Forms and Functions of Houses as Spatial Settings in Select Novels by Ian McEwan

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von

Sonja SAURUGGER

am Institut für Anglistik

Begutachter: O.Univ.-Prof. Mag.art. Dr.phil. Werner Wolf

Graz, 2014 Table of Contents

1. Introduction...... 5 2. The Contemporary English Novel and Ian McEwan: A Synthesis of Tradition and Innovation ...... 7 3. The Relevance of Space in Literature: The ‘Spatial Turn’...... 10 4.1. A Fruitful Interdependence: House and Literature...... 13 4.2. Gaston Bachelard and the Poetics of Space: “The house […] is a ‘psychic state’”...... 14 4.2.1. The Vertical Perspective: The House and the Mind...... 15 4.2.2. The Horizontal Perspective: The House and its Surroundings ...... 15 4.2.3. The house as refuge for the inner life...... 17

5. The Great Good Place: The English House and its Garden ...... 18 5.1. The Country House as a Literary Symbol...... 20 5.2. The Country House Overlooking the Garden ...... 21 5.3. The Decay of the Country House...... 22 6. The Gothic House and the Uncanny...... 23 7. Spatial Analysis ...... 23 7.1. Lotman’s Spatial Reading: Space as an Ordering System ...... 23 7.2. The Relevant Elements of the House ...... 25 7.2.1. The Door: Protection and Secrecy...... 25 7.2.2. The Window: Border and Frame...... 26 7.2.3. Korrespondenz : Space as a Mirror ...... 27

8. Form and function of the House in The Cement Garden (1978) ...... 28 8.1. Children Running Wild: Tradition Revisited...... 28 8.2. The Setting: A Family Home ...... 31 8.2.1. A House of Decay ...... 32 8.2.2. The Decaying Garden...... 35 8.2.3. Lost in time...... 36

8.3. Transgressing Social Borders...... 37 8.4. A Psychological Reading ...... 39 8.5. Applying Lotman ...... 44 8.5.1. Inside vs. Outside...... 44 8.5.2. Vacant roles...... 47 8.5.3. Order vs. Disorder...... 48

2 8.5.4. Transgression by the heroine...... 49

8.6. Benefit for Interpretation...... 50 9. The Form and Function of the House in Atonement (2001)...... 52 9.1. The Setting: A Family Home ...... 53 9.2. Reading the Rooms: Space as Mirror at Work...... 58 9.2.1. Briony’s Room: “a shrine of her controlling demon”...... 58 9.2.2. Cecilia’s and Emily’s Rooms: “What squalor and disorder”...... 59 9.2.3. Robbie’s Room: “squashed under the apex”...... 61 9.2.4. Turning the Postmodern Screw: Korrespondenz Revaluated ...... 63

9.3. Applying Lotman ...... 64 9.3.1. Inside vs. Outside...... 64 9.3.2. Aggressor and Transgressor: Some Difficulties...... 66 9.3.3. Imagination vs. Reality ...... 68 9.3.3.1. The Window Gaze: “Two Figures by a Fountain” ...... 69 9.3.3.2. The Bridge as a Place of Transformation: “until something significant happened” ...... 71 9.3.3.3. The Library: Figures Projected onto Books ...... 72 9.3.3.4. Transgression by the Heroine ...... 75 9.3.3.5. Inventing a Happy End: Transgression Reloaded ...... 77 9.4. Benefit for Interpretation...... 79 10. Form and Function of the House in Saturday (2005)...... 81 10.1. The Setting: A Family Home ...... 83 10.2. Applying Lotman ...... 84 10.2.1. The Door: A “mundane embattlement”...... 84 10.2.2. The Window: A Proleptic Glimpse...... 85 1.1.1. Inside vs. Outside...... 87 10.2.2.1. Inside Spaces: Safe and Ordered ...... 87 10.2.2.2. Outside Spaces: Threatening and Chaotic ...... 89 10.2.2.2.1. The Renegotiation of the City: A “brilliant invention”...... 89 10.2.2.2.2. The Urban Idyll Destroyed: A “condition of the times” ...... 91 10.2.3. Transgressions: Private vs. Public Realm ...... 94 10.2.3.1. Media Interruptions: An “infection from the public domain” ...... 94 10.2.3.2. Hero and Anti-Hero ...... 96 10.2.3.3. First Confrontation: An Urban Drama ...... 98 10.2.3.4. Second Confrontation: A Domestic Drama ...... 99 10.2.4. The Restitution...... 102

10.3. Benefit for interpretation...... 104 11. Conclusion ...... 105

3 12. Bibliography ...... 107 12.1. Primary literature...... 107 12.2. Secondary literature...... 107 12.3. Internet Resources ...... 112 13. Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache...... 114

4 1. Introduction The relevance of space for literary analysis is a quite recent acknowledgment: with the ‘Spatial Turn’, which started in the late 1980’s with Edward Soja’s coinage of the term, spatial analysis has become a prospering approach in literary and cultural studies. As Cosgrove (quoted in Warf and Arias 2009: 1) describes, the “widely acknowledged spatial turn across arts and sciences corresponds to […] the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge”. Furthermore, Michel Foucault (1984, online) declared the current era “the epoch of space” and consequently, spatial analysis can be considered one of the major preoccupations of literary studies. In a similar way as the engagement with space has become a leading topic in literary studies, English writer Ian McEwan is a dominating figure in contemporary literature and can be called with Peter Kemp (quoted in Childs 2006: 145) the “supreme novelist of his generation”. So why should one not try to combine these two topics into one literary analysis? The first challenge in drafting this thesis was to narrow down the scope of spatial analysis in McEwan’s work. This spans from the rundown prefabs in the suburbs of an unnamed city in The Cement Garden , to the labyrinthian city of Venice in The Comfort of Strangers , the historic sites of the Berlin wall in Black Dogs or Dunkirk in Atonement , to the eponymous city of Amsterdam, the modern capital city London in Saturday , to the Dorset seashore in On Chesil Beach and a setting between the Arctic and the dry heat of New Mexico in Solar . Within this spatial and geographic scope, family homes emerged as recurring central settings. Since the house as a home carries the preconceived connotation of being a safe place and providing shelter from a hostile outside world, McEwan’s handling of this setting pregnant with meaning represented a promising field of study. For this analysis, the novels The Cement Garden (1978), Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005) have been chosen since all of them feature a family home as their central spatial setting. Furthermore, the time scope between the first and the latter novels establishes an interesting basis for comparison. Houses do not only represent a mere backdrop for the action of a novel; on the contrary, their outward appearance and inward composition are employed semiologically, supporting the characterisation of their inhabitants. Furthermore, the house as a place of action rises questions of the boundary between the private and the public realm including intrusive disturbances from the outside and withdrawal into the sheltered inside. These dichotomies offer a field of spatial analysis best explored with the theories of Russian literary scholar Yuri M. Lotman.

5 The questions I will answer within this thesis are build upon the assumption that Ian McEwan is a representative of the literary tradition that shaped contemporary British literature and was termed “muted postmodernism” (Broich 1993). Upon this assumption that McEwan’s writing is located between the traditional and the innovative, I will investigate how McEwan uses the house within these two poles. Therefore, the house as a setting will be analysed in terms of plot construction, but also in terms of characterisation since the house as the dwelling of a character can have semiological qualities. The theoretical background for this exploration are on the one hand the cultural and psychological reflections on the house with Gaston Bachelard’s central text The Poetics of Space and a historical investigation of the representation of the English country house; on the other hand, the spatial analysis will be carried out by applying Yuri M. Lotman’s theories on space in the literary text. With Lotman’s approach questions of topographical and semantic spaces in the novels will be analysed and aspects of plot construction with view to understanding agency in the story will be outlined. This thesis starts with investigating McEwan’s position in contemporary literature and continues with discussing the relevance of space for literature focusing on the ‘Spatial Turn’ and its consequences. In the following, the house and its spatial and psychological features will be analysed, before the special relationship between the house and the English novel will be investigated with a particular interest in the country house motif. Before the actual analysis of the three novels, Lotman’s theory on space in literature, the foundation for this analysis, will be outlined. Furthermore, the central elements of the house will be discussed with a special interest in the function of spatial setting as a mirror of character and plot development. At the end of this thesis, the question will be answered how McEwan as a proponent of muted postmodernism employs the house with view to plot construction and engages with innovation and remains with tradition with view to spatial setting.

