Melusina and A. S. Byatt's Alchemical Imagination in Possession: A Romance
2021; Routledge; Volume: 102; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0013838x.2020.1866309
ISSN1744-4217
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
ResumoThe Fairy Melusine is a fictional literary text incorporated in A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession: A Romance, which is a retelling by the fictional poet LaMotte of Jean d'Arras's tale of the fairy, Melusina. This paper examines four of LaMotte's short poems, both texts and subtexts of the Melusina story, and explores how Paracelsus's definition of the snake-woman determines the alchemical imagery in LaMotte's literary texts. LaMotte artfully weaves narratives around both the snake-woman and alchemy out of recurrent images in Byatt's canon and uses them ingeniously to indicate the alchemical nature of Melusina as well as the nature and conditions of LaMotte's own long period of isolation and motherhood. Melusina becomes an alchemical symbol of the philosopher's stone, a symbol of LaMotte's long seclusion and an enactment of a recurrent motif in Byatt's works that isolation is a sine qua non of literary creation.
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