Dragons

Dragons in Possession are not a single creature with a stable meaning but a recurring mythic figure through which the novel tests boundaries between human and nonhuman, threat and shelter, and independence and attachment. They appear as guardians of golden fruit, as shape-changing beings in the Melusine legend, and as images that Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash use to describe themselves and each other. Their recurrence makes the dragon both a force of separation and a figure through which intimacy can be acknowledged.

Mythic Forms and Guardians

In the Hesperidean grove, the dragon Ladon keeps watch over fruit that glows on eternal branches. His jewelled crest, gold claw, and silver tooth give the guardian an extravagant material presence, while his sleep and waiting stretch across eternity until the hero Herakles approaches. In a later poetic return to the same scene, Ladon again dozes beside the golden fruit. The repetition preserves the creature’s vigilant role while drawing attention to the contrast between timeless myth and the human actions that eventually enter its guarded space.

The dragon also belongs to the tradition of Melusina, the fairy whose story Christabel LaMotte retells in an epic poem. In an account of that myth, Melusina’s husband discovers her hidden nonhuman form; later, after a family catastrophe, she becomes a dragon and flies around the castle battlements. She is also associated with foretelling deaths. The transformation links the dragon not simply with an external monster but with a woman whose identity cannot be contained by marriage or by the human appearance she has maintained. In this tale, revelation and separation coincide: once the secret is exposed and blame is spoken, Melusina leaves the human household in a form that makes her difference unmistakable.

Dragon Imagery in Art and Interpretation

Dragons and dragon-like forms recur in the visual world associated with Blanche Glover’s illustrated stories. One illustration shows a long wolf curved around a small house in a dragon-like clasp, its body enclosing the building. The image places the creature at the boundary of shelter: it seems to hold the house, but its clasp also suggests the possibility of confinement. This illustration belongs to stories marked by animals, disobedience, and frightening transformations, where the nonhuman presence unsettles domestic order rather than simply decorating it.

The novel also gives dragons a place in critical debate. Melusina’s transformation has prompted symbolic, mythological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, while feminist readings have treated her as an image of female sexuality and creative autonomy. The shifting focus of LaMotte’s poem—from exact description of the transformed body to cosmic conflict—helps explain why the figure resists a single gloss. The dragon can signify a concealed self brought into view, a power that exceeds domestic and human categories, or a disturbing presence that readers struggle to classify. Its meaning remains mobile because the narrative repeatedly places it at a threshold between recognizable form and mythic possibility.

Ash and LaMotte’s Dragon Metaphor

In a late letter to Ash, LaMotte recalls a dragon image from Samson Agonistes and sets it against the gentler creature with which she had associated herself. She quotes the dragon’s fiery virtue rising suddenly from beneath ashes and appearing as an evening assailant among ordered roosts and nests. The image gives Ash a forceful, disruptive presence, while the contrast with LaMotte’s own former self-description registers the difference she perceived between them. The allusion is not merely a literary label: in the letter, it becomes a way to revisit their shared history and the emotional consequences of their relationship.

LaMotte’s account complicates the dragon’s threatening aspect. She writes that she would rather have lived alone, yet gives thanks for Ash, imagining that if a dragon had to exist in her life, she is grateful that it was him. She also reflects on solitude, self-possession, and the question of whether Ash’s presence diminished or enlarged her as a poet. Rather than resolving those tensions into a simple judgment, the letter holds together anger, love, artistic independence, and gratitude. The dragon becomes an image for a relationship that could unsettle her chosen solitude while also expanding the life she made through writing.

Recurrence and Significance

The dragon’s appearances connect separate kinds of evidence and storytelling: an epic poem’s mythic guardian, the transformation in Melusina’s legend, an illustrated wolf clasping a house, and a private letter that recasts a relationship through literary allusion. Across these contexts, the creature marks a limit that can be crossed but not erased. A guardian waits at the edge of a mythic garden; Melusina leaves human society by transforming; a wolf-like figure encloses a house; and LaMotte uses the dragon to name Ash’s disruptive presence in her life.

That pattern also keeps the dragon ethically and emotionally ambiguous. It can be dangerous, but it can also stand for a presence that is valued; it can guard what is precious, yet its enclosure may feel restrictive. Most importantly, the dragon does not reduce LaMotte’s solitude to a problem that love solves. Her final reflection preserves her preference for living alone even as she acknowledges love and gratitude. The creature’s enduring force lies in that unresolved doubleness: it embodies the threat to autonomy and the possibility of a relationship that, however complicated, becomes part of the self’s story.