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2. The Contemporary English Novel and Ian McEwan: A Synthesis of Tradition and Innovation

At the time, when Ian McEwan started publishing fiction, the British novel was going through a dynamic process of change. The late 1970s and early 1980s marked “an important point of departure in contemporary British fiction” (Malcolm 2002: 6) as a new group of young writers emerged. While the 1960s and 70s were dominated by postmodernist literary experiments, this group of young English novelists in the 1980s raised opposition to the proclaimed “death of the English novel” (Möller 2011: 10) 1. To this newly emerging group belonged novelists such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan (Möller 2011: 9f). McEwan started out as a writer “obsessed with the perverse, the grotesque, the macabre” (Ryan 1994: 2), which also earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre” (Walsh 2007, online). As Ryan (1994: 2) describes, “the secret of his appeal lay in his stylish morbidity, in the elegant detachment with which he chronicled acts of sexual abuse, sadistic torment and pure insanity”. Critics, however, documented the development of McEwan’s writing, from the early McEwan regarded as an “enfant terrible (Childs 2006: 1) to the later McEwan, “considered a serious and contemplative novelist” (Childs 2006: 2). Ryan (1994: 2) suggests that already in the 1980s the “claustrophobic menace” of the short stories and the first two novels gave way to “a mature engagement with the wider world of history and society”. Child (2006: 2) specifies the turning point in McEwan’s process of growing from a preoccupation with sexual abnormity to an engagement with major topics like love, history, religion and politics with his novel Atonement in 2001. With this first book in the new century, McEwan placed himself, according to Childs (2006: 2), “firmly in the mainstream literary tradition running from Samuel Richardson […] through Jane Austen […] to Henry James […] and beyond”. According to Nünning 2 (2000: 190) the most significant characteristics of the contemporary English novel evident since the 1980s are a “Synthese aus Tradition und Innovation” and a “Rückkehr zum Erzählen”. The claimed synthesis of tradition and innovation and a re-valuation of the narrative appear alongside with other characteristics of the English novel, such as a mixing of genres termed “Hybridisierung” (Nünning 2000: 189),

1 The literary magazine Granta published in 1980 an issue entitled “The End of the English Novel”. 2 Nunning’s analysis is based on the earlier work of Maack and Imhof (1993) Radikalität und Mäßigung: Der Englische Roman seit 1960 . 7 an increasing engagement with formal experiments or an interest in history as a literary subject for instance realised in so-called “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1988, quoted in Nünning 2000: 190). 3 However, this alleged return to narrating stories has to be relativised, as Wolf (2001: 292) argues, since, firstly, the English tradition has always shown a certain moderation concerning ‘experimentalism’ – in contrast to the American or French tradition. 4 Secondly, this newly appearing tendency cannot be understood as a mere return to a traditional way of storytelling. Rather, as Nünning (2000: 192) emphasises, this tendency also shows elements of a postmodern exploration of all available traditional narrative methods. As Vera Nünning (2007: 5ff) summarises, the contemporary English novel is characterised by a pluralism of techniques and genres. The symbolical image of the “novelist at the crossroads”, which David Lodge created in 1969, does no longer fit reality; Lodge himself reinvented his symbolic imagery by positioning the novelist in an “aesthetic supermarket” (Lodge 1997: 11) in which writers can ‘shop’ from all available literary styles. Nünning (2007: 6) emphasises the conventions of representations which are available from the different centuries: the shelves offer realism, modernism and postmodernism, “erlaubt ist, was gefällt”. Therefore, contemporary English fiction presents itself as a collage of styles. Realistic means of narration allow the reader to immerse himself into an aesthetic illusion that is fostered by lifelike characters, an exciting and causal plot and a specific spatial and cultural context (Nünning 2007: 9). However, these traditional characteristics of narration are connected with postmodern techniques that aim at disturbing the aesthetic illusion. Through postmodernist techniques, the artificiality of a novel is made obvious to the reader. The most propagated characteristic of postmodern writing is metafiction (Wolf 1993: 46) meaning fiction that “constantly reminds the reader that it is fiction” (Malcolm 2002: 6), but also thematises the problems of writing and narration. Further forms of postmodernist experiments are intertextuality and intermediality which are, according to Nünning (2007: 10), especially relevant for the English novel. Unreliable narration is a further popular form of creating some disturbance of the aesthetic illusion in a novel. Authors of the 1990s such as Ian McEwan (e.g. in Enduring Love ) or Nick Hornby use this technique to question and blur the ethic boundary between reliability and unreliability. Furthermore, especially novels published

3 For a more detailed description of contemporary trends in the English novel refer to Nünning (2000) or Haefner (1996). 4 Wolf names the French nouveau roman and the American narrative tradition of the 1960/70s as examples of a more radical instance of a postmodern approach to fiction. 8 since the 1990’s show a coexistence of different focalisers or narrating instances and lack a unifying narrator (Nünning 2007: 10). Above all these postmodern possibilities, the genuine domain of the English novel is moderate experimentalism also termed “muted postmodernism” (Broich 1993). As Wolf (2001: 293) describes, in English novels self-reflexive writing is only used moderately. Or, as Lodge (1977: 105) put it in his description of the so-called ‘problematic novel’: “the reality principle is never allowed to lapse entirely”. This illuminates the ambivalence between tradition and innovation that Nünning depicted as the dominant characteristic of the English novel. The re-evaluation of the traditional narration goes along with the understanding that “man […] is the story-telling animal” as Graham Swift (1984: 53) terms it in his novel Waterland . Therefore, English fiction still appears to feel obliged to provide its readers with the classical story-telling that “Homo narrans” (Möller 2011: 10) craves for. Ian McEwan can be firmly placed in this tendency of the contemporary English novel. As Wolf (2001: 310) shows in his analysis of Atonement, Ian McEwan offers in his writing a synthesis of the current trends in English fiction as he combines “postmoderne Selbstreflexivität mit der Entfaltung einer traditionellen, illusionistischen Wirkungsästhetik”. According to Wolf (2001: 296) the novel owes its success to the fact that it tells a “good story”, offers an uncomplicated “readability” and allows the reader to delve into an illusionary world through its realistic ‘true-to-life-ness’. Thus, McEwan engages with the claimed “Rückkehr zum Erzählen”. Furthermore, McEwan combines these traditional story-telling elements with a moderate use of innovative techniques and thus honours the trend of combining tradition and innovation. Wolf’s exemplary analysis shows that McEwan’s writing can be located within a tradition dominating the contemporary English novel: a temperate experimentalism that allows the immersion in a represented world, but combines a realistic tradition with a moderate try on postmodern techniques. Also Möller (2011: 12) states in her analysis of McEwan’s novels that “[n]otwithstanding the fact that they are thematically dealing with issues that are clearly problems of our postmodern society, McEwan’s novels are stylistically very firmly placed in the tradition of realism.” Against this backdrop, this thesis aims at emphasizing traditionality in McEwan’s writing with reference to an aspect that has been largely neglected in literary analysis of Ian McEwan: the representation and use of space. Concerning space, the microcosm of the house in particular will be of interest in the following analysis, since the house offers not only wide varieties for a detailed realistic depiction but can also be a means of addressing semiotic

9 questions of the readability of a fictional world. The level of space, however, has not only been neglected with view to McEwan’s writing, but with respect to literature in general. Only lately has the spatial setting of a story been revalued as a worthwhile field for literary analysis.

3. The Relevance of Space in Literature: The ‘Spatial Turn’ The early analysis of space that started to prosper in the 1930s with the works of Ernst Cassirer was dominated by philosophical approaches and the quest for defining the ontological status of aesthetic space (see Lange 2007: 21). Until this time, literary space was conceived as a mere scenic setting for a story. Cassirer (1931/1975: 26) broke ground for the insight that space is not just a given and generally applicable entity, but that space gains its specific content by the “Sinnordnung” in which it is embedded. Furthermore, aesthetic space has to be differentiated from spaces that belong to mathematical or physical systems of order; aesthetic space in its construction is, according to Cassirer, freer and obtains a more intensive power of expression and representation. From these earliest approaches towards an understanding of literary space in the 1930s, it took a long way until a paradigm shift made spatial setting a current topic in literary studies. This change came with the ‘Spatial Turn’. The ‘Spatial Turn’ established a counterpart to the dominance of history in cultural studies. According to geographer Edward Soja (quoted in Schmid 2005: 62), who is regarded the first to coin the term ‘Spatial Turn’ in 1989, with postmodernity came a paradigm change from history to space. Literary scholar Fredric Jameson (1991, quoted in Döring und Thielmann 2008: 9) described that while modernism focused on the category of time, beginning postmodernism would be the age of a “spatialization of the temporal”. In addition, Foucault (1984, online) stated that in contrast to the nineteenth century’s “obsession with history […] the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space”. According to Foucault (1984, online), the reason for this paradigm change is that the human experience of the world has changed: people perceive their lives no longer as evolving through time, but as “a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein”. With the ‘Spatial Turn’, cultural studies and analysis no longer perceived space as a fixed entity providing the backdrop to action; instead, since then, space has been viewed as a product created out of the interaction of people and things (Andresen 2009: 93). The basis for this assumption was already provided by Henri Lefebvre (1974), who stated that spaces are not existing physical entities but are culturally produced. According to Lefebvre “space is a (social) product” (1974, quoted in Löw et al 2008: 52) that is produced by society. Lefebvre,

