Regjistruar: 23/06/2004
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A young scholar, Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), accidentally discovers a letter tucked away in a book at the library. It is from a renowned nineteenth century poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) to his extramarital lover, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). Michell, suspecting he is on to an important discovery, blithely steals the letter and then contacts a professor whose specialty is LaMotte, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow). Together they begin an investigation into the relationship between these two nineteenth century poets, played out a bit like a mystery story, while flashbacks recreate the events that they are uncovering.
Ash and LaMotte's story is an intriguing one because it upsets the previously held images of these characters. Ash, poet laureate to Queen Victoria, was seen as a paragon of monogamous virtue; he celebrated his relationship with his wife in his poems. LaMotte, a hero to feminists, was an independent type who lived in a long-term lesbian relationship. Documentation of an affair between Ash and LaMotte would be an academic career-making breakthrough, shaking up the world of scholarly English literature and necessitating a revaluation and revision of earlier thinking about the work of both poets.
In the midst of all the detective work, Michell and Bailey, become emotionally involved with each other; their romance plays in parallel time (but not in nature) to that of the nineteenth century poets. Labute smoothly and creatively handles the transitions back and forth between periods. Tacked on, quite gratuitously in the film version at least, is a subplot of competing scholars following at Michell and Bailey's heels. The characters involved in the latter are never developed; they are stick figures whose behaviors (including grave robbing) stretch the credulity of the narrative.
It is the two love stories which are the substance of the film. The poets' relationship is cast in idealistic, hyper-romantic terms--poetry flowing, glances from a distance, a social and verbal foreplay of charm and intensity. That both parties are betraying their truly beloved partners adds to the exquisite construct of their romance. Love comes always accompanied by sacrifice and pain, but the fleeting shared moments are never regretted, whatever the fallout.
In direct contrast, as portrayed here the romance between the twentieth century academics seems rather pathetically contemporary, both of them holding back defensively in fear of commitment and in view of the hurts and disappointments they have experienced in past love affairs.

(and i was curious to know if the two poets had lived in victorian age or were simply fictious)

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Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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Regjistruar: 23/06/2004
Vendbanimi: on the palm of God's hand
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that the movie was based on a book .
Possession ----A.S. Byatt(Antonia Susan Byatt) a brittish writer. (appearantly by critics a very talented writer)
the book was winner 1900 of Booker Prize.

A Love Affair with Literature!

This book professes to be "a novel" but is poetry and short story and critical essay and epistolary novel and diary... It is the fullest achievement of creative endeavor . A. S. Byatt not only gets the telling of a story right, she manufactures an entire reality in the academia of not one but TWO poets who never existed!
(comments)

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Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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To find a person who has not heard a fairy tale is very rare. Most children grow up with Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, and Sleepina Beauty. As a child, I loved to read, reread, and act out these marvelous tales. While I was reading A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, the story of "The Glass Coffin" especially captured my attention. It is a fairy tale very similar to Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty and is written by Byatt's character from the past, Christabel Lamott. Throughout the romance, many details come to light regarding Lamott's life. In the first half of the book, the present-day character of Fergus Wolff expresses his interest in Christabel Lamott's work, "The Fairy Melusine". Wolff attemps to seek advice from a woman who has dedicated her life to studying Lamott's works, and through this, we know that Wolff approaches "The Fairy Melusine" psychoanalytically with an emphasis on the views of Jacques Lacan. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as the basis for analysis, Christabel Lamott's unconscious desires are also revealed in "The Glass Coffin".

Enhancing upon and narrowing the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan created his own theory of psychoanalysis. The first stage in the development of consciousness is called the mirror stage in which a child's first feelings of alienation and a sense of self develop. Another aspect critical to Lacanian psychoanalysis is language. According to Lacan, unconscious desires are represented through language. Since the unconscious has a need to tell stories, this means that all stories, written or verbal, express the unconscious' motives and desires within the text of the story. Therefore, it is up to the reader to decipher the unconscious motives lying within the tale.

In "The Glass Coffin," Christabel Lamott writes about a certain master craftsman, a tailor, who is traveling in search of work. In the woods, he comes across a cabin and knocks to see if his services are at all desired. An old gray man with a growling

gray dog opens the door. He denies the tailor work for he is scared of thieves. Soon the dog, Otto, settles down and the old man is then reassured that the tailor is an honest man. So in order to get a clean bed for a night, the tailor has to help cook, clean and prepare whatever is needed in the old man's home. While waiting for the supper he prepared for himself and the old man to finish cooking, the tailor feeds all the animals in the house: a cockerel and his wife, a goat, a cat, a dun cow, and of course the dog. Because of his kindness to everyone in the house, the old man lets the tailor choose from three gifts: a leather coin purse clanging with coins, a large black cooking pot, and last of all, a glass key. Loving the fine workmanship of the key, the tailor chooses it and with it an adventure.

