a healthy child; she blocks out the stories of other women and the advice of 

nurses, rejecting the prescribed relaxation exercises in childbirth books. The novel is set 

in 1950s England, and Stephanie is constantly frustrated in her attempt to find models for 

living which adequately take into account both her remarkable intellectual abilities and 

her position as wife and mother. Although loved and supported by her charitable husband 

Daniel, an Anglican curate, Stephanie has to face birth (and later, death) depending solely 

on her own (considerable) resources. "She imagined that women were not so civilized 

that they had no natural sense of what to do with things that happened to everyone as 

imperatively as eating and excreting" (Still Life 85). Byatt and Stephanie are clearly, at 

times, conflated; see the 1991 interview with Jeffrey Canton, when Byatt says, "I don't 

know what I shall do without her" (6). I assume in this discussion that Stephanie's 

childbirth events resemble Byatt's own experiences, and that Stephanie's reflections on 

language and birth are, at least in part, Byatt's. 

Erdrich likewise says: "I take her [the baby's] instructions without translating her 

meaning into words, but simply bypass straight to action" (Blue Jay's Dance 56). These 

authors have decided, under the pressure of the task at hand, that they must get on with 

the crucial work of having children, and they trust their bodies will perform adequately 

outside the scope of language. The reader must ask, however, to what extent these writers 

claim that a woman can naturally and permanently cope without accurate language or 

historical models. Or is their apparent trust in the female body's unspeaking and essential 

knowledge only a preliminary step toward the development of a fuller, more exacting 

narrative of birth? 

I would argue that Byatt, like Atwood and Erdrich, does assert that the birth event 

has not been adequately examined from a woman's point of view, and further that, of 

necessity, this story must be told using the faulty but by no means contemptible tools at 

hand. What does not seem to concern Byatt is the surveying and plotting of revolutionary 



39 

inroads into an eventual liberated, wholly feminized expression of the childbirth 

experience. For Byatt, the arrival of this event into our literature is too long overdue for 

the writer to be warmly exercised about the bias now evidenced in our language. One 

model for Byatt may be Virginia Woolf, who accepts, in A Room of One's Own (1927) 

that women write differently than men, but praises style that can "absorb the new into the 

old" (81) and pleads for a future androgynous consciousness. In 1974, in discussing the 

feminist linguistics of Monique Wittig, Byatt declared her own allegiance to "subtle 

distinctions within a continuing language, not doctrinaire violations" (Passions of the 

Mind 276). Cosslett speaks of Byatt and others as "women writers negotiating with and 

within dominant ideologies" ("Childbirth from the Woman's Point of View" 284), 

emphasizing the compromises these writers feel they are either forced or willing to make. 

Byatt, however, stresses not the woeful inadequacy of male-dominated discourse 

but instead the multifold possibilities by which our existing language can be made to 

connect more closely with the birth experience; these opportunities, she implies, have not 

been fully utilized. Her contribution to this nascent literary field has been diverse. 

Stephanie Potter gives birth twice in Still Life, and each birth is a very different 

experience. The birth of her son Will, described in fuller detail than any birth in fiction I 

can bring to mind, is painful but mostly triumphant, while the subsequent birth of Mary is 

marked by frustration. In each case Stephanie depends, with mixed success, upon 

literature to help her through labour (Wordsworth in her first pregnancy, Dickens in her 

second), a difficult conjunction of books and motherhood with which Stephanie will 

struggle through the rest of the life remaining to her. In Possession, Christabel LaMotte 

refuses to acknowledge publicly her pregnancy, and secretly gives the baby to her sister 

to raise. LaMotte believes that her vocation as a poet is incompatible with motherhood 

and is unwilling to try to connect the two roles. In the parodic, semi-allegorical novella 

"Morpho Eugenia" (1992), the women of Bredely Hall are either queen ants or worker 

ants, and again it is clear that, in the nineteenth century at any rate, a life of the mind and 



40 

motherhood are nearly impossible to combine, and additionally that women's 

reproductive capabilities are a precarious source of power. In Byatt's first novel, The 

Shadow of the Sun (1964), Anna (who may or may not be a latent artist) discovers her 

pregnancy with a feeling of passive foreboding, acting not unlike the acquiescent Jane in 

Drabble's The Waterfall (1969). 

Childbirth prompts and demands a much wider range of responses than are 

typically recorded, and Byatt's fiction provides an unusually full sampling of them. 

"Morpho Eugenia" presents Byatt's criticisms of cultural productions of gendered 

identity, while Possession and The Shadow of the Sun demonstrate some of the social 

and artistic consequences for the woman facing childbirth. But Byatt's fullest exploration 

of the subject, the story of Stephanie Potter, declares the author's central intention: to 

emphasize the unique and individual aspects of the event, the singular ways, depending 

on intellectual and imaginative characteristics, that each woman will experience 

childbirth. In an interview Byatt underscores the individual, personal experience which 

informed the writing of Still Life: 

I read a very good article [probably Cosslett's] about descriptions of 
childbirth by women which assumes that my accounts of childbirth in the 
1950s and 60s are informed by feminist perspectives, whereas in fact they 
are simply accurate memories of, for instance, the rage I felt at not being 
allowed to walk up and down when I was in labour. It's nothing to do with 
feminist theory having told me that, I observed it. (Tredell 61) 

This elevation of individualism, memory, and imagination testifies to the ways in 

which Byatt allies herself with the Romantic poets, and it is no accident that Stephanie is 

so adamant about having her Wordsworth with her when giving birth to her first child, 

whom she appropriately names William. Throughout her works, Byatt repeats a line from 

Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" that is, for her, a touchstone: "But there's a Tree, of 



41 

many, one" (line 51) 4 Wordsworth's Tree, like Van Gogh's yellow chair, is deceptively 

simple, stark, seemingly general; yet it is also capable of communicating precision and 

particularity. (I return to the importance of this tree in chapter 4, and to the chair in 

chapter 5.) Byatt also raises the possibility that Wordsworth's idealistic faith in "that 

immortal sea / Which brought us hither" (lines 164-165) can be seen as a way for a 

woman to visualize a positive and creative childbirth, transforming it, perhaps, from pain 

to "splendour in the grass [and] glory in the flower" (line 179). Wordsworth's language 

of birth and childhood may be exceptionally innocent, but his metaphors are refreshing 

and authoritative for Byatt's characters. 

§ § § 

Even though direct and active depictions of childbirth in literature are rare, we 

should, nevertheless, look at some of the literary conventions which do exist 

(concentrating on fiction and poetry), and determine how Byatt's treatment of this theme 

differs. As we do so, keep in mind feminist scholarship which asserts that male ideas 

have contaminated childbirth narratives. Carol H. Poston has said that 

the most startling perception to emerge from a study of [childbirth in 
literature] is that although the experience has been woman's, the language 
has been men's; and so great has the tyranny of language been that women 
begin experiencing birth from a male point of view. (20) 

The usual discussion of literary childbirth is dominated by metaphor. Metaphor has 

always been especially useful here, as writers - old and new - wish to sum up childbirth 

as quickly as possible, in some generic way. Thus, individuals are reduced to "the 

woman" and "the baby" and the event abstracted from the personal. Images of mouths, 

4 This line occurs in Still Life (chapter 21), "On the Day That E. M . Forster Died" (Sugar 134), 
and "Still Life / Nature morte" (Passions of the Mind 19). Anna writes a similar line of poetry in The 
Shadow of the Sun (9). 



42 

doors, caves, and evacuation, for example, may be used, as they are by Louise Erdrich in 

her 1989 poem "Hydra": 

The hinged mouth swings wide at birth, the dark 
peristalsis, the great swallowing begins. 
The child's first lesson is the iron knocker, 
the hasp of hunger opening. 

Erdrich, although usually alert to gendered power relations operating within language, 

does not seem uncomfortable with at least some of the customary generalizations about 

"the child," "the body," and "the pain." 

At the other extreme, Margaret Drabble insists on generalizing about the lack of 

difficulty in labour. Rosamund Stacey, the unwed mother in The Millstone, reports that 

after giving birth to her daughter, "I felt remarkably well, a usual reaction I believe on 

such occasions, and I could have got up and walked away" (114). In a 1967 interview, 

Drabble confirmed that this was her own experience. 

Margaret Drabble recalled how she had managed to write a book about 
Wordsworth5: "I wrote the whole thing - the re-write, that is - in the ten 
days when I was in hospital when my youngest child was born. I took my 
typewriter into hospital - 1 sat in the ambulance clutching it saying, 'Don't 
take that away.' M y baby was born ten minutes after I got to hospital. And 
the minute I got into bed I got my typewriter and was able to get on. I had 
some lovely fish and chips and a nice evening's work." (Williams 15) 

Drabble's insouciance sounds odd to us, as does her refusal to couch the 

experience in metaphor. We are more familiar with the figurative language of conquest, 

sacrifice, and blood in Anne Stevenson's "Victory" (1969): 

I thought you were my victory 
though you cut me like a knife 
when I brought you out of my body 
into your life. 

5 It is intriguing that Wordsworth is associated with ease in childbirth for both Byatt and Drabble. 



43 

A prevalent comparison, between giving birth and engaging in combat, surfaces as 

recently as the films Courage Under Fire (1995) and Robin Hood. Prince of Thieves 

(1991), in which women declare their fitness for battle precisely because they have given 

birth. 

And of course, there is the required analogy between women and animals, a 

tradition used by Zola and many others. This view is, at least, mingled with some 

compassion and admiration in the 1930s doctor stories of William Carlos Williams: 

"Now, poor soul, I see her to be clean as a cow that calves. The flesh of my arm lay 

against the flesh of her knee gratefully. It was I who was being comforted and soothed" 

("A Night in June," Collected Stories 142). 

Sylvia Plath, in the 1961 poem "Morning Song," also sees herself as "cow-

heavy." A related "natural" comparison is that of birth as a splitting, like a germinating 

seed. This process may be difficult (in Byatt), indifferent (Plath), or casual (Erdrich). "By 

June I'll push the baby out/as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon," writes 

Erdrich in the poem "The Fence." 

Although Byatt shares in some of the common images used by other women 

writers, whenever possible she seems determined to avoid or interrogate the universalist 

assumptions associated with childbirth. Some critics, not inappropriately, see Byatt as a 

"traditional" writer. The review of Still Life in The Spectator said, "Her tetralogy [the 

Potter novels]... looks as if it will be an ornament to the Great Tradition" (Jones 31). 

But Byatt can be also impatient with "radical" writers for not going far enough in search 

of innovation. For example, she has taken Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body to task 

for "the limpness with which it adheres to traditional myths" (Passions of the Mind 275). 

In Still Life Byatt attempts to go beyond hackneyed and limited representations, and 

simultaneously wants to return to an examination of the possibility of making intellectual 

and physical knowledge adhere to words, with accuracy and originality. Hers is a 

strangely old-fashioned radical task. 



44 

She uses a number of common metaphors, but prods them for multiple meanings. 

There is, for example, the recurring notion of possession: "I am used. I am drummed into 

use," writes Plath in her 1962 poem "Three Women." In Still Life Stephanie complains 

she has "lost her autonomy. Something was living her life; she was not living" (84). This 

is a particularly frightening notion for the female artist, and it is this sense of the inability 

to escape from the inexorable claims of motherhood which drives Edna Pontellier to her 

death in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. In Plath's "Three Women" a baby's cries are 

"hooks that catch and grate like cats." In Still Life, Byatt pushes beyond the obvious 

meanings of possession (as she does in her novel Possession), teasing out ambivalence 

and multiple interpretations. Stephanie finds a rather grim satisfaction in describing her 

pregnant self as "sunk in biology" (Still Life 20). This phrase echoes one from Iris 

Murdoch's "Against Dryness," the 1961 essay which attempts to correct existentialist 

notions that we are "isolated free choosers"; instead, says Murdoch, we are "benighted 

creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted 

to deform by fantasy" (20, emphasis mine). Byatt, following Murdoch, insists it is crucial 

to accurately name; accuracy in this case means not giving in to the temptation to 

oversimplify pregnancy as either complete fulfillment or entrapment. Still Life, she says 

in a recent interview, is her book about "biology described from very close up" (Wachtel 

1996); if Stephanie feels possessed by the imperatives of her body, she also realizes this 

has positive and negative ramifications. 

A common method of coping with birth pain, a kind of visual aid not unlike, but 

not precisely, a metaphor is to move into the pain, using darkened ideas of welcome or 

embrace. Byatt writes that Stephanie "found the desperate energy to end the pain by 

increasing it" (Still Life 93); Erdrich says that "very often in labor one must fight the 

instinct to resist pain and instead embrace it, move toward it, work with what hurts the 

most" (Blue Jay's Dance 45). In The Millstone Drabble's character reports "sensations 

which though unbelievably violent were now no longer painful but indeed almost a 



45 

promise of pleasure" (113). It is no great distance from here to masochism, and it is 

possible in Plath's work to read a perverse pride in being the "center of an atrocity"; she 

writes that "there is no miracle more cruel than this. /1 am dragged by the horses, the iron 

hooves. /1 last. I last it out. I accomplish a work" ("Three Women"). 

A related matter is the way in which the protagonists of Byatt, Atwood and Plath 

alike describe the emotions of rage they feel in near-murderous terms. In Still Life 

Stephanie "was amazed at the rage she felt. She wished the women dead for holding her 

so uncomfortably in an unnatural position" (92). A woman who will give away her 

newborn child in Plath's "Three Women" decides "I should have murdered this, that 

murders me." Atwood's Jeanie is less violent, but she is "outraged" at the lack of 

understanding her doctor demonstrates and is "vicious" to her husband (237). 

Several of these writers bring forth battering ram images of the final stages of 

labour. In "Three Women" Plath writes: "I am breaking apart like the world. There is this 

blackness / This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain." In Still Life 

Stephanie also describes this, in more detail, giving the battering ram personality, an 

animal intensity. It is a "furious blunt block," and a "thing [which] launched itself again 

against its prison walls" (92), echoing and inverting Wordsworth's "prison-house" from 

the "Immortality Ode." 

One of the most common comparisons involves labour as powerful waves. 

Stephanie is described as "pulled almost off her feet" by the waves (87); Erdrich similarly 

says, "I feel myself slip beneath the waves as they roar over" and eventually "the 

undertow grabs me" (Blue Jay's Dance 45). And finally, there is birth as art. Atwood and 

Plath each describe the creation of a child as the crafting of a well-made watch. Babies 

are frequently compared to statues, paintings, poems, especially in Plath. Byatt tends not 

to set up this semi-antagonistic comparison between children and works of art, but she 

does make frequent use of water and tidal imagery, often considered to be stereotypically 

female. 



46 

Each writer also taps into an idiosyncratic store of more original images: 

Atwood's narrator compares herself to a birdcage opening inside out; Erdrich sees herself 

as a boat and as an armoured figure, her baby as a rocket. I could continue to enumerate 

birth metaphors, but this list will serve as an introduction. As previously noted, I refuse to 

divide this list into "light" and "dark" groups. The dualism set up between the Old 

Testament emphasis on the punishing pain of childbirth and the modern pretense of ease, 

as evidenced in Drabble and in some of the sterile myth-making which surrounds the 

modern hospital birth, is an overly simplistic and not very useful one. 

I have also hesitated to assign typically "male" or "female" meanings. I was 

surprised at how most of these common images resisted male labelling, with the obvious 

exceptions of images of warfare and of Erdrich's "rocket" mentioned above. And while 

the equation between women and animals can be queried, I believe for a feminist to 

prolong that argument (the one that goes - are animals, or women, "lower" forms of life 

than men?) is to play into the wrong hands. The use that many of these writers make of 

natural or animalistic examples is simply to underline our connection to other forms of 

life; a heavily gendered interpretation is a mistaken one, I believe. M y point is that I have 

not found in my research the preponderance of patriarchal images which feminist 

childbirth scholars led me to believe I should. 

It is true that some of the writing I am discussing is of fairly recent vintage, but I 

have also found that Sylvia Plath's metaphors, 35 years ago, do not always, or even often, 

fall in with Carol Poston's judgement that male language has tyrannized this female 

experience. Perhaps the complaint of feminist critics is valid when applied to birth as 

written by Sterne, Hemingway, Joyce, and Lawrence, as Maria Curro Kreppel claims. 

But Virginia Woolf, in Orlando, uses the flight of a kingfisher and the music of an organ 

grinder to sketch the birth of Orlando's child; neither of these ideas, it seems to me, is 

poisoned by the patriarchy. 



47 

Contrary to what Kreppel and Poston argue - and to a lesser extent Cosslett, who 

claims that Stephanie's use of Wordsworth does not work and that the poet's masculinity 

limits the applicability of his model - the birth scene as practised by A . S. Byatt in Still 

Life attempts to use language which has neither a male nor a female bias. The obvious 

exception is the use of water imagery often considered to be stereotypically female. 

However, there is a precedent for Byatt challenging or disregarding the established 

hierarchies of symbols; in The Virgin in the Garden (1978) she deliberately attempted to 

reverse the usual association of men with the sun and women with the moon, by 

emphasizing the identification of Elizabeth I (and, by extension, Frederica Potter, who is 

acting the part of Elizabeth in Alexander Wedderburn's play) with sun iconography (see 

her introduction to the 1991 reprint of The Shadow of the Sun). Byatt's intention is, I 

believe, not to take command of a point of male privilege - or at any rate that is only part 

of her intention - but more importantly to strip imagery of its gendered associations. In 

an interview with Olga Kenyon, Byatt politely says she "doesn't wholly agree" with 

critics like Ellen Moers, who think "there are specifically female metaphors" (18). But 

most importantly, Byatt retains the sensory power that such imagery confers, the 

instantaneous communicative energy of imagining a wave or a battering ram. 

§ § § 

With this background in mind, I turn to Byatt's most detailed treatment of 

childbirth: the experience of Stephanie Potter in Still Life. The tentative method for 

giving expression to the birth experience at which Stephanie Potter arrives is a 

combination of metaphor and "direct treatment of the thing," some form of Imagism6. 

Byatt has said that William Carlos Williams's famous dictum "no ideas but in things" 

61 do not attempt a full discussion of Imagism and its changing manifestations here, but find the 
following definition, by Natan Zach, who quotes Ezra Pound, useful for this discussion of Byatt's Imagistic 
tendencies: "The poem projected by Imagism is a laconic complex in which 'painting or sculpture seems as 
if it were just coming over into speech' " (A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler). I am 
also aware, as Zach is, that Imagism "may comprise traditional metaphor." I am separating, for the sake of 
simplicity, two tendencies which do, in fact, overlap. 



48 

was the starting point of the writing of Still Life (Passions of the Mind 11). But she soon 

realized that for her to write a novel "eschewing myths and cultural resonances [and] 

which would try to forgo metaphor" would be "doing violence to something in my own 

mental constitution" (9,14). This struggle - between condensed, concrete plainness and 

verbal elaboration - is explicitly played out in the pages of Still Life. Both the narrator 

and Stephanie engage in this struggle. The narrator vacillates between lovingly piling up 

verbal comparisons and celebrating the wordless communication of Van Gogh's 

paintings. Stephanie works through birth by alternately imagining her body in, for 

example, the grip of tides and animals ("the pain, like an incoming tide, abated a little, 

rippled back, gathered itself and sprang, heavy", [92]) and by expressing herself as flatly 

as possible (as when she names her child "You" [94]). 

Let us first consider imagery. The most important images used to describe 

Stephanie's sensations in childbirth are those involving music and colour. It is unusual 

for Byatt to refer to music; it is one of the few fields with which she is not comfortably 

conversant. I think it is for this reason that Byatt does use music to describe the unique 

feelings of labour; for her, it is something beyond the ordinary realm of understanding. 

Her use of music also, again, declares her allegiance to the Romantics; Stephanie creates 

music metaphors because she is a reader of Wordsworth, who writes, in Book I of The 

Prelude: 

Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to make 
A present joy the matter of my Song, 
Pour out, that day, my soul in measured strains. (Lines 55-57) 

Stephanie has internalized Wordsworth's images of song, and she is able to put them to 

work for her: "She brushed a floury hand across her brow, and pain hit her, pure and 

clear like a note in music, spreading up and out from the disturbance in the spine, singing, 

diminishing" (Still Life 86). If anything interferes with Stephanie's natural rhythms, as 



49 

when she is not allowed to move or is administered an enema, then the singing is "hurt 

and twisted" (87). It is the pain itself which sings, not Stephanie or the baby; the pain has 

its own voice which "sing[s] severely" (88). 

The use of colour to describe birth is not unique to Byatt, but Byatt's intense 

interest in colour extends throughout the lives of her fictional characters and through her 

narrative discourse in a characteristic way. Louise Erdrich also captures labour pains in 

colour in Blue Jay's Dance: 

During transition, as the baby is ready to be pushed out into life, the waves 
are no longer made of water, but neons so brilliant I gasp in shock and 
flourish my arms, letting the colors explode from my fingertips in banners, 
in ribbons, in iridescent trails - of pain, it is true, unendurable sometimes, 
and yet we do endure. (46) 

And even Drabble in The Waterfall cuts through the languor to report that the "colors of 

the scene affected Jane profoundly: they were the violent colors of birth, but they were 

resolved into silence, into a kind of harmony" (6-7). 

Byatt goes into more detail. The lines from the "Immortality Ode" which 

Stephanie chants to herself are simply- but absolutely-hued ones: "The Rainbow comes 

and goes. And lovely is the Rose" (Still Life 91). Later, "her vision filled with nasturtium 

pale-scarlet, and then with a curtain of blood" (92). When Will is a few days old, she 

looks at him through tears, "rainbow-hazed" (107) and Will himself is described as 

experiencing light and colour simultaneously, and is able to distinguish the golden 

colours of his mother's face and hair, as well as the lamp and the flowers. 

The meaning of Byatt's colour imagery is more difficult to interpret than the bulk 

of the imagery under discussion here. On the one hand, colour is associated with the 

primal, the "imperative" (Still Life 85) that Stephanie identifies as the way in which she 

must meet birth. This is especially true in the section where Byatt imagines Will's 

viewpoint soon after birth. According to her, colour is one of the basic and powerful 



50 

components of Will's first contact with the world, reminding us of the Babe's "quick" 

and "tenacious" faculties in Book II of Wordsworth's Prelude (see lines 237-280). 

But colour also seems indeterminate, so widespread in use and relatively 

uncontaminated by cultural affiliations (as compared to war or animal metaphors) as to 

be opaque. This is Byatt's goal; she has frequently congratulated Iris Murdoch on the 

concept of "opacity of persons" which Murdoch outlines in "Against Dryness" (20). For 

Byatt and Murdoch, opacity is an essential human characteristic, difficult but vital to 

describe. (Murdoch's theorizing of opacity of persons has not necessarily meant that her 

novels successfully captured it; many of her characters all too clearly "stand for" a 

problem or an abstraction.) It is impossible to know fully what compels people to act as 

they do, just as it is impossible to understand and articulate how a woman's body gives 

birth. This is an experience Byatt and Murdoch might say is "unutterably particular," a 

phrase each often uses in this discussion (see Byatt's study of Murdoch Degrees of 

Freedom 95; see Murdoch's essay "The Sublime and the Good" in Existentialists and 

Mystics 215). Stephanie recognizes that birth is an imperative and that she must 

somehow attempt to join her compulsion for words and books with this other compulsion. 

But if language and birth are equally imperative, they are also, in a way, equally 

ineluctable, and any attempt to encompass them must take into account this 

impenetrability. Thus, Byatt's depictions of music, a subject she does not understand, and 

colour, which is primal and impervious to definition (as she knows from her readings of 

Wittgenstein),7 represent themes that exist permanently beyond the experience under 

scrutiny and simultaneously and paradoxically capture its qualities of beauty, primacy, 

and inhumanity. 

7 In Remarks on Colour Wittgenstein preserves 458 observations and questions about colour and 
perception. Buried in the midst of these is the crystalline and unusually decisive admission: "There is no 
such thing as the pure colour concept" (III.73). I discuss colour theory in more detail in chapter 4. 



51 

Stephanie's most difficult task in creating a personal language of childbirth lies in 

combining these metaphors with examples of the "hard idea of truth," a phrase of 

Murdoch's which Byatt often cites approvingly ("Against Dryness" 18). Byatt's 

intriguing contribution to the literary depiction of childbirth is her use of (and 

commentary on) these "hard" ideas - to describe childbirth in flat, unadorned, non-

metaphorical terms. Drabble had attempted this in The Millstone, completely eschewing 

metaphorical language in the birth account, but Drabble's birth scenes in that novel and 

in The Waterfall lack detail and are, respectively, unhelpfully breezy and torpid, as if 

there were a tacit and natural agreement between mother and baby which cannot be 

communicated outside the relationship. (Elaine Showalter feels more positively than I do 

that Drabble has some success with presenting pregnancy as "a way of knowing" [A 

Literature of Their Own 306].) 

Where Byatt differs from Drabble is that her effort to bring the "thing itself 

(Passions of the Mind 11), the detailed and unmediated realities of the birthing body, onto 

the page is much more strenuous. She also avoids generalizing about "women." Thus 

Byatt attempts to use active description, as opposed to passive ("being delivered o f ) , for 

Stephanie's sensations: "She felt things grind, pull and tear inside her" (Still Life 88). 

Stephanie feels that "beneath the helpless trunk a whole wall, a box-side of flesh and 

cracking bone seemed to rear and expand between the bursting thing and the air" (92). It 

is an effort for the well-educated Stephanie to think in the "bare" and "down-to-earth" 

terms which Byatt wants to use (Passions of the Mind 11), and thus metaphor constantly 

obtrudes, as with "box-side" above. But the attempt is made to see from an unimpeded 

viewpoint, ideally, like a newborn; the baby Will, says Byatt, perhaps enviously, is not 

"capable of simile" (Still Life 107). Stephanie does realize that kind of plainness, as when 

she thinks, simply, "someone had to get out" (89), and when she encounters the 

unadorned and unexpected words "ecstasy" and "bliss" (93, 94) when she sees Will for 

the first time. 



52 

In Stephanie's second labour, plain speech is just as difficult as metaphorical had 

been, because "every contraction had its cross-currents of negation." She merely feels 

herself "a numb sack of knotted and ripped and sagging muscles that would revive to 

hurt" (249), and can go no further in articulating the experience. 

The combination of Byatt's version of Imagism, writing which she initially calls 

"innocent" (108), with more traditional metaphorical writing, quickly shows itself as 

vulnerable, both for the narrator and for Stephanie. The "recovery of the innocent eye" is 

impossible, whether describing a woman's sensations of birth or the way the newborn 

child sees the world. "We cannot think at all without a recognition and realignment of 

ways of thinking and seeing we have learned over time" (108) reports the narrative voice 

in Still Life. But neither the effective use of established forms nor the recognition of the 

anxiety of influence guarantees the thinker freedom from banality. The writer must 

additionally aim for the very highest standards of precision and accuracy, and this is one 

of the points at which Byatt's faith in language begins to fissure. 

"Make it new" cannot mean, see it free of all learned frames and names, 
for paradoxically it is only a precise use of learned comparison and the 
signs we have made to distinguish things seen or recognised that can give 
the illusion of newness. (108) 

In the search for precision, her demands are so exacting that, ultimately, she turns away 

from words and more definitely toward the visual, in this case the paintings of Van Gogh. 

The brushstrokes of what might be called Van Gogh's version of a birth story, "The 

Sower," are cited approvingly as "thick and solid: they are the movement of light over 

things, of the eye over things" (109). Chapter 7, "A Birth," concludes, not with Stephanie 

and baby William, but with Van Gogh, whose visual articulation of experience, according 

to Byatt, is finally more sustaining than the verbal element in which Stephanie and Byatt 

both sink and swim. Van Gogh's brushstrokes, imposed on the world of the sower, 

simultaneously capture it with accuracy and translate it into his own terms. 



53 

In Still Life Stephanie and Byatt work toward this "thick and solid" 

representation, mixing it with the linguistic metaphor intellectually more familiar to 

them. They are simultaneously verbal and visual people and have no choice but to 

attempt this fusion. Byatt has said that she personally can "see other people's metaphors 

- if there is any iconic content to a metaphor I will 'see' a visual image on some inner 

mental screen" (Passions of the Mind 13-14, emphasis in original). Stephanie "always 

won Kim's game, the objects on a tray . . . she remembered them for their quiddity, 

naming and denoting them in language in her mind" (Still Life 33). 

But in attempting to expand on this fusion of visual and verbal knowledge, 

Stephanie, less fortunate than her author (and unwilling to live outside society like Van 

Gogh), is constantly checked and thwarted by a social arena which values neither 

metaphor nor the "thick and solid" precision of things. The hospital practices of the 

1950s do not even allow her to have books, her first and most primitive strategy for 

coping with birth. (Kathleen Coyne Kelly in her study of Byatt believes that the 

descriptions of hospital practices are among "the most harrowing sections" of Still Life 

\A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 65] and makes no mention of Stephanie's 

considerable triumphs.) Stephanie tries not to succumb to the belittling routines of the 

maternity ward, "a female world of endurance, diminished vocabulary, chattered 

conventional confidences," where everyone is addressed as "mother" or (ominously) 

"mum" (Still Life 95, 101). During labour she demands, unsuccessfully, to be given her 

copy of Wordsworth's poems, and when it is not forthcoming, she marches up and down 

her hospital room, chanting memorized sections of the "Immortality Ode" to herself. 

"The next pain, when it came, was possible to weave into the rhythm of this tramping" 

(90), but when the nurses order Stephanie to stop, "the pain choked again like a 

suffocating net, as it did when they interfered with its liveliness" (91). It is, partly, the 

musicality of poetry which Stephanie finds attractive as an aid in labour; if labour pains 

are met correctly she finds they are "pure and clear like a note in music" (86). 



54 

Because Stephanie is not allowed to work out fully her own methods for coping 

with labour, it is unclear how helpful the books that she wanted to keep with her would 

have been, but her small bit of success with what Wordsworth she could remember is 

provocative. Given time, could Stephanie have moved beyond rhythm and worked the 

themes and metaphors of Wordsworth or other authors into her labour? Perhaps, but it 

appears that the other, non-metaphorical, route would have been even more successful, as 

exemplified in this remarkable passage - Stephanie's plain and lucid recognition and 

naming of her son Will: 

"There," she said to him, and he looked, and the light poured through the 
window, brighter and brighter, and his eyes saw it, and hers, and she was 
aware of bliss, a word she didn't like, but the only one. There was her 
body, quiet, used, resting: there was her mind, free, clear, shining: there 
was the boy and his eyes, seeing what? And ecstasy. Things would hurt 
when this light dimmed. The boy would change. But now in the sun she 
recognised him, and recognised that she did not know, and had never seen 
him, and loved him, in the bright new air with a simplicity she had never 
expected to know. "You," she said to him, skin for the first time on skin in 
the outside air, which was warm and shining, "you." (94) 

D. J. Taylor has called these scenes "epiphanic" (After the War 255). The beauty and 

ecstasy of this moment, approaching the Renaissance "undissociated sensibility" for 

which Byatt has said she is nostalgic (Passions of the Mind 9), echoes Stephanie's 

courtship in The Virgin in the Garden. In that book "[d]esire lunged at them" and she and 

Daniel Orton turn to each other and say, simply, "I want, I want, I want" (183). In each 

case, the prevalence of monosyllabic words encourages in our reading starkness, 

breathlessness, and sharpness of focus which are particularly striking. But even this 

method can lose its lustre. These moments of bliss are, of course, simultaneously 

moments of extremity, and their rarity and danger is part of the defining quality of their 

worth. Ordinary living erodes and dissipates the high notes of recognition and meaning 

momentarily revealed for Stephanie and Daniel and the baby. The plain language of these 



55 

scenes, if used too often, would become cliched or inadequate; it is the surprise of calling 

a baby "You" that is so effective. 

Stephanie's latent visual abilities would need to be developed, and there is little 

possibility for such education in the strictly-bounded world of a Yorkshire minister's 

wife. She has only advanced as far as seeing the unborn baby as a "furious blunt block" 

(92). This sketch is original but lacks detail, shading. Even this tentative success has been 

eroded and dissipated by the time Stephanie enters the hospital to have her second child. 

This is demonstrated by the fact that she does not take poetry with her but instead 

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. In the two years since the birth of Will, her marriage and 

her intellectual life have become more troubled, due to the demands of the baby and to 

the inarticulate and irritating presences in the Orton home of Stephanie's brother Marcus 

and Daniel's mother, Mrs. Orton. Stephanie will later explain to Daniel that she feels 

thwarted by the lack of opportunity to use what Daniel recognizes as her "great unopened 

volumes of vocabulary" (306). Right until her death, Stephanie's words "wandered loose 

and unused" (307); she is numbed by convention and loses touch, not only with her 

intellectual vocabulary, but with that which her vocabulary helps her to encompass, "her 

unregarded s e l f (306). Losing the ability to connect either with words or with basic 

things, Stephanie does not encounter an epiphany of recognition, as she had with Will, 

but feels for her second child "not wonder, but protective pity." There is no bliss, beyond 

"a shot of pethidine" (250). 

Stephanie has not built on the successful experience of her first labour, but, 

confused, attempts to use a different book during her second labour. The combination of 

a physically difficult labour (an accident) and the wrong book (a defective intellectual 

choice) adds up to fused images of the "slowly developing nightmare of a blocked labour 

. . . with the sluggish Thames and its cargo of dead bodies" (249). Mary is ominously 

marked with a birthmark on her face and the prints of forceps on her skull. 



56 

The knowledge that Stephanie has gained is summed up in an inaccurate line from 

The Faerie Queene, which comes to her as she drifts off into a drug-induced sleep: "Ease 

after pain . . . doth greatly please" (Still Life 250). Thematically, there is gloom here; 

there is also the mechanical failure of Stephanie's fine mind, no longer able to quote 

poetry accurately. The line should be "ease after war," not "after pain." But if we turn to 

the entire stanza, we find, even more disturbingly, that what Stephanie is inadvertently 

remembering of Spenser is not rest, but death. 

He there does now enjoy eternall rest 
And happie ease, which thou doest want and crave, 
And further from it daily wanderest: 
What if some litle paine the passage have, 
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter wave? 
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease, 
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave? 
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, 
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please. (Book 1, Canto 9, 
Stanza 40) 

The reader perhaps suspects that, since this prophecy of doom occurs during a birth 

scene, death is waiting for one of the children. This is reinforced by the presence in the 

novel of the character Gerry Burtt, who comes to the Ortons for help after his wife is 

found guilty of the death of their baby. But it is Stephanie's own death which is 

anticipated. At the end of Still Life she will die of an accidental household electrocution, 

reaching under an ungrounded refrigerator to rescue a sparrow. 

Does Stephanie's failure to accurately name her experiences, and finally her 

failure to survive at all, occur because she is, at the simplest level, reading the wrong 

book, and, at another level, seeking the wrong words and the wrong images? Is this lack 

of success an accident, or is it symbolic of something inherently wrong in the way 

Stephanie has used (or not used) language and imagination? Byatt has explicitly made a 

case for accident and chance as important driving forces in Still Life; in the 1984 video 

interview with Murdoch, Byatt emphasized that the novel was about how "chance 



57 

operates in the world in this terrifying way and can change things overnight. A l l our best 

endeavours are subject to it." Yet it seems clear to me that Stephanie's failure is not 

merely accidental, but is also directly connected to her losing battle with language. 

At each decisive and elemental moment of Stephanie's life, one word is offered, 

as a signature, to convey the integral experience of that moment. The high points of her 

existence, the passionate courtship scene with Daniel in chapter 18 of The Virgin in the 

Garden and the birth of her first child in chapter 7 of Still Life, are imprinted with the 

words "want" and "you." The vibrancy and simplicity of these signatures give way to the 

grim determination evidenced by the words she says to her second child, "I'll protect you 

. . . I will" (Still Life 251). Stephanie's use of "will" here is merely a pale echo of the 

name of her first child. "Will" in the first instance symbolized a connection with poetry 

which held great meaning for Stephanie; in the second instance, the word's connotations 

of self-discipline and of a document concerning death can be heard. Furthermore, in each 

case, Stephanie's application of "will" to her two children hints at the degree to which her 

own will is being sacrificed to theirs. The last word of Stephanie's life, "altruism," to be 

discussed in the next chapter, halts the linguistic descent evident in Stephanie's decisive 

experiences - but the hope and self-awareness inherent in her use of "altruism" come too 

late for her. 

One of Byatt's purposes in Still Life was to explore the possibility of rescuing the 

debased or abandoned idea of the "undissociated sensibility." Writing several years later 

about the composition of the novel, in an essay called "Still Life / Nature morte," she 

discusses T. S. Eliot's analysis of Donne. Donne "felt his thought as immediately as the 

odour of a rose: this in practice we took to mean that he thought with, in, sensuous 

images" (Passions of the Mind 9). Byatt personally identifies with this immediacy of 

thought and image; although she makes no claims for the rest of humanity, she hints that 

she herself can, at times, achieve something of this sort. 



58 

Her fictional characters, however, undergo more profound testing. Stephanie 

Potter struggles to fuse mental images with words, as do Stephanie's brother Marcus and 

her friend Alexander Wedderburn; only Stephanie has provisional success, and that 

success is stunningly undermined by her accidental death. Yet Byatt clings to an 

idealistic hope that word and image can be combined into something immediate and 

imperative; she is excited about linguistic theories, discussed in "Still Life / Nature 

morte," which she interprets as saying that metaphor is both experience and act (Passions 

of the Mind 15), or, to put it another way, is the thing itself and the understanding of it. 

As evidenced in Stephanie's childbirth stories, however, this return to Donne's 

immediacy remains an untenable ideal (or an incomplete manifestation of that ideal), and 

Byatt's significant breakthroughs in the depiction of childbirth, using "exacting" 

language to denote an "exacting" event, are, in the end, limited by her own 

epistemological ambitiousness. 



59 

Chapter 2: Death 

So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan, that moves 
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, 
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustain'd and sooth'd 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 

William Cullen Bryant, "Thanatopsis" (1821) 

Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most 
exemplary one. . . . Today people live in rooms that have never been 
touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity. . . . 

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (1936) 

Among Antonia Byatt's greatest written achievements is the narrative of the death 

of Stephanie Potter Orton in the 1985 novel Still Life. The death is a shock, and is meant 

to be: the reader is bound to feel affection for Stephanie, an endearing woman of 

exceptional compassion and intelligence. Iris Murdoch, in a filmed interview with Byatt 

at the time of the novel's release, said that Still Life "contains one of the most wonderful 

surprises which I've seen for a long time in a novel — an accident which is very 

unforeseen, and is like a real accident. Accidents in novels don't always feel like real 

accidents." The novel's title, however, does provide clues about the coming death in 

chapter 30. "Still life" first reminds us of painting, and the book's presiding genius is Van 

Gogh, whose death seems prefigured in so many of his pictures. In French, "still life" 

translates, more bleakly, as "nature morte" On the other hand, the phrase hints at life's 

continuity - ordinary life still goes on - and Byatt's readers, aware that Still Life is only 

the second of a proposed four volume series about the Potter family, will not expect a 



60 

major character to die. Or does the "still" refer to immortality - a different life still goes 

on? The mixed signals the title emits are an apt prelude for the complexity of responses 

about death that the book provides. 

Still Life seeks to remedy the absence of honest death in recent literature. We are 

an immense distance from Montaigne, who (following Cicero) said, in the 16th century: 

It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. 
Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned 
how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us 
from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man 
who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an 
evil. (Essays I. 20) 

Virginia Woolf was critical of modern literature's refusal to deal directly with death and 

introduced Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway to rectify the situation, a hero to 

become "the new psychotic bard of death," as one critic puts it (Stewart 255). Jacques 

Choron believes that recent investigations "show that the average person thinks of death 

much more frequently than has been generally assumed" (272) but Ernest Becker and 

Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross disagree. As Rilke writes: "We lack all knowledge of this parting. 

Death / does not deal with us" ("On Hearing of a Death"). 

Death's face is obscured in our society, but what representations we do find are 

aberrant and violent. Our understanding in this century of the experience of an ordinary 

person dying is no more accurate than it ever was, and is probably inferior. We are not 

any closer to a definition of death's essential qualities. Paul de Man has called death "a 

displaced name for a linguistic predicament" (qtd. in Steiner, Real Presences 140). Such a 

definition demonstrates the debased state of our thinking about death's reality. 

The failure of faith in God and in language - two key components of an inquiry 

such as this - hampers the postmodern intellectual who seeks knowledge about death. 

Wittgenstein counsels us, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), that "Whereof one 



61 

cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (189).1 St. Paul's exaltation that "Death is 

swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15.54) will not satisfy the unbeliever. No atheist 

has written anything like John Donne's meditations on death, born of his dynamic belief 

in the Christian resurrection. He can pity death, the "slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and 

desperate men" ("Death be not proud"). Donne's faith in God and the resurrection gives 

him the upper hand over death, contentedly containing and explaining it, as no secular 

interpretation can. "Why swellst thou then?" he asks death. 

As moving and as real as Stephanie Potter's death is for us, there is a residual 

force, an interfering static, in the scene which confounds explication or acceptance, and 

which comparison to Donne clarifies. The most concerted effort to describe a secular 

death leaves something undone. A large space in Still Life hums with undispersed power. 

It is faith, abandoned and made quarrelsome. 

§ § § 

Death has been treated more fully, even more enthusiastically, in modern 

literature and philosophy than has birth, but the formulations are nearly always in the 

abstract. Death interests Schopenhauer as the inspiration of philosophy (a belief which 

recurs from Plato to Heidegger to Derrida). It is the "origin and aim of life" (Freud), the 

"mother of beauty" (Wallace Stevens), and the "most poetical topic in the world" - if it 

involves a beautiful woman (Poe).2 Henry James delineates death's sombre, but still 

abstract, mien in "The Beast in the Jungle" when death, or some other destiny which has 

become conflated with it, looms "huge and hideous" (Collected Stories 1898-1910 541). 

These methods of treating death do not elucidate the work of A. S. Byatt. When 

Kenneth Burke wrote "Thanatopsis for Critics: A Brief Thesaurus of Deaths and Dyings" 

in 1952, he itemized 15 possible "deflected" themes which discussions of death actually 

'in the consideration of death, language does seem inadequate compared to music. Just one 
composition by Schubert, the Death and the Maiden quartet for example, delineates more of death's 
actuality than the listener can take in. 

2Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 39; Stevens, "Sunday Morning"; Poe, "Philosophy of 
Composition" 19. 



62 

conceal, because "death can only be an idea" and "the ubiquitous talk of death can very 

readily be talk of something else" (369). One cannot avoid the fact that death in literature 

often unites or exchanges figurative places with other forces, most famously erotic love. 

Wordsworth's Lucy, for example, is wedded by Death to Nature, who promises her "vital 

feelings of delight." Byatt, however, once termed herself a practitioner of self-conscious 

realism (Hass interview) and more recently, elegant empiricism (Gussow C l 1). A more 

direct approach to death is demanded. 

The reader will note the absence, in this chapter, of encyclopedic overviews of 

literary deaths by genre, period, or type; neither is there sustained discussion of 

psychoanalytic, philosophic, or religious views of death.31 will briefly touch on some of 

these subjects, because their various elements do inform Byatt's particular view of death. 

But her twofold purpose in depicting death can be discovered without draping the weeds 

of thanatological history and theory completely about us.4 First, Byatt aims to strip the 

literary experience of dying of its attendant myths, superstitions, and conventions as 

much as possible, and to tell it plainly. Second, she focuses our attention on a kind of 

death not easily assimilated into the conventional view: sudden, premature, accidental 

death, a kind of death for which reading Kubler-Ross or Keats may not prepare us. A n 

essential aspect of this latter purpose is her attempt to describe death from the point of 

view of the dying consciousness. This is uncommon, although not as uncommon as we 

found it to be in our study of birth. 

Byatt's determination to tell death plainly is similar to the way she handles birth, 

and she employs many of the same strategies. She removes much of the figurative 

3 Death studies are not difficult to locate. See Freud's influential discussions in Totem and Taboo 
and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For an overview of philosophical and psychological issues see Choron, 
Brown, and Becker. Stewart is dense but occasionally illuminating on British fiction. Wheeler is important 
for 19th century studies. Fiedler and Kermode are influential but unhelpful with actual death. For suicide 
see Alvarez. Post-structuralist accounts are given in Death and Representation (ed. Goodwin and Bronfen). 
Feminist studies include those by Loraux, J. Todd, and Bronfen. A helpful anthology is The Oxford Book 
of Death, edited by D. J. Enright. 

4The subject of grief is an important one in Byatt, but it concerns the living rather than the dying, 
and I do not treat it here, hoping that another reader will take it up. 



63 

language from the scene, is careful to avoid stereotypical and gendered formulations, and 

attempts a direct relation of body and mind experience, in defiance of traditions which 

construct death as a spiritual event.5 She rejects in turn most of the sentimental and 

mystic tendencies of the Romantics and Victorians and the black, absurdist comedy of 

late modern or postmodern works by Beckett or Robbe-Grillet. She seems, at first, akin to 

early modernists like E . M . Forster, who attempted to demystify the act of dying, while 

rendering it honestly. But Byatt then attempts to reinscribe the event with meaning, 

which complicates things considerably. 

§ § § 

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her influential book On Death and Dying, says that "in 

our unconscious, death is never possible in regard to ourselves" (2). (I am putting aside 

Kubler-Ross's recent mystical revisions of earlier statements about the necessity of 

accepting death.) This begins to explain the diverse ways writers have treated death; 

although we all must nominally accept our mortality, none of us have any data from our 

lived (as opposed to observed) experiences concretely demonstrating that end. So we 

furnish the subject with religious beliefs, or with fantasies and theories. Death is "always 

only represented. There is no knowing death, no experiencing it and then returning to 

write about it" (Goodwin and Bronfen 20). 

As with the treatment of birth, there is a marked shift in the literary depiction of 

death with the onset of modernism. Before this century, death scenes in literature were 

sites where meaning is housed, events in which fulfillment, beauty, or even ecstasy are 

revealed. O f course there are exceptions. Death in Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1899) is a drab 

thing. But in pre-modern literature it is rare to find the emphasis on the cruelty and 

homeliness of death that is found, for example, in the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, and 

5I separate Byatt's death scenes from her ghost scenes, treated in chapter 6. The apparently 
revenant Arthur Hallam in "The Conjugial Angel" and the boy in "The July Ghost" must be closely 
examined to determine what kind of reality they possess. Byatt allows for the possibility that they are not 
ghosts, but memories. 



64 

Goya. Jane Eyre, for example, learns who she is and acquires a fortune at the deathbed of 

the guilt-ridden Mrs. Reed (1847). Wagner's Tristan and (especially) Isolde die in a 

swoon of gorgeous melody and sexual bliss (1865). Shelley emphasizes the heroism of 

the dead Keats in "Adonais" (1821). Garrett Stewart, in Death Sentences: Styles of Dying 

in British Fiction, writes that the nineteenth-century death scene has an "often frustrated 

impulse toward a revelation not necessarily numinous, as in the high Romantic poem, but 

retrospectively illuminating" (21). So even an ambiguous suicide, like the one in Kate 

Chopin's The Awakening (1899), resonates with freedom. 

But Dostoyevsky, writing in 1880, begins to subvert the conventions when he 

describes Father Zossima's death in The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zossima dies "in 

joyful ecstasy" (389) and crowds gather in excited expectation of miracles; instead the 

priest's body emits an astonishing stench. This loss of sanctity expands in the black 

comedy of Faulkner's As I Lav Dying (1930), and is examined with terrifying frankness 

in L'Etranger (1942). Camus opens the novel with Meursault's less than soulful thoughts 

on his mother's death: 

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram 
from the Home says: Y O U R M O T H E R P A S S E D A W A Y . F U N E R A L 
T O M O R R O W . D E E P S Y M P A T H Y . Which leaves the matter doubtful; it 
could have been yesterday. (1) 

Later, after he kills the Arab on the beach, Meursault has trouble remembering the 

murder and feels "less regret than a kind of vexation" (87). Death no longer automatically 

earns respect and fear; increasingly it ceases to be a matter of consequence. 

As the twentieth century has advanced, the idea that one can make a "good 

death" has become drastically undermined; Cardinal Newman's ecstatic and elaborate 

death drama "The Dream of Gerontius" (1865) has no recent imitator. The deathbed 

confessions in Dickens and the dramas of unity-through-death in The M i l l on the Floss 

(1860) or "The Blessed Damozel" (1850) have given way to unexpected and seemingly 



65 

pointless deaths in Forster and Beckett, ironic moments without a witness to hear the last 

thoughts - or even worse, moments with banal or nonsensical last words. 

Lawrence Langer, who in The Age of Atrocity examines mass death, concludes 

that the staggering numbers of "inappropriate deaths" in our time have had devastating 

effects on our expectation of what he calls "purposeful death." Langer writes: "The 

human imagination seems unable to exist without hope for a purposeful death" (15). We 

begin to sense this helplessness in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) when Tom 

Brangwen drowns. As Brangwen is pulled down by the water, "a great wonder of anguish 

[goes] over him" and then his "unconscious, drowning body" (this phrase is used 

repeatedly) sweeps around and around the farm (246-248). However, Tom's dead body is 

still "impressive, inviolable" for his wife Lydia (251). This significance will fall away by 

the time we encounter the dead body as joke in Robert Coover's Gerald's Party (1985). 

This is not the nihilism of Macbeth: "I have supped full with horrors" (V, v, 14). We 

enter a flattened space where death is equated with the squalid and the petty. 

Consider the lines of William Cullen Bryant, typical of their time, quoted at the 

beginning of this chapter; a mortal is enjoined to "approach thy grave / Like one who 

wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." What has 

occasioned the shift from this calmer acceptance, this certainty or fervent hope that the 

unique personality continues to exist throughout the death experience? I cannot agree, 

with Langer, that our century is unique in atrocity. It is also too easy to ascribe this 

remarkable shift to the decline of religious faith; after all, God has been in question for 

hundreds of years, and recent generations hold no monopoly on doubt. 

Other factors are in evidence here. Personal identity has become a vexed question. 

Cardinal Newman is one of the last to write confidently of "the mansion of my soul" 

("The Dream of Gerontius" 453); other Victorians, reading Darwin and, later, Freud, 

began to entertain serious doubts as to the provenance and substance of humanity. And in 

the wake of the theory of relativity, the postmodern era is marked by confusion about the 



66 

real nature of time. We no longer identify easily with Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 

Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier (1910): 

Often I hear [time] flowing - staunchlessly. 
Often I rise in the middle of the night and stop all, all the clocks. 
And yet one need not be afraid of it. (Act I) 

But the most pressing problem is language. We have been encouraged by 

language-based theorists to think that the arbitrary nature of language exposes death as a 

void, that "the radical abstraction death is pure construct, pure language" (Stewart 4). 

While Walter Benjamin could say in 1936 that authority was bestowed on "even the 

poorest wretch in dying" (333), now authoritative meanings of all kinds are suspect. Even 

death has lost authority and is primarily associated with absence. Freud, writing in 1913 

of the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, says, "eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, 

bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of 

dying" ("The Theme of the Three Caskets" 301). By 1972 Jacques Derrida will promote 

interpretation which "tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the 

name of that being who . . . has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the 

origin and the end of the game" ("Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the 

Human Sciences" 264-65, emphasis mine). "The end" for Derrida appears transparent; 

death is a lack, not a necessity we need to befriend. The words "that teach the rustic 

moralist to die" in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751) have no 

sacred status. Neither language nor death retains the distinction it once had. (In 1992, 

however, Derrida published The Gift of Death, a thoughtful and humane meditation on 

the complex interrelations of history, secrecy, responsibility, religion, and death, with less 

emphasis on the arbitrary power of language.) 

O f these injuries to meaning that stain the postmodern representation of death, it 

is this last - language - that affects A. S. Byatt, who carefully takes up the challenge of 

representing meaningful death. It is significant that one of the tales embedded in 



67 

Possession, "The Threshold," is a reiteration of the three casket theme. In this story, the 

Childe freely chooses the third casket, which for Freud symbolizes death. 

§ § § 

One way of evaluating the effectiveness of language to inscribe death's meaning 

is to consider the last words of the dying. The conventions tell us that the character of the 

dying person is solidified, that last words are trustworthy and significant. The dying 

heroes and villains of Shakespeare's tragedies are not untroubled by questions, but there 

is a strong sense of "poetic justice" (Stewart 23) present at their deaths. (Cordelia is, for 

Byatt, a painful exception.) Old rascal Peter Featherstone in Middlemarch (1871-72) dies 

trying to make good, wanting the deserving to inherit his money, while the unredeemable 

Casaubon makes certain Dorothea's lovelessness and lack of fulfillment are made 

permanent in his will. The defining qualities of these characters are asserted at death. 

This happens more rarely in twentieth-century fiction. Like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy 

anticipates this shift in the late 19th century, demonstrating in Anna Karenin the 

expectation of revelation in death scenes, and then undermining such hope. Levin, for 

example, is envious of his dying brother Nikolai, certain that "something was becoming 

clearer and clearer to the dying man which for Levin remained as obscure as ever" (528). 

But finally Nikolai's slowness in dying just creates irritation and exhaustion in those 

around him. Anna's own death is petty, grisly, and unrevelatory; at the last moment she 

wonders, "Where am I? What am I doing? Why?" (802). Tolstoy sets the tone for the 

fiction that follows. The two most surprising deaths in Forster's The Longest Journey 

(1907), a book Byatt cites as exemplary in its technical achievement of accidental death 

(Byatt/Murdoch video interview), are each marked by banality. Gerald, unexpectedly 

smashed on the football field, dies petulantly and without insight: "I want - 1 don't want 

to talk. I can't see you. Shut that door" (56). In the same novel, Rickie dies wearily and 

blandly in a paragraph which starts off so innocuously that the unobservant reader might 

miss the nearly-buried sentence, "The train went over his knees" (303). Both men end in 



68 

failure, as does Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910), dying, baffled, in a shower of 

books. Leonard's last words, or the narrator's (in either case, a damning conclusion), are 

"Nothing had sense" (256). 

In Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), Jim dies "with his hand over his lips" (416), 

blocking the illuminating last words we are led by convention to expect. Death here is the 

"stupid physiological fact" Nietzsche said it was in The Will to Power (section 916). 

Modern death brings the buzzing of the fly to Emily Dickinson; it prompts Vladimir and 

Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1954) to think of erections. 

Thomas Mann and Henry James work at finding meaning in death, but their 

resolutions are ambivalent. For Aschenbach, at the conclusion of Death in Venice (1911), 

"it seemed to him, though, as if the pale and charming psychagogue out there were 

smiling at him, beckoning to him; as if, lifting his hand from his hip, he were pointing 

outwards, hovering before him in an immensity of promise" (63, emphasis mine). If not 

for that "seemed," which undermines Aschenbach's grasp of the truth, his death can be 

read as fulfillment. 

Death in the tales of Henry James is a powerful force informing and shaping lives, 

but often in a negative way. Death obsessions in "Maud-Evelyn" and "The Altar of the 

Dead" prevent the living characters from being truly alive. In "The Middle Years" death 

reveals small truths, but also disappointments. In James and Mann, death retains its 

ability to bring knowledge but its true identity is seldom fully recognized. The point is, 

however, that for James and Mann death does have an identity, almost a personality, 

which is theoretically recognizable. 

A recent restatement of faith that death has a powerful identity occurs in Peter 

Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987), in the description of the death of Charles Wychwood: 

He could see her outline as she bent over him, and she was encircled by 
light; the boy burned brightly also and, as Charles's soul left the world, 
their souls were shining in farewell. At that instant of recognition he 



69 

smiled: nothing was really lost and yet this was the last time he would ever 
see them, the last time, the last time, the last time, the last time. Vivien. 
Edward. I met them on a journey somewhere. We were travelling together. 
(169)6 

This positive death is told from the point of view of the dying person, as is the death of 

Stephanie. But Ackroyd's account is marked by a Dickensian sentimentality which Byatt 

rejects. 

Closer in spirit to Byatt is Julian Barnes, who meditates on death more 

pragmatically in Flaubert's Parrot (1984): "When she dies, you are not at first surprised. 

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You 

got it right. This is part of it all" (160). Barnes, like Byatt, presents the effects of death 

flatly, trying to find the importance of the experience using a stripped-down vocabulary. 

You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. 
You seem to be talking about other people's griefs. I loved her; we were 
happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There 
is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables. (161) 

Barnes does not, however, attempt to represent death directly, as Byatt does. He feels too 

formidably the limits of language, and gives no vigorous indication that he argues with 

the construction of death as a void. In Barnes's first novel, Metroland (1980), his 

protagonist experiences feelings of unmitigated terror when, shortly after rejecting belief 

in God, he faces up to the idea of non-existence after death. The adolescent Chris 

describes being kept awake at night by "a sensation of total aloneness within your 

pyjamaed, shaking body; a realisation of Time (always capitalised) going on without you 

for ever and ever" (54). Barnes and Byatt alike refuse to retreat into religion for comfort, 

but for Byatt panic is never the issue. 

6Compare Wychwood's five uses of "the last time" with Lear's five instances of "never." Is 
Ackroyd offering a slight corrective to the atheist Shakespeare? Ackroyd seems to propose a vague afterlife 
which, while ruling out the possibility of "seeing" the beloved again, promises some sort of unspecified 
eternal union. 



70 

§ § § 

In A. S. Byatt's most arresting death scene, Stephanie is electrocuted by an 

ungrounded refrigerator at the conclusion of Still Life. She has reached under the 

appliance to retrieve a sparrow, brought alive to her kitchen by a cat. This shattering 

accident has hit Byatt's readers hard. 

Every three weeks or so -1 get an accusing letter from somebody, saying 
"How could you do that? How could you put me through that? Why did 
you just suddenly do that in that chapter? It wasn't prepared, you had no 
right, the novel wasn't going there." (Hass interview) 

Byatt's achievement in the remarkable portrayal of Stephanie's sudden death is 

made clearer by comparison with other deaths she has written. In her fiction, which 

straddles the Romantic /Victorian and modern/postmodern sensibilities, the reader 

encounters a range of deaths - accidental, suicidal, natural, symbolic - which group 

themselves in various positions on either side of a dividing line between purposeful and 

purposeless death. These deaths represent, variously, a conviction that death holds 

meaning and resolution (either potential or actual), and an ironic modern or postmodern 

refutation of this. 

Perhaps the simplest kind of death which Byatt treats in her fiction is death by 

nature. Simon Moffitt in The Game (1967) is haunted by the memory of his friend 

Antony Miller being devoured by piranhas in the Amazon. For Joshua Riddell in the 

short story "Precipice-Encurled," nature is likewise fatal; he is killed by a sudden, vicious 

storm while painting in the Apennines. Byatt hesitates between presenting these deaths as 

untroubled by higher meaning and desiring to make nature correspond to a human or 

moral sphere. 

Like her characters Marcus and Stephanie Potter, she distrusts "argument by 

analogy" (Babel Tower 251, The Virgin in the Garden 261); she has said, in a television 

interview with Michael Ignatieff, that "part of my subject matter as a novelist is the 

danger of endlessly arguing by analogy." Nevertheless, Byatt and her characters do not 



71 

stop creating analogies. They recognize the danger of seeing human behavior reflected in 

or punished by the natural world, but they are nevertheless fascinated by the parallels. 

Byatt strives but fails to provide convincing non-moral conclusions for these deaths. 

Plainly, piranhas do what piranhas do; yet the ensuing nightmares for Simon resonate 

with moral significance. 

Motivated death occurs more obviously in Byatt's fairy stories. In "Gode's Story" 

the madness and death of the miller's daughter is retribution for her capricious rejection 

of the sailor who loves her. The scapegoated woman cast out of her primitive village to 

die in the story "The Dried Witch" seems to accept her role as part of the design for her 

community. Similar acquiescence to death's power is remarked in "Dragon's Breath." A 

more optimistic expression of this theme occurs in "The Glass Coffin," in which a tailor 

is tested for bravery and individuality by facing symbolic death. This tale, influenced by 

the Grimms, upholds a traditional view that death is infused with meaning and that a clear 

understanding of death undeniably contributes to the value of living. Although 

postmodern irony is a feature of these tales, and the consciousness of the dying is not 

examined in any detail, they provide a useful indicator of Byatt's fundamental attitudes 

toward death. While some of the fairy-tales were written for characters in Possession, 

they have subsequently been published separately, under Byatt's name, which elevates 

their status beyond legerdemain. 

"On the Day that E . M . Forster Died" has a contemporary setting, but here death 

is, for the most part, likewise part of a structure of meaning to which the characters adjust 

themselves. Forster's death allows Mrs. Smith, a novelist, a place of her own in the 

pattern of English literature. In "The Changeling" the suicide of a disturbed boy actually 

allows another novelist, Josephine Piper, to overcome writing-block, proof of death's 

authoritative power. 

But "On the Day that E . M . Forster Died" also contains ironic retorts to the 

assumption that meaning is lodged in death. Mrs. Smith's dealings with the disturbed 



72 

Conrad, a man shadowed by mortality and madness, end in farce; and finally Mrs. 

Smith's exalted plans to write important fiction are quashed by the news of her own 

terminal illness. This ironic view of death is continued in "The Next Room." Here a 

protagonist is relieved by the deaths of those who have been burdens to her, but then 

finds that the bickering of the dead carries on just as it did in life. In this case, death has 

resolved nothing. 

Despite the current of doubt running under the surface of several stories, in 

Byatt's minor works significance in death is present more often than not. Her most 

popular work, the comic Romance Possession, continues the trend of affirmation. The 

last paragraph of Possession (before the Postscript) reads rather like the last act of 

Wagner's Gotterdammerung: the music of a world dying is mingled with the music of a 

world reborn. I have noticed that Byatt's conclusion is also a commentary on, and 

expansion of, a similar passage in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954): "It was the first 

day of the world. I was full of that strength which is better than happiness, better than the 

weak wish for happiness which women can awaken in a man to rot his fibres. It was the 

morning of the first day" (283). 

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell 
of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing 
resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some 
relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and 
destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful. (Possession 551) 

The deaths of the poets Ash and LaMotte in Possession are integral elements of 

the literary detective story which Maud and Roland unravel. Death provides the impetus 

for Ash and LaMotte to seek reconciliation, creating satisfaction at the story's personal 

level; their hidden papers, preserved by the grave, allow the biographers comprehension 

at the textual level. The fullest comprehension is granted to the reader, who alone garners 

the advantages of both spheres. In Possession, the living learn from the dead - how to 

interpret accurately, how to write, how to live with passion. The dead are rewarded with 



73 

continuing existence through their written work. "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in 

his shade, / When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st," was Shakespeare's formulation 

of this conviction (Sonnet 18). But the optimism of Possession is, as I will argue 

elsewhere, deceptive; it is wise to remember that the novel is at least partly parodic. 

The celebratory view of the interaction of life and death does, however, find an 

echo in "Sugar." In this autobiographical story the narrator's dying father finds the time 

to construct a satisfying explanatory narrative of his life and tells his novelist daughter, 

"You mustn't think I mind" about dying (Sugar 232), just the sort of deathbed resolution 

we like to hear. A further hint of this positive attitude toward death occurs in Still Life. 

The paragraph is an isolated one, and obviously autobiographical, in a chapter called 

"Growing Things": 

The germ of this novel was a fact which was also a metaphor: a young 
woman, with a child, looking at a tray of earth in which unthinned 
seedlings on etiolated pale stalks died in the struggle for survival. She held 
in her hand the picture of a flower, the seed packet with its bright image. 
Nasturtium, Giant Climbing, mixed. (237) 

The death of at least some of the seedlings is necessary, and contributes to the health of 

the other flowers. But the fact that "a young woman, with a child" is faced with this 

incident is ominous; when death comes to youthful human beings, platitudes about the 

naturalness of death arrive unwanted. 

Byatt's treatment, then, of conventional death, death-by-nature, and symbolic or 

fairy-tale death usually contains large portions of reassurance, along with some 

ambivalence. But illumination and value is more often granted to survivors, those who 

find in death a puzzle solved or a pattern completed. The dying consciousness itself is not 

considered; its given formulations are distant, their integrity uncertain. For example, in 

"Sugar" we have no way of determining with confidence whether the father's deathbed 

version of events is truly more trustworthy than the mother's. 



74 

The encounter with suicide and violent accidental death in Byatt's fiction, to 

which I now turn, is far less reassuring. Suicide is pervasive in The Game, which is about 

two sisters, a novelist and an Oxford don, who have shared an elaborate childhood 

fantasy. It contains three important suicides: Simon Moffitt's father, the needy woman to 

whom Thor Eklund is providing pastoral care, and Cassandra Corbett after she reads 

about her "self in Julia Corbett's roman a clef, A Sense of Glory. A l l three suicides defy 

comfortable or even ambivalent readings. 

The suicide of Simon's father is disturbing on two levels. First, there is the 

macabre act itself, which the father means to be a murder-suicide (of Simon and himself) 

to take revenge on Simon's mother, discovered in adultery. Secondly, the teenaged 

Simon unburdens himself of his horror to the unsympathetic Julia, who views the 

situation as an absurd joke. Julia demonstrates here, as throughout the book, her inability 

to imaginatively place herself in the position of others, an inability that will lead directly 

to Cassandra's suicide. Julia Corbett is also the sort of contemporary novelist, adept with 

empty death, whom Byatt tacitly criticizes. Simon's tale of his father's death is marked 

by stammering and hesitation: 

"Then he took me and the dog into the conservatory one day. 
Things were pretty bad by then. He said to the dog, 'Come here, you,' and 
he - dragged her a bit - she didn't want - and then he, he shot the dog. So 
then he, he said to me, 'Come here,' so I - 1 hid behind the water-butt, and 
he stood - looking stupid - for a bit, and then he gave a sort of snort and 
said, 'Oh, well, never mind,' in a sort of puzzled voice and he - he shot 
himself. And then planes of glass fell in, and potted plants dropped off the 
edges of shelves. One hit me. On the shoulder." 

Julia spread one hand across her face to choke another involuntary 
burst of laughter. (84) 

The idea of a fulfilling or peaceful death is shattered, as it is in the suicide of the woman 

Thor has been counselling. 

Cassandra kills herself in an attempt to retain dignity, after her usual strategies of 

retreat and emotional self-amputation fail. She wishes to stop the "overlap" not only 



75 

between herself and Julia, whose latest novel has turned one facet of Cassandra into a 

"weird heroine . . . with a steady lunatic clarity" (220), but also between herself and 

Simon, with whom a satisfying relationship seems impossible. In addition, Cassandra's 

death is the result of interference by people who force choices on her that she does not 

believe are tenable. The novel concludes on this note, that the characters are locked into 

limited roles and have few viable choices available. (This is a more complete rejection of 

existentialist assessments of choice than Iris Murdoch presents in her novels of the time, 

although many critics see Byatt and Murdoch, in the 1960s at least, as closely linked.) 