10 however, distinguishes between social and natural space, but argues that today, natural space has become a mere idea that does no longer exist in reality. Thus, in modernity, space always is socially constructed and each society produces its specific space. Pierre Bourdieu (1985) later resumed and elaborated this concept of a socially constructed space as he established the theory of social space in the context of a theory on class and capital. According to Bourdieu (1991: 26), “der von einem Akteur eingenommene Ort und sein Platz im angeeigneten physischen Raum [sind] hervorragende Indikatoren für seine Stellung im sozialen Raum”. Thus, a place of living in physical space – whether in a posh suburb or in the run-down area around a railway station – indicates a person’s standing within the social space; whether the person has economic capital and a high standing within society or not. (cf. Bourdieu 1985: 27f) Soon, however, the movement termed ‘Spatial Turn’ became an object of criticism. It was remarked that the ‘Spatial Turn’ functioned solely as a label attached to collections and symposia, but lacking an “interdisciplinary nucleus” (Andresen 2009: 93). Therefore, subcategories emerged, termed ‘Topological Turn’ or ‘Topographical Turn’ with all of them representing different sub-approaches to the analysis of space. Most relevant for the analysis of literature seems the ‘Topographical Turn’, coined by literary scholar Sigrid Weigel. Within this approach, she defined a concrete object of analysis for a spatial analysis in cultural studies: Der Raum ist hier nicht mehr Ursache oder Grund, von der oder dem die Ereignisse oder deren Erzählungen ihren Ausgang nehmen, er wird selbst vielmehr als eine Art Text betrachtet, dessen Zeichen oder Spuren semiotisch, grammatologisch oder archäologisch zu entziffern sind. (Weigel 2002, quoted in Döring and Thielmann 2008: 16)

Weigel thus describes one of the core ideas of the newly emerged interest in literary spatial relations: space is no longer perceived as a mere backdrop to a text, but can itself be read as a system of signs. The following analysis should also take place against this background of perceiving the spatial setting not as a mere backdrop to the narrative, but as an ordering system for the structure of the story. Furthermore, the spatial setting in a work of literature should be understood as an element that was consciously constructed by the author and thus can as well be regarded as a tool for transporting meaning. On the basis of Charles W. Morris three-tier theory of signs, Dünne (2004, online) differentiated three types of spaces: technical, semiotic and cultural pragmatic spaces. Semiotic spaces are, according to Dünne (2004, online) spaces that are represented in different forms of media, such as in painting or writing, and thus constitute the semiotic meaning of spaces. The semiotic quality of spaces depends on the medium in which they are

11 created; in pictures they are dominantly iconic, while in texts, they are dominantly symbolic (Dünne 2004, online). Semiotic spaces are thus spaces that become “Gegenstand zeichenhafter Darstellung” (Dünne 2004, online) and in consequence become object of a semiotic analysis. Dünne’s and Weigel’s approaches to space form the theoretical basis for this thesis: they seem to be most relevant for the analysis of literary spaces and their functions in fictional world making. In contrast, Lefebvre’s or Bourdieu’s sociologist approaches do not offer much input for a literary analysis; rather, their ideas could be useful for investigating real spaces, their inhabitants and the socio-economic consequences of these allocations. Based on the understanding that the construction of space in a literary text is a means of transporting meaning, I will in the following use Yuri M. Lotman’s theory on the structure of literary texts as a tool for the analysis of these semiotic vehicles. Lotman’s theory will be summarised later in this chapter. First, the central element of analysis, the house, should be analysed with depth.

4. The House: “A small world defined against, but also reflecting, a larger one”

Good reasons can be found to make the house the major concern of an analysis of Ian McEwan’s writing. Firstly, according to Nünning (2000: 204), the connection of traditional and innovative methods of narration, which is also present in McEwan’s writing, becomes also visible in the exploration of the semantics of space. Space and its detailed description does not only function as a mere backdrop to a historical event as in the classic historical novel, but becomes a “Bedeutungsträger” loaded with associations. Secondly, in the range of McEwan’s novels several houses are a central feature: This is true for the house of decay in The Cement Garden , the grand house in Atonement and Perowne’s house in Saturday standing against the modernity of the city. An analysis of the spatial setting within a house is also useful since one of McEwan’s recurring topics is the transgression of social boundaries. The crossing of borders is, as will be outlined in the chapter on Yuri M. Lotman, an essential tool in spatial analysis. The house and its meaning for its inhibitors should be grasped from a philosophical and sociological point of view.

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4.1. A Fruitful Interdependence: House and Literature

The interrelations of houses and literature are invoked by philosophers such as Gaston Bachelard and sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, as Mezei and Briganti (2002: 837) summarise. These interrelations were dominated by using the house and its inner structures as analogues for characterisation and interpretation. Thus, terms like “literary architecture” (Pater 1903, quoted in Mezei and Briganti 2002: 838), Henry James’ “house of fiction” (quoted in Mezei and Briganti 2002: 838) or “house of mirth” (Wharton 1905, quoted in Mezei and Briganti 2002: 838) were created to capture the fruitful interdependence. This interdependence is deeply rooted in English literature since the English house as we know it today and the English novel rose simultaneously in the 18 th century (Tristram 1989: 2). As Lukacs (1970, quoted in Mezei and Briganti 2002: 838) states “domesticity, privacy, comfort, the concept of home and of family are principal achievements of the Bourgeois age”. Simultaneously with the emergence of the home as a private retreat, the borders between domestic and public life were established. Hence, houses became the places for fostering an internal life of the individual (Rybczynski 1986, quoted in Mezei and Briganti 2002: 839) and thus, the emergence of private life in private houses influenced the psychological development of individuals and provided an intimate space for the exploration of inner life and thoughts. Thus, house and novel were interconnected from their beginning on and share attributes as being domestic and intimate: “Because the novel is invincibly domestic, it can tell us much about the space we live in; equally, designs for houses and their furnishings can reveal hidden aspects of the novelist’s art” (Tristram 1989, 2). The house is both linked to the exploration of the inner life and the body of the individual, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 2) outline: “The house is the extension of the person […] it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and protect.” The house thus becomes a “second layer of clothes” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 2) that functions as a vehicle for representing and socialising the self. In the same way the body might be beautified to represent one’s identity, a house’s façade can obtain decorative elements metonymic for the resident’s character. Moreover, the inside structures of a house can be representative of hierarchical systems dominating a family or a whole society, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 12) argue. Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 21) thus summarise that “houses, like bodies, come to play as symbols of social groups, inscribing boundaries and hierarchies and giving them an aura of naturalness.”

13 In consequence, not only inhabitants are interacting with the houses they live in, but also the house interacts with its surrounding landscape. Therefore, houses are considered “dynamic entities” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 37) since they endure over time, but different people come to fill the house’s walls with life and their belongings. “They are born, live, grow old, die and decay”, Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 45) describe the life circle that also houses go through. During this lifetime, the significance of a house is based on “a ritual construct” as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 45) suggest. This ritual of ‘house making’ is based on ancestors, names and titles that enrich the semiotic system conveyed by a house. As has been shown so far, the house is closely related to intimacy and the inner life of its inhabitants. The basis for this understanding of the house as a place of intimacy and shelter offered Gaston Bachelard in his fundamental writing The Poetics of Space. His understanding of spatial analysis or “topoanalysis” (Bachelard 1964: 8) suggests that a philosophy of literature should view space as being written and thus “read a room” or “read a house” (Bachelard 1964: 14). In accordance with this claim, this thesis aims at reading the houses and rooms in Ian McEwan’s writing.

4.2. Gaston Bachelard and the Poetics of Space: “The house […] is a ‘psychic state’”

Bachelard’s interest (1964: xxxi) lies in the analysis of “felicitous space”, meaning space that is grasped and loved by humans. Thus, he considers space that provides shelter and home to people and makes houses and their rooms the objects of his analysis. Bachelard is thus interested in space that is not hostile but characterised by attributes like protective and intimate (Bachelard 1964: xxxiii). Furthermore, Bachelard (1964: xxxiii) argues that the house serves as “a tool for analysis of the human soul”. He refers to C. G. Jung, who used the example of a house that incorporates elements from different epochs to outline the complexity of the human soul and its analysis.

We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, an a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling- tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure. (C.G. Jung 1928: 118-119)

Jung uses the image of an era-hybrid house as an analogy for the complexity of human mental structure. Similarly, Bachelard (1964: xxxiii) views the soul as an “abode” (1964: xxxiii), a place of residence, and states that humans do not only inhabit houses and rooms, but

14 also use the house image to order their inner lives: “the house image moves in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.” Therefore, Bachelard (1964: 38) argues that it is reasonable to “read a house” or a room, since “both room and house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy”.

