“Real/Reality of Love” in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance

• Main Authors: Siang-Ru Lu, 盧相如
• Other Authors: Hui-Ling Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/91725658838343060982

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 創作與英語文學研究所 === 95 === Abstract This thesis utilizes Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to distinguish “love in reality”—a conventional understanding of love—from what Lacan refers to as “love in the Real”—or love as a construct of the mind—in A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession. In the novel there are two love stories which move forward in parallel fashion; one story follows a Victorian couple in a clandestine love affair, and the other, a postmodern pair trying to disclose the secret of their ancestors. Both in the Victorian era where love and sex were two separate, clearly defined phenomena, and in postmodern society, where people live in an ambiguous relation between love and sex, lovers are confined by ideas of love. We cannot escape the paradigm of love created by our ancestors. We are in love but the kind of love we experience is not what we experience “in reality.” Chapter One of this thesis begins by exploring love as narcissism. According to Lacan’s courtly love theory, the exalted Lady in courtly love legitimates the knight’s obsession with his own idealized ego which he projects onto the woman. This love is a “narcissistic illusion” between the loving subject and the loved object. Chapter Two uses psychoanalysis to analyze feminine subjectivity and sexuality in images such as ice, caskets, towers, mirrors, etc. in myths, fairy tales, and legends within the novel. The Mother-goddess’s creative and destructive power arouses men’s unconscious fear of being devoured by women, who are turned into abject femme fatale figures, under the man’s gaze. Chapter Three examines relations among love, desire, phallic signifiers, and jouissance. Dominated by the phallic function, men and women’s desire is caused by the desire of the Other. The subject looks for his or her other half when falling in love, but the fact is that there is no object that exists in “the Real.” In “the Real” there is only void, and the object is already lost. It is this void—or “The Thing”—that drives us to pursue “object a” to fill up our lack. The subject obtains “jouissance” from permanently seeking the beloved one. The Lacanian concepts “woman does not exist” and “there is no sexual relationship” imply that all love is merely masculine fantasies in which the love object is veiled by the mind of the one who loves. In sado-masochistic love, the subject obtains his or her jouissance from “the Real.” Chapter Four focuses on the relations between romance and ideology. “Love in reality” is the oneness in which two people combine as a whole, then live happily ever after. This social fantasy is built on the series of signifiers of freedom, goodness, and happiness, etc. which create a signifying chain in the ideology of love. When two individuals fall in love, each believes that it is his or her free choice to love the other. Are we able to escape from the control of the ideal vision of the grand narrative of love in which the prince and the princess “in reality” live happily ever after?