Possession

by A.S. Byatt

Christabel LaMotte wrote this long and very convoluted poem about Melusina’s story in the 1860s and it was published at the beginning of the 1870s. It’s an odd affair—tragedy and romance and symbolism rampant all over it, a kind of dream-world full of strange beasts and hidden meanings and a really weird sexuality or sensuality. The feminists are crazy about it. They say it expresses women’s impotent desire. It wasn’t much read until they rediscovered it—Virginia Woolf knew it, she adduced it as an image of the essential androgyny of the creative mind—but the new feminists see Melusina in her bath as a symbol of self-sufficient female sexuality needing no poor males. I like it, it’s disturbing. It keeps changing focus. From very precise description of the scaly tail to cosmic battles.” “That’s very useful. I’ll look it up.”