4.2.1. The Vertical Perspective: The House and the Mind

The central concept Bachelard (1964: 17) attaches to the house is the concept of verticality. A house is perceived as a vertical being that rises upwards due to the polarity of the cellar and the roof. This image of the house also conveys stability. According to Bachelard (1964: 18), applying a semantization of the vertical zone of the human body, it is obvious that the roof symbolises rationality in contrast to “the irrationality of the cellar”. Bachelard (1964: 18) reasons that “up near the roof all our thoughts are clear.” The dichotomies of cellar and roof are semantically loaded: the roof provides shelter and is thus positively connoted, while the cellar is at first solely perceived as a dark entity and therefore connoted negatively. In the darkness of the cellar, rationalisation is ‘slower’ than in the attic. Thus, also fears that maybe triggered by noises or shadows in the cellar, take longer to be explained rationally. On the basis of this duality of attic and cellar, psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (quoted in Bachelard 1964: 19) analysed the fears a house accommodates and uses the house, once more, as an analogy for the unconscious. In Jung’s imagery, the basement symbolises the unconscious from which a person might hear frightening noises; instead of venturing to the cellar and confronting his fears, the person runs to the attic and reassures himself that – as there are no dangers in the attic – that noise must have been a product of his fantasy (Bachelard 1964: 19). Thus, Jung explains how people neglect uprising emotions from their unconscious as they are afraid of confronting them; instead they interpret them as fantasies.

4.2.2. The Horizontal Perspective: The House and its Surroundings

Bachelard (1964: 3f) considers the house as an entity that combines unity and complexity and thus is classified as “our corner of the world […] our first universe”. It is a human characteristic that the notion of home is attached even to the most primitive bolthole: the minimum requirement a home has to fulfil is to provide shelter through its walls. This image of the home as a shelter begins at birth when “man is laid in the cradle of the house” (Bachelard 1964: 7) and the human life starts in a protected and warm place. Due to these protective and warm characteristics, Bachelard (1964: 7) even attributes “maternal features”

15 to the house and supports his claim with an exemplifying statement from Oscar Milosz’s “Melancholy”: “I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House. House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood” (Milosz, quoted in Bachelard 1964: 45). The house’s function as shelter is defined in opposition to the outside world, as there are hostile forces from the outside against which the house shelters its inhabitants. Bachelard (1964: 27) focuses on the “house’s situation in the world” as it can be perceived as a metaphor for a human’s situation in the world. According to Bachelard (1964: 27) there is a difference between a house standing on its own in the countryside and a house being part of a city cosmos. As the houses in a city are no longer set in a natural surrounding, “the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one” (Bachelard (1964: 27). Houses in an urban setting are no longer subject to “the storms of the universe” (Bachelard 1964: 27). Bad weather conditions are not as frightening anymore to a house that does not stand on its own, but is part of an enclosed settlement. As Bachelard (1964: 38) observes, rough weather conditions outside increase the intimacy in a house which braves the weather in all its forms. The argument is that “we feel warm” inside the house, because “it is cold out-of-doors” (Bachelard 1964: 39). The contrasts between inside and outside the house thus have great influence on how a house is experienced. Especially the function of sheltering is increased through hostile conditions outside; the house safely stands against the feared attacks of the universe. This consideration aligns with the concept of private and public sphere, a distinction that Habermas (1962/1993) in his fundamental work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 5 traces back to the bourgeois society of the eighteenth century. With a more bourgeois orientation, upper classes execute a “privatization of life” (Habermas 1993: 44) that is also visible in architectural terms as the houses are separated into rooms with representative functions contrasting with private rooms, that occupy most of the house’s space. This privatization “made the house more of a home” (Habermas 1993: 45), often leaving only “the salon” as a space for public gatherings. The desire behind this segregation of private and public life was, according to Habermas (1993: 46) “to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent” from the state’s official power, together with a “psychological emancipation” of the individual. The intimacy of the family was thus “set free from the constraints of society” (Habermas 1993: 46) and the private realm of the family also gave individuals space to feel independent and “privatised” from “the private sphere of their economic activity” (Habermas 1993: 48). The individual occupation, thus, is also regarded as part of the private

5 The full German title of the original publication: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. 16 sphere, while family intimacy represents an entirely privatised haven from work. In contrast, bourgeois public sphere, that appeared according to Habermas (quoted in Kellner, online) around 1700, gave individuals space to discuss public affairs, directly express their needs and feelings and thus offered the opportunity to “shape public opinion […] while influencing political practice” (Kellner, online) for the first time in history. This public sphere “consisted of organs of information and political debate” (Kellner, online) such as magazines and newspapers, “institutions of political discussion” (Kellner, online) such as literary or political salons or coffee houses. As Kellner (online) summarises, the “public sphere thus mediates between the domains of the family and the workplace – where private interests prevail – and the state which often exerts arbitrary forms of power and domination”. At home, however, people were purely private persons and the house provided the shelter for this private state of being. In Bachelard’s terms, the distinction of private and public sphere can be aligned with the opposition of inside and outside. This separation represents a dichotomy that has “the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no , which decides everything” (Bachelard 1964: 211). Between these two antipodes exists a “borderline-surface” (Bachelard 1964: 218), which always symbolises, according to Gräf and Schmöller (2009: 11), an “Übergangsraum” as it represents the space where two separate areas meet. The boundary, thus, marks the common bond of these two entities in separating them and establishes the border area as a space in which forms of transition or transgression can take place. A boundary not only defines the inside of a system, but also in the same way establishes a barrier against the outside. Thus, boundaries are excluding and including phenomena at the same time (Gräf und Schmöller 2009: 10). An embodiment of the border within the house is, according to Bachelard (1964: 222) the door. It is the one vehicle that does not only divide inside from outside but also represents rooms as open or closed. A door can either be “closed, bolted, padlocked” as Bachelard (1964: 222) depicts, or be open, “wide open”. The concept of the border and border crossing will be analysed with more depth in the chapter on Lotman’s theorems on spatial analysis.

4.2.3. The house as refuge for the inner life

The house, however, does not only shelter the body from threatening outside forces, but also provides places of refugee for our inner life. “Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life”, states Bachelard (1964: 78). The inside of a wardrobe is an “intimate space” (Bachelard 1964: 78) preserved for the eye of the wardrobe’s owner only. As

17 Bachelard (1964: 79) quotes Milosz: “A wardrobe is filled with the mute tumult of memories”. The importance of small caskets such as boxes or drawers lies with the “need of secrecy” (Bachelard 1964: 81) and an intuitive human “sense of hiding places”. These requisites of order enhance the feeling of intimacy within a house since they provide sheltered space to memories, thoughts or dreams. Bachelard (1964: 8) argues that for memories the localisation in space is far more important than a temporal fixation. Through a determination in space, memories become more profound and secured. Thus, Bachelard (1964: 9) aligns himself with the premise of the paradigmatic ‘Spatial Turn’ that marks the changing point where the age of time is replaced by the age of space.

5. The Great Good Place: The English House and its Garden

Making the house a central element within his texts, McEwan follows a long tradition in English literature. Since its simultaneous rise with the novel in the eighteenth century, the English country house has inspired or influenced many English writers and in consequence has become an emblem for Englishness and English tradition. The meanings already attached to the English house throughout its tradition cannot be neglected in an analysis of houses in McEwan’s writing and shall therefore be summarised and analysed in the following.

Of all the great things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the only one they have mastered completely in all its details, so that it becomes a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house. (Henry James 1905, quoted in Kelsall 1993: 5)

The English country house is regarded a powerful emblem for Englishness. Kelsall (1993: 5) notes that “the country house was the essential expression of England”; also Gill (1972: 3) states in his analysis of the English country house in literature that “what has generically become called the country house […] is peculiar English”. It can neither be compared to the French chateau or the Italian historic villas, since it “is much more than a house in the country” (Gill 1972: 3). With this, Gill (1972: 6) means that the English country house has been regarded as an emblem of “the life of the English landed classes”, especially for their portrayal in writing. This success story of the country house started as early as in Tudor times. According to Egbert (2006: 133f) the country house emerged in Tudor times (1485- 1603) as the new aristocratic dwelling and thus replaced the military castles. As the relationship between the landlords and their tenants became more distant, the country houses were adjusted to a more private life (Egbert 2006: 134). Country houses experienced their next heyday in the 18 th century. The country side was a place representing purity and leisure:

