Department of English and American Studies the Dysfunctional Family

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Barbora Vlachová The Dysfunctional Family Model in Ian McEwan’s Novels Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Barbora Vlachová I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her invaluable advice, encouragement and kind guidance. I would also like to thank my family and my partner for their support and patience during the writing of this thesis. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................5 2. Three Plots, One Model – Tracing the Family in McEwan’s Novels ….......11 2.1 The Cement Garden .................................................................11 2.2 On Chesil Beach ......................................................................26 2.3 Atonement ..............................................................................40 3. The Rough World of “Ian Macabre” .....................................................55 4. Present, yet Absent – Parental Incompleteness and its Substitutions …...62 5. Dysfunctional Family – Formative and Devastating ...............................69 6. Conclusion .........................................................................................86 Bibliography .............................................................................................91 English Resume ........................................................................................94 Czech Resume ..........................................................................................96 1. Introduction It is a common thing with many writers that their works, no matter which period of their writing they come from, usually bear signs of more or less similar attitudes, themes and ideas. Ian McEwan, winner and multiple nominee of the Man Booker Prize, is of course no exception to that. While the primary focus and plots of his literary works naturally change with time, one could, at the same time, find some similar patterns that keep recurring in many of them. The nature of these patterns is often a rather underlying one, insignificant at first, yet tightly connected with the main plot, and in many cases even influencing and forming it. Such a pattern is then, quite easily derivable already from the title of this thesis, also the presence of a dysfunctional family background and its intense and negative impact upon the mental and physical development of the characters. Moreover, it is the main purpose of this thesis to show that Ian McEwan uses the destructive and inescapable nature of this distorted family background to indirectly and sometimes almost invisibly form the characters and predestine them to end up in rather unsuccessful relationships, or even worse, result in their personal failures. Looking at Ian McEwan’s writing from a general perspective, one simply has to notice that his novels are anything but optimistic and romantic. As John Walsh in his review of McEwan’s novel Saturday says: “Happy endings have never been Ian McEwan’s style” (Walsh). Indeed, Walsh’s further description of McEwan as a “dealer in inventive cruelty and casual violence” (Walsh) does suggest a little bit about the nature of McEwan’s novels and it is then not 5 surprising at all that many of them end up tragically for the characters, leaving them emotionally ruined and convulsing in misery, or even worse, dead without the chance of resolving their personal issues. While one of the possible (and frequently used) reasons for these personal tragedies is some sort of outer influence beyond the character’s reach, mostly the well-known “wrong time – wrong place” pattern, another cause could be found in the characters’ family background, or rather its dysfunctionality and incompleteness. This issue may not seem so obvious at first – with an exception being The Cement Garden, a novel dealing basically with nothing else but dysfunctional family relationships – yet after reading the novels closely, one can clearly feel its underlying presence and, usually in the end, observe the cruel inevitability of its consequences. Roger Boylan in his essay “Ian McEwan’s Family Values” suggests that: “To Ian McEwan, only the universal values represented in the family unit – love, loyalty, trust stability – stand between us and barbarism” (Boylan). It is then the aim of this thesis, in connection to this statement, to show that in many of his works Ian McEwan experiments with breaking these values, bringing a little bit of this “barbarism” to the lives of his characters and thus challenging the borders of morality and the thin line between good and evil, normal and abnormal. To be a little bit more specific in forming this thesis’ main argument – when we look closely at Ian McEwan’s characters, we can easily observe that their life is often an unhappy, bleak and unsatisfying one. Families from which these characters come are usually “physically complete,” with both parents theoretically present. Yet not even this “physical completeness” can ensure a full functionality, for what we can frequently witness is actually one of the parents, 6 though being alive and physically close, practically appearing to be rather absent from the family life. No matter if this absence is caused by work, illness or emotional detachment, the truth is that it influences the family and mostly the further development of the children. And it is no wonder, for mothers that spend most of the time lying in bed with strong headaches or in a strongly submissive position to their husband, or fathers who care about nothing but keeping their garden neat and tidy or devote themselves to their work, do not form any good preconditions for a healthy growth and emotional stability of their offspring – not to speak about the possible father-daughter sexual abuse, as intimated in On Chesil Beach. Quite inevitably then, their sons and daughters are stigmatized by these distorted circumstances of their childhood and they carry on these emotional marks further in their life. What is more, in Ian McEwan’s novels these marks are so significant and determining, that they influence the children’s, and later adults’, behaviour in their own relationships – unfortunately in a rather negative and destructive way. Consequently, their sexuality is often significantly distorted, their mental health unstable and their personal lives end up in ruins. Such is the rough and surreal world of Ian McEwan’s fiction and the main theme of this thesis. Now, having articulated the main theme of this thesis, let us have a look at the formal practical aspects. Putting aside the usual introductory and concluding chapters, the core of the thesis is divided into four main sections. First section provides a close reading of three selected novels that do not only work with the topic of dysfunctional family background and its influence on the characters, but also come from different periods of McEwan’s writing and thus 7 offer a cross-section of his literary production, proving that the aforementioned topic is present in more of his works and is not a mere limited attribute of one short period. The names of these selected novels are The Cement Garden (1978), The Atonement (2001) and On Chesil Beach (2007). To strengthen the importance of these novels, not only in regard to this thesis, but also to Ian McEwan’s writing in general, it should be noted that two of them even brought him the Man Booker Prize nomination. These were namely the Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Both these novels, together with The Cement Garden, will be introduced in terms of their plots, characters and the overal narrative technique, and then closely analyzed, with a focus on the family roles, relationships and their further impact upon the characters’ mental and physical development. The analysis will thus create a solid underlying foundation for the following three chapters, the first of which focuses on the frequently occurring topics of sexuality, rough realism and dreariness that gained Ian McEwan the well-known nickname “Ian Macabre.” The chapter will look closely at the narrative techniques and methods that Ian McEwan uses and the way he expresses the topics of sexuality and builds up the generally bleak and pessimistic ambience. For this purpose not only the novels themselves but also selected short stories will be analyzed, for they too form an important part of McEwan’s writing and significantly contribute to the birth of his nickname, as mentioned above. This chapter will be followed by one that focuses mostly on the unusual, yet in McEwan’s work frequently occurring lack of parental functions caused by a “mental absence” of one of the parents. Though in his novels both the parents are usually alive and present (at least at the beginning), one of them often does not perform the parental function 8 as we would expect him to. And no matter if this absence is caused by work, illness or some other reason, the children simply have to deal with a lack of an authoritative person to show them the right direction and subsequently tend to replace this gap with one of themselves. The way they choose to do so, together with its serious consequences, then naturally will become the main focus of a deep analysis and one of this thesis’

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