Possession is set largely in 1986, a moment when literary studies in Britain and North America were deeply shaped by French-inflected critical theory. Moving away from the mid-century revival of formalist techniques in the New Criticism movement of literary studies, critics pushed for the application of new theories to influence interpretation. This led to several new movements in literary studies, including structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic criticism, which collectively argued for the interpretation of texts against contexts that exist outside of the written work itself. Structuralism, for instance, suggested that literary texts could be understood through the lens of a larger theoretical structure based on language. This theory was championed by theorists like Roland Barthes, who investigated the influence of linguistic structure on narrative meaning in essays like “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” stressing that each word was the building block on which larger interpretations could be drawn, ultimately leading to the construction of narrative. Structuralism soon found a response in the post-structuralist and deconstruction movement, which was introduced by Jacques Derrida through his 1966 lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” and his key work, Of Grammatology. Derrida suggested that Western criticism tended to view texts on the basis of binary oppositions, which he argued was reductive to interpretation. Through deconstruction, Derrida called for the erasure of such oppositional boundaries, urging readers to find the inherent contradictory meanings contained in any text to show that definitive meaning or interpretation did not exist or was tenuous at best. Barthes himself would contribute to this movement in criticism with his seminal 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” encouraging readers to look outside of an author’s life and intent to interpret a text, giving preference to each individual reading of a text, instead of an ultimate, static interpretation. Jacques Lacan would demonstrate these theoretical principles in psychoanalytic criticism, applying the ideas of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the reading of literary texts. Though Lacan did not consider himself a literary critic, he frequently used literature to explain psychoanalytic concepts. This led to offshoot approaches, like reader response criticism, which prioritizes the text’s relationship to its reader to derive meaning from a text. This was also the period when feminist literary criticism, exemplified by the emerging field of Women’s Studies, was actively reclaiming forgotten or marginalized women writers. In 1979, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar analyzed the works of Victorian women writers like Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti through the lens of feminist theory. Deborah E. McDowell’s 1980 essay “New Directions in Black Feminist Criticism” helped to drive the overlap between Women’s Studies and post-structuralism by urging readers to favor theoretical frameworks in interpretation over close thematic analysis.

Byatt’s novel satirizes the jargon-heavy, ideologically driven atmosphere of this academic culture through characters like the confident Fergus Wolff, who lectures on phallogocentrism, and Leonora Stern, whose book-length study of Christabel LaMotte interprets every landscape feature as a symbol of female sexuality. The novel’s young scholar Roland Michell registers unease with this intellectual climate, worrying that critical metaphors have come to devour the actual experience of literature: “Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world?” (275). This cultural atmosphere stands in sharp contrast to the world of the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, who wrote from within the Romantic tradition’s confidence in passion, imagination, and authentic selfhood. Ash’s letters are full of urgent, direct feeling, and his belief that poetry reaches for genuine truth through language is entirely at odds with the postmodern premise that language only ever refers to itself. Byatt dramatizes this tension by making the reader feel the vitality of the Victorian correspondence in ways that the theoretical frameworks of the novel’s academic characters are incapable of capturing. The novel implicitly argues that while critical theory offers useful tools, it can calcify into a reflex that forecloses rather than opens experience, and that the Romantic commitment to feeling and imagination retains a power that no amount of ideological unmasking can wholly dissolve.