18 country houses were used as pristine retreats in contrast to the city, which must sustain the “nation’s leaders” (Christie 2000: 2). The country house of the 18 th century was the British aristocracy’s “vehicle for expressing their political, social and aesthetic dominance” (Christie 2000: 26). In order to give their power a solid expression, wealthy British classes built great houses. Furthermore, the architecture of the country house should mirror the rank of its owner, through splendour and decorum, grand entrance halls or large scale churches attached to their houses (Christie 2000: 31). Therefore, the central influence on the 18 th century country house was the Palladian architectural style, creating houses with “a centre block, wings and end blocks” (Christie 2000, 35). This Italian influence, based on the Ancient temple architecture, created expanding estates and “certain country houses can be regarded as rural palaces” (Christie 2000, 37). As the British country houses found their role models in the classic architecture, they also adopted the ancient imperialistic claim of power (Egbert 2006: 135). The country house, then, became the topic of the emerging novel in the 18 th century (Egbert 2006: 137). Thus, the country house, its typically landscaped garden and the novel are closely interrelated. As Kelsall (1993: 8) summarises, country house poetry first appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with representatives such as Ben Jonson and Alexander Pope who were praising estates in “second-rate poems”. Then, still in Pope’s lifetime, the country house enters the newly emerging fictional form of the novel and Henry Fielding with the mansion Paradise Hall in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and Samuel Richardson with Grandison Hall in Sir Charles Grandison (1753) established the country house tradition in the novel (Kelsall 1993: 8). Their most significant successor is Jane Austen, whose Mansfield Park Gill (1972: 244) regards as “country-house novel par excellence”, and a late follower of the tradition appears with Henry James at the end of the nineteenth century. Philippa Tristram (1989: 1) explains the intensive interconnections between novel and house by stating that “[…] a house, like a novel, is a small world defined against, but also reflecting, a larger one”. According to Tristram (1989: 23) the eighteenth century is often described as “the great age of the English house” while the Victorian period could be named “the great age of the English home”, as this time was obsessed with the comfort of the home. In the eighteenth century, with the emerging separation of private and public sphere, it became fashionable to have separate premises for private and public life: through French influence on the interior structure of country houses, the appartement de societé , a room for entertaining family and friends, became important, contrasting with the private appartement de commodité (Christie 2000: 53). In Victorian times, moreover, the house became more

19 private and enclosed than it was during its rise in the eighteenth century. English country houses no longer stood open for visitors and segregation also became apparent within the house; as Tristram (1989: 25) describes “upper and lower orders of society were made invisible to one another”, meaning that master and servant were occupying different areas within the house. The servants were removed to the attic, the basement or out to the wings (Tristram 1989: 38); the ‘core’ of the house thus became reserved for the core family. The country house as the home of the family became a strong symbol for community in literature. Within its microcosm, the house does not only provide Aristotle’s unity of place, but also assembles people and provides them with a stage to meet, collide, unite and separate (Gill 1972: 15). Furthermore, as the decoration on a stage, the style and outward appearance of the house might convey the sentiments and tastes of the inhabitants. Gill (1972: 15) summarises the house’s role as a readable entity being semiotically loaded: “Depending upon the novelist’s intention and tone, all the concrete elements of the house and its setting – rooms and furnishing, gardens and landscape – may combine in a subtle network of supporting images”.

5.1. The Country House as a Literary Symbol

Different writers in different periods used the country house imagery diversely. In Jane Austen’s novels, for example, as Egbert (2006: 138) shows, country house and garden are metonymically used to demonstrate a character’s wealth. As the English garden should be characterised by its naturalness in contrast to the symmetry and order of the jardin à la française , the unaffectedness of a park or garden is a symbol of the owner’s taste and noble style. In Victorian times, already established as the age of the English home “society is […] regarded as an infection from which the home is a protection” (Tristram 1989: 232). People in the Victorian period are confronted with a world being transformed at high-speed through the industrial revolution; the house, as a counterpart, was a place entirely within one’s control. Thus, the house conveys safety, sheltering against threats coming from a modernised world or the sexual threat that intimidates the house through the person of an “adulterer” (Tristram 1989: 265). Henry James (1900) then worshipped the English country house as “the great good place” in the eponymous short story for its greatness and the width and spaces that exude hospitality (Gill 1972: 27).

The English country house experienced a further revival in the “inter-war years”, as Briganti and Mezei (2004: 148) state. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf or Katherine

20 Mansfield revalued the house as a “setting for an emerging interior life” (Rybczynsli 1986, quoted in Briganti and Mezei 2004: 149); within the house’s intimate privacy, inner thoughts and feelings could be explored. Thus, Woolf or Mansfield used “private domestic space as frame and metonym of inner, psychological space”, Mezei and Briganti (2002: 839) describe. The “symbiosis of house and novel” (Mezei and Briganti 2004: 149) in this inter-war novels like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is employed in such a way as the domestic interior mirrors the inner life and thoughts of the inhabitants. Simultaneously, a certain nostalgia can be grasped in the country house novels of the early twentieth century: this nostalgia is caused by growing industrialisation and fading values like a sense of nationhood, privileged classes or the imperial power of the British. Briganti and Mezei (2004: 150) declare the central mansions in novels like E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) as “disturbed spaces” that are haunted by this nostalgia. The English great house, however, has once again been rediscovered as a setting for family drama in novels in recent times; the English country house plays a leading role in popular TV series like “Downton Abbey”, current novels like Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) and in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). This aspect will be elaborated with more depth in the analysis of Atonement .

5.2. The Country House Overlooking the Garden

Looking out of the country house, the view often revealed a great landscaped garden or park in which the house was the dominant element. “Gardens are rarely included in analyses of domestic space”, states Alexander (2002: 858) and in the same article proves that gardens, especially as companions of English country houses, are worth being viewed at least as “occasional domestic space”. The garden offers several elements that are crucial for a spatial analysis: the boundary in form of a wall, ha-ha or hedge that divides cultivated from wild nature or garden from garden; the separation of different areas within the garden that fulfil specific functions such as the societal area with the terrace in contrast to the kitchen garden; the interrelations between the house and the garden, since the garden takes “order from the house” (Alexander 2002: 861) and is also an object to be gazed at. The house dominates the garden and the view across the garden needs to be unimpeded, states Alexander (2002: 860), because in this way, the garden becomes subjugated to the gaze from the house. The consummation that this garden view brings is “contemplative” (Alexander 2002: 860) and “spiritual” to the consumer. The spiritual

21 character stems from the paradisial origin of the first garden being Eden. The spectacle of the garden finds its frames in the windows of the (country) house; from this sublime position the ‘gazer’ can consume the garden like a “still painted moment” (Alexander 2002: 862) in its frame. Michel Foucault describes gardens as “heterotopias” meaning places “in which the real sites, all other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1984, online). According to Foucault, the garden is a typical example of a heterotopia in which “several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1984, online) meet. Foucault’s idea refers back to the gardens of the ancient Orient: these Persian gardens were sacred and supposed to bring together four parts representing the four parts of the world and surrounding “the navel of the world” (Foucault 1984, online) in the centre represented by the fountain and the basin. Although perceived as paradisiacal, the garden in contrast to the house, which is characterised by providing shelter from the “the storms of the universe” (Bachelard 1964: 27), is “open to the elements” (Alexander 2002: 861). “The borders are porous” (Alexander 2002: 861), and thus hostile elements have to be endured in the garden.

5.3. The Decay of the Country House

According to Gill (1972: 167) the fall of the great English houses came with the Second World War and the violence and devastation the war brought with it. The English country house was “taxed out of existence, sold to profiteers, turned into school or clubhouse” (Gill 1972: 168); simultaneously, the country house in its decline gained strength as a symbol of community, “order and continuity” (Gill 1972: 167) in a time dominated by “dislocation and isolation”, Gill (1972: 17) argues. Tristram (1989: 262) in contrast remarks that although the house never lost its significance for the novelist’s art, its meaning changed. The notion of comfort and shelter that was central to the Victorian house is no longer graspable in modern times: “the confidence, indivisible from the Victorian fireside, that, if the world without is storm and sea, the house within is a secure and peaceful haven is no longer accessible as it once was” (Tristram 1989: 262).

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6. The Gothic House and the Uncanny

While the English country house was perceived in literature as a “felicitous space” (Bachelard 1972: xxxi), Briganti and Mezei (2004: 159) argue that the Gothic novel, which also appeared in literature in the eighteenth century, was “an excessive, nightmarish permutation of the domestic novel”. According to Redling (2011: 100) Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764) can be regarded as the "origin of the Gothic genre”. As the term Gothic originally referred to a style of architecture typically seen in castles, abbeys and churches associated with a past of "barbarity, superstition and fear" (Botting 1996, quoted in Redling 2011: 100) also the Gothic novel is closely interlinked with some kind of house. One of the central ingredients of the Gothic novel is, besides supernatural events, a villain, a “damsel in distress” (Redling 2011: 100), horrific vaults in the underground or the ‘Doppelgänger’-motif, “decaying castles and abbeys” (Redling 2011: 101) set in remote eerie landscapes. All these elements of the “Gothic machinery” (Botting 1996, quoted in Redling 2011: 101) aim at arousing feelings of uncanniness and horror. As Freud (1919, online) outlines in his study on “The Uncanny” that “the uncanny is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”. By examining the ambiguity of the German word ‘heimlich’, Freud shows that uncanniness is caused by things or circumstances that are familiar to us. ‘Heimlich’ belongs to two sets of meaning: on the one hand, it describes what is familiar and denotes the idea of “belonging to the house” (Freud 1919, online); on the other, ‘heimlich’ in German describes things that are kept secret and concealed. Freud’s reflections suggest that since the word ‘heimlich' is intensely connected with the home, the house is a place with uncanny potential. This aspect is especially relevant for the first novel to be analysed, McEwan’s The Cement Garden .