Cassandra's death is fulfilling only insofar as she has escaped pain. Unlike the survivors 

in Possession, Julia and Simon appear to garner very little insight from their brush with 

death. 

The most recent developments of the suicide motif are contained in "The Chinese 

Lobster," first published in 1992, and in the 1998 story "Crocodile Tears." Here, suicide 

is a vital option that several of the characters reserve for themselves as an escape from 

pain. Patricia Nimmo in the latter story is a widow who is unable to articulate her grief 

and instead lurks in dangerous situations, near lorries and on high rooftops, which seem 

to give voice to her fear and loneliness. She is finally able to tell another unhappy 

character, Nils Isaksen, also fleeing the realities of decay and death, of her feelings about 

her late husband. "When I first knew I loved him, I was terrified he would die," she says 

(Elementals 76); this truth-telling releases them into the future. In "The Chinese Lobster" 

the characters "flirt" even more obsessively with suicide, giving it optimistic colouring 

and positive form; Gerda Himmelblau, whose name means "blue heaven," sees death as 

"white, and clear, and simple" (The Matisse Stories 129). This connects, surprisingly, to 

the view of contentment (a white bed in an empty room) shared by Roland and Maud in 

Possession (291). In "The Chinese Lobster" suicidal tendencies bind the characters 

together in knowledge, and the kiss between Himmelblau and Perry Diss ("Hades" — the 

counterpart to heaven) at the story's end is a sign that they have gained strength from 



76 

their shared suffering. Himmelblau and Diss identify with the dying lobsters and crabs in 

the Chinese restaurant tank, but can also see them purely as objects. Somehow this 

double vision provides them with insight which they can either turn toward life or toward 

death. 

"I find that absolutely appalling, you know," says Perry Diss. 
"And at the same time, exactly at the same time, I don't give a damn? 
D'you know?" 

"I know," says Gerda Himmelblau. She does know. Cruelly, 
imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly. (The Matisse Stories 134) 

Choice is a more liberating conception than it is in The Game. Freud reminds us "that 

every organism wishes to die only in its own fashion" (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 

39). The death wish, as long as it can be contained, amplifies the characters' compassion 

and comprehension. 

§ § § 

Finally we approach the most difficult of Byatt's kinds of death, sudden 

accidental death.7 Byatt's attempt to capture this experience in Still Life is 

phenomenological, and clearly draws on the death of her son Charles in a traffic accident 

in 1972, and additionally on the accidental domestic electrocution she survived in the 

early 1960s. Writing Stephanie Potter's death by electrocution "very nearly finished me 

off," says Byatt (Hass interview). Not only did she force herself to face the possible 

feelings of her son as he died, but she re-entered her own partial electrocution. 

Stephanie's death is not the first of this kind. Her death is prefigured by the death 

of Mrs. Thone's son, briefly and poignantly mentioned in The Virgin in the Garden: 

Once she had understood exactly that between a good breakfast and an end 
of break bell a boy could run, fall, smash, twitch, stop moving forever, and 

7I have not included murder in this discussion. The murder of Gerry Burtt's baby by his wife 
Barbara is peripheral to the action of Still Life, as are the sadistic murders in the novel-within-a-novel of 
Babel Tower. In Still Life Daniel Orton is helping a woman whose children were the victims of IRA 
violence, but details are few. These murders are not unimportant, but neither are they given sustained 
treatment. Fuller attention is given to the Moors Murders in Babel Tower, but the case is handled primarily 
as one of Frederica's "laminations" and the connection to the main narrative is tenuous. 



77 

begin to decay, she understood also that nothing could be undone, no air 
raid, no death camp, no monstrous genesis, and that the important thing 
about herself was that she had not much time and it did not matter greatly 
what she did with it. (243) 

Mrs. Thone's grief lurks in the background of the comic narrative of The Virgin 

in the Garden, hinting of the bleaker sequel. The fact of her son's death is overwhelming 

to Mrs. Thone, but in Byatt's mostly agnostic world this insistent fact encounters no 

religious presence sufficient to explain or sustain it. And so it hangs suspended, an 

unfinished story. Stephanie Potter's death, although recounted in more detail, has the 

same effect. It remains, unrelenting in its presence, even in Babel Tower (1996), the third 

Potter novel, which shows Daniel and all the Potters still struggling unsuccessfully with 

its meaning, more than six years later. 

Stephanie's death occurs on an ordinary day, when various people come to her, as 

they always have, for help. A social worker is looking for the disturbing Gerry Burtt, 

Clemency Farrar asks for advice about her philandering husband (Gideon, the vicar), 

Marcus Potter needs to talk about love. Stephanie is frustrated, helping automatically but 

with compassion. The sparrow brought in by the cat becomes the distillate of this semi-

unwilling compassion. Stephanie wants to free the sparrow, but is aggravated by its 

willfulness. The entire chapter reverberates with the heightened presence of the 

vulnerable and unreliable human body, evidenced by Daniel's anger, Gideon's lust, 

Marcus's desire, and Clemency's disgust; additionally, the Orton children crave the basic 

physical comforts of food and parental love. 

Stephanie is located, or even trapped, at the center of these whirling and 

conflicting physical forces, which are unresolvable. In the form of a sparrow and cat, 

primitive or animal nature makes a deceptively mild appearance, a further concentration 

of unconscious physicality. This is enough to tip the balance toward destruction. 

Stephanie tells her son Will that it is a cat's "nature" to hurt birds, but adds that such 

violence won't happen "in our house . . . if we can help it" (332). 



78 

The access of electricity which kills Stephanie is, in one sense, the overload of 

physical forces within the human characters that they ask Stephanie to bear on their 

behalf. Her death is far more than "death by domesticity," the description of one reviewer 

(Barber 21). Like Cordelia, Stephanie is the one on whom others place their burdens, a 

casualty of a post-Christian world teeming with demanding, unacknowledged, 

unarticulated forces. Once a scholar and teacher of literature, Stephanie has become a 

mother and curate's wife, and is frustrated by her inability to use her intellectual gifts. 

The community uses her as a healer, needs her as the repository of their stories. But not 

only is she agnostic, she is out of touch with her linguistic side; her "words [wander] 

loose and unused" (Still Life 307). Does this absence of language, combined with lack of 

faith, kill her? 

Despite Byatt's criticism of Lawrence for placing the blame on the victims of 

accident, Stephanie's death does seem to be compelled, at least on a public level: 

I was very angry again with poor D. H. Lawrence, who said in Women in 
Love there are no accidents, every man makes his own fate, people get 
killed for reasons in themselves. And I thought this is an appalling thing to 
say, and simply not true. (Hass interview) 

This declaration notwithstanding, Stephanie is, at least partly, the victim of her 

community's inability to arrive at an equilibrium of body, mind, and spirit, and of its 

failure to articulate that quest. Still Life at this point establishes the authentic human need 

for religious solutions to insoluble problems. I will return to this matter in a later chapter. 

But Stephanie, on a personal rather than public level, does achieve some kind of 

resolution as she is dying, and it is that moment to which I now turn. 

Stephanie dies in one short, stark paragraph. She has no audience but the reader. 

And then the refrigerator struck. She thought, as the pain ran through her, 
as her arm, fused to the metal, burned and banged, as her head filled, "This 
is it" and then, with a flashing vision of heads on pillows, "Oh, what will 
happen to the children?" And the word, altruism, and surprise at it. And 
then dark pain, and more pain. (Still Life 334) 



79 

In an interview Byatt described the refrigerator which nearly electrocuted her in more 

murderous terms than the ones she uses for Stephanie's death. 

I had a bird which went under a refrigerator and the refrigerator took hold 
of me and started to kill me. But my first husband, who is a pragmatic sort 
of man, turned it off at source. Which is not what happens in the novel. 
(Hass interview) 

In the novel Byatt tries to downplay causality. She avoids metaphorical language; there is 

only the suggestion of the refrigerator's malevolence in the active verb "struck" and the 

symbolic role of the sparrow itself. Other than this, Stephanie faces her death directly 

when she says "This is it," much as she welcomed Will at birth by naming him "You" 

(Still Life 94). "Altruism" is the culmination of the moment. It is a powerful word, 

deliberately cited to indicate that Stephanie has "lived for others," that she knows what 

her life has signified, and that she has chosen this life. The word evokes Stephanie's life 

more positively and explicitly than "charity" or "benevolence" or even "goodness" would 

have. 

Stephanie's husband, Daniel, feels guilt after her death because she had 

previously complained to him of her estrangement from the intellectual vocabulary once 

hers: 

"Like what?" 
"Oh," she said, frivolously, desperately. "Discourse. Discourse of reason. 

Sophistical. Ideal - in a Platonic sense. Catalyst. Anacoluthon. Mendacious. 
Realism. The worst things are the words that do have meaning in the tiny 
vocabulary I do use, like real and ideal, words that lose half their associations . . . 
Don't you understand, Daniel?" 

"I do," he said. (306) 

But they never resolve the problem. Her last word, altruism, is partly a remnant of 

her "great unopened volumes of vocabulary" (306). It might be meant as a critical 

comment on the waste of Stephanie's intellectual gifts (she could have been so much 



80 

more than a good wife and mother), but I believe it is, instead, approbation of that very 

goodness. 

"Altruism" is an example of an influential word coined by one person, 

demonstrating the power of the individual to effect change and make language more 

precise. (It was formed, according to the O E D , by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth 

century from various Latin and French roots.) Stephanie's last word is, in its simplicity 

and accuracy, an affirmation that her personal life (as opposed to her public function) has 

meaning which death, despite its imperative power, cannot efface. Indeed Stephanie's 

ability to recognize and name death in an instant ("this is it") forms an essential part of 

that affirmation. She does still command the vocabulary that matters. Most of the words 

that Stephanie claims she longs for in her speech to Daniel are much less vital than 

"altruism" and the altruistic acts of her everyday life which have benefited, even saved, 

people like Malcolm Haydock, Lucas Simmonds, Gerry Burtt, her children, and Daniel 

himself. After her speech in chapter 27, Daniel makes love to her, and a few more words 

occur to her before sleep: "Peripeteia. Anguish. Morphology" (307). These words are 

more urgent, and if Stephanie could have combined her altruistic life with intellectual 

consideration of words such as these, she would have made a contribution even greater 

than the considerable one she does make. 

Stephanie's vocabulary is an indicator of at least partial fulfillment, but it is not 

everything. Byatt's narrator says, somewhat sardonically, that "men have died and worms 

have eaten them, but not for love, nor yet for constriction of vocabulary" (307). We will 

be reminded, when we visit in the next chapter the love scenes between Stephanie and 

Daniel, of how much can be gained in abandoning language. 

§ § § 

For those who seek clues about the accident to come, the novel's epigraph from 

the Venerable Bede is about a swallow, symbolic of a fleeting human life, and the chapter 

title heralding Stephanie's death repeats Bede's Latin phrase for one swallow, "unus 



81 

passerum." It is deeply ironic that a sparrow is the cause of Stephanie's death. In several 

key Biblical verses, the sparrow is the means of comparison demonstrating the greater 

worth of human life. 

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to 
the ground without your Father's will. But even the hairs of your head are 
all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many 
sparrows. (Matthew 10.29-31) 

Unsurprisingly, Daniel does not choose this text for Stephanie's funeral. He focuses 

instead on scripture emphasizing the power of death. 

The words were a thin defence between him and the pit. They were an 
action, customary and saving, not because he any longer believed any of 
the more comfortable ones, but because the terrible ones spoke some of 
the truth of things. (Still Life 341) 

Daniel stops short of blaming God for electrocuting Stephanie, although that 

suspicion runs very close to the surface of the text when Daniel imagines a God "who 

held together the stones of that place, who lived like electricity in its heavier air, whose 

presence he sensed only rarely but who had driven him" (350). Daniel, who is not 

conventionally devout, has chosen the church as the most appropriate place to do good. 

Through the sparrow that ironically brings his wife's death instead of demonstrating her 

value, Daniel comes to realize the limits of his earth-bound view of life, the practical 

basis of his ministry. He tentatively creates a metaphor for God out of the electricity 

which brings death, but he creates only confusion for himself. 

There was more in the world, and more outside the world, than men and 
their small concerns; Daniel could hear it, life, beyond the thud of his own 
heart, the snuff of his own breath. (350) 

There is a text that does illuminate the circumstances of Stephanie's death for 

Daniel: it is not the Bible, but King Lear. 

The worst suffering in Lear is at the end, the accident after the resolution, 
the unacceptable. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no 
life at all? Cordelia's death, if we imagine Cordelia and not only Lear, 



82 

makes that play too uncomfortable for the Aristotelian relief. We can let 
Lear go, gladly and gracefully, but not, if we have imagined her, Cordelia. 
Thoult come no more. (344) 

Lear leads Daniel to the realization that the crisis he faces is not the death of God or the 

loss of meaning: Daniel finds there is too much meaning, too much presence. The pain is 

larger, the end more immense than we have been led to expect. The grave fact of death, 

looming large in Lear and Still Life, demands to be comprehended. But how? Stephanie's 

small but crucial word worked for her, but Daniel did not hear it. In 1980, Daniel still 

seeks understanding; he metaphorically shakes his fist at death, "some looming energy-

field" (StiULjfe 9). 

The death of Cordelia provides the structure for one of Byatt's rare poems, "A 

Dog, a Horse, a Rat," published in 1991 but detailing the death of Charles Byatt 20 years 

before. I reproduce the poem here in its entirety, because it is little known and contributes 

greatly to an understanding of death in Byatt's work. 

A dog, a horse, a rat 
A l l those red-troubled days 
Heraldic in my head 
Danced in their lively ways. 
The bright-eyed rat, so sleek, 
The dog with plume and claw 
The horse's hot bright neck 
And thou wilf come no more 
The terror of their life 
Their moving flesh, their air 
In nostril, lung and heart 
He cried, look there, look there, 
Fooled by a flutter, Lear -
But I heard what they said 
As they remade my life 
With their plain "he is dead". 
None of my breaths since then 
Is easy or is sure 
Nothing I think or hear 
Without, thou'It come no more, 
A dog, a horse, a rat 
I see in bliss and fear 
Live fur and bone delight 



83 

Wet eye and curling ear 
But every breath I draw 
In pleasure or in pain 
Sings in my flesh and blood 
He will not come again 
And still, when I live most 
And walk in the warm air 
M y nostrils breathe the ghost 
O f your warm yellow hair 
M y skull contains the lost 
Breath of your yellow hair 
O f your burned yellow hair. 

There are many echoes of the death of Stephanie in the death of Charles: the yellow hair, 

the burning, and, particularly, the author's insistence on immediately grasping and telling 

the reality that "he will not come again." Byatt and Daniel desperately need to apprehend 

the commanding power of death, to acknowledge the presence it has. 

A continued presence is exactly what Byatt describes in her other poem about her 

dead son, "Dead Boys," published in 1994. Here she writes surrounded by unspeaking 

apparitions of her dead son who are "more alive than I." These are not poems about 

memory or (merely) about grief. The vitality of the dead boys relates to the "singing" of 

"he will not come again" in the previous poem. These are strenuously worked out 

formulations (twenty years in the making) of death's vitality, that remind us also of the 

electricity which kills Stephanie: what is electricity but raw power, energy that we think 

we have harnessed but can easily overmaster us? 

It is difficult to decide what to do with Stephanie's death, which occupies the 

heart of Byatt's fiction, and emits painful vibrations whenever one returns to it. Byatt 

herself has said, "I don't know what I shall do without her" (Canton 6). Stephanie's 

private death has a simple and distinct coda, but the swirling forces that filled the stage of 

her public death remain unresolved. Why is Stephanie, like Cordelia, offered as a 

sacrifice? If death is the end, why does so much energy from this experience still remain? 

The remainder demands a religious explanation: God gives death its presence, and names 

and contains its power. 



84 

Byatt has declared her agnosticism. God is "an omni-present absentee" she says in 

Passions of the Mind (5), yet Still Life questions that agnosticism. In her powerful 

depiction of Stephanie's accident, Byatt achieves partial restoration of faith in language 

and in death as a fundamental and meaningful element, but given the unspeaking and 

ongoing vitality of the "Dead Boys" and the dead Stephanie, this is not enough. Stephanie 

is unquestionably constructed as a religious sacrifice of some sort; if the world view 

presented here is truly agnostic or atheistic, why the need for a character to bear the sins 

of others? The full double vision achieved by the suicidal characters in "The Chinese 

Lobster" comes closer to a satisfactory conclusion; it combines the emotional and 

intellectual insight which Stephanie would have reached if she'd been given the time to 

analyse "Peripeteia. Anguish. Morphology." A triple vision, one incorporating the 

transcendent, would bring even greater accuracy. 



85 

C h a p t e r 3: L o v e 
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all 
knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not 
love, I am nothing. 

The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 13.2 

Love is unenglish and sloppy and soft 
So be English and stringy and tough. 

If you keep yourself fit you will never want It, 
So give up Love. 

W. H. Auden, from "Give Up Love" (1937) 

When critics consider the work of Antonia Byatt, they usually comment on her 

erudition, her intertextual command of an astonishing variety of styles and subjects, and 

the way she combines Victorian amplitude with postmodern questioning. Less frequently 

do commentators note that Byatt's fiction is firmly based in realism, and that hers is a 

profoundly personal realism. As I have already noted, throughout her fiction Byatt 

determinedly and precisely examines fundamental personal events - those basic and 

essential human experiences which seem, in their primal enormity, to defy accurate and 

detailed expression. These events, as I formulate them, are birth, death, and love, and 

Byatt treats them with the utmost respect. She probes the apparent inexpressibility of 

these situations and additionally (and, in some minds, astonishingly) plumbs their depths 

for clues about ultimate meaning. 

O f these three fundamental human experiences Byatt is, rather surprisingly 

perhaps, most sceptical about love. Another way of expressing this might be to say that 

love prompts the least portion of her idealism while provoking the maximum amount of 

realism. In Still Life Byatt's excitement about the possibilities of extending the 

capabilities of language to encompass the feelings and importance of Stephanie Potter 



86 

Orton's birthing moment is palpable; even more powerful and moving is the section on 

death in that same novel, where Stephanie, while dying, grasps at meaningful words, 

entities she loves nearly as much as she loves her children. But when Byatt writes of 

romantic and erotic love, that other famous experience which apparently no one can do 

without, her optimism falters. Her lovers often lapse into silence; her narrators are 

ambivalent about the value of love. Whether Byatt's reservations are about the 

experience itself, or about our ability to cast its essence in language, she approaches love 

rarely and cautiously. 

For readers who are familiar only with Possession: A Romance, my assertion that 

Byatt is hesitant about romance will seem odd, since the appeal of that popular novel for 

many was its "old-fashioned" love story. But Possession is an anomaly; nearly all the rest 

of Byatt's fiction is deeply suspicious about romantic love. Francis Spufford, in her 

review of Byatt's short story collection Sugar, noted that the stories were all about 

"losses," including the loss of love, and even of hope (23). Love of art and literature, love 

of children, even love of science - these figure more prominently than erotic or romantic 

love. Byatt has written frequently and astutely about sex, associated in the Potter novels 

particularly with Frederica, but her depiction of fulfilled romantic love is confined, in 

over 30 years of fiction, to two couples: Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash in 

Possession and Stephanie Potter and Daniel Orton in The Virgin in the Garden and Still 

Life. 

At a secondary level of significance, I include two couples in Angels and Insects 

(1992): Lilias and Arturo Papagay in "The Conjugial Angel" seem genuinely in love, and 

Matty Crompton and William Adamson embark on love at the conclusion of "Morpho 

Eugenia." But these romances linger on the margins of each novella, and each bears 

strong traces of fairy-tale. To this secondary category I also consign Roland Michell and 

Maud Bailey of Possession, about whose relations we do know a great deal. But 

throughout Possession what impresses is not their love but their avoidance of it. Their 



87 

situation coyly, somewhat mockingly, conforms to traditional conceptions, from the 

courtly love tradition to Freud, which insist that separations and obstacles are necessary 

components of love. Roland and Maud's1 reluctance to fall in love also provides a tart 

commentary on the distrustful nature of postmodern love. Maud and Roland, therefore, 

despite their status as the couple whose relations are given the closest attention in Byatt's 

fiction, do not explicate Byatt's ideas about fulfilled love as clearly as do the Ash-

LaMotte affair or the Orton marriage. 

The Ortons have a marriage that works but is largely wordless. The affair of the 

poets in Possession is far more articulate; Christabel LaMotte provides the inspiration for 

some of Ash's most emotional poetry and he is able to tell LaMotte that she is "the life of 

things" (310). This is not unlike one of John Donne's definitions of love in "The Sun 

Rising": "Nothing else is." But the consequences of the LaMotte-Ash affair are tragic, 

and their separation acrimonious. Clearly, at its best, love is going to be a problem or a 

riddle rather than a solution in Byatt's world. 

I pause for a brief comment on sexual orientation in Byatt. Heterosexual desire 

dominates this fiction, although lesbian love surfaces in Possession and in the short story 

"The Chinese Lobster." Byatt has been faulted for her portrayal of lesbians in Possession 

(in Lorena Love Russell's thesis "Lesbian Representation in Recent Historical Fiction" 

and Louise Yelin's essay "Cultural Cartography"). While the jolly and energetic Leonora 

Stern may be vulgar, and "poor" Blanche Glover pathetic, neither lesbian is 

unsympathetic (more accurately, Leonora is bisexual). By way of contrast, the depiction 

of the ultra-hetero Fergus Wolff is much more negative. The love of Gerda Himmelblau 

for her female friend Kay in "The Chinese Lobster" is sincere and moving. Certainly 

11 notice, on re-reading this, that I use Ash's and LaMotte's last names and Roland's and Maud's 
first, as if the latter were children. I am, in part, following Byatt's example, although she usually writes of 
"Roland," "Maud," and "Christabel," giving "Ash" alone the honour of respectful address. I use "LaMotte' 
and "Ash" because they display a greater maturity than the twentieth-century characters. 



88 

heterosexual love is the norm in Byatt's fiction, for the obvious reason that this is where 

her experience lies. 

In 1991, writing about the composition of The Shadow of the Sun in the 1950s, 

Byatt said she believed at the time that "men could have both, work and love, but it 

seemed that women couldn't" (Shadow ix). Byatt's first two novels, The Shadow of the 

Sun and The Game, evince the darkest suspicions about love, and those suspicions are 

forcefully resurrected in her most recent works, The Matisse Stories and Babel Tower. (It 

is possible that Frederica Potter and John Ottokar are falling in love at the conclusion of 

Babel Tower, but the evidence is meagre.) Characters who attempt to love are met by 

hopelessness and failure. Margaret Canning, in Shadow, believes first in the power of 

love "to invigorate and transform and illuminate," and then in love "as a last resort from 

dullness." She finally discovers that "both love and dullness wore forms so alien and 

complicated that she could not always distinguish one from the other" (22). More 

commonly Byatt's characters are zealous in their avoidance of love; the relationship 

between Roland and Maud in Possession is typical. Casualties of postmodern doubt, they 

are unwilling to entertain even the idea of being in love. 

"Sometimes I feel," said Roland carefully, "that the best state is to 
be without desire. When I really look at myself - " 

"If you have a self - " 
"At my life, at the way it is - what I really want is to - to have 

nothing." (290) 

When love in Byatt is not depicted in this negative manner, it is shown as 

descending onto an inappropriate object. It is frequently channeled into overwhelming, 

and often destructive, love for children. This is glimpsed within the damaging attachment 

between Winifred and Marcus Potter. In Babel Tower, Frederica experiences this sort of 

consuming love for her son Leo, demonstrated in this breathless and magnificent 

Jamesian sentence: 



89 

She is obsessed by the fear of losing Leo, a person who makes her life 
difficult at every turn, who appears sometimes to be eating her life and 
drinking her life-blood, a person who fits into no pattern of social 
behaviour or ordering of thought that she would ever have chosen for 
herself freely - and yet, the one creature to whose movements of body and 
emotions all her own nerves, all her own antennae, are fine-tuned, the 
person whose approach along a pavement, stamping angrily, running 
eagerly, lifts her heart, the person whose smile fills her with warmth like a 
solid and gleaming fire, the person whose sleeping face moves her to tears, 
to catch the imperceptible air of whose sleeping breath she will crouch, 
breathless herself, for timeless moments in the half-dark. (Babel Tower 
476) 

Thwarted love is also sublimated, its energy transferred to religion (see Cassandra 

Corbett in The Game and Christabel LaMotte in Possession) and art (see "The Story of 

the Eldest Princess," "Art Work," and "The Chinese Lobster"). This achieves partial 

success; Byatt seems complacent about Freud's tenet that sublimated Eros is necessary 

for cultural advancement.2 \ 

Her description of the courtship and marriage of Stephanie and Daniel is atypical, 

and is the only sustained portrait Byatt provides of love that succeeds even partially. The 

Ash-LaMotte affair, while more intense, is swiftly terminated; LaMotte's refusal to 

commit to a relationship with Ash blocks our attempts to plot that love's trajectory. The 

Orton marriage is also open to sceptical readings; Stephanie is more reluctant than the 

taciturn Daniel to verbalize her love, and we are forced to read her fidelity and affection 

in her actions. Judging by one of C. S. Lewis's definitions of love, that "one of the first 

things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving" (The Four 

Loves 137), Stephanie does seem to find a good deal of satisfaction in using generosity to 

express her feelings. But there is no doubt that Stephanie also experiences great 

frustration in love, as does Daniel. 

2 Byatt reported in a New York Times interview in 1996 that one of the three new novels she is 
planning concerns female psychoanalysts in the time of Freud (Gussow C12). Byatt's sympathy with Freud 
is apparent in her 1979 book review "Charles Rycroft: The Innocence of Dreams." She says that she prefers 
"Freud's fleshly pessimism" and "liberating" biological thinking to the passivity inherent in Jungian 
archetypal theory (Passions of the Mind 289). 



90 

Byatt is less certain that language can encompass love, compared to the other two 

fundamental personal experiences (death and birth) I have been examining. She is less 

willing even to explore the possibilities of articulated romance. One of T. S. Eliot's rare 

love poems expresses the same hesitation; he writes "of lovers whose bodies smell of 

each other / Who think the same thoughts without need of speech / And babble the same 

speech without need of meaning" ("A Dedication to my Wife"). This is a poem that Byatt 

admires ("Amatory Acts" 913). Byatt has said, of her characters Frederica and 

Alexander, that "they were both in love with words and wanted to prove that you could 

love with words. But of course there are passions which are too powerful to be expressed 

with words" (Dusinberre interview 192). 

We have already encountered this preliminary capitulation to wordlessness in the 

matter of birth. But Byatt was eventually convinced that language can strongly suggest, if 

not contain, birth and death. The subject of love, on the other hand, surely the most 

extolled in the history of art, and one, at first glance, "easier" to grasp than birth or death, 

prompts in her an unexpected reticence. It is as if here, at last, she does ally herself with a 

post-structuralist view that language constructs reality; she seems to suspect that love is 

created by the act of naming, rather than having an independent existence. She finds this 

thought disturbing, and so retreats into silence. 

Perhaps silence is a haven from deconstructive forces. Is silence the only way to 

protect essence? If we accept, for the sake of argument, that silence may offer 

accommodation to love, we must also recognize that the opacity of silence makes love 

vulnerable. In silence love is difficult to locate, easily mislaid or misinterpreted. "No 

more speech," thinks Randolph Henry Ash to himself when he makes love with 

Christabel LaMotte (Possession 308). Language is not working as well for them in Eros 

as it did in friendship; Ash hopes that a retreat into a meaningful silence will preserve and 

sustain their romance. It does not work. 



91 

Or is language indeed the problem? Does Byatt truly believe in love at all? She 

hesitates to name love as one of the primary forces of life. M y formulation of the "basic 

themes" followed in these first three chapters is not as Byatt would have it. Instead of 

birth, death, and love, she has said that Still Life, in particular, is an exploration of "how 

far one can denude language of allusion and metaphor and keep to the basic themes of 

birth, sex, and death. 'The thing itself, unaccommodated man' " (Kenyon 16, emphasis 

mine). 

When Byatt does write of sex, her interest is often general rather than personal. 

On the subject of her sex scenes, she has said, "I see [Stephanie's] sexual encounters 

mythologically. . . . I'm not so much interested in one relationship when I describe love-

making as in the genetic order of what goes on" (Kenyon 13). In abstracting and 

theorizing erotic love, Byatt insists on its physical and social aspects, while ignoring the 

emotional. This contrasts sharply with her accomplishments in describing death and birth, 

which strenuously attempt to combine the physical, intellectual, and emotional meanings 

of an experience specifically located within a character's individuality. One does not 

expect the atmosphere to grow chillier in the vicinity of love, and yet that is what 

happens. In reviewing some anthologies of love poetry for the Times Literary 

Supplement in 1990, Byatt had some revealing remarks about readers who might be in 

love "and looking for that sense of unearthly clarity and absolute rhythm that one seems 

to need, however briefly, in that deluded, illuded, or disestablished state" ("Amatory 

Acts" 913). Kathleen Coyne Kelly, in her study of Byatt, believes that the constants in 

Byatt's writing are "her preoccupation with the artist, the imagination, the impossibility 

of love and the inevitability of loss" (14). 

Auden's acerbic prescription to "give up love" has found a ready response. Byatt 

almost seems to agree with Catherine Belsey, whose deconstructive project in Desire: 

Love Stories in Western Culture is 



92 

to interrogate the metaphysics of desire, to call into question the 
widespread notion that desire, however differently conceptualized by 
fiction, sexology or psychoanalysis, remains a fundamental and 
constitutive category of human experience. (8) 

§ § § 

At this point, I will make an attempt at a working definition of love appropriate to 

a study of Byatt, aware that any definition of love which did not immediately become 

elusive and contradictory would be no definition worth having. As I proceed, examples 

from poetry begin to dominate the discussion. This is partly an accident of my own 

reading, but because love in Possession is so closely entwined with poetry, I think this is 

fitting. 

For Plato, earthly love at its best allows the lover to gain access to the ideal, to 

Beauty itself in its abstract perfection. This ideal love can encompass the physical, but 

will surpass it. Augustine's Christian writings in the fourth and fifth centuries widen the 

Platonic division between physical and spiritual love. Stendhal, in 1822, itemizes four 

kinds of love: passionate, mannered, physical, and vanity-love (43). Freud combined 

affection and sensuality in his definition of love (Belsey 43). Many contemporary 

thinkers ask us to discard any notions we might have that love is universal or eternal. C.S. 

Lewis in The Allegory of Love makes a convincing case for the theory that much of what 

we still take to be model romance was artificially constructed in the Middle Ages for 

particular historical reasons. "[Chivalry] always was [dead]: let no one think the worse of 

it on that account," he says (24). In The Four Loves, Lewis expands classical categories 

of love for contemporary Christian use; they are Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, 

ascending in order of excellence. 

Nearly all the commentators on love as it was perceived before this century make 

claims for erotic love as the most powerful human force; most idealists, Christian or 

otherwise, have additionally suggested that one ought to attempt to transcend Eros, or use 

it as a stepping-stone to divine love. The metaphysical poets in the seventeenth century 



93 

provide a welcome, but brief, deviation from this pattern. John Donne's view, similar to 

that found in the Song of Songs, is that erotic and divine love intermingle. "Take me to 

you, imprison me, for I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, 

except you ravish me," is his address to God in Holy Sonnet 14. But after the era of the 

metaphysical poets, love's theorists return obsessively to division. Denis de Rougemont, 

in Love in the Western World, takes as his thesis "the inescapable conflict in the West 

between passion and marriage" (8). Like Lewis and the other scholars of courtly love, de 

Rougemont notes the continuing attraction, over the centuries, of transgressive or 

forbidden love; he claims that "the community still drives passionate love in nine cases 

out of ten to take the form of adultery" (16). Then, of course, there is the question of 

death, which rationally might seem to oppose love, but has become, poetically or 

perversely, fused with it. We see this in the stories of Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and 

Juliet, and more recently in the adulterous lovers of Michael Ondaatje's The English 

Patient (1992). Old patterns hold fast; as C. S. Lewis says, "whatever we have been, in 

some sort we are still" (Allegory 1). De Rougemont says: 

Love and death, a fatal love - in these phrases is summed up, if not the 
whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally 
moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the 
sweetest songs. Happy love has no history. (15) 

These classic ideas about love - its pre-eminence, its fusion with death, its links with or 

opposition to spiritual fulfillment - are all rejected by Byatt. 

In our century, modern and postmodern thought have wended their sceptical ways 

into the province of love. The result, especially in the concourse of scholarship, is love 

brought low by materialism and shot through with doubts, like other verities formerly 

deemed eternal.3 In a recent novel like Julian Barnes's Metroland, postmodern characters 

3 That romance has a robust and relatively unchanged existence in "everyday" life is obvious. 
Neither have the tropes of popular romance books altered much in several hundred years. I must decline 
further comment on this genre, other than to say that I recognize the serious gaps between academic 
constructions of contemporary discourse and what is actually being desired and read. 



94 

obsess about the linguistic and behavioural requisites of love at the expense, of course, of 

the experience itself: 

Well, what about the simple question, again, do I love her? 
Depends what you mean by love. When do you cross the dividing 

line? When does je t'aime bien become je t'aimel The easy answer is, you 
know when you're in love, because there's no way you can doubt it, any 
more than you can doubt when your house is on fire. That's the trouble, 
though: try to describe the phenomenon and you get either a tautology or a 
metaphor. Does anyone feel any more that they are walking on air? Or do 
they merely feel as they think they would feel if they were walking on air? 
Or do they merely think they ought to feel as if they are walking on air? 
(125) 

There are portents of this anxiety and denial in Victorian literature. Long before 

W. H . Auden wrote in 1937, "Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless 

arm," Matthew Arnold was mourning love's waning power in "The Buried Life" ("Alas, 

is even Love too weak / To unlock the heart and let it speak?"). In 1862, George 

Meredith asks, in Modern Love, "What are we first? First, animals; and next / 

Intelligences at a leap" (Sonnet 30). For Meredith, love trails behind our physical and 

intellectual natures, and is transitory. 

Contemporary theory and "serious" literature have concentrated on sex, at love's 

expense. Many, if not most, of Anne Sexton's and Robert Graves's love poems are 

actually about sex (yet Byatt counts Graves as one of the three greatest love poets, with 

Browning and Donne [Passions of the Mind 29]). Catherine Belsey's book Desire: Love 

Stories in Western Culture foregrounds sex and dismisses love. Love stories have long 

since been relegated to the lower echelons of literature; love's supporters are lonely 

voices in intellectual discourse. John Bayley's voice, in 1960, echoes as in an empty 

room: 



95 

[Sex] is the part of desire which is concerned not with the individual but 
with the attribute and the gender, while love is preoccupied with the 
uniqueness of the individual. Besides, sex is ridiculous - lyrically, 
touchingly, or gruesomely so, but always and inescapably ridiculous. Love 
is not. (The Characters of Love 4-5) 

Bayley continues: "But surely if the realization of love means anything it must mean 

precisely . . . our delight in the existence of another person?" (27). There is not much 

delight left in contemporary discourse. One exception is the work of Roland Barthes, 

where love's fragments do glitter with a remainder of delight, providing the lover with 

mystical hope and self-knowledge: 

I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but 
according to his existence; by a movement one might well call mystical, I 
love, not what he is, but that he is. . . . 

I know more about myself than all those who simply do not know 
this about me: that I am in love. (A Lover's Discourse 222, 229) 

John Bayley's speculative "if the realization of love means anything" is telling. So 

too is the definition of love offered by his wife, Iris Murdoch. Love plays an important 

idealistic role in Murdoch's mostly-Platonic metaphysical system, but neither her 

philosophical nor fictional writings demonstrate a convincing vigorous faith that love can 

advance beyond abstraction. In "The Fire and the Sun" (based on lectures she gave in 

1976), Murdoch says: 

"Falling in love," a violent process which Plato more than once vividly 
describes (love is abnegation, abjection, slavery) is for many people the 
most extraordinary and most revealing experience of their lives, whereby 
the centre of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and the 
dreamy ego is shocked into awareness of an entirely separate reality.... 
[A] love which, still loving, comes to respect the beloved and (in Kantian 
language again) treat him as an end not as a means, may be the most 
enlightening love of all. (Existentialists and Mystics 417) 

Murdoch's writings have been influential for Byatt, and it is intriguing to note the (not 

inappropriate) violence of this description ("ripped," "shocked") and the built-in 



96 

hesitations ^may be the most enlightening love of all"). In 1967, Murdoch offered an 

even more qualified definition, putting her pessimism up front. Love is 

capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors; but 
when it is even partially refined it is the energy and passion of the soul in 
its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the 
world through Good. (The Sovereignty of Good 103) 

Murdoch does not dwell on joy or communion, but on the importance of laying aside the 

gratification of self, finding Good, and simply recognizing the other - in a discussion of 

Tolstoy ("The Sublime and the Good") she describes love rather severely as "the non-

violent apprehension of difference" (Existentialists and Mystics 218). 

The theorists of love in the past, the metaphysical poets excepted, emphasize 

division, failure, impermanence. The theorists of love in the present discount its existence 

almost completely, or offer carefully limited definitions. As previously noted, T. S. Eliot 

believes that lovers "babble" and their words have no meaning. Maud Bailey, in 

Possession, holds a characteristic postmodern view: "We never say the word Love, do we 

- we know it's a suspect ideological construct - especially Romantic Love" (290). A. S. 

Byatt shares many of Maud's misgivings. 

§ § § 

If we rely on poetry rather than criticism, as Byatt does in Possession, we can 

recover some part of an active and optimistic belief in love. Over the centuries poetry has 

been the site where most frequently we can encounter these descriptions of being in love: 

a sense of firstness, oneness, and comprehensiveness. "No one has ever loved but you 

and I," says Yeats in "The Ragged Wood." Anne Bradstreet, in the seventeenth century, 

writes, "If ever two were one, then surely we." Donne's memorably unified lovers, 

compared to a compass in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," are "inter-assured of 



97 

the mind." In "The Sun Rising" the lovers famously become the entire world. They 

apostrophize the sun: 

and since thy duties be 
To warm the world, that's done in warming us. 
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; 
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. 

Paradox is triumphant in Donne's definitions of love, as it is in "Moods of Love" 

(1957) by C. Day Lewis. 

Lose and possess yourself therein: adore 
The ideal clay, the carnal innocence. 
Where all's miraculous, all is most real. 

Early in this century, Tagore captures the common notion that love transcends time and 

becomes eternal: "I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, / In 

life after life, in age after age forever" ("Unending Love"). And of course love is 

transformative. This is a common theme in Shakespeare's sonnets: "But if the while I 

think on thee, dear friend, / A l l losses are restor'd, and sorrows end" (Sonnet 30). 

Love at its most powerful becomes synonymous with life itself We can define 

love backwards, as it were, by looking at C. S. Lewis's grief after the death of his wife 

Joy: "Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything" (A Grief Observed 11). 

Daniel's grief years after the loss of Stephanie matches this, defining the all-

encompassing qualities of his love for her: "He feels - it is no exaggeration - his heart 

willing itself to stop beating, juddering in his body like an engine in trouble" (Babel 

Tower 46). His love for Stephanie was, seemingly, what made his heart beat, since the 

lack of it is powerful enough to make him "will" himself dead. 

The primal quality of Daniel's love for Stephanie is exceptional in Byatt. She is 

silent about most of the qualities poets and theorists have found in love. Part of this is, I 



98 

believe, accounted for by her feminism; the canon of love poetry (where most of the 

definitions abide) abundantly describes the experiences of men and the "universal" truths 

which men have drawn from their experiences. The work of Christina Rossetti, Emily 

Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, which has more recently entered the canon, is 

grimmer, differing from the norm much as Christabel LaMotte's pessimistic poems differ 

radically from those of Randolph Henry Ash. Rossetti's love poems, for example, rarely 

idealize or praise, but rather mourn or blame. Millay's sonnets ache with sarcasm. For 

women, it seems, the cost of love is high. 

Byatt's reluctance to be optimistic about love does not, however, align her with 

postmodern strategists, feminist or otherwise. It is clear that she is impatient with Maud's 

and Roland's inability to define themselves as other than "[matrices] for a susurration of 

texts and codes" (Possession 273). What Byatt rejects is becoming clear, but what she 

accepts is more problematic. 

A more complex model is needed, and D. H. Lawrence provides help. Byatt 

responds keenly to Lawrence's determination to yoke oppositions and create a radical 

new type of romance. Unlike Donne, Lawrence refuses to use spirituality (in any 

conventional way) to equalize opposition and paradox in his representation of love. 

Women in Love (1916) supplies one of the originating points for Byatt's Potter tetralogy. 

She has said: 

I did want to rewrite it, in a sense, with the women at the centre. Though 
nobody can say that Ursula and Gudrun are not very powerful images of 
women. It wasn't corrective in that sense, it was really taking it on. (Hass 
interview) 

Women in Love overflows with potential definitions of love, although on examination 

many of them define sexual union rather than love. Some are negative, like Gudrun's and 



99 

Gerald's "mutual hellish recognition" (272). Others are playful or bombastic. The most 

optimistic ones (not necessarily in the majority) are those which combine a perception of 

newness, unity, and speechlessness with an abandonment of selfishness (this latter the 

hardest for Lawrence's characters to attain). Birkin best describes these states: "He 

seemed to be conscious all over, all his body awake with a simple, glimmering 

awareness" (351). And: "we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness 

where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one" 

(417). 

Lawrence's ideals in Women in Love have more vital existence in theory than in 

the reality of his characters. His poem "Fronleichnam" provides a more convincing 

description of love in actuality. 

Shameless and callous I love you; 
Out of indifference I love you; 
Out of mockery we dance together, 
Out of the sunshine into the shadow, 
Passing across the shadow into the sunlight, 
Out of sunlight to shadow. 

This "sunlight and shadow" formulation of love is helpful in reading Byatt. For Lawrence 

and Byatt, love is an uneasy and ultimately impossible dance, combining physical desire 

and emotional interdependence. The effort to sustain this state is more compelling for 

Lawrence than Byatt, and he also wants to believe in an ideal love more clearly than she 

does. She is wary about the sacrifice of individuality she believes is entailed in being part 

of a couple. Marriage, she has said in an interview, involves "a problem that [has] always 

bothered me - the problem of separate identity" (Kenyon 13). Lawrence was wary too, 

but unlike him, Byatt is unwilling finally to accept that the rewards of sexual love, at their 

best, might be adequate compensation. 

Byatt gives her full attention to the "sunlight and shadow" demands of love at 

their destructive worst. In "A Farewell to False Love" Walter Ralegh wrote of 



100 

A fortress foil'd which reason did defend, 
A siren song, a fever of the mind, 
A maze wherein affection finds no end, 
A ranging cloud that runs before the wind, 
A substance like the shadow of the sun, 
A goal of grief for which the wisest run. 

Byatt used this stanza as the epigraph to her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun. It also 

provided her title. The sun, of course, has no shadow, so therefore love, in this "false" 

case at least, has no substance. Ralegh and Byatt take as their subject affection which is 

illusory, damaging. "You have to be the sun or nothing," she comments in her 

introduction to Shadow (xiv). There is no place here for two lovers to give the sun 

whimsical commands a la Donne. 

But, as Ralegh hints in the next stanza of "False Love," which Byatt does not 

quote, the negativity of this conviction can lead the cynic to doubt even what may be 

trustworthy: false love prompts "a deep mistrust of that which certain seems." The habit 

of pessimism creeps early on into nearly all of Byatt's thinking about love. (Even Salman 

Rushdie is more positive; in February 1999, he wrote, "love feels more and more like the 

only subject" [29].) For Byatt, rosy definitions of love, like Shakespeare's "ever-fixed 

mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken" (Sonnet 116), have little 

applicability. She does not completely refute its existence or power, but most often, she is 

uncharacteristically quiet about it, ambivalent. 

§ § § 

When love does work in Byatt's fiction, place is an important constituent, as it is 

in Lawrence. A primal natural setting, something stark and ultimate, speaks for the 

characters, who feel that reticence is necessary. In Women in Love, Birkin and Ursula's 

union in a darkened Sherwood Forest is, finally, a silent one, arrived at after they have 

exhausted long emotional, social, and intellectual arguments about love and marriage. 

Their flight to unspoiled nature allows them to abandon language and achieve 

equilibrium. Peace for Ash and LaMotte in Possession is found in a wild setting on the 



101 

Yorkshire coast; away from London, they can tacitly acknowledge the centrality of their 

relationship. They arrive at being "quiet together" as their solution for a troubled future; 

Ash is puzzled by many things about LaMotte but he "could never ask" (309). 

In chapter 18 of The Virgin in the Garden, Stephanie and Daniel adopt Ursula and 

Birkin's strategy of wordlessness on the same beach that Ash and LaMotte walk. At Filey 

Beach Stephanie tries to speak and Daniel "could not hear; the air took her words and 

mixed them with its own noise" (179). Words are of necessity replaced with looks, 

movement, and intuition. They become "obsessed by seeing" the ocean and sun (180). "I 

know what you want," says Daniel (182). Although Stephanie and the narrator have 

doubts about this, it does seem true that Daniel sees Stephanie, who has repressed nearly 

all personal desires, more accurately than she sees herself. 

On Filey Beach, buffeted by the elements, they learn to limit their conversation to 

essentials. When they reach the Marine Cafe, Stephanie's thoughts are basic and 

optimistic: "It was open. Life was good" (177). Daniel's courtship arguments are 

similarly terse: "You will have to marry me," he says (181), and "I want, I want, I want" 

(183). While Stephanie thinks to herself "that such things slipped away whilst you tried 

to recognise them, died whilst you tried to find out how to keep them alive" (181), Daniel 

convinces her otherwise. After they make love for the first time, "she felt the limits of 

their bodies were not quite clear" (186), as large a concession to ideals of "oneness" as 

Byatt will make. 

Richard Todd in his Writers and their Work study of Byatt also identifies the 

importance of the Filey beach episodes, but he sees the presence of Eros there in mythical 

terms: "Whatever is it that happens to Daniel and Stephanie at Filey, they are shown 

undergoing a mystical experience that apparently changes their lives forever." This is 

"the entry of the dark god Eros into their lives" (21). According to Todd, no real claim 

for the "authenticity" of this experience is made by Byatt; the question as to whether 

these characters really experience love seems, he says (in an oddly-worded phrase), "to 



102 

resist any answer more direct than citation from Possession" (22). On the contrary, I see 

the Filey beach scenes as among the most intimate that Byatt has ever written, places 

where she strives to eschew allusion and write plainly and personally. The potential 

destructive power of Eros is not entirely absent from the beach episodes, but it does not 

warrant the emphasis that Todd places on it. 

The best natural setting allows characters who are mature to strip away social 

appurtenances and approach their elemental selves.4 The paradigm of this is contained 

within Ash's "Ask to Embla" poetry. In his Norse epic Ragnarok the first man and 

woman are created by Odin, Honir, and Loki on a beach, and Ask sees that Embla "was 

like himself, yet other; then she saw / His smiling face, and by it, knew her own - " 

(Possession 263). At first Ask and Embla are speechless, but later they share the naming 

of the world, claiming it as theirs and finding creative power in the act. 

We two remake our world by naming it 
Together, knowing what words mean for us 
And for the others for whom current coin 
Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, 
And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun, 
Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now 
Particularly our s u n . . . . (127) 

This is key. Ask and Embla move from silence to definitive and creative language 

- but outside the confines of Ash's poetry, "real" characters have difficulty achieving 

Ask and Embla's fulfillment. Ash and LaMotte in Yorkshire come nearest, but LaMotte's 

recalcitrance limits their success. She insists on reminding Ash of the obstacles which 

face them, and at Filey beach she, rather ominously, "sang like Goethe's sirens and 

Homer's" (310). Sirens in LaMotte's mythology are sympathetic rather than evil, but the 

unhappiness of siren figures in her writing reveals that she has no confidence, as Ash 

does, that women and men can overcome their separateness. Ash has deliberately chosen 

4 The criterion of maturity disqualifies Simon and Julia in The Game, who undergo the beach walk 
but find only the corruption of dead fish, not love. Similarly nature can only bring out the worst in Gudrun 
and Gerald in Women in Love, showing the hypertrophic development of animalistic aspects of their 
characters. 



103 

a creation myth which he sees as untainted by gender inequality; LaMotte continues to 

work with myths which emphasize sexual difference. 

Roland and Maud achieve the important moments of silence that Ash prescribes 

in Raenarok. but they remain stalled at this stage through most of Possession. 

On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon 
with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white 
lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking. (459) 

Stephanie and Daniel, in The Virgin in the Garden, also negotiate this stage, but they 

quickly move on to consummating their relationship, acknowledging their love, and 

launching their life together. More so even than Ash and LaMotte, Stephanie and Daniel 

achieve a unity of purpose and personality, and they do it largely without words. 

However, they are unable to proceed to the joint naming of their world which Ask and 

Embla experience. 

In contrast with Stephanie, Frederica Potter strives to keep separate from any 

man, and through a dizzying number of sexual exploits remains stubbornly immune to 

romance. (Frederica dallies with four men in Virgin, and with eight more in Still Life. In 

Babel Tower she limits her lovers to three.) She uses language to maintain separateness, 

never successfully negotiating the space of silence which allows Ask and Embla to 

emerge into a new vitality of unified language. Frederica believes that being in love 

makes people "more banal, more ordinary" (Babel Tower 464), and instead of seeking 

wholeness, she preserves the intellectual model of "laminated" experience she first 

developed in The Virgin in the Garden. "Things were best cool, and clear, and 

fragmented" (Babel Tower 315); she thinks that "she is many women in one - a mother, a 

wife, a lover, a watcher, and that it might be possible to construct a kind of plait of 

voices, with different rhythms and vocabularies" (463-4). It is significant that in Babel 

Tower the sceptical Frederica comes to dominate the Potter saga. Byatt has said that she 

herself thought of lamination "as a strategy for survival when I was Frederica's age" but 



104 

"I think I also have this desire to connect everything I see to everything else I see" 

(Tredell 69). Frederica is not capable of this sort of simultaneity; "her consciousness is 

too powerful and she tries to keep down her unconscious," says Byatt. "She's due for her 

comeuppance" (Tredell 71). 

For Frederica, only independence is reliable and honourable. This is amplified by 

her adverse experience with marriage; in Babel Tower Frederica is married to Nigel 

Reiver ("robber") and their mutual physical passion takes her "beyond words" (42). After 

her marriage to Nigel ends in violence, Frederica learns to equate oppression with the 

silence she has shared with him. Nigel's is a negating silence, one which wants to change 

and deny aspects of Frederica's personality. And when Nigel does use words, it is falsely. 

He says "I love you" in order to gain power over Frederica: "He has learned what a 

surprising number of men never learn, the strategic importance of those words" (40). 

In Babel Tower, Frederica comes to believe that "language fails man and woman 

trying to transcend it and themselves" (315). Frederica's identity is so bound up within 

language that she is only able to see a glimmer of love's possibilities which may be 

beyond language. Frederica's "chatty linguistic s e l f (361) always talks in her head 

during lovemaking, and there is no hope for change until, near the end of Babel Tower, 

she and John Ottokar finally "make love in deepening silence" (433). John Ottokar has 

learned the power of silent communication with his twin Paul, with whom he had a 

private language of "signs and gestures" (291). 

There are two kinds of silence under discussion here. For Frederica, silence in 

love usually signifies emptiness, denial, constriction. It is true that Nigel's silence 

conceals deception and brutality, and that the Ottokar twins' silence also contains 

something destructive. But for Ash, and for Daniel and Stephanie, love's silences are 

inhabited, productive, generous. Byatt has special affection for Henri Matisse's painting 

Le Silence habite des Maisons, with its mysterious portrayal of (probably) familial love; 

she analyses it in her story "Art Work," finding its enigmatic silence vivid and appealing. 



105 

Ash writes to LaMotte that to hide his love for her in "complete silence [is] out of my 

power" (Possession 211); eventually his silence will evolve into eloquent language. The 

kind of silence he experiences is full of her presence: "I have dreamed nightly of your 

face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in 

my silent brain." Only the latter kind of silence leads somewhere positive, at least 

potentially. 

A phrase Byatt repeatedly uses to describe love is the one Roland and Maud agree 

upon at the conclusion of Possession: "Oh, love is terrible, it is a wrecker" (550). They 

would rather not love each other; "it isn't convenient," they say. "Terrible" love is used 

to describe Winifred's futile affection for Marcus (The Virgin in the Garden 88), and also 

Frederica's feelings for the chilly Raphael Faber in Still Life (217). Characters like 

Cassandra, Julia, and Simon in The Game cannot surmount their fear of love's 

destructive qualities; that the terror is justified is borne out in the characterization of 

Margaret and Anna in The Shadow of the Sun, women who are pulled under by love, 

who lose their individuality to men. What happens after the smash-up of love is, in a 

sense, the stuff of Babel Tower, although discourses of liberty command more space on 

the playing field of that massive novel. 

Love as "wrecker" has this in common with the forces which kill Stephanie 

Potter; both are construed in terms of electricity. Ash uses the phrase "the kick galvanic" 

(Possession 297) to describe romantic passion, and Roland picks up this formulation from 

him (162). In one of Ash's poems, Ask compares Embla to powerful falling water: "And 

you - 1 love you for it - are the force / That moves and holds the form" (285). The 

galvanic force of love is the only agency with the potential to answer or equal the 

electricity which causes Stephanie Potter's death. But this powerful force only answers if 

it is properly recognized. None of the twentieth-century characters, even strong-willed 

Daniel, are any better equipped to comprehend the authority of love than they were able 

to interpret death's authoritative message. Indeed, the situation is worse. For a repressed 



106 

character like Maud, love's "kick galvanic" is terrifying. Here is Roland's approach in a 

wintry garden:" "A figure loomed black on the white, a hand touched her arm with a huge 

banging, an unexpected electric shock" (Possession 157). 

"Love, strong as Death, is dead," says Christina Rossetti in the poem "An End." 

Rossetti's vital Christianity provides her with a structure through which she can argue 

life's fundamental questions. But in Byatt's agnostic world, hardly anyone is willing to 

admit and work out, in either divine or human form, the implications of love, so powerful 

and dangerous. Randolph Henry Ash and Daniel Orton attempt to contain love's 

imperative force in a positive framework, but the task is too weighty for them. Daniel 

exists largely outside the realm of language. Ash should fare better; in his poetry, ideal 

lovers, given "the spark of vital heat" by the god Loki (Possession 262), gain knowledge 

of self through other, and preserve their difference within their union - "like himself, yet 

other" (263). But the conceptions of Ragnarok are simple and child-like, lacking in detail 

or nuance: this is a myth, after all, and the complexities of real life do not correspond to 

the poetry. As Ask and Embla walk down the beach on the day of their creation, their 

footprints are the "first traces in the world, of life and time / And love, and mortal hope, 

and vanishing" (263). "Love" comes in the middle of a stark list of terms which begins 

with "life" and ends with "vanishing," big ideas barely held together by small 

conjunctions. Frederica Potter is dismissive of such "connecting" with others; she finds 

the obsession with "oneness" in Lawrence and Forster, for example, fanciful and delusive 

(Babel Tower 312). 

Randolph Henry Ash would not agree with Frederica. The beloved becomes all 

things loved and lovely, he says (Possession 310), and he sees Christabel LaMotte as 

representing or containing all of Time. He notices her waist, thinks of her as an hour-

glass, and remembers that the word for waist in Italian is "vita." His ruminations on her 

waist hint at an intricacy of thought which is more satisfactory than the Ask to Embla 

poem. 



107 

She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped 
together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small 
circumference.... This is my centre, he thought, here, at this place, at this 
time, in her, in that narrow place, where my desire has its end. (312) 

Like Donne's lovers in "The Sun Rising," asking the sun to warm the world in warming 

them, Ash sees LaMotte as his beginning and his end. Alone among Byatt's characters he 

actively struggles with paradox, striving to yoke disparate elements, while others, with 

Frederica at their head, are content with fragmentation. Eventually, we must see Ash as 

an appealing but lonely nostalgic figure. Those who carry on his legacy, like James 

Blackadder and Roland Michell, are comparatively hapless. In failing to convert anyone 

to his idealism, Ash loses to the forces of doubt. Female characters, lacking Ash's 

freedom and confidence, have already been claimed by these forces. 

That much of Byatt's discussion of romantic love occurs in the semi-parodic 

Possession should give the reader pause. Her particular intentions in writing this comic 

Romance must be considered, for any understanding of this enigmatic portrayal of love to 

be possible. 

Byatt quotes Hawthorne's preface to The House of the Seven Gables as an 

epigraph for Possession. Her purpose, like his, is "to claim a certain latitude" for her 

material, "to present [the truth of the human heart] under circumstances, to a great extent, 

of the writer's own choosing or creation." Byatt expects of the reader a reasonable 

amount of suspension of belief and some tolerance for nostalgia. In other words, she 

abandons the project of modified realism which characterized her first four novels. In 

1993, she spoke of the writing of the first two Potter novels: 

I also had the idea at that time that I was very much defending realism 
against the rather trivial kinds of experimental novel that were then going 
on in E n g l a n d . . . . I don't now feel in quite the same way, that I want to go 
on doing what I used to call self-conscious realism. I don't feel - 1 mean, 
I've done that. (Hass interview) 



108 

Possession, her post-realistic novel, is where we locate most of the evidence of the sort of 

love which John Donne might recognize: the lover is all, being in love changes 

everything, lovers feel as if they have invented the world. 

The other novels provide sombre alternative views, and clarify the differentiation. 

In The Shadow of the Sun Anna drops into love with Michael "like a stone into water, 

[submerging] tracelessly and altogether" (20); later, when Anna talks with her 

manipulative lover Oliver, they reduce "the world of art and the world of love and the sun 

to manageable proportions" (210). In The Game. Julia Corbett believes that love is a 

prison (63). Her sister Cassandra shouts at a Quaker meeting that "love will not 

overcome, it will not" (38), and later kills herself. 

In the fiction which precedes and follows Possession, the positive images of love 

are much weaker than the negative descriptions of suppression, reduction, and failure. 

And although Angels and Insects features several love affairs with happy endings, the 

resolutions are qualified by the fabulist nature of the book. There are, for example, 

hopeful aspects to the courtship scene in "The Conjugial Angel" between Emily and 

Richard Jesse, but there is also a deliberately cliched and arch quality about it: "His hands 

and skin spoke to her, he pulled like a magnet, he was strong as a tree" (242). When the 

Papagays are happily reunited, Lilias, once described as "of imagination all compact" 

(163), can only say "Arturo, Arturo" (289). There is not much evidence here of a 

profound philosophy of love. 

In The Virgin in the Garden, when Daniel marries Stephanie, he smiles with 

"unabated delight" (266), but she looks at him "briefly, vaguely" (259). Both Daniel and 

Captain Jesse see and speak plainly, bodily, and optimistically, but their language often 

doesn't reach their wives, whose expectations are sophisticated, their outlooks cynical. 

Daniel feels affection for everyone on his wedding day: "They were all right, they were 

in the right place" (266) is how he puts it. This formulation of love, pleasing in its small 

plainness, like William Adamson's erotic attraction to Matty Crompton, which is based 



109 

on her wrists (Angels and Insects 96,157), doesn't seem substantial enough to combat 

the plethora of negative opinions about love that crowd into the fiction. In "Medusa's 

Ankles" a woman's husband is newly attracted to her as a result of a hairstyle she detests. 

§ § § 

Critics are divided about Byatt's portrayal of romantic love in Possession. Many 

reviews celebrated the sunniness of the book; the Times Literary Supplement is typical in 

its assertion that the reader can "revel in the delights of a boldly romantic narrative" 

(Jenkyns 213). The New York Review of Books noted that the novel is "both a mystery 

and a love story, and is also reassuringly complex and allusive" (Johnson 35). But 

Catherine Belsey sees Byatt as portraying frustrated love constructed - and constricted -

by some mixture of fate and patriarchy. According to Belsey, the women of Possession 

are silenced, the men control point of view, and LaMotte "has lost her lover and her 

child" (87, emphasis mine). This is willful misreading; as I interpret the events, LaMotte 

has chosen to be alone, and the men of the story go out of their way to respect the 

freedom of the women they love. Belsey continues: 

Possession is a profoundly Lacanian novel, not only in its explicit 
invocations of Lacan's texts, and not only in its figuration of a desire 
which is heroic to the degree that it cannot be fulfilled, but above all in its 
indications to the extent to which desire is inevitable . . . [and] dangerous. 
(87) 

I disagree that the characters in Possession are ever in the grip of the "inevitable"; 

instead they are highly cerebral creatures who are all too conscious of their choices. For 

example, the potential reconciliation scene at the end of Ash's life (when various letters 

and explanations never reach their intended recipients) is not a drama of accident or fate, 

but instead is one of choice. A l l of the three Victorian protagonists (Randolph Henry Ash, 

Ellen Ash, and Christabel LaMotte) have thought through the situation carefully and 

know that they are responsible for their actions. 



110 

With Derrida, Belsey decides that "it is not possible to tell the truth of desire, or 

about desire" (71) or indeed about anything: "The possession of truth is not an option" 

(73). Belsey's reading of the unfulfilled desires lingering in Possession is not completely 

inaccurate, but she misses Byatt's ironic uses of contemporary theory. Jackie Buxton, 

more accurately, sees that Byatt is "using post-modernism - or, at least, post-

structuralism" against itself (213), but what escapes both these critics is the way in which 

Byatt's use (or abuse) of post-structuralism builds multiple layers within the text, creating 

an atmosphere so archly redolent with knowingness that the excessive ironies become 

almost burdensome. 

For example, consider the concentric circles of knowledge around the existence of 

LaMotte's and Ash's child, Maia. The first level of Romance presents Ash, searching for 

his child. The postmodern irony hovering above this story is that twentieth-century 

scholars discover the child's existence, and they believe they hold knowledge that Ash 

did not. On another level is the Romance of the Postscript, in which the reader alone 

shares the successful conclusion of Ash's quest for his daughter. The irony here - the 

joke on the postmodernists - is that the scholars do not know that the golden hair Ash 

kept in his watch belonged to Maia, not to Ellen or Christabel. This time the Romance is 

apparently embellished with Realism; "this is how it was," the narrator says crisply (552). 

But a further irony exists in that the postmodern reader is likely to reject the closure of 

the Postscript. A sentence like "this is how it was" raises hackles and creates suspicions. 

A l l this, and more, is part of Byatt's deliberate structuring, and indeed my model is 

probably not convoluted enough. 

The review of Possession in the London Review of Books criticized Byatt for the 

"denial of human contingency" complicit in her "sweeping exercise of the novelist's 

providential powers" (Karlin 18). But Byatt expects her readers to exercise their own 

rational powers while engaging with this ironic Romance. Recognition of irony is 

missing from nearly all the analysis of Possession. Jackie Buxton claims that 



i 111 

Possession does reflect the ideology of the conventional romance 
narrative: Roland meets Maud, they court, kiss, make love, and 
presumably live happily ever after. But is Love the "suspect ideological 
construct" Maud perceives it to be? Obviously not for Byatt, who makes it 
clear that Roland and Maud's romance is a productive, liberating affair. 
(216) 

This is not "obvious" or "clear" at all. Buxton sees too much affirmation in Byatt, 

where Belsey doesn't see enough. Byatt hints that Maud and Roland may have a future, 

but equally they may not.5 Byatt expects the reader to recognize at least one important 

aspect of the conclusion for what it is — a fairy-tale ending. She has said that adults must 

learn that fairy-tale predictability is a childish belief to be put aside (Byatt/Murdoch 

video interview). 

Christabel LaMotte's cousin Sabine says of critics: "I do not believe all these 

explanations. They diminish" (384). Byatt, with Sabine, emphasizes that meanings are 

more complex, contradictory, and ironic than our models allow. 

§ § § 

Consider that Byatt creates, at most, two couples who are really in love. Then 

consider what she does, additionally, to undermine those two. The portents for Ash and 

LaMotte are not good from the start. In part, they are mythological creatures who are 

playing out a timeless scenario: the god who falls in love with a mortal woman. What 

good has ever come of that? Ash is identified with Wotan, the Norse god who made 

sacrifices so that he might have knowledge of magic runes and drink the mead of poetry. 

Ash re-creates, in his poetry, the first people, Ask and Embla, and the great world-Ash 

tree, symbol of everlasting life. The last scene in Possession clearly sketches Ash as 

Wotan in Wanderer guise: 

5 However, in the Spring 1995 issue of Victorian Poetry, a letter appeared from "Maud Michell-
Bailey" about some newly discovered fragments of LaMotte poetry. Byatt coyly provides a happy ending 
which is external to the novel by writing that Maud, still a scholar, is also the mother of a daughter named 
Rowan - and "rowan" is a kind of ash-tree. 



112 

There was a man, tall, bearded, his face in shadow under a wide-brimmed 
hat, a wanderer coming up the lane, between high hedges, with an ashplant 
in his hand and the look of a walker. (553) 

Christabel LaMotte is determinedly, even stubbornly mortal. We might say that 

Ash, in loving her, offers her immortality, which she refuses. "I cannot let you burn me 

up. I cannot," she says (213), fearing the usual fate of mortals loved by gods. Her name, 

like Maud's, is unalterably earthly; "motte" and "bailey" are parts of a fortification or 

castle. "I am a chilly mortal," she says when Ash names her "the life of things" (310). 

Given a designation of divinity, LaMotte refuses. Being a god, or being in love, is not 

rational. 

M y mythological reading has limits. Ironically, it is the earthly LaMotte who has 

religious faith, while Ash is agnostic. And the negative qualities of ash (that is, the 

remains of a dying or dead fire) are also attached to him. But both the myth and the ironic 

reading which undermines it share a view of love that has failure built in. 

Similarly, Stephanie and Daniel offer a mixed portrayal of mythic and ironic 

signs. Byatt has said that Stephanie's marriage can be read as "Persephone carried off by 

gloomy Dis" (Kenyon 13). Like the marriage of the daughter of Ceres to Dis (or Hades), 

the Orton marriage is both passionate and doomed. Unlike Persephone, Stephanie is not 

allowed even a half-life after her accident. The love of the Ortons is not eternal, but is 

ended, abruptly, by a distorted, terrifying version of the "kick galvanic." It does not 

matter that Ash and Daniel, scaled-down versions of Wotan and Hades, have the strong 

wills of gods. They cannot convince LaMotte and Stephanie that love is stronger than 

death. Without mutual confidence, marriage does not work; this is especially true for 

mixed marriages between gods and mortals. 

