REALISTIC RENDERING OF SELF-CONSCIOUS THOUGHT IN A. S. BYATT’S POSSESSION: THE PRESENTATION OF VICTORIAN VERSUS CONTEMPORARY IDEAS OF MAN, FAITH AND LOVE

The realistic rendering of Self-Conscious Thought in A. S. Byatt’s Possession is an evidence of Byatt’s success in making abstract ideas concrete. Possession, as an encyclopedia of theories and thoughts, Victorian or modern, is a novel in which ideas are less obtrusive and the author’s presence is intrusive. The twentieth-century part of the novel embodies Byatt’s confrontation with modern literary thoughts which are different in nature than the ideas incarnated in Victorians i.e. George Eliot’s fiction. Although such ideas are difficult to be turned into immediate daily concerns yet in Possession they fit into immediate personal dilemmas and gain a sense of urgency. A. S. Byatt, successfully, represents the universal ideas of man, faith and love, with a skeptic twentieth-century background in this novel. In addition, while George Eliot begins to generalize these ideas with an authorial voice, Byatt knows that these ideas have become equivocal, thus overthrowing authority of the author.