7. Spatial Analysis

As has already been suggested, the most suitable tool for analyzing space and its semiotic qualities is Yuri M. Lotman’s theory on the structure of literary texts.

7.1. Lotman’s Spatial Reading: Space as an Ordering System

Spatial characteristics are according to Lotman (1977: 218) the basis for “most social, political, religious and ethical models of the world” and define relations of “valuable – not

23 valuable”, “right – left” or “open – closed”. These pairs of spatial attributes are not only used for describing a physical reality, but are also applied as metaphors in order to convey a symbolic meaning. If the world’s systems work on this basis of spatial directions and oppositions, and hierarchies of social and political life are constructed on the basis of directions, why should literary texts not? In Lotman’s sense, the spatial world within a text functions as an ordering system. This spatial organisation involves three aspects: topological oppositions, their semantic interpretation and their topographical realisation. In this process of ‘world-making’ within a literary text, first topological oppositions like ‘inside vs. outside’ or ‘high vs. low’ are established. These oppositions are loaded semantically, such as ‘safe vs. unsafe’ or ‘powerful vs. not powerful’. In a third step of world making, these semantically loaded oppositions are given their physical equivalents within the literary landscape of the text, such as ‘city vs. wood’ or ‘heaven vs. hell’ (Martinez and Scheffel 1999: 141). This outlines that spatial constructions within a literary text are not only a mere backdrop or a simple realistic replica of reality, but are conveying or constituting meaning on their own. Spatial relations are always dominated by a boundary. According to Lotman (1977: 229), the boundary is “the most important topological feature of space”. The function of this boundary is not only to divide the entire space into two “mutually non-intersecting subspaces” (Lotman 1977: 229), but also to create a division, for example between insiders and outsiders, rich and poor or the living and the dead. According to Gräf and Schmölzer (2009: 10) a boundary does not only define the inside of a system, but also establishes a barrier against the outside. Thus, boundaries are excluding and including at the same time. Open and closed spaces implicate not only in- and outsiders within an in- and outside, but carry further connotative implications: closed space may be connected to warmth and security, whereas open space can trigger associations with cold, enmity and strangeness. (Lotman 1977: 229) As Gräf and Schmöller (2009: 10) describe, a boundary always symbolises a “Übergangsraum” (Gräf und Schmölzer 2009: 10) in which forms of transmission, transition or transgression can take place. The boundary is of further significance for the literary text as, in Lotman’s theory, the concept of event is based on a border crossing. “An event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the border of a semantic field”, states Lotman (1977: 233). An event, the “smallest unit of plot construction” (Lotman 1977: 232), is thus the transgression of the boundary within a text and as this event is embedded in a semantic field, one event can lead to another event and thus establish a chain of events which becomes a plot (Lotman 1977: 233f). Lotman (1977:

24 238) in the following summarises and reduces any plot to this basic principle: “the crossing of the basic topological border in the plot’s spatial structure.” Since the event, the basis for any plot, has been described as the transgression of a border, the divided spheres in the diegesis of the story are closely connected with the characters acting in the story. The characters act within their restricted sphere and if they are potential heroes, they struggle to cross the border that divides their own sphere from the opposing sphere. If they actually manage to transgress the formerly impenetrable border, they perform the so-called “revolutionary event” (Lotman 1977: 234). Consequently, an event has to involve a type of violation of rules or some transgression of expected behaviour. “An event is that which did occur, though it could also have not occurred” and “an event always involves the violation of some prohibition”, Lotman (1977: 236) describes. Following Lotman, a plot needs to consist of three obligatory elements: a semantic field that is divided into two sub-fields, a border that divides the sub-fields and is principally impenetrable and a “hero-agent” (Lotman 1977: 240) who is able to transgress the border and change from his or her semantic field to the “anti-field” (Lotman 1977: 241). Talking about one central border in literary texts does not tell all the truth, since all other kinds of barriers or obstacles in the text are linked to this one central border. Lotman names false friends or hostile weather conditions as examples for further hindrance that make the movement of the agent hero towards the border difficult. The agent hero in a text is different from the other persona within the same semantic field; the hero is marked by activity, as he or she is the one who breaks away from his or her social milieu and ventures the revolutionary transgression into a different semantic field. Consequently, verbs of action can often be found in connection with the hero-agent and they signify his or her active and mobile status.

7.2. The Relevant Elements of the House

“Most of life, after all, is spent within four walls, and the space they define, the objects that fill them, the prospects on which they open, inevitably influence and express our consciousness.” (Tristram 1989: 2)

7.2.1. The Door: Protection and Secrecy

One central element that represents the border between the threatening outside and the safe intimate inside is the door. The door carries different symbolic meanings as Rohmer (2008: 388f) describes. The door signifies protection and resistance, especially if the door can be locked. A locked door, however, also connotes secrecy since whatever is hidden behind a

25 locked door might be something illicit. As the door is the border between the sharp dichotomy of inside and outside, it is also a symbol of transition; with the door of a private house, this transition takes place between the public and the private realm. Inside the house, the rules and order of the family are dominant, while outside public regulations of society prevail. In order to lock a door a key is needed; and the key itself can be read as a literary symbol. In the same way as the locked door, a key can become a symbol of secrecy, best exemplified in the folktale Bluebeard where the forbidden key reveals the secret bloody crimes of King Bluebeard. In contrast, the key is also employed as a metaphorical symbol of love, since the lover uses a metaphorical key to win the heart of the beloved one. Sigmund Freud was as well aware of the significance of doors, their status of being locked or unlocked and the sexual connotation of keys and their fitting keyholes. According to Freud (quoted in Tristram 1989: 244), keyholes equal with “orifices in the body” that can be either open or locked; the key that opens it is in Freud’s view a “decidedly male symbol”.

7.2.2. The Window: Border and Frame

In the same way as the door, the window represents an “interface where the inside and the outside meet” (Senn 2000: 57). In her interesting dissertation, Cathrin Senn explores the function of windows and window gazing in English literature. The two aspects of the window Senn (2000: 67) focuses on in her interpretation are the window’s role as a border “producing a dichotomy of inside and outside” and the window’s function of framing the observer’s gaze. The window does not only separate observer (subject) and the observed object, but the window’s frame also restricts the observer’s field of vision. Thus, the window as a frame becomes a symbol of the “human being’s limited interpretation of ‘reality’” and “the subjective selection of the individual with his or her particular approach to the world” (Senn 2000: 68). The framing imagery of the window may also symbolise literature as such, since the fictional story is presented through the lens of a narrator or author. When Henry James describes the essence of literature through his metaphoric “house of fiction”, he creates the imagery that at each window of this house stands a figure and “[h]e and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less […]” (James 1908/1984: 45). Thus, the window can be understood as a symbol of the subjective perception of the world presented by the narrator of a story. The distancing function of the window not only establishes the relationship between observer and the observed, but also has excluding qualities as “the imprisoned mind […] looks out on the world” (Senn 2000: 46). Furthermore, the gaze through the window offers an

26 opportunity in fiction to present the setting of the story (Senn 2000: 54). Further aspects relevant for the interpretation of windows in fiction will be employed in the analysis of the individual novels. Door and window are the dominant borders that can be found within the house; both represent an interface diving inside and outside; however, while the door offers an exit for the body, the window only allows exit to the mind, as Senn (2000: 58) describes. And as Tristram (1989: 247) attests for the relevance of windows in literary houses, “[s]tories can occur when one looks out as well as in”.

7.2.3. Korrespondenz : Space as a Mirror

One of the framing ideas for this thesis is the claim that the later McEwan employs a so-called ‘muted postmodernism’, meaning that he combines postmodernist techniques with traditional story telling; therefore, one of the aims of the analysis will be to investigate to what extent McEwan uses the interior of houses as a tool for characterisation. “Rooms […] reflect the personalities of their inhabitants”, state Briganti and Mezei (2004: 156) and therefore, the concept of “Korrespondenz” (Kullmann 1995: 26) between a human and his surroundings should be applied. This concept originally describes a so-called “Seelenspiegelung in der Landschaft” as Dethloff and Neuschäfer (2005: 23) term it; the fictional landscape is used to mirror and convey certain moods and emotions. This phenomenon has been described in German literature of sensibility and during the period of ‘Sturm und Drang’ (Dethloff and Neuschäfer 2005: 23). Kullmann describes this technique of creating an analogous relationship between humans and nature in English literature of the nineteenth century: Die motivsyntaktischen Formen dieser ‘Korrespondenz’ von Mensch und Natur sind […] die Zuweisung von Symbolbedeutungen an die Natur, der Vergleich von menschlichen Emotionen und Naturphänomenen und schließlich die Schaffung einer Parallele zu menschlichen Emotionen in der Natur mit Hilfe der beseelenden Vermenschlichung von Naturphänomenen. (Kullmann 1995: 26)

This idea of “Korrespondenznatur“ (Dethloff and Neuschäfer 2005: 23), meaning to have inside emotions mirrored in the immediate surrounding of the character seems to be a fruitful approach for the analysis of the function of houses in McEwan’s novels. Houses and their inner structures are used as tools for characterisation and interpretation and the inside of the house offers implements that function as semiotic signs. Therefore, based on the idea of a corresponding relationship between characters and the space they live in, McEwan’s novels will be read as a system of signs.