§ § § 

For all Byatt's layers of postmodern knowingness, her attitude toward love is also 

a very ancient one. C. S. Lewis quotes Dante as saying that "love has not, like a 



113 

substance, an existence of its own, but is only an accident occurring in a substance" 

(Allegory of Love 47). Lewis also describes Thomas Aquinas's view of erotic love as 

follows: "The evil in the sexual act is neither the desire nor the pleasure, but the 

submergence of the rational faculty which accompanies them" (16). Dante's "accident" 

and Aquinas's glorification of the "rational" are helpful in understanding Byatt. She is 

not willing to defend love as an essence with the energy she defends the fundamentals of 

birth and death. Like Evelyn Waugh, who in Brideshead Revisited worries about human 

love which sets up a "rival good to God's" (340), Byatt wonders if love impedes higher 

thought. Like C. S. Lewis, who apparently champions Eros and Agape in The Four Loves 

but is actually more convincingly attached to Philia, Byatt is more comfortable with 

relationships based on intellectual friendship than on romantic ties. This is evident in 

Frederica Potter's relationships with men, which only succeed if erotic love is left out of 

the equation. 

What is certain is Byatt's advocacy of a love of books. Like Barthes, Jackie 

Buxton notes, Byatt presents an "erotics of reading" (217). The novel "knows how to 

elicit the desire of the reader," says Catherine Belsey (86), and Caroline Webb agrees, 

stating that in Possession language "is both the means and the object of desire" (183). 

The latter eventually takes precedence over the former. 

C. S. Lewis learned late in life that "to love at all is to be vulnerable" (The Four 

Loves 169). Few of Byatt's characters are willing to embrace that perilous fact. "Love is 

a destroyer of cities" says Auden ("Love Letter") but he still wants it; "love is a wrecker" 

says Maud Bailey, and she barely seems to want it at all. The overly intellectual attitude 

toward love demonstrated by Julia and Cassandra in The Game is one of Byatt's most 

distinctive descriptions of characters inextricably tangled up in both longing and 

avoidance - the sisters are so involved with their own responses that the figure of a 

beloved is not even taken into account. The strategies of their complicated childhood 

game foreshadow their adult existences: 



114 

They had worked out already attitudes to all sorts of adult problems which 
[Julia] for one had found alternately percipient and fantastically thwarting 
- how did one ever rid oneself of a longing for a devouring love which 
one saw, wisely, to be impossible, but had enjoyed in such verisimilitude 
and detail when nothing else was happening to one at all? (46-47) 

Loving books, for all these characters, is less dangerous and frustrating, since the 

emotional movement is safely in one direction. 

Possession's status as the most popular Byatt novel testifies that her readers have 

responded, among other things, to the story's greater stress on love, even though this 

emphasis is sometimes deceptive. This situation is, a little, reminiscent of the majority of 

Schoenberg's listeners who prefer his romantic, Wagnerian compositions to his cerebral, 

atonal ones (which constitute his most original contribution to music). Ironically, it is 

Byatt's ironic book on love that her audience desires, and it is the love story rather than 

the suspicious apparatus encasing it that they respond to most warmly. 

Ash's idea that "we two remake our world by naming it / Together" (Possession 

127) is a comforting romantic trope, but Byatt is not Ash. His faith is too solid. His 

confidence, like Donne's confidence that "Nothing else is" but love, is ineffectual in the 

face of a death such as Stephanie Potter's, which looms large in Byatt's fiction. Byatt's 

implicit conviction is that Stephanie and Daniel's love is defeated by death's superior 

power. One of Byatt's recurrent motifs is the image of a white bed in an empty white 

room, which for Roland and Maud in Possession represents contentment, ostensibly 

erotic but strangely static. In the more recent story "The Chinese Lobster" the same 

image betokens death. Discussing suicide, one character says, "You are in a white box, a 

white room, with no doors or windows.... There is only one thing possible. It is all 

perfectly clear and simple and plain" (The Matisse Stories 125). Death replaces love at 

the heart of Byatt's knowledge of living. It speaks louder than love. 



115 

Part II: The Language of Perceptual and Aesthetic Experience 

Chapter 4: Form and Colour 

A l l art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses.... And it is only 
through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form 
and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care 
for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to 
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be 
brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of 
words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. 

Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897) 

Pourquoi apres avoir ecrit: "qui veut se dormer a la peinture doit 
commencer par se faire couper la langue, " ai-je besoin d'employer 
d'autres moyens que ceux qui me sontpropres? 

[After having written "he who wants to devote himself to painting must 
begin by cutting out his tongue," why do I feel the need to use other media 
than my usual ones?] 

Henri Matisse, text notes for Jazz (1947) 

Do we need words to think? Are there other reliable ways for humans to attain 

and contain knowledge? Does verbal language deserve its privileged position, or has it 

been used because it is conducive to systemization, even coercion? Is its power 

authoritarian? ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the 

Word was God." - John 1.1.) Might pictures or music be a more egalitarian route to 

creativity or truth? Does the authority of the word unfairly empower certain categories of 

persons? Some of these questions have been asked for centuries, in subtle and intricate 

ways which my simplified queries resemble very little. None of them has been 

conclusively answered. A. S. Byatt's engagement with these debates is the subject of this 

chapter. 



116 

It is widely assumed that verbal discourse has long held a position of mastery in 

western culture. Jacques Derrida writes, in "The End of the Book and the Beginning of 

Writing": 
if for Aristotle, for example, "spoken words . . . are the symbols of mental 
experience . . . and written words are the symbols of spoken words" . . . it 
is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of 
essential and immediate proximity with the mind. (Of Grammatology 11) 

For Derrida, logocentrism, the power of the (spoken) word, has long exercised rigid 

control over the intellectual world and is indissolubly associated with paternalistic 

Judaeo-Christian dogma, among many other things. (Derrida has written of the 

opposition between speech and writing throughout the history of language, but, because 

A. S. Byatt does not emphasize this difference, I will collapse these two categories into 

the one entity of verbal language. This is not to say that the opposition between oral and 

written language is unimportant, but only that I will not debate it here.) Claude Levi-

Strauss, in "A Writing Lesson" is unequivocal about his opinion of the role of words: 

"The primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery" (Tristes 

Tropiques 299). For Roland Barthes, this purpose is inherent in syntax. He says, "The 

Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions" (The 

Pleasure of the Text 50). A lonely optimistic voice is Noam Chomsky's. Chomsky does 

not see that signification is always arbitrary, nor that language, despite its frequent abuse 

by those in power, necessarily constitutes a restriction or imprisonment of original 

thought. In "Language and Freedom" he says that 

the study of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of 
rule-governed behavior and the possibilities for free and creative action 
within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least, reflect 
intrinsic properties of human mental organization. (154) 

These theoretical writings from the 1950s through the 1970s (which I have 

summarized rather briskly) underpin the complicated semiotic, feminist, and post-

structuralist debates about language occurring at present. Most participants in this debate 



117 

would agree that logos is domineering and suspect, that it no longer can be trusted to lead 

the reader to Truth (just another suspect category), that almost any accumulation of signs 

(gestures, advertisements, jokes) may be read as texts which should be as valid as the 

verbal texts formally revered as canonical. It is ironic that those who champion the 

theoretic possibilities of other semiotic systems continue to rely heavily on words and -

less ironic but more frustrating - that their language becomes less lucid (sometimes 

deliberately so) as these debates lengthen. Hardly anyone, for example, has satisfactorily 

built on the groundwork of John Berger who, in Ways of Seeing (1972), provided 

"pictorial essays" which, in all their ambiguity and plenitude, the reader could interpret 

without the mediation of words. 

Much of the discussion in the field of visual theory is divided: philosophers and 

psychologists discuss internal or mental imaging, while visual modes of external 

communication are the province of art critics and communications specialists. The 

division between these aspects is surprisingly wide; most commentary centres on one, 

ignores the other, and is also remarkably rudimentary. Serious methods that utilize our 

visual capacities in quotidian life cannot be fully developed until philosophers and 

psychologists decide just what reality our mental images have. Meanwhile, visual art 

itself continues - obviously - to flourish, often (but not always) ignoring these theoretical 

skirmishes. 

M y inclination is to treat visual imaging as an independent way of knowing and 

communicating, to accept the visual as a language in and of itself- despite the official 

lack of agreement on the fine points of the "reality" of visual language. For A.S. Byatt, 

these two domains - mental imagery and concrete visual representations - are 

indissolubly linked and equally important, and my discussion treats them as interrelated, 

although the major discussion of visual representation as art occurs in chapter 5. Hardly 

any of the work on visual imagery currently being published allows images to stand 

alone: most of the arguments end up being about words. A. S. Byatt's skill with and 



118 

affection for words has been much commented upon (she has also been accused of 

prolixity). But her interest in visual language, while it may not be equal in importance, 

requires critical attention, as does the way that verbal and visual work together - and pull 

apart - in Byatt's writing. 

In a 1982 article, "Forms of Reality in A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden." 

Juliet Dusinberre collapses verbal and visual tendencies in a discussion of the characters' 

"image-making faculty" (59), and she accedes automatically to the idea that words have 

the upper hand. According to Dusinberre, Byatt's third novel is about a battle between 

reality and the knotted human desire to make images of it. Says Dusinberre, "Her novel 

demands whether any form can define reality, or whether the real is a dark chaos which 

even the Word - and the Christian Logos is part of Byatt's reference - cannot record or 

control" (58). Here, the lack of sustained examination of visual language and the assumed 

superiority of verbal is typical. 

Dusinberre's pessimistic reading of The Virgin in the Garden is both inaccurate 

and oddly prescient. The novel's comic exploration of words and pictures is, in the main, 

optimistic and joyful - but Byatt's later forays into this field will illustrate more 

definitely the battle that Dusinberre posits, one where "the reader is harried between 

opposing perceptions of the power of the imagination and its impotence" (58). I disagree 

with Dusinberre's conclusion that the 1978 novel "seems to declare that the real is 

beyond form" (61) of any kind - either verbal or visual. Byatt's overall confidence in 

words, while occasionally held up for interrogation, is never in critical danger, and that is 

amply demonstrated by the many thousands of rigorously-articulated pages she has 

published in the last 20 years. But her reliance on visual knowledge is more vague and, 

eventually, less certain, although at times she champions it more enthusiastically than she 

does its verbal counterpart. 



119 

§ § § 

Describing visual knowledge and assigning its intellectual importance is an old 

problem. As Michael Tye demonstrates in The Imagery Debate, the quarrels about 

definition go back to Plato and Aristotle. Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant 

also wrote volubly on the subject, variously gauging the significance and independence 

of the mental image. The latest writings by W. J. T. Mitchell, Steven Pinker, and Daniel 

Dennett still feature these familiar contentious issues. How can one verify inner visions 

that are only available through introspection and evade empirical proof? Can inner 

visions be original, or are they only copies? Can one make some basic generalizations 

about the connections between inner imagery and the way imagery manifests itself in 

religion, poetry, film, and the other arts? 

But the primary issue, debated for centuries and still at the centre of a storm of 

opinion, is the supposed antagonism between word and image. It seems that nearly every 

article on visual and verbal languages contains a sentence like this one, from W. J. T. 

Mitchell's Iconology: Image. Text. Ideology: "The history of culture is in part the story 

of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs" (43). In 

"Ekphrasis and Representation" James Heffernan sees verbal language as desperate to 

keep its position of prominence; Jay David Bolter in "Ekphrasis, Virtual Reality, and the 

Future of Writing" requires an almost hysterical rhetoric of battle to describe the tension 

between word and image. Mary Ann Caws attempts a playful approach to the rivalry 

between visual and verbal texts, promoting a healthy and positive intertextuality, but even 

she notes that ekphrastic texts (usually, the verbal representation of visual art, although 

the term is used in different ways) demand "to control the angle from which the 

observer/reader [is] to read" (The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and 

Visual Texts 8). Robert P. Fletcher, in a recent P M L A article on "visual thinking" in 

Thackeray's Henry Esmond, posits that artists who attempt to combine visual and verbal 



120 

language necessarily emphasize fractured and multiple meanings, destroying illusions of 

unity. 

Visual language is almost always seen as the underdog in this conflict. Susan 

Sontag is unusual in that she enters the visual side of the combat zone, but her 

conclusions are equally pessimistic. In On Photography (which Mitchell thinks should be 

called Against Photography), she proposes that visual images (particularly photographs) 

are no less aggressive than words. Employing a rhetoric of invasion, alienation, 

consumption, and objectification, Sontag claims we are "image-junkies" (24), obsessively 

"collecting" experience - and finding that the images we consume actually distance us 

from experience. Likewise Roland Barthes in "Rhetoric of the Image" notes that our 

dependence on writing is based on fear of the visual, on "the terror of uncertain signs" 

(Image, Music, Text 39). Both Barthes and Sontag attempt to codify visual imagery in 

order to counteract this fear of the unknown other. 

W. J. T. Mitchell attempts balance, insisting that neither word nor image is more 

natural or anterior. In Iconology, he works to historicize and politicize both strands, 

pointing out how they are both caught up in various traditions of artificiality and 

construction. But even Mitchell expresses a strange fear of things visual: "If we can 

understand how images have come to possess their present power over us, we may be in a 

position to repossess the imagination that produces them" (31). 

In these discussions, nearly all the critics are making the image/text debate more 

explosive than it is. Is the history of culture really the story of the struggle for dominance 

between word and image (rather than the struggle between capitalist and worker, 

imperialist and colonized, masculine and feminine)? Perhaps we are dealing here with 

mere cases of overstatement, but there is a further issue that presses. To my knowledge, 

an essential component of this debate is not being satisfactorily addressed. Hardly any 

visual theorists confront the basic problem of variability. Individuals vary widely in their 

ability to use visual knowledge. Partly this is a result of the lack of emphasis on visual 



121 

training in our educational system, but equally it is difficult to make general assumptions 

about inherent visual attributes. (Verbal ability varies too, of course, but our ability to test 

and measure verbal indicators is more advanced.) It follows, in literary criticism, that 

analysis of, for example, a work of fiction's visual qualities ought to take into account the 

varying individual propensities of readers. But little is known of this. (Michael Irwin 

poses part of this particular reader-response problem in Picturing: Description and 

Illustration in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.) In the current instance, next to nothing can 

be said for certain about the relationship between A. S. Byatt's visual abilities and the 

reader's. What aspects are working? What vocabulary can be used to describe them? In 

writing about English painter Patrick Heron in 1998, Byatt says that her words "are 

completely inadequate" and declares her response a "non-verbal experience"- yet she 

carries on cheerfully with the essay ("A Riddle Around the Edges of Vision" 13, 15). 

Perhaps the dearth of commentary on visual language in Byatt's work is an indication 

that readers are not responding to her investigations of visual knowledge. Aside from a 

few comments in reviews about her "painterly" qualities, there is not much to go on. O f 

all the aspects of Byatt's work under discussion in this study, only love also demonstrates 

the sort of intense subjectivity and definitional resistance that visual language presents. 

• § § § 

There is another possible challenger to the position of authority held by verbal 

language. This is music.1 Susanne Langer has written that music "can be 'true' to the life 

of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence 

of content which words cannot have" (243). George Steiner agrees; he says in "Retreat 

from the Word" that "only music can achieve that total fusion of form and content, of 

means and meaning, which all art strives for" (299). However, the idea that music is an 

'Another possible independent language category is mathematics. George Steiner says that 
numbers are becoming dominant in our society; indeed in 1961 he said that mathematics and music had 
already overtaken verbal language ("Retreat from the Word" 285). This interesting possibility is not, 
however, directly relevant to an analysis of Byatt's works; neither music nor mathematics is discussed by 
her in any detail. 



122 

independent language has not been given much attention in philosophy or linguistics; this 

hypothesis rarely appears outside the confines of aesthetics. Most proponents of music's 

superiority have, understandably, worked primarily in that medium. That music is 

commonly seen to have superior access to emotional, rather than intellectual life, is 

another impediment to its acceptance in the philosophical realm. What music does have 

in its favour is the positive ambiguity which Langer notes; music's proponents would 

argue that, compared to verbal texts, and even to visual ones, the interpretative 

possibilities of musical texts are relatively limitless. Also, the flexible but real rules of 

composition and harmony provide a structure for meaning that counters the fear of 

uncertainty and excessive freedom demonstrated by critics of the visual mode. 

A. S. Byatt, however, admits her lack of ability and interest in music (Grove 3.3) 

and her participation in this debate is confined to the rivalry between word and image. 

Visual language increasingly attracts supporters who see logocentrism as hopelessly 

contaminated, and music, perhaps, as too demanding and inaccessible without special 

training or skill. 

§ § § 

John Berger promotes visual imagery as the most accessible means of 

communication for the masses. "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and 

recognizes before it can speak," Berger says (7). He continues, "If the new language of 

images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power" (33). 

Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking (1969) also stresses the superiority of the visual 

image. Sight, he says, is "the most efficient organ of human cognition" (vi); he 

emphasizes the seemingly endless fluidity, adaptability, and creativity of human visual 

actions and reactions. "Purely verbal thinking is the prototype of thoughtless thinking, the 

automatic recourse to connections retrieved from storage. It is useful but sterile," writes 

Arnheim (231). Frances Yates agrees that sight is our strongest sense, and her book The 



123 

Art of Memory (1966) outlines the ingenious ways in which classical theories of rhetoric 

utilized visual images to support memorization. 

"The essentially verbal character" of western civilization, says George Steiner, is 

the root and bark of our experience and we cannot readily transpose our 
imaginings outside it. We live inside the act of discourse. But we should 
not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which the articulations 
and conduct of the mind are conceivable. ("Retreat from the Word" 283) 

Although Steiner wrote this over 35 years ago, cogent studies of these other matrices are 

hard to come by. Visualization, for example, is often thought of merely as a New Age 

ritual (see Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization, for example). This subject is fraught 

with difficulty, because the investigation is expected to take place within the realm of 

verbal language and played by rules and conventions defined by word-based thinkers. 

Even those who champion alternative epistemological theories admit that our knowledge 

of these other modes of thought is rudimentary and disputable, while our acquaintance 

with words is intimate and long-standing. Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who calls 

for a redefinition of thinking in her 1995 book Thinking in Pictures, challenges the 

prevailing notion that verbal language is necessary for true thought. Grandin's book is 

one of the first of its kind; there are few dependable studies of the sort of visual thought 

she ascribes to the autistic. 

In the 1930s, psychological research on a phenomenon called "eidetic imagery" 

was popular. Researchers hypothesized that the ability to see forms (eidos) in the mind is 

intrinsic to certain people, and is relatively common in children, pregnant women, and 

less certainly, in poets and artists. A 1934 monograph provides this definition of what 

was being studied: 



124 

The eidetic image is a subjective perceptual phenomenon which becomes 
objective in perceptual character. It is found in all sensory fields but is 
particularly demonstrable in the visual field where it takes the form of the 
projection of an image after the stimulus has been removed or even when 
there has been no visual stimulus. (O'Neill and Rauth 3) 

The Russian physician A. R. Luria provided one of the most startling studies of this 

phenomenon in The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria's subject was a man with a seemingly 

inexhaustible memory, which was primarily graphic. The man was baffled by poetry, for 

every word and phrase prompted an intense visual image, and the accumulated 

impressions were contradictory and chaotic. Like the composer Scriabin, Luria's subject 

also experienced synesthesia; all his sensory data ran together, there being no dividing 

line between sensory experiences. This field of research fell out of favour, partly no 

doubt because of the difficulty in drawing boundaries between verifiable physiological 

experience and either psychosis or mysticism. How does one define photographic 

memory, hallucination, dream? Scriabin, for example, is notorious for his belief that his 

compositions would synthesize all art forms and herald a religious cataclysm. 

The subject of how the brain creates pictures was taken up again in earnest in the 

1980s, but a look at the speculations of researcher Daniel C. Dennett shows that little 

progress has been made even defining the issues at stake. His ironically titled 1991 book, 

Consciousness Explained, proposes multiple models of the brain's activities but is unable 

to settle any of the basic arguments. In 1981, Imagery, edited by Ned Block, assembled 

opinions on mental images to that point. Block summarizes the debate as being between 

"pictorialists" who insist "that our mental images represent in roughly the way that 

pictures represent" and "descriptionalists" who believe that mental images represent "in 

the manner of some non-imagistic representations - namely, in the manner of language 

rather than pictures" (2-3). The researchers do not get much further than this. They 

cannot decide if images are just after-images or memories, are hesitant to assign them an 

independent existence, disagree about whether the ability to manipulate or turn an image 

in the mind is indicative of anything, and so on. Block prefaces the book with doubt: 



125 

No one writing in this book (nor any of the other serious participants in the 
debate) thinks that people can literally see and manipulate real internal 
pictures. (2) 

More encouragingly, Steven Pinker has recently said that a mental image is 

"simply" a pattern "loaded from long-term memory rather than from the eyes" (How the 

Mind Works 286), although research has shown that mental imaging does stimulate the 

visual cortex of the brain (289). But Pinker also admits that such images seem to be 

fragmentary and limited in their ability to represent complex figures or abstract concepts 

(294-296). Given the difficulties of definition, it is doubly difficult to go on and 

determine, for example, the boundary between the aesthetic and linguistic properties of 

visual language. In other words, when colour, for example, is invoked in discussions of 

communication, is it merely being suggested as a model for better verbal 

communication? Does a fuller awareness of music or painting or sculpture revitalize 

writing? This seems to be the way Joseph Conrad, for example (see epigraph), uses this 

notion. Rarer are those who wish to approach the visual as a completely independent and 

alternative way of communicating. Wittgenstein, who struggled with an approach to pure 

concepts of colour, and with the appropriateness of finding verbal language in which to 

couch these concepts, is indicative of this smaller, second group. "The question is clearly: 

How do we compare physical objects - how do we compare experiences?" he writes in 

Remarks on Colour (proposition 315). For Wittgenstein, it is remarkable that one 

person's use of "blue" manages to convey to another a sense of "blueness" at all. 

Although the aesthetic qualities of visual writing are important in considering A. S. 

Byatt's work - there is no doubt that she uses "verbal pictures" to create beauty and 

vividness for the reader - it is the more complex matter of the independence of visual 

language that is of greater moment. 

E . H. Gombrich is one of the few researchers of visual knowledge who stresses a 

necessary continuum between the realm of speech and writing on the one hand and the 



126 

visual on the other. Neither, he says, is sufficient. Our visual responses to the world, 

suggests Gombrich in The Image and the Eye, are no more natural or primary than our 

linguistic ones, and must be conditioned, shaped, and educated in much the same way 

(159). Gombrich recognizes the ambiguity or ambivalence which visual images often 

contain, but he makes no great moral or aesthetic claims for this ambivalence, as Langer 

or Berger do. The verbal mode, according to Rudolf Arnheim, is comparatively one-

dimensional and static, inherently conservative, all too ready to stabilize and discipline 

ideas (Visual Thinking 230-32). Gombrich suggests caution; image is still an "imitation 

of reality" (The Image and the Eye 278), just as word is, and we do not yet understand 

how the eye and brain convert light or memory into these representations. Gombrich's 

detailed knowledge and appreciation of visual language and his refusal to subscribe to 

antagonistic binary word/image formations make him one of the few really helpful 

theorists in approaching Byatt. In a 1990 interview, Byatt said: 

One of my great heroes is Gombrich, and one of the great moments in 
Gombrich is when he says Giotto never drew a sheep, he saw other sheep 
that people had drawn and corrected them against reality. (Tredell 68) 

Byatt's acknowledgement of these combined forces of culture and nature (or reality) in 

visual representation is one of the keys to understanding the mixed currents of idealism, 

empiricism, and skepticism in her writing about visual language. 

A. S. Byatt delights in words. But, especially in her early fiction, she investigates 

visual phenomena with great seriousness. In 1986 she wrote that she herself thinks "with 

mental imagery." She adds: "I see any projected piece of writing or work as a geometric 

structure: various colours and patterns. I see other people's metaphors" (Passions of the 

Mind 13, 14, emphasis in original). Throughout her writings, we encounter characters 

whose natural medium is not words, but pictures, and through whom Byatt tests the limits 

of representation and communication. Byatt has never promoted visual thinking naively, 



127 

as, perhaps, John Berger or Rudolf Arnheim have. Like Gombrich, she seeks to know the 

strengths and shortcomings of both verbal and visual systems, and how they interact. 

However, in the 1980s and 90s, her treatment of the visual has become lighter, 

less intellectual and more aesthetic. Recent interviews and essays have playfully outlined 

the colour palettes of her novels - Still Life was primarily aubergine, she told reporter 

Val Ross in 1991, and "then I needed a yellow to balance the purple" ("Booker Fuss 

Keeps Byatt Busy" C5). 2 In the following pages, I will focus on Byatt's investigations of 

two particular aspects of the visual: geometric form and colour, and their roles in human 

knowledge and communication. One of the most striking things I have observed in 

analysing Byatt's writing on these subjects is how important order is to her; for example, 

Juliet Dusinberre's interview in the early 1980s is full of Byatt's comments on the 

imperative - for her - of ordering reality. The inadequacy of laws to systematize visual 

thinking eventually results in her disenchantment with the field. 

§ § § 

In A . S. Byatt's early fiction, there are several characters who experience the 

world primarily through the visual; shapes, light, and colour are their means of 

understanding. Such is Henry Severell in The Shadow of the Sun, a visionary writer in 

the lineage of Coleridge and Blake. Marcus Potter in The Virgin in the Garden (and the 

Potter novels that follow) also lives almost entirely in a visual realm; unlike Henry, 

Marcus is unsuccessful in translating his experiences into verbal language, and his 

experiences cause him great anguish. Here is a typical passage about Marcus. He sees 

"empty patches of bright light on the inner eye, ringed by a prismatic flaring of colour 

and danger" (Still Life 239). 

Both Henry and Marcus have mystical visions of, for example, spirals and cones 

and spheres - this is "projective geometry," which is imaginative and perspectival, rather 

2 See also Byatt's Independent article "In the Grip of Possession" and her interviews with Lewis 
Burke Frumkes and Nicolas Tredell for similar comments. 



128 

than traditional Euclidean geometry, which "deals with rigid forms," as Charles Davy 

says (Towards a Third Culture 128) - and both characters experience sunlight as a 

transcendent medium. Although they are hesitant to couch their beliefs in conventional 

religious terms, the extraordinary sensory abilities of Marcus and Henry, which I will call 

geometric sight, do lead each of them (however temporarily) to a belief in something 

numinous, something that might be called God. 

In Byatt's later fiction, characters who experience the world in this unusual 

geometric way are rare; instead colour comes to dominate the field of non-verbal 

communication. Colour plays a prominent role in The Matisse Stories and in the life of 

Alexander Wedderburn in Still Life. Colour is less closely tied to transcendence or the 

visionary, and Byatt's use of it in these middle period and recent works is more 

conventional. Colour is occasionally used to code characters, to bind them together. 

Kathleen Coyne Kelly says that Byatt's "colors often serve as objective correlatives to 

both theme and character" (A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 55), but "often" is an 

overstatement. It is true that, for example, Maud Bailey and Christabel LaMotte in 

Possession are both associated with the colour green; Maud often wears green and drives 

a green Beetle, and LaMotte's blonde hair has tints of green. We are not terribly surprised 

to discover at the end of the novel that LaMotte is Maud's great-great-great-great-

grandmother. But Byatt insists, in her essay on Patrick Heron, that "associations we make 

to colours are a mystery, and not constant, either within or beyond cultures" ("A Riddle 

Around the Edges of Vision" 15). If one expects that Byatt might use colour 

symbolically, it turns out that she rarely does; her characters distrust conventional colour 

symbolism. Colour is more often used, especially in The Matisse Stories, for its own 

sake: to paint a scene as vividly as possible; to communicate as basically and primally as 

Matisse does in his paintings; to describe pleasure. 

In Byatt's most recent novel, Babel Tower, both colour and form take a decided 

back seat to verbal communication. This solidifies a trend noticeable in Possession and 



129 

Angels and Insects, where Byatt begins to favour and trust words more enthusiastically, 

uses visual communication more decoratively, and expects less profundity from form and 

colour. In Babel Tower, John and Paul Ottokar share a private language based on 

mathematics and shapes, "of signs and gestures" (291-2). Their idiolect is portrayed as 

dangerous and too personal, and John is shown as the healthier twin when he displays the 

desire to learn a more "detached" verbal language (292). Although Babel Tower's style 

seems deliberately chosen to reflect its themes of "fragments jerking apart" and 

"language breaking loose from the world," as Byatt has said, the "papery" quality of its 

expression (Wachtel 1996) is not unique and can be traced in other Byatt writings of the 

1990s. 

Byatt's explorations of visual language once held out serious hope that a new and 

better kind of communication was possible. A n important group of characters, in addition 

to some of her narrators, were willing to believe that if there are universal or essential 

Meanings, one is more likely to meet them in a field of sunlight, in a perfect geometrical 

form, or in a band of colour than within a novel or a poem. Words, to Marcus and 

Stephanie Potter and to Henry Severell, dilute and distort meaning; especially for Marcus, 

words do not even begin to approximate the way he sees the world. The visionary 

experiences Henry and Marcus have are powerful; unless we wish to read their visions as 

delusions, we must seriously consider that Henry and Marcus are in contact with 

transcendent power and knowledge. Unfortunately just what this transcendence entails is 

difficult to apprehend or clearly define, either in visual or verbal terms. 

And why has Byatt's more recent fiction, for the most part, abandoned this 

exploration of the connection between visual knowledge and transcendence? The highly 

verbal characters, such as Frederica Potter, tend towards agnosticism and even cynicism; 

they increasingly take centre stage in the fiction. The 1994 story "The Djinn in the 

Nightingale's Eye" is a case in point. The main character, Gillian Perholt, identifies 

herself as a narratologist. She has developed her academic interest in stories (rather 



130 

tedious ones) at the expense of her affinity for the visual. In the story, the flask which 

contains the djinn has a striking spiral pattern, but it is seen merely as a lovely decoration 

(183), and several characters agree that geometric flowers within glass spheres are more 

attractive than real flowers just because "the whole effect is better with the patterning" 

(275). Whereas in The Virgin in the Garden spirals are a component of an ideal "garden 

of mathematical forms" that Marcus views as an essential "order and a source of order" 

(337), in "Djinn" spirals and other shapes lack such significance. Or if they are 

significant (after all, the spiral is found on the flask which contains a magical djinn), the 

telling of the tale is decidedly arch. Byatt's interest in searching out serious connections 

between visual experience and transcendence has diminished, and she is now untroubled 

about affirming her commitment to words and stories that principally serve human needs 

and hesitate to strive beyond. 

§ § § 

Marcus had what he recognised from earlier experience as a dangerous 
sense of physical well-being, which simultaneously induced and fought 
against an increased sensitivity of his nasal passages, throat and lungs to 
the flying pollen. There was the accustomed visual clarity: he took in the 
balancing patterns of the dry stones in the long grey wall: he saw threads 
connecting red and red poppy and poppy, in triangles and loops among the 
haze of blue and white and green. (Still Life 240) 

There is another aspect to this discussion which should be explored, although it cannot be 

done here in any detail, and that is the connection between disease and visionary 

experience. Kathleen Coyne Kelly believes Marcus to be "clearly" schizophrenic and 

probably epileptic; she also believes that Byatt "grafts" Van Gogh's personality and 

medical problems on to Marcus (A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 64, 69). I 

disagree. Marcus Potter is definitely asthmatic (one of his attacks is described above) and 

it is possible he also suffers from a degree of autism. Unlike Van Gogh, Marcus has no 

interest in expressing his visions, and his have very different qualities; it is Alexander 

Wedderburn who overtly identifies with Van Gogh, although Marcus certainly shares 



131 

some of Van Gogh's tortured sensitivities. There is insufficient evidence for the diagnosis 

of schizophrenia - and where does the condition "go" in the third Potter novel, Babel 

Tower, where Marcus has normalized? 

Asthma and migraine headaches have been shown to prompt states of mind like 

Marcus's visions3, and those of Henry Severell are similar. (In writing of asthma and 

migraine, Byatt is detailing some of her own experience with the conditions - see Sarah 

Booth Conroy's 1991 profile of her.) There is very little research on the connection 

between these physical conditions and aesthetic or spiritual matters. Any speculations I 

can make are necessarily rudimentary. But it is intriguing to note that asthmatics Marcel 

Proust and John Updike write with heightened visual sensibility and sometimes assign a 

dizzying sense of significance to asthmatic episodes. Updike says in his memoirs that his 

own prose style "seemed to me a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the 

complexity of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and 

self-indulgent" (Self-Consciousness 103-4). 

Byatt herself does not stress this connection between disease and visual 

knowledge; she offers little in the way of diagnosis for Marcus. But a number of 

questions are insistent. If visionary attacks are brought on by autism, asthma, or migraine, 

should we ignore their spiritual impact? Is Henry's sense of being at one with the earth 

and the sun merely an accidental side effect of a physical condition and therefore to be 

discounted? Is it merely a splendid accident that Samuel Palmer, the English painter 

whose work Cornfield by Moonlight, with the Evening Star graces the covers of some 

editions of The Shadow of the Sun, was also asthmatic (Lister 24)? Byatt says that 

Palmer's painting was one of the points of origin for her portrait of a visionary 

(Introduction to Shadow xv). I cannot expand on this here, but note the interesting 

possibilities for further study. 

3 See Oliver Sacks's studies in Migraine. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and An 
Anthropologist from Mars. 



132 

§ § § 

The first aspect of Byatt's visual investigation I will consider is geometric form, 

in its Platonic ideality. In The Shadow of the Sun, the writer Henry Severell has "attacks 

of vision" (58) that drive him out into the countryside. There he walks for miles, with 

only a tenuous hold on reality, courting considerable physical danger. These sessions feed 

his novels, "studies of crises, not of conscience, but of consciousness" (60), which are 

closely allied to the work of the Romantic poets Coleridge and Blake. 

At first it had been only an inexplicable attentiveness, a tightening of 
sight, a thing seen suddenly and remembered as a visual touchstone, a tree 
like a branched and burning candlestick, with flame upon flame of leaping 
green light. (58) 

Sunlight is the key to Henry's experience; he gains power from facing it. 

He would never, he thought, get over looking up there at the light and 
knowing that he was looking up there. He was so constantly, so 
consistently surprised to think, here is a man seeing and knowing - if not 
precisely what - that he is seeing. (85) 

Henry searches for words to contain this seeing and knowing. "One must find a language 

new and washed clean" (84), he thinks, and he mourns that "we have murdered our 

superlatives," the kind of words he needs in order to share his special knowledge. 

Henry is able to expose himself completely to the light of the sun and of fire by 

using his "curious, geometrical visual memory, whole areas of things seen fined down to 

one visual symbol" (60). During one attack, he imagines the circle of the sun 

superimposed with another "angrier copper circle . . . and saw both as the orifice of a 

cone, in the centre of which he walked.... He walked more and more quickly, using all 

his body. If he kept still at this time, or tried to look, it would all be too much for him" 

(61). Later in the novel Henry enters his heightened state of awareness by looking at a 

fire. 



133 

Light welled into the room from somewhere undefined, a new unearthly, 
wild light, drawing live, singing triangles between the cool sea-green 
plane of the window, the still white circle of his desk lamp, and the rising 
flames in the chimney. (279) 

He sees the flames as rising "cone within cone" (280) and then notices that his room is 

transfigured, "patterned in an instant brilliant geometric clarity" (280). 

There are several consequences of Henry's attacks of vision. One is that he is able 

to use geometric patterns to plan his writing. 

Something slid into place, the pattern of the part of the chapter he had 
been looking for. He knew no more about precisely what he would write 
than he had known, but a shape, a pattern of relations had come to him -
his imagination carried a diagram, a squat triangle, a long one on the same 
base reaching out, and when he sat down to write, the pattern would be 
available now, he could draw on it, spin from it. (121) 

Another is that he is able to see the other characters and their relationships in perspective. 

Henry is able to judge with accuracy the problems Margaret, Oliver, and Anna have, 

although he keeps his distance from them. Margaret and Anna share some of Henry's 

ability to achieve special visual insight, but they fail to achieve Henry's feeling of power 

because they "see" with too much relation to self. Henry channels his visions through 

geometry and relates his experiences to essential or universal objects beyond himself: 

sun, earth, moon, trees. 

Finally, Henry's visions seem to allow him a glimpse into the eternal, into 

ultimate Meaning. During one episode, "the window split and opened finally, an infinite 

tunnel of bright glass into a live and turning sky" (280). He looks outdoors and finds he is 

drawn "to whatever it was that was incandescent in the orchard, crackling and powerful 

in the shrubbery, flames in the bushes, light climbing in nooses over the trees" (280). If 

Henry reads Blake or Coleridge during these times, he finds that "everything connected, 

all meanings were a network, and his coming experience the master-knot" (59). Byatt 

stops short of examining the full spiritual impact of what Henry sees, but vocabulary like 

"infinite" and "incandescent" is more than suggestive. 



134 

Henry's daughter Anna struggles to achieve the full intensity of her nascent 

visions. Like Henry, she believes that "to see clearly was the deepest and most violent 

kind of action" (237). In the course of the novel, she has three visionary experiences she 

calls "events." The first is the most profound: on a stormy night she watches moonlight 

shining through glass and sees "shadows of l i g h t . . . thickness on thickness, all these 

textures of light, caught and held in glass, spirals and cones and pencil trellises" (133). 

Nothing she had ever seen had been more exquisite, or more unreal. She 
felt balanced and complete, between all this trapped, plotted light and the 
approaching storm; she said to herself, turning the glass round and round, 
over and over again, not knowing herself quite what she meant, "I can do 
something with this. Oh, I can do something with this, that matters." It 
was all so extremely important and she would, any moment now, know 
clearly why. (134) 

At this point Anna's event is interrupted by Oliver, a critic of her father's work, 

who strives to bring her back to "reality." Anna's ensuing relationship with Oliver, and 

her eventual pregnancy, dilute the intensity of the two "events" that follow, and at the end 

of the third one, in which she sees the lights of Cambridge at night as the lights of hell, 

she realizes that "there would be no event, no transforming knowledge" (239). As an 

adolescent woman, Anna's passions are easily diverted from art to sexual and domestic 

matters. Her "events" are always lighted by the moon, a pale reflection of the sun which 

empowers her father. The novel's title underlines the dilemma Anna faces; her existence 

and knowledge are merely the shadow of Henry's. Within the novel, Anna appears to be 

a failure, although it is not out of the question that with future maturity she may achieve 

fulfillment of some sort. 

The identification of woman with moon and weakness, and man with sun and 

power is not necessarily inherent. Byatt makes it clear that Anna refuses to learn the 

discipline, the geometry, which Henry must carefully use to negotiate his attacks of 

vision, channel them away from self, and ground them in the external world. The 

geometrical figures Anna sees on the night of the storm occur accidentally; she does not 



135 

seek a way of further developing an inner sense of order, and she attempts to keep her 

insights internal ones, wondering merely how they affect her and her future. Where 

Henry writes and rewrites novels after his attacks of vision, painstakingly revising and 

sculpting his findings, Anna's desultory attempts at writing poetry are quickly abandoned 

and she falls into lassitude: "From time to time she took intense pleasure in writing, in the 

act of putting pen to paper, but this never lasted for more than a sentence or at most a 

paragraph at a time" (15). 

But there is no doubt that Anna is in a difficult position, as the daughter of a 

famous and imposing man, living in an era when marriage and child-rearing were the 

assumed future for most women. What is clearly stated here is the difficulty for a woman 

of balancing domestic life with a life of the mind, a recurring theme with Byatt. But it is a 

mistake to pin the blame solely on male dominance, which some critics have done. 

Anna's mother is a self-sacrificing wife who provides Anna with only one model of 

femininity. One impetus in the writing of Shadow, as Byatt makes clear in her 1991 

introduction to the Vintage reprint, was the crushing influence on her not only of F. R. 

Leavis at Cambridge, but also of Helen Gardner at Oxford. Both scholars discouraged 

attempts by their students to write fiction and poetry. In a 1990 interview with Nicolas 

Tredell, Byatt makes it clear that Gardner also tried to imprint upon her more 

fundamental rules about how to think, and that Byatt vigorously resisted such confining 

notions: 

Helen Gardner had told me that if you haven't thought a thing out in 
words, you haven't thought it. I said to Charles Rycroft, it isn't true, I 
know that I know certain things and I know them in visual shapes, and the 
word may or may not come to be fitted to the pattern that I already know 
is there. (Tredell 67) 

Anna's floundering attempts to find her footing as an artist and a woman are not, 

as Richard Todd has claimed, "an early contemporary assertion of a feminist programme" 

(A. S. Byatt: Writers and their Work 8). The Shadow of the Sun is, ultimately, more 



136 

sympathetic to Henry than to Anna; his determination and necessary ruthlessness are 

presented as preferable to her weakness, indecision, and passivity. Todd, who describes 

Byatt's passages about Henry's visions as "purple," says that Anna's inability to achieve 

Henry's insight "is to be understood in terms of Anna's beginning to exercise her own 

autonomy" (9). But an autonomy that consists of welcoming a formerly unwelcome 

pregnancy is viciously limited. Anna is, primarily, lazy. 

The power of Henry's achievement is further emphasized by comparing his use of 

precise perspective or "scale" (Shadow 116) with the average or ordinary "proportion" 

which his wife Caroline and the critic Oliver practise. "Neither of you has any sense of 

proportion," says Caroline to Anna and Henry (95); later Oliver will teach Anna to be as 

reductive as he is, diminishing "the world of art and the world of love and the sun to 

manageable proportions" (210). The other characters, with their "proportion," have a 

cheapened version of Henry's accurate "perspective," and it allows them to live less 

dangerously and, concomitantly, less creatively. At the other extreme, Oliver's wife 

Margaret, who lacks either proportion or perspective, has visionary moments which she 

grossly misapplies, resulting in near madness. Instead of using her insight in the service 

of art, Margaret stares at the images in fashion magazines, frightening herself. 

They had the mystery, the exhilaration as Henry had seen it in [high-speed 
photography of flowers opening], of colours brighter than they are usually 
seen, the jewelled glitter of the mediaeval heaven. But Margaret looked 
too l o n g . . . and saw too much, in too much detail. (181) 

Margaret arrives at the sensation that she is "falling apart, that bits of her were separate 

and falling irretrievably away" (182). This danger is always present in Henry's visions 

and acknowledged by him; the "nooses" of light which he sees near the novel's 

conclusion are an indicator of this risk (280). 

The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing The Shadow of the Sun (or, as it was 

then called, by the ill-considered decision of C. Day Lewis at Chatto & Windus, Shadow 

of a Sun) in 1964, said that "Henry is not, despite his eccentricities, a convincing literary 



137 

genius" (21). The reader's belief in Henry's worth as an artist is crucial; if Henry's 

creativity is not convincing, then his visions are better called delusions or attacks of 

mental illness. In her retrospective introduction to the novel, Byatt writes that 

Henry Severell is partly simply my secret self. . . . Someone who saw 
everything too bright, too fierce, too m u c h . . . . This vision of too much 
makes the visionary want to write - in my case - or paint, or compose, or 
dance or sing. (Shadow x) 

In contrast to Possession, where Byatt produces the poetry of Randolph Henry Ash for 

our perusal, in Shadow she does not provide many examples of Henry's writing in order 

that its aesthetic value might be weighed.4 The narrative voice provides little help; 

whereas Byatt's narrators will provide sharp commentary and leading suggestions in later 

novels, in this first novel, the narrator is distant. The narrator does, however, take Henry 

Severell seriously: his attacks are rendered in vivid and believable detail and his 

judgements of people or situations are not shown to be faulty. His absorption in his work 

and the distance he places between himself and other people make him a less than 

admirable husband and father, but there are no major shadows cast on his ability to see 

accurately. 

§ § § 

With Cassandra Corbett in The Game, the figure of the visionary is bent to a 

considerably less auspicious angle. Cassandra and her sister Julia, a sociological novelist, 

together make up one artist, and alone each is incomplete. Cassandra has submerged her 

aesthetic tendencies in academe, and is increasingly able to think only in abstractions 

(199). Like Henry, Cassandra strives to find order and structure in the natural world (75), 

but unlike Henry she has retreated for comfort into conventional and conservative 

Christianity. 

4 The critical reaction to the poetry of Ash and LaMotte has been mixed; most critics found it 
convincing, but not brilliant. Ash can be seen as a gentler, more rational version of Henry Severell. One 
passage of Henry's non-fiction prose is quoted on page 238 of Shadow; while it is intelligent, the sample is 
not long enough to judge its profundity. 



138 

Both Julia and Cassandra are good observers; Julia collects "tones of voice" (114) 

and is able to capture in her fiction the personalities of Oxford dons with devastating 

results. But like many of the characters in Shadow. Julia lacks either perspective or 

proportion. "What do you know about proportion?... What do you know about 

anything?" says her idealistic husband Thor, in the midst of a violent tirade just before he 

leaves her (185). Julia has commodified her artistic gifts. Cassandra, on the other hand, is 

unable to apply her insights to the mundane world at all. She takes to painting and, in 

painting a fish, "decided to paint it from underneath, distorting it carefully" (190). Just 

before she commits suicide, she expresses a longing to see less clearly, to "let everything 

run into everything else" (228). 

The danger in vivid and hypersensitive insight which Cassandra exemplifies is not 

merely, as her name might suggest, that she, as a woman cursed by a male god, is not to 

be believed. More importantly, the danger is inherent in visionary experience itself. This 

is made clearer when Byatt turns her attention to the character of Marcus Potter in the set 

of novels about his family which begins with The Virgin of the Garden. Like Anna and 

Cassandra, Marcus struggles to find a way to survive his visionary experiences, and like 

the two women, his experiences are marked by failure and devastation. Unlike Henry, 

these other characters are unable to turn their visions into words. 

§ § § 

In The Virgin in the Garden the discussion of visual knowledge reaches its peak. 

(Still Life actually presents visual scenes more vividly, but there are more and varied 

references in the earlier novel.) A number of characters in Virgin are highly attuned to 

visual experiences; Edmund Wilkie is actually researching this at university and is able to 

offer the reader an overview of the subject. He is studying, he says, 

the relations between visual images and languages. The way we form 
concepts, ultimately. Whether, as some psychologists think, visual images 
are more primitive, more fundamental than words, or whether you can't 
think without some sort of precise symbolic language. I want to work with 



139 

eidetic phenomena - people who think by simply visualising.... One 
could study interesting relations between visual memory and conceptual 
memory and analytic thought.... (134-135) 

Alexander Wedderburn has embryonic visual skills which he abandons in favour 

of words as the Potter novels progress. In this first volume, he feels an equal "giddiness 

of words and things" when he is writing Astraea, his verse play about Elizabeth I. He is 

able to see his ideas "sharp as he wrote, in some stereopticon or inner camera obscura, 

bright with colour and feature" (315). But in trying to develop ideas from this crystalline 

conception, Alexander usually falls back upon lists (Elizabeth's iconography: "the 

phoenix, the rose, the ermine, the Golden Age, the harvest-queen, Virgo-Astraea, virgin 

patroness of justice and foison" [103]) and upon laboured metaphors. His struggles to 

encompass vision within language end in frustration. 

Stephanie Potter experiences less frustration. She has an "unselectively retentive 

memory" (109) in which "remembered objects clogged her thoughts, floated, vivid 

spectra, before her closed eyes" (110). In her observation of the richly coloured fabrics 

for the Astraea costumes, "Stephanie saw it all double, with wide clarity and narrow 

sharpness. She saw what things meant to be, and missed no detail of how they, in fact, 

presented themselves" (110). Where Stephanie's friend Felicity Wells is caught up in the 

colour symbolism of the fabrics, Stephanie "saw and did not share." She believes "it was 

not her business to fuse any of these into new wholes. She just saw" (111). 

Both Stephanie and Daniel, who will soon be her husband, are skeptical of colour 

allegories, but Stephanie does have a vivid knowledge of colour. The description of her 

body's imagined inner spaces when she makes love with Daniel explodes with light, 

water imagery, movement, and natural colours. 

This inner world had its own clear landscape. It grew with precise 
assurance, light out of dark, sapphire rising in the black-red, wandering in 
rooted caverns, glassy blue running water between carved channels of 
basalt, and coming out into fields of flowers, light green stalks, airy 



140 

leaves, bright flowers moving and dancing in wavering tossing lines to the 
blown grass of a cliff over a pale bright strand beyond which shone the 
pale bright sea. (282) 

It is clear from this description and others that Stephanie has exceptionally clear 

visualization skills but that the properties of her vision are not strictly ordered. (In chapter 

2 of Babel Tower, her daughter Mary shows similar tendencies.) Stephanie's inner vision 

makes use of natural objects, where other characters use geometry. Usually Stephanie 

feels no urgent need to cast her vision into words. When she does, the result is a 

conventional attempt to "appropriate," to "come to terms with" bathroom tiles she 

dislikes by using "words like cucumber and avocado" (Virgin 280). But it is far more 

common for Stephanie to "just see" and to allow her knowledge to remain untouched by 

verbal language. 

Marcus Potter's visual experiences are the most extreme. In contrast with 

Alexander, who gives up visions for words, and with Stephanie, whose visions are natural 

and rooted in reality and memory and who does not attempt to match them with words, 

Marcus is flung into hallucinatory experiences which threaten his grasp of reality and 

which he is completely unequipped to communicate to others. Marcus first plays a game 

called "spreading himself," involving an "impossible simultaneity" of vision (27) over a 

large field. But he soon loses control of the game and leaves his body. He discovers that 

only geometry can save him: "circles, parallel tramlines, fixed points [form] a network of 

salvation" (28). Geometry is "immutable, orderly, and connected with extremity" (92); it 

is not an escape from the situation, but a solution to be found within it. Marcus can feel at 

times "tormented by geometry" (229); this is partly a result of the danger always inherent 

in his visions. But more importantly, geometry loses its defining efficacy as a safety net 

because the biology master, Lucas Simmonds, in an attempt to understand the spiritual 

implications of Marcus's gift, pushes Marcus beyond the limits of what his body can 

endure. 



141 

There is no doubt, however, that even without Lucas's interference, Marcus is in 

serious trouble. He is gripped by fear of the funnel of water in the toilet, and when he 

reads he finds that "print reared off the pages like snakes striking" (118). Finally, light, 

which formerly "spread," begins to "shift" (120) and move wildly, terrifying him. The 

language of the novel at this point reflects the anxiety and inexpressibility inherent in 

Marcus's visions. 

It had other motions not measured by measurements available to man, or 
separable in the experience of man, yet there, so that he had to know he 
could not know more than that they were there. (120) 

The light, which "had been a condition of vision" became "an object of vision" (120). 

This is the sort of "staring at the sun" that Henry Severell is able to do only with the help 

of geometric forms to anchor him. Finally, geometry does return to Marcus's aid, but he 

finds he is at the meeting point of "intersecting cones, stretching to infinity, containing 

the pouring and rushing" (120). Marcus feels that he will shatter. 

More explicitly than Henry Severell names it, Marcus identifies the tormenting 

and powerful light as "a presence with a purpose." It is "blinding" and "annihilating," a 

presence "wholly outside his scale, conducting its work with a magnitude and a 

minuteness at once too grand and too precisely delicate for him to map" (120). He 

produces a drawing of his vision for Lucas Simmonds that Lucas identifies as a symbol 

of infinity (126). When Lucas labels the experiences as photisms, "experiences of floods 

of light and glory which frequently accompany moments of revelation" (125), Marcus is 

dubious. He finds that Lucas's naming of his vision makes it "safe to handle," but he also 

finds that words make the experience "recede," and finally, vanish (126,127). 

Lucas wants to use science to prove the spiritual significance of the visions. As 

Lucas forces the experiences into the straitjackets of experiment and notation, trying to fit 

what Marcus sees into "The Pattern and the Plan" (the title of Lucas's manuscript about 

cosmogony), Marcus loses the certainty he once had that he had viewed an eternal 



142 

presence. There is a tremendous amount of detail, in chapters 26 and 34 of The Virgin in 

the Garden, of the vision experiments which Lucas forces on Marcus and which go 

terribly awry, pushing both of them to the edge of madness. It is nearly impossible to 

wade through the choking detail and determine what is significant in these scenes, so 

thoroughly does Lucas's mad hybrid of religion and science confuse the subject. I will 

not attempt it. What is important about these chapters is that Lucas "confirmed 

[Marcus's] mistrust of words" (298). In trying so desperately to comprehend and 

document Marcus's visions and bend them to his own purposes, Lucas leads Marcus only 

to the certainty that words force a reductive "coincidence and coherence" (298). Marcus 

comes to the realization that there are connections between him, light, form, and a higher 

intelligence, but that the connections are complex, random, not "so seamlessly 

interrelated as all this pretty but reductive word-work made it" (299). In other words, his 

visions are beyond human understanding. They may have tremendous Meaning, but to 

capture it and cast it in words is impossible. 

As Lucas's influence over Marcus lessens, Marcus is able to return to geometry as 

an ordering system which saves him from the terror of his visions. In chapter 36, Marcus 

has a vision of a glowing sphere of light that is "immensely sensually pleasing" (337). 

Marcus decides, as his sister Stephanie does, that "the thing was as it was." He also 

returns to having a recurrent dream of living "timelessly, in the garden of mathematical 

forms which he had lost by attempting to describe them to his father." One of the models 

for this ideal garden is Book I of The Prelude, where Wordsworth describes a similar 

inner place of "huge and mighty Forms" (line 425). Bill Potter had been intensely proud 

of Marcus's ability to do "instant mathematics" (135) and had, like Lucas, forced Marcus 

to perform and explain beyond his physical and linguistic limits. This had resulted in 

"Marcus's mathematical Fall." By the conclusion of The Virgin of the Garden, Marcus 

has retreated from the influence of family and tutor and from the snares of language, with 

mixed results. 



143 

Although Marcus is an important character in Still Life, where his inability to be 

decisive in a crisis is an indirect cause of his sister Stephanie's accidental electrocution, 

in this second Potter novel and in Babel Tower, the third, there is little further elaboration 

on his extraordinary powers of visualization. Do his experiences diminish as he gets 

older? Does he learn to control them more stringently by further use of geometry, or does 

he dilute them with language? Was it all due to asthma? At one point in Virgin Marcus 

says that what asthma did to him "was stretch time and perception so that everything was 

slow and sharp and clear" (91), but the comment is an aside, and undeveloped. 

The portrait of a visionary we have in the character of Marcus Potter is more 

complex and more frightening than the one provided in Henry Severell. Partly what is at 

issue here are the different manifestations that a phenomenon will undergo depending on 

the personality involved. Those characters who have less success than Henry in handling 

their visions (Anna, Margaret, Alexander, Marcus) lack maturity, selflessness, discipline, 

and courage. The character who seems most at ease with her ability to visualize is 

Stephanie, whose visions are admittedly less arduous, but who is also mature, an 

admirable balance of intellect and emotion, and is able, like Henry, to channel her visions 

away from herself into the outside world. Henry pours his visual knowledge into art, 

while Stephanie dedicates hers to her children and husband, insofar as she does anything 

with her visions - their value is largely potential because of her early death. 

But it is also apparent that as Byatt's thinking about visual knowledge develops 

over the decades, she is much less sanguine about its capabilities, about its links to the 

transcendent, and about its ability to provide a much-needed balance to the power of 

verbal knowledge. The topic has nearly disappeared from recent books. Marcus has a 

very small role in Babel Tower, and discussion of his visions is almost entirely absent. 

Richard Todd in his Writers and their Work study of A . S. Byatt offers an explanation for 

this shift of emphasis. He constructs a model of Babel Tower's structure made of three 

braided strands; these represent Frederica's story, Daniel's story, and Jude Mason's 



144 

dystopic Babbletower, the story-within-the-story. A fourth section, which Todd terms an 

"intermittent continuo," is identified with thrushes, snails, and Marcus Potter, or 

the theme of sounds and visual characters, pertaining to a natural world 
under threat or to past civilizations now vanished, that are devoid of 
meaning - or at least of anything we could give significance to. Residual 
crackle or babble, they may be analogous to what Big Bang theorists 
would term "black-body background radiation," but this is in no way to 
suggest they do not have their own beauty . . . . (63) 

I believe that the space accorded to this "continuo" is not sufficient to grant it the 

importance Todd gives it, although the idea is intriguing - certainly it helps to make 

sense of the puzzling snail and thrush sections. But Marcus is so marginal in Babel Tower 

that the visual theme is nearly forgotten, submerged in an ocean of words. If Byatt 

intended something of the sort that Todd postulates (she apparently did not disagree when 

she read his study in manuscript, although he says she did so "only with an eye to 

correcting any errors of fact" [ix]), it has had limited success. 

In Babel Tower, the snail is one of the few remaining vestiges of Byatt's interest 

in geometric form, and the very smallness of the snail and the lack of space accorded to it 

is significant. (I return to the snail and thrush issue in chapter 7 and discuss their possible 

spiritual attributes.) A graphic of a snail opens and closes the novel, and the spiral of the 

snail's shell recurs as a theme in several conversations. One of the characters who thinks 

about snails and spirals is Gerard Wijnnobel, "Vice-Chancellor of the University of North 

Yorkshire, grammarian and polymath" (167), who occasionally appears in the Potter 

novels to muse on matters of language, form, and order, and is then dismissed from the 

action. 

He became a mathematician in order to contemplate order and to renounce 
the mess of language. He worked on the Fibonacci numbers, which 
describe, among other things, the spiral of the cochlea in the inner ear and 



145 

the principle that curls the ramshorn, the ammonites, certain snails, certain 
arrangements of branches around tree trunks. (Babel Tower 192-193) 

In Still Life Wijnnobel, some of whose linguistic views bear a resemblance to 

Noam Chomsky's, gives an important address at his inauguration as Vice-Chancellor. He 

speaks of vision and order and truth, and his monologue fades into the narration so that 

his voice, for a moment, becomes the narrator's. Byatt treats WijnnobeFs opinions with 

absolute seriousness; they are based on physicist Max Planck's insistence that concrete 

experience and sensory data must form the foundation of scientific hypothesis (The 

Philosophy of Physics passim). Wijnnobel's version of this is his assertion that "picture-

forming seems crucial" (Still Life 276). What follows is, I believe, one of Byatt's most 

profound statements of faith in visual knowledge. 

We cannot perhaps picture our picture-making. Even with all our windows 
we shall only catch glimpses of the real world. I believe, with Planck, said 
Wijnnobel, that it is real, it is there, that it is our need and our duty and our 
delight to picture it. We shall not answer the question, what is man, nor 
the harder question, what is real, what is true. But our plurality of 
windows should surely protect us against, rather than inducing, solipsist 
despair. (276) 

Despite the conditions Wijnnobel attaches to vision, the spirit of this speech is almost 

joyously optimistic; he is confident in his concepts of reality and implies that the amount 

of information we can gather from the world is, in any case, as much as we can humanly 

handle. 

In Babel Tower a change has taken place; the windows have closed. Wijnnobel's 

interest in order is seen, at least partly, as escapist, as distant from more pressing modern 

issues. Byatt distances herself from him and says: 

He withdrew into pure form, as though he saw only the relations of 
quadrilaterals, lengths, and primary colours in Mondrian, when once he 
had seen the forms of light made and recorded by Vermeer with an image 
of a rectangular coloured window and the enlightened solid body of a 
reading, or thinking, or pouring woman. (193, emphasis mine) 



146 

Babel Tower's reductive view of Wijnnobel, who in Still Life seemed a candidate for a 

Byatt alter ego ("win Nobel" is a very positive name), demonstrates Byatt's shift of 

attention from what Kathleen Coyne Kelly calls "the underlying geometry of the 

universe" (A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 69) toward a more pronounced interest 

in colour arid form as they are related to ordinary human life and to actual artworks; the 

latter will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. But the major shift in allegiance in 

Babel Tower is, as I have said before, toward words. Although the minor character Elvet 

Gander is chided for his "logorrhea" (438) and Alexander complains about the resistance 

of language in his work on the Steerforth Committee on the Teaching of English -

"We're writing about teaching language and the language we write about teaching 

language won't stick to the thing we're writing about" (477) - the author, the narrator, 

and nearly all of the characters are happy in their verbosity. 

§ § § 

As we will note again and again, the composition of Still Life in the early 1980s 

marks an indisputable turn in Byatt's fiction. The pure forms of geometry which acted as 

perceptual and indeed moral guides for characters in the fiction of the 1960s and 1970s 

are reduced in Still Life to "patterns" serving merely as guides to normality for Marcus 

(30, 33) in the second book in the Potter series. Marcus adapts and dilutes his visionary 

propensities; as he recovers his strength throughout the novel, he increasingly turns for 

solace to the more complex and often irregular geometric forms found in nature. Still 

later he will apply this knowledge to human physiology: in Babel Tower he will do 

research "mapping algorithms in the brain" (364). 

In chapter 21 of Still Life. "A Tree, of Many, One,"5 we find the most striking 

passage about Marcus's newfound awareness of what he calls "outer geometry" (240) or 

"solid geometry" (241), but that I will call "natural geometry" in order to differentiate it 

more clearly from the "pure" or theoretical geometry on which Marcus formerly 

5 The title of this chapter in many editions is incorrectly called "A Tree, of Mary, One." 



147 

depended. Marcus, in the midst of an asthma attack, sits beneath an elm tree and is able to 

"map" it: "Marcus stared and mapped, stared and mapped, learning the tree" (240). He 

finds pleasure in the act, and loses his feelings of panic. While Marcus still sees, with 

precision, the regularity of leaf patterns, the trunk as a cylinder of water, and the intensity 

of sunlight, he also discovers the living presence, the "real" situatedness of the forms of 

natural geometry. Not only does Marcus recognize "the drama of the tree" (241), he also 

realizes the vital importance he and his vision have in making this drama possible. "He 

himself was not there for nothing," he thinks. "It was his eyes that perceived." This tree 

becomes, for Marcus, a healing tree, and it is noteworthy that he feels "earthed" or 

grounded in its presence; it is precisely and literally the lack of groundedness that will 

later kill Stephanie. 

Marcus's elm tree is related to a number of other literary trees that contribute to a 

breakthrough in vision and understanding for a poet or philosopher. (Another key tree 

discussion takes place in The Shadow of the Sun, but as that episode is not related to 

geometry or colour, I defer my examination of it until chapter 8.) The elemental qualities 

of Marcus's tree (it is "a kind of peculiarly happy tree, a self-sufficient tree, a kind of 

single eternity" [242]) link it to Goethe's ideal Urpflanze, the primal plant which he 

visualized in his botanical speculations of the 1780s. Even more important for Byatt and 

equally Utopian, although not quite so categorically positive, is Wordsworth's "Tree, of 

many, one" (line 51) from the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807), which Byatt 

uses as the title of the chapter about Marcus's elm and quotes repeatedly throughout her 

work. This tree is representative of perfection, of a time when every sight was 

"apparelled in celestial light" (line 4). Both Wordsworth and Byatt celebrate gifts of 

vision and expression in writing about their trees; while Marcus does not talk about the 

tree, he does sketch it and formulate linguistic ideas about it in his mind. 

Where Byatt parts company with Wordsworth is on religious issues. There is a 

tempered sense of loss and longing in Wordsworth's ode that is not picked up by Byatt. 



148 

Wordsworth's tree "speak[s] of something that is gone" (line 54); significantly, the full 

line about the tree is "But there's a Tree, of many, one" (emphasis mine). Byatt neglects 

to mention this negative formulation; she omits the "but" in her quotation. (Neither does 

she take up the idea that the Tree is associated with the Christian cross, a possibility that 

the Immortality Ode hints at.) The nostalgia for pre-birth perfection and belief in 

immortality found in Wordsworth is missing in Byatt; what she adopts is the prevailing 

optimism of the poem, its insistence on the importance of the "vision splendid" (line 73) 

of which humans are capable and the "timely utterance" (line 23) which gives the poet 

relief and strength. 

Marcus's experience with the elm tree is also a response to something quite 

different, Roquentin's apprehension of the chestnut tree in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea 

(1938). Where Roquentin finds disorder, superfluity, and absurdity in his vision of the 

tree's existence, Marcus intensely realizes his tree's history and patterning, its intelligent 

inter-connectedness with the rest of nature. Marcus encounters ordinary contingency -

the dependence of living forms upon each other and the mixed natural conditions of 

chance and order - while Roquentin sees radical contingency and a terrifying freedom. 

Marcus "felt that he had his place, he was part of something" (Still Life 242) and 

Roquentin too is "entirely conscious of [the tree's] existence" (Nausea 131) - but the 

difference is that the revelation for Sartre's character doesn't prevent him from feeling 

simultaneously estranged from the tree and hating the "ignoble mess" of life (134). 

Roquentin also dismisses the important potential verities that Byatt's characters have 

been struggling with - colour and geometry. He thinks hopefully of a circle and of the 

colour black - might they have escaped absurdity? - but then rejects them for their lack 

of real existence (as compared to himself and the tree). "In another world, circles, bars of 

music keep their pure and rigid lines" (128), but in an existentialist scheme they are 

illusory, too abstract to be important. Colour is also tainted by its association with words 

(this seems less true of geometry and music for Sartre). Sartre's character is deeply 



149 

suspicious about words and ridicules their applicability, only to rush back to his hotel 

after the tree episode and write it all down. On the contrary, Marcus's tree truly and 

slowly helps him to articulation: "he must learn more," he thinks (Still Life 242). (In 

Byatt's world, curiosity is always an excellent remedy for anxiety.) The tree also 

potentially can lead Marcus to an understanding of living in community. The narrator 

points out that an "English elm grove is one individual" propagating itself in its 

underground root system. 

In chapter 21 of Still Life Byatt reprises these different voices - of Goethe, 

Wordsworth, and Sartre - and answers them. Goethe and Wordsworth are nostalgically 

obsessed with origin and immortality in a way that Byatt is not, while Sartre is oppressed 

and excited by different but not unrelated notions of eternity. Byatt is concerned with 

representing the present; Marcus, in contemplating the tree, remains bounded by the 

empirical situation at hand and his own sensory responses - while Roquentin spins off to 

examine all the chaos of creation. Unlike the others, Byatt draws no moral conclusions 

from her study of the tree's existence beyond the necessity for seeing the interdependence 

of living things (an important refutation of Nausea's emphasis on isolation). And on the 

question of the ability to articulate such a primal experience, she positions herself neatly 

between Wordsworth and Sartre. The Romantic poet betrays few signs of struggle with 

language and takes his ability to see and say for granted; Roquentin both distrusts and 

craves expression and his dilemma contributes to his overall feeling of disgust. Marcus is 

nearly silent, but he has within him the potential for precise articulation; whatever 

conclusions he comes to in his communion with the tree, they are comforting and 

stimulating for him. From Goethe, Byatt's most important borrowing is the notion of 

order, that there can be an ideal plant to add to Marcus's Platonic Garden of Forms. The 

tree episode is, overall, an unusually happy one for Marcus. 