With the West Wind and feathers from the cockerel and hen, the tailor begins his adventure leading him underground and into a room. Inside this room he finds glass flasks and bottles, a glass dome with a castle and woods inside, and a glass coffin. Within the glass coffin lies a young woman enveloped by her long, golden hair. Placing the glass key inside a small keyhole in the coffin, the tailor soon releases the beautiful young woman from her entrapment within. He kisses her. She awakes and tells him of how she was placed under the spell. It is a story of how a black magician came and tried to ruin her life and that of her twin brother. They both had vowed to never marry and to remain companions forever. When she refused to take the black magician's hand in marriage, he turned her brother into a gray dog, put her in the glass coffin, their castle and lands into the dome, and all the other people of the kingdom into the glass flasks and bottles. Just as the woman finishes her story, the magician comes to see if she has changed her mind, and the tailor kills him with a glass sliver from the splintered coffin. The world within the glass flasks, bottles and dome come alive. The brother and sister are reunited. And they along with the tailor, live happily ever after.

The significance of the title, "The Glass Coffin", and its actual role in the story has to do with Christabel Lamott herself. Just as the young woman is enclosed within the glass coffin, so is Lamott encased. The glass coffin, as a whole, represents her relationship with her female companion, Blanche Glover. Not only does Lamott's relationship with Glover encompass her but also the feeling that she is being watched. This is one of the dual functions of glass in the tale. Another is symbolic of the qualities of Lamott's relationship and "the egg" in which Lamott and Glover existed. The egg, which is their relationship, was very strong and independent -- like the hard shell covering of an actual egg. Still, this egg was very fragile because a comradeship like theirs was very rare at the time.

The glass key in tale is also very strong and lasts despite all the hardships it endures underground, before releasing the captive young woman from the glass coffin. This key is the literary counterpart of the relationship between Lamott and her new poet friend, Randolph Henry Ash. Similar to the glass key's power to disintegrate the glass coffin, so too does Randolph Henry Ash have the ability to break up the companionship so carefully guarded between Christabel Lamott-and Blanche Glover by becoming more and more important to her. In the relationship between the two women, it is very important to prove that they do not need a man in their lives.

But, Lamott does need a man. She needs Randolph Henry Ash to rescue her just like the young woman needed the tailor to release her from her entrapment. In the tale, the young woman and the tailor discuss the issue of kisses as promises. The correspondence between Ash and Lamott is their promise to become something more than just friends.

A happy ending where the young woman, her twin brother and the tailor all live happily ever after is the final desire of Christabel Lamott. Unconsciously, she would like to have Randolph Henry Ash and Blanche Glover be able to live with her as a threesome -- one big happy family. In a way, Blanche Glover is like the twin brother to the young woman in the tale. Like the brother and sister duo, Christabel Lamott and Blanche Glover vowed never to marry and that they would remain companions forever. The women also had personality traits that were very similar and they were able to survive for the time that they did without outside interference. They were dedicated, modern women who knew what they wanted from life until they were thrown a curve-ball in the way of Ash.

In the end, of course, Christabel Lamott's unconscious desires were never fulfilled because Blanche Glover committed suicide and it was just impossible for Randolph Henry Ash to dedicate himself to her and the illegitimate child that she bore. Lamott had to deal with these issues the rest of her life. It was a time when she felt that she had to figure out where her priorities were. When examining it in a very technical way in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror stage is exemplified when Lamott realizes that she and Glover are two very similar but different people, and that she does have an interest in others. It is difficult for her to come to terms with this fact and that is why she wants to then include Ash into their "egg." Through this analysis, it is obvious that Christabel Lamott's unconscious was "speaking out" when she wrote the tale of "The Glass Coffin".

__________________
Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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the Glass Coffin turned out to be an original story of Grimm Brothers (the tailor and the captured girl) but the analogy here is unbeliavable.
It is a stroy within a story within a story ,created with layers ,like a sculpture where everything falls into its place,every layer covers smoothly the other underneath .