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8. Form and function of the House in The Cement Garden (1978) 6

The Cement Garden , the first McEwan novel to be analysed, starts with the death of the father, a “little story” (CG: 9) Jack, the narrator and 14-year-old son, only includes to explain why he and his sister have so much cement for their use. This cement horded in the cellar was originally intended for his father’s plan to concrete the whole garden – “it will be tidier” (CG: 16) he argued, as he could no longer cultivate and care for his symmetric garden after his heart attack. After father’s death, also mother – both of them never get a name – soon becomes bedridden by an unnamed, wasting disease. As she dies, the four children, Jack (15), his older sister Julie (16), his younger sister Sue (12) and the little brother Tom (6) decide to “keep mum” and burry her with the unused cement in a trunk in the cellar. Malcolm (2002: 8) describes what now starts as the children’s “slide into anarchy” as they “escape from all authority and traditional moral and social standards”. Jack passes his days by sleeping, masturbating and adoring his beautiful sister Julie; Julie soon assumes the role of the surrogate mother, especially for little Tom who first wants to be dressed like a girl and later regresses to infantility; Sue becomes the family’s chronicler as she documents the eventless days in her diary. As Malcolm (2002: 46) observes, they allow the house “to fill with decaying refuse” while the ill-made tomb in the cellar cracks and the odour of mother’s decaying corpse slowly fills the house. When Julie brings an outsider, her boyfriend Derek, into the house of the isolated children’s world, the novel heads towards its climax: as Derek smashes open the trunk in the cellar, Jack and Julie have incestuous intercourse in the bedroom next to Tom sleeping in his cot. In the final scene, all children gather in the bedroom, awaiting the authorities, who approach the house with flashing blue light.

8.1. Children Running Wild: Tradition Revisited

The themes negotiated within Ian McEwan’s first novel are variegated; as Childs (2006: 33) argues, one of the central tensions in the novel is the struggle between culture and nature. Already the oxymoronic title combining a material – cement – typical of human buildings, and a place thought of as a refuge for nature – garden – suggests this basic dichotomy as one of the central topics. Furthermore, according to Childs (2002: 33), the novel questions the “lines between the social and the personal […] the right and the wrong” as well

6 McEwan, Ian (1978/1997). The Cement Garden . London: Vintage. In the following quoted with the abbreviation CG and the page number in parenthesis: (CG: 3). 28 as taboo topics like incest and Oedipal complex. With all these aspects, the book focuses on childhood and the question, what happens if children and teenagers are freed of any parental control. With this background, The Cement Garden stands in a literary tradition, most notably shaped by William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954). In contrast to Golding’s children, the brothers and sisters in The Cement Garden do not start to fight each other or run wild, but stay together and try to protect their isolated being within an excluded house apart from the rest of society. Liberated from social restrains, the aspect that McEwan’s children let ‘run wild’ is their sexuality, as Childs (2006: 34) points out, and in this development they struggle to assume family patterns and roles their parents left vacant after their death. Another literary tradition has to be mentioned in connection with The Cement Garden , especially with view to the topic of analysis of this thesis: McEwan’s first novel uses typical elements of the Gothic tale. In fact, regarding the decaying house and the corpse buried in the house’s cellar that re-invades the world of the living, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be seen as a pretext to The Cement Garden . Malcolm (2002: 52) also stresses the Gothic features in the novel; the most obvious of these ingredients is the house as the central locus. As Redling (2011: 101) described for the Gothic tale one of the model ingredients are “decaying castles and […] underground vaults” which are set in remote eerie landscapes. All this elements typical of the “Gothic machinery” (Botting 1996, quoted in Redling 2011: 101) can be found in McEwan’s first novel. The locus of the story is the family house which does not seem appealing: “Our house was old and large. It was built to look a little like a castle, with thick walls, squat windows and crenelations above the front door. Seen from across the road it looked like the face of someone concentrating, trying to remember.” (CG: 21) Thus, the house is perceived as an old castle with a façade resembling a grim looking face. Maybe this is one reason why “no one ever came to visit us” (CG: 21) as Jack relates. “As far as I could remember, the last people to visit the house had been the ambulance men who took my father away.” This aspect underlines the house’s status of being isolated and set in a remote landscape. As Redling (2011: 103) observes the dominant theme in “The Fall of the House of Usher”7 is “physical and psychological deterioration”. The physical decline is obvious in the Usher’s house itself as the narrator, a friend of landlord Roderick Usher, describes the house as having “vacant eye-like windows” (FHU: 317), crumbling stones within its brickwork and a fatal crack in its façade. In approaching the house of Usher, the narrator travels through “a

7 Poe, Edgar Allan (1984). “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839]. In: Edgar Allan Poe Poetry, Tales and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America. 317-336. In the following quoted with the abbreviation FHU and the page number in parenthesis: (FHU: 317). 29 singularly dreary tract of land” (FHU: 317) and perceives “a sense of insufferable gloom” emitted by the decaying mansion and its desolate surrounding. The castle-like home of the unnamed family in The Cement Garden “had once stood in a street full of houses. Now it stood on empty land where stinging nettles were growing round torn corrugated tin” (CG: 21). The Gothic resemblance is intensified through the impression of isolation. Furthermore, a similar impression of the gloom, the narrator detects in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, is also present in The Cement Garden as a heat wave paralyses the whole house and its surrounding; “The days were too long, it was too hot, the house seemed to have fallen asleep. […] And even while it was hot, the sun never quite broke through a high, yellowish cloud; everything I looked at merged and seemed insignificant in the glare” (CG: 65). What is named a gloom in Poe’s Gothic tale is termed a glare by McEwan, but both occurrences suggest an unpleasant, even uncanny atmosphere surrounding the house. Beside the parallels in setting, there are common elements in the course of events and themes dealt with in the tale and the novel. In approaching the house of his friend Usher, the unnamed narrator suggests the “Usher race” (FHU: 318) has a tradition of incestuous relationships, which could be a reason for the “mental disorder” (FHU: 318) Roderick Usher suffers from. After the narrator spends many hours with Usher filled with artistic activity in order to cheer him up, the landlord suddenly informs his visitor one evening that his sister Madeleine “was no more” (FHU: 328). Then follows a private burial scene in the mansion’s vault, in the narrator’s words a “region of horror” (FHU: 329), with the two men carrying Madeleine’s coffin down to the vault. Taking a last glance at Madeleine, who turns out to be the twin sister of Roderick, the narrator notices “a faint blush upon the bosom and the face” (FHU: 329). Roderick’s decreasing mental decline in the days that follow is the prelude to a scene of “primal horror” (Frank/ Magistrale 1997, quoted in Redling 2011: 103). In the last part of the story, Usher discloses to his guest in the mid of a violent storm that they have buried his sister alive and the noises, his guest hears, are produced by his sister struggling up her way from her tomb. Madeleine’s ‘resurrection’ from death culminates in falling on her brother in an incestuous embrace and bearing him “to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (FHU: 335). In horror, the narrator flees from the mansion and watches it collapse from a distance. While the mother in The Cement Garden is not buried alive and does not resurrect from the world of the dead, she, in the same way as Madeleine, refuses to accept her exile in the cellar and re-enters the house – at least through her decaying body’s stench that fills the house. Similar to the collapse of the Usher mansion, the house in The Cement Garden is

30 shaken in its very fundament as Julie’s boyfriend Derek smashes up the mother’s tomb in the cellar while Jack and Julie are enacting their incestuous intercourse. Consequently, Jack “heard and felt a deep regular pulse, a great, dull slow thudding which seemed to rise through the house and shake it” (CG: 126). “The set of correlations between the decaying house and the physical as well as psychological disintegration of the last of the long line of Ushers make manifest the inherent bond between family and house and foreshadow the ultimate demise of the House of Usher.” What Redling (2011: 104) states for Poe’s Gothic tale from 1839 can also be applied to McEwan’s 1978 novel: the decay of the family, the collapse of norms and rules within the family home is mirrored in the house, its interior and its garden, as will be shown in the following.