Marcus has earlier told his mother and Stephanie that his first infant memory is of 

an ash under which his pram was placed (Still Life 105). The ash as a vigorous 



150 

mythological symbol will be used frequently in Possession, and this glimpse of the power 

of the Norse World-Ash is significant. While Marcus is able to find a new, healing order 

in nature, it is important to remember that nature's geometry is necessarily much more 

contingent and quixotic than the realm of triangles and spheres. Marcus's movement 

toward nature signals a lessening of the visionary power and a strengthening of his 

emotional adaptability. 

This awareness of knowledge as something more provisional, more heavily 

qualified is echoed in the syntax of the narrator's sections of Still Life. The narrator has a 

more pronounced presence here than in most Byatt books; the narrative role, partly, is to 

set limits, ask questions, challenge certainty. For example, the infant Will Orton 

communicates, but from a distance; the narrator suggests what Will "could have said" his 

vision was like, but clearly the baby lacks the verbal skill to be a trustworthy conveyor of 

data (107). The description of a session between Marcus and his psychiatrist is peppered 

with "might or might not" constructions (33, 34); it is uncertain how well they are able to 

understand each other. Mr. Rose, says the narrator, "might, or might not, have felt able to 

offer help or advice" (34). This provisional style of narration appears prominently again 

at the beginning of Babel Tower, where several points of origin for the novel are 

suggested ("It might begin").6 

The key event of Byatt's life in the 1970s was the accidental death of her son 

Charles, and the irregular and more provisional kind of order to which she begins to 

subscribe in the 1980s stems, at least partly, from her reaction to that death. It must be 

said, however, that she remains a thinker highly sympathetic to order, and experiments 

like Frederica's chaotic collages of text in Babel Tower are whimsical and not very 

convincing. The most positive result of Byatt's changing thought about order is the more 

central position she assigns to human agency. Whereas early characters like Henry, Anna, 

6This style of qualified narration also appears frequently in Byatt's sister Margaret Drabble's The 
Witch of Exmoor (1997). 



151 

and Cassandra seem to be passively held in the grip of universal forces (like many of Iris 

Murdoch's characters), recent characters like Frederica, Ash, and LaMotte demonstrate a 

rootedness in and an intense curiosity about a world which, although by no means 

completely haphazard, is unpredictable and susceptible to human interference and 

interpretation. 

§ § § 

Whatever confidence Byatt's characters have in the visual world is increasingly 

focused on colour, but the depth of this certainty and the moral consequences of it are 

much less remarkable than the former trust in form. Whereas the geometric figures which 

give comfort and stability in The Shadow of the Sun and The Virgin in the Garden can 

suggest symbolic readings, colours in Byatt are usually resistant to such interpretation. 

Spirals, for instance, often are seen to indicate mystery and immortality; circles are 

perfection; triangles are associated with harmony and stability (Olderr passim). These 

common symbolic meanings, although not explicitly cited by Byatt, do fit the novel's 

situations - as, for example, when Henry sees triangles as stabilizing the book he is 

writing. When Byatt uses colour, however, she turns agnostic, frequently challenging the 

typical significance assigned to a particular hue, or instead insisting that colour is 

significant in and of itself, needing no outside referent. But this independent significance 

founders on the fact that Byatt, as a writer, cannot avoid the dependence of colour on 

verbal language. Finally, colour rarely, if ever, points the way to possible transcendence, 

as geometry did. 

Colour is much more a sensory experience than geometry is. Marcus's 

experiences with forms are cerebral, perhaps spiritual, and sensory stimuli are not 

necessarily needed to set his speculations in motion. But characters cannot meditate upon 

colour independently, intellectually - they must actually see yellow or green in a painting 

or a bowl of fruit. And it is comparatively chaotic. Anna's experience in The Shadow of 

the Sun is representative: 



152 

Things became suddenly beautiful, intolerably beautiful, and she 
intolerably aware of them: she found herself, despite herself, driven to 
tears by the intense green she saw, looking up through the apple trees at 
the summer sky, unable to reduce the profusion of the gold-edged crossing 
twigs and the overlapping, deepening, glittering rounds of the leaves 
against that uncomprehending midsummer blue to any order that she could 
comprehend. (19) 

Part of Anna's agonizing impression of excess is attributable to adolescence. But the 

peculiar pain caused by the beauty and intensity of colour is primarily a problem of order 

- there are no set rules to help her comprehend and assimilate colour, and the highly 

individual nature of the colour-viewing experience is so trying for an adolescent that she 

eventually does her best to abandon her visionary tendencies. 

Chapter 14 of Still Life. "Figures of Speech," is a long meditation on colour-

words and on the difficulty Alexander Wedderburn experiences while writing a play 

about Vincent Van Gogh. Alexander is used as a springboard, and Byatt's narrative voice 

controls the chapter; Alexander is her puppet, a thinker not unlike her who is nevertheless 

deliberately made inadequate. The problem of the plum-skins is characteristic. For 

several pages, Alexander and the narrator wonder "How would one find the exact word 

for the colour of the plum-skins?" (164). 

There was a further question of why one might want to do so, why it was 
not enough to look at, or to eat and savour the plum, but Alexander did not 
wish to address himself to that, not just now. It was a fact that the lemons 
and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognised with pleasure, 
and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and 
understood. 

Alexander and the narrator come to the conclusion that it is impossible, or nearly so, to 

use words to find a precise and plain name for the plum colour, but that paint and 

metaphor come closer to the ideal (165). (Byatt here places metaphor outside the realm of 

verbal language.) Both Byatt and Alexander have tried to find exact and plain words and 

have found that "analogy was a way of thought and without it thought was impossible." 



153 

The relation between language, reality, and perception is treated with great 

seriousness in this section of Still Life, but nowhere is there the sense that Alexander's 

quest is as profound as Marcus's. The search for an exact colour word has significance in 

epistemological terms, but a glimpse into eternity is not a possibility. Colour is not 

allowed to resonate beyond itself, to hint at transcendence or even (much) to illuminate 

human life. Alexander finally decides that plums most closely resemble human bruises, 

and then dodges the disturbing resonance this comparison evokes. "But the plum was 

neither bruised nor a bruise nor human. So he eschewed, or tried to eschew human words 

for it" (164). 

Van Gogh's paintings of yellow chairs are a kind of perfection of knowledge for 

Alexander, and he becomes obsessed with them (69). It is clear to Alexander that the 

yellow chair "was the opposite of the insane messianic visions and voices" (70) with 

which Van Gogh struggled, that the yellow chair represents sanity, certainty. But more 

important than its human and psychological associations is the fact that, for Alexander, 

the painting of the yellow chair has authority. It is, precisely and absolutely, what it is. 

Alexander eventually realizes that his own quest for such certainty is hopeless, and in 

Babel Tower he seems to have stopped writing. 

In Babel Tower, Stephanie's daughter Mary sees vivid colours after she suffers a 

mysterious accident (47), but her "grape-dark world, her gentian caverns" (49) are not 

investigated. Mary, like Stephanie and Marcus, has latent visionary qualities, but Byatt 

gives them little attention. In the short fairy story "The Story of the Eldest Princess" 

(1992), a quest to reverse an enchantment which changed the sky from blue to green is 

actually abandoned by the princess, who instead finds her vocation in storytelling. 

Whether the sky is green or blue turns out to be immaterial, and the tone of the story is 

wry. Less sardonic is "A Lamia in the Cevennes" (1995), in which a painter struggles to 

capture colours precisely and, for knowledge of colour, is willing to forego the pleasures 

of love with a lamia, an enchanted monster who is half woman, half snake. The colour of 



154 

Bernard's pool is "a blue he needed to know and fight" (Elementals 83), and painting it 

accurately is a consuming passion "firing the neurons in Bernard's brain to greater and 

greater activity" (102). 

Like Robin in "Art Work" (1991), another story about an obsessed artist, Bernard 

has a colour fixation which is a closed endeavour estranging him from others. Robin's 

studio displays an array of colourful fetishes, "the small icons of a cult of colour" (The 

Matisse Stories 62). Investigating colours makes Robin and Bernard happy "in one of 

those ways human beings have found in which to be happy" ("Lamia," Elementals 88). 

Colour is an unquestioned imperative for these painters, but it does not extend beyond the 

edge of a canvas. Neither painter relates colour to his human life, but gives himself over 

to it. "He didn't want a woman. He wanted another visual idea," says Byatt of Bernard. 

"All those blues, all those curious questions, all those almost answers" (110, 109). To 

arrive, alone, at "almost answers" is sufficient; Bernard doesn't share them or wax 

metaphysical about them. Byatt agrees that this intellectual and aesthetic questing after 

colour has importance; Bernard's happiness is real and, more importantly, he has no 

choice. 

Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of 
board? I could just stop. 

He could not. (87) 

Unlike other recent literary questers after colour's meaning, Byatt's characters 

remain rooted in aesthetic dilemmas: how to get blue on canvas and what to call it. 

Penelope Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower (1993) writes about the eighteenth-century 

philosopher Novalis and his use of the blue flower as an interpretative test for those who 

love him. As Fitzgerald re-tells the story, the blue flower quest has many possible 

meanings. Fitzgerald gives none of these meanings priority, but the significance of the 

quest is left at least partly intact. In Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride (1993), the 

ability of a character to read colour "auras" in people and situations is presented at face 



155 

value. Charis associates blue with her grandmother, who has powerful healing skills. 

Atwood does not undermine this ability, although it is true that the novel has elements of 

fable. Filmmakers Derek Jarman and Krystof Kieslowski have no problem with assigning 

meaning to colour. 

Blue an open door to soul 
A n infinite possibility 
Becoming tangible 

writes Jarman shortly before his death (11). Jarman's Blue is a meditation on AIDS and 

the profound impact of the visual on his life. For Kieslowski, Blue in his Three Colours 

trilogy is about the tangled and various meanings of liberty. "The colour is not 

decorative; it plays a dramaturgic role" (222). 

Byatt, on the other hand, actually parodies those who seek meaning in colour in 

"The Names of the Rose," a 1991 New York Times piece which pretends to unlock the 

manifold secrets of the nursery rhyme "Roses are red / Violets are blue." Here, colour is 

entertainment. And in a 1997 interview, she praises the simple and pleasing qualities of 

her favourite words, that "tend to be colour words. At the moment, I'm very keen on 

vermilion and emerald, which I think are very beautiful words" (Frumkes 15). 

Only occasionally in the 1990s does she accord colour more serious status. A 

1992 profile of painter David Royle offers this about Royle's depiction of flames: 

What he has made of those flames is a prolonged meditation on how 
things hold their form, are eaten up by light and energy, and re-form into 
other elements of matter and colour. ("The Ambition of Art" 42) 

Although she says that Royle "wants to get everything in, life and death, brightness and 

darkness, destruction and human warmth," she follows with praise for his certainty that 

"making works of art is so important that [he] can live on almost nothing, and go on 

working out relations of colour and form" (43). She hints here at an elevated status for 

colour not unlike her use of geometric form in the 1960s and 1970s; Royle's paintings 

confirm that form and colour are linked to something eternal. But she steps back from 



156 

this idea and underlines finally his aesthetic commitment to colour and form in 

themselves. (Royle, interestingly, is the dedicatee of the rather un-spiritual Babel Tower.) 

The purity and transcendence which she at least momentarily ascribes to Royle's use of 

colour are, however, generally absent from her own fiction of this decade. In Possession, 

for instance, her use of colour is decidedly conventional; a typical passage is the one 

where Maud's vividly coloured flat provides the reader with a clue to her hidden 

passionate nature (58). 

What colour lacks for Byatt is a sense of well-understood order which she can 

apply to human and intellectual situations with authority. As Charles Riley notes in Color 

Codes, a study which is unusual in its notice of Byatt's work on colour in Still Life, she 

"continually sets up color as the benchmark of artistic energy and purity" (271), 

especially as exemplified in the works of Van Gogh. But she finds that "to harness color 

is not a simple task" (272). Riley describes her ambitious efforts to circumscribe and 

systematize colour as "anxious" and "chafing" (271). Geometry has an ancient set of 

formulae which are dependable, provable; colour's laws are still being debated. And 

colour's human associations are far more disputable. Green, for example, commonly 

signals growth and optimism, but in the Franz SchubertAVilhelm Muller song "Die Liebe 

Farbe" ("The Beloved Colour"), green is death. 

Byatt and David Royle are intrigued and pleased by chaos theory, the study of 

"amazingly rich, even bizarre patterns" in nature, "clouds, waves, flames, weather — 

which at first [appear] to be totally random" ("The Ambition of Art" 43,42). Colour is 

more resistant to this solidification into law. Locke's belief in our passive reception of 

colour and Newton's in the intrinsic colour properties of objects have been proven 

inadequate. Goethe and others speculated on the way the brain creates colours — and, 

strikingly, illusions. As Oliver Sacks says, colour theorists now know "that colors are not 

'out there' in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of 



157 

wavelength, but, rather are constructed by the brain" (An Anthropologist on Mars 24). 

Exactly how this is accomplished is still unknown. 

Byatt's need for colour to contain order - hinted at in Possession, where Maud's 

allegiance to the colour green confers coherence on her personality (44) - is ultimately 

not satisfied. Like Smilla, a woman who loves mathematics because it is more 

trustworthy and permanent than human relations in Peter Hoeg's 1993 novel Smilla's 

Sense of Snow, Byatt and her characters crave stability, certainty, and, if possible, purity. 

Mathematics for Hoeg and geometric forms for the early Byatt provide this sort of 

completion and balance, an order which ultimately allows for the possibility of 

limitlessness and essential truths. Colour has the advantage of being more closely allied 

to people (since it is constructed in the brain) and Byatt's colour fiction (from Still Life 

on) is more character-driven, more emotional. But this closer link with the human realm 

yokes colour more closely to words, the realm Byatt was attempting to counter. The 

wordy Babel Tower attests to our ancient dependence on words as being profound and 

unavoidable. 

The shifting allegiance from geometry to colour in Still Life is temporary, and 

ultimately misleading. In most of her recent fiction, Byatt's primary allegiance rests with 

words. Two of the epigraphs to Still Life are from Proust, who, with Joyce, is surely the 

most word-obsessed writer of the twentieth century. The first of these declares 

confidence in the ability of words to present a small clear and common image of things 

("Les mots nous presentent des choses une petite image claire et usuelle"). In Possession 

bright colours merely communicate "primitive childhood expectations" for Roland 

Michell (291); colours, supposedly, remind us of comforting, basic objects, of fairy-tale 

images. For Roland to gain maturity and happiness, he must learn to strip himself of 

abstraction and the anxiety of influence, make lists of words untainted by theory, and 

write poems using those words. This actually works; Roland instantly wins romantic 

fulfillment and career advancement because of his commitment to plain, pure words. 



158 

Increasingly, Byatt's use of colour is as an object of aesthetic contemplation. In 

The Matisse Stories, colours are allowed to just be in ways they formerly were not. 

Byatt's intention here is to attempt a mimicry of painting, to contemplate colours and 

forms as elements in and of themselves. The paintings of the Impressionists are 

frequently mentioned in Byatt's recent works; impressionism emphasizes the act of 

vision itself. But what happens when vision itself becomes the object of attention? Does 

it mean that the goal of transcendence has been rejected, or is concentration on the act of 

seeing capable of leading beyond, to a higher level? Derek Jarman writes of the 

excruciating power of the visual symbol: "From the bottom of your heart, pray to be 

released from image" (15). Matisse claimed that he believed in God when he was 

painting (Jazz 102). But for Byatt, attempting to work the power of the visual into fiction, 

transcendence is more doubtful. Transcendence for her is a possibility only when shapes 

or colours are pure and exact; since colours are not yet understood and additionally must 

be swallowed up in language in order to appear in fiction, they fail. 

Byatt's reason for abandoning form is less clear. Capturing geometry in words is 

problematic, although less so than with colour, and Byatt's attempts are confident and 

ambitious. The shapes that Marcus Potter and Henry Severell see as projections on their 

inner landscapes are communicated with some success to the reader - yet it must be 

noted that surely this varies from reader to reader, depending on one's own ability to 

create mental images. One can only speculate that the death of Byatt's son in 1972 

prompted a rejection of whatever faith she formerly had, and a need to develop new 

systems. (She wrote very little in the decade following Charles Byatt's death.) 

Additionally, however extraordinary Marcus's and Henry's visions are, the danger they 

court is equally remarkable. Their search for knowledge pushes them to the limits of 

human endurance; the extremity of their experiences places them beyond human 

companionship, nearly in the realm of madness. 



159 

Finally, fiction demands the presence of characters, and one of Byatt's firmest 

convictions is that character is opaque; she agrees with Iris Murdoch's insistence in 

"Against Dryness" that "what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and 

complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons." Opacity, ironically, is by 

definition a visual quality - or, more accurately, a description of the impossibility of clear 

vision. Murdoch's "respect for the contingent" and for "the real impenetrable human 

person" (20) is evidenced in most of Byatt's fiction since Still Life, where the search for 

order and transcendence was laid to rest with Stephanie Potter. But Byatt's fascination 

with the rules and possibilities of visual language resurfaces from time to time, signs of a 

search for order without meaning which seems both foolhardy and courageous. Like the 

characters in Julian Barnes's Staring at the Sun, who seek revelation in doing what the 

title suggests, but probably find only death, Byatt's characters continue to seek out the 

significance of vision, even amidst their loss of faith in the enterprise. 



160 

Chapter 5: Visual Art: Van Gogh and Matisse 

For good painting is nothing but a copy of the perfections of God and a 
recollection of His painting.... 

Michelangelo (1475-1564) 

You don't understand 
Nor care to understand about my art, 
But you can hear at least when people speak: 
And that cartoon, the second from the door 
- It is the thing, Love! so such things should be -
Behold Madonna! I am bold to say. 
I can do with my pencil what I know, 
What I see, what at bottom of my heart 
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep -

Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto" (1855) 

Like the characters in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton (1897), the people of 

A. S. Byatt's fiction are judged by their responses to visual art. The reader is expected to 

discern personality based on works and artists associated with certain characters; 

additionally, Byatt uses paintings and, less frequently, sculptures to further her thematic 

exploration of the articulation of imagination and knowledge. Is there a way paintings 

appeal to the spectator that is superior to speech or writing? For Byatt, the answer is a 

qualified yes, especially in her work of the 1980s. Can the attributes of painted or 

mentally visualized knowledge be successfully introduced into or fused with aspects of 

the verbal realm? Here, the response is more troubled. In Still Life, Byatt's novel most 

intimately concerned with visual art, Vincent Van Gogh and Stephanie Potter Orton are 

adept in both fields - they have highly developed visual imaginations and are verbally 

articulate as well. (Stephanie's skill with language is jeopardized by family life, but when 

she is introduced in The Virgin in the Garden she is a successful literature teacher and an 



161 

insightful analyst of Keats and Wordsworth.) Both suffer shocking, violent deaths at 

young ages, when the potential of their dual ways of knowing is just being explored. 

In recent years, Byatt's expectations of visual knowledge, or of verbal/visual 

fusion, have been reduced. Her book The Matisse Stories uses the bold simplification of 

Matisse as a model for a minimal and vivid style of representation (and to explore the 

ramifications of Matisse's depictions of women). But the ambitious goal of formulating 

something akin to a poetics of vision and word has been, apparently, abandoned. 

Intriguingly, both Matisse and Van Gogh were artists who engaged with religion in 

unconventional and curious ways, and their ambivalent spirituality suits Byatt's own 

ambivalence admirably. Matisse's reflection on God in Jazz illuminates the faith of Van 

Gogh and Byatt as well: "Sije crois en Dieu? Oui, quandje travaille" (102). When Byatt 

quotes this in the story "The Chinese Lobster," she problematizes it immediately, by 

having a character recall, "I think he also said, 'I am God when I work' " (The Matisse 

Stories 132). Byatt's contemplation of vision, language, and religion, as filtered through 

her exploration of specific painters and paintings, has resulted in some of her most 

engaging and colourful fiction. What she has accomplished of her larger goal - a 

meditation on or a striving after a "paradis perdu in which thought and language and 

things were naturally and indissolubly linked" (Passions of the Mind 9) - remains to be 

seen. 

§ § § 

In Babel Tower. Frederica Potter, A. S. Byatt's most word-driven character, takes 

a job in the 1960s teaching literature in London at the "Samuel Palmer School of Art and 

Craft." (Byatt taught at the Central School of Art and Design in the same era.) The 



162 

students and some of the teachers are in revolt against the art of the past. Frederica is 

unusual among Byatt characters in that she has no particular affinity for visual art, but in 

the course of the three Potter novels written to date she is given a series of art history and 

appreciation lessons, which are revealing about the author's aesthetic biases. 

In Babel Tower, Frederica visits the studio of one of the painting teachers, 

Desmond Bull, and attempts to interpret his work. Bull shows her rows of coloured 

pebbles, which he tells her are representative of houses on his mother's street. Frederica 

says, "It's a row of stones.... Can it mean anything to me without your talking?" (231). 

While looking at Bull's erasure canvases, abstract colours covering figurative and cubist 

underpaintings, Frederica remarks that they are "very theoretical'^ (232). Finally, viewing 

Bull's mask paintings, which combine flat patterns of colour and bits of masks, feet, and 

hands, Frederica has a breakthrough. 

She has been in the Art School long enough not to try to convert it into 
narrative, although the masked figures half-invite t h i s . . . . 

"It's about the impossibility of figurative painting," says Bull. 
"About what it feels like to be a human body in an abstract world," 

says Frederica, cleverly, catching his thought. (233) 

Frederica's foray into the world of postmodern art reveals Byatt's intense 

curiosity about all kinds of art, but the slightly mocking tone she adopts when discussing 

the 1960s indicates that her sympathies lie with representation and order. 

Notwithstanding her halfhearted attempts at Burroughs-inspired literary collages in the 

course of the novel, Frederica respects tradition, and allies herself with the few in the 

pop-art era who still admire the beauty and precision of Vermeer and Brueghel (228, 

441). But she is also intrigued by experimentation, especially with colour; "It's alive, 

here," she says on first entering the Palmer School (166). Eventually, she will reject the 



163 

excesses of 1960s art, leaving a performance-art-type "Happening" in disgust at the 

novel's end (616). As Frederica says of an earlier performance piece, "There is not 

enough point to all this, or else I am missing something" (443). 

Byatt's loyalty is to earlier styles of art - impressionism, post-impressionism, and 

early modernism in particular - and she believes that the epistemological and optical 

questions raised in the time of Monet, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse 

are still compelling and apposite. If we compare the Desmond Bull episode in Babel 

Tower with a similar and less satirical scene featuring a younger Frederica, this can be 

readily understood. In The Virgin in the Garden, the first of the projected four novels 

featuring her family, she is instructed by Alexander Wedderburn to appreciate Rodin and 

Rose Period Picasso.1 In this earlier novel, turn-of-the-century art earns a respectful tone 

(104-106). For Alexander, sharing views of his favourite art works is "next to giving 

gifts." He actually achieves self-knowledge through his knowledge of Picasso's Boy 

With A Pipe. The art lesson is so enlightening for Frederica that it makes her behave, 

unusually, with "grace" (105). 

Usually, there is a linguistic agenda for the study of visual art. Byatt and her 

characters read paintings in an attempt to learn the language of art, in order that they may 

adopt its most vivid qualities for written and spoken language, as when Alexander in Still 

Life describes his lover Elinor as "lovely repeated ovals and rounds" (167), comparing 

her to a Matisse or Picasso nude. But occasionally, there is more at stake, and the 

characters strive to go beyond the superficial forms and colours of paintings. Alexander 

1 In Still Life. Byatt writes that Family of Saltimanques and Bov With a Pipe. Alexander's 
reproductions, are works of Picasso's Blue Period (1900-1904), but in fact both paintings were painted in 
the more optimistic Rose Period, in 1905. See Still Life, page 57. 



164 

Wedderburn in Still Life will immerse himself in a study of Van Gogh in an attempt to 

find meanings for his own life, as will the novel's zealous and imposing narrator, who 

pursues the Van Gogh inquiry to greater lengths than Alexander does. Several characters 

in The Matisse Stories approach the paintings of Matisse with something of the same 

seriousness, but the results are very different, in proportion with the minimalist means 

used to achieve them and with the less anguished painter who inspired the stories. 

When Byatt uses visual art to delineate the personalities of her characters, the 

results are, at the most basic level, similar to the way she sometimes uses colour: 

paintings provide shorthand for character analysis. For example, Frederica notes that an 

actress in The Virgin in the Garden reminds her of the "Tenniel illustration of Alice as 

serpent" (132), and an embrace between two characters is seen as "a straining parody of 

Rodin's Baiser" (329). In Still Life Frederica and her sister Stephanie, as feminists 

struggling to lead independent lives, react negatively to a Henry Moore sculpture of a 

woman with a small head, "like a powerful staring doll," while her erect male partner 

stands with head "raised to the sky" (277). Frederica, whose visual acuity is strangely 

variable, notices as a teenager that "Alexander was leaning classically against the 

proscenium arch, one leg across the other at an elegant angle she was later to note in 

Hilliard's decorous lover behind the delicate pale roses" (Virgin 72). Visual art is 

accorded a place of privilege; it is treated as being relatively stable and reliable in its 

explanations of the world, as books also are, and as human beings are not. As she does in 

2 Byatt has said that most of her characters are based to varying degrees on herself (Dusinberre 
interview 190, Kenyon 14, Wachtel 1993: 87), and she has explained the highly visual nature of her own 
imagination in her essay "Still Life/Nature morte" (Passions of the Mind 14) Thus, although Frederica 
Potter is supposed to have a predominantly verbal sensibility, occasionally she has a keen visual insight, 
which seems out of keeping. See Still Life, page 317, for another such example, when she is perceptive 
about Van Gogh. 



165 

Possession, Byatt is refuting "The Death of the Author" (and artist) in her fiction about 

painting and painters; she defends the belief that painting, like writing, reveals and 

illuminates the personality of both artist and reader/viewer. Art is not "that neutral, 

composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is 

lost," as Roland Barthes would have it (Image. Music, Text 142). 

Even so, the implications of knowing a person or an idea through paintings has 

troubling aspects. Consider that Byatt's people often achieve insights about themselves 

and others through contemplation of two-dimensional, static works of art which 

necessarily abstract elements of human personality. The relationship between viewer and 

art is unidirectional - it can teach us, but we have nothing to offer in return. The distance 

and separation are unbreachable. A great love and knowledge of art does not bring 

happiness to James's characters in The Spoils of Povnton; neither does a veneration of 

English painters in Peter Ackroyd's English Music (1992) ameliorate the miserable lives 

of his impoverished mountebanks, one of whom can actually enter paintings. For the 

most part, Byatt does not offer explicit commentary on the folly of such a trusting 

dependence on art: her characters generally retain their ties to art and it is left to the 

reader to judge the worth of the relationship. But Byatt's awareness of the dangers of this 

relation is shown in the 1995 story "A Lamia in the Cevennes," in which a painter is 

given a choice between sensual pleasure and perfection in art; his choice of the latter is 

both idealistic and more than faintly inhuman. 

Art works are also used by Byatt as ancillary, if not fundamental, plot elements. 

The Virgin in the Garden is the most heavily allusive and symbolic of Byatt's novels, 

delving into the realms of history, literature, and cosmogony, and its art references have a 



166 

corresponding breadth. The action of the novel revolves about Alexander Wedderburn's 

verse play about Elizabeth I. Alexander's struggle to balance realism and allegory in his 

drama, Astraea, is mirrored in the presentation of allegorical paintings throughout the 

novel. Matthew Crowe's houseful of valuable Renaissance paintings - depictions of 

seduction and murder, Diana and Actaeon, Hyacinth and Apollo - leave Frederica 

"oppressed" but "interested" (144). When Crowe expounds upon the lines and curves of 

the paintings' compositions and offers symbolic readings of them - the flaying of 

Marsyas is "the moment of the birth of the new consciousness" (Virgin 143) - Frederica 

argues that she just sees death and cruelty (141,142). However, allegory is not entirely 

derided in the novel. Alexander responds warmly to certain allegorical paintings of 

Elizabeth I, particularly the Darnley portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, which he 

reads doubly, as a simultaneous portrait of a real woman and of a state. 

It was so clear, thought Alexander, that there had been someone real there 
to be portrayed. But she was like Shakespeare, a figure whose over-
abundant energy attracts dubiously mixed emotions, idolatry and 
iconoclasm, love and fear, and the accompanying need to diminish and 
reduce their strangeness and ordinariness by reductive myths and pointless 
"explanations." (Virgin 13) 

The portrait which Alexander admires is one of the least iconographical of the 

Elizabethan pictures. Frederica is shown another Elizabeth, which she dislikes, at 

Crowe's house, in which the queen's dress is the map of England and she "seem[s] to be 

squatting," a cornucopia ridiculously obtruding from between her knees (Virgin 139). 

Byatt's characters are fascinated by iconography, although it is nearly always found to be 

wanting. Alexander's play, which initially aimed "at a vigorous realism" (17), eventually 

is described as "nervous and glittering, adjectival and highly metaphorical" (101). It is 

mounted as a Pageant and, in later years, Alexander is embarrassed by it. In the short 



167 

story "Art Work," an artist whose neo-realist paintings are "about the infinite terror of the 

brilliance of colour" (The Matisse Stories 72) is distressed by a gallery owner who 

attempts to read them allegorically. The artifice of allegory is never entirely dismissed, 

however. The arch style of Angels and Insects owes much to allegory. The passive, pale 

Alabasters (doomed, bloodless aristocrats) and William Adamson ("everyman") assist 

Byatt's investigation of the relation between human and animal civilizations. 

§ § § 

In the Potter novels, the characters who are the most visually inclined are closely 

associated with specific paintings. Not surprisingly, Marcus Porter, whose visual 

language is that of geometry, is not associated with art at all, as his way of seeing the 

world is presented as being elemental, not aesthetic. But Stephanie Potter is associated 

with several images, real and imagined, all of them depictions of ideals, albeit troubled 

ones. In chapter 8 of The Virgin in the Garden she is observed teaching Keats's poem 

"Ode on a Grecian Urn." Stephanie tells her students that this is the poem "she most 

care[s] for" (78). She not only values the language, but savours the visual landscape of 

the poem, and wants her students to attempt to "see" a real Urn and to reflect on the 

appealing impossibility of picturing the unseen artifact. "They talked, as Stephanie had 

meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at 

all, like beauty and truth" (78). More concretely, Stephanie, upon learning of her first 

pregnancy, is discovered by Daniel to resemble a painting of the Annunciation. "You 

look like all those pictures of the Virgin at her desk, and just as stunned as if you'd seen 

an angel" (297). 



168 

Stephanie is also associated with the pagan goddess of beauty and love, Venus. 

Chapter 18 of The Virgin in the Garden, narrating the courtship of Daniel and Stephanie, 

is entitled "Anadyomene," and although no specific painting is explicitly invoked, there 

are paintings by Titian and Ingres, both called Venus Anadyomene, which come to mind. 

The birth of Aphrodite /Venus in the waves, springing forth from the semen and castrated 

genitals of the god Uranus, is a powerful image well-known to Stephanie.3 (By using the 

less familiar "Anadyomene" appellation, Byatt is, I think, asking us not to recall the more 

famous Birth of Venus by Botticelli, a more innocent version of the myth.) While 

attempting to visualize Keats's Grecian Urn, the image of the "foam-born" Venus 

"involuntarily" comes to Stephanie's mind instead. "Not relevant, her judgment said" 

(77-78), yet the image recurs in the title of the novel's most important chapter, 

"Anadyomene," when Daniel and Stephanie walk on a stormy beach at Filey and make 

the decision to marry. 

The associations are complex and contradictory. Stephanie is compared with a 

goddess, but one born, un-mothered, out of wholly male sexuality, and one whose 

identity is completely erotic. The identification of her with the Virgin Mary and with the 

unseen Urn underscores the limited, unreal role Stephanie is being fitted for. Her 

introduction to passion on Filey beach, by way of Daniel's forceful declaration, is a 

revelation to her, but it is also a partial rejection of the intellectual path she had been 

leading, as a scholar. Although Stephanie is not as radical as the postmodern feminists in 

Possession, who write contemptuously of Venus Anadyomene, "put together out of the 

3Byatt says that Aphrodite was born from the dismembered body of Kronos/Saturn (Time), who 
was killed by his son, Zeus. She repeats this in Possession (266) and in her essay "Van Gogh, Death and 
Summer" (Passions of the Mind 327). Most collections of myths, however, say that Venus was born as a 



169 

crud of male semen scattered on the deep" (266), we are still surprised that she is so 

willing to adopt the traditional "Venus" role of lover/wife/mother. So is her father Bill, 

who throws books at her on the announcement of her engagement (Virgin 199). 

Stephanie's earlier rejection of the Venus image and that "not very nice foam" (79), in 

favour of the cerebral and aesthetic perfection of the Urn, had been her attempt to stake 

out high intellectual ground. In sum, the visual ideas clustered around Stephanie are a 

mixed blessing, particularly the Venus images. The blonde Venus of the Ingres painting, 

who more closely resembles Byatt's description of Stephanie, is lovely, calm, but slightly 

vacuous. In another allusion to a Venus work, Stephanie deplores the Venus de Milo for 

its "blind and horrible empty eyes" (69). A woman associated with such impossible 

immortality and bland perfection would not seem to be long for this world, especially in 

the work of a realist like Byatt (however tempered her realism is). This suspicion is, of 

course, borne out. 

A number of art works also gather around Alexander Wedderburn in The Virgin 

in the Garden. In his rooms, we are told, Alexander has several prints displayed, 

including two Picassos, the Family of Saltimbanques and Boy With a Pipe. He also has a 

large photograph of Rodin's sculpture Danaide. Picasso's circus figures are not given 

much consideration in the text, but the other two works are offered up as evidence of 

Alexander's sensual but isolated personality. 

It was, he said, Rodin's Danaide. He went and stood under it, 
studying minutely what her distracted gaze had skated over the gloss of. 

"Look what a line. Look." 
He ran his index finger along the indicated line of recumbent 

marble spine, under the marble-silky skin, a half-moon from abased nape 

result of the murder committed by Kronos himself, of his father Uranus (see Morford and Lenardon, 
Graves). 



170 

to rounded buttocks vanishing and shining into the black. A n ambiguous 
gesture, purely instructive, purely sensual. Frederica watched the moving 
finger and saw the statue. (104) 

Alexander's admiration for Rodin's nude woman is aesthetic, erotic in a detached way, 

and intellectual. Unlike his lover Jenny, who sees in the sculpture only a "woman's white 

despair," Alexander reads his favourite art works on several levels, none of them 

emotional. He sees Picasso's Boy as sexually ambiguous; it is described as Alexander's 

"private joke" and "a mode of knowledge" that he keeps to himself and does not share. 

The Boy fills Alexander with "vicious envy" because he "could be anything, or more 

probably everything" (105-106). Alexander's eroticism is almost entirely played out in 

his relationship with works of art; with Jenny he is impotent, with Frederica titillated and 

frustrated, with Stephanie only intellectually engaged. Alexander's private thoughts and 

feelings about his Rodin and Picasso reproductions - images of isolation and enigmatic 

personality - are never completely revealed to other characters in The Virgin in the 

Garden, but only, via the narrator, to the reader. Later, Alexander will become wholly 

obsessed with Vincent Van Gogh, will have a son named after the painter with a woman 

he does not love, and will neither acknowledge the child nor pursue a relationship with 

him. Similarly his insights about Van Gogh are revealed only to the reader. Paintings 

underscore both what is appealing about Alexander and what is lacking in him. 

§ § § 

Byatt has created several fictional painters, and two of them - Robin in "Art 

Work" and Bernard in "A Lamia in the Cevennes" - were discussed in the previous 

chapter. A third is Joshua Riddell in "Precipice-Encurled." Unlike Robin and Bernard, 

who sacrifice personal life to the demands of art, Joshua is balanced. Devoted to the 



171 

problems of painting and drawing - "How to draw softness, and youth, and sheer 

pleasantness!" (Sugar 197) - he nevertheless has time to fall in love with Juliana 

Fishwick, the daughter of the family he is visiting in the Italian Apennines. The year is 

1882; Joshua has just seen Monet's Vetheuil in the Fog in Paris and his ideas about "the 

steady, the definite, the luminous" (206) are changing. 

Joshua shares with Byatt's most astute characters the quality of being able to see 

thoroughly. He is perceptive about Juliana, "seeing her intrigue and anxiety both clearly" 

(200). He is able to extend this vision, as a gift, to her: "She had looked at the chestnut 

trees, suddenly seeing them, because he asked her to" (199). Joshua is both an artist of his 

time, and of the future. A reader of Ruskin, he has absorbed Ruskin's contention that 

"clarity of vision was the essence of truth, virtue, and good art, which were, in this, one" 

(205). He believes that reality and personality can be captured on the page, and still 

believes in the soul: 

What a complicated thing is this meeting of eyes, which disturbs the air 
between two still faces, which has its effects on the heartbeat, the hair on 
the wrists, the flow of blood. You can understand, Joshua thought, why 
poets talk of arrows, or of hooks thrown. He said, "How odd it is to look at 
someone, after all, and to see their soul looking back again. How can a 
pencil catch that? How do we know we see each other?" (201-202) 

But Joshua also sees that new perceptions of reality and the self are possible, and 

this possibility excites him. He sees some aspects of visual art as ends in themselves: 

"The shadow cast on the flesh by the circumference of the hat was another pleasant 

problem in tone and shading" (200). Uncertain about his future relations with Juliana, he 

sets off alone on a sketching journey in the mountains, to contemplate his next action. 

There he "would look at the land beyond habitation" (204), the future of painting. Once 

he begins to sketch, his personality is subsumed in the task of "recording the effects of 



172 

these ashy whitenesses, of the reddish iron-stains in the stone" (208). Portentously, "the 

notation of things seen [became] no more than the flow of his blood" (209), 

simultaneously elevating the status of painted objects and diminishing the human 

element, in a complex reciprocity. 

Joshua ignores the danger of an approaching storm, choosing instead to see it as 

an artistic challenge: "the speed of its approach was beautiful" (210). He is consumed by 

the problem of light; one of his last thoughts relates to how Monet "trapped light in his 

surface" (210). When Joshua dies, he is attacked by the "impenetrable white darkness" of 

the storm (211); he falls "still thinking of Ruskin and Monet" (211). 

His death is a result of his devotion to the act of representation and his 

(momentary) disregard for nature and human fragility. Like Stephanie Potter, Joshua 

Riddell stands for abundant possibility: he respects the past and the future, he is open to 

art and love. It is admirable, indeed necessary, to seek more, the story declares; it is also, 

both for Stephanie and Joshua, fatal. The punishment is disproportionate, cruel. Is the 

ambition to see with precise clarity and originality so insupportable that "the vanishing 

between instants of all that warmth and intelligence and aspiration" (211) is warranted? 

§ § § 

In The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt's first novel, paintings are not specifically 

invoked as they are in the Potter novels. But the influence of painting is evident. 

Romantic poets and painters are invoked in the character of Henry Severell, the visionary 

writer. We know that Henry reads and admires Blake (59), and the physical description 

of Henry could be of a muscular Old Testament figure drawn by Blake: 



173 

He had his head down like the bull, and, with the curling mass of his beard 
and hair obscuring his face from this angle altogether, presented 
something of the same solid, blind, purposeful front. His speed, or some 
earlier gesture, had whipped up his hair into two great curved peaks, not 
unlike horns, which added to the illusion, and the whole of him, silver hair 
and white garment - his shirt was outside his trousers now, like a tabard -
shone in some strange way, with a white glitter, as though he was giving 
off a concentrated light of his own and not merely the refracted light of the 
still sun over the hill. (57) 

Henry, like Blake but with less faith, has converted Judaeo-Christian beliefs to suit his 

idiosyncratic purposes. He is given to shouting out old hymns (120), contemplates his 

own versions of the Fall of humanity (125,279), and is compared to Samson (214,279). 

Byatt uses Blake for his memorable pictorial and dramatic qualities, and has limited 

interest in him as a thinker. Blake is mocked in Babel Tower as one of the heroes of the 

chaotic art school where Frederica teaches. His Romantic excesses are seen by Frederica 

and the narrator as foolish and "unintentionally comic"; but it is true that Frederica's 

objections refer primarily to Blake's "ugly" Prophetic poetry (162-163). Byatt's Use of 

Blake in her first novel serves to show that Henry Severell is a man out of time, a 

formidable anachronism, a prophet with a lost message. Unlike Van Gogh and Matisse, 

whose paintings Byatt considers to be permanently relevant, Romantic painters are 

usually used by Byatt to demonstrate incomplete aesthetic growth or inordinate passion. 

One painter is given respectful treatment as an influence in The Shadow of the 

Sun, and that is Blake's disciple, Samuel Palmer. Although Palmer was also eccentric and 

visionary, his minutely-observed, spiritually charged landscapes of the English 

countryside meet Byatt's approval more than Blake's fantastic Biblical figures. Palmer is 

not directly referred to in the main text of The Shadow of the Sun, although he is in the 

retrospective introduction; he is mentioned in both Babel Tower, where he has a school 



174 

named after him, and in Still Life. The reference in the latter is worth careful 

consideration: 

Samuel Palmer, an asthmatic, managed both to contain a visionary stook 
of straw, a tree full of fruit, a bright moon and a white cloud in a cage or 
net of dark outlines and to suggest that these things consist only of 
differing brilliances of pure light, defined by the eye in the linear mapping 
of their periphery. (197) 

The Palmer passage in Still Life occurs in a chapter about Marcus, a different kind of 

visionary asthmatic. Byatt cites Palmer as an artist who captures both spirituality and 

plain ocular phenomena, a painter whose works seem to be contradictory - or to combine 

antitheses. Are they about the deeper meanings within seen objects, or about the material 

qualities of light and the bare act of seeing - or both? The Still Life passage also helps us 

locate Palmer's influence in The Shadow of the Sun, written over 20 years previously. 

Henry's visions in the fields are Palmeresque: "He thought, amongst the sheaves, which 

in some lights were almost bodiless, cages for light, of Joseph; the stars were up now, 

like lights off metal" (63). The cages of light and darkness, the sheaves, the moon and 

stars recur in each novel in a way that can be read as otherworldly, but is never definitely 

so. Like Marcus Potter, Henry Severell struggles to reconcile the jarring meanings of 

what he sees and what he feels the unseen spiritual worth of such vision to be. 

In her introduction, written in 1991, to the reprint of The Shadow of the Sun. 

Byatt named Samuel Palmer as a guiding influence on the book: "The visual image that 

always went with the idea of 'The Shadow of the Sun' was that of Samuel Palmer's 

Cornfield with the Evening Star" (xv). In some editions of the novel, Palmer's painting is 

on the cover. It is remarkably like Van Gogh landscapes such as Starry Night and, 

especially, Road with Cypress and Star, anticipating their style by nearly 60 years. In 



175 

Palmer and in Van Gogh, Byatt treasures the treatment of light and the otherworldly 

quality of representations which are nevertheless rooted in reality. Her tentative steps 

toward incorporating Palmer into her writing in the early 1960s will eventually become 

the massive undertaking of making Van Gogh an integral part of the fabric of Still Life in 

1985. 

The Game, published in 1967, is dominated by the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, 

painters whom Byatt does not seem to admire any more than she does the Romantics, but 

who are usefully suggestive of the jewel-coloured, mythic world of the doomed 

protagonist, Cassandra Corbett. The Corbett family actually owns "a huge Burne-Jones 

painting of knights, ladies, hounds and horses" (34); Cassandra and her sister Julia, the 

narrator reports, resemble models for Burne-Jones or Rossetti (45). Cassandra is 

immersed in Arthurian studies; she reads "Scott, Tennyson, Morris and Malory" because 

they are "brightly-coloured" (18); she is frequently compared to the Lady of Shalott and 

associated with weaving motifs (141, 225, 230). Cassandra's neurotic fellow-sufferer, 

Simon Moffitt, lives as a child with a painting that is a "huge Martyrdom of St. Sebastian; 

the saint's limbs were elongated and female, his mouth somewhere between pouting and 

secretively smiling, his flesh precisely punctured by the arrows so that the wounds 

recalled the raised red mouths of rubber suckers" (92). While not Pre-Raphaelite, 

Sebastian's painting is certainly histrionic. The impression arising from the art mentioned 

in The Game is that it is sensual but unhealthy. 

This kind of moralizing about art influences is absent from later use of Pre-

Raphaelite painters. The use of Pre-Raphaelite art in Possession is scenic and sensual. 

Possession effectively uses an image by Burne-Jones on the American Vintage paperback 



176 

cover. The Pre-Raphaelite circle is treated with more respect in Possession; Christina 

Rossetti serves as one of the models for Christabel LaMotte. 

In Possession. Roland watches Maud unbind her hair while they are on a picnic. 

And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the 
heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook 
her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and 
glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of 
gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes and saw scarlet blood. (296) 

To me, this scene reads like an enactment of William Holman Hunt's painting The Lady 

of Shalott in which the Lady's hair swirls madly about her head as she stands, partly in 

shadow, partly in light, trapped within the frame of the tapestry she is weaving. However, 

Maud's situation is not nearly so dire as the Lady's. A more dramatically apposite use of 

a Pre-Raphaelite image of doom is the mad scene at the conclusion of The Virgin in the 

Garden. Lucas Simmonds in a pond, singing, his hair "very carefully dressed with 

flowers" (398), is an Ophelia painting with gender reversal. (Richard Todd disagrees with 

me, seeing Lucas as Lear [A. S. Byatt: Writers and their Work 21].) There are versions of 

Ophelia by John Millais and Arthur Hughes which could have served as models. 

Possession also features a number of vivid still lifes in words: a picnic is lovingly 

rendered in primary colours (291-92); Maud's living room is sketched in bright white and 

jewel tones (58). In Possession, the book written to please - "I wanted to write a comedy 

and I wanted to keep it light" (Wachtel 1993: 80) - these word-paintings are minimalist, 

solid, and devoid of the complex significations belonging to, for example, the allegories 

of The Virgin in the Garden. In Virgin, there are verbal still lifes, but they are more 

florid, as in a series of manic department store tableaux (190-194) and Marcus's 

hallucinatory, Bosch-like view of a butcher shop, running to nearly 1000 words (92-95). 



177 

The still lifes and portraits of Still Life are more restrained, as in a paragraph describing 

three characters grouped before a mirror as if sitting for a group portrait called "the 

quintessence of Cambridge" (263). Like D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow, Byatt uses 

pictorial strategies to "retard the movement of our reading," as Keith Alldritt says, to 

experience "the heightened consciousness that life does not ordinarily allow" (129, 86). 

Still Life, however, goes beyond the use of paintings to revitalize our imaginative 

strategies and to animate the prose. This novel takes on the nature of visual language 

itself, what it relates about the nature of representation and faith in God, and its 

connection to the verbal language which dominates Byatt's fiction of the 1960s and 

1970s and will reign again in the "papery" world that Byatt has described as the setting of 

Babel Tower (Wachtel 1996). 

§ § § 

In an interview when the second Potter novel was published, A. S. Byatt said: 

I found that Vincent Van Gogh had rather replaced Queen Elizabeth as the 
sort of guiding presence in the centre of my thinking. Well, they're not so 
different. They're both rather fierce. They're both terribly solitary. 
They're both unmarried and unmarriagable and carry slightly difficult 
areas of prickly power with them. (Byatt/Murdoch video interview) 

Van Gogh had not been a presence in the previous 20 years of Byatt's writing, nor had 

Byatt written at all of impressionism or post-impressionism. But with the markedly 

different intentions Byatt stated for Still Life, there was a need for a change from the 

often florid and cerebral influences found in The Virgin in the Garden, from the 

Renaissance and Romantic artists whose shadows fall on the books of the 1960s and 

1970s. Byatt planned a plain and vivid book, a "biological" book (Wachtel 1996) about 

pure events: life, birth, death - and colour. After three highly intellectual novels, powered 



178 

by words and metaphors, Byatt had become "frightened of the involuntary way language 

took over" (Dusinberre interview 183). With the human body, in birth, sex and death, the 

focus of the novel, Byatt developed an interest in late nineteenth-century painters who 

were exploring the way that body sees, instead of only the material objects seen. 

She decided that the second Potter novel would be written "in a very spare 

language without any metaphor at all" (Dusinberre interview 194). She uses Vincent Van 

Gogh as a way of exploring the possibility of pure sight and direct expression. Van Gogh 

emerges, nearly, as a character in the book, although he is somewhat disembodied: the 

playwright Alexander Wedderburn and the narrator engage with Van Gogh's ideas and 

contemplate his letters and paintings. They are much less involved with his psychological 

problems and biography. It is Van Gogh's world view and aesthetics that Byatt explores. 

Two chapters of the novel, "Figures of Speech," chapter 14, and "The Yellow Chair," 

chapter 28, are almost wholly about Van Gogh, and throughout Still Life Byatt discusses 

in some detail over 25 of his paintings. 

In Vincent's letters, he is constantly exhorting his brother Theo to "look" and to 

"see." "You ought to have seen it this week when it rained," he writes in 1876 (letter 67, 

emphasis in original), and he imperiously and enthusiastically tells Theo to seek out, look 

at certain lithographs and books.4 Van Gogh also uses forms of "to see" in an attempt to 

enforce understanding of his thoughts and feelings.5 In early 1890, he writes: "What was 

4 1 use the standard system of numbering Van Gogh's letters begun by his sister-in-law Jo: letters 
to Theo are just given numbers, while letters to Emile Bernard are prefaced with "B" and to Vincent's sister 
Wilhemina,"W." 

5 English translations of Van Gogh's letters have, however, overemphasized the language of 
"seeing" which he uses. For example, in Mark Roskill's 1963 selection Van Gogh appears to use phrases 
like "look here" which often turn out to be, in the original French letters, phrases like "eh bien" "vo/7a," 
and "ecoutez" (letters 418 and 573). The visual imperatives of Van Gogh's letters are nevertheless worth 
remarking, since a large number of readers know them in translation. 



179 

to be done -you see, I generally try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is also threatened at 

the very root, and my steps are also wavering" (letter 649, emphasis mine)6 

For Byatt, despite her erudition, the importance of just looking cannot be 

underestimated, and she treats Van Gogh as the exemplar of this theme, which recurs 

throughout her work. Matty in "Morpho Eugenia" demands of William Adamson: "Look 

at me... .1 only wanted you to see me" (Angels and Insects 157, emphasis in original). In 

Still Life Frederica Potter stops loving her teacher Raphael Faber because of his failure to 

see: "He had judged Alexander without seeing Alexander, and Frederica... withdrew 

[her] tolerance" (318, emphasis in original). In a 1983 interview Byatt was asked if she 

was "conscious of a battle between real people and images" in The Virgin in the Garden. 

Byatt answers, 

Yes, but there is a third element, which is the rest of creation, neither 
people nor images, just what is there. Painters know naturally that the 
artist is concerned with that third element, but writers don't always. I think 
it is very important to see what is there before any of it becomes related. 
(Dusinberre interview 182) 

Van Gogh is a talisman, a symbol of plain seeing in a book which purports to do 

without symbols. This plan works, and it doesn't, as Byatt admits by the early stages of 

the novel: "Even the innocent eye does not simply receive light: it acts and orders" (Still 

Life 108). But Daniel Orton, for example, is solid and plain, seeing and naming things 

clearly. "He never now made a sermon from a metaphor, nor drew analogies: he preached 

examples, cases, lessons" (10). He comments that he names his daughter Mary "not for 

anyone. It just seemed the right name for a woman" (252). Other characters, however, are 

less successful. 

6 "Q1* y fa're - voyez-vous, je cherche d 'habitude a etre de bonne humeur assez, mais ma vie a 
moi aussi est attaquee a la racine mime, monpas aussi est chancelant." 



180 

The authoritative simplicity of Van Gogh's images and letters, Alexander finds, 

cannot be facilely duplicated. Alexander sees Vincent's letters about his paintings as 

reaching a height of accuracy Alexander cannot achieve. For example, the painting Still 

Life: Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit (which Byatt calls Breakfast Table), 

a key painting in the novel, is described by Vincent in an 1888 letter, and quoted by 

Byatt: 

A coffee pot in blue enamel, a cup (on the left) royal blue and gold, a milk 
jug checkered light blue and white, a cup (on the right) white with blue 
and orange patterns on a plate of earthenware yellow-grey, a pot of 
barbotine or majolica blue with red, green, brown patterns, finally two 
oranges and three lemons; the table is covered with a blue cloth, the 
background yellow-green, thus six different blues and four or five yellows 
and oranges. (Still Life 167, letter 489) 

She continues: "In Alexander's mind these colour-words sang like a poem, though not 

like any poem he could have written, in or out of his play" (167). Alexander is obsessed 

with the success of Van Gogh's painting of his simple yellow chair. "The man could both 

paint and name a chair," Alexander realizes (70), and he himself does not have the same 

authority in naming and painting. Antonin Artaud says, of Van Gogh's lucid descriptions 

of his paintings: 

it seems so easy to write like that. 
Well! Go ahead and try. And tell me, since you are not the author 

of a Van Gogh picture, whether you could describe it so simply, so 
succinctly, objectively, durably, validly, solidly, opaquely, massively, 
authentically and miraculously as in this little letter of his. (150) 

Despite her initial declaration that Still Life aimed for the plainness and directness 

of sight, Byatt does not distrust words, as D. H. Lawrence does, for instance. In Women 

in Love Ursula and Birkin can only achieve happiness when words stop, when they touch 

each other with "fingers of silence upon silence" (361). Byatt has said that her stories of 



181 

Stephanie and Frederica Potter were meant as answers to Lawrence's Ursula and Gudrun 

(Hass interview). Like Lawrence, she does want to add a "moral and visual quality" to 

writing, the quality Keith Alldritt identifies with Lawrence (154); she also wants, as he 

did, to experiment with realism. But his need to break free from a dependence on words 

is less acute for Byatt; she wants it all, and in Vincent Van Gogh she sees an artist who 

seems to have it all. 

§ § § 

The fictional uses Byatt has for Van Gogh are unusual. She emphasizes the 

realist, not the expressionist, in Van Gogh, unlike Artaud, whose comprehension of Van 

Gogh's solidity, as above, is not typical and who more usually emphasizes the emotional, 

violent Vincent. Although she does not dwell on his psychology, she refuses to lose sight 

of Vincent as a person, the fiesh-and-blood author of his works, in contrast with 

Heidegger and Derrida, who employ him (or, rather, his paintings of shoes) as an 

abstraction for their reflections on being and presence. However, if she had wanted an 

even plainer exemplar of the impressionist view of the physical world, she might have 

chosen Cezanne, who painted, as Rilke said approvingly (and Byatt's character Raphael 

Faber echoes), "Here it is," instead o f ! love this here" (Rilke, Letters 311, Still Life 

316, also quoted in Passions of the Mind 310). Later, as we will see, she does move in the 

direction of a simpler, saner representation when she turns her attention to Matisse. In 

Still Life. Byatt takes Vincent at his word, that he wanted to get at the truth of objects, of 

light, of colour, and she makes his electric personality of secondary importance. But she 

knows that, despite his stated intentions, metaphor and personality presents itself, subtly 

or obtrusively, in Vincent's work. The tangled matter of symbolism thwarts her desire to 



182 

find transparency in his images, and, she knows, goes a long way to explaining our 

attachment to him. 

Van Gogh was uncomfortable with symbolic readings of his paintings (especially 

if they came from others), although he did not, entirely, deny them: he wrote to Emile 

Bernard in 1889 about painting a pine tree struck by lightning, as a "defeated proud man" 

(B21). But legions of critics have gone much further, seeing Vincent's paintings and 

letters as the deeply symbolic productions of a hypersensitive, if not insane, personality. 

Vincent is seen as a messianic figure in the first article written about him, by Albert 

Aurier in 1890: "How would one explain him apart from this idee fixe that haunts his 

brain: the need for a man to arrive now, a messiah, a sower of truth, to regenerate our 

decrepit art and perhaps also our imbecile industrialist society?" (223). Theo Van Gogh 

and Emile Bernard helped spread the myth of the misunderstood martyr after Vincent's 

suicide in July 1890 (Walther/Metzger 676). Among the famous declarations of Van 

Gogh's status as martyr is Antonin Artaud's: "we are all, like poor Van Gogh, suicides by 

society!" (155). Starry Night, says art critic Helen Gardner, is not a nightscape of sky and 

village but an "anticipation of cosmic disaster" (Art Through the Ages 787). 

Van Gogh has been a popular subject for novels, poetry, and films, his famous 

self-portraits re-interpreted by other artists like Joe Fafard. In 1978, Robert Fagles 

published I, Vincent, an entire collection of poems based on Van Gogh's paintings and 

life. In 1934, Irving Stone's novel Lust for Life emphasized Vincent as a labourer, intent 

on forming links of solidarity with workers. Stone's melodramatic version of Vincent's 

mental illness has been influential; it inspired Vincente Minnelli's highly-coloured film 

in 1956, and Kirk Douglas's crazed intensity has been the benchmark for portrayals of 



183 

Vincent ever since. In 1944, Paul Eisler had taken a similar approach in his play Vincent, 

which bears some structural similarities to Alexander Wedderburn's play The Yellow 

Chair, especially in its use of scrims for projecting paintings and dividing the action on 

the stage. Eisler, like Stone - and unlike the fictional Alexander, whose play is criticized 

for not being about "social ferment" (Still Life 318) - sketches Vincent as a genuine 

friend of the common people, perhaps even as a political revolutionary. Again, in Eisler, 

the artist's mania is simplified, exaggerated. "Every picture was painted with the red of 

his heart's blood," says Eisler in his preface (7). Vincent long ago ceased to be a 

personality and became an icon. 

The histrionic Vincent who has entered the popular imagination is not the Vincent 

which A. S. Byatt uses. Vincent as political revolutionary is ignored. She does not unduly 

emphasize the severed ear, the religious fanaticism, the incarceration in an asylum, the 

suicide. Instead, she pays close attention to his paintings, particularly his less pretty still 

lifes, interiors, and landscapes (rather than his portraits and famous flower arrangements), 

and to his intentions as outlined in the famous letters to Theo, to Emile Bernard, and 

others. "What I should like to find out is the effect of an intenser blue in the sky," Van 

Gogh writes in 1888; Byatt quotes this admiringly in Still Life (84). She treats him 

seriously as a thinker of subtlety and intellectual depth. Vincent is, for Byatt, one of the 

few people who can successfully speak two distinct kinds of language, the visual and the 

verbal. The dual creation of the letters and the paintings is Van Gogh's unique 

achievement. He has, Alexander Wedderburn realizes in Still Life, "two voices" (70). In 

his poem "Harvest," Robert Fagles writes, as Van Gogh: "there are times when I cannot 

tell if I am writing drawing / or doing both." 



184 

It is ironic that Van Gogh has been one of the most influential figures in modern 

and postmodern art, when conventional representation and narrative have disappeared 

from most canvases. Although Van Gogh rarely painted overt narratives, he had great 

respect for narrative painters (Delacroix, Millet, Daumier) and a profound reverence for 

books. "Admit also that the love of books is as sacred as the love of Rembrandt - 1 even 

think the two complement each other," he wrote in 1880 (letter 133). His lists of favourite 

books are startling: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens were read over and over. 

More predictably, he loved Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Michelet, Hugo, and Shakespeare. 

He quoted profusely from poems in his letters, being a voracious reader of Christina 

Rossetti, Whitman, and Longfellow, although most editions of his letters have omitted 

the lengthy quotations as being irrelevant. The fiction of George Eliot, which he read in 

English, having taught himself several modern languages, was a great influence, as it has 

been for Byatt. In Van Gogh's "great, wise, intelligent letters," as Byatt calls them in her 

long essay "Van Gogh, Death and Summer" (Passions of the Mind 292), he commonly 

equates writers and painters, blurring the distinctions between their disciplines. He finds 

Rembrandt and Shakespeare complementary, for example, and similarly pairs Correggip 

with Michelet, Delacroix with Hugo (letter 133). For his own paintings, George Eliot was 

sometimes a correlate. He wrote to his sister Wil in 1889 about the painting of his 

bedroom at Aries: "I wanted to achieve an effect of simplicity of the sort one finds 

described in Felix H o l t . . . . Doing a simple thing with bright colors is not at all easy..." 

(W15). As is well known, complements in colour theory were vitally important to Van 

Gogh, and he seems to have reached outside the palette to see and create complementary 

patterns in literature as well. 



185 

Van Gogh's intentions, even near the end of his life, were remarkably realist, a 

point verified by Albert Boime's painstaking research on the accurate astronomical 

phenomena shown in Starry Night seen from the asylum at Saint-Remy in 1889. Van 

Gogh's lucidity, his method of painting nearly always from life and rarely from idea or 

memory (as Gauguin disastrously urged him), his admiration for realism in literature -

these factors have been underestimated in Van Gogh studies which, Byatt says in her 

essay "Van Gogh, Death and Summer," have become "a hagiography [of] the 

uncomprehended sufferer, or the flaming and bloody visionary" (Passions of the Mind 

292). That "this dear zealot," as Rilke called him (Letters 299), was a thinker, an artist 

intent on joining word and image in a new, meaningful form, is anathema to many. For 

Rilke, 

that one can read Van Gogh's letters so well, that they contain so much 
speaks in fact against him, as it also speaks against him as a painter (when 
set beside Cezanne) that he intended this and that, knew it, had found it 
out; that blue summoned orange and green, red: that he, the inquisitive, 
secretly listening at his eye's interior, had heard such news in there. (317) 

Among Byatt's several intentions in Still Life is to redirect us toward a respect for Van 

Gogh's realistic inclinations, to question the mainstream of Van Gogh criticism, and to 

accept him as a fellow literary artist. In emphasizing Van Gogh's realism, Byatt is also 

declaring her own allegiance. 

It is important to understand the manner in which Van Gogh's paintings were 

literary. Although he admired the anecdotal paintings of Millet and Delacroix and 

periodical illustrators of the day like Thomas Nast, he believed the time for such obvious 

representations was past. He put it this way to Theo: "I am trying now to exaggerate the 

essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague" (letter 490). He admired the 



186 

work of painters who were striving for reality which was simultaneously symbolic (letter 

425). He did make copies of a few anecdotal paintings, First Steps (after Millet) and The 

Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), for example, but these are uncharacteristic, undertaken 

in the stressful conditions of life in the asylum at Saint-Rimy. More usually he deemed it 

sufficient to depend upon colour to tell a story, as in the famous Night Cafe, in which he 

"tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green" (letter 

533). Byatt reaches for similar effects in The Matisse Stories, which owe something to 

Van Gogh as well as Matisse. She downplays action in favour of a scenic method which 

lingers on colours and objects. 

§ § § 

Van Gogh was particularly determined not to paint Biblical stories, even though 

religious themes continued to be present in his work long after his break with the church 

occurred in 1880, as Tsukasa Kodera has demonstrated. The fact that his friends Gauguin 

and Bernard were painting scenes from the life of Christ disturbed Vincent's northern 

Calvinist sensibilities and his distaste for obvious iconography. He chastised them 

roundly: 

One can try to give an impression of anguish without aiming straight at the 
historic Garden of Gethsemane;... it is not necessary to portray the 
characters of the Sermon on the Mount in order to produce a consoling 
and gentle motif. 

Oh! undoubtedly it is wise and proper to be moved by the Bible, 
but modern reality has got such a hold on us that, even when we attempt to 
reconstruct the ancient days in our thoughts abstractly, the minor events of 
our lives tear us away from our meditations.... 

Sometimes by erring one finds the right road. Go make up for it by 
painting your garden just as it i s . . . . (B21) 

Van Gogh's ideal realistic religious painter was Millet, who painted "the doctrine of 

Christ" (B8) but "never, or hardly ever, painted Biblical pictures" (B21). Vincent's many 



187 

paintings of olive trees were meant in the same spirit: "I shall not try to paint 'Christ in 

the Garden of Olives,' but the glowing of the olives as you still see it, giving nevertheless 

the exact proportions of the human figure in it, perhaps that would make people think" 

(letter 614). 

On the subject of religion Byatt agrees with the conventional reading of Vincent 

as an atheist or agnostic, despite her rejection of prevailing views on his sanity, 

aesthetics, intellectual ability, and politics. Her acceptance of his supposed loss of faith 

is, I think, a deliberate misreading of the evidence which she has considered so carefully 

in other respects. The influential account of his loss of faith came from Vincent's sister-

in-law, Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, who wrote in 1913: 

His illusion of bringing through the Gospel comfort and cheer into the 
miserable lives of the miners [in the Borinage in 1879] had gradually been 
lost in the bitter strife between doubt and religion, which he had to fight at 
that time, and which made him lose his former faith in God. (The Bible 
texts and religious reflections which became more and more rare in his last 
letters now stop entirely.) (Qtd. in Roskill 50) 

In her memoir, Jo Van Gogh-Bonger approvingly quotes Vincent's last doctor, Dr. 

Gachet, who wrote: "The word love of art is not exact, one must call it faith, a faith to 

which Vincent fell a martyr!" (qtd. in Roskill 82-83). Van Gogh-Bonger and Gachet were 

among the first to encourage the overly simplistic idea which still has currency in Van 

Gogh studies, that Vincent made art his new God. 

Anyone with access to the complete letters knows that the artist's religious 

reflections did not cease but continued until the end of his life, as did his Biblical 

allusions. Vincent did not reject God, although he rejected Christian institutions. His faith 

became ambivalent: "For me that God of the clergyman is as dead as a doornail. But am I 

an atheist for all that?" (letter 164). Although it is commonly accepted that art replaced 



188 

God at the spiritual centre of his life, it is more accurate to say that the two became fused. 