__________________
Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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Bashkangjitje: possession 1.jpg
Ky file është shkarkuar 23 herë.

melding two eras very naturally

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Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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other books by this author that captured my curiosity ___

1-Babel Tower
2-The Djinn In The Nightingale's Eye
3-The Matisse Stories
4-Angels & Insects
5-Still Life
6-The Virgin In The Garden
7-Passions Of The Mind
8-Degrees of Freedom
(the names sound very poetic)

the 1st , 5th, and 6th have the same heroine ,Frederica.

__________________
Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell embark upon a journey of discovery in A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. They learn of a connection between two Victorian poets, Randolph Ash and Christabel La Motte. They discover unpublished and unrecorded letters between the two poets that suggest a romantic affair. However, they must work quickly and secretively in order to introduce their findings to the literary world. Information concerning the letters leaks to other literary critics and buyers, and Bailey and Mitchell slip away on extended vacations in order to produce a coherent and valid argument that Ash and La Motte were romantically allied. Their attempt to unearth the romantic couple's past leads them to abandon their lives at home and at their respective universities. Roland withdraws from his live-in girlfriend, Val, leaving her without any information as to his whereabouts. Despite Roland and Maud's collective effort interpreting the letters between La Motte and Ash, they often work in the same room, though separately and without speaking. Solitude plays a substantial role not only between Roland and Maud, but also between Ash and La Motte. Ash threatens Christabel's liberal lifestyle which includes living in her own home and doing as she pleases. Their correspondence reflects her apprehensions regarding their relationship, describing how it might infringe upon her sense of solitude and freedom. The style in which the novel is written, and the connections between various documents and characters suggest that isolation and solitude which is often desired by Christabel and Roland is difficult to obtain and maintain.

"The most important thing to make clear to you is this. I make no threat to your solitude. How should I? How may I? Is not your blessed desire to be alone the only thing which makes possible what would else in very truth harm someone?" [p.214; Ash to Christabel]

Ash desires a relationship with Christabel. She desires solitude and space, while he yearns for her presence. Thus, he must combine solitude and togetherness in some way in order for them to be with one another. He says he does not threaten her solitude, is this true?

What other female characters have we seen who desire freedom, while the male desires attachment and a relationship? Aurora Leigh desires freedom to complete her work, poetry, yet ultimately falls in love with a man. What are the commonalities between Aurora and Christabel? Is Jane Eyre similar to Christabel, or an antithesis of her personality?

While Ash tried to become closer to Christabel, he distanced himself from his wife Ellen. Roland and Maud examine his letters before they are sure of the affair between poets.

"No. They read exactly like the letters of a solitary husband on holiday, talking to his wife of an empty evening...Think about it -- if you were a man in the excited state of the writer of the Christabel letters-could you sit down every evening and write to your wife -- in front of Christabel, it would have to have been? Could you produce these travelogues?" [p.235]

What is it exactly about Ash's letters to his wife that suggests that he is travelling alone? Is writing without emotion and indicator of solitude?

In a letter from Ash to Christabel, he suggests a concept of freedom which does not mean complete solitude.

"The true exercise of freedom is -- cannily and wisely and with grace -- to move inside what space confines --and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. But we are human -- and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means." [p.218]

What is Ash attempting to say to Christabel? Is this his ultimate combination of solitude and togetherness which would make their relationship work? When Ash states "But we are human -- and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means", how does this relate to the work between Maud and Roland?

Maud and Roland must escape and leave others behind in order to complete their investigation.They claim that they must "disappear," Maud leaving Leonora and Roland leaving Val without explanation. Is their leaving simply because they must keep their work a secret, or because solitude and isolation is a necessary requirement for intellectual progression? Is their activity, meaning their disappearances and secretive nature, a mirror of Ash and La Motte's behavior? Are they working within a confined space mentioned in the above statement, or are they creating their own space?

Does the writing style of Possession indicate that human curiosity makes solitude impossible? The documents are interconnected, Byatt includes Ash and La Motte's letters, Ash's letters to his wife, La Motte's poetry and narrative to produce a puzzle-piece type of story. Everything appears interconnected, nothing stands alone.

Why is Val jealous of Roland's work? How is this different than the behavior of Ellen Ash to her own husband?

__________________
Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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Passions Of The Mind
Degrees of Freedom
she explains her views about solitude and freedom widely.

__________________
Fear less,hope more/eat less,chew more/whine less,breathe more/talk less,say more/love more and all good things will be yours:p(swedish proverb)

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