8.2. The Setting: A Family Home

To identify the house in The Cement Garden as the central place of action is an obvious interpretation. Except for Jack’s little excursion to the snooker hall with his sister’s boyfriend Derek (CG: 93-98), the story’s action is set within and around the family’s house. This house is firstly presented as an isolated place: “Our house had once stood in a street full of houses. Now it stood on empty land where stinging nettles were growing round torn corrugated tin.” (CG: 21) Even before the reader gets an impression of the house’s outlook or its interior, the homodiegetic narrator Jack indicates the house’s remote location. As Ryan (1994: 19) describes, the house is situated within a “bleak, apocalyptic landscape” and Malcolm (2002: 57) as well notices the “urban decay and desolation which surrounds the children’s house”. Remembering Bachelard (1964: 27) and his remarks on the “house’s situation in the world” as a metaphor for the human’s situation in the world, the house’s lonely stand in an area of decay without any neighbouring settlements, the children’s situation in the world can be read as one of abundance and isolation. The setting suggests that the family and their home are excluded from any form of society. Before his heart attack, the father even intended to give this exclusion a physical presence in form of a high wall he planned to build “round his special world” (CG: 14). Their status of being excluded is further intensified by the fact that they never have any visitors in their house; Jack states: “No one ever came to visit us. Neither my mother nor my father when he was alive had any real friends outside the family.” (CG: 21) This passage indicates the isolation of the nucleus family even before the parents’ death. As their parents do not invite friends to their home, the children also

31 follow the “unspoken family rule” (CG: 19) and never bring friends to their house. Also Tom, the youngest one, is forbidden to take anybody home to the excluded realm of the family. As Bachelard (1964: 27) remarks, a house standing on its own secluded from urban settlement conveys a stronger impression of sheltering and intimacy. The lonely house is subject to the “storms of the universe” (Bachelard 1964: 27) and thus the sheltering effect inside increases. The house in The Cement Garden could be read in this way as well: The house’s thick walls suggest a securing effect against the apocalyptic landscape that surrounds it. The house’s outward appearance with a façade resembling “the face of someone concentrating” (CG: 21) seems to strengthen the isolated status of the children’s home. As Ryan (1994: 23) observes, the children’s house is an embodiment of the “impenetrable privacy of their universe” and thus the house’s thick walls only intensify the impression of remoteness – from other houses, from society and, most importantly, from social rules and norms.

8.2.1. A House of Decay

The central house in The Cement Garden becomes a symbol of decay. As the family, originally inhabiting the house falls apart, the house does so as well. Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do – here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. But in this burned-out place there was no order, everything had gone. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared. There was a mattress in one room, buckled between the blackened, broken joists. The wall was crumbling away round the window, and the ceiling had fallen in without quite reaching the ground. The people who slept on that mattress, I thought, really believed they were in ‘the bedroom’. They took it for granted that it would always be so. I thought of my own bedroom, of Julie’s, my mother’s, all rooms that would one day collapse. (CG: 37)

As Jack inspects one of the burned down “prefab[s]” (CG: 37) in the deserted streets surrounding his own house, he implicitly anticipates the decay and disorder that will soon fill his own house. As Malcolm (2002: 55) observes for the setting in The Cement Garden , “the features of that setting are very clear. It is one of utter decay and disorder”. This decay is already evident before the parents’ death, most apparently in the father’s garden which he “had constructed rather than cultivated” (CG: 14): “Weeds pushed up through the cracks in the paving stones, part of the rockery collapsed and the little pond dried up. The dancing Pan fell on its side and broke in two” (CG: 16). These first indications of a process of decay visible outside of the house will soon be followed by an overt decay within the thick walls of the family mansion. Thus, the decay of the house and its interior corresponds with the decay of order and social norms within the children’s reduced family. The concept of

32 “Korrespondenz” (Kullmann 1995: 26) between inner life and exterior setting is thus applied in The Cement Garden as will be shown in the following. The first aspects of disorder finding its way into family life are alterations of the house’s interior and the employment of rooms. As mother’s illness advances, she becomes bedridden; with her, pieces of the living room’s furniture move to her bedroom. “Sue and I were manoeuvring the dining-room table into her bedroom” (CG: 44), Jack narrates, as the children had decided to “eat our meals in the bedroom with mother” (CG: 44).

In the same way as Jack found the burned-out house in disorder, his own house now enters the path to chaos and decay. Simultaneously, he quickly adapts to the new situation, re-orders his idea of the interior of the home and settles himself with stating that he could no longer imagine the table in the dining room where it belonged (cf. CG 45). As the garden dissolves into disorder after father’s first heart attack, the disorder within the house starts to flourish in parallel to the decline of mother’s health. Thus, the decay of the characters – in terms of health – is mirrored in their typical surroundings: father’s dominant refuge was the garden which he constructed after his plans with “narrow flagstone paths which made elaborate curves to visit flower beds” (CG: 14) and with a single row of marigolds he alone calls “the hanging garden” (CG: 14). Mother’s decay, on the other hand, is mirrored in the growing disorder within the house, which starts with the rearrangement of a table, but soon, after her death, gets much worse. As the two sisters and Jack have buried their dead mother in a trunk in the house’s cellar and covered her in cement, they have the house solely for them. Jack recounts a situation when both parents left the four children at home for attending a funeral and remembers Julie giving out a “whoop of delight”(CG: 64) and a “wild, violent pillow-fight” (CG: 64). These parent-free hours were a remarkable event in his childhood memories: “It was no more than a few hours, but this time seemed to occupy a whole stretch of my childhood” (CG: 64). Also after his mother’s death, Jack feels a sense of “adventure and freedom which I hardly dared admit to myself and which was derived from the memory of that day five years ago” (CG: 64f). This emotion, however, does not last very long. “But there was no excitement now”, Jack states, as the days are too long, it is too hot outside, and “the house seemed to have fallen asleep” (CG: 65). In the children’s state of paralysis, the house is left to dissolve into “domestic entropy” (Ryan 1994: 23). As Jack decides to abandon “all the rituals of personal hygiene” (CG: 20) and no longer washes himself, changes his clothes or brushes his teeth, also the house is no longer cared for. Sue chronicles Jack’s decay in hygiene in her diary she is addressing to her dead mother: “He has not changed his clothes since you died. He does not wash his hands or

33 anything and he smells horrible. We hate it when he touches a loaf of bread.” (CG: 90) Jack’s horrible smell, however, is not the only disgusting appearance within the decaying house. The kitchen turns into a “place of stench and clouds of flies” (CG: 67), but “[n]one of us felt like doing anything about it beyond keeping the kitchen door shut. It was too hot” (CG: 67). From the kitchen, the flies, a clear indication of rotting and decay, spread through the house and “hung in thin clouds by the windows” (CG: 67). The kitchen is further decorated with “mould-covered plates” (CG: 78) and “a huge pile of rubbish” (CG: 78) that spreads across the floor. The kitchen floor itself is also a mess: “I walked on the sides of my bare feet because the floor around the sink was covered with something yellow and sticky, probably spilt orange juice” (CG: 66). Jack, the narrator, however, does not bother himself with cleaning the sticky floor, he is also indifferent to the cloud of flies that “hummed around my face” (CG: 66). The house’s degeneration into “a disorder of decayed food and dirt” (Malcolm 2002: 63) is also visible in the children’s individual bedrooms. Julie’s bedroom is first present as the location where Julie and Jack carry out their secret game with their younger sister Sue. “The game was that Julie and I were scientists examining a specimen from outer space.” (CG: 11) The siblings barricade Julie’s bedroom door with a chair, strip Sue naked and investigate their sister’s body. Sue’s bedroom is also a place of secrecy as she keeps filling her diary with daily reports addressed to her dead mother. As Sue opens her locked door for Jack and lets him in, he notices that the “floor of her bedroom was covered with books, some of them open and placed face downwards” (CG: 88). The books on the floor and the diary she keeps under her pillow describe Sue’s role within the household: she is the one chronicling the eventless days. As Jack asks her, if she does not ever get tired of “sitting in here all day reading” (CG: 88) Sue answers, “I like reading […] and there’s nothing else to do” (CG: 88). Thus, Sue spends her days in an entropic room crowded with books and her diary. The matter is not developed further within the novel, but one could argue that Sue flees from the chaotic claustrophobic house into the parallel worlds of her books and keeps a secret world of her own within her diary where her mother still is an attachment figure. Jack’s bedroom best shows the decaying process dominating the house. Furthermore, he himself understands his messy room as a manifestation of his personality.

[…] I sat up and stared about me. On the floor were Coca Cola tins, dirty clothes, fish and chips wrappers, several wire coat-hangers, a box that once contained rubber bands. I stood up and looked at where I had been lying, the folds and rucks in the yellowish-grey sheets, large stains with distinct edges. I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself. (CG: 117)

34 Jack has not only dispensed with all forms of personal hygiene, but also allowed his bedroom to turn into a mirror of his bodily decay, as he himself realises by stating that every piece of the rubbish crowding his room remembers him of himself. In the same way as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 2) described the house as a “second layer of clothes”, Jack perceives his room as a representation of himself. This is already Jack’s second acknowledgment of the telling character of room interiors. Thinking back of the opening quote of this chapter, Jack, in investigating the burnt