He became as fanatical in his commitment to painting as he had once been in his 

commitment to the church, adapting his Biblical metaphors and rhetoric to his new faith: 

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream 
which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at 
all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work 
that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. (Letter 274) 

Painting alone was not enough for Vincent. He had some hope of immortality through art, 

but he also pondered the immortality of his soul. "There is nothing to be said against the 

unlimited possibility of future existence," he wrote hopefully to Theo in 1888, offering 

several instances of proofs "of a life beyond the grave" (letter 518). Whether Vincent, in 

the last decade of his life, began to create his own theology of a fallible artist God who 

would encompass the "positive value of imperfections," as Clifford Edwards contends 

(255), or whether Vincent continued to emulate Christ through his rejection of personal 

materialism and his hope in a community of believers, merely abandoning the trappings 

of orthodox Christianity, as I believe, there is no mistaking the continued influence of 

religion. 

In her 1990 essay on Van Gogh, "Van Gogh, Death and Summer," A. S. Byatt 

circles around the question of Vincent's religion and her own beliefs, declaring, on one 

hand, their common agnosticism, and then returning, fascinated, to the elements of faith 

which remain. She first describes his "rejection of religion" as tough and 

uncompromising (Passions of the Mind 298). For herself, she says, "I baulk at the words, 

'religious,' 'spiritual,' even 'contemplative,' so what is left?" (321). They both want to 

explore, she claims, "representation without a system" (301). 



189 

Van Gogh painted the light of the sun, and the earth under the sun. He 
painted what men had made of it, and he painted it naked, as far as any 
man can. This nakedness, and ways of representing it, are part of a modern 
apprehension of reality I find deeply moving because of what has been 
stripped from it. (313) 

As Van Gogh's religious qualities have only recently been seriously considered 

by scholars, for the action of Still Life, set in the 1950s, a secular Van Gogh is very 

much in keeping with the times. However, Byatt's essay about the painter was written in 

1990, and here she misrepresents Van Gogh's agnosticism to suit her own purposes. 

Although it is true that Van Gogh struggled to paint "natural objects, including the sun, 

the savage source of light, as images of themselves, meaning themselves," as Byatt says 

(Passions of the Mind 320), it is at the same time true that Van Gogh could not help 

continuing to muse, hopefully, on Christ's example, on belief in some kind of deity, and 

on eternal life. "Christ lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists," Vincent 

wrote in 1888 to Emile Bernard (B8, emphasis in original) and, in 1889, to Theo, said 

"even when suffering, religious thoughts sometimes bring me great consolation" (letter 

605). Byatt prefers Vincent as a strictly secular figure. In this she follows a familiar line: 

most selections from his letters to Theo omit many important ones about faith. The 

intellectual currents of the twentieth century nervously eddy around and away from God, 

and studies of faith and art which might have been profitable have been prematurely 

abandoned. Byatt touches on this in "Van Gogh, Death and Summer": 

We all make meanings by using the myths and fictions of our ancestors as 
a way of making sense, or excitement, out of our experience on the earth. 
We believe and half believe and reject, we respond to certain powerful 
symbols and feel repelled by others whose death we sense. (Passions of 
the Mind 312) 

Selections of the letters edited by Roskill, de Leeuw, Auden, and Hulsker all omit letter 242, an 
important letter to Theo concerning religion. Only Hulsker uses letter 490, another important religious 
letter. De Leeuw alone uses letter 518. Hulsker and Roskill omit letter 506. 



190 

The struggle to articulate faith or atheism here is sketched or outlined only; the 

elaboration is missing. To "sense" a death is surely inadequate: Van Gogh did not reject 

all of religion so precipitately. 

Despite herself, Byatt is drawn to Van Gogh's paintings of sower and reaper, 

images which confirm his continuing interaction with Christian metaphors. They are used 

prominently in Alexander Wedderburn's play, and are found on the wall of Alexander's 

home when Daniel, in a crisis of faith, visits him in the final pages of Still Life. 

"Alexander lived with them to live with the idea of extremities he didn't, perhaps 

couldn't, know" (358). She also considers them at length in "Van Gogh, Death and 

Summer." Van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard in 1888 on the power of Christ's parables: 

"What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig tree!" (B8). The seed and grain so central to 

these paintings is explicitly identified by Vincent with Christ. "The consolation which is 

contained in [the Bible], like a kernel in a hard shell, a bitter pulp, is Christ" (B8). (The 

sower symbol adapted from Millet, as are Van Gogh's versions, continues to be identified 

with the Canadian Bible Society.) The reaper is a positive image of death also allied to 

Christ; "there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun 

flooding everything with a light of pure gold" (letter 604). 

Byatt believes that these mostly optimistic figures, surrounded by a blaze of gold, 

have achieved a balance between the earth, standing in for realism and the human 

condition, and the sun, which Tsukasa KOdera identifies as a replacement for church in 

Vincent's theology (238), and which Byatt cites as a return to ancient mythic worship 

(Passions of the Mind 331). Although Byatt prefers to read Van Gogh as an agnostic, her 

keen interest in these particular paintings demonstrates a continued concern with matters 



191 

of religious faith. Byatt chooses not to read the happy death of The Reaper as an explicit 

affirmation of Christian hope. But unlike those who see in it merely Vincent's acute 

death wish, Byatt sees in it an acceptance of the interrelation of life and death, a kind of 

immortality without attached belief systems. 

§ § § 

Most of the Van Gogh canvases Byatt mentions in Still Life were done in the 

prolific final two years of Van Gogh's life, when his mature style took hold. They are 

characterized by boldly-scored impasto, insistent brushstrokes, and vibrant colours, often 

complementary. They are Van Gogh at a moderate boil. O f the 25 or more canvases that 

Byatt discusses in Still Life, she does not include the famous madly whirling or louring 

skies of Starry Night, Wheat Field with Crows,8 or the paintings of flame-like cypresses, 

such definite death symbols. She refuses to emphasize the famous images of mental 

anguish. John Berger has pointed out that the spectator's reaction to Wheat Field with 

Crows changes utterly when one is told that it is the last painting Van Gogh painted 

before his suicide (Ways of Seeing 27-28), but this chronology has recently been proven 

to be false (Hulsker, New Complete Van Gogh 478). In any case, to dwell on mad Van 

Gogh is not Byatt's interest; neither are the more decorative and cheerful works unduly 

stressed (the famous Sunflowers are less important to her than other works such as 

Vincent's empty chair and The Breakfast Table). She is drawn by the paintings which 

mediate between extremes, and writes in the 1987 story "Sugar" of her dislike of the 

overwrought paintings. 

8 Byatt repeatedly describes Van Gogh's final paintings as being of corn fields (see Sugar 240, 
Still Life 165, Passions of the Mind 306), although all the catalogues I have consulted clearly label them as 
wheat fields. John Berger does the same. They seem to be following an English practice of using corn as a 
generic category for all kinds of grain. 



192 

I could not like, I could not respond to the very last paintings, the tortured 
and incompetent cornfield, with the black despairing birds crowding over 
the paths which lead nowhere. But the great paintings of Aries and St 
Rimy shone. The purple irises on gold. The perturbed bedroom. The 
solitary chair. The reaper, making his deathly way through white light in 
fields of shining corn. (Sugar 240) 

The images which attract Byatt are redolent with what Alexander calls "quiddity" 

(Still Life 179). Using William Carlos Williams's dictum "no ideas but in things," which 

she quotes in Still Life (301), she initially approaches the pictures of the yellow chair, 

piles of yellow novels, and boats at Saintes-Maries with admiration for their independent 

status as things. Frederica Potter, as met in the Prologue in 1980, has partly overcome her 

lack of visual perspicacity, and, studying Van Gogh, realizes that "one should never... 

ignore surface meanings in favour of implications" (Still Life 11). Van Gogh teaches 

Alexander that "you could see things before saying them, indeed without saying them" 

(163). Even in a section about Marcus Potter and his geometric vision, Van Gogh 

obtrudes, although Marcus shows no interest in painting. The narrator interrupts Marcus's 

story to report: "As Vincent Van Gogh said, in our world, olive trees may stand for 

themselves, maybe must stand for themselves, and so with cypresses, sunflowers, corn, 

human flesh" (302). 

The narrator and characters of Still Life return obsessively to this ideal, of an 

Adamic state where things can be seen and named (or painted) for what they are, and 

nothing more nor less need interfere. Because Van Gogh has so often been used as an 

example of a painter whose personal vision manipulated reality, Byatt takes pleasure in 

pointing out the contrary, just how precise and true his vision was. Alexander, visiting 

Aries, finds that the site of Vincent's Yellow House is instantly recognizable (67); 

Frederica sees with a shock that the boats at Saintes-Maries are exactly as Vincent 



193 

painted them, even to the point of seeing that one of them has the same name, Amitie, 

recorded in Vincent's 1888 painting (73). In 1882, Vincent wrote to Theo that "the surest 

way, which cannot fail, is to work from nature faithfully and energetically" (letter 221). 

The narrator of Still Life believes that the Sunflowers "were exact records of particular 

dying flowerheads in 1888" (174). 

Byatt does give credence to the idea that artists and others involved in 

representation re-make the world, and that the south of France looks as it does to 

Frederica and Alexander because of Vincent's powerful mediation of the landscape. 

Thus, a certain colour of yellow is "Van Gogh chrome, not Renaissance gilt" (Still Life 

75), just as Van Gogh himself classified colours using other painters, as in his term 

"Velasquez gray" (letter 521). A. S. Byatt's ideas about Vincent are an amalgam of 

Romantic idealization of the artist, a modernist version of realism, and postmodern doubt 

about the reliability of art or artist. This last is recognized by her rather than ascribable to 

her. The importance of Van Gogh as a mediator of vision for those who come after is not, 

for Byatt, to be underestimated. But, says Byatt, the status of the author/artist is less 

important than trying to see, name, and paint the thing itself, and Van Gogh, thinks 

Alexander, could "get nearer to the life of the plums than he ever could" (Still Life 165). 

In this way, Byatt refutes thinkers like Derrida who suggest, as David Joel Shapiro says, 

that Van Gogh and others "are hallucinating presence" if they believe in the solidity of a 

colour or a pair of shoes, or in the significance of the artist who represents them (282). 

These ideals constantly slip out of reach, however. Alexander finds that his 

attempt to create a "plain" drama about Vincent fails: The Yellow Chair becomes a 

battle of personalities (Gauguin versus Van Gogh) rather than a battle of colours and 



194 

forms (Still Life 83), is given a Freudian interpretation by the director, and is considered 

to have captured the mystical rather than the essential in Vincent's story (313, 316). Byatt 

and her characters are forced to realize that we "use his images as icons by which to 

recognise certain things" (60), which militates against their independence as things. And 

his personality must be admitted as a powerful factor in the way we read the paintings: 

Alexander lives, for a time, almost in a trance, steeped in the "yellow light" of Vincent's 

world, which suffuses his own bedroom (167-68); Alexander admits that Gauguin's 

equally "rich and strange" colours, on the other hand, leave him "unmoved" (6). 

Alexander, making love to Elinor Poole in his yellow bedroom, enjoys the "surface" and 

"form" of the woman rather than knowing the woman herself (174), aestheticizing his life 

as a result of his Van Gogh studies. Van Gogh's power as a writer is explained, in Still 

Life, partly by his original use of colour adjectives, which rarely "agree with the nouns 

they qualified. The result was that they could almost be read as things more real than the 

things they qualified" (79). 

Alexander, our chief translator of Van Gogh, begins to see things too much as 

things. He sees his own "breakfast table [as] a still life, with the easy life of vegetables 

and culture" (164). But the human life he is avoiding should not be so easy. Frederica, 

under Alexander's tutelage, studies visual objects intently, and contemplates a primeval 

preserved body in the British Museum as Death, "the thing itself." Frederica, to her 

credit, rejects the inhumanity of this approach; of course mummified museum artifact is 

not Death itself "Let's get out into the sun, said Frederica, let's go" (82). Alexander 

eventually realizes that he is in danger of elevating things too highly, and has "a dim 

sense that it was possible to conceive of a state of affairs where this busy naming and 



195 

comparing might not seem as much of a biological imperative as an unreflecting man 

might suppose" (163). Although Byatt makes no statements about genius, none of the 

characters in Still Life can even approach Vincent's success. Alexander's play is 

compared unfavourably not only to Vincent's work, but also to Stephanie Potter's 

triumphant creation of a child, something whole, natural, and essential. 

He had got the language as right as he could. As he levelled and 
counted the pages he thought that a play neither came together nor 
achieved its own life in any way to which the comparison of childbirth 
was helpful. This had been put together as jigsaws are, as patchwork is, 
with a templet, not a germ-cell, to guide its formation. Its scales were 
stuck on like the panoply of the Pearly King, not grown like fish scales or 
fowl feathers. It was made of language, which could still be jigged, 
adapted, re-ordered. It was made, that was the point, its 'growth' was 
metaphorical. Wasn't it? 

Anyway, it was finished. (253) 

The minor character Gerard Wijnnobel, who often acts as a mouthpiece for Byatt, 

reminds Alexander that a Van Gogh still life - "nature morte" - can be read as a 

Freudian death wish, "the kind of lifeless life of things bathed in light. . . another version 

of the golden age - an impossible stasis, a world without desire and division" (179). And 

for A. S. Byatt, the painting represents yet another Golden Age, a time of innocent 

knowledge no longer attainable. 

Retreating from the possibility that the essential quality of an object can be seen 

and named, Byatt then contemplates the material elements of expression, the methods of 

art. First she considers form, the necessary ordering of reality which artists and writers 

provide for "the thing itself." Van Gogh's uniquely heavy brushstrokes, she believes, 

"ordered his world of raw and sophisticated vision," creating maps and patterns which 

were part of his attempt to remain sane (Still Life 109). "The brushstrokes in 'The Sower' 

are almost tessellations," she says (109), that is, parts of a mosaic, a regular and orderly 



196 

design. Colour theory, adapted from Delacroix, was another method of ordering 

Vincent's vision of a chaotic world, and through the 1880s he struggled toward a theory 

of colour which was independent of the world but strongly suggestive of it. In 1885, 

Vincent declared that "colour expresses something by itself' (letter 429, emphasis in 

original), and in 1888 he proclaimed, "I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist" (letter 

520). For W. H. Auden, 

what Van Gogh is trying to do is to substitute for a historic iconography, 
which has to be learned before it can be recognized, an iconography of 
color and form relations which reveals itself instantaneously to the senses, 
and is therefore impossible to misinterpret. ("Calm Even in the 
Catastrophe" 300) 

Order, suggests Byatt's Gerard Wijnnobel, is possible in picture-making, 

mathematics, and geometry, in a way that it cannot be in verbal language. He adds that it 

is, however, "human nature" to strive for order in all our representational systems (Still 

Life 275-77). One of Van Gogh's methods of maintaining order was to use 

complementary colours (red/green, yellow/purple, orange/ blue) to outline his ideas, 

sometimes literally outlining his subjects with haloes of their complement. The 

compound meanings of The Reaper, described by Vincent as "almost smiling," are 

captured in paint which is "all yellow, except a line of violet hills, a pale fair yellow" 

(letter 604). He also painted subjects as complements of each other: he identified his 

sower and reaper in this way. Byatt and her characters try similar strategies. The "I love 

this here" and "Here it is" ideas which Rilke proposes when discussing Cezanne are 

seized upon by Frederica as necessary complements to explain Van Gogh (317). Nigel 

Reiver, the unabashedly physical man whom Frederica will marry, is a complement to 

Raphael, the intellectual she has previously been in love with. Even the ideas which 



197 

shimmer throughout the book can be seen as complements of each other: plain speech 

and metaphor, making things and giving birth to them, being and saying. It is tempting to 

find comfort in these complements, but the comfort does not last. Stephanie hopes for a 

balance of motherhood and scholarship and finds death. Frederica rejects the "only 

connect" ideal she reads in Forster and Lawrence. Alexander abandons visual art and 

poetry, while Marcus abandons visions. Each of them settles for an intellectual life which 

is less dangerous and less stimulating, leaving off the attempt to find equilibrium between 

complements. 

§ § § 

Ultimately, Byatt finds that her identification with the artistry of Van Gogh is 

untenable and dangerous. His personality is too conspicuous; his subjects have been 

adapted as icons and can no longer be identified as plain "realism." Although she 

believes that she and her characters share with Van Gogh a northern sensibility, "northern 

brains [which] responded biologically and spiritually to tones of black, donkey-brown, 

varied greys, touches of white in dark" (Still Life 9), and which reject institutionalized 

and ritualized religion, his willingness to explore the outer reaches of what is sanely 

knowable is frightening. Van Gogh also was a shockingly frank observer of himself, 

making dozens of direct and often unflattering self-portraits. His relationship with his 

self, as graphically demonstrated in his self-portraits, is boldly investigative in a way that 

Byatt never is. She has written only one clearly autobiographical story, "Sugar," and 

declared that it would likely be her only story written in the first person (Wachtel 1993: 

88). (This has turned out not to be true; her recent story "Jael" [1997] is also in the first 

person.) She abstracts in a way which Van Gogh, usually, does not. What she wants from 



198 

Vincent is pure colour and pure form, and the complex religious and psychological issues 

which come with his methods are, in the end, too much. Once or twice, in Still Life, she 

records a scene with painstaking accuracy, using Vincent as a model: 

They rested on elbows, or lay stretched like stars, stomachs in sand, 
smooth heads together, a brown hand lifting a white cigarette to a rose-
painted mouth, and a line of malachite green smoke going up into the air, 
which was not here the intense cobalt of the plain of Orange, but pearl-
cream-gold, a heavy air, soft and undulating like the pale sand and beyond 
it the warm, hazed, sand-green sea. The figures were not hard-edged, like 
the high boats, but soft patches of bright colour, impinged on by soft sand. 
(73) 

Byatt's scene, on the beach at Saintes-Maries, draws us back to Van Gogh's letter from 

the same place: 

One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore. It was not 
gay, but neither was it sad - it was - beautiful. The deep blue sky was 
flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense 
cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky 
Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, 
pink, more brilliant, more sparklingly gemlike than at home - even in 
Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires. 
(Letter 499) 

The differences, I think, are plain. Van Gogh has more ease with fundamentals; he makes 

no effort to strain after synonyms for blue or for unusual metaphors. He also attaches an 

ambivalent emotion to the scene (neither gay nor sad) simultaneous with the appellation 

of its beauty. Byatt's lovely set-piece, by comparison, contains no emotional investment. 

§ § § 

From Byatt's descriptions of the Van Gogh paintings she admires, one can 

enumerate the characteristics of his work she aspires to duplicate in writing. Clearly one 

of the things she admires the most is the simultaneity of contrasted thoughts and emotions 

which can be represented in a painting. The first painting mentioned in Still Life, one of 



199 

Vincent's Arlesian Poet's Garden paintings of 1888, arrives early, in the third paragraph. 

The painting is described as "serenely impassioned" (2), a mixture of modifiers not 

unrelated to the title of Byatt's 1991 essay collection, Passions of the Mind. Later in Still 

Life. Byatt discusses Vincent's painting of his bedroom, which he claimed to be 

expressive of "absolute restfulness" (B22). Byatt, like many other viewers, finds the 

opposite. "He wrote also that the broad lines of the furniture must express inviolable rest 

but the deliberate distortions of perspective make the walls and ceiling, the very paintings 

on the wall, seem louring and crushing" (Still Life 169-170). Meyer Schapiro has 

speculated that Van Gogh found rest in such a painting because he had painted through 

his anxiety to a catharsis: "the final effect upon him is one of order and serenity after the 

whirlwind of feeling" (92). The effect upon others is quite different. Daniel Orton 

speculates on the strangeness of hanging Vincent's Harvest at La Crau in hospitals and 

mental wards; while Vincent's ordering of nature signifies harmony for himself, Daniel 

thinks that for others it is "not serene, overexcited" (Still Life 4). 

This simultaneous experience of pain and order for the painter, of disorientation 

and recognition for the observer, fascinates Byatt. There is a fullness to Van Gogh's 

works, both written and painted, which she strives to emulate. His earliest success, The 

Potato-Eaters (1885), manages to be, she says in Still Life, an entire "sermon in paint 

about the basic necessities of life" (166). Alexander studies a Sunflowers print which 

makes him "daily more puzzled and delighted" (160). Although the reapers, sowers, olive 

trees, and sunflowers which Vincent painted over and over do stand for themselves, as he 

insisted they must, they unavoidably stand also for something else, as he also knew. 

"Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower," Byatt observes (2). 



200 

Vincent's writings share the simultaneity and near-impossible plenitude 

observable in paintings like Harvest at La Crau, in which the perspective remains almost 

absurdly clear to the horizon. Here is a typical passage from a letter of 1889: 

I beg you, send rne the canvas soon if it is possible, and then I 
think that I shall need another ten tubes of zinc white. A l l the same, I 
know well that healing comes - if one is brave - from within through 
profound resignation to suffering and death, through the surrender of your 
own will and of your self-love. But that is no use to me, I love to paint, to 
see people and things and everything that makes our life - artificial - if 
you like. Yes, real life would be a different thing, but I do not think I 
belong to that category of souls who are ready to live and also at any 
moment ready to suffer. 

What a queer thing the touch is, the stroke of the brush. (Letter 
605) 

Although Byatt rarely strives to emulate Vincent's perilous abundance, but instead stays 

on the rational or minimal side of the equation, she nevertheless occasionally achieves in 

print an equivalent to what Meyer Schapiro calls "the loading of the pigment" in Van 

Gogh's paintings (93). 

On his daily walks to the B B C [Alexander] discovered the glories of 
Goodge Street and Charlotte Street, Italian grocers smelling of cheese, 
winecasks, salami, Jewish bakers smelling of cinnamon, and poppyseed, 
Cypriot greengrocers overflowing with vegetables unobtainable in the 
North, aubergines, fennel, globe artichokes, courgettes, glistening, 
brilliant, green, purple, sunshine-glossed. (Still Life 161) 

Here, modifiers and colours have, nearly, the same status as the nouns, "brilliant" and 

"purple" becoming as solid as the aubergines. This is precisely what Alexander has 

observed about Van Gogh's own prose, that his colour adjectives "could almost be read 

as things more real than the things they qualified" (79). 

As indicated by the title of the novel "in which the idea of Van Gogh stalk[s] in 

and out" (Sugar 236), the painter's still lifes are particularly important to Byatt. She 

returns frequently to a painting which she calls Breakfast Table: "a clean, bright paradox, 



201 

still and very much alive, held together by the contrast and coherence of blue and yellow" 

(Still Life 166-67). This painting has been featured as the cover of some editions of Still 

Life. Alexander, who is said to be "obsessed" with the painting, values its quality of 

"stillness" and knows that he cannot duplicate it in his play about Vincent. "How could 

one dramatise stillness?" (178). The surface of Breakfast Table is calmer than most Van 

Goghs are; the complements of orange and blue provide focus. Yet the shapes of the 

objects are slightly disturbed and one cannot honestly call the spatial arrangement restful. 

Van Gogh's still lifes exemplify the painter's stubbornly individual commitment 

to truthfulness, what Meyer Schapiro calls his "personal realism" (93). If Byatt is tempted 

by the authority of such paintings to think that the stillness and simplicity of the painted 

image might be replicated in words, she recognizes that life, lived by humans, messily, 

disastrously, is not static or still - a human being is not a blue enamel coffee pot. On the 

final page of Still Life, Byatt brings the "breakfast table" image to life, and has 

Alexander pour the grief-stricken Daniel coffee from a blue pot very similar to the one 

Van Gogh painted, offering him sustenance and fellowship in a way that a painting 

cannot. Here is "still life" (or "life still") - beyond Stephanie's death, which Daniel must 

will himself to survive, beyond a painting which cannot, after all, show any of the 

characters how to live. Alexander has hung copies of Sower and Reaper on his walls and 

knows that, although he lives with them "to live with the idea of extremities," the 

extremities of birth and death the paintings represent he "didn't, perhaps couldn't, know"; 

he is also aware that most visitors "might see in them the usual bourgeois brightening-up" 

(Still Life 358). 



202 

§ § § 

In Byatt's autobiographical story "Sugar" she enumerates the Van Gogh 

reproductions which hung in her family home in Yorkshire when she grew up in the 

1940s. Her parents' choices are surprising: "a Zouave in full oriental trousers and red fez, 

sitting on a bench on a floor whose perspective rose dizzily and improperly towards 

him"; a portrait of the son of Roulin, the postman who befriended Van Gogh in Aries; the 

boats on the beach at Saintes-Maries; and, more conventionally, one of the bridges at 

Aries (Sugar 234-35). With the exception of the boats, which Frederica recognizes on her 

trip to France in Still Life, just as Byatt recognized them "with shock" on her own first 

trip to France, the Drabble family's Van Gogh collection does not appear among the 

many paintings Byatt analyses in Still Life. In "Sugar," the choice of the paintings has 

been, for Byatt's father, Judge Drabble, an important personal statement; his daughter 

makes a new set of choices for herself when writing her own version of Van Gogh. The 

Zouave, he tells his daughter when he is dying, was his favourite, because it was "a very 

powerful image of pure male sexuality. Absolutely straightforward and simple" (237). 

One could say the same about the Portrait of Armand Roulin. He is an unusual subject for 

Van Gogh, this suave young man, with a saucily-worn hat and a handsome moustache. 

The paintings do indicate a good deal about the people who admire them. Since Antonia 

can remember these so clearly - and reject them decisively - and since her father, on his 

deathbed, is pleased to recall the aspects of his personality the paintings represented for 

him, the potency of the art works is not inconsiderable. 



203 

Byatt still holds to theories of painting as an index of personality (for artist and 

spectator) in a way which some of the more abstract theorizing in the discursive sections 

of the Potter novels can obscure. And her identification with Van Gogh, whom W. H. 

Auden calls a "religious realist" ("Calm Even in the Catastrophe" 299), despite Vincent's 

rejection of the church, signals that Byatt, at least in the 1980s, was not as ready to let go 

of religion as she claimed to be. Van Gogh's effort to paint internal and external reality 

with colourful intensity appealed to Byatt's ambitions at the time. Still Life explores 

whether it really might not be possible to have it all: simplicity and fullness, faith and 

doubt, anguish and relief, sight and word. When this hypothesis fails, Van Gogh drops 

out of Byatt's work and is replaced by a less heated painter, one who "was born to 

simplify painting," as Gustave Moreau said (qtd. in Aragon 298). This painter, who 

becomes the basis of several stories by Byatt in the 1990s, is Henri Matisse. 

§ § § 

For many people, Henri Matisse's art expresses sensuality and pleasure, and is 

primarily decorative. He is the wizard of colour, creating, as Louis Aragon says, 

a great calm, dazzling fiesta, a sort of challenge to things as they are, 
flinging them into the brazier of colour, into those vast flaming canvases, 
sometimes quite small but alwayis vast, where nothing is of its own colour 
but always of Matisse's colour, seen with his eye. (276) 

In one of his rare public statements, written early in his career, Matisse seemed to 

confirm this view of himself as a partisan of voluptuousness, but revising it in a more 

placid direction. 

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of 
troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every 
mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for 
example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a 



204 

good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue. ("Notes of a Painter," 
qtd. in Flam 42) 

One of his most famous paintings, Luxe, calme et volupte (1904-1905), is based on these 

lines from Baudelaire's L'Invitation au voyage: 

La, tout n 'est qu 'ordre et beaute 
Luxe, calme et volupte 
[There, all is order and beauty, 

Luxury, calm and sensuous delight] (Qtd. in Aragon 282) 

Matisse admits that this becomes a motto for him. According to Lawrence Gowing, 

Matisse's pursuit of such beauty exploits a "Post-Impressionist apparatus, which had 

been devised to deal directly with the world [for] quite a different and opposite purpose." 

Says Gowing, for Matisse the "pictorial means themselves," rather than the material 

world, "offered an escape" (49). His paintings of tranquil female nudes have especially 

contributed to this idea of escapism into a "secret seraglio world made carefully 

benevolent" (Elderfield 49). 

Matisse, at first glance, is as unlike Van Gogh as a painter can be, and one 

wonders at A . S. Byatt's intense interest in both of them. There is no doubt that she uses 

Matisse to explore themes of beauty, order, and harmony in The Matisse Stories, and that 

she could make little similar use of Van Gogh. Matisse's world, she wrote in a review of 

Hilary Spurling's biography of the painter in 1998, "is a world of Platonic forms, of the 

perfected exploration of the relations of colours and spaces, frames and shapes" and our 

experience of him "is of a timeless and abstracted ordering" ("A Very Ordinary Genius" 

28). The three stories in The Matisse Stories are carefully-wrought, exquisitely-detailed 

studies of women and of their domestic situations for which Matisse, that painter of 



205 

charming interiors, enigmatic windows, and silent families, serves as an admirable 

model. 

However, just as Byatt inverted the conventional view of Van Gogh, insisting on 

his realism, desire for human connection, and intellectual capability instead of his erratic 

behaviour and mental isolation, her rendering of Matisse is equally individual. Two of the 

Matisse stories designate "power" as the attractive element in his paintings. "Not 

softness, he said to Debbie, power, calm power" is the description of Matisse in "Art 

Work" (The Matisse Stories 56), while a near-identical conversation takes place in "The 

Chinese Lobster": "Not consolation, Dr Himmelblau, life and power" (121). In the latter 

story, the Matisse scholar and painter Perry Diss (based perhaps on Lawrence Gowing, 

whose prose also seems to have influenced Byatt's descriptions of Matisse) provides this 

unexpected summary: 

Matisse was cunning and complex and violent and controlled and he knew 
he had to know exactly what he was doing. He knew the most shocking 
thing he could tell people about the purpose of his art was that it was 
designed to please and to be comfortable. That sentence of his about the 
armchair is one of the most wickedly provocative things that has ever been 
said about painting. You can daub the whole of the Centre Pompidou with 
manure from top to bottom and you will never shock as many people as 
Matisse did by saying art was like an armchair. (122-23, emphasis in 
original) 

On the subject of Matisse's depiction of pleasure, Diss has this to say: 

Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr Himmelblau? . . . Pleasure is life, 
Dr Himmelblau, and most of us don't have it, or not much, or mess it up, 
and when we see it in those blues, those roses, those oranges, that 
vermilion, we should fall down and worship - for it is the thing itself 
(123-24) 

Byatt's view of Matisse joins these two surprising elements - profound, indeed 

holy pleasure, and subtle violence - in a way which few commentators have done. To 



206 

provide pictorial references for these elements, I would choose the Dance murals done for 

the Barnes Foundation in the 1930s, exercises in soaring vivacity, and the 1914 image 

Open Window. Collioure. a bleak expression of anxiety about World War I, dominated 

by a huge black vertical. The three most notable paintings mentioned in Byatt's three 

Matisse stories amalgamate these underrated aspects of the artist. Pink Nude, described 

lovingly in "Medusa's Ankles" as "so calm, so damn sure of herself' (The Matisse 

Stories 4) is actually a monochrome abstraction of woman on a disorienting background; 

The Silence Living in Houses and The Black Door manage to encompass both composure 

and menace. 

Matisse saw no great distance between himself and Van Gogh. In "The Role and 

Modalities of Colour" Matisse wrote: 

From Delacroix to Van Gogh and especially Gauguin, through the 
Impressionists, who cleared the way, and Cezanne, who gives the 
definitive impulse and introduces coloured volumes, one can follow this 
rehabilitation of the role of colour, and the restitution of its emotive 
power. (Qtd. in Flam 155) 

Both Matisse and Van Gogh are realists experimenting with abstraction and with a use of 

colour and form which Matisse called a "return to the purity of the means" (qtd. in Flam 

123). Neither painter would countenance a slavish attitude toward material reality nor a 

carelessly arbitrary and wholly personal manner. This balance between realism and an 

expressive sort of abstraction makes them attractive to Byatt, who is always intrigued by 

dialectical movements between extremes and the resultant creation of new forms and 

ideas. Matisse's few statements about art are carefully-honed condensations of a lifetime 

of aesthetic thought, and often apply equally well to Van Gogh: "Colors and lines are 

forces, and the secret of creation lies in the play and balance of those forces" (qtd. in 



207 

Flam 219). While Matisse never sounds as ethereal as Wassily Kandinsky, who said "art 

is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to 

the improvement and refinement of the human soul" (54), Matisse, like Van Gogh, felt 

called to painting as a vocation and believed in the power of art to attain a purity of 

expression which would express essential truths. 

Henri Matisse said, "You want to be a painter? First of all you must cut out your 

tongue because your decision has taken away from you the right to express yourself with 

anything but your brush" (qtd. in Flam 145). Given this sentiment, one which has become 

infamous for Matisse, why would A. S. Byatt choose his paintings to further her 

exploration of verbal/visual fusion? First, the painter was exaggerating his estrangement 

from words, much as he told his students that in drawing "One can always exaggerate in 

the direction of truth" (qtd. in Flam 152). Second, as Louis Aragon writes in Henri 

Matisse: a Novel. Matisse had a profound love and respect for the written and spoken 

word. He read Baudelaire and Mallarme, wrote poetry, was a keen conversationalist, 

encouraged Aragon in writing texts to accompany Matisse's drawings, and took pleasure 

in accepting commissions to illustrate volumes of poetry and prose (Aragon and Flam 

passim). 

Byatt is even less interested in Matisse's personality than she was in Van Gogh's. 

Matisse's life was considerably less fiery than Vincent's; he has inspired far less fiction, 

film, and postmodern commentary. Aside from Aragon's "novel" - a mixture of memoir, 

tribute, and analysis - only Byatt's Matisse Stories and Peter Everett's Matisse's War 

(1996) use Matisse as an interpretive device for fiction. Gertrude Stein's "portraits" of 



208 

Picasso and Matisse in "G. M. P." are in an entirely different province, and offer no 

useful point of comparison. 

Everett's treatment of Matisse could not be more different than Byatt's, yet Byatt 

had high praise for Matisse's War when it was published (see her choices for 

"International Books of the Year" in the Times Literary Supplement in 1996). Everett's 

novel is a confusing evocation of the often horrific political and cultural scene in France 

in the 1940s which disconcertingly uses many of the techniques of the surrealist writers 

who populate the novel. Matisse's passive presence, painting while apparently oblivious 

to the war, comes in for sharp criticism from most of the characters, and is made to seem 

foolish by the narrator. Everett puts unlikely dialogue in Matisse's mouth. "My work 

could be no more than a jaded parody of past ideas; the slapdash shorthand of an old man 

trying to immobilise his serenity" (264). The friendship between Aragon, the Communist 

Resistance hero, and Matisse, the aging post-impressionist devoted to colour, seems 

inexplicable. And while Everett attempts to cast some of the paintings into words, as 

Byatt does, his efforts are dispirited. The depressing experience of Matisse's War 

contrasts sharply with Byatt's writing about Matisse, which is firmly located in her belief 

that Matisse's achievement in the capturing of pure colour and joyous vitality is 

unparalleled. 

Matisse is important to Byatt for a number of reasons. Her primary use of him is 

to emphasize, even more than Van Gogh could, the importance of just looking. A 

character in "Art Work" discusses her husband's imaginatively realist paintings in a 

manner learned from approaching Matisse: 

They are miraculous, they are like those times when time seems to stop, 
and you just look at something, and see it, out of time, and you feel 



209 

surprised that you can see at all, you are so surprised, and the seeing goes 
on and on, and gets better and better (The Matisse Stories 53) 

Also of importance is the fact that Matisse uses no single method: his styles, 

extraordinarily broad through his entire career, range through pointillism, impressionism, 

fauvism, varying degrees of abstraction, and the careful realism of some of the drawings. 

Further, Matisse's paintings often have no single focal point on which the eye may rest: 

this can make viewing troubling and confusing, but it contributes to a democratization of 

the viewing experience, wherein the viewer has a number of choices in making sense of a 

painting. (See Red Studio for a good example.) His paintings are not, however, irrational, 

as is made clear by Susannah in "Medusa's Ankles," who values coherence and precision 

(The Matisse Stories 9, 19) and cares deeply for Matisse. In addition, Matisse (more than 

Van Gogh) is a "painter of perpetual hope" who hardly ever paints explicit pain (Aragon 

240, 184). Aragon reports that Matisse said that he painted optimistic scenes in "self-

defence," and Aragon carefully qualified that optimism on his friend's behalf: "Let it be 

understood what despair is implicit in my use of the word optimism" (285). That Byatt 

values this heavily freighted optimism is clear in her story "The Chinese Lobster," in 

which suicidal characters find in Matisse not only a reason to embrace life but a 

recognition of their despair. 

What Matisse cannot provide is the sort of complex interaction with the written 

word which Van Gogh represents for Byatt. Matisse was not a literary artist, and Byatt, in 

these stories, relaxes her quest for verbal/visual consolidation. Instead, in her own 

medium, she simply mimics Matisse's visual strategies. Matisse's emphasis on the 

"purity of means," especially on the vitality of colour, is adopted by Byatt in purposefully 

pleasurable sections of The Matisse Stories describing colours, domestic objects, and art 



210 

works. In trying to write like Matisse paints, Byatt has more success than the narrator or , 

Alexander did in Still Life, where the prose and painting style of Van Gogh proved 

unattainable for others. The Matisse Stories dispenses with the self-conscious strategies 

deployed by the narrator of Still Life and with the use of Alexander as a surrogate author 

to try out various representational theories. The narrator of The Matisse Stories makes a 

straightforward attempt to write like a painter, without convolution or irony. The 

domestic setting of most of Matisse's canvases has a nice fit with the feminine sphere 

Byatt is examining; when Susannah, in a fit of wrath, destroys the interior of a hair salon 

in "Medusa's Ankles," the Matisse colouration of the scene is entirely appropriate. 

It was a strange empty battlefield, full of glittering fragments and sweet-
smelling rivulets and puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, 
patches of crimson-streaked foam and odd intense spills of orange henna 
or cobalt and copper. (The Matisse Stories 26) 

Matisse scholar Jack Flam writes that "what Matisse sought in his paintings was a 

pre-verbal means of expression, innocent of and resistant to analytical thought" (7). 

Although this is perhaps stated too strongly, it is basically correct. Byatt confirms this in 

the opening pages of the story "Art Work," in which she analyses the enigmatic The 

Silence Living in Houses and is unable to come to a definitive conclusion about its 

meaning. The critique is marked by uncertainty - "The mother, it may be, has a reflective 

chin propped on a hand propped on the table" (The Matisse Stories 31) - and ends with 

an unresolved question. "Who is the watching totem under the ceiling?" (32). (Critic 

Kathleen Coyne Kelly in her Twayne study of Byatt does an astonishingly reductive 

analysis of the painting, arriving effortlessly at the conclusion that the painting is of a 

mother and child and the totem in the painting is equated with the cleaning lady in the 

story, Sheba Brown.) The power of the painting is undeniable, however, and Byatt 



211 

emulates whatever she can of this power, scaling down her expectations of the Van Gogh 

years. 

Overall, The Matisse Stories concede the mastery of the visual sphere. Susannah, 

the aging academic about to go on television in "Medusa's Ankles," knows that her 

appearance is primary, and her words secondary. "So interesting are [the] revelations [of 

the cameras] that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a 

chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists" (20). The 

elegant scholar Perry Diss, when explaining his love of Matisse (and his distress at a 

feminist project to "revise" Matisse) becomes inarticulate in "The Chinese Lobster": 

It seems to me - forgive me, Dr Himmelblau - but this - this caca offends 
something I do hold sacred, a word that would make that little bitch 
snigger, no doubt, but sacred, yes - it seems to me, that if she could have 
produced worked copies of those - those masterpieces - those shining -
never mind - if she could have done some work - understood the blues, 
and the pinks, and the whites, and the oranges, yes, and the blacks too -
and if she could still have brought herself to feel she must - must savage 
them - then I would have had to feel some respect. (112-13) 

A catalogue of colours is, finally, the best that Matisse admirers can hope to produce in 

words. But it is a considerable achievement. For the protagonists of "The Chinese 

Lobster," a stark comparison of the "white" realm of suicide with the blacks and oranges 

of Matisse, which represent life, is all they need to communicate with each other (129-

132). 

The stuttering identification of Matisse with the sacred, above, demonstrates that 

Byatt has not abandoned all of the investigative goals of her work on Van Gogh. Like 

Van Gogh, Matisse believed he was serving something higher and purer in his painting; 

Jack Flam says that "unlike the Impressionists . . . Matisse emphasized the imaginative 

and even the ethical aspects of seeing, rather than simply the physical process" (7). His 



212 

design for the Vence chapel near the end of his life has been the focus for most 

discussions of Matisse and God. Matisse very rarely introduces God into explanations of 

his art; the statement "God guides my hand" in a 1945 interview (qtd. in Flam 163) is 

exceptional. The importance of the artist takes precedence in a 1951 discussion of Vence: 

"The artist is revealed with complete freedom... .This marks the encounter of the artist 

with the great tragedy of Christ" (198-99). In 1952 he removed himself still further from 

Christianity: "My only religion is the love of the work to be created, the love of creation, 

and great sincerity. I did the chapel with the sole intention of expressing myself totally" 

(212). 

Like Matisse, Byatt wavers gingerly on the question of a faith in higher things: it 

is there, and it is not. Van Gogh, who, says Byatt, "both represented and understood the 

knotted religious and artistic tensions of his time" and "was driven by a desire to make an 

art that would contain and express the spiritual meanings he had once seen in his 

religion" (Passions of the Mind 293, 296), represents a struggle with faith too intense and 

troubled. Van Gogh invested his whole being in this struggle; Matisse was able to 

displace such questions onto an investigation of line, colour and the relationships 

between objects and personalities, but the struggle is nonetheless important. Matisse 

wrote in 1953 that the artist "has to look at life as he did when he was a c h i l d . . . . Great 

love is needed to inspire and sustain this continuous striving toward truth" (qtd. in Flam 

218-19). 

For Byatt, Matisse's portrayal of human personality is a final point of kinship. 

Refuting the commentators who see his paintings of women as ornamental 

objectifications which lack compassion and individuality - Matisse's paintings of chairs 



213 

seem to have more individuality than some of his women, says Louis Aragon (238, see 

also Kennedy Fraser 93) - Byatt, following Lawrence Gowing, emphasizes their idyllic, 

thoughtful, and sensual qualities in a positive way. Pink Nude is presented in "Medusa's 

Ankles" as a powerful Amazon figure representing the strength of women. When the 

image is removed from the hair salon where the middle-aged Susannah goes to trust 

Lucian the hairdresser "with her disintegration" (The Matisse Stories 7), the betrayal 

Susannah feels is an important factor in her destruction of Lucian's salon. The fact that 

Matisse's figures often feature blank ovals for faces does not deter Byatt from seeing 

power and beauty in them; indeed it heightens her recognition of them as a higher state of 

womanhood, a paradisal feminine archetype which should be esteemed rather than 

ridiculed. Matisse's women, Gowing and Byatt point out, are thinkers. They are at 

contemplative ease in the world. They take both pleasure and thought seriously. This is at 

odds with the way Peter Everett presents the female form in Matisse in his novel 

Matisse's War: "He paints the girl into his harem of idle women who have nothing to do 

except pamper themselves all day" (246). 

Byatt's opinions of Matisse's women, and her particular version of feminism, 

need to be investigated more fully in a more appropriate forum, but they are relevant here 

insofar as they underscore her endorsement of the painter's integrity. Matisse, like 

Byatt's fictional painter Robin Dennison in "Art Work," refuses to succumb to prevalent 

theories of abstraction and arbitrariness, making "a serious attempt to answer the question 

every artist must ask him or herself, at some time, why bother, why make representations 

of anything at all?" (The Matisse Stories 52). The dedication to "sensuous delight" (55), 

which should not be belittled, and to truthfulness, is as close an approach to religious 



214 

faith as Robin, Matisse, and Byatt can make. Matisse's images have lasting stability for 

Byatt. The portraits affirm what Nicholas Watkins calls "the permanence of personality" 

(5). A l l the paintings are a source of energy and hope. For Wassily Kandinsky, Matisse 

pursued the means of colour to the "supreme end" (18). 

In Byatt's determination to show that Matisse was not merely a master of 

decoration and colour, but also an interpreter of complex emotions and ideas, she has not 

entirely abandoned the investigative program of Still Life. Her confidence that words and 

images can be fused, however, has diminished. Throughout The Matisse Stories, as is 

apparent from the sections quoted in this study, she resorts to abundant use of italics to 

contend with the impossibility of writing like Matisse paints. Her admiration of the 

elemental clarity of his colours and her determination to create something comparably 

minimalist results in characters who express themselves by exhorting others to 

understand "the blues, and the pinks, and the whites, and the oranges, yes, and the blacks 

too" (112-13). The uncertain conclusions of the three Matisse stories, which record small 

victories, large compromises, and hints that truth will not always prevail, indicate the 

overall failure of her project. 

Byatt's intense admiration of painters does not prevent her from concluding, in 

"Precipice-Encurled," as in Still Life and The Matisse Stories, that art finally cannot, in 

any profound or spiritual way, make life better. Art does provide insight and moral and 

sensual sustenance of a sort. But ultimately her characters are left, more or less, as they 

began. They have not learned the language of art beyond a rudimentary level. They are 

drawn to emotionally expressive painters but are rarely able to participate in or duplicate 

such uninhibited feeling. Some - Stephanie Potter and Joshua Riddell - die in spite of (or 



215 

because of) their knowledge of the visual idiom. They have not been able to find in art a 

replacement for religious faith, and this need of something in which to place absolute 

faith will not go away. 



216 

Part HI: The Language of Spiritual Experience 

Chapter 6: The Supernatural 

Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker? Once in the 
realm of the fictitious, what difference is there between an apparition and 
a mortgage? I see the soundness of this argument, but my heart refuses to 
assent. 

E . M . Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927) 

I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead I am 
not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where 
she told me I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I 
open them I see the face I lost 

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) 

you want to know / whether i believe in ghosts / of course i do not believe 
in them / if you had known / as many of them as i have / you would not / 
believe in them either 

Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel (1936) 

The Hebrew scriptures contain one of the earliest references to a medium calling 

up the spirit of a dead person. In 1 Samuel, the Woman of Endor1 is entreated by Saul, 

who is in disguise, to summon the ghost of Samuel. 

The woman said to him, "Surely you know what Saul has done, how he 
has cut off the mediums and the wizards from the land. Why then are you 
laying a snare for my life to bring about my death?" But Saul swore to her 
by the Lord, "As the Lord lives, no punishment shall come upon you for 
this thing." Then the woman said, "Whom shall I bring up for you?" He 
said, "Bring Samuel for me." When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out 
with a loud voice; and the woman said to Saul, "Why have you deceived 
me? You are Saul." (1 Samuel 28. 9-12) 

1 Over time, this medium has become known as the "Witch of Endor" and her characteristics 
distorted, suggesting evil in a way the original text does not support. Margaret Drabble's 1996 novel The 
Witch of Exmoor is a (sly) recent example of this way of seeing the Woman of Endor. 



217 

The Woman of Endor and her ability to communicate with the dead are treated 

respectfully in this Biblical story. The passage leaves no doubt that she does in fact raise 

the spirit of Samuel; later she shows compassion for Saul, feeding and caring for him. In 

a reversal of most later stories about mediums, it is Saul who is unmasked and accused of 

dishonesty, while the Woman of Endor is shown to be sensible and truthful. In the 

centuries to come, mediums will become even more distrusted and marginalized than the 

Woman of Endor is - the king of Israel has made her profession illegal, but he also trusts 

her. By the nineteenth century, Robert Browning's famous Mr. Sludge, who claims to 

"somehow vomit truth," and who begs "Now, don't, sir! Don't expose me!" in the 

poem's opening line, will exemplify spiritualist trickery. 

A . S. Byatt has written several stories and a novella about mediums and ghosts; in 

addition, a seance is integral to the plot of Possession. Her major treatments of the 

subject are set in the Victorian era, but she has also tackled contemporary spirits. In The 

Virgin in the Garden Marcus Potter has otherworldly visions, their origins variously 

given scientific, psychic, and religious explanations. Byatt's attitude toward the 

supernatural2 is respectful, curious, and temperate, and the introduction of spiritual 

concerns into her customary "self-conscious realism," as she herself calls her style 

(Passions of the Mind 4). makes for an unusual and ambivalent atmosphere reminiscent 

of the ghost tales of Henry James. Like James, Byatt writes of occult matters which admit 

of either psychological or spiritual interpretation. But another influence on her occult 

tales is E . M . Forster, whose depictions of otherworldly matters are more resolutely 

spiritual. Like many twentieth-century writers of ghostly tales, A. S. Byatt delineates the 

2 Byatt's fairy tales might be included in this discussion, but generally they are less weighty and 
more fanciful, indicative of her interests in myth rather than in religious faith. 



218 

dire consequences for those who have lost faith in the transcendent. Additionally, her 

fiction seems to refute the starkly human explanations that critics like Leon Edel provide 

for supernatural stories. Again like E . M . Forster, her autobiographical and critical 

pronouncements of agnosticism sometimes come into conflict with the evidence of her 

fiction. 

In 1989 Byatt wrote an admiring review of a book about Victorian mediums by 

Alex Owen, The Darkened Room. The Times Literary Supplement entitled Byatt's 

review "Chosen Vessels of a Fraud," a typically negative summary of spiritualism, but 

this title was at odds with Byatt's text. She writes: "[Owen] describes frauds; she also 

cites very frightening and convincing descriptions of the dividing and splitting self in 

trance" (605). Owen is reluctant to ascribe "genuine" medium activity (that which 

remains after obvious frauds are discounted) wholly either to the spiritual or mental 

sphere, choosing instead to focus on spiritualism as a "discourse" (Owen xviii). Byatt, in 

her turn, shies away from the spiritual explanation, but is clearly fascinated by it. 

(Witness her willingness to delve into Swedenborg's well-nigh-unreadable Arcana 

Caelestia when researching "The Conjugial Angel," her novella about a Swedenborgian 

seance circle involving Alfred Lord Tennyson's sister Emily.) Byatt's and Owen's 

ambivalence mirrors that of many nineteenth-century figures who studied occult activity. 

The popularity of mediums at that time is helpful to Byatt in her writing about the era; the 

use of a mediating personality between her and the supernatural is a distancing strategy, 

allowing her to explore the otherworld without committing herself to belief. 

From the 1840s, when the Fox sisters in the United States were credited with 

supernatural gifts and prompted a resurgence of the ancient preoccupation with spirit life, 



219 

thousands of people in North America and Great Britain struggled with the origin of 

supernatural activity: was it divine or human? By 1882, when the Society for Psychical 

Research was founded, the divisions in the field became marked. The SPR, determined to 

use scientific methods to test occult phenomena, leaned toward psychological 

explanations, while the Spiritualist movement presented the quasi-religious point of view 

- for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his History of Spiritualism (1926), frequently 

compares the movement to early Christianity. However, these distinctions are not always 

clear. Carl Jung, whose 1902 doctoral dissertation was on occult phenomena, was a 

corresponding member of the SPR. But Jung was willing to entertain belief in the 

numinous, although in his theories it is most usually associated with the "collective 

unconscious." William James, one of the most famous participants in SPR activities, 

reserved judgement on the origin of otherworldly messages and visitations. A more 

recent SPR book, Apparitions, written by G. N. M . Tyrrell in 1953, declares that the SPR 

must be dissociated from the "cult of popular spiritualism, which is our worst enemy," 

and that occurrences like crisis apparitions (the appearance of a person in distress, usually 

at the moment of death, to another at some distance) are telepathic in origin. Tyrrell puts 

the emphasis on hallucination and on communication between unknown levels of human 

consciousness (40, 9). 

The Society for Psychical Research continues today, although few people seem 

aware of this. Its heyday, when prominent members of society partook of the spiritualist 

debate, is long over; however, it is intriguing to note that the October 1998 issue of the 

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research features a continuing debate on Eusapia 

Palladino, a nineteenth-century medium I believe to be a model for Byatt's character 



220 

Lilias Papagay in "The Conjugial Angel." In 1957, Carl Jung noted that supernatural 

experiences are as common as ever, but today "one doesn't speak of these things. . . . 

They simply happen and the intellectuals know nothing of them - for intellectuals know 

neither themselves nor people as they really are" (Jaffe vi). In 1989, Alex Owen wrote 

that even acknowledging the reality of the human unconscious was a big step for her, a 

historian steeped in materialism. Scientific investigation of the occult has lost credibility. 

But popular interest in the subject has not waned, nor have religious interpretations been 

abandoned. As I write this, in spring 1998, the number one bestseller on the New York 

Times bestseller list is Talking to Heaven: A Medium's Message of Life after Death by 

James van Praagh. 

I should clarify what ghosts have to do with my overall investigation of faith 

(religious, linguistic, aesthetic) in Byatt's work. It is not necessary to believe in ghosts in 

order to write or enjoy a ghost story. Even if one does believe in ghosts, it does not 

necessarily follow that one has any interest in the numinous. And those who have 

religious faith may have no corresponding belief in ghosts. Having stated all these 

provisos, however, I believe that ghost stories, based as they are on a concept of 

immortality, do relate, however strangely, to religious traditions which also hypothesize 

some sort of continued existence after death, although religious orthodoxies have often 

been unsettled about ghosts and spirits. (I do not refer to comic treatments of the 

supernatural such as Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost. Byatt's treatment of this 

theme is far more serious.) 

The ghost story is a way in which the agnostic can discreetly explore the question 

of the afterlife. Byatt also has an aesthetic or cultural goal. Most ghostly tales have 



221 

returned to their lowbrow sources, experiencing a long downward slide from the high 

point of "The Turn of the Screw" in 1898. Byatt aims to reclaim, for supernatural tales, 

some higher intellectual ground. A n additional motive may be a wish to counteract, by 

way of spectral atmospherics, the dryness (as explicitly decried by Byatt's mentor, Iris 

Murdoch) of late twentieth-century art. Byatt's presentation of verbal and visual 

knowledge is also relevant here, although her treatment of the linguistic aspects of 

spiritual activity is not thorough. 

What Byatt does not do in her supernatural stories is revealing: she neither sets 

out to offer blood-curdling entertainment nor uses horror to expose the violence and 

alienation peculiar to present-day society (surely the purposes of many contemporary 

writers of supernatural fiction). Unlike her fairy-tales, which ironically and comically 

present classic human dilemmas revolving around maturation, independence, and 

sexuality, her ghost stories lack humour and archness. The highly-coloured "Djinn in the 

Nightingale's Eye" and "The Tale of the Eldest Princess" bear little resemblance to the 

sombre atmosphere of "The Next Room" and "The July Ghost." The unironized subject 

of these ghost tales, like "The Conjugial Angel," is simply this: what happens to those 

who die, to those who remain alive, and to the bonds of love and responsibility which 

they felt? Psychological explanations for her ghosts are feasible, but there is no explicit 

place in these stories where you can locate the author's assertion that "it's all in your 

head." As Kathleen Coyne Kelly has noted, Byatt strongly hints "that the border between 

the living and the dead is more permeable than we think" (49). 

Although I maintain a connection between ghost stories and religion, there is by 

no means easy agreement on this point. Andrew Lang, in his 1909 study The Making of 



222 

Religion, outlines his argument that belief in ghosts and belief in God need not be related. 

Lang believes that the earliest forms of worship involved belief in a Deity, but that as 

people rose "in the scale of material culture" they became obsessed with tangible things. 

This materialism led them to privilege manifestations of the immaterial, including ghostly 

visions and rites of all kinds. Therefore, according to Lang, spiritual life becomes 

debased and the connection between God and worshipper more tenuous. Reverence for a 

Supreme Being, he says, "must degenerate, under social conditions, as civilisation 

advanced" (299). 

For William James, religion and the supernatural are more closely connected, but 

again, not necessarily. His exposition of faith in The Varieties of Religious Experience 

(1902) deliberately neglects the question of immortality, which he feels we cannot 

sensibly know or analyse with any acuity (although he was profoundly involved with 

gathering spiritualist data). For James, religion is defined by an apprehension of the 

divine, the feeling of solemnity that such an apprehension prompts, happiness and 

enthusiasm in faith, confidence in an unseen order of reality, and certainty that 

deliverance from this world is at hand (31-53). James feels that while it is possible to 

examine the personal experience of religious ecstasy and awe, it is less possible to draw 

precise conclusions about deliverance after death. James's theories about religion also 

involved speculations about consciousness which are appealing to partisans of the ghost 

story. As his brother Henry James famously demonstrated in his ghost tales, it is possible 

to view supernatural happenings either as manifestations of life-after-death or as 

psychological phenomena - or both. As William James said, in The Varieties of 

Religious Experience: 



223 

Whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious 
experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the 
subconscious continuation of our conscious life (502). 

Famous skeptics include David Hume, who wrote in 1748 in "Of Miracles" that 

"the gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever sooths [sic] 

superstition and promotes wonder" (132). For Sigmund Freud, "the uncanny is in reality 

nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and 

which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression" ("The 

'Uncanny' " 241) - thus the German words for familiar and uncanny are intimately 

related (heimlich and unheimlich). In other words, the uncanny is all in your head. 

Elizabeth Bowen echoes this when she says that "the advance of psychology" has 

benefited ghost stories: "the guilt-complex is their especial friend" (A Book of Modern 

Ghosts vii). 

It is quite possible, of course, that ghost stories are written merely to entertain and 

that none of these questions of faith, cosmic consciousness, or psychology need obtain. 

However, Byatt's ghost tales are written, for the most part, with apparent seriousness, and 

one work in particular, her ambitious novella "The Conjugial Angel," delves into the 

conflict of matter and spirit with tremendous intellectual energy. Her nineteenth-century 

characters who believe equally in God and in ghosts (Christabel LaMotte in Possession 

and the Swedenborgians in "The Conjugial Angel") have apparently authentic and 

enlightening supernatural experiences, while the twentieth-century characters who have 

abandoned the worship of God and have sudden encounters with ghosts find the 

experience disquieting and confusing. 



224 

What commentary there is about ghostly tales reveals the same division between 

nineteenth-century sincerity and awe and twentieth-century confusion, doubt, and 

alienation. Montague Summers, a collector of Victorian occult tales, believed that the 

writers of the time were "at least bound to admit the possibility of such happenings" (8); 

personally, he was "convinced of the sensible reality of 'apparitions' " (9). According to 

Robertson Davies, the distinguished ghost tale author M . R. James "regarded the 

dangerous and terrifying side of the supernatural as the shadow of its redemptive side" 

("Gleams and Glooms" 236). But, by the late nineteenth century, says critic Jack 

Sullivan, ghosts come to be firmly located in the Self and tales about them become 

overwhelmingly psychological (Lost Souls passim). Gary Crawford agrees: "modern 

fiction of supernatural horror is a literature of consciousness.... [T]he human [is] an 

isolated being in an indifferent cosmos who has only this: consciousness of s e l f (276). 

Influential in this line has been Leon Edel, who wrote of Henry James's "Turn of the 

Screw" as a fantasy "in the sense in which psychoanalysis uses the term." The governess 

who sees malevolent ghosts and does battle with them for the souls of living children 

"imagines all sorts of things" and is "hysterical" (Henry James: Stories of the 

. Supernatural 432). "The evil," Edel states unequivocally, "is in her own mind" (xi). 

That such a rationale is applicable to most ghost tales - fictional or anecdotal - is 

the consensus of the criticism on the subject, although Jack Sullivan sounds a note of 

confusion when he says that "the gradual decay of belief in an afterlife has been an 

enormous boon to ghosts, who are able to terrify us precisely to the extent that their 

existence is denied" (Lost Souls 11). In that case, it seems to me, if the fear continues, 



225 

then unbelief is not the reigning mode, but rather uncertainty. Robertson Davies is one of 

the few contemporary writers on this topic who will face this religious aspect straight on: 

Revengeful ghosts arouse that sneaking belief in the supernatural that 
lingers among people who have no use for religion. Religion may include 
the uncanny and the evil, but its emphasis is on the redemptive and 
doctrinal aspect of belief The people who have lost religion, or who have 
simply grown up as religious illiterates - a very common class today -
have lost their sense of the beneficent part religion plays in life, but they 
have not shaken off their primitive fears. They dimly guess at an area of 
being which is not readily approached, and which is certainly not good; 
this is the haunt of Evil, the Devil's Kingdom. ("Gleams and Glooms" 
227) 

Davies also believes, with many others, that the ghost story satisfies because it feeds the 

repressed, irrational part of our personalities (High Spirits 4). Ultimately, however, 

Davies has this to say about the choice between "Hell" and the "Psyche" as origins for 

uncanny tales: "the difference seems often to be one merely of terminology" ("Gleams 

and Glooms" 241). 

Byatt's ghost tales feature the presence of fear, but they do not inspire fear, in the 

flesh-crawling sense. Are ghost stories written to frighten? That simple question has not 

been definitively answered in the nascent critical work in this genre. Julia Briggs believes 

that the main aim of a ghost story is simply to frighten (11) and to reassert a connection 

with an older, more spiritual time (17). Other critics downplay the creation of fear. Jack 

Sullivan, in Elegant Nightmares, states that such tales necessarily evoke chaos and the 

unknowable for an overly materialist society (5,10). The modern ghost story, says 

Briggs, insists upon a "careful exploitation of realism" (17), but Michael Cox writes that 

the leading characteristic of the twentieth-century ghost story is "the exploitation of [the] 

principle of obliquity" (xvii). The Prentice-Hall Guide to English Literature, in its entry 

on "Ghosts," claims that they "have rarely been used in serious literature of the last two 



226 

hundred years," with the exception of Wuthering Heights and "The Turn of the Screw." 

Michael Cox speculates that twentieth-century writers still return to the ghost story form 

(although more frequently to science fiction) because our "need to submit to the unknown 

has been culturally denied" (xviii). For Sara Maitland, they are about doubleness, about 

"trying to deal with two discourses, two ways of speaking, at the same time" (xi). 

Byatt's use of the supernatural is not, for the most part, outlandish or fantastic. 

She neither asks us to "pay something extra," as E . M . Forster puts it in his discussion of 

fantasy (Aspects of the Novel 101), nor insists that we make an additional adjustment for 

the outrageous. Or at any rate, she does not call attention to the necessary adjustment. 

Ghosts enter her fiction without much fanfare, with the exception of the glass creature 

with the proboscis who colours the rather more extravagant atmosphere of "The 

Conjugial Angel." But even this being is accepted quite matter-of-factly. Do her ghost 

stories employ irony or satire, then? Certainly Possession, in its postmodern revamping of 

the Romance, contains a portion of gentle irony. While the novellas in Angels and Insects 

contain no postmodern framing devices, as Possession does, there is an element of satire 

in the portrayal of Swedenborgian convictions in "The Conjugial Angel." For example, 

when the members of the spiritualist circle attempt to catch the scent of spectral roses, 

what they actually smell are the farts of Emily Jesse's dog Pug (195). The young medium 

Sophie Sheekhy has a clairvoyant vision of Tennyson ruminating on In Memoriam while 

attempting to do up the buttons on his nightshirt; this passage occupies 20 pages, surely a 

wry comment on the fact that Tennyson's sisters said that he couldn't button his own 

clothes without help. For the most part, however, supernatural scenes in Byatt's fiction 



227 

are written with sincerity. Witness the following passage about the return of Arthur 

Henry Hallam to Sophy Sheekhy: 

She thought she had been afraid in trances before, but that that fear had 
been nothing compared to this, pity and fear, fear and pity, each making 
the other harder to bear. He wanted to feed off her life, and was invading 
the very fibre of her nerves with his death. The surface of her thought was 
that she would never again, never again try to come into the presence of 
the terrible dead, and this time too the depths of the still dark places of her 
were stirred with terror too, his terror, her terror, the terror of the tearing-
out of life from flesh and of the energy of love for whatever remained 
when that was gone. (Angels and Insects 274) 

In Sugar Byatt's short stories about ghosts contain very little comedy. Irony, outside of 

Possession, is in short supply, and it is not much used in Possession's seance scene, the 

atmosphere instead being bitter, sad, and violent. 

§ § § 

Byatt's view of life-after-death is enigmatic; it is necessary to consider a number 

of functions which her use of ghosts suggests. First, Byatt's interest in spiritualism is, in 

part, driven by the same feminist social historical concerns which Alex Owen's book The 

Darkened Room demonstrates. Byatt acknowledges the importance of the book in her 

research for the 1992 novella "The Conjugial Angel," and in that story spiritualism is 

shown to be one of the few opportunities for a woman to grasp economic and social 

power in 1875. (Significantly, fraudulent spiritualist activity plays no part in "The 

Conjugial Angel.") However, the economic factor is less consequential for Byatt than the 

fact that suffering and grieving women turn to spiritualism. In "The July Ghost" and in 

Possession (when Christabel LaMotte desires to communicate with her dead friend, or 

lover, Blanche Glover), we observe women who are suffering and lost; their desire to 

speak with spirits is an indication of the failure of the material world to satisfy all their 



228 

needs. The feminist perspective in "The Conjugial Angel" was much noted in reviews, 

out of proportion, I think, to the attention Byatt actually accorded it. The presence of 

female characters who commune with the dead is explained primarily by the fact of 

Byatt's grief for her young son Charles, after his death in 1972. 

Another aspect of Byatt's treatment of the supernatural which must be considered 

is to what extent her supernaturalism and ghosts stand figuratively for art and artists. 

Michael Levenson puts forward this idea in his review of Angels and Insects: "we novel 

readers are always seeing ghosts. Every character is an apparition. Whenever we lend 

solidity to the stories we follow, we are living proof of a visionary capacity almost 

always undervalued" (44). This, in part, is applicable for Possession, as is evident from 

the passage chosen from "Mr. Sludge^ 'the Medium' " which stands as one of the novel's 

epigraphs: in it Mr. Sludge declares that poets and prose writers alike participate in 

"Sludgehood." Just as the participants in a seance must interpret the clues given in 

automatic writing or spirit rapping, so the scholars in Possession (and the readers) must 

scrutinize the various intertexts from the lives of Ash and LaMotte which Byatt provides. 

A similar plot is used by Tom Stoppard in Arcadia,3 and Stoppard goes so far as to allow 

the two groups of characters from different centuries to coexist on the stage. However, as 

they don't interact with each other, Stoppard manages to dodge the question of whether 

the nineteenth-century characters are ghosts. The utility of Stoppard's "ghosts" is 

principally aesthetic and narrative, contained in their ability to advance and explicate the 

story. 

3 A number of similarities between Possession and Arcadia can be remarked (mysterious letters 
are inserted in books, new knowledge is acquired about famous literary figures - Byron in the case of 
Arcadia). The character of Stoppard's Hannah Jarvis might even be loosely based on Byatt herself; Hannah 



229 

In Byatt's "The Conjugial Angel" Mrs. Papagay has tried to support herself by 

writing before taking up seances "but her skills in language were unequal to it" (Angels 

and Insects 168); she does, however, recognize the close relation between the two arts. 

The Tennyson family's obsessive dealings with the dead Hallam are shown to be parallel: 

Emily Tennyson Jesse, his former fiancee, waits at the seance table for messages, while 

Emily's brother Alfred, even in old age, is working through the grief of Hallam's loss and 

hoping for spiritual guidance as he reconsiders In Memoriam. There is an element of 

spiritualist activity in Byatt which is metaphorically aesthetic; this is also the case in, for 

example, James's The Bostonians and Peter Ackroyd's English Music. Artistic talents 

denied development because of gender or poverty break out instead in the supernatural. 

But again, this explains the merest portion of Byatt's entire concern with supernaturalism. 

There is much more going on here; as one critic noted in a review of Angels and Insects, 

that book contains "an overplus of effects, intellectual and sensual" (Wallace-Crabbe 

194). 

The extent to which Byatt pursues psychological explanations for occult matters 

is more promising. It is evident from her review of Alex Owen's book, quoted above, that 

Byatt gives serious consideration to the apparent coexistence of the material and the 

supernatural as evidence of a radical split within the human psyche. In the review, 

"Chosen Vessels of a Fraud," Byatt briefly mentions Lacan, "who sees the unitary self as 

an illusion, and whose idea of a divided Subject has obvious possible connections to the 

split selves of the mediums" (605). Byatt reports that Owen is cautious about Lacan, as, 

apparently, is Byatt herself. Lacanian speculation is not pursued, in the review or 

has had an unexpected popular success with a book rehabilitating past literary personalities, in this case the 
Romantics. 



230 

elsewhere. (Lacan does not appear at all in Byatt's book of collected essays and reviews, 

Passions of the Mind. Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Jung, Sartre, and Wittgenstein are the 

psychologists and philosophers she cites.) Lacan's insistence on subjectivity as a 

construct continually in the making would not appear to be a theory with which Byatt is 

in sympathy. The divided self is identified by many critics as being the interpretative key 

to the ghost stories of Henry James; as Northrop Frye says, in James's later works "the 

ghost begins to come back as a fragment of a disintegrating personality" (Anatomy of 

Criticism 50). Similarly, in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dallowav, the ability of Septimus 

Warren Smith to see his dead friend Evans is a function of Smith's mental disintegration. 

Many of Henry James's ghostly tales clearly are about the divided self, the 

ubiquity of the past, and the pressure of the unlived life. Some stories involve ambiguous 

spirits, some merely evoke what Leon Edel calls a "vague, crepuscular world" (Henry 

James: Stories of the Supernatural xi). Spencer Brydon in "The Jolly Corner" becomes 

possessed by the idea of who he might have been, to the point of seeing a spectre of that 

being, while John Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle" is haunted by the expectation that 

something remarkable will occur in his life. George Stransom in "The Altar of the Dead" 

and Marmaduke in "Maud-Evelyn" literally devote themselves to commemorating the 

dead. In all these stories, men neglect the love and superior knowledge of the women in 

their lives, obtusely refusing to see that fulfillment and illumination lie with the present 

and the living. The phantoms of "Maud-Evelyn," "The Jolly Corner," and the simpler tale 

"The Private Life" (in which a Browningesque writer is discovered to have two selves -

one banal and public, one creative and private) are not very ghostly and lend themselves 

easily to psychological interpretation. Leon Edel emphasizes the strange power of the 



231 

imagination in his explications of James's stories, and many critics have followed him. 

Martha Banta, in her 1972 book Henry James and the Occult, begins her study with the 

following disavowal: 

Four words are used recurrently in this book: supernatural, occult, 
psychical, and transcendent. They do not refer to outside influences such 
as demons, nature spirits, gods, the stars or the planets. They apply solely 
to hidden powers of the human mind that go sufficiently beyond the 
"ordinary" to grant it that metaphoric stature of the "exceptional" that 
Henry James often sought for his privileged characters. (3) 

For Banta, James's "faith in the powers of the human consciousness sufficed as the only 

religion he knew or needed" (4). This remark is typical of the stubborn secular bias 

evidenced even by those who purport to be studying the transcendent in literature. 

"The Turn of the Screw," however, presents a more difficult riddle than stories 

like "The Private Life"; the former has been designed so that it is impossible to 

pronounce a definite psychic or a spiritual judgement. Rather than dwell on that familiar 

debate, I suggest that James's lesser known story "The Great Good Place" makes for a 

similarly convoluted interpretive problem, and one which reveals authorial ambivalences 

which may well have influenced the manner that A. S. Byatt writes of these quasi-

supernatural matters. "I write the way I do from James via T. S. Eliot," Byatt said to 

Juliet Dusinberre in 1983 (183). 

"The Great Good Place" is a kind of heavenly vision (or dream) that the writer 

George Dane experiences. There are three striking points about this heaven. Dane states 

that this heaven is the conception of a great and wise "consciousness" very "like his 

own." He also feels that in this Place the "real exquisite was to be without the 

complication of an identity," and he recognizes that his happiness - indeed "rapture" - is 

composed of "absences" (Collected Stories 1898-1910 168-69). The religiously-inclined 



232 

reader can use these remarks to read the Place as an intimation of transcendent reality, 

created by a greater entity, who is wiser but still deeply involved with the human; a site 

where human personality is immersed in something larger; and proof that, ultimately, the 

material world fails as an influence and entirely fades from view. Or, for the skeptic, the 

"great consciousness" that Dane infers may be only a reflection and concoction of his 

own; the loss of an identity merely signals pressure and anxiety in his waking life; and 

the absence he enjoys indicates that there is no deity or life-after-death (for isn't God 

usually identified with presence!). 

The fact that George Dane wakes up from this vision supports the view that the 

whole experience has been a kind of wish-fulfillment in a time of mental stress. But 

clearly Dane longs for heaven - as does, perhaps, Henry James, whom Dane resembles -

and the fact that Dane conceives of heaven as a place where identity is lost (rather than 

fulfilled) and absence reigns (rather than holy presence) demonstrates just the lack of real 

religious feeling which guarantees that Dane's dream will never come true. James means 

us to take careful note of this. 

In "The Altar of the Dead" James provides us with this illuminating comment on 

Stransom's strange reverence for the dead: 

He had wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a 
religion; being very sure, and not a little content, that he had not at all 
events the religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have. 
Gradually this question was straightened out for him: it became clear to 
him that the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been 
simply the religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it satisfied his 
spirit, it gave employment to his piety. (Collected Stories 1892-1898 451-
52) 

Stransom's devotion is less ambiguous than Dane's visions in "The Great Good Place" or 

the governess's in "The Turn of the Screw." Stransom is pitiful and deluded; his smug 



233 

homage, without religious faith, is actually a sort of affliction, and it kills him. That a 

punishment or sinister afterlife may be in store is hinted in the "great dread of what might 

still happen" that descends on Stransom's friend as she gazes on "the whiteness of death" 

in his face (485). 

A. S. Byatt's characters - the mother in "The July Ghost," the seance circle in 

"The Conjugial Angel" - are likewise devoting themselves to the dead without giving 

sufficient consideration to the possibility that forces beyond human comprehension and 

origin may be at work. Like James, she presents ambiguous situations and, as has 

transpired in James criticism, the numinous qualities of the experiences have been 

neglected by critics. 

It is certainly possible to read James's "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Jolly 

Corner" in a wholly psychological manner, but we need to be reminded that it is still 

possible to decide in favour of the spiritual, or to create some alloy of the two theories. In 

The Bostonians, Verena Tarrant is a dupe at the same time as she seems to have some 

genuine power of trance-speaking. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady is visited by a 

spectre of Ralph Touchett at the moment of his death; perhaps she is merely 

overwrought, but James presents the strong possibility that it really is Ralph's spirit. In 

Byatt's Possession we are invited to join in such a double reading of the 1861 seance 

which makes such a decisive rupture in the relationship between Christabel LaMotte and 

Randolph Henry Ash. From Ash's point of view, the supernatural emanations are all 

connected to the medium by strings, and the highly emotional atmosphere of the seance 

exploits "an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire, to hear what we long to hear, to 

see what we incessantly form to our own eye or ear as gone and lost," as he writes in a 



234 

letter to John Ruskin (421-22). However, LaMotte is seeking knowledge about the soul of 

Blanche Glover, and the messages received about the rocks which weighed down 

Blanche's clothes when she committed suicide seem to confirm the veracity of some of 

the seance's findings. The rocks were mementos of the Yorkshire tryst between Ash and 

LaMotte and no one but Blanche could have guessed at their significance. 

In "The July Ghost," a rather unpleasant woman and man - the grieving mother of 

a dead son and her new lodger, a literary scholar - struggle intellectually with the reality 

of the apparition of the son. They make all sorts of hazards at the meaning of the lodger's 

visitation by the son and the mother's inability to see the child. The living aren't sure 

what they believe or what they care for; both are emotionally inept people. The woman 

fervently wishes she could be visited by the ghost of the boy, yet declares "No illusions 

are pleasant" (Sugar 43); the two adults decide, on dubious evidence, that what the boy 

wants is for them to engender another baby. The boy himself is more trustworthy; it is 

significant that he wears a shirt "striped in the colours of the spectrum, arranged in the 

right order" (44) and that in his presence, the man is calmed and able to do "quite a lot of 

work - wrote about three reasonable pages on Hardy's original air-blue gown" (49). This 

indicates that the man is studying Hardy's poem for his dead wife, "The Voice" (1914). 

The first two lines of "The Voice" are 

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, 
Saying that now you are not as you were 

It is the boy who is reliable and good in this story. He has a coherent, optimistic, and 

happy presence; he represents visual fact (his spectrum t-shirt) and instills verbal insight 

(the scholar's breakthrough on the Hardy poem, which emphasizes the altered-but-

genuine reality of the "voice" of the dead loved one). 



235 

The ghosts in "The Next Room" are less cheerful, but they are no less dependable. 

The voices of Joanna's parents bicker after death, just as they had in life. There is a 

stronger indication here that Joanna's imagination produces the ghosts: "As if in answer 

to her thoughts on disappointment and anger the voices started up" (Sugar 83). Joanna is 

a Barbara Pym woman, brow-beaten by stronger characters, lacking ambition or the 

willingness to grab hold of life. It is entirely appropriate that the dead have more tenacity 

than she does. But it is Joanna's entire lack of vivacity that makes the ghosts of her 

parents so convincing; they follow her from town to town, demonstrating an energy she 

herself does not have. Again, these ghosts tell the truth, although the truth is less 

appealing in this story - it is the ugly truth of loveless familial bonds, of interdependence 

from which liberation is impossible. Joanna makes the mistaken assumption that death 

separates her from her unhappy parents, but no such simple relief is possible. In both of 

these stories from Sugar, the situation for the living is irremediable. No matter what 

efforts they make either to escape from or make contact with the dead, it is the dead who 

are more powerful and more knowledgeable. 

While psychological explanations are proffered for the supernatural activities in 

"The Next Room" and "The July Ghost," Byatt does not invest James's subtle energy in 

developing these, and the reader is left with the strangely solid reality of the living dead. 

If anything, Byatt's spirits are more old-fashioned than James's. The return from the 

grave of Arthur Henry Hallam in "The Conjugial Angel" is rendered with gruesome 

vividness; Byatt goes to great lengths to make this visitation palpable. 

Her hand shook, the face behind her bulged and tightened, sagged and 
reassembled, not pale, but purple-veined, with staring blue eyes and 



236 

parched thin lips, above a tremulous chin. There was a sudden gust of 
odour, not rose, not violet, but earth-mould and corruption. (Angels and 
Insects 249) 

Compare Byatt's literary seance, where lost souls obsessively quote Tennyson's poetry 

through a medium, with a similar episode in Yeats's "The Words Upon the Window-

Pane," where the spirit of Swift constantly interrupts a seance. In Yeats's play, Swift 

remains an unhappy shadow; in Byatt, Hallam acquires a fearfully material substance, 

energetically reciting his own letters and the poetry of Dante and Tennyson, demanding 

that his fiancee Emily join him. The spirit of Hallam is, says Byatt, "larger than life" and 

powerful enough that it almost kills the medium, Sophy Sheekhy (282, 284). 

§ § § 

In addition to allowing her to pursue oblique investigations of life-after-death and 

psychic phenomena, ghost tales provide Byatt with a forum for an exploration of fear. 

Fear is the dominant quality of the stories in Sugar - not terror for the reader, but the 

effects of fear on characters. (When Byatt edited The Oxford Book of English Short 

Stories in 1998, the reviewer from The Times noticed that the most common theme of the 

stories she had chosen was fear.) O f the 11 stories in Sugar, five have supernatural 

elements. "The July Ghost" and "The Next Room" have already been mentioned. In 

"Rose-Coloured Teacups" and "The Changeling" a vision of the past and an eerie child 

hint at a milder ghostly atmosphere; "The Dried Witch" is an anthropological tale of a 

woman found (justly) by her primitive tribe to be a jinx. The remainder of the stories do 

not feature spirits, but the tone remains fearful: children are bullied by adults, old women 

are menaced by young men with knives, a young painter falls off a mountain, scholars 

and writers face humiliation and death. For the predominantly rational Byatt, who 



237 

assumes that "order is more interesting than the idea of the random" (Passions of the 

Mind 11), and who has been accused by reviewers of idealizing the orderliness and 

rationality of the nineteenth century (Hawthorne, Diamond), ghost stories help in the 

presentation of disorder, the inexplicable. As Virginia Woolf says about Henry James's 

ghost tales, "they have their origin within u s . . . . We are afraid of something unnamed, of 

something, perhaps, in ourselves" ("Henry James's Ghost Stories" 52, 54). Byatt's 

characters are afraid, of course, of the unknown. They are also afraid of loneliness and 

madness and, most significantly, afraid equally of religious belief and unbelief 

§ § § 

Although Byatt's ghosts do illustrate other interests - feminist concerns, art 

allegories, neurosis, fear - primarily they stand for themselves, for the spirits of the dead. 

A l l of Byatt's writing about ghosts has appeared since the death of her young son Charles 

in 1972, most of it long after. The plainest expression of this death appears in the poem 

"Dead Boys," published in 1994, and in the much-anthologized story "The July Ghost," 

broadcast on B B C Radio 3 in 1981 and first published in 1982. In each work, silent, 

blonde boys inhabit the memories of their mothers in ways which are disturbingly 

palpable. 

They are more alive than I. 
It is hard for me to know 

If I love or fear them most. ("Dead Boys") 

To interpret the ghost in this poem as the manifestation of a grieving mother's memory is 

surely correct: the living will not or cannot let the dead go. But the ghost in "The July 

Ghost" is more difficult to read. He does not appear to the mother at all, but to a lodger in 

her house. The woman and her lodger speculate "that what he had seen was what she 



238 

desired to see, a kind of mix-up of radio waves" (Sugar 48). Because the mother is 

adamant that she is "too rational to see ghosts" (46), her desire to see her son is channeled 

through the lodger, who, in a James-like framing device, turns to another listener to tell 

his tale. The sharing of this desire for another plane of existence has erotic ramifications, 

as it does in James's "Maud-Evelyn" and "The Jolly Corner." (Men and women speaking 

of the ineffable are also voicing their buried sexual desires.) 

But the power which the dead exercise in Byatt's stories implies that it is not 

merely that the living will not let the dead go, but that the reverse is true as well. In 

"Gode's Story" this power is malevolent, luring the living to their destruction; in "The 

Next Room" the ghostly voices are demanding and cruel, but in a petty way. Hallam in 

"The Conjugial Angel" is half dark angel, half unhappy, impotent mortal - an ambivalent 

visitant. The boy in "The July Ghost" is a sunny ghost, but he wants something, and the 

living cannot decipher what it is. This range of needs and personality types among the 

dead, and, especially, the difficulty of deciphering what they want, gives them a fleshly 

reality which cannot be explained completely by the psychological disorder of those who 

see them. This is plainest in "The Conjugial Angel." Sophie Sheekhy is the least likely of 

all the characters to desire communion with the spirit of Hallam; she is still, quiet, 

unagonized. Like Daniel in the Potter books, Sophie just "is," and demonstrates herself as 

a trustworthy witness. The other characters feel "a pressing and threatened desire to know 

that the individual soul was immortal" (Angels and Insects 184). Sophie just knows. 

In The Virgin in the Garden Marcus Potter and the biology master Lucas 

Simmonds perform a number of occult or psychic experiments, with startling success. 

Although Marcus refuses to take part in any rite which might call up the dead, he allows 



239 

Lucas to identify "Places of Power" in the area around Calverley, the "minor Minster 

town" (21) close to their Yorkshire village, Blesford. Marcus has a number of visions 

while they perform these experiments, primarily of geometric and biological forms. 

When Marcus sees flowers with "sap rising in transparent reeded stems, clear green 

flowing light up to gold cups," Lucas excitedly speculates that Marcus is "seeing the 

inner Forms of the Biosphere, flowers as they had been, or would be, or innerly meant to 

be" (228). 

At Owger's Howe, a place that Lucas believes to constitute "a way in, a way 

through, to another dimension" (235), they have an experience which Byatt terms 

"occult." They make offerings and spin over a "power point": "Marcus opened his eyes 

to blackness.... He stared into the black, which took on the aspect of a tunnel" (236). 

Later, Lucas and Marcus have further occult experiences when they successfully transmit 

random mental images to each other. 

Marcus is uninterested in naming the phenomena he and Lucas experience. Lucas 

offers a blend of scientific and religious explanations. The "Places of Power" are possibly 

connected with "the motions of the earth's magnetic fields" (230). Marcus is more 

inclined to this view than to the alternative - Lucas's proposal that these "umbilici of the 

earth" are "meeting places between the earthly and the unearthly" (228). Daniel Potter's 

Anglican Church is another such umbilical spot and Byatt chooses the church as the site 

of the most detailed telepathic scene of The Virgin in the Garden, in chapter 29. Marcus 

sends Lucas a communication of a vivid painting in the church, a depiction of the mouth 

of Hell; later, in chapter 38, as Lucas becomes increasingly unhinged, he returns to the 

painting and is found crouched "in an attitude of rebarbative prayer" (376). 



240 

For Marcus, Lucas's attempts to explain 

were somehow wrong-headed descriptions of actual forces. No doubt all 
would be made clearer, in so far as Marcus chose to seek clarity. He 
preferred, in fact, a certain area of cloudiness, as to the naming and 
categorising of things. (234) 

There does not seem to be any doubt that in The Virgin in the Garden Marcus and Lucas 

are indeed located at an "intersection of two realms" (236) and that they do experience 

otherworldly visions. (I disagree with Olga Kenyon, who says that Marcus's visions are 

given "no authorial endorsement" ["A. S. Byatt: Fusing Tradition with Twentieth-

Century Experimentation" 70].) Byatt's presentation of these events is darkly serious, 

unironic, and packed with specific detail. The details are overwhelmingly visual; the two 

characters have no success in transmitting words or ideas to each other, nor are they able 

to successfully describe their experiences in words. As long as the visions are strictly 

bounded, Marcus is unalarmed. 

The things received were to him, in their limitations, manageable and 
pleasant. They were without the endless extension which so terrified him 
in the geometry which in its inhuman clarity also so consoled him. (262) 

Marcus identifies perfection and eternity with his geometric visions, but this idea of a 

simultaneously terrifying and consoling infinity is more than that - it is also identifiable 

as spiritual transcendence. 

Marcus and Lucas, whose experiments blend scientific, religious, and 

psychological elements in an idiosyncratic way, somehow tap real and dangerous 

energies and knowledge. The limits of what they can achieve, using Marcus "as a kind of 

human dowsing twig, or divining rod" (234), are unknown. Although Lucas inclines to 

some hazy spiritual beliefs, his speculations are mixed erratically with science and 

superstition, while Marcus has little religious feeling at all, having been brought up in the 



241 

aggressively secular Potter household. As a result, their penetration into sacred areas 

takes on sinister aspects, and the painting of the mouth of Hell stands as an unheeded 

warning of the risks they court. Their quest is, for the most part, selfish, haphazard, and 

irreverent. By the end of The Virgin in the Garden they are nearly shattered by their 

willful exposure to powers beyond their understanding. Marcus is incapacitated 

throughout the next novel, Still Life, and only manages to recover by the third book in the 

Potter series, Babel Tower; Lucas, as far as we know, does not recover. (Lucas's shame 

about his homosexuality is an additional complicating factor in his mental breakdown.) 

At the conclusion of Still Life. Marcus will be, in part, responsible for the death of his 

sister Stephanie because of his inability to act in the right manner in the face of 

something more forceful than human power. 

Although magnetic and psychic explanations of Marcus's abilities are proposed in 

the novel, it is also true that the Christian Church is a powerful factor in his experiences. 

In chapter 38 of The Virgin in the Garden, Lucas uses his mind to call Marcus to the 

church and tells him that they are "safe" there. "I did tell you prayer and preparation 

would be required," he says (378). Most significant of all is the fact that Daniel Orton, as 

a clergyman, has the force to check and control Marcus's disturbed visions. Twice in the 

novel Daniel, when within Marcus's line of vision, manages to "absorb" the manic 

energy which torments Marcus, and to calm him: "The lines of energy, the fuzz of forces 

went into that solid flesh and ceased, coiled and rested, or so it seemed" (264). This 

functions as an exorcism; Stephanie, perhaps learning from Daniel or perhaps tapping 

spiritual sources of her own, also unconsciously performs a kind of exorcism for the 



242 

autistic boy Malcolm Haydock, and for Lucas Simmonds, in his mad scene at the end of 

The Virgin in the Garden. 

Olga Kenyon, writing about Marcus in 1988, emphasizes his separation from 

religion. "He has elements of the child-seer, but bereft of religious blessing.... His 

visions, unlike Saint Paul's (or Wordsworth's), cannot be used" (70). In a "world without 

religion," Kenyon writes, Marcus suffers in isolation, his visions devoid of illumination. 

This analysis willfully ignores the importance of Lucas and Daniel to Marcus, both of 

whom represent different aspects of religious belief. And Marcus occasionally does 

experience feelings of revelation - it is just that he is incapable of casting his revelations 

into conventional language. Part of the fascination of Marcus's character for the reader is 

that we can only approximate what his life is like; in providing us with the elaborate 

details of his visions and the spiritual experiments, the narrator attempts to compensate 

with volume. This anxious offering of quantity is really a narrative admission that 

Marcus's mind, working outside of verbal language, is partly closed to us until other 

kinds of language can be more fully developed. 

A l l of this is not to say that Byatt believes in ghosts, occult activity, or an 

afterlife. But her presentation of ghosts and visionary experience has a solidity which 

indicates a veiled need to believe in something like them. What if the transcendence 

hinted at in the stories is not merely symbolic, as most critics assume it is, but is instead 

an actual manifestation of an afterlife? This is where A. S. Byatt's writing about spirits 

leads us - doubtless some of her apparitions are symbolic of feminist, aesthetic, and 

psychological issues, but some of them won't be reduced in such a way. Byatt gives what 

she calls the "presence of absence" ("The Conjugial Angel," Angels and Insects 284) a 



243 

bodily existence which, she suggests, must be faced as if it were real. Although most 

critics prefer not to make a connection between ghost stories and religion, and indeed 

Jack Sullivan bluntly states that ghost stories are not substitutes for religion (Elegant 

Nightmares 130), I believe that writing ghost stories is one of Byatt's ways of backing 

into religious territory, as it were. This is evident in her admiration and analysis of Toni 

Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, one of the six novels discussed with Ignes Sodre in their 

book of "conversations about women writers," Imagining Characters (1995). After 

mentioning the powerful African heritage of animism, as it exists in tense relation with 

western religion, Byatt says: 

I feel that Toni Morrison, with her intensely Christian background, has 
. played with this idea: that there is a spirit world and you might treat it as 

real as opposed to treating it simply as a literary p r o p . . . . [This is] purely 
practically a world in which spirits do rise up and can be accepted as being 
part of the normal run of things, so that when you read that wonderful first 
paragraph you think right, we're in a world in which babies haunt houses, 
this is this world, this is not a world in which you ask 'was there a baby, 
wasn't there a baby?' There is a baby and it is haunting the house.. . . She 
is what she is, she is Beloved in a terrible rage. And that is why the book 
is so powerful. It's the concreteness... .[I]t isn't psychological, it is a 
story of things. (217) 

Byatt's admiration for Beloved may have been a factor in the concreteness of the living 

dead in "The Conjugial Angel." Although the ghost of Beloved does represent painful, 

repressed memories, belonging equally to her family and to the collective African-

American community, Beloved is also a real individual: "she is what she is." But what 

does it truly mean to be in the presence of a dead individual who refuses to be absent? 

And what does it mean for Byatt, who professes not to have religious faith? 



244 

§ § § 

Byatt's longer works featuring spiritualism - Possession and "The Conjugial 

Angel" - are set in the late nineteenth century, an era when many intellectuals insisted 

that spiritualism was, as Russell and Clare Goldfarb state in their study Spiritualism and 

Nineteenth-Century Letters, "the new religion, a religion based on fact, supported by 

history, and proved by science" (11). Victorian thinkers were obsessively trying to 

combine art, faith, and science, and Byatt's characters take part in this composite 

research; for proof we can read the notes and compositions of Randolph Henry Ash in 

Possession and of Harald Alabaster and Matty Crompton in "Morpho Eugenia." Science 

raised troubling questions for what had been, primarily, a God-fearing society. The 

theories of geologist Charles Lyell are significant for the characters in Possession; in 

"Morpho Eugenia" Charles Darwin is often cited. Their books, respectively The 

Principles of Geology (1830-33) and The Origin of Species (1859), were among the most 

influential studies of the period, challenging commonly-held assumptions about creation 

and the age of the earth. Byatt's use of Emmanuel Swedenborg in "The Conjugial Angel" 

further indicates a fierce interest in the conjunction of material and spiritual. 

Swedenborg's works are little read today, but his teachings are known intimately by the 

characters of "The Conjugial Angel" (as they were by Henry James's father, Henry James 

Senior, an energetic proponent of Swedenborgianism). In addition to being a mystic, 

Swedenborg was a leading scientific thinker of the eighteenth century, a mining engineer, 

inventor, and geologist who also anticipated later findings in brain physiology. His very 

bodily views of heavenly marriage result in the title of the novella (complete with 

Swedenborgian spelling). His idiosyncratic blend of materialism and spiritualism helps to 



245 

explain Swedenborg's appeal to the Victorians, with their conflicted desires. As Alex 

Owen notes, the spiritualists' use of the phrase "spirit matter" to describe the emanations 

at seances indicates the peculiar determination at the time to yoke opposites which may 

be irreconcilable (The Darkened Room xvi). In a 1968 book review about the Victorians, 

Byatt describes their "precarious balancing between public and private, conscious and 

unconscious, social and selfish" ("The Victorian Balancing Act" 112). She could add the 

tension existing between science and religion. Byatt respects, even admires, the tangled 

motives of the age, and believes, to some extent, "we are still in it" (111). 

It is strange, from our present vantage point, to consider the sincere involvement i 

in spiritualism by some of the leading literary and political figures of the era. Reformer 

Robert Dale Owen, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe 

were confirmed supporters of mediums and their activities. Stowe's belief did not prevent 

her from the realization that "spiritualism is a reaction from the intense materialism of the 

present age" (qtd. in Goldfarb 60). Arthur Conan Doyle, a doctor and another unlikely 

believer, had this to say in his History of Spiritualism about the odd intersection of 

materialism and spiritualism: 

In such an age of materialism as Swedenborg can never have imagined, 
we are endeavouring to prove the existence and supremacy of spirit in so 
objective a way that it will meet and beat the materialists on their own 
ground. (1: 22) 

He went on, in Volume 2 of his History, to expand on this idea. 

Special material signs have been granted by the Invisible rulers of earth to 
satisfy the demand for material proofs which come from the increasing 
mentality of man. (277) 

Several members of the Tennyson family were indeed confirmed Swedenborgians, and 

Byatt makes use of this history for the plot of "The Conjugial Angel." (Alfred was less 



246 

committed, but apparently he could put himself into a trance and had the ability to 

mesmerize [Thwaite 246]). Thinkers of the calibre of William James and F. H . Bradley 

argued otherworldly phenomena in the journals of the day: Bradley devoted tremendous 

energy to identifying inadmissible proofs of spiritualist activity, while James kept an 

open mind (with an apparent desire to believe). He wrote, in 1909: "I personally am as 

yet neither a convinced believer in parasitic demons, nor a spiritist, nor a scientist, but 

still remain a psychical researcher waiting for more facts before concluding" ("Final 

Impressions of a Psychical Researcher" 203). 

Those who doubted included George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Robert 

Browning. In an incident reminiscent of Ash's 1861 "Gaza Exploit"4 in Possession. 

Lewes (described as a "cynical investigator" by Arthur Conan Doyle) rudely questioned 

the American medium Mrs. Hay den at a seance in 1852 or 1853 (Doyle 1: 162). Eliot and 

Lewes attended another seance in 1874, leaving in disgust when they believed they 

discovered the medium's trickery. Lewes did not mind making public his sentiments 

about what he believed was "monstrous folly" (Goldfarb 111-12). The Brownings were 

divided on the subject of automatic writing and table-tipping. In 1853 Elizabeth Barrett 

Browning wrote to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, "I always believed in a spirit-world 

and in the possibility of communications" (Women of Letters 257). Robert Browning 

participated in spiritualist evenings to indulge his wife, but his poem "Mr. Sludge, 'the 

Medium' " (the model for Ash's poem "Mummy Possest" in Possession) amply displays 

his misgivings, which are, however, not as brutal and accusatory as Ash's. A close friend 

4 This medium denunciation by Ash is so called, one assumes, because Ash brings the seance 
down around himself, destroying not only the hopes of others, but also destroying any chance for his own 
happiness with LaMotte. At Gaza Samson pulls down the pillars of the house he is in, killing himself along 
with the enemy Philistines (Judges 16). 



247 

of Mrs. Browning, a woman named Sophia Eckley, claimed to be a medium and was later 

detected in fraud. The incident was reported to have hurt the Brownings deeply (Goldfarb 

105). 

That Byatt named one of her mediums Sophie Sheekhy demonstrates Byatt's 

intense interest in this history. Sophie, however, is quite different in character from 

Sophia Eckley - Byatt's medium shows no signs of fraudulent behavior. The name of her 

. other medium in "The Conjugial Angel," Lilias Papagay, bears a resemblance to that of 

the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, chronicled by Doyle (1:11-29) and other writers 

of the era. Andrew Lang claims that Palladino was discovered to be a fraud (325), but 

Mrs. Papagay, a charming and sympathetic figure in the novella, is never accused of 

dishonesty. 

Her respectable fingers wrote out imprecations in various languages she 
knew nothing of. . . . Mrs. Papagay was an intelligent, questioning kind of 
woman, the kind who, in an earlier age, would have been a theologically 
minded nun, and in a later one would have had a university training in 
philosophy or psychology or medicine. (Angels and Insects 169,170) 

Incidents from the life of the Tennyson family are reported with historical 

exactitude in "The Conjugial Angel." Emily Tennyson Jesse did indeed have a "stout lap 

dog and raven, always fed on raw meat" (Tennyson and Dyson 165); the scene which 

Byatt recounts about Emily's re-emergence into society after Hallam's death, with a 

white rose in her black hair "as her Arthur loved to see her" (Angels and Insects 174) is a 

precise echo from several biographical accounts (Thwaite 36, Kolb 795). Various 

elements of Emily's conversation are actual quotations from these biographies. The most 

important repetition which Byatt uses is Emily's declaration to her husband Richard 



248 

Jesse, after she receives a spirit communication from Hallam, bidding her to join him in 

"conjugial" bliss: 

Richard, we may not always have got on together and our marriage may 
not have been a success, but I consider that an extremely unfair 
arrangement and shall have nothing to do with it. We have been through 
bad times together in this world and I consider it only decent to share our 
good times, presuming we have them, in the next. (Thwaite 574-75, Kolb 
802) 

Readers will likely be unaware that this statement, which occurs at the climax of "The 

Conjugial Angel" (Angels and Insects 283), has not been written by Byatt, but they 

probably will notice the genuine historical items inserted in the spiritualism scenes in 

Possession. Nearly all the names mentioned in an autobiographical account by Byatt's 

medium Hella Lees as being at seances in the 1860s were actual participants at seances of 

the time, and several are famous: "Lord Lytton, Mr. Trollope, Lord and Lady Cotterell, 

Miss Christabel LaMotte, Dr. Carpenter, Mrs. de Morgan, Mrs. Nassau Senior" 

(Possession 427). With the obvious exception of the fictional LaMotte, only the Cotterells 

are not mentioned by Arthur Conan Doyle in his History of Spiritualism. Byatt has taken 

the name for her medium Hella Lees from Victorian medium R. J. Lees, mistakenly 

named H. J. Lees by Doyle (1: 172). Robert Lees was rumoured to have acted as medium 

for Queen Victoria, eager to commune with the spirit of Prince Albert, although reliable 

biographies of the queen reject this claim for lack of proof (Longford 334, Cullen 88). 

A. S. Byatt, famous for her parodic intertexts in Possession, uses real intertexts in 

"The Conjugial Angel," a gesture criticized by reviewers in The New York Times Book 

Review and The New Yorker, while the National Review went so far as to call the 

novella "parasitic" (Tate 61). Mary Hawthorne in The New Yorker speculated on the 

reasons for this almost suffocating immersion in Victorian experience: 



249 

In conjuring up a time that engages her so intimately, Byatt herself 
becomes a kind of medium - our conduit to a lost world. And by inserting 
"real" people and texts in her narrative she further underscores her theme 
of transfiguration: the dead live again - or a version of them, at any rate. 
(100) 

For Hawthorne, as for many who reviewed Possession, Byatt's use of the nineteenth 

century is, then, primarily nostalgic. The living dead stand as metaphors for ideas which 

should still be current, for writers whose works can speak to our present age. Hawthorne 

is uneasy when discussing the surface reality of the occult experiences under discussion. 

She writes: "Byatt hints here at something like cosmic connection" between the dead and 

the living, and then she backs away from the topic (100, emphasis mine). A more 

positive evaluation of "The Conjugial Angel" came from the Village Voice: 

The occult visions of Byatt's characters . . . [are] a well-informed 
portrayal of a Victorian state of mind. By allowing those apparitions 
legitimacy and substance, Byatt refuses to patronize the past.... Byatt's 
ghosts, though real, are dead, but when men and women won't let go of 
them they start to take over. The way to exorcise them is to understand 
them, acknowledge their death, and redirect attention toward the living. 
This scheme could be a script for psychological healing, or incorporating 
political change. And it might also be a wise way for fiction writers to 
handle the literary past. (Shulman 15, emphasis mine) 

Again, this reviewer believes that the ghosts signify a literary, rather than a religious or 

spiritual engagement with the dead. But, as my italicized sections indicate, both 

Hawthorne and Shulman acknowledge that Byatt's treatment of ghosts "hints" at 

something beyond metaphor. The ghosts "though real, are dead." Why need Byatt's 

ghosts be so palpably real? Lawrence Norfolk verifies the substance of the most visceral 

spirit in "The Conjugial Angel"; "Hallam dead is a far more potent presence than Hallam 

alive," he writes in his review (10). And - an important question - why Hallam? If 

Byatt's main purpose in raising the spirits of dead Victorians is to remind us of their 



2 5 0 

greatness and to emphasize their affinity with us, the appearance of Hallam's ghost is 

odd. Hallam died at such a young age that his talent was known largely in potential; 

without In Memoriam, he would probably be little known today. By raising Hallam's 

ghost, Byatt dilutes the possibility that the afterlife being presented is symbolic of the 

power of past artists. Hallam is significant as a person, someone who was loved and 

missed - and not as an idea or literary icon. 

Byatt's defence of the Victorians is also based on her stated longing for a fusion 

of an age of faith and an age of criticism. This is declared in a review of books about 

realism which she did for the Times Literary Supplement in 1987. Citing J. P. Stern's On 

Realism as a "wise book, precise and liberating," she continues: Stern is "a critic for a 

possible Age of Faith or a perennial realism" ("The Real Made Sense" 65). Part of the 

faith cited in her discussion of Stern is faith in things, rather than faith in abstractions, but 

she cautiously goes beyond this. Paraphrasing Stern, she writes approvingly that realism 

can represent "something abiding, morally and spiritually necessary to our life in the 

world and in our own communities" (65). Stern himself is bolder; he writes that while 

works of realism must "bear witness . . . directly to life in the world," they are also "like 

the stars that form the night sky, all equidistant from us, timeless, transfixed images of 

the possibility of human existence" (On Realism 179). The Victorians represent for Byatt 

this kind of mixed idealism - loyalty to transcendence combined with intellectual rigour 

- as Hallam represented this for Tennyson. 

. . . one indeed I knew 
In many a subtle question versed, 
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first, 

But ever strove to make it true; 



251 

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his music out. 
There lives more faith in honest doubt, 

Believe me, than in half the creeds. (In Memoriam section 96) 

One of the outcomes of Byatt's heavy use of intertexts in the supernatural scenes 

in Possession and throughout "The Conjugial Angel" is that it allows her to express faith 

at second hand. Her personal uneasiness about religion and immortality prompts her to 

explore faith issues obliquely. "I have absolutely no religious beliefs although I think I 

have a religious temperament. Indeed I have a slight hostility to Christianity because I 

think it to be in the way of Truth," is how she expresses it during her 1984 video 

interview with Iris Murdoch. Glimmers of the religious temperament show themselves 

from time to time. "The human need for the cosmos to be human does not make it so," 

she says, rather plaintively, in another book review in 1988 ("Control of the Life-

Sources" 890). But it is rare to get more than a glimmer of this side of Byatt. More 

typical is her treatment of religious themes in Possession. The Ash-LaMotte 

correspondence allows Byatt to investigate religion at one remove. LaMotte's letters to 

Ash plead the case for Christian belief; Ash counters with regretful but firm agnostic 

responses. The disastrous seance at which Ash confronts LaMotte about the existence of 

their child is worked over in no less than six scattered intertextual documents -

LaMotte's letter to American spiritualist Priscilla Perm Cropper, Ash's letter to Ruskin, 

an excerpt from medium Hella Lees's book The Shadowy Portal, Ash's dramatic 

monologue "Mummy Possest," an unsent and later burned draft of a letter from Ash to 

LaMotte, and an unreceived and later buried letter from LaMotte to Ash. We, as readers, 

work through the strata of this investigation, acquiring important additional knowledge in 

a manner more active than is usual in reading fiction. Simultaneously we are made aware 



252 

of the wariness of the author, who can distance herself from the subject by way of these 

accreted layers. In "The Conjugial Angel" Byatt's reliance on the actual words Emily 

Tennyson Jesse spoke to her husband after receiving a seance message from Hallam 

signals Byatt's reluctance to engage personally with the issues, and an equal reluctance to 

declare, unequivocally, her unbelief. 

Byatt's other treatment of nineteenth-century ghosts is the short tale "Gode's 

Story," found within Possession and later published separately in the collection The 

Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. "Gode's Story," the relatively straightforward tale of a 

haunting, lacks mediums or any such mediating device. But as its title suggests, the 

spectres of "Gode's Story" are offered at another sort of remove. Originally, the story is 

one of the many intertexts in Possession. When the story was republished, it retained the 

name of its teller, an old Breton woman, although outside the context of the 1990 novel, 

the name holds no meaning - except as a distancing strategy for Byatt. In the story, a 

young woman is punished for her haughtiness toward the sailor she loves. She is haunted 

by the vision of a tiny, dancing child, which eventually leads her over a cliff to her death. 

The young man in turn is haunted by the spirit-child, and wastes away. On his death, 

Byatt writes that "the room smelled of apple blossom and ripe apples together" (The 

Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye 38). This odd description is closely related to the "smell of 

the aftermath" recorded in the final paragraph of Possession (before the Postscript): "a 

tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of 

death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful" (551). This optimistic 

view of death, appropriate in the comic Romance of Possession, is affixed rather 



253 

whimsically to the much darker "Gode's Story." Byatt apparently desires to offer a 

positive view of death, one that hints at rebirth - a curious thing for an agnostic to do. 

The writing of E . M . Forster provides a precedent for this kind of effect, what 

Virginia Woolf calls "contrary currents that run counter to each other" in her 1927 study 

of him ("The Novels of E . M . Forster" 322). Woolf describes a "double vision" (328) of 

realism and mysticism permeating Forster's writings, which fails to combine into the 

single masterful vision that Woolf believes would serve Forster better; as a result she 

finds in his fiction a lack of "force" and "fusion" (325). Despite Woolf s misgivings 

. about the overabundance of ambiguity in his work, she does identify Forster as "the most 

persistent devotee of the soul" (320). As we have noted regarding Henry James criticism, 

few critics of Forster will admit to his spiritual tendencies, or know what to do with them. 

Denis Godfrey, in his singular 1968 study E . M . Forster's Other Kingdom, deplores this 

skittishness, and points out that the short stories, in particular, are nearly all concerned 

with the transcendent. "The Celestial Omnibus," in which a boy beleaguered with an 

insensitive family comes upon a bus to take him to a heaven populated by writers and 

literary characters, and "The Other Kingdom," the story of a girl, hemmed in by vulgar 

materialism, turning into a tree, can be seen as Forster's insistence on an idealism that he 

proposes as a necessary corrective to pragmatism. In other Forster stories, however, the 

otherworldly stands more definitely for itself, and not merely as an indicator of intuition, 

nature, creativity, tradition, or any of the other Romantic values that Forster uses to 

temper his realism. "The Other Side of the Hedge," a portrayal of heaven not unlike 

James's "The Great Good Place," is one such story, an ironic but simultaneously sincere 

investigation of the notion of paradise. 



254 

Denis Godfrey writes that Forster's fiction and critical writings are at odds with 

each other on the subject of the transcendent. In his essays, Forster is more pessimistic, 

displaying a "spiritual evasiveness" (207), while his fiction promotes "the existence of an 

unseen world, a transcendent spiritual reality" (205). This is clearest in A Passage to 

India (1924), which examines the varying potencies of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, 

with Forster presenting the latter as the most exciting possibility for spiritual progress (as 

evidenced by Professor Godbole's visions). Most significant is the way in which Mrs. 

Moore - like Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End (1910) - exercises more influence after her 

death than she did when alive. Both women, when dead, enter an even more complex 

existence and play a more vital role in the lives of those still living than they ever had 

before. 

The persistent presence of the dead in Forster's fiction need not be seen only as 

expressive of his interest in eternal life; Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Moore can, more simply, 

be identified as representatives of Forster's idealism - his advocates of tradition, 

intuition, and the like. A . S. Byatt's characters do not fulfill functions in this way. But 

other points of connection between Forster and Byatt, particularly in the short fiction, are 

striking. The stories of each are less realistic than the longer fiction, more bold in the 

portrayal of transcendent reality. And a similar problem for the characters of each author 

is that access to transcendence is limited, choked off, because of the private and 

individual nature of the religious feeling involved. Isolated spirituality is doomed to 

failure - to misinterpretation, neglect, and malnourishment - because characters like 

Professor Godbole, Mrs. Wilcox, and Mrs. Moore make no concerted attempt to 

communicate their spiritual beliefs to others or to share their insights. Similarly, the 



255 

repressed and doubting characters in Byatt's "The July Ghost" are frustrated in their 

attempts to see and understand the dead boy in their midst, and the passive Joanna in 

"The Next Room" has developed neither strength of character nor loving bonds with 

others that might help her work through the haunting she endures. Both Forster and Byatt 

are unable to imagine a convincing community of believers, with coherent theological 

beliefs and the support of a like-minded fellowship. The result is that characters who 

experience transcendence, through visions of heaven or the visitation of the living dead, 

are unable to comprehend or positively act on this knowledge. 

In 1988, Byatt wrote an appreciative introduction to Rachel Ferguson's eccentric 

1931 novel The Brontes Go To Woolworths. In that book, a family of women have 

created an elaborate fantasy life for themselves called the Saga. The Saga extends to 

sightings of the Bronte sisters and the dead father of the family. Ostensibly living an 

upper middle class existence in the London of the 1920s, some members of the Carne 

family eventually are unable to distinguish between that reality and their fairy-tale world. 

In her introduction, Byatt astutely notes the danger and fear that Rachel Ferguson courts 

in this novel. The line between what is real and what is not is hazy, an unsettling state of 

affairs for the characters and for the reader. 

Byatt's own twentieth-century ghost stories, "The July Ghost" and "The Next 

Room," influenced as we have seen by James and Forster, additionally feature versions of 

this homely dilemma, suggested by Ferguson: what if ghosts turn up, casually, in very 

ordinary circumstances, doing nothing in particular? In these two stories the possibility 

that the observers are, if not mad, then somehow mentally unstable, is given some 

credence, as it is not in the nineteenth-century story told in "The Conjugial Angel." The 



256 

twentieth century carries with it a weight of doubt and alienation, even psychosis. But the 

very banality of the twentieth-century spirits' activities complicates any easy diagnosis of 

mental illness. The mundane character of most spirit communications can be seen to be a 

proof of their reality: doesn't banality colour most of our everyday communications? The 

dead son of the grieving woman who so longs to see him in "The July Ghost" and the 

dead parents of the disappointed woman in "The Next Room" engage in behaviour no 

more malevolent than running across a landing in pyjamas and bickering behind the wall. 

The ordinariness of these events, and the lack of fear invoked by them, creates for the 

witnesses a particularly acute anguish. Banality makes these preternatural occurrences 

more genuine. 

The women who are visited by ghosts in these two Byatt stories are both 

resolutely rational and pragmatic. Says the mother in "The July Ghost: 

"I got it wrong, you see, I was so sensible, and I was so shocked because I 
couldn't get to want anything - 1 couldn't talk to Noel - 1 - 1 - made Noel 
take away, destroy, all the photos, I - didn't dream, you can will not to 
dream, I d i d n ' t . . . visit a grave, flowers, there isn't any point. I was so 
sensible. Only my body wouldn't stop waiting and all it wants is to - to 
see that boy. That boy. That boy you - saw." (Sugar 47) 

Joanna in "The Next Room" is "absolutely sure that there was no better place, that the 

end was the end" (Sugar 58). She is a "development economist," a believer in "human 

ingenuity" (81). When she meets a woman keen on spiritualism who has had a Near 

Death Experience, Joanna tries to tell her "I don't want heaven" (71). These women are 

punished for their unbelief. And they have been dishonest about their feelings about the 

dead: the mother has tried to forget her son; Joanna has pretended to love her parents. 

The dead return to remind them of their responsibilities, to truth and to the living. 



257 

We can look upon the spirits who visit Joanna and the dead boy's mother as 

vestiges of sexual loneliness and emotional isolation, but the inconclusive endings of 

both stories mitigate against a strictly psychological reading. Like "The Turn of the 

Screw," "The July Ghost" features a frame tale with a beginning but no end; at the story's 

conclusion, we are, significantly, still in the ghost's presence. "The Next Room" lacks 

the framing device, but similarly, ends with the ghosts in possession. The open-endedness 

of these tales is an element of their realism; the narratives are not closed off, as Gothic 

tales often are, with denouements full of reasonable explanations. A dual reading of such 

tales, much the best way to read James's ghost stories, entertains simultaneous 

psychological and supernatural interpretations. But when the ghosts are still in power at 

the conclusion, as they are in "The Turn of the Screw" and in Byatt's "The Next Room" 

and "The July Ghost," the balance is tipped, however slightly, in favour of the 

supernatural. Nothing has exposed them as illusory or fraudulent, and the very 

pragmatism of the women who learn to believe in them is another point in the ghosts' 

favour. The theory of sexual hysteria so often applied to "The Turn of the Screw" might 

be used in interpretation of Byatt's ghost tales. But such a strategy suggests itself in the 

main merely because "The Turn of the Screw" inevitably dominates any discussion of 

tales of this sort; on examination, Byatt's phlegmatic female characters in these stories 

bear little resemblance to James's imaginative governess. 

If a realist or empiricist (even an ironic or postmodern one, like Byatt) offers a 

psychological aberration in the form of a returned spirit, this is hardly less strange than 

the appearance of the ghost itself. Like Robertson Davies, I believe that arguments about 

whether such phenomena are supernatural or psychological are slightly beside the point. 



258 

In either case, we have gone beyond the material. The physical world has failed Joanna, 

the mother in "The July Ghost," and the governess in "The Turn of the Screw," and, by 

extension, the authors themselves. Whether Byatt's characters turn toward the intangible 

or whether it comes to claim them, the incorporeal has definite moments of triumph. Is it 

less bizarre to see another person's memory (the primary explanation offered by the 

characters in "The July Ghost") than to see the ghost itself? Byatt's ghost stories are the 

acknowledgment, by a literary realist, that rational life, earthly existence, and scientific 

explanations are inadequate. 

§ § § 

The competition between word and vision noted elsewhere in Byatt is less 

strained in her ghost stories. In "The Conjugial Angel," Byatt's major treatment of this 

topic, both language and sight verify the existence of ghosts for the living characters. 

Indeed, it is the combination of this evidence which makes the living dead so peculiarly 

solid in this work. As we have seen, Byatt's ideal of communication combines the 

immediacy and primal vigour of the visual with the methodical pragmatism of words. 

Hallam's ghost in "The Conjugial Angel" is present in speech, written word, and sight. 

He satisfies a full range of criteria; Sophie Sheekhy even suffers his touch, as they lie 

together in her bed. Doubt about Hallam's spirit is not even entertained within the 

confines of the novella. Byatt allows here, and encourages in the reader, the confidence in 

the ghostly supernatural that she does not allow in her presentation of conventional 

religious topics, such as Christian faith. If we doubt Hallam's ghost, it is our own doubt, 

brought from outside the text, which is at work, and Byatt has not overtly courted or 

acknowledged it. 



259 

In Possession, the primary evidence for the afterlife comes through words, from 

the spirit of Blanche Glover, or so Christabel LaMotte believes. The optical phenomena 

that are offered - wreaths and lights - are rejected by Randolph Henry Ash. The evidence 

is, overall, weaker in Possession, although the two day coma into which LaMotte falls is 

indicative of something extraordinary. The overwhelming visual and verbal evidence 

offered in such profusion in "The Conjugial Angel" is missing. The idea that the spirits of 

the dead poets "possess" the living scholars is mostly symbolic in Possession, but worth 

noting in passing. 

The contemporary stories each offer one half of Byatt's ideal fusion of 

communication modes. In "The July Ghost" the dead boy can be seen, but he does not 

speak. The dead parents of Joanna in "The Next Room" are Voluble, but invisible. As a 

result, these ghosts are less substantial than the ghost of Hallam. As in Possession, there 

is room for doubt, for alternative interpretations of the ghosts' existence. Both words and 

sight are needed for sound proof of a supernatural emanation. This is also one of the 

reasons for the lack of spiritual coherence in E . M . Forster's fiction - only vision is 

employed. Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Moore, and Professor Godbole see beyond the material 

world, but they do not put their mystical visions into words, and the transmission of 

knowledge is interrupted or lost. In A Passage to India, Adela Quested is able to ascertain 

the truth of the events at the Marabar Caves in a courtroom "vision," but is unable to 

explain the events (290-98); Godbole, whose verbal utterances are utterly enigmatic, is 

able to reach a state of "completeness" while having visions of, among other things, Mrs. 

Moore, a wasp, and a stone (373). In Still Life, Frederica Potter values Forster because 



260 

she believes that she too "had suffered, and recognised" the "vision of nothing" in the 

Marabar Caves (120). 

Verbal language is associated with materialism, and therefore with the realism 

which marks so much of Byatt's fiction. The visual is suited to idealism, transcendence, 

and the supernatural - and is attached to the Romantic or mystical qualities in her work, 

elements which usually knuckle under to the materialistic. Unwilling to allow vision to 

monopolize the entire province of the mystical, like Forster, or, like James, to present 

words and visions in iiisolubly ambiguous supernatural puzzles, Byatt attempts, in her 

ghostly tales as elsewhere in her fiction, a combination of visual and verbal. But material 

reality, pragmatic and powerful, often disrupts the attempted connection. Like J. P. Stern, 

who suggests a new form of realism in literature which would build "bridges between the 

visible and the invisible" (47), Byatt (more hesitantly) introduces the unseen into her 

realistic fiction in an attempt to expand the limits of the form and to enable a more 

accurate reflection of the full range of ambiguous human experiences and beliefs. Stern, 

whom Byatt admires, does not see that realism need be "implacably hostile to any form 

of transcendence" (45). But, in practice, it often is. 

Much of the long excursus on Tennyson at the heart of "The Conjugial Angel" 

discusses Tennyson's, and Byatt's, fascination with materialism. "He nodded sagely 

when his friends castigated the crass materialism of the Age, but his imagination was 

stirred by matter" (Angels and Insects 264). Here is where many of Byatt's characters 

locate presence. Roland in Possession finds happiness in listing concrete words which 

resist abstraction. The lists were "compulsively readable and desperately important" 

(467). In "The Conjugial Angel" the beauty and power of the material is evoked in a long 



261 

graceful paragraph near the conclusion of the novella. In it, Sophie Sheekhy watches 

Emily Tennyson Jesse pouring out tea, and the cups and biscuits, in their resolute 

solidity, seem to Sophy to represent a miracle: "their tongues tasted goodness" (Angels 

and Insects 287). In "The Next Room," "The Conjugial Angel," and Possession, those 

who are investigating spiritualist matters are simultaneously immersed in scientific study: 

the concrete world exerts an attraction for the nineteenth century characters, who study 

geology and biology, as it does for Joanna, who studies economic development in our 

own century. The power and importance of science and verbal language are never 

doubted by Byatt's people; if they are given visions of ghosts, the intent is not that the 

earthly be usurped but that it be augmented. 

The supernatural quest is a hopeful complement to the materialistic one: in 

Byatt's ghost stories reside faith in ideals, desires and fears about the afterlife. In the 

supernatural quest, the power of absence, the, allure of the unknowable, is felt. V i s i o n -

both actual seeing and inner vision - is the idiom of possible immortality, the language of 

infinity. (This world is often called "the unseen" world - which the hopeful strive to see 

in "visions" - a paradoxical state of affairs recalling Freud's heimlich/unheimlich 

alliance.) The visual world has, of course, claims on universality and accessibility that 

verbal language cannot make, even if that universality is sometimes stalled at the level of 

potential. A picture of a cup will have more immediacy than the word "cup." Ruth 

Wilcox knows this: she does not want to explain Howards End to Margaret Schlegel but 

to show it to her. Rupert Brooke gives sight the primary place of importance in his 

(apparently sincere) "Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for 

Psychical Research)." In the afterlife, says Brooke, we will -



262 

Spend in pure converse our eternal day; 
Think each in each, immediately wise; 

Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say 
What this tumultuous body now denies; 

And feel, who have laid our groping hands away; 

And see, no longer blinded by our eyes. 

Speech and the other senses are subordinate, in Brooke's scheme, to sight, which serves 

as the culmination of a description of spiritual perfection. This is commonly encountered 

in conventional religions, especially its mystical branches. Here we have the Word, or the 

Name; there we will finally see face to face. As Paul says, "Now I know in part; then I 

shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood" (1 Corinthians 13.12). 

Unlike Brooke and Forster, Byatt investigates both speech and vision in her 

supernatural stories. But Byatt's analysis of this dual quest for the material and spiritual 

is found, primarily, within one of her most difficult and least admired works, "The 

Conjugial Angel." (It is not surprising that Philip Haas, in adapting Angels and Insects 

for the screen, used only the first novella, "Morpho Eugenia," and scrapped "The 

Conjugial Angel.") The density of the prose and the distancing strategy of using 

Tennyson as a conduit for the discussion can be off-putting. For Byatt's Tennyson, these 

two halves - the verbal material and the visual otherworldly - come together in the 

poetry of In Memoriam. the best sections of which he sees as "animal,and abstract at 

once, matter-moulded and shadowy" (Angels and Insects 271). Tennyson is able to put 

himself into a trance by staring at his mirror image and chanting his own name, 

"unmaking both of them with every naming of this nothing" (272)! Tennyson is caught 

between these two worlds, attempting to name things which resist language, trying to 

scrutinize personality by losing it. His poetry, or so Byatt would have us believe, 

represents an amalgam of word and vision, concrete and abstract, matter and spirit. 



263 

However, the sheer wordiness of "The Conjugial Angel" weighs it down, 

establishing its worldliness. Byatt's reluctance to engage personally and directly with the 

question of the afterlife results in a book which, strangely enough, lacks the necessary 

imaginative space and visual stimulation which can be found in her books not devoted to 

spiritualism (Still Life. The Matisse Stories). Using the occult as an indirect method of 

confronting religious questions to which Byatt has (officially) declared herself 

antipathetic is a plan that miscarries. If one believes in, for example, Christian teachings, 

then the afterlife is a viable way to examine the intersection of material and spiritual 

existence. But in presenting an afterlife cut loose from religion Byatt frustrates the 

analysis of faith and language, of matter and spirit which she has attempted. 

The fusion of visual and verbal knowledge which Byatt pursues - and 

occasionally sees glimmers of - in her examination of birth and love, geometric forms 

and colours, and visual art, is sought in her supernatural stories as well. Byatt's 

description of death-as-the end, discussed in chapter 3, suggests that the mortal, finite 

thing which human death must be for atheists can neither provide the aggregate 

knowledge Byatt seeks nor help find the language in which to couch that knowledge. 

Byatt's distrust of organized religion leads her to experiment with death and possible 

immortality through this middle way - the more vaguely supernatural way - where she 

hopes to find traces of her ideal fused knowledge. She tries to reclaim some aspects of 

spiritual life to invigorate the intellectual novel (as Iris Murdoch does in The B e l l a 

comparison I will pursue in the next chapter) and to explore the possibility that 

otherworldly visions explained solely by psychological means are robbed of their vitality 

and significance. The visions that Marcus and Sophy see have a disturbing reality; the 



264 

dead are powerful, and so is some source of power beyond material life which goes 

unnamed. The distress from which Marcus and Sophy barely recover indicates the hazard 

of such visions when one has not truly invested in religious faith. Marcus in particular has 

access only to visions, not words, and the imbalance (and the irreverence of the quest) 

nearly destroys him. The simultaneous presence and absence which is life-after-death is 

too powerful an idea to be grasped by an agnostic. 



265 

Chapter 7: Religion 

He had breathed on them 
the breath of a living man -

even then 
when hope tried with a flutter of wings 

to lift me -
still, alone with myself, 

my heavy cry was the same: Lord, 
I believe, 

help thou mine unbelief. 

Denise Levertov, "St. Thomas Didymus" (1989) 

We can act as //there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature 
as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be 
immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference 
in our moral life. 

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) 

M y discussion of A. S. Byatt and religion will naturally have much in common 

with my chapter on ghosts and the supernatural. Assuming that my reader will forgive 

small repetitions and understand overlapping concerns, I hope nevertheless in this chapter 

to focus more particularly on Byatt's attitude to deity, to institutional religion, to 

morality, and to ultimate meaning. I will not treat the immortality of the soul, as that 

aspect of metaphysical speculation belongs to the previous chapter. There is less 

emphasis on the intersection of visual and verbal language in this part of my analysis, 

possibly because in her writing about conventional religious traditions Byatt has been 

unwilling to invest the intellectual and creative enthusiasm she brings to her rather more 

oblique approaches to semi-religious events, like Henry Severell's geometric visions. But 

as I have been writing "around" Byatt's religious views for so much of this study, I think 



266 

it is important to consider what she has indeed written and said about traditional religious 

faith. 

It is not an easy matter to characterize Byatt's relationship to religion. I have 

called her, throughout this study, an agnostic. Most of her comments on faith, in essays 

and interviews, support this, and some readers might even be tempted to call her an 

atheist. For a number of reasons, I think atheism is not part of Byatt's disposition. In 

1990 she described her view of God as "an omni-present absentee whose linguistic 

essence is reduced to traces of moral and cultural nostalgia, touched with savagery" 

(Passions of the Mind 5). This carefully worded credo would strike one as almost wholly 

pessimistic but for "omni-present," a powerful modifier ruling over the quiet noun 

"absentee." In the afterword to New Writing 4. edited with Alan Hollinghurst in 1995, 

she noted that, after the nineteenth-century struggle with faith and after a burst of 

religious literary activity in the 1960s, today's novelists "are thinking about what it is to 

be a naked animal, evolved over unimaginable centuries, with a history constructed by 

beliefs which have lost their power" ("A New Body of Writing: Darwin and Recent 

British Fiction" 443). In a television interview conducted by Michael Ignatieff in 1996, 

she elaborated on this "naked animal": "I think this generation of novelists has come to 

terms with the fact that we are complicated and beautiful animals." She goes on to 

describe her search for a scientific model of human meaning and determinism: 

If you read someone like Richard Dawkins, he gives you a way into 
thinking about ethics. The loss of religion, or what I think of as the loss of 
religion, has taken away all the reasons we used to think of for why we 
should behave well or badly. Dawkins, with his Selfish Gene, with his 
explanations for things like the use of the maternal instinct, gives you a 
vision of yourself you can work with, gives you a model of human 
behavior which you could put into a novel and look at." (Ignatieff 
interview, emphasis mine) 



267 

In 1984, in her filmed conversation with Iris Murdoch, Byatt provided one of the 

pivotal remarks for a discussion of her (lack of) faith: "I have absolutely no religious 

beliefs although I think I have a religious temperament." She followed that with: "Indeed 

I have a slight hostility to Christianity because I think it to be in the way of truth." The 

necessity of the search for truth is an indisputable component of Byatt's philosophy, even 

though the outcome is constantly problematized . Most biographies describe her parents 

as Quakers, and Byatt was sent to a Quaker boarding school in 1949, but she denies that 

she was a believing Quaker, and sometimes extends this to her family. She has said that 

"my family were sympathetic to the Quakers, but unlike the Corbett family in The Game, 

which was taken from the family of a friend of mine, we were not ourselves Quakers" 

(Dusinberre interview 188). However, in her sole first-person autobiographical story, 

"Sugar," she describes her father as a "late-convinced Quaker" and adds "I respected his 

moral opinions, I share most of them, I am his child" (Sugar 217).1 

Already a number of complicating factors arise in describing Byatt's views of 

religion. Her interest in Darwinism and her comments on the human as a "naked animal" 

are stated within discussions of fiction-writing, not within personal discussions: she is 

intrigued by the recent writings of Richard Dawkins because they give the writer 

something to "work with," something "you could put into a novel and look at." For 

herself, she admits a religious temperament, but clearly has many quarrels with 

institutional religion, both mainstream Christian and dissenting Quaker traditions. I 

emphasized the phrase "what I think of as the loss of religion" above because it seems to 

'Although "Sugar" is fiction and cannot be equated with an interview, the story is accurately 
autobiographical throughout, giving a detailed account of Byatt's family history which tallies with most of 
the personal information available about her, particularly as it involves her parents. 



268 

me to be typical of Byatt's comments on faith: she qualifies, ponders, and adapts her 

terms and phrases. She does not make absolute statements about her personal certainty of 

the absence of God, although organized religion certainly falls short of her truth-seeking 

ideals. 

If we turn to her essays, we find discussions of God and faith everywhere: in 

extended studies of Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Vincent Van Gogh, and in 

shorter reviews of D. J. Enright and William Golding, all collected in Passions of the 

Mind (1991). In a 1989 video interview with Anthony Burgess (where Byatt acts as 

interviewer), she immediately asks Burgess about his "quarrel with God," and they 

proceed to a detailed discussion about his religious beliefs, good and evil, and 

Catholicism, with Byatt apparently in respectful sympathy with many of Burgess's 

remarks, particularly those about evil as a crucial force to be reckoned with but instead 

ignored by secular writers. 

Byatt has also been shaped by Iris Murdoch's discussions of good and evil. The 

Bell (1958) is one of Murdoch's most extended treatments of religion, and Byatt has 

written appreciatively about it in her study of Murdoch's fiction, first published in 1965, 

where she notes that The Bell has "the solid life that Miss Murdoch praises in the great 

nineteenth-century novels" and that its characters "have a life of their own" existing 

beyond the allegorical framework in which Murdoch places them (Degrees of Freedom 

79). Murdoch's attitude toward Christianity in this novel is complex and respectful. She 

acknowledges the real power the Christian message still has to those who can hear it. 

Those who try to struggle outside the faith have an extremely difficult time, although 

Murdoch admires and to some extent promotes that very struggle. 



269 

The Bell concerns an idealistic community of lay-people attached to an abbey in 

the English countryside. Several of the characters, including Michael Meade and 

Catherine Fawley, waver uncertainly on the edge of the monastic life (which also 

represents Christianity more generally). Dora Greenfield, the unbeliever, assumes that the 

abbey is a prison, yet the nuns we encounter are healthier and wiser than the people 

outside. The sexuality of the outside world is threatening and a cause of great anguish, at 

the same time as it is the best reason to stay in the outside world. 

The bell itself, an ambitious symbol with many facets, is profoundly associated 

with guilt. In legend, a 14th century curse on an amorous nun and her lover made the 

abbey bell fly into the lake. When a new bell is about to be placed in the abbey, Dora and 

the boy Toby find the old one and plot a fake miracle to have it raised in the tower in the 

place of the old one. But the corruption of innocence which occurs in various subplots 

causes the bell's function - declaring guilt - to be resurrected. It rings out, and later falls 

back into the lake, in repudiation of the irreligious intentions of Dora and Toby. 

Simultaneously, Catherine's sudden descent into madness and her twin brother Nick's 

suicide shake the community to its foundations. 

There are no easy answers to the religious and sexual questions Murdoch 

proposes. The bell, associated both with Christian faith and with eroticism, is "a truth-

telling voice that must not be silenced" (The Bell 267). In sermons, both Michael Meade 

and his colleague James Tayper Pace use the image of the bell. James sees the bell as a 

voice acknowledging innocence and counselling renunciation (135). For Michael the bell 

communicates the importance of self-knowledge; the bell is subject to the force of gravity 

as we are subject to the forces of our personalities, including our sexual identities (204). 



270 

Religion at its worst is a "machine of sin and repentance" alien to human nature 

(303); however, we observe that the characters who don't believe in God are not as 

complete or convincing as those who do. Byatt has noted in particular the sympathy and 

affection Murdoch has for the sincerely Christian but personally anguished Michael 

Meade: "She shows toward Michael, to an unusual extent in her work, the quality which, 

referring herself to the love the great novelist, such as Tolstoi, has for his characters, she 

calls 'tolerance' " (Degrees of Freedom 95). Murdoch's loving portrayal of Michael will 

influence Byatt's own creation of Daniel Orton, just as Murdoch's thoughtful agnostic 

reflections on religious faith are followed by Byatt's own tentative but fascinated 

speculations on the subject. On C B C Radio in 1996 Byatt said, "I know Daniel. I think 

quite a lot about Daniel in the way you think about people you love" (Rogers interview). 

One of Byatt's unusual acts as a critic has been to include an essay by Michael 

Levenson, "The Religion of Fiction," originally published in the New Republic, as an 

appendix to Degrees of Freedom. Levenson's essay concerns Murdoch only tangentially; 

it is, in fact, a review of Byatt's Angels and Insects. Levenson believes that Murdoch and 

Byatt "count as a distinct contemporary lineage" of moral writers (42). There are, of 

course, differences between them; for example, Byatt is critical of Murdoch's symbolic 

use of the bell, which makes her "uneasy" (Degrees of Freedom 83), and in her own 

writing about religion she has tended to avoid Murdoch's heavily allegorical 

formulations. She has also, it must be said, never attempted such a compassionate reading 

of faith as Murdoch does in The Bell. 

Levenson says, of Byatt alone, that "she wants to be the natural historian of a 

post-Christian spiritual life," and that "her point is not to confirm religious truth, but to 



271 

enlarge the religious sense, which locates value not in the infinite but in the yearning for 

the infinite, not in God but in the search for God" (43). Byatt, in her introduction to 

Degrees of Freedom, writes that Levenson's essay "surprised and excited" her (viii). His 

evaluation of her aims - his recognition of Byatt's fascination with mystery and her 

frustration with the limits of empirical knowledge - is more accurate than most of the 

criticism that sprang up in the wake of Possession, claiming her as a nostalgic 

postmodern Romantic and a master of pastiche and irony, and the reviews of her earlier 

novels, focusing on genre and allusion and on comparisons with her sister Margaret 

Drabble. 

Aside from Levenson, there have been few discussions of religion, or even 

philosophy or ethics, in Byatt criticism. Michael Westlake in "The Hard Idea of Truth" 

takes Byatt to task for backsliding into humanism and empiricism in Still Life, instead of 

staying with the hard moral and epistemological questions that novel purports to ask, and 

J. Stephen Fountain in "Ashes to Ashes," a humourless reading of Possession (making 

links with Kristeva's use of jouissance, among other things), works out abstract and 

pessimistic deconstructive ideas of genesis and apocalypse in that novel. Neither essay 

directly faces the matter of religious faith. Scholars have disregarded the fact that Byatt 

once embarked upon a PhD dissertation on seventeenth-century religious allegory, 

ignoring also the author's clarion pronouncement on her thesis, in Passions of the Mind: 

It is not too much to say that this unwritten work, with its neoplatonic 
myths, its interest in the incarnation, in fallen and unfallen (adequate and 
inadequate) language to describe reality, has haunted both my novels and 
my reading patterns ever since. (3) 

The assumption, prevalent in the academy, that religious faith is a thing of the past, has 

dried up much potential fruitful speculation about religion and literature in the last few 



272 

decades. Even Northrop Frye, an ordained minister, in his studies of the Bible and 

literature, does not write explicitly of belief but of myth. Christian apologist and scientist 

John Polkinghorne clings to the idea that "modern Western unbelief is an historical and 

geographical oddity" (60) and hopes that it will pass.2 J. Hillis Miller, in The 

Disappearance of God (1963), gives the impression that there just aren't any believers 

left. His sole concession is to suggest, not very convincingly, that perhaps "God exists, 

but he is out of reach" (1). Influential literary studies such as Kenneth Burke's The 

Rhetoric of Religion (1970) treat language and religion like an elaborate logic puzzle; his 

book builds on a primary assumption that "theology is preeminently verbal. It is words 

about 'God' " (vi). If one has problems with his first assumption (and I do - his is a 

limited view of theology, as it immediately interrogates the reality of "God" by setting 

the term off to the side), then Burke's work on the structures of faith is not very helpful, 

especially as it ignores the phenomenological actuality of worshipping humans. 

Studies do exist, of course, of nineteenth-century religion and literature; as Byatt 

remains avidly involved with nineteenth-century thinkers, insisting that our debates are 

continuations of theirs, these can be helpful. Robert Lee Wolff in Gains and Losses: 

Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (1977) reminds us that many novels in 

the period engaged in precise religious debates with a passion we are now incapable of 

grasping. "Not since the seventeenth century," Wolff says, "had religious contention been 

the stuff of everyday English life" (2). Most recent studies of this period display 

insecurity about these religious issues, to the point of absurdity. For example, Oliver 

Lovesey's 1991 study The Clerical Character in George Eliot's Fiction insists on treating 

2Compare this to C. S. Lewis's confidence, only fifty years ago, that the majority of humanity has 
always believed (and continues to believe) in "some kind of God or gods" (Mere Christianity 39). 



273 

the "character" type as important, ignoring the "clerical" aspect. In Lovesey's detailed 

introduction, God is not mentioned at all, and Christ makes one belated appearance on the 

last page. Atheism is the assumed modus operandi of the contemporary critic. Edward 

Said, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), promotes literary and cultural 

criticism that is rigorously "secular" instead of "religious" because the latter is apparently 

synonymous with "unthinkability, undecidability, and paradox" and characterized by 

unscholarly "appeals to magic, divine ordinance, or sacred texts" (291). 

Leslie Stephen, in "An Agnostic's Apology" (1876), wrote: 

We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and 
darkness, learning only by incessantly-repeated blunders, obtaining a 
glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly 
discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing 
whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths. 
(39-40) 

From Stephen, that energetic agnostic, one obtains a sense of the epic importance of the 

decision about faith. In our century that urgent quality has vanished from literary 

criticism. Agnosticism - the belief that God's existence can neither be proven nor 

disproven, a position, in the Victorian era, resolutely not identical with spiritual apathy -

no longer claims many adherents. Now atheism and faith divide up the field between 

them, and faith, it seems, largely resides outside the intelligentsia. But in the introduction 

to the anthology Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith (1997), Darryl 

Tippens and Stephen Weathers sketch out the preliminaries of an argument against the 

widely-held view that literature about the transcendent is "peculiar and anachronistic," 

that "God is dead as far as significant literature is concerned" (xiii, xiv). They point for 

proof to the work, in our century, of Flannery O'Connor, W. H . Auden, John Updike, and 

Denise Levertov. 



274 

Byatt's place within this discussion is unusual: as Michael Levenson points out, 

her contribution is a direct continuation of the Victorian debate about faith, a debate in 

which very few intellectuals outside of religion or theology departments now are 

engaged. The controversies that occupied Leslie Stephen, John Henry Newman, Matthew 

Arnold, George Eliot, and Robert Browning are more vitally present in Byatt's work than 

are twentieth-century assumptions of unbelief. Like her mentor Iris Murdoch, whose 

Platonic writings unabashedly uphold moral ideas that are centuries old and ask why they 

cannot still be current, Byatt insists that the great debate about the reality of God is not 

finished. "The old shudder of Darwinism is what ["Morpho Eugenia"] wants to give. And 

why shouldn't we still shudder? What have we become that we have forgotten the shock 

of our origins?" writes Michael Levenson (42). 

As Byatt does not consider herself a Christian, it may seem there is no particular 

reason to use Christian beliefs as the horizon against which to examine the residues and 

glimmers of faith in her outlook. But several factors indicate Christianity as the 

underlying system in Byatt's work. Most obvious is the high proportion of Christian 

ministers as pivotal characters in her fiction: Edwin Merton and Father Rowell in The 

Game, Mr. Ellersby and the Anglican priest responsible for Daniel Orton's conversion in 

The Virgin in the Garden, Gideon Farrar in Still Life, Harald Alabaster in "Morpho 

Eugenia," Canon Holly in Babel Tower, and (most importantly) the deeply sympathetic 

Daniel Orton, a fixture of the Potter novels. Nearly all these men are sincere Christians, 

whatever their failings. Outside the clergy, several of Byatt's major characters are also 

3 Female ministers just do not appear in Byatt's fiction, although the ordination of women has 
become increasingly common in the past century. It is equally unusual to find them in other fiction about 
the clergy, from Goldsmith and Sterne to Greene and Updike. This literary absence is worth investigation, 



275 

devout Christians, in particular Cassandra Corbett and Simon Moffitt in The Game and 

Christabel LaMotte in Possession. Additionally, an obsession with the idea of 

Incarnation, heavily influenced by Christian doctrine, runs through several of her critical 

essays, culminating in her analyses of Robert Browning (the piece is entitled "Fact, 

Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art") and George Eliot. And finally, there is, plainly, the 

absence of another creed to be of use. Byatt displays little interest in Buddhism, 

Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. She appears equally unenthusiastic about other quasi-divine 

"gods" of the past two hundred years or so - nature, the Romantic Imagination, Jungian 

collective unconscious, Shavian Life Force, Pelagian faith in human progress and 

perfectibility. About science and myth, however, she is more excited. I shall return to this 

later. 

§ § § 

Byatt's Quaker background goes some way in explaining her ambivalent attitude 

toward Christianity - being outside the faith but fascinated by it. A dissenting group, 

founded by George Fox in the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends dispensed with 

ministers and sacraments, emphasizing instead an "inner light" and direct contact with 

the Holy Spirit. Less concerned with doctrines and public Biblical readings (although 

they know the scriptures well) than with spontaneous spiritual experience, the Friends 

also stress social justice, and are well known for their work in prison reform, the abolition 

of slavery, the fight for women's rights, and pacifism. Byatt's suspicions about 

mainstream Christian beliefs (which get "in the way of truth," as she says in the Murdoch 

video interview) follow from this. The Friends dislike hierarchy, ceremony, and dogma, 

Dinah Morris in George Eliot's Adam Bede being an important exception. As Byatt makes no contributions 
to debates about women and the ministry, I do not address the issue here. 



276 

and value simplicity and charity. Byatt's most admirable Christian character, Daniel 

Orton, although an Anglican, embodies these Quaker principles. 

The deficiencies of Quaker belief are put forward by Cassandra Corbett in The 

Game. In an impassioned speech at a Friends Meeting, she says: 

You always talk as though passive resistance could convert violence to 
love. But it can't, and it doesn't, and we ought to admit it. There will 
always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to 
them. In this life love will not overcome, it will not, it will go to waste and 
it is no good to preach anything else. We need God because we are 
desperate and wicked and we can find Him only through Himself. The 
Inner Light doesn't necessarily shine, and doesn't illuminate much. (38) 

Although Cassandra has psychological problems (her outburst is prompted partly by 

sexual loneliness and feelings of alienation, and the novel ends in her suicide), these are 

honestly-felt theological opinions. Cassandra's sister Julia agrees; she sees Quakerism as 

a failed attempt "to reduce life to its elements" (39). Cassandra moves to Anglicanism 

and to Catholicism, but finds no satisfaction. Their friend Simon Moffitt, once a 

candidate for the ministry, becomes a scientist instead. His attempt to combine, 

somehow, science and religion is presented by Byatt as a particularly destructive 

amalgam. A l l three characters find that religion does not answer enough of their 

questions; there are inexplicable and unmanageable elements loose in the world 

aggravating and undermining their faith. They come to see religion as escapist, as a way 

for people to give false meaning or structure to their existences. 

The Game is one of Byatt's most explicit struggles with the problem of evil and 

suffering, a problem which will not return to her fiction with much intensity until Babel 

Tower. Cassandra says that "we have to find a way of living in a world that eats and 

destroys and pays nothing back" (The Game 38) and Quakerism is seen as inadequate to 



277 

the task. The Quakers in the book - the Corbett parents and Julia's husband Thor -

practise good works obsessively, to the detriment of their familial relationships, and with 

inadequate positive results. Thor is presented as an extremist, a good but conflicted man 

who is submerging his violent nature in religious social work; the scene where he breaks 

down, wrecks the apartment, and leaves his family is an exciting piece of writing. (Byatt 

revels in such demolition scenes; another is found at the heart of "Medusa's Ankles"). 

The Game is Byatt's only extended treatment of Quakerism, but the influence of 

Quakerism colours her future examinations of religion. The simplicity of Quaker faith 

makes her suspicious of sacrament and creed, and accounts for her pursuit of pure vision, 

of fully illuminated language. But that very simplicity, combined with the fallibility of 

human beings, disappoints in its inability to contain or explain evil and pain. 

A large portion of Byatt's portrayal of mainstream Christianity is found in 

Possession. That Christian faith receives its most strenuous examination in this novel 

might be seen as an impediment to any serious analysis of it, since I have argued 

elsewhere that Possession is anomalous in Byatt's oeuvre, on account of its comic 

purposes. (Amidst the general approbation on Possession's release, a disappointed Punch 

reviewer compared it to Graham Greene's "entertainments" and urged Byatt to return to 

more serious fiction.) But the nineteenth-century stratum of the novel, with the Ash-

LaMotte correspondence at its heart, is not where the comedy is located; the postmodern 

characters are the ones who are held up for ironic probing and gentle ridicule. Byatt 

confirms this when she says that she meant for "the dead [to be] much more alive and 

vital than the living" (Wachtel 1993: 82). When interviewer Eleanor Wachtel notes that 



278 

Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are, by comparison with Ash and LaMotte, "a little 

anaemic," Byatt agrees, and continues: 

The Victorians, on the other hand, were quite sure that they were real 
people. They didn't have modern theories of there being no concrete 
personality, of everybody being just a kind of mixture of moments in time 
and voices of the language speaking through them; they really believed 
that they were important people, that what they did mattered in the eyes of 
God and in their own lives. (82-83) 

The Ash-LaMotte correspondence, encompassing over forty pages in chapter 10 

of Possession, contains a detailed series of arguments about religious faith. Indeed, the 

religious debate is the foundation of the nascent relationship between the poets Christabel 

LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash; it is only after they have delved into Christianity 

quite thoroughly that they go on to discuss myth, spiritualism, poetry, and finally, their 

love for each other. Although some reviewers pinpoint the letters as a static section of the 

novel, and Joyce Carol Oates regrets that the correspondence requires such readerly effort 

and "continues at a pace more suitable to the Victorian era than to ours" (276), a close 

reading of the letters, which actually bristle with vitality and passion, is imperative to an 

understanding of the poets, their beliefs, and the failure of their romance. Religion is one 

of the reasons why LaMotte leaves Ash. She certainly desires her independence, as a 

woman and as an artist, but it is important to notice how she withdraws from the religious 

conversation after Ash fails to reply satisfactorily to her anguished plea, "Tell me - He 

Lives -foryou" (Possession 184).4 This withdrawal foreshadows her ultimate departure 

from Ash. 

LaMotte's second letter to Ash acknowledges that 

your great poem Ragnarok was the occasion of quite the worst crisis in the 
life of my simple religious faith.... It seemed to me you made Holy 

4I have retained the italics which are a feature of the correspondence in Possession. 



279 

Scripture no more than another Wonder Tale - by dint of such writing, 
such force of imagining. I confuse myself, I shall not go on, I ask your 
pardon if what I have said appears incomprehensible to you. I doubted 
and I admitted Doubt I have had to live with since. Enough of that. (176) 

Ash responds, never with atheistic arguments, but with the statement that "A secure faith 

- a true prayerfulness - is a beautiful and a true thing" (179). He then outlines the stages 

of his own struggle with faith. As a young poet he had believed in 

the Universal Truth of the living presence ofAllfather (under whatever 
Name) and of the hope of Resurrection from whatever whelming disaster 
in whatever form... . But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a 
slicing weapon that cuts both ways.... And the existence of the same 
Truths in all Religions is a great argument both for and against the 
paramount Truthfulness of One. (179-80) 

Ash goes on to decry their "old world - a tired world" where truths "are now obscured 

by palimpsest on palimpsest" (181). He wonders if God has withdrawn, and if so, what 

are the reasons. There is no doubt that Ash desires faith: 

/ am not yet become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least, not 
as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of 
Humanity - for although I wish my fellow men well, andfind them 
endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than 
were createdfor their, that is our, benefit.... 1 find it hard to shift without 
the Creator - the more we see and understand, the more amazement there 
is in this strangely interrelated Heap of things - which is yet not 
disordered. (180) 

LaMotte's response is "partly in accord" with this: "Doubt, doubt is endemic to 

our life in this world at this time." She urges Ash to recognize the importance of the 

"Centre of our living faith," the Incarnate Christ, God as divine human, and offers this 

argument: "could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifice—if it 

were not so?" (182). This is reminiscent of one of C. S. Lewis's arguments for 

Christianity: "it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer 

twist about it that real things have" (Mere Christianity 44). The comparison with Lewis is 



280 

useful. LaMotte and Ash have, by this time, entered into the kind of rational, exquisitely-

detailed debate about God that is quintessentially Victorian - and of which Lewis was 

one of the last great practitioners. Ash contributes the last, and most subtle, proposition in 

this contest. He offers his idea of Art-as-Religion (he says "When I write I know," very 

much what Matisse says about believing in God when he paints): "The only life I am sure 

of is the life of the Imagination. . . . I am saying that without the Maker's imagination 

nothing can live for us" (Possession 185). Although Ash goes on at greater length to 

explain this vague Romantic notion of religious imagination, LaMotte refuses to answer 

in kind. She writes: 

He said — I am the Truth and the Life - what of that, Sir? Was that an 
approximate statement? Or a Poetic adumbration? Well - was it? It rings 
- throughout eternity -1 AM— (186) 

These quotations furnish just the skeleton of the passionate argument which Byatt 

provides on behalf of her Victorian poets. She has a profound understanding of the vexed 

intellectual and spiritual quandaries of the age and a sincere respect for their meditations. 

Although at first glance the letters appear to be offering point and counterpoint on the 

reality or fictiveness of Christianity, on a closer inspection they are revealed as the 

conversation of two people who each embody elements of faith and agnosticism, in 

different measure. They are not caricatures or types. Byatt has drawn on Robert 

Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson as models, but Ash 

and LaMotte are also originals, uniquely the product of their author's own concerns. 

LaMotte, the believer, does not fire conservative salvos like Cardinal Newman, who 

writes in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) that the infallibility of the (Roman) Church is 

necessary 



281 

to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought, 
which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to 
rescue it from its own suicidal excesses. (221) 

Ash, the doubter, does not sound the elegiac note of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," 

with its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith. Ash is actively engaged 

in issues of faith, but from outside Christian institutions. Ellen Ash, who has the steadiest 

and most conventional faith in the novel, shows no alarm at this. She writes in her journal 

in 1859: "If the Tale of Noah's Deluge turns out to be a fine poetic invention, shall I, the 

wife of a great poet, thereby cease to pay attention to its message about the universal 

punishment of sin?" In comparison, she does display a modest annoyance with her 

minister, Mr. Baulk, who is working out his questions from within the church (as Ash, 

lacking hypocrisy, is not): 

Well, I assent. I do assent. I do know that my Redeemer liveth. But I 
should be grateful on earth if Herbert Baulk could respectably resolve, his 
intellectual doubts so that our prayers could be full of honest praise and 
robust faith in a watchful Providence, rather than darkly riddling, as at 
present. (Possession 243) 

The depth and complexity of the Victorian investigation of faith contrasts 

markedly with the pallid state of confused unbelief which Roland and Maud demonstrate. 

Although commentators always note Byatt's satiric reproof of various postmodern 

intellectual scepticisms in Possession, fewer remark on her attitude toward contemporary 

secularism. Roland and Maud are hollow characters, not only intellectually and sexually 

but also spiritually disconnected, from self and from other. Maud thinks of herself as 

"intermittent and partial" and as a "matrix for a susurration of texts and codes" (273). 

Roland sees himself as "discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of 

various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and 



282 

pheronomes" (459). They do not allow themselves to believe in much except linguistic 

and biological codes; it is amazing Roland has such sympathy with Ash, who writes in 

his dramatic monologue "Swammerdam" of God 

Who made us as we are, so fearfully 
And wonderfully made our intellects, 
Our tireless quest to know, but also made 
Our finitude, within His Mystery, 
His soft, dark, infinite space, wherein we rest 
When all our questions finish and our brain 
Dies into weeping . . . (228) 

Equally, what does Maud, well-versed only in feminism and psychoanalysis, make of 

LaMotte's profoundly believed poem "Metamorphosis"? 

Does the ruffled Silken Flyer 
Pause to recall how She - began -
Her soft cramped crawling Origins -

Does man 
In all his puffed and sparking Glory 
Cast back a Thought 
To the Speck of Flesh the Story 
Began with, from Naught? 

But both, in their Creator's terrible keen sight 
Lay curled and known through timeless Day and Night 
He Form and Life at once and always - Gave 
Is still their Animator and their Grave - (177-78) 

For Roland and Maud, the debate about faith, myth, science, and origins does not 

happen at the personal level, although it sometimes does at the intellectual. Intuitively, 

however, Roland and Maud are capable of greater depth. Roland hints at the incipient 

believer he is by his old-fashioned search for "sources for Ash's Garden of Proserpina" 

on the second page of Possession. Both of them are more emotional, more vulnerable, 

and more open to mystery by the novel's conclusion, under the edifying influence of the 

nineteenth-century poets. The dully secular cast of their spiritually inarticulate 



283 

personalities, as presented throughout the first part of the narrative, is one of the 

particular twentieth-century problems that Byatt exposes in Possession. 

§ § § 

In the Ash-LaMotte correspondence, and in their poetry, Byatt captures some of 

the real anguish nineteenth-century thinkers experienced about religious matters. Atheists 

and agnostics were not cheerful about leaving the Christian church; Leslie Stephen writes 

in 1876 of "a deep sadness in the world. . . . Optimism would be soothing if it were 

possible" (36). The researches of Darwin and Lyell are often cited as precipitating the 

era's crisis of faith, but for George Eliot and many others it was the so-called Higher 

Criticism of the Bible which was influential. Eliot translated David Friedrich Strauss's 

The Life of Jesus into English in 1846 and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of 

Christianity in 1854. These investigations of the historical context of Christian text and 

belief were shattering for many Victorians. Eliot had been in her youth a devout 

Evangelical Anglican but lost her explicitly Christian faith, although she retained what A . 

O. J. Cockshut calls a "reverent, moral agnosticism" (50). Cockshut notes that several 

key literary figures of the time (including John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold) 

"disbelieved in the truth of Orthodox Christianity, but were in some way deeply 

concerned with religious problems" and "[nourished] their spirit on Christian sources" 

(10). T. S. Eliot would later take Arnold to task for this admixture of belief and disbelief: 

"What had a man whose youth was so rigorously seized and purged at Rugby, to do with 

an abstract entity like the Soul?" (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 117). 

Robert Lee Wolff, in his study of Victorian novels of "faith and doubt," argues that the 

apparent inconsistencies among Biblical messages (and not necessarily the historical 



284 

discoveries of the Higher Criticism) were key factors in loss of faith, as were the 

arguments of Thomas Paine (one assumes Wolff means the anti-clerical writings rather 

than the political). But, he says, "more important than any book was the conviction that 

the Church was indifferent to the sufferings of the poor, and a force against social 

advance" (419, emphasis mine). It is this serious flaw in the human, institutional aspect 

of Christianity which is often overlooked in discussions of agnosticism and atheism. 

The religiously-inclined agnostics of the 1800s turned to a variety of human-

centered faiths to replace Christianity. They had faith in reason, historical progress, 

capital, science, basic human goodness. They assumed that ultimate truth and morality 

existed outside Christianity and that it was attainable. In an 1851 review of R. W. 

Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect George Eliot writes: "he who believes, whatever 

else he may deny, that the true and good are synonymous, bears in his soul the essential 

element of religion" (Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings 281-82). Her doctrine 

of sympathy enables her to test for religious essence by judging simply the ethical and 

generous behaviour of individuals. Jesus was respected as a teacher, as a superlatively 

good man. F. W. H . Myers provides this famous 1881 report of the Christian tenets 

George Eliot rejected and retained: 

Taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the 
inspiring trumpet-calls of men, - the words God, Immortality, Duty, -
[she] pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the 
first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute 
the third. (Qtd. in Haight 464) 

There are a number of misconceptions about faith in the Victorian era, and I 

highlight two of them important in any consideration of A. S. Byatt. One is a 

retrospective exaggeration and oversimplification of the faithlessness of the agnostic 



285 

movement. J. Hillis Miller, for example, in The Disappearance of God severely 

downplays the elements of faith retained by Emily Bronte, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 

Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold and overemphasizes their doubts. He claims that 

all the writers in his study take as their originating point a feeling of God's absence, and 

then struggle on from there. The struggle is surely correct, but the assumption of 

absence? It cannot be proven by Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" or "The Windhover" or 

Bronte's "No Coward Soul is Mine." Even Browning, who exclaims in Christmas-Eve 

and Easter-Day (1850) "How very hard it is to be / A Christian!" also writes, of Jesus, "I 

cannot bid / The world admit he stooped to heal / M y s o u l . . . /1 only knew he named my 

name." Byatt's emphasis on Browning's incarnational strategies, for example, 

demonstrates her keen awareness of the importance of religion to even those Victorian 

authors normally considered agnostic, as does the close attention she pays to the internal 

religious conflict of Randolph Henry Ash. Among her favourite writers are many who 

struggled arduously and sometimes painfully with Christianity, from inside and outside 

the tradition, including Donne, Herbert, Coleridge, Dickinson, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche 

(Antonia Fraser 132). 

M y second point concerns the supposed blithe optimism about human progress 

that these agnostics put in place of God. George Eliot, who coined the word "meliorism" 

to describe a belief in gradual progress, is called to task, by critics as various as A. O. J. 

Cockshut and Friedrich Nietzsche, for preserving the idea of divine justice and cloaking it 

in humanistic robes. Byatt, in "George Eliot: A Celebration," refutes this "too general" 

summation. "She had a strong - stronger - sense of black comedy, black tragedy than she 

is now generally credited with, and a saving savagery in her vision of man's normal and 



286 

natural inhumanity to man," says Byatt. "She offered us scope, not certainties" (Passions 

of the Mind 76). 

The nineteenth century occasioned livelier and more unsettled skirmishes on the 

issue of faith than we choose to remember. Wordsworth and Tennyson were claimed as 

champions in both religious and secular camps. In 1864 John Henry Newman warned his 

readers not to put too much faith in "the wild living intellect of man" and "the raw 

material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous" (Apologia Pro Vita Sua 220, 226). 

By the end of the century, many others were realizing the danger in elevating humanism 

to a religion. The Christian apologist Richard A. Armstrong writes in 1905 that his 

society is haunted by the "problem of the limits and trustworthiness of our intellectual 

powers" (185). "Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god 

within," cautions G. K. Chesterton in 1909. "Worship cats or crocodiles . . . but not the 

god within" (138). The family of Thomas Arnold, the famed educator, is an exemplary 

study in turmoil and contrasts. The elder Arnold was a Broad Churchman, a liberal 

Anglican with a keen interest in social justice. His son Matthew famously elevated a 

vague doctrine of "the best that has been thought and said" in place of his father's 

religious faith and salvaged from the Gospels a strange sense of Christ's "sweet 

reasonableness" (Literature and Dogma 199). Another son, Thomas, converted from 

Anglicanism to Catholicism not once but twice (in 1856 and 1876), rending his family 

and causing much distress. His daughter, Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphry Ward), 

wrote many novels on the subject of religion, and frequently relocated herself along the 

spectrum of agnosticism. The religious upheaval in families like the Arnolds was not 



287 

unusual; the debates were passionately felt and the ruptures highly visible in all layers of 

society, but especially in the middle and upper classes. 

In essays on Browning and George Eliot, Byatt emphasizes their strenuous 

engagement with these religious issues. She offers a careful definition of Eliot's 

celebrated realism: it is "partly a moral realism, rejecting 'compensation' and other 

consoling doctrines, and partly a related technical realism, a desire for accuracy" 

(Introduction to Eliot's Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings xvi). Eliot honoured 

questions, sought precision and detailed knowledge, defied easy answers. Christianity as 

it stood could not be reconciled with her intense desire for truth, although she retained 

admiration for many Christian principles and ministers (as we shall see when we come to 

my section on fictional ministers). One important principle which Eliot attempted to 

employ and rework in her own moral system is the idea of the Incarnation. Byatt writes, 

in her introduction to Eliot's Essays: 

The long nineteenth-century debate about the precise meaning, or lack of 
meaning, of the Christian concept of the Incarnation, the meeting-point of 
the divine and the human, the infinite and the finite, is inextricably 
connected, consciously and unconsciously, to the development of the form 
of the novel. As the biblical narrative ceased to be privileged as unique 
truth, and became associated with partial histories of other kinds, or what 
Froude in The Nemesis of Faith calls "Wonder Tales," so there arose, for 
certain kinds of speculative minds, an interest in the nature of the 
individuals and the values they represented, as portrayed in secular 
narrative.... Lydgate and Dorothea, Maggie and Adam Bede, are 
invested, in their limited individuality, with the religious value that has 
been displaced from the incarnate Man to the succession of human beings, 
(xxv, xxvii) 

Not only does George Eliot attempt to transfer sacred portions of the Incarnation to her 

characters, she also wanted, as she said in an 1866 letter, "to make certain ideas 

thoroughly incarnate" (Essays 248) in language. In her 1868 unpublished essay "Notes on 



288 

Form in Art," Eliot defines poetry in its highest Form as "the fullest expression of the 

human soul" and as "living words fed with the blood of relevant meaning" (235). 

Byatt indicates that Robert Browning has similar ideas, and her account of them is 

more complex. "We can perhaps place his incarnate individuals as a series of infinites, 

put within finites, the proper activity of Art," she says in her 1991 essay "Robert 

Browning: Fact, Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art" (Passions of the Mind 54). This 

transfer of Incarnation theology to fictional characters and literary language is not, says 

Byatt, original to Eliot or Browning, but is derived, in part, from Strauss, Feuerbach, and 

Michelet (42). But Byatt is taken with a particular use Browning makes of the notion: his 

vivid lists, the sensuously detailed earthly things cast in language by Fra Lippo Lippi and 

the Bishop of St. Praxed's, somehow redeem even the most monstrous characters (57). 

This intersection of powerful language, finite humanity, and transcendent ideals is 

described by Byatt in terms which she does not bother to strip of their religious 

associations. Byatt interprets Browning's "Epilogue" to Dramatis Personae in this way: 

What the third speaker [whom Byatt identifies as the poet] seems to say is 
that even the least of men, in his individuality, is one incarnation of the 
infinite, that the walls of the world, which confine him, are at the same 
time his temple - as David saw God in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in 
the soul, in the clod, indifferently. The Face is not resurrected but 
"recomposed" out of its death and decomposition, made by the poet, or 
singer, or perceiver, who, in knowing his separateness, knows also the 
existence of everything else, with both mind and heart, with both spirit and 
flesh. Because he differs from his fellows utterly (as opposed to becoming 
one man with others in the Temple), he composes his world with an 
essential difference, "my universe that feels and knows." He is a witness 
of difference. He is a poet who writes men and women, all separately 
incarnate, all separately aware in their necessarily and splendidly limited 
ways, of infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn. (Passions 
of the Mind 71) 



289 

It is impossible to mistake Byatt's passionate tone in this conclusion to her very 

long essay on Browning. In both Browning and Eliot Byatt cites approvingly their 

transfer of Incarnational theology to the field of art. Eliot's Adam Bede and Dorothea 

Brooke are, in a sense, little Christs, as perhaps is Daniel Orton in Byatt's work; the 

attractively delimited infinity Byatt identifies in Browning allows her to recapture some 

of the splendour and mystery lost when religious faith is abandoned. The extent of the 

hopefulness that Byatt invests in this line of inquiry is clear when we note the weight of 

responsibility she places on language. Does Browning's vivid and concrete language 

really redeem his characters, as she says? (We are justified in probing the full religious 

sense of this word, since Byatt is encouraging a transformation of very powerful 

terminology.) Her eagerness to find in art and language an outlet for her "religious 

temperament" leads her to hope unduly that secular words can borrow some of the power 

of the Christian Word, the Incarnate Christ. But neither Browning's nor Eliot's work, as 

admirable as it is, can honestly fulfill this longing. This deeply-felt exegetical activity 

seems slightly out of keeping for a woman with an interest in humans as "naked animals" 

and who has a self-proclaimed "slight hostility to Christianity." 

§ § § 

Byatt's attitude to twentieth-century religion is quite different than her intense 

engagement with nineteenth-century religion, evidenced by her Incarnation essays and by 

the characterization of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash. Byatt expresses 

herself more freely on Victorian religious issues than on contemporary ones. About the 

latter her opinions are veiled, ironic, and circuitous. Although she acknowledges the 

influence of T. S. Eliot on her work, and in The Virgin in the Garden Frederica Potter 



290 

plays Eliot's recording of Four Quartets obsessively (153), Eliot's religion is nowhere 

explicitly mentioned by Byatt. Perhaps this is because, as Alfred Kazin has said, Eliot's 

love was less for God or Christ than for "the Church itself (God and the American 

Writer 195) - Byatt's interest in religious institutions has never been great. When she 

undertakes the religious problems of the 1960s characters of The Game, we find that they 

are already on the way to becoming the partial caricatures that Roland and Maud will be, 

more expressly, in Possession. Critic D. J. Taylor suggests that religion in The Game 

comes off marginally better than humanism (After the War 186). But we are distanced 

from the people in The Game, evidence perhaps of the climate of "inconsequentiality" 

and "dethroned sincerity" which religion scholar Kenneth Cragg identifies as the literary 

hallmark of contemporary secularism (The Secular Experience of God 33). 

Cassandra Corbett and Simon Moffitt, although in genuine metaphysical distress, 

are also, to some extent, stiff, Murdochian allegories or place-holders. Cassandra works 

through a number of religious crises in a cerebral way. She moves from a position of 

arguing with Simon that Christ's death doesn't seem necessary to her, to one where the 

Incarnation is "the supreme event of both factual and imaginative worlds" (The Game 74, 

76). She tries to convince herself that the Church can energize metaphors and make them 

Truth (225). Christian faith, writes Cassandra in her journal, creates a world "where 

action is meaningful, love is purposeful" (76). A l l of this highly willed belief takes place 

within her sterile and unloving life. Cassandra is suspicious of human contact; her 

discussions of love seem bitterly ironic. Julia Corbett and her husband Thor do not share 

a common religious faith, and the gulf between them is eyed very coolly by Julia. 

She thought: how the religious man is separated for ever from the 
irreligious because there is a whole set of moral problems created for him 



291 

by the assumption that there is a God whose meaningful intention placed 
him where he is. (63) 

Christianity in The Game is an intellectual issue. Characters try to convince 

themselves of their faith, and the love at the heart of the Christian story is entirely absent 

from their actual lives. Part of the difficulty for Cassandra and Simon is the problem of 

evil, that classic dilemma. The simplicity of the Quaker faith, with its absence of ritual, 

does not provide a strong enough bulwark against evil for Cassandra's liking ("love will 

not overcome, it will not" [38]). Her move to Roman Catholicism provides her with a 

weightier set of myths and propositions, but increasingly Cassandra has problems 

assessing reality, and Catholicism does not save her either. 

Byatt has professed an admiration for a number of Catholic writers, including 

Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess. She respects the way they treat evil 

as an existing force of immense power being ignored in our current secular life. The 

theme recurs in her discussions of William Golding and D. J. Enright, who are not 

Catholics, but whose disquisitions on Satan and on ultimate darkness Byatt finds 

gripping. In 1989, Byatt comments: 

Graham Greene said, I thought rather beautifully, that in the English novel 
since E . M . Forster characters have become unreal, which I think he 
associated with this kind of moral unreality, thafpeople were betterable, 
and also with a sort of formal wishywashiness. There is a sense in which 
the Catholic novel has kept alive a sense of the importance of the human 
character. (Byatt/Burgess video interview) 

Byatt has a good deal of confidence in human rationality, and she has inherited her 

family's Quaker disposition toward compassion and liberal political views, but on the 

subject of evil, she finds much in the Catholic view to recommend it. Although she does 

not, to my knowledge, overtly recommend a belief in original sin, she is respectful and 



292 

thoughtful about Catholics who do demonstrate such a belief; this is, I think, what 

underlies the sentence about "human character" above. It is not general character she is 

describing, but a character with inherent badness. 

Byatt's apprehension about evil is allied to her views on chance and accident. 

Byatt has rarely written about evil itself, as, for example, Martin Amis and Salman 

Rushdie have. Instead, she has chosen to focus on destructive accidents. Chance, of 

course, is the subject of Still Life. This is not the positive chance of Pascal, a happy 

embrace of the forces beyond reason, a recommendation that one might as well believe in 

God since the alternative is much less charming. Byatt says, to Iris Murdoch in their 1984 

video interview, that "chance operates in the world in this terrifying way and can change 

things overnight. A l l our best endeavours are subject to it." Byatt cites as an important 

influence E . M . Forster's The Longest Journey, with its completely unexpected death on 

the rugby field near the beginning of the book. Murdoch calls Byatt's depiction of 

accident - the death of Stephanie Potter - "one of the most wonderful surprises which 

I've seen for a long time in a novel" because it "is like a real accident." 

Byatt's predisposition is towards the orderly, as she has said herself and as is 

evident from most of her writings. Indeed the very subject of this dissertation is her quest 

for systems of orderly belief (language, geometry, art) which can replace the loss of 

religious faith. Ironically, it is in an essay about the writing of the accident-riddled Still 

Life that she says: "I wanted at least to work on the assumption that order is more 

interesting than the idea of the random" (Passions of the Mind 11) - although the order 

she mentions is linguistic order rather than cosmic or human order. But her two novels 

preceding Still Life are certainly orderly. The Shadow of the Sun and The Game do seem 



293 

indebted to Iris Murdoch, an influence often noted in Byatt criticism, but one less 

appropriate as the years go on. The early plots are somewhat fatalistic, darkly hinting at 

the helplessness of characters trapped in systems (familial, romantic, educational) which 

are confining and at least potentially destructive. The characters typify ideas the author 

wants to probe, although both Byatt and Murdoch do allow, at least partially, for the 

"opacity" of personality promoted by Murdoch in her essay "Against Dryness." (As I 

have said before about Murdoch, that opacity, or impenetrability, has not always played 

out in practice as well as it does in theory.) 

Chance and accident do not play important roles in the first two novels, written in 

the 1960s. Characters are more inexorably driven toward their ends, although The 

Shadow of the Sun does end on an ambiguous note (we are not absolutely sure of Anna's 

future, although it looks restrictive). But in 1972, Byatt's son Charles was killed by a 

drunk driver on a London street, and Byatt's attitude toward life's orderliness changed 

drastically. Although The Virgin in the Garden (1978) precedes Still Life (1985) and is, 

on the whole, a comic novel, Byatt had the trajectory of the entire Potter series planned in 

the early- to mid-1970s (see interviews with Dusinberre and Kenyon - in the latter Byatt 

mentions her "six thick notebooks on the quartet" [12]). Virgin is dedicated to Charles, 

and a tiny hint of the ruin to come in the next novel is offered in the story of Mrs. Thone, 

the headmaster's wife, whose life is shattered by the inexplicable death of her 10-year-old 

son, who "between a good breakfast and an end of break b e l l . . . could run, fall, smash, 

twitch, stop moving forever and begin to decay." For Mrs. Thone, "her interest in the 

future, and her real interest in the outside world, had ceased with her son" (Virgin 243). 

Cognates of Mrs. Thone recur from this time on: in the Murdoch video interview Byatt 



294 

notes that she had been studying a newspaper item about a woman whose two children 

drowned by accident in a chalk pit. "Yesterday this was a woman with a life," Byatt says. 

In the Prologue to Still Life, Daniel Orton is brooding about the tragedy of a woman who 

has three children killed by a car containing an IRA gunman, "gratuitous" deaths which 

foreshadow the death of his wife (foreshadowing for the novel's readers, but of course 

not for Daniel, as the Prologue is retrospective, taking place in 1980, while Stephanie 

dies in 1958). 

"Ever since my own son died I always bring in a violent, sudden death. It's in the 

background to all my thoughts," Byatt says (Kenyon interview 12). By the 1990s, 

however, Byatt's fiction will revert, somewhat, to the carefully patterned and controlled 

style of the 1960s fiction. Angels and Insects in particular is heavily allegorical, as is 

Babel Tower's text-within-a-text, the novel Babbletower. Possession has been 

characterized as "too knowing and too coercive" by Danny Karlin in the London Review 

of Books, who calls the book's inventions and plot twists "fatally convenient" (18). The 

shadow of accident is sighted occasionally in Babel Tower, as when Daniel and 

Stephanie's daughter Mary mysteriously falls in the playground. Then Mary recovers 

consciousness: "It is all a miracle, her voice, her struggling quickness, the heaving of her 

small stomach, the sounds of her retching, it is life, she is alive" (49). 

A miracle. Despite Byatt's 1970s and 1980s pronouncements on the malevolence 

of chance, its destructiveness dims in the recent fiction. "A child has fairy-tale beliefs in 

patterns and predictability, thinks things will get better," Byatt said to Iris Murdoch in 

their 1984 video interview. "An adult must learn how vulnerable we are to chance and the 

random." But in the last decade, Byatt has actually taken to writing fairy-tales, publishing 



295 

them in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, and she has translated another, "The Great 

Green Worm" by Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, for Marina Warner's 1994 collection 

Wonder Tales. Although the moving and accidental death of Stephanie is at the heart of 

Byatt's fiction, it is also unique; the shock of the incident has never been repeated. The 

most violent action in Stephanie's sister Frederica's life, the tremendous scene in Babel 

Tower in which her husband Nigel attacks her with an ax, has no connection to the dark 

forces of randomness. Although Byatt uses chance as a reason why religious faith seems 

nonsensical, her recent fiction undercuts the argument. There are very clear reasons why 

things happen in Babel Tower and Possession: greed, dishonesty, desire, sadism. And 

some "accidents" in the fiction turn out to be felicitous - as in the Yorkshire tour Roland 

and Maud make in Possession, opportunely duplicating that of Ash and LaMotte, even 

though the scholars did not know all the details of the trip the poets took. A similar happy 

accident is the reunion of the Papagays at the end of "The Conjugial Angel." 

Science is another stumbling block to faith offered up for argumentative purposes 

in Byatt's fiction, particularly in "Morpho Eugenia." In that novella, the clerical character 

Harald Alabaster is attempting to write a Christian apology incorporating the 

evolutionary researches of Darwin. The quest is "shot through with trouble, indeed 

anguish," as the story's protagonist, Charles Adamson, notes (Angels and Insects 117). 

Alabaster concocts arguments from beauty (58) and from love (86), and asks why Natural 

Selection cannot derive from the Deity (83). Even the agnostic Adamson offers Alabaster 

the consoling hypothesis that "Mystery may be another name for God" but Alabaster 

feels "all these arguments are nothing, the motions of minds that are not equipped to 

carry them through" (60). Alabaster's writings (which Byatt provides in harrowing 



296 

abundance) attempt a hybrid of incompatible creeds; the name of his estate, Bredely, 

warns of genetic synthesis experiments gone awry. Instead of proving Alabaster's faith, 

his manuscript amply demonstrates its decline. "It is not impossible that the world is the 

work of a Creator, a Designer," Alabaster tells Adamson, who immediately notes the 

negative formulation of the sentence (33). "How shall we name the Force that directs 

them [i.e. natural laws]? Blind Chance, or loving Providence?" Alabaster writes, but his 

answers do not even satisfy himself (86). Just as the minster town near which the 

resolutely agnostic Potters live is a corruption of Calvary (Calverley), so is Harald's 

name a sad echo of the kind of divine messenger, or herald, he wants to be. 

It is not necessarily science, however, that is responsible for Alabaster's loss of 

faith. The father of many children, he is oblivious to the actuality of their lives, and does 

not see the morass of incest, class strife, and petty cruelty in his own huge household. 

Alabaster is as blind as the statue his surname makes him out to be. While Victorian 

intellectuals debated theories of origin and the textual history of the Bible, more people 

were losing their faith because of the hypocritical immorality of church adherents and 

leaders and the irrelevance of church creeds for combating everyday adversity. 

Harald Alabaster illustrates the inconsequence of church debates in the lives of 

ordinary people. There are scientists today who continue the quest to reconcile science 

and theology, and with some success. John Polkinghorne, an English physicist turned 

Anglican minister, theorizes that life is based on an interplay of "chance and necessity," 

and he sees this as reason for confidence: 

Cosmic history is not the unfolding of an inexorable plan. A n evolutionary 
world is to be understood theologically as a world allowed by the Creator 
to make itself to a large degree.... [The world is] endowed with 



297 

fruitfulness, guided by its Creator, but allowed an ability to realize this 
fruitfulness in its own particular ways. Chance is a sign of freedom, not 
blind purposelessness. (42-43) 

Byatt admires the work of Daniel C. Dennett; she recommends his book Darwin's 

Dangerous Idea in the 1995 Times year-end roundup of books. In that book, Dennett 

writes rather wistfully about elements of godhead to be found in a post-Christian 

creation: 

The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is 
actual. . . and sacred. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in 
affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.... [After Darwin] 
the "miracles" of life and consciousness turn out to be even better than we 
imagined back when we were sure they were inexplicable. (520-21) 

This short discussion of the intersection of science and religion merely touches on 

an extensive ongoing controversy (which in many ways has not changed much in the last 

150 years). M y interest is in Byatt's application of it: she uses science as she uses chance, 

as an apparent stumbling-block to faith that is not, on reflection, necessarily a stumbling-

block. Byatt's portrayals of the problems for religion raised by evolutionary theory and 

by randomness are not wholehearted or convincing; instead, she admires people like 

Dennett who attempt to salvage the sacred in evolutionary theory, and she has recently 

displayed an approving curiosity about chaos theory, the study of systems apparently 

random which turn out to be governed with a degree of order (see her 1992 Independent 

piece "The Ambition of Art"). 

§ § § 

Another major factor in the religious crisis of the Victorian era was the growth of 

humanism, of engagement with and faith in the human being, rather than in an 

unprovable divinity. Human history, along with the earth's history, was an obsession of 



298 

George Eliot's, as Byatt points out in her introduction to The M i l l on the Floss (11). Eliot 

was influenced by Auguste Comte, who saw humanity proceeding through three stages: 

from the theological stage to the metaphysical and finally to the positive. Byatt is at pains 

to point out where Eliot parts company with Comte: "she had her doubts, her caveats, her 

sense that immutable causality and inexorable development were only part of the tale" 

(23). Byatt quotes an 1857 letter of Eliot's, in which she feels "every day a greater 

disinclination for theories and arguments about the origins of things in the presence of all 

this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness, that floods one with conflicting emotion" 

(23). 

Another earlier proponent of a human-centered view of history is Giambattista 

Vico, the eighteenth-century scholar important to Randolph Henry Ash in Possession. It 

is serendipitous indeed that the drafts of embryo love letters from Ash to LaMotte are 

found in Ash's copy of Vico's Principles of the New Science discovered by Roland 

Michell in the London Library. LaMotte will challenge Ash on that which Vico 

represents - the earthly faith he has in science, history, and myth. The novel suggests that 

romantic love is at least one force with a more mysterious power than any human-

centered theory can account for. Michael Ondaatje puts Herodotus to a similar use in The 

English Patient; the histories contained in the book Almasy carries everywhere can only 

be fully animated when he pastes in miscellanea from his own life and, most importantly, 

adds the evidence of the love he shares with Katharine. (Kathleen Coyne Kelly suggests 

another use for Vico; she emphasizes Vico's cyclical view of history and points out the 

appropriate parallels between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century lovers in Possession 

\A. S. Byatt: Twayne's English Authors 97]). 



299 

In the nineteenth century many Christian ministers, as portrayed in the fiction of 

the time, were actually ethical humanists, doing good works, working toward the 

betterment of human society. At their worst, the clergy of Victorian literature were 

working both against humanity and God, like Casaubon in Middlemarch or Mr. 

Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. There is little that is holy about any of the clergy in Anthony 

Trollope's fiction, and they run the gamut from sympathetic to ineffectual to rapacious. 

Jane Austen's ministers display a similar variety: Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice 

(1813) is ambitious and obsequious; Mr. Elton in Emma (1816) is selfish and decidedly 

unspiritual; Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811) is a good man, although I 

must jog my memory to recall that he is a clergyman. One would not go to Primrose in 

Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1764) with a serious spiritual crisis; the trend to 

humanize the ministry as depicted in fiction did not begin with the Victorians. 

George Eliot's ministers are particularly important to A. S. Byatt, although the 

intentions of the two authors are not identical. According to G. H . Lewes, in writing 

Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) Eliot intended to portray "the actual life of our country 

clergy about a quarter of a century ago; but solely in its human, and not at all in its 

theological aspect" (qtd. in Wolff 225, emphasis in original). Thus, the "sad fortunes" of 

the Reverend Amos Barton are not directly related to his ministerial capacity, but are 

related to bad judgement, bad luck, carelessness, and gossip. In "Janet's Repentance," 

Janet is saved not so much by the pastoral ability of Mr. Tryan, but by his sympathetic 

manner, by a romantic bond between them, and by his neediness, as a fellow sinner and 

as a consumptive. This "human aspect" is also in play in the portrayal of Farebrother, the 

sympathetic clergyman in Middlemarch. Farebrother is studied as a man, with faults and 



300 

goodness intermixed; one of his most obvious qualities is not his reverence for God but 

his awareness of his own failures. This makes him a good counsellor and a keen and 

accurate observer of other people. "I am not a model clergyman - only a decent 

makeshift," says Farebrother (206). One of his primary tasks is to act as an intermediary 

- not between humans and God, as might be expected, but between human and human 

(often between couples, like Fred Vincy and Mary Garth). E . M . Forster's Mr. Beebe, in 

A Room With a View (1908) plays a similar role and displays both similar insight and 

absence of sanctimonious demeanour. Farebrother's opposite in Middlemarch is the self-

righteous "apostolic" Tyke, of whom the narrator says, "Nobody had anything to say 

against Mr. Tyke, except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant" (210). 

Although critic Oliver Lovesey claims that "the exposure of the flawed individual behind 

the clerical facade" is one of George Eliot's prime motivations (14), Farebrother is one of 

Eliot's most honourable and likeable creations, and he, modestly, does much good. 

Farebrother is a literary ancestor of Byatt's Daniel Orton. Daniel is a dependable 

and trustworthy man, at first glance a social worker rather than a spiritual leader. 

Although Daniel's faith falters at the death of Stephanie, through the three Potter novels 

he steadily plods on with his work, which is, increasingly, helping people in crisis. In 

Babel Tower he is no longer a curate or vicar with a congregation, but is staffing the 

phone at The Listeners, a crisis hotline in London loosely affiliated with the Church. He 

does hospital work, counsels the despairing, and cares for the unlovable Jude Mason at 

the conclusion of Babel Tower, taking him into his own home. 

Daniel Orton is more effective a minister than most of the ministers in Eliot, 

Forster, or any of Byatt's other literary antecedents. He is also more genuinely religious 



301 

than his literary forebears, and is the most successful minister in Byatt's fiction. This is, 

perhaps, unexpected, as Daniel does not present himself as a profoundly religious man. If 

theology is strictly "words about God," then Daniel would not seem to have much 

theology at his disposal. But he does have an unarticulated theology, which is sound and 

unselfish, based on forgiveness and practical help. Daniel demonstrates a faith that exists 

outside the realm of words, and his hard work and gruff sympathy get results. In The 

Game, Edwin Merton and Father Rowell seem to be genuine believers, and although 

caring, they are ineffectual in their attempts to help the distressed Cassandra. They are 

adept at discussing theology, unlike.Daniel, whose principles are resolutely practical. 

"I'm not the debating kind of churchman, nor yet the preacher," he says (The Virgin in 

the Garden 39). Byatt is at pains to demonstrate the importance of Daniel's philosophy of 

being and doing, his realism and pragmatism: 

What was needed, he came to see, was someone practical, someone 
completely committed to practical solutions. He used this word to himself 
in a sense perhaps uniquely his own. As it became clear to him that he was 
neither a reflective man nor a scholarly man, that he was interested neither 
in his own nor anyone else's motivation, nor in early heresies and 
liturgical forms, he reiterated to himself that there was need for someone 
..wholly committed to being practical. To be practical was to deal directly 
with pain, poverty, horror, quite directly. To drag back to a place where 
they were measured by human standards those forced out of human 
proportions of body, or understanding, or social relations, by the forces of, 
evil. (55) 

Daniel recognizes similar views and abilities in Stephanie, and although she does not call 

herself a Christian, he assumes that she is one for all relevant purposes, to him and to 

God. Stephanie recognizes that Daniel "dealt absolutely, in areas where one neither 

thought nor lived, normally. Where one hoped to avoid living. He saw the world in 

extremis and was right" (85). 



302 

The other clerical characters in Byatt's fiction help to delineate Daniel's particular 

strengths. In The Virgin in the Garden, there is the Anglican priest - a "niesmeric" orator 

of "imperative biological urgency" - who converts 15-year-old Daniel. 

He said that it seemed odd, that when so much was clear, was admitted, so 
few answered. That when Christ had said how men should live, so few 
even considered living so. He said bleakly, his face somehow stripped, 
that what was required was that people should use their lives. . . . Christ 
came that they might have life more abundantly. Not happiness, life. (53-
54) 

This man is responsible for Daniel's "only experience of communal passion" (53). There 

is no doubt of the priest's absolute sincerity, as there is, later, no doubt of Daniel's. Each 

emphasizes action, not contemplation; others, not self; altruism, not theology. The other 

clerical character in Virgin is Daniel's superior, Mr. Ellenby, who performs the marriage 

of Daniel and Stephanie. Like many clerical characters in fiction, Mr. Ellenby is more 

perceptive than the average man. He silently recognizes the strange blend of pagan and 

Christian in both Daniel and Stephanie as he marries them and manages to be "solicitous, 

rather than clerically hooting" (260). However, neither Stephanie nor Daniel like Mr. 

Ellenby, and Stephanie in particular "harboured briefly savage thoughts" about his 

wedding homily, which is characterized by the "essential shiftiness of argument by 

analogy" (261). 

By comparison with Daniel, Mr. Ellenby is stuffy and conventional. When he 

leaves, the replacement vicar, in Still Life, is the opposite - and this turns out to be more 

dangerous. Gideon Farrar, interested in sociology and psychology, is a modern minister 

of "personal relations." Daniel recognizes in retrospect Mr. Ellenby's "profound belief 

and misses it; Gideon, on the contrary, is interested in power (138). Later in the novel, 

Gideon is found to be sexually aggressive, "interfering" with teenage girls, and his wife 



303 

reveals that his ideals of family love are false (330). Gideon is the sole "bad" minister in 

all of Byatt's fiction, representative of those who abuse clerical power for their personal 

gratification. 

We have already discussed Harald Alabaster in "Morpho Eugenia," a pathetic and 

perplexed man entangled with theories and uninvolved in real life. The final minister of 

note in Byatt's fiction is Canon Holly, Daniel's co-worker at the crisis hotline in Babel 

Tower. Like Gideon, Canon Holly combines an intense interest in sexuality and in 

religion, but in a more positive way. Holly is another Christian humanizer, not unlike 

liberal American bishop John Shelby Spong and his ilk; Daniel justly wonders how 

Holly's position differs from atheism or pantheism (23). Holly presses people to identify 

the "Godwithin" (22); he is gently criticized by Ginnie Greenhill, another counsellor, 

who believes that God is not about human passion but about "how to live with the idea of 

death" (25). Daniel does not take sides in this argument; in Babel Tower he is, if 

anything, even less of a theologian than in previous books. He says that he is "only an 

instinctively religious man" (an appellation not unlike Byatt's self-identification as a 

person with a "religious temperament") who needs the structure of the church to make 

him patient and virtuous (23). But it works - he is patient and virtuous. 

In Babel Tower Daniel takes a small role and Frederica Potter occupies the centre 

of the book. However, Daniel's conversations with Jude Mason on the existence of God 

are pivotal in an understanding of Byatt's purposes in this puzzling and massive novel. 

Jude takes a gleeful but anguished Nietzschean position on the death of God when he 

calls The Listeners; Daniel stolidly and almost wordlessly defends God's presence. Jude 

explores the potential of lawlessness and lovelessness in his novel Babbletower, and is 



304 

tried for obscenity. Babbletower is an extreme and perverse version of Canon Holly's 

"Godwithin," a parable of a community obeying only its own increasingly terrible 

desires. Jude's atheism brings him intense spiritual pain; Daniel recognizes from the 

beginning of their relationship that "theological despair as a motive for suicide" (Babel 

Tower 11) is quite plausible, and indeed Jude is near death when rescued by Frederica 

and Daniel at the book's conclusion. Jude's last appearance in the novel is significant: 

He closes his eyes again, and settles back into Daniel's pillow. He 
murmurs, "You are a man of God." There is a note of satisfaction in his 
voice. (611) 

Daniel is not overtly holy, not obviously exceptional, and claims to have no 

special relationship with God. But he is the working moral centre of the Potter novels, 

someone who very quietly believes in God and, in his actions, actually saves lives and 

changes people. He is more effective as a minister and moving as a character than the 

more theologically-oriented ministers of The Game or the man who converts Daniel in 

Virgin, who never reappears. The positions which the humanist ministers take in Byatt's 

fiction - Alabaster's scientific musings, Farrar's and Holly's sociological and 

psychological leanings - are valid aspects of religious speculation and Byatt does not 

wholly hold these aspects up to ridicule. But the persons of Holly and Alabaster are 

treated satirically, and the character of Farrar is revealed as corrupt. Only Daniel 

succeeds, through simplicity and discipline and stern compassion. Although in some 

ways Daniel seems to be a social worker rather than a clergyman, he lacks the optimism 

about people which is the hallmark of the humanist. Daniel's faith resides in his 

confidence that there is a higher moral authority than the human; his behaviour, although 

not explicitly stated as such, is modelled on Christ's. 



305 

S S S 
There are three epigraphs in Babel Tower, Byatt's most concentrated portrayal of 

evil. The excerpts from W. H. Auden's "Circe" and from a letter of Mme. de Sade to the 

Marquis indicate that the core of the novel will be an accusatory examination of the 

dangers of human freedom and assumptions that we are alone in the universe. Not only 

the Babbletower scenario, but the presence in the novel of the Moors murders, the 

pornography found in Frederica's marital bedroom, and the formlessness discovered in 

the English school system (being analysed by Alexander Wedderburn's committee in a 

subplot) - all of these point to the hazards inherent in the human assumption of 

supremacy, or complete liberty, in the universe. 

The last epigraph is the most important. It is a terse quotation from Nietzsche: "I 

fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar." This riddling 

aphorism can be read in several ways. We cling to God, as we cling to grammar, 

wrongly, because we crave order. Or, we cling to God, a false belief, because we 

foolishly associate the formulae of religion with the orderliness of language, which is 

actual and true. Or, grammar and God are both true, and Nietzsche is just determined to 

rid himself of the overwhelming problem of God because it is something humans, in their 

maturity and independence, must do. 

It is not possible to say for certain which interpretation Byatt promotes, although 

her advocacy of grammar is made clear in remarks to Eleanor Wachtel: 

In Britain, in political life now, the right wing has taken up the 
cause of grammar in a rather repugnant way. It believes that there are 
orders for rugby football and there are orders for grammar. And these are 
good for your soul, like being whipped in public school, if you're a poor 
little boy in a boarding school. And of course grammar isn't good for you 
for that reason. Grammar is good for you because it's intensely 



306 

pleasurable and because it's actually part of your own brain. It isn't good 
for you if applied from outside like a punishment. 

People need rules.... On the whole I'm a liberal, and on the whole 
I believe individuals should do as they please as much as possible. I do 
deeply believe in things like obeying traffic lights. I see rules as being like 
traffic lights. A city will simply clog up if you can't get everybody to stop 
at the red light and move on the green light. (Wachtel 1996) 

Various aspects of Babel Tower also prove Byatt's defence of the order of grammar and 

language - Frederica's experiments with randomness in writing are unsatisfactory; the 

children in the novel crave structure in their stories and in their schooling. Byatt's 

position on God is less transparent, but the misery of Jude and the healing ability of 

Daniel counts for a good deal. Daniel lives out a compromise between the abstract claims 

of theology and the overly humanistic convictions of the sociologist Christians: he needs 

the structure religion gives him and he knows that a human-centered faith is dangerous; 

he also knows that too much dogma will destroy the good he can do on God's behalf. 

And Daniel, as the Potter quartet unfolds, certainly does seem to be working on God's 

behalf. A scripture passage associated with him is 1 Corinthians 14, reading in part (Byatt 

uses the King James Version): "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the 

world, and none of them is without signification." Including the Christian voice. 

§ § § 

It would be irresponsible to discuss A . S. Byatt's attitude toward religion without 

some mention of myth. As Northrop Frye says, 

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a 
mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from 
his existential concerns. (The Great Code xviii) 

One can choose to see the Judaeo-Christian tradition as one strand of a system of myths 

used by cultures to explain the origin, meaning, and end of the universe. Many of Byatt's 



307 

citations from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are used in this general mythological, 

rather than spiritual, manner. Although reference works have noted the importance of 

myth, symbol, and history in Byatt's fiction (see entries by Seymour-Smith, Campbell, 

and Griffin), very little analysis has been forthcoming on her use of myth and symbol, 

although several articles have been published on historical aspects of her writing (see 

Holmes, Janik, Webb). 

Byatt's most common mythological sources are Scandinavian mythology and the 

Hebrew Scriptures; occasionally she uses Greek and Roman myths (Richard Todd in his 

study of Byatt makes much of the latter, ignoring to his detriment the Norse myths). Less 

frequently she uses the New Testament. M y emphasis in this study is on religion as 

currently-held or at least actively-questioned faith, not as fodder for anthropological or 

psychological study. Nevertheless, her use of Norse Ragnarok stories and some Judaeo-

Christian stories holds promise from a religious point of view. 

Byatt's usual method is to reveal a mythological referent as symbolically 

significant of cultural types and patterns - and often she then demonstrates how loss of 

faith has diluted the mythical figure's potency. For example, an important character in the 

text-within-a-text in Babel Tower (Jude Mason's Babbletower) is Samson Origen, a silent 

witness to the horrors taking place at the Sadeian dystopia that is La Tour Bruyarde. The 

original Samson is the violent strongman of the Hebrew Scriptures; Origen is the 3rd 

century Christian scholar and ascetic. Origen attempted in his teachings to unite Christian 

and Platonic doctrine and was also an influential interpreter and promoter of allegory. 

According to Helen Gardner (A. S. Byatt's supervisor at Cambridge in the 1950s), Origen 

can be seen as the "founder of all Christian Biblical study, the father of all textual 



308 

criticism, and of grammatical as well as allegorical exegesis" (Limits of Literary 

Criticism 11). Two other "mythological" characters from Byatt's fiction are Cassandra 

Corbett in The Game and Fergus Wolff in Possession. Cassandra, a princess of Troy, is 

the famous prophet of Greek myth who, having spurned the love of Apollo, is punished 

by universal disbelief in her prophecies (which include the Trojan Horse and the death of 

Agamemnon). Fenris Wolf, in Scandinavian legend, is the child of Loki, the tempter god, 

and is responsible for killing the chief god, Odin, in the Last Battle, or Ragnarok. 

These three examples from the Judaeo-Christian, Greek, and Scandinavian 

traditions are used in similar ways. Each Byatt character takes characteristics from his or 

her mythical forebear, but the religious power has been stripped away. Even Origen, a 

historically verifiable Christian, is used by Byatt as a mythological figure. Samson 

Origen is one of three sane and trustworthy characters in the Babbletower narrative; he 

makes an impressive speech about the wisdom of standing silent and desiring nothing 

(Babel Tower 285), but his passivity in the face of the atrocities he witnesses is nearly as 

appalling as the sado-masochism practised by the leaders of La Tour Bruyarde. Byatt 

demonstrates, via her use of Origen in this context, her indictment Of the lack of 

dynamism within the Christian church when faced with human evil, and also points out 

(by the use of Samson) that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has itself been the source and 

site of destruction and violence. Cassandra Corbett in The Game retains from her 

namesake the fated unhappiness and lack of ability to communicate with others, but she 

has no gift of prophesy or deep insight. Fergus Wolff, the deconstructionist in Possession, 

is a successful scholar who threatens to undo the tentative steps that Roland and Maud 

are taking toward an unfashionable but meaningful reading of the Victorian story of Ash 



309 

and LaMotte. Fenris Wolf in myth is wholly evil, a destructive principle, born of a 

Satanic character. Byatt uses this myth satirically; she sets Fergus Wolff as a foil for 

Roland, whose more traditional humanistic scholarship is allowed to triumph over 

sceptical language-based criticism. Fergus is the one scholar who is not allowed to be 

present in the stormy cemetery for the conclusion of the Ash-LaMotte mystery. Again, 

the mythical figure has been stripped of his power. The evil wolf is declawed and 

undone. 

The use of the Babel Tower image in the 1996 novel is less ironic, its moral status 

more earnest. In Genesis 11, after the Flood the earth's people want to "make a name for 

themselves" (v. 4) and attempt to build a tower to heaven, an edifice which will challenge 

God's sovereignty. God is alarmed at their ambition and scatters them, confusing their 

language so they may not understand one another, giving as His reason that "this is only 

the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be 

impossible for them" (v. 6). Aside from the tower's implicit relation to the portentous 

tower of the free-thinking Fourierist colony in Babbletower, Byatt makes few explicit 

comments on the Babel Tower image throughout the novel. But in an interview, Byatt 

commented that Babel Tower is about "fragments jerking apart," a "whispering of papery 

voices," and "language breaking loose from the world" (Wachtel 1996). However, it is 

not God who has ordered this chaos and punishment. This state of affairs has been 

created entirely by humans. 

The overweening emphasis on human desire and power and the destructive 

licence which Byatt presents as the hallmark of revolutionary France (the setting for 

Babbletower) and the 1960s (the setting of the main narrative) cannot be laid at God's 



310 

feet. Byatt's most dangerous characters have not only rejected God, but have made gods 

of themselves. This is in line with traditional interpretations of the Babel Tower image. 

Northrop Frye goes further, and posits the Tower of Babel in Genesis as a demonic 

parody of Bethel, also found in Genesis; each name connects, says Frye, to an idea 

meaning "gate of God." Bethel is the place where Jacob dreamed of a ladder descending 

from heaven: "It was not a human construction but an image of the divine will to reach 

man" (Words with Power 152,154). The Tower of Babel is the place where humans undo 

God's work and try to take God's place, climbing to heaven. The result is an unhappy 

chaos, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Byatt's novel. 

A n even more sincere use of a Biblical symbol is Byatt's choice of the name 

"Daniel." In the Hebrew Scriptures Daniel is a prophet in exile, whose faith is sturdy 

despite being severely tested. Daniel is able to interpret the famous "writing on the wall" 

for the Babylonian king Belshazzar; one of the prophecies he offers is "you have been 

weighed in the balances and found wanting" (Daniel 5.27). The Book of Daniel also 

features a strong apocalyptic strain. Daniel Orton is no prophet; but he does stand firm in 

his faith in trying circumstances. As a saddened religious man in the midst of agnostics 

and atheists, he might also be seen as a herald of the apocalypse. He may not read the 

writing on the wall, but he listens to it daily on the telephone at The Listeners. Less 

intellectually inclined than the other characters in the Potter novels, Daniel is 

nevertheless an efficient exegete, interpreting Christian scriptures generously, reading the 

needs of the people around him, and almost exclusively among the characters (especially 

in Babel Tower, after the loss of his partner-in-charity, Stephanie) able to translate belief 

into action. He does not offer reproach, although he does afford a mode of comparison. 



311 

Contrasted with Daniel, most of the characters in Babel Tower would be "weighed in the 

balances and found wanting." 

If one regards my identification of apocalyptic ideas in Byatt's fiction as far-

fetched, Byatt in 1996 offered this description of the projected fourth and last Potter 

novel. It will, she says, feature a battle between rebellious students and academics having 

a conference about the mind at the University of North Yorkshire - an image of 

apocalypse, the Last Battle, Ragnarok (Wachtel 1996). Ragnarok is also used by Byatt in 

Possession as the subject of an important poem by Randolph Henry Ash. Ragnarok in 

Scandinavian myth is the destruction of all the gods and all of creation. It follows the 

poisoning of creation by the evil Loki and his children, which culminated in the death of 

Odin's beloved son, Baldur the Beautiful, a Christ-like figure. 

Byatt's usage of Scandinavian myth is traced to one of her favourite books as a 

child (Antonia Fraser 127), W. Wagner's nineteenth-century collection Asgard and the 

Gods. In Wagner's view, the flawed, human-like gods have excellent allegorical and 

cosmogonic uses but fail as objects of worship, except where the northern myths have 

been infiltrated by Christian ones (as has probably happened in the case of Baldur, for 

example, and in various trinitarian constellations of gods). These myths have appealed to 

Byatt partly, perhaps, due to the greater power given to the female gods (the sun, Sol, is 

female, as is Hel, the goddess of Death). Evidence of Byatt's fascination with these 

myths can be found throughout her novels. It is in Wagner's book that we discover the 

source of the name Gode in Possession: the old woman who tells Breton tales in that 

novel is named after the chief goddess of Asgard - Gode is an alternate name for Frigg, 



312 

or Freya. More important is the association of Randolph Henry Ash with the Allfather 

god, Odin, or Wotan. 

In Asgard and the Gods Odin is divinely associated with language and 

interpretation; indeed he has sacrificed one of his eyes to be granted the ability to read 

runes, the sacred symbols. However, neither the runes nOr any other power can save Odin 

and the other gods once they succumb to the guile of Loki the tempter. Loki's child, the 

Midgard-Snake, wraps around the Yggdrasil, or World-Ash tree, choking the life from it. 

Another of Loki's children, the Fenris Wolf, is the killer of the Allfather during the Last 

Battle. 

Ash the poet has not lost an eye in the service of his art. But he can be identified 

as Odin in the Postscript of Possession by this description: "tall, bearded, his face in 

shadow under a wide-brimmed hat, a wanderer coming up the lane, between high hedges, 

with an ashplant in his hand and the look of a walker" (553). Odin often disguises himself 

as a Wanderer and is closely linked with the World-Ash tree; puns on the word "ash" 

recur frequently in Possession. Odin is also the Allfather, and in Possession Ash is not 

only Roland Michell's spiritual father and mentor but, it turns out, is Maud Bailey's 

actual great-great-great-great-grandfather. In the years after Ragnarok, according to W. 

Wagner, two innocent humans, L i f and Lifthrasir, emerge from hiding and are the source 

of a new creation. It is not out of the question that L i f and Lifthrasir are Roland and 

Maud, embracing a resurrected belief in the old stories, defeating the Fergus Wolff who 

wants to devour the old ways with his deconstructive strategies, just as the Fenris Wolf of 

myth destroyed Odin, the Allfather, keeper of the runes of meaning. Fergus has sat "at the 

feet of Barthes and Foucault" (Possession 37); Roland initially searches for a place in the 



313 

British Museum Reading Room, among the "secondary desks, stammering desks, D D G G 

0 0 " (31); Maud is stranded with ideas of margins and thresholds, writing papers on 

liminality (154). A l l three of them initially are inclined to scepticism and fragmentation, 

but only Roland and Maud are able to forge a new relationship to the "Allfather," one 

which gives their lives and work new meaning and vitality. 

Byatt in her fiction also comments on other users of myth in fiction; of particular 

significance is her nod to J. R. R. Tolkien in Babel Tower. A n important character in the 

novel, if it is not impertinent to speak of a bird as such (and in this case I do not believe it 

is), is a thrush. The thrush opens Babel Tower, and an echo of this initial thrush scene 

closes Babel Tower. Byatt's thrush is a relative of the important thrush in Tolkien's The 

Hobbit, the bird who shows Bilbo and the dwarfs the way into the mountain where the 

dragon Smaug lives and later is instrumental in the destruction of Smaug; the thrush is 

able to tell the archer the location of the evil dragon's vulnerable spot. Byatt mentions 

Tolkien as a particular favourite of hers in Antonia Fraser's The Pleasure of Reading; in 

Babel Tower Frederica reads The Hobbit to her son Leo. Tolkien's bird is wholly 

trustworthy, a harbinger of goodness and truth quite in keeping with the thrush's 

traditional symbolic qualities of wisdom and heavenly aspiration (Olderr). Thomas Hardy 

also uses the thrush in this way. In his poem "The Darkling Thrush," he presents the 

bird's hopeful and incongruous "full-hearted evensong" on a dreary evening as 

expressive of a lonely Christian faith at the dawning of the troubled twentieth century. 

Byatt does not mean her thrush to be an ordinary bird; its mythical qualities are 

apparent. Additional evidence is supplied by the character Turdus Cantor, in 

Babbletower. He has a thrush-like name, Turdidae being the Latin name of the thrush 



314 

family, while "cantor" of course is a leader of religious song. He is a friend of Samson 

Origen, and his role in Jude Mason's vicious allegory is much the same as Origen's. They 

are religious figures who rise above the violence - the reader clings to them for security -

but their inaction is, finally, reprehensible. Byatt's thrush is more ambiguous than 

Hardy's or Tolkien's. She emphasizes the thrush as a destroyer of snails; the bird never 

appears in Babel Tower without its attendant "anvil or altar" on which to smash snail 

shells. Although the bird's song is lovely, made of "liquid syllables," it is also "limited." 

The narrator asks, "Why does his song give, us such pleasure?" (3). The question is 

unanswered, but implicit is the response that a creature who seems to get such enjoyment 

out of smashing and eating his prey ("he extracts the bruised flesh, he sips, he juggles, he 

swallows") is an uncertain source of innocence and wisdom. The altar of shells is paired 

with the altar of bones at the end of the novel; the fate of the libertine community at La 

Tour Bruyarde is to be prey for the cannibalistic Krebs, who are (incredibly) more 

barbaric than their victims. In each case, religious sacrifice is implied and derided; both 

the thrush and the characters of Babbletower are destructive in appeasing their desires 

and appetites. 

This thrush occurs in Babbletower. not Babel Tower, so the presentation of the 

thrush is, ostensibly, Jude Mason's and does not belong to the narrator of Babel Tower 

(one can identify the parts written by "Mason" by the snail graphics opening and closing 

each section). Perhaps one ought not assume too much about the complexities of this 

thrush, who sings so beautifully and smashes so readily. But the importance of the 

positioning of the scene - at the beginning of Byatt's massive novel - outweighs the 

problem of whose point of view is presenting the thrush. Byatt actually offers four 



315 

potential beginnings to the book: the thrush (an excerpt from Babbletower, exact position 

in that novel unknown), Hugh Pink meeting Frederica, Daniel at work, and chapter one of 

Babbletower. The thrush comes first of these four possibilities, however, and the mixed 

pessimism and beauty of the little scene does much to set the tone for the entire novel. 

Is it odd to emphasize one or two scenes about a bird in a novel as huge and 

multifarious as Babel Tower? I have taken some time over the thrush because it is 

indicative of some of Byatt's most ambivalent mythological tendencies. The thrush is far 

from being her most complex symbol: her analysis of snails in Babel Tower, with all their 

scientific, political, and philosophical ramifications, is more intricate. But there is little in 

the snail that has religious significance,5 and the thrush, in general symbolic discourse 

and as used by Hardy and Tolkien (as Byatt well knows), is directly associated with 

religious faith; this is the context that intrigues me. And Byatt has given the thrush pride 

of place at the novel's beginning. 

Once again, Byatt has taken a mythological symbol of religious power and, partly, 

undermined it. Her thrush is not a Good Bird, but has its horrible side. Like Christianity, 

like Origen, it has made mistakes, some of them devastating. But Byatt has not made the 

thrush wholly evil either, nor has she made it inconsequential. The thrush is honoured in 

Babel Tower, and it is still lovely: "Why does his song give us such pleasure?" (3). There 

is a longing here for religious faith not unlike Hardy's. Although she has not written 

much about Hardy (he is mentioned in her short story "The July Ghost"), his poem 

"Hap" precisely expresses one of Byatt's religious anxieties - the force of chance in the 

universe. Hardy writes in that poem: "Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, / And 

5 According to Steven Olderr, snails do have resurrection connotations, but generally this is 
connected to natural, seasonal cycles rather than spiritual beliefs. 



316 

dicing Time for gladness casts a moan." Byatt darkens Hardy's pessimistic longing one 

degree further, by making his thrush a barbarous creature, but the yearning for faith does 

not disappear. 

§ § § 

In her 1995 book of "conversations" with Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters, 

Byatt ostensibly groups religion and myth together: 

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale 
you use to present your world to yourself in. For that matter I suspect you 
could do that with Christianity too, whether it's the Virgin and Son or the 
figure on the Cross you choose to devote yourself to. (74) 

Byatt and Sodre are, however, using a psychoanalytic approach to literature and culture, 

not a literal or pragmatic or historical one. Byatt says, 

In a sense what we are partly saying is that you can give a psychoanalytic 
explanation of why religious certainty makes people better, which is 
nothing to do with whether the religion is true or not. (42) 

Much of Imagining Characters traces the use of myths and archetypes in writers such as 

Charlotte Bronte, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison. These writers, says Byatt, know 

"how to evoke and stir up in us those ancient forms which we then clothe as one does in 

one's life, with flesh and blood" (142). Byatt and Sodre see this, absolutely, as a positive 

thing; they note repeatedly how characters discover mythical forms (including Christian) 

which they internalize and which aid in moral direction. In most cases, the characters 

under discussion find something in myth that allows them to create a saving image of 

Goodness. In particular, Byatt and Sodre are drawn to discuss Iris Murdoch's Platonic 

ideas, her belief in an ideal Good that can function in the place of God in a post-Christian 

society. Byatt paraphrases Murdoch: "Our sense of Good depends upon the sanction of a 

God in whom we no longer believe" (174); Murdoch instructs us to get on with learning 



317 

about Good and Evil without the protection of a deity. Because Byatt is commonly seen 

as an heir to Murdoch, one might assume that Byatt's stance on God is the same. That 

assumption would be a mistake. 

O f the six women writers discussed in Imagining Characters (George Eliot and 

Jane Austen join the four already mentioned), Byatt and Sodre are toughest on Iris 

Murdoch - although temperamentally and thematically they have the most in common 

with her - and call her to task for unrealistic characters and false effects. Surprisingly, 

they reserve high praise for Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), which Byatt 

describes as having "a kind of almost buried, almost inactive Christian myth" (143). It is 

as if Iris Murdoch's confidence that the Sovereignty of Good can replace Christian faith 

does not strike Byatt as sufficient. Murdoch does not seem overly bothered, in her 1969 

essay "On 'God' and 'Good'," about "the disappearance of a permanent background to 

human activity" (The Sovereignty of Good 53). Byatt's overt statements on religion and 

philosophy seem to be in general agreement with Murdoch, but the anxious undercurrents 

I have been uncovering in Byatt's writing demonstrate her own philosophy to be 

considerably less sanguine, less committed to a cheerful attempt at ethical living without 

God. 

Iris Murdoch writes, in "On 'God' and 'Good,' " that: 

God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and 
necessarily real object of attention; and I shall go on to suggest that moral 
philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these 
characteristics. (55, emphasis in original) 



318 

This definition could be a model for Byatt's definition, written in 1990, one we have 

noted before. God, says A . S. Byatt, is: 

an omni-present absentee whose linguistic essence is reduced to traces of 
moral and cultural nostalgia, touched with savagery. (Passions of the Mind 
5 ) 

Ambivalence is there in each appellation; Murdoch wavers on whether God "was (or is)," 

while Byatt endows her God with both presence and absence. Another similarity is an 

obvious pressing need to keep the idea of God in circulation and under discussion, 

somehow, no matter how many doubts are enumerated about God's existence. After this, 

their definitions part company. Murdoch seems to say that we should be able to live a 

moral life guided by a perfect Idea which is much like God; her proposal is cerebral, 

unbodied, abstract.6 Byatt's God, however, is wrapped up in linguistic and mythological 

issues; we cannot simply free ourselves from the influence of thousands of years of 

theism, even if we want to. It is not just our minds that must grapple with God and Good, 

but our bodies and our intuitive inner selves, once (and sometimes still) called souls. One 

of the most important elements of Byatt's definition is the last phrase, "touched with 

savagery." If I read the sentence correctly, it is not God who is designated as savage, but 

either the "linguistic essence" or the "moral and cultural nostalgia" that is - most likely 

the latter, I hazard. In other words, the trappings of Christianity (or, more generally, the 

entire Judaeo-Christian heritage) are contaminated by violence and falseness, but the 

contamination does not necessarily extend to God or Christ. There is a sense of bodily 

pain, anger, restlessness, and active searching in Byatt's formulation entirely lacking in 

6 It should be noted that Byatt identifies, in a 1986 assessment, an "increased urgency" in the 
religious concerns of Murdoch's late novels (Degrees of Freedom 330-31). The direction of Murdoch's 
future religious thoughts became impossible to chart after she acquired Alzheimer's disease in 1994. 



319 

Murdoch's. Byatt's God is allowed an uncertain certainty, and can be seen in her work as 

a longed-for but dubious reality; as Marcus Potter realizes, "it was almost impossible not 

to believe in a Designer" (Still Life 303). 



C o n c l u s i o n 

320 

Words strain, 
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, 
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, 
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, 
Will not stay still. 

T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" 

Near the end of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, A. S. Byatt creates a 

conversation between novelist Henry Severell and critic Oliver Canning. They speak of 

individual ways of looking at a tree, and what these differing attitudes represent. 

[Oliver] looked up at Henry, and then back at his hands against the 
fire, and said, as though treading dangerous and familiar ground where he 
was doomed to lose himself, "Things are solid for my wife. Here, she 
says, is a tree, and she walks round and round it, patting its trunk, and 
sniffing at its leaves, and admiring the pattern of the sun through its 
branches on her new silk dress, and there is a tree - " 

Henry sat up, and said, "Yes." 
"God knows what you see. God only knows. I look, I see there is 

something, and I see a hole." 
"The tree is there." 
"Oh, I know, you're so certain. A transfigured tree, an ideal and 

shining tree, a visible witness to the fact that you are there, and you see it 
so, and are alive. Terribly simple, but unfortunately convincing, as you put 
it. The holes are the same, equally simple, quite damning. I can't get out 
by saying what do trees matter? They do - 1 work - Anna works - in the 
same area. It's not that we've lost our faith in Margaret's solid tree, nor 
that we've not been fortunate or clever enough to see your eternal Tree. 
It's positively a lack of trees, a space for a tree, no tree. No tree. But we 
come back and back to it, it's an issue, all right. We stand in the same field 
from time to time, and scan the horizon for trees. Why d'you think I spend 
my time writing about your novels? I suppose you think I don't know what 
you see - " (276) 

This passage is worth quoting at such length because it contains a number of the 

arguments recurring in my examination of Byatt. The problem of individual variability in 



321 

apprehension is here, the importance of the search for Meaning which is a substitute for 

religion, the gap between empiricism and idealism, the multiple readings of the object 

under scrutiny, even the way "sight" is used as shorthand for intellectual and moral 

insight. The manner in which Oliver and Henry discuss this symbolic tree is different 

from the way Marcus sees a tree in The Virgin in the Garden (as discussed above, in 

chapter 4). Marcus's tree offers a way into a more natural, but still abstract, theorizing of 

the geometric thinking which is essential to his being, and stands beside Goethe's, 

Wordsworth's, and (most importantly) Sartre's similar trees, trees emblematic of their 

authors' fundamental beliefs about the world. Although for both Byatt and Sartre 

perception of the tree constitutes a part of the process being described, more significant is 

the status of the tree itself as a thing, a separate piece of existence, indicative either of 

order or randomness, of divine origin or accident, depending on your philosophical bent. 

Oliver and Henry, on the other hand, are discussing solely what the tree reveals about the 

character of the perceiver, the human experience of viewing the tree. Margaret just sees 

but cannot judge. Henry sees beyond the actual to the ideal. Oliver longs for the ideal 

tree, and is an accurate observer of other people's observations, but cannot see the thing 

at all - he has no faith. Oliver assumes Anna is like himself, but actually she was initially 

closely aligned with Henry. Anna had to be taught by Oliver not to see the tree, taught to 

lose faith. 

Oliver has lost touch with truth, empirical or ideal or any other kind. He is a 

useful signpost, because his genus does not often recur in Byatt. There is something of 

Oliver in Fergus Wolff and other deconstructionists in Possession, but by 1990 these 

character types are comic, while Oliver is anything but comic. Nearly all of Byatt's other 



322 

characters are still struggling (with some success) to see the tree; nearly all of them have 

faith of some kind or another - in words, pictures, objects, the human brain, sensory 

experience, God. Margaret's empiricist approach appears in a more positive light when 

incarnated in Daniel Orton - someone who also just sees, just is - but who is able to 

make intelligent judgements based on the sensory knowledge he acquires. Henry's 

idealism recurs (in differing degrees) in Ash and LaMotte in Possession, and in Van 

Gogh and Matisse in Still Life and The Matisse Stories. But the sort of nihilism that 

Oliver represents, while acknowledged by Byatt as a possible approach to knowledge and 

existence, is not accorded much space. She stresses the positive in theories of 

apprehension, the importance of hope and curiosity in the face of existential despair. 

Still, a portion of Oliver's pessimism remains in all of Byatt's books. No one is 

ever absolutely certain about Meaning; if Marcus and Henry occasionally glimpse the 

eternal order of things, that vision does not stay. It cannot be definitively captured in 

words. And there is something terribly familiar about Oliver's keen ability to observe 

other people's observations. Byatt's characters and narrators are good readers of texts of 

all sorts, including human beings as texts - but the revelations about each other that the 

characters come across are rarely shared with each other or acted upon. The insights that 

Stephanie, Daniel, Alexander, Marcus, and the narrators of Still Life and Possession have 

are usually shared with the reader only. This is a process of literary illumination, one that 

does not comfortably expand into the world of personal relations. Frederica Potter's 

excellence as a reader leads her astray; not realizing that Forster's "only connect" may 

not work in her own life, she makes a disastrous marriage which ends in violence. 



323 

There are, if one wants them, even more trees. In her 1986 essay about Still Life, 

Byatt talks about being "haunted by trees" (Passions of the Mind 19). Trees from Milton 

and Darwin join the trees I've already mentioned from Sartre and Wordsworth. Her 

comments accentuate one of the issues in Byatt interpretation, the sometimes formidable 

abundance. This is part of the reason why analyses of Byatt, such as they exist, are so 

dissimilar. In addition to the idiosyncratic critical equipment interpreters bring with them, 

Byatt herself suggests a wide array of exegetical possibility. 

"But there is a moment in all this when we, the readers, imagine the tree, vividly," 

says Byatt of the tree in Nausea (Passions of the Mind 19). Despite Sartre's emphasis on 

absurdity and disconnection, Byatt believes that he simultaneously demonstrates 

connection and meaning, rootedness and precision. She can see Roquentin's tree and she 

can see him seeing it, and although she does not share his viewpoint, she can present both 

viewpoints to us. Language allows this connection; it is language she hopes to rescue, in 

pointing out to us that, ironically, Sartre's pessimistic deconstruction of the tree allows 

her to build an accurate picture of it in her mind. This is one of Byatt's fortunate 

moments, combining as it does the visual and the verbal, faith and scepticism in a single 

eddy of thought. 

Pessimistic voices like Oliver's and Sartre's are allowed to revise Byatt's views of 

reality. Through them she states, indirectly, that there is no exact correspondence 

between thing and word, there is no certainty about the human relation to eternity. But it 

is possible, she and the majority of her characters tell us over and over, to accurately see 

and to accurately name. The sight and the naming may not be permanent or perfect or 

universal, but there is powerful possibility nevertheless. 



324 

We live at a time when there are a great many theories about the 
untrustworthiness of language, the inadequacy of language and not many 
theories about the enormous power of it, the enormous accuracy of it, the 
enormous descriptive energy it has ~ so that you can describe a flower or 
a hospital room and none of your readers will see the same flower in their 
minds but none of them if they can read at all will not see more accurately. 
We seem to be slightly beleaguered by theories that try and persuade us 
that this is not the case, that language isn't in the world. (Byatt/Murdoch 
video interview) 

Byatt's slightly convoluted negative construction of her credo here - "but none of them 

if they can read at all will not see more accurately" - indicates her concession to 

scepticism. Still, the repetitive use of the word "enormous" (enormous power, accuracy, 

energy) points to her overriding belief in the still-present possibility that language can 

fruitfully engage with truth. Referring to her autobiographical story "Sugar," she has 

written of her double intention in another way: 

There is a certain amount of defiance in "Sugar." Defiance of the moral 
imperative (my own, my family's, my culture's) that one should not "eat 
up" life with the order of art. Defiance of the aesthetic imperative that all 
good fiction now is overtly Active and about fictiveness. "Sugar" is that, 
but it does try to be truthful. It does, also, indicate that there are truths its 
author chooses to omit, not to tell, to ignore. It does, indeed, also claim 
authorship for its author. (" 'Sugar' / 'Le Sucre'," Passions of the Mind 
25) 

§ § § 

I have not examined A. S. Byatt's intentions because she wanted me to, or 

because I wanted to return to some mythical golden age where the author had primacy. I 

have found that a consideration of her intentions, her sources and allusions, is genuinely 

helpful and that, combined with other critical methods, a recognition of the author's 

presence in her work is an enriching rather than a limiting way of reading. Once I 

discovered that Marcus's visions, Frederica's laminations, Stephanie's electrocution, and 

Roland's lists of words-that-defy-theory were experiences shared by Byatt herself 



325 

(Tredell 67,69, 70), it seemed foolish to ignore these powerful personal sources. But the 

distancing that other critical methods provide is crucial. Byatt's commentary on her own 

work, the maxims of her narrators, and the declamatory monologues of her characters can 

lead you to a more positive place than you ought to be. Doing close and comparative 

reading, paying phenomenological attention to characters, reading from a religious 

perspective - these reveal other elements. Although the fiction makes enthusiastic claims 

that language and truth might fuse, one cannot forget the tragic failures of the characters 

who strive for this union. 

The deaths of Stephanie Potter in Still Life and Joshua Riddell in "Precipice-

Encurled" are accidents, and yet they are not. These characters are punished for their 

endeavour in joining verbal and visual, for their attempt to find revelation without 

religion. Like Van Gogh, whose death was not accidental, Stephanie and Joshua force the 

reader to wonder about the consequences of seeking purity of knowledge and articulation 

without an attendant faith in some transcendent power, some deity. An accurate critical 

analysis of Byatt has to take account of this failure, and ask why an agnostic writer 

allows her characters to be punished for lack of faith. It also has to be acknowledged that 

Byatt's openness to religious questions, the believing part of her agnosticism (as it were), 

is the source of much of the vitality and solidity of her fiction. 

The character who provides the moral equilibrium that keeps the Potter novels 

from spinning into endless disquisitions on the stimulating impossibilities of making 

sense of language and reality is Daniel Orton, the taciturn clergyman. Daniel is a man of 

God, a man of bodily reality, but resolutely not a man of language. Like Randolph Henry 

Ash in Possession, Daniel offers hope against meaninglessness: Ash is able to bring order 



3 2 6 

to his thoughts using language, Daniel by acting on his religious faith. However, faith and 

language ability do not occur within the same character (in Christabel LaMotte there is 

possibility but she is trapped by limited Victorian notions of femininity). The shrinking 

size of Daniel's role in Babel Tower is striking - the issue of faith is put aside and 

language dilemmas predominate. There have been no more tragedies like the death of 

Stephanie Potter in the recent fiction - elemental events that force the characters and the 

reader up against the wall of belief The death of Patricia Nimmo's husband in the 1998 

short story "Crocodile Tears" happens off-stage and the story primarily concerns 

Patricia's avoidance of grief, rather as Possession features Roland's and Maud's 

avoidance of romance. 

Even the matter of language, while ever-present, seems less crucial in Byatt's 

work in the 1990s. Linguistic debates are increasingly the stuff of comic scenes; the old 

debate about visual and verbal modes of knowing is gradually abandoned. The visually-

oriented Prologues of The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life (set in the National Portrait 

Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts respectively) have not been followed up with a 

similar Prologue in Babel Tower, which is in the present tense, while the other two 

novels are in the past tense. In the third Potter novel, verbal language takes control; 

characters who try to combine verbal and visual language are in short supply. And 

apparently the past (including its passionate debates about God) suddenly has less status 

than the present. Babel Tower relinquishes debates about faith and about vying 

epistemologies, replacing them with hollower discussion about verbal language alone. 

One of Byatt's most recent stories points out the diminished status of visual inquiry. 

"Christ in the House of Mary and Martha" (1997) - an ekphrastic tale about Velasquez's 



327 

painting of that name - counsels that to look intently at the world and be "interested" is 

enough. The painter's claim in the story that when "I paint eggs and fishes and onions, I 

am painting the godhead" (Elementals 226) is not very convincing. 

Byatt is becoming a separatist. She still writes about painting, but she now 

differentiates distinctly between saying in paint and saying in words. About English 

painter Patrick Heron she writes: "What I love about Heron's work is the visual and 

intellectual delight of the colours and forms which are other than language, and cannot be 

reduced to it, or involved in it" ("A Riddle Around the Edges of Vision" 13). In the 

1980s, Byatt was obsessed by Van Gogh, a painter who still blended his colours, however 

eccentrically, trying to duplicate to his personal satisfaction the complex realities of the 

world (think of his striated multi-coloured skies and fields, the simultaneity of blue and 

yellow in Starry Night). Byatt also loved the fact that Van Gogh needed to write about 

painting, and produced letters in the same imperative way that he produced his art works. 

Later, she became attracted to Matisse, who separated his colours. He used blocks of 

colours, distinct forms, and simplified shapes to process the world, to analyse and report 

on it rather than attempt to represent it as it stands. Matisse did not have the same interest 

in written language that Van Gogh did; he made a choice between the two modes. The 

new message: you can have one or the other, but not both. 

§ § § 

I have thought, while writing this doctoral dissertation, that I was often coming at 

A. S. Byatt from a negative formulation, from a conception of what she isn't, rather than 

what she is. Perhaps this is the experience of many academic writers, who feel they must 

measure their subject against a curtain of other histories or define by redefining. The 



328 

theories which worked for other writers never fit exactly, need to be refurbished and 

realigned, endlessly. And the experience of interpreting A. S. Byatt features these 

problems of redefinition acutely. She has deliberately placed herself in opposition to 

certain received ideas (both creative and critical) and declares herself to be against 

reductive thought, against facile systemization. When writing about birth, for example, 

Byatt rejected most of the literary models available to her, identifying in them too much 

hyperbole and romanticism and too little realism about the body. Critical methods of 

analysing death in literature focus on what death stands for, rather than what it is - see 

Kenneth Burke's "A Thanatopsis for Critics" for an obvious case of this. This is no help 

in reading Byatt. Death in Byatt is stubbornly itself: shocking, momentous, resolutely 

self-defined. This resistance becomes clearest in her writing about love: she is suspicious 

of nearly all the definitions and throws them out. Like Flaubert in writing The Dictionary 

of Received Ideas, she weighs cliches and worn standards of expression against the 

horizon of carefully-considered experience, finding the usual representations inadequate 

at best and, more likely, foolish. But Byatt's determination to strip superfluous and trite 

ideas from her work has not made her prose spare and crystalline; indeed quite the 

opposite seems to have happened. There is so much more to all of this - this is, overall, 

one of her basic messages. This "so much more" is one of the dictionary definitions of 

transcendence. 

Even when considering Van Gogh and Matisse, two of art history's most closely-

analysed painters, Byatt tells us to start over. Reject the received ideas about madness or 

decorativeness or sexism. Her Van Gogh is intellectually capable and articulate, carefully 

preserving his version of realism. Her Matisse believes that colour and form enunciate a 



329 

kind of purity of thought, that women are powerful. When I reached religious concerns, 

there was a new surprise: Byatt stopped throwing everything out, instead claiming for 

herself territory one would expect her (as an agnostic) to reject out of hand. 

Another problem that presented itself was Byatt's profound ambivalence on 

certain key topics. At first, an uncertain Byatt seemed an impossible idea; my first 

experience of reading her was Possession in 1990, and in it she seemed a paragon of 

confidence. But reading through the rest of her works, I could not sort out with certainty 

her views on language, on perception, on faith. They seemed unsettled - although not 

undeveloped - even taking into account the alterations in a personality maturing over 

nearly 40 years of writing. I decided to make this uncertainty the object of my 

exploration, to find out what it might mean. Critics have catalogued her, with reason, as a 

realist, a moralist, a postmodernist, a neo-Victorian - but which strand predominates? 

Her love-hate relationship with allegory and metaphor is indicative: she tried to write 

Still Life without metaphor and found it impossible. Her characters distrust argument by 

analogy and allegorical readings of paintings - but what could be more allegorical than 

the novellas in Angels and Insects and the fairy-tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale's 

Eye? And what about those allegorical and symbolic names - Perry Diss, Jude Mason, 

Harald Alabaster? When lined up against her praise of non-representational aspects of art 

(see not only her writings on Henri Matisse but also on David Royle and Patrick Heron), 

the whole effect is decidedly puzzling. 

I still believe that language and religion are key in an accurate reading of A. S. 

Byatt's fiction, but I cannot explain their function in her work conclusively. Byatt has a 

circumscribed faith in language (the circumscription a legacy of this century) and a 



330 

passionate quarrel with religion (an inheritance from the last); because she recognizes the 

failures and risks inherent in each she can never give in to the optimism she admires in 

the metaphysical poets and the Romantics. One of her largest stumbling-blocks to faith in 

words and in God is something that I realized only gradually. This is the pressure to 

capture and enshrine individual experience. When this works, as it does in Stephanie 

Potter's encounters with childbirth and death, the result has been original writing of great 

intensity. But ultimately Byatt's belief in the prominence of individualism - almost to the 

point of isolationism - has limited the possibilities of illumination that her characters and 

narrators so energetically seek. Henry Severell and Stephanie and Marcus Potter have 

genuine revelations - about art, children, cognition itself - but are rarely able to share 

these. There is no community of believers in Byatt's mostly secular world. The ability to 

articulate and understand, to have faith, is so variable from person to person, and each is 

so determined to find his or her own path, that, turned inward, the revelations become 

explosive, shattering, harmful. 

Byatt's faith arguments have been misread. In an article entitled "The Redemptive 

Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel" Dana Shiller attempts to transform redemption 

doctrines into something more hazily humanist - a commitment to learn from history and 

a realization of the salutary effects of intellectual curiosity. In Possession, says Shiller, 

"what matters more than the substance of the truth is the process of truth-seeking" (556). 

But Shiller does not address whether truth can be dismissed in this way without resultant 

damage to language and ethics. It is precisely this "process" of individualistic truth-

seeking that causes chaos in Babel Tower, where characters at all levels of the narrative 

realize that others plainly do not speak the same language as they do. The outcome is 



331 

unhappiness (and death in Babbletower) because language is still tied up with moral and 

spiritual value, whether 1960s radicals or eighteenth century French revolutionaries like it 

or not. English journalist Mira Stout offers a more accurate judgement of Byatt's 

substitution of intellectual values for religious ones: "Her erudition isn't a store of 

disposable intellectual trivia, but a protective belief system, a virtual haven from 

humanity's anguishing frailties and banalities. This is both the strength and weakness of 

her work" (25). Characters are increasingly advising each other, in the fiction, to take up 

intellectual and linguistic curiosity as a cure for depression, grief, and metaphysical 

anguish. This works, to an extent. But curiosity is an inadequate alternative to 

transcendence, at the same time as it is indicative of a deep human need to seek 

transcendence. 

In 1977 Iris Murdoch, in a television interview, spoke about this very secular 

literary pastime of carving personal systems of order out of previously religious domains: 

"A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the 

formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what 

otherwise seems a mass of senseless rubble" (Existentialists and Mystics 7). Murdoch 

herself created neo-Platonic systems that resembled Judaeo-Christian ones very closely. 

Byatt, officially, distances herself even further from institutional religions, yet her own 

blending of empiricism and idealism has a devotional bent. Randolph Henry Ash in 

Possession disparages their "old world - a tired world" where truths "are now obscured 

by palimpsest on palimpsest" (181). The palimpsests are the marks left by the frustrating 

and foolish history of human religious creed-peddling (among other things) - and yet 

Byatt's characters learn abundantly about themselves by reading those palimpsests and 



3 3 2 

marginalia. M o s t significantly, Byatt's fictional world hungers for the order that religious 

beliefs once supplied. Overall, her explorations o f alternate ways o f knowing, seeing, and 

saying have failed to reveal patterns or harmonies that can make life secure for her 

characters. 



333 

Bibliography 

Key to Abbreviations 

NS The New Statesman 
N Y R B The New York Review of Books 
N Y T The New York Times 
N Y T B R The New York Times Book Review 
OUP Oxford University Press 
T L S The Times Literary Supplement 

PRIMARY WORKS 

Books by A. S. Byatt 

Byatt, A.S. The Shadow of the Sun. 1964. London: Vintage, 1991. 

. The Game. 1967. London: Vintage, 1992. 

. Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time. London: Hogarth, 1970. 

, Iris Murdoch. Writers and their Work series. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: 

Longman, 1976. 

. The Virgin in the Garden. 1978. London: Penguin, 1981. 

. Still Life. 1985. London: Penguin, 1986. 

. Sugar and other Stories. 1987. London: Penguin, 1988. 

. Possession: A Romance. 1990. New York: Vintage, 1991. 

. Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991. 

. Angels and Insects. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. 

. The Matisse Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. 
• The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eve: Five Fairy Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 

1994. 

. Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Vintage, 1994. 
Revision of 1965 edition. 



334 

, and Ignes Sodre. Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers. 

London: Chatto & Windus, 1995. 

. Babel Tower. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. 

. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. 

Uncollected Fiction and Poetry by A. S. Byatt 

Byatt, A. S. [As Maud Michell-Bailey and Christabel LaMotte]. "Letter to the Editor 
[with poems]." Victorian Poetry 33.1 (Spring 1995): 1-3. 

. "A Dog, a Horse, a Rat." Poem. T L S 24 May 1991: 22. 

. "Dead Boys." Poem. T L S 2 December 1994: 27. 

Non-Fiction Articles by A. S. Byatt 

Byatt, A . S. "The Family Today: Parents on the Defensive." Sunday Times Magazine 10 
November 1968: 57-61. 

. "The Lyric Structure of Tennyson's Maud." The Major Victorian Poets: 
Reconsiderations. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. 
69-93. 

_. "The Wife: The Last of the Great All-Rounders." Sunday Times Magazine 9 
February 1969: 7-10. 

. "Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on." Sunday Times Magazine 16 February 1969: 

40-41. 

. "Coleridge 'an Archangel a Little Damaged'." Times 2 December 1972: 8. 

. "The Ferocious Reticence of Georgette Heyer." Sunday Times Magazine 5 October 

1975: 28-37. 

. "Imagining the Worst." Listener 15 July 1976: 35-37. 

. "Examination Fever." Listener 22 July 1976: 66-68. 

. . "Who are the English?" Listener 5 August 1976: 130-131. 

. "Some Call it Democracy." Listener 19 August 1976: 204-205. 

. "Flair Criticism." Listener 19 January 1978: 80-81. 



335 

. "English Literature on a Latter-Day Passage to India." Times 29 May 1981: 10. 

. "Viewpoint: the Resistant Element." TLS 17 May 1985: 548. 

. "Neglected Fictions." T L S 18 October 1985: 1186. 

. "Shakespearean Plot in the Novels of Iris Murdoch." Iris Murdoch. Ed. Harold 
Bloom. Modern Critical Views series. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 87-94. 

, "Katerina Brae." [Letter to the editor.] T L S 25 April 1986: 447. 

. "Subversion and Stubbornness: On Culture and its Critics." Encounter 67.4 
(November 1986): 46-51. 

. "Fear and Loathing in Putney." [On being mugged.] Evening Standard 8 February 
1988: 24. 

, et al. "Obscenity and the Arts ~ a Symposium." TLS 12-18 February 1988: 159-161. 

. "The Dangerous Belief That There is No Such Thing as Knowledge." Independent 
29 April 1988: 16. 

, "Writing and Feeling." T L S 18-24 November 1988: 1278. 

. "Theoria." [Letter to the editor.] T L S 30 December 1988: 1443. 

. "Potholes in the Case Against Random Tests." [On breathalyser testing and road 
accidents.] Daily Telegraph 3 February 1989. 

. "The Pain of Finite Hearts That Yearn." Independent 23 December 1989: 31. 

. "The Names of the Rose." Independent 14 February 1991: 13. 

. "Love's Rhyme Knows Reason." N Y T 14 February 1992: A19. 

. "The Ambition of Art." Independent Magazine 22 February 1992: 40-43. 

, "Either a Borrower or a Lender Be." Guardian 2 March 1992: 23. 

. "Life in a Soap Opera." Independent Magazine 10 October 1992: 30-34. 

. "A.S. Byatt." The Pleasure of Reading. Ed. Antonia Fraser. Toronto: Knopf, 1992. 
127-132. 



336 

, et al. "A Hundred Years After: Twelve Writers Reflect on Tennyson's Achievement 
and Influence." TLS 2 October 1992: 8-9. 

:Envy." Deadly Sins. New York: W. Morrow, 1993. 82-102. Reprint of "The Sin of 
Families and Nations." N Y T B R 18 July 1993: 3,25-26. 

Continental Assortment." Guardian 18 November 1993, Section 2: 9. 

. "Reading, Writing, Studying. Some Questions about Changing Conditions for 
Writers and Readers." Critical Quarterly 35.4 (Winter 1993): 3-7. 

. "In the Grip of Possession." Independent 2 February 1995: 26. 

."The Dislikable Gwendolen: A Conversation on George Eliot between A. S. Byatt 
and Ignes Sodre." T L S 6 October 1995: 19-20. 

. "The Architectural Origins of a Provocative Film." Architectural Digest (April 
1996): 100-108. 

. "International Books of the Year." TLS 29 November 1996: 11. 

, "A Touch of Evil." [Letter to the Editor.] Sunday Times 17 May 1998, Section 8:2. 

Reviews B y A.S. B y a t t 

Byatt, A.S. "The Obsession with Amorphous Mankind." Review of Miss Macintosh by 
Marguerite Young. Encounter 27.3 (September 1966): 63-69. 

. "The Battle Between Real People and Images." Review of The Solid Mandala by 
Patrick White. Encounter 28.2 (February 1967): 71-78. 

. "Distrusting the Intellect." Review of books about the Victorian age. NS 19 May 
1967: 689-690. 

. "Connoisseur of Order." Review of The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode. NS 
4 August 1967: 146. 

. "Whittled and Spiky Art." Review of Collected Poems and Stories by Muriel Spark. 
NS 15 December 1967: 848. 

. "Kiss and Make Up." Review of The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch. NS 75 (26 
January 1968): 113-114. 

. "The Victorian Balancing Act." Review of The Victorian Debate by Raymond 
Chapman. NS 26 July 1968: 111-112. 



337 

"The Rage for Order." Review of Continuities by Frank Kermode. NS 1 November 
1968: 584. 

"The Spider's Web." Review of Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch. NS 17 January 
1969: 86. 

"Daughter of Debate." Review of Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser. NS 16 
May 1969: 693-694. 

"Prophet and Doubter." Review of books about Robert Browning. NS 2 January 
1970: 16. 

"A Man of Balance." Review of The Letters of Thomas Mann. NS 18 December 
1970: 839-840. 

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall." Review of Letters Home by Sylvia Plath. NS 23 April 
1976:541-542. 

"Yearning for Jerusalem." Review of The Hill of Evil Counsel by Amos Oz. T L S 6 
October 1978: 1110. 

"Worldly Wise." Review of The Realists by C. P. Snow. NS 96 (3 November 1978): 
586-7. 

"Wallace Stevens: Criticism, Repetition and Creativity." Journal of American 
Studies 12.3 (December 1978): 369-375. 

"The Greedy Reader." Review of The Myth Makers by V. S. Pritchett. NS 97 (18 
May 1979): 724. 

"The Power of Learning." Review of books about the Victorian age. NS 17 August 
1979: 239-240. 

"Cannibals, Scholars, and Artists." Review of The Rear Column. B B C T V . T L S 25 
April 1980: 466. 

"The Isle Full of Noises." Review of Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald. T L S 28 
September 1980: 1057. 

"The Raj and the Great Tradition." Review of Staving On. Granada T V . T L S 9 
January 1981: 33. 

"Working by Intuition." Review of Designs in Prose by Walter Nash. T L S 23 
January 1981: 86. 



338 

Impressions in Their Rendering." Review of The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford. 
T L S 13 February 1981: 171-172. 

'Flourishing Fleshily." Review of Who Was Oswald Fish? by A. N. Wilson. T L S 23 
October 1981: 1231. 

The Architecture of the Emotions." Review of The Oxford Book of Short Stories. 
T L S 11 December 1981: 1446. 

An Assorted Life." Review of The Exile by John Carswell. T L S 2 December 1983: 
1338. 

Wisdom After the Event." Review of E . M . Forster's Commonplace Book, ed. 
Philip Gardner. T L S 7 March 1986: 258. 

The Disreputable Other Half." Review of Memoirs of Many in One by Patrick 
White. T L S 4 April 1986: 357. 

'Suffering and Creating." Review of The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. T L S 13 
June 1986: 637-8. 

Marginal Lives." Review of books by and about Barbara Pym. T L S 8 August 1986: 
862. 

'Insights ad nauseum." Reviews of Reading 'In Memoriam' by Timothy Peltason, 
and 3 other books. T L S 14 November 1986: 1274. 

"The Real Made Sense." Review of Realism in European Literature edited by 
Nicholas Boyle and Martin Swales and Telling the Truth by Barbara Foley. T L S 
16 January 1987: 65. 

"An Explosive Embrace." Review of Baroque 'n' Roll by Brigid Brophy. T L S 13 
March 1987: 269. 

"Hearths in the Wilderness." Review ofWilla Cather by Sharon O'Brien and The 
Voyage Perilous by Susan J. Rosowski. TLS 15 May 1987: 507-8. 

"All the King's Mirrors." Review of Louis X I V by Olivier Bernier. N Y T B R 3 1 
January 1988: 9. 

"Beginning in Craft and Ending in Mystery." Review of several short story 
collections. T L S 13 May 1988: 527. 

"Control of the Life-Sources." Review of works by Peter Redgrove. T L S 12-18 
August 1988: 890. 



339 

"A Word Play." Review of The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (play). T L S 5 May 
1989: 487. 

"Chosen Vessels of a Fraud." Review of The Darkened Room by Alex Owen. TLS 
2-8 June 1989: 605. 

Review of History and Hope: Essays on History and the English Civil War by C. V. 
Wedgwood. N Y T B R 8 October 1989: 25. 

"Savage Londoners." Review of The Pursuit of the English (play) by Doris Lessing. 
T L S 9 February 1990: 146. 

"The Trouble with the Interesting Reader." Review of Romanticism, Writing, and 
Sexual Difference: Essays on 'The Prelude.' T L S 23-29 March 1990: 310. 

"Mr. Identity Crisis." Review of Ford Madox Ford by Alan Judd. Guardian 14 June 
1990, Section 2: 22. 

"After the Myth, the Real." Reviews of books about Vincent Van Gogh. T L S 29 
June-5 July 1990: 683. 

"Amatory Acts." Review of love poetry anthologies. T L S 31 Aug-6 September 
1990: 913. 

"Dickens and His Demons." Review of Dickens by Peter Ackroyd. Washington Post 
Book World 10 February 1991: 1, 2. 

"Love and Death in the Shadow of Vesuvius." Review of The Volcano Lover by 
Susan Sontag. Washington Post Book World 16 August 1992: 1,2. 

"The Passions of the Soul." Review of Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom. 
Washington Post Book World 25 July 1993: 1,14. 

"The Surreal Thing." Review of Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin. Sunday Times 
January 1995. 

"By Love Possessed." Review of O f Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia 
Marquez. N Y T B R 100 (28 May 1995): 8. 

"Identity Crises." Review of Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch. Sunday Times 1 
October 1995, section 7: 13. 

"Ignorance But No Bliss." Review of Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen. Sunday 
Times 19 November 1995, section 7: 18. 

"Nights to Remember." Review of Arabian Nights Vol 2 translated by Husain 
Haddawy. Sunday Times 17 December 1995, section 5: 9. 



340 

. "George and His Dragons." Review of books by George Steiner. Observer 7 January 
1996: Review 14. 

. "Alice Munro: One of the Great Ones." Review of Selected Stories by Alice Munro. 
Globe and Mail 2 November 1996: D18, D14. 

. "Anglo-Saxon Beatitudes." Review of In Memory of England by Peter Vansittart. 
Guardian Weekly 7 June 1998: 29. 

. "Reports from the Edge of Reality." Review of The Knife Thrower by Steven 
Millhauser. Guardian Weekly 5 July 1998: 18. 

. "Redemption by Long Sentences." Review of Proust Among the Stars by Malcolm 
Bowie. Daily Telegraph 21 September 1998: n. pag. Online. Internet. 

. "A Very Ordinary Genius." Review of The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling. 
Guardian Weekly 6 December 1998: 28. 

Introductions by A.S. Byatt 

Austen, Jane. The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of 
Charles the 1st. Intro. A . S. Byatt. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel 
Hill. 1993. 

Bowen, Elizabeth. The House in Paris. Intro. A. S. Byatt. Penguin: 1976. 

Browning, Robert. Dramatic Monologues. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Folio Society, 
1990. 

Cather, Willa. M y Antonia. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1980. 

. A Lost Lady. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1980. 

. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1981. 

. The Song of the Lark. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1982. 

. M y Mortal Enemy. Intro. A . S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1982. 

. O Pioneers! Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1983. 

. The Professor's House. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1980. 

. Lucy Gayheart. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1985. 



341 

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Intro. A . S. Byatt. New York: Modern Library, 1994. 

Fens, Keen. Finding the Place: Selected Essays on English Literature. Ed. W. Bronzwaer 
andH. Verdaasdonk. Intro. A. S. Byatt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 

Ford, FordMadox. The Fifth Queen. Intro A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin, 1999. 

Ferguson, Rachel. The Brontes Went to Woolworths. 1931. Intro. A . S. Byatt. London: 
Virago, 1987. 

Heron, Patrick. Patrick Heron. Ed. David Sylvester. Intro. A . S. Byatt. ["A Riddle 
Around the Edges of Vision."] London: Tate Gallery, 1998. 

Khayyam, Omar. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Trans. Edward FitzGerald. Intro. A. S. 
Byatt. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1996. 

Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Intro. A . S. Byatt. London: Virago, 
1979. 

. The Little Disturbances of Man. Intro. A. S. Byatt. London: Virago, 1980. 

Song of Solomon. Canon Pocket Bible Series. Intro. A . S. Byatt. London: Canongate, 
1998. 

Edited by A.S. Byatt 

Buford, Bill, ed. With A . S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie, guest editors. Granta_43: Best of 
Young British Novelists. Spring 1993. 

Byatt, A . S., ed. The Oxford Book of English Short Stories/Oxford: OUP, 1998. 

, and Alan Hollinghurst, eds. New Writing 4. London: Vintage, 1994. 

, and Peter Porter, eds. New Writing 6. London: Vintage, 1997. 

Eliot, George. The M i l l on the Floss. Ed. A . S. Byatt. Penguin, 1979. 

. Selected Essays. Poems and Other Writings. Ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. 
Penguin, 1989. 



342 

Translations by A.S. Byatt 

D'Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine. "The Great Green Worm." Trans. A.S. Byatt. Wonder Tales. 
Ed. Marina Warner. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. 189-229. 

Interviews with A . S. Byatt 

Baichwal, Jennifer. Interview with A. S. Byatt. On the Arts. C B C Newsworld. June 
1996. 

Byatt, A. S., and Iris Murdoch. "A. S. Byatt with Iris Murdoch." Writers Talk: Ideas of 
Our Time. Northbrook, IL: Roland Collection of Films on Art, 1984. Videotape. 
49 minutes. 

, and Anthony Burgess. "Anthony Burgess with A. S. Byatt." Writers Talk: Ideas of 
Our Time. Northbrook, IL: Roland Collection of Films on Art, 1989. Videotape. 
56 minutes. 

, and Toni Morrison. "Toni Morrison with A. S. Byatt." Writers Talk: Ideas of Our 
Time. Northbrook, IL: Roland Collection of Films on Art, 1989. Videotape. 42 
minutes. 

Canton, Jeffrey. Interview with A. S. Byatt. What! Contemporary Writing and Ideas 
28/29 (December 1991): 5-8. 

Dusinberre, Juliet A. Interview with A. S. Byatt. Women Writers Talking. Ed. Janet 
Todd. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983. 181-195. 

Frumkes, Lewis Burke. "A Conversation With A. S. Byatt." The Writer May 1997: 15-
16,46. 

Hass, Robert. Interview with A. S. Byatt. City Arts of San Francisco. Petaluma, C A : 
Pacific Vista Productions. 8 November 1993. Audiotape. 59 minutes. 

Ignatieff, Michael. Interview with A. S. Byatt and Steve Jones. Ignatieff C B C 
Newsworld. 14 July 1996. 

Kenyon, Olga. Interview with A. S. Byatt. The Writer's Imagination. Bradford: U of 
Bradford, 1992. 9-21. 

"The Man in the Back Row Has a Question V . " Paris Review 39.146 (Spring 1998): 156-
179. 

Miller, Laura. "Limeade Seas and Bloody Cobblestones: The Salon Interview - A . S. 
Byatt." Salon: 27 June 1996: n.pag. Online. Internet. 



343 

Rogers, Shelagh. Interview with A . S. Byatt. Morningside. C B C Radio. 3 June 1996. 

Tredell, Nicolas. "A. S. Byatt." Conversations with Critics. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. 
58-74. 

Wachtel, Eleanor. Interview with A. S. Byatt. Writers & Company. Toronto: Knopf, 
1993. 77-89. 

Wachtel, Eleanor. Interview with A. S. Byatt. Writers & Company. C B C Radio. 15 
September 1996. 

Wallin, Pamela. Interview with A. S. Byatt. Pamela Wallin Live. C B C Newsworld. 27 
May 1996. 

SECONDARY WORKS 

Studies of A. S. Byatt (published separately) 

Hope, Christopher, and A. S. Byatt. Contemporary Writers: A. S. Byatt. Pamphlet. 
London: Book Trust/British Council, 1990. 

Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. A. S. Byatt. Twayne's English Authors series. New York: 
Twayne-Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996. 

Todd, Richard. A. S. Byatt. Writers and Their Work series. Plymouth: Northcote 
House/British Council, 1997. 

Discussions of A. S. Byatt (found within larger general studies) 

Alexander, Flora. Contemporary Women Novelists. Modern Fiction Series. London: 
Edward Arnold, 1989. 

Belsey, Catherine. Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 

Cosslett, Tess. Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood. New 
York: St. Martins, 1994. 

Gerrard, Nicci. Into the Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women's Writing. 
London: Pandora, 1989. 



344 

Gilbert, Sandra M . , and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer 
in the Twentieth Century. Volume 3, Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale 
UP, 1994. 

Kenyon, Olga. "A. S. Byatt: Fusing Tradition with Twentieth-Century Experimentation." 
Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the 70s and 80s. 
Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988. 51-84. 

Massie, Allan. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970-1989. 
London: Longman/ British Council, 1990. 

Riley, Charles A , II. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and 
Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover: U P of New England, 
1995. 

Rossen, Janice. The University in Modern Fiction: When Power is Academic. New York: 
St. Martin's, 1993. 

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to 
Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. 

Taylor, D. J. A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. 

. After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945. London: Chatto & 
Windus, 1993. 

Selected Reference Works about A. S. Byatt 

Campbell, Jane. "Byatt, A. S." Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers. 3rd 
ed. Ed. Aruna Vasudevan. London: St. James, 1994. 106-107. 

Griffin, Gabriele. "Byatt, A. S." British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide. Ed. 
Janet Todd. New York: Continuum, 1989. 116-117. 

Seymour-Smith, Martin. "British Literature." New Guide to Modern World Literature. 
Peter Bedrick Books, 1985. 312-315. 

Lewis, Peter. "Byatt, A. S." Contemporary Novelists. 5th ed. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 
Chicago: St. James, 1991. 168-170. 

Musil, Caryn McTighe. "A. S. Byatt." Dictionary of Literary Biography 14: British 
Novelists Since 1960. Part I A - G . Ed. Jay L . Halio. 194-205. 



345 

Theses and Dissertations about A . S. Byatt 

Connor, Kimberly Jean. Caught in the Hall of Mirrors: The Progressive Narrative 
Techniques of A. S. Byatt. M A Thesis. U of Alaska Anchorage. 1994. 

Enstrom, Ethel L . A. S. Byatt: Tradition and the Female Talent. M A Thesis. Lakehead U . 
1994. 

Ho, Elizabeth. "Speaking Likenesses": From Imitation to Ventriloquism: John Fowles's 
"The French Lieutenant's Woman and A. S. Byatt's "Posssession" M A Thesis. U 
of Vermont. 1997. 

Jamet, Anne-Sophie. Feminism. Literary Genres and Structure in "Possession: A 
Romance" by A . S. Byatt. Dissertation. Universite de Toulouse le Mirail. 1992. 

Kirkness, Catherine Jane. Reading Widdershins: A Study of Romance and A. S. Byatt's 
"Possession: A Romance." M A Thesis. U B C . 1994. 

Magrath, Jane L . The Resurrection of the Author: "Possession." "Swann," and "Changing 
Heaven" (A. S. Byatt. Carol Shields. Jane Urquhart). M A Thesis. U of Guelph. 
1992. 

May, Kari Kristen. Who Possesses It?: The Quest for Meaning in A. S. Byatt's 
"Possession". M A Thesis. Appalachian State U . 1997. 

Obura, Soraya J. A . Texture and Desire: Models of Practice in Umberto Eco's "The 
Name of the Rose" and in A. S. Byatt's "Possession". A B Thesis. Harvard. 1993. 

Pearce, Margaret Tina. A. S. Byatt: Writing Feminist Issues. M A Thesis. M c G i l l U . 
1994. 

Russell, Lorena Love. Lesbian Representation in Recent Historical Fiction (Christa Wolf. 
A. S. Byatt, Jeannette Winterson). M L A Thesis. U of North Carolina, Ashville. 
1993. 

Walker, Meg. In the Corridors of the Gothic Mind: Explorations of Freedom in 
Dickinson, Byatt, and Byatt's LaMotte. M A Thesis. Dalhousie U . 1994. 

Welsh, Joseph L . Human Understanding: The Novels of A. S. Byatt. M A Thesis. James 
Madison U . 1996. 

Wylie, Jessica. Heliotropes: Gender and Archetype in the Novels of A. S. Byatt. M A 
Thesis. WinthropU, 1995. 



346 

Selected Reviews of A. S. Byatt's Work 

Barber, Dulan. "Spinning Faster." Review of Still Life. Times Educational Supplement 
19 July 1985:21. 

Diamond, Ann. "Queen of Victorian passions." Review of Angels and Insects. Montreal 
Gazette 23 January 1993: K3. 

Dirda, Michael. "The Incandescent Spell of Possession." Washington Post Book World 
17 October 1990: C l . 

Gale, Patrick. "Sensuous Frivolity." Review of Elementals. Daily Telegraph 5 December 
1998: n. pag. Online. Internet. 

Grumbach, Doris. "Affinities and Affections." Review of Passions of the Mind-
Washington Post 29 March 1992: XI1. 

Hawthorne, Mary. "Winged Victoriana." Review of Angels and Insects. New Yorker 
69.18 (21 June 1993): 98-100. 

Hill, Tobias. "Fear and Loathing in Old Blighty." Review of The Oxford Book of English 
Short Stories. The Times 2 April 1998: 41. 

Hulbert, Ann. "The Great Ventriloquist." Review of Possession. New Republic 204 (7 & 
14 January 1991): 47-49. 

Jenkyns, Richard. "Disinterring Buried Lives." Review of Possession. T L S 2 March 
1990:213-214. 

Johnson, Diane. "The Best of Times." Review of Possession. New York Review of 
Books 28 March 1991: 35-36. 

Jones, Lewis. "What's Wrong with Somerville?" Review of Still Life. Spectator 255 (20 
July 1985): 31. 

Karlin, Danny. "Prolonging Her Absence." Review of Possession. London Review of 
Books. 8 March 1990: 17-18. 

Lesser, Wendy. "Seance and Sensibility." Review of Angels and Insects. New York 
Times Book Review 27 June 1993: 14. 

Norfolk, Lawrence. "Life in the Ant Colony." Review of Angels and Insects. Guardian 
Weekly 20 June 1993: 18. 

Roberts, Michele. "Matisse: A l l the Nudes That's Fit to Print." Review of The Matisse 
Stories. Independent 22 January 1994: 30. 



347 

Oates, Joyce Carol. Review of Possession. Vogue 180 (November 1990): 274,276. 

Review of Shadow of a Sun. T L S 9 January 1964: 21. 

Shilling, Jane. Review of Possession. Punch. 23 March 1990: 41. 

Shulman, Polly. "Past Masters: Everything Old is New Again." Review of Angels and 
Insects. Village Voice Literary Supplement June 1993: 14-16. 

Spufford, Francis. "The Mantle of Jehovah." Review of Sugar. London Review of Books 
25 June 1987: 22-23. 

Tate, J.O. "Dress for Success." Review of Angels and Insects. National Review 45 (23 
August 1993): 60-61. 

Thurman, Judith. "A Reader's Companion." Review of Possession. New Yorker 66 (19 
November 1990): 151-155. 

Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. "A. S. Byatt: Rich Tables, Hectic Parlours." Review of Angels 
and Insects. Scripsi 8.3: 191-194. 

Selected Journalism about A. S. Byatt 

Baker, John F. "A. S. Byatt: Passions of the Mind." Publishers Weekly 20 May 1996: 
235-6. 

Brace, Marianne. "That Thinking Feeling." Guardian 9 May 1996, Section 2: 6-7. 

Conroy, Sarah Booth. "The Magic Brew of A. S. Byatt." Washington Post 29 November 
1991: D l , 9. 

Grove, Valerie. "Academic Reflections in a Victorian Climate." Sunday Times 21 
October 1990: 3.3. 

Gussow, Mel. "A New Byatt Novel With a Novel Within." N Y T 9 July 1996: C l 1, C12. 

Kellaway, Kate. "Self-portrait of a Victorian Polymath." Observer 16 September 1990: 
45. 

Kemp, Peter. "Academic Questions, Passionate Solutions." Sunday Times 21 October 
1990: 8.6. 

MacCarthy, Fiona. "The Drabble Sisters." Guardian 13 April 1967: 8. 



348 

Rosenfeld, Richard. " 'My mother's rage was really displaced anger' (A Childhood: A. S. 
Byatt)." Times Saturday Review 27 April 1991: 54. 

Ross, Val. "Booker Fuss Keeps Byatt Busy." Globe and Mail 7 November 1991: C5. 

. "Art, Myth and A. S. Byatt." Globe and Mail 28 May, 1996: A10, A l l . 

Stout, Mira. "What Possessed A. S. Byatt?" N Y T Magazine 26 May 1991: 12-15, 24-25. 

Taylor, D.J. "The Rise and Rise of Antonia Byatt." Sunday Times 15 January 1995: 7.8-
7.9. 

Trucco, Terry. "Brit Wit's Lit Hit: Antonia's Anonymous No More." Wall Street Journal 
6 December 1990: A16. 

Vincent, Sally. "A. S. Byatt." Profile. Sunday Times 5 December 1993: 28-32. 

Williams, Pat. "The Sisters Drabble." Sunday Times Magazine 6 August 1967: 12-15. 

Scholarly Articles about A. S. Byatt 

Ashworth, Ann. "Fairy Tales in A.S. Byatt's Possession." Journal of Evolutionary 
Psychology 15 (March 1994): 1-2, 93-94. 

Bell, Hazel K . "Indexing Fiction: A Story of Complexity." [On indexing all of Byatt's 
novels.] The Indexer 17.4 (October 1991): 251-56. 

Bronfen, Elisabeth. "Romancing Difference, Courting Coherence: A. S. Byatt's 
Possession as Postmodern Moral Fiction." Why Literature Matters: Theories and 
Functions of Literature. Ed. Rudiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: 
Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996. 117-134. 

Buxton, Jackie. " 'What's Love Got to Do With It?' Postmodernism and Possession." 
English Studies in Canada 22.2 (June 1996): 199-219. 

Campbell, Jane. "The Hunger of the Imagination in A.S. Byatt's The Game." Critique: 
Studies in Contemporary Fiction 29.3 (Spring 1988): 147-162. 

. " 'The Somehow May be Thishow': Fact, Fiction, and Intertextuality in Antonia 
Byatt's 'Precipice-Encurled'." Studies in Short Fiction 28.2 (Spring 1991): 115-
123. 

. "Confecting Sugar: Narrative Theory and Practice in A.S. Byatt's Short Stories." 
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.2 (Winter 1997): 105-122. 



349 

Chevalier, Jean-Louis. "Conclusion in Possession by Antonia Byatt." Fins de romans: 
Aspects de la conclusion dans la litterature anglaise. Ed. Le-Bouille, Lucien. 
Caen: P U de Caen, 1993. 109-131. 

Civello, Catherine. "George Eliot: From Middlemarch to Manhattan." George Eliot 
Fellowship Review 20 (1989): 52-56. 

Clutterbuck, Charlotte. "A Shared Depository of Wisdom: Connection and Redemption 
in Tiger in the Tiger Pit and Possession." Southerly: A Review of Australian 
Literature 53.2 (June 1993): 121-129. 

Cosslett, Tess. "Childbirth from the Woman's Point of View in British Women's 
Fiction." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 8 (Fall 1989): 263-286. 

Creighton, Joanne. "Sisterly Symbiosis: Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall and A.S. 
Byatt's The Game." Mosaic 20.1 (Winter 1987): 15-29. 

Dusinberre, Juliet. "Forms of Reality in A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden." Critique: 
Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24.1 (Fall 1982): 55-62. 

Fountain, J. Stephen. "Ashes to Ashes: Kristeva's Jouissance, Altizer's Apocalypse, 
Byatt's Possession, and 'The Dream of the Rood'." Literature and Theology: A n 
Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory and Criticism 8.2 (June 1994): 193-208. 

Giobbi, Giuliana. "Sisters Beware of Sisters: Sisterhood as a Literary Motif in Jane 
Austen, A.S. Byatt, and I. Bossi Fedrigotti." Journal of European Studies 22.3 
(September 1992): 241-258. 

. "Know the Past: Know Thyself. Literary Pursuits and Quest for Identity in A.S. 
Byatt's Possession and F. Duranti's Effetti Personali." Journal of European 
Studies 24.1 (March 1994): 41-54. 

Gitzen, Julian. "A.S. Byatt's Self-Mirroring Art." Critique 36.2 (Winter 1995): 83-95. 

Heilman, Robert B. "A. S. Byatt's Possession Observed." Sewanee Review 103.4 (Fall 
1995): 605-12. 

Holmes, Frederick M . "The Historical Imagination and the Victorian Past: A. S. Byatt's 
Possession." English Studies in Canada 20.3 (September 1994): 319-334. 

Hotho-Jackson, Sabine. "Literary History in Literature: A n Aspect of the Contemporary 
Novel." Moderna-Sprak 86.2 (1992): 113-119. 

Hulbert, Ann. "The Great Ventriloquist: A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance." 
Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Ed. Robert E . 
Hosmer Jr. New York: St. Martins, 1993. 55-65. 



350 

Janik, Del Ivan. "No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel." 
Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (1995): 160-90. 

Levenson, Michael. "The Religion of Fiction." New Republic 209.5 (2 August 1993): 41-
44. Rpt. in Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. By A. S. 
Byatt. London: Vintage, 1994. 337-344. 

Lund, Mark F. "Lindsay Clarke and A.S. Byatt: The Novel on the Threshold of 
Romance." Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal 2 (1993): 151-159. 

Sanchez, Victoria. "A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Fairytale Romance." Southern Folklore 
52.1:33-52. 

Schumann, Kuno. "English Culture and the Contemporary Novel." Anglistentag 1981: 
Vortrage. Ed. JorgHasler. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983. 111-127. 

Shiller, Dana. "The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel." Studies in the Novel 
29.4 (Winter 1997): 538-560. 

Todd, Richard. "The Retrieval of Unheard Voices in British Postmodernist Fiction: A . S. 
Byatt and Marina Warner." Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post) 
Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist. Postmodern Studies 8. Ed. Theo D'haen and 
Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 99-114. 

Webb, Caroline. "History Through Metaphor: Woolf s Orlando and Byatt's Possession: 
A Romance." Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives (Selected Papers from the 
Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Lincoln University, Jefferson City, 
M O , June 1993). Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow. Intro. Jane Lilienfeld. 
New York: Pace UP, 1994. 182-188. 

Westlake, Michael. "The Hard Idea of Truth." PN-Review 15.4 (66) 1989: 33-37. 

Yelin, Louise. "Cultural Cartography: A . S. Byatt's Possession and the Politics of 
Victorian Studies." Victorian Newsletter 81 (Spring 1992): 38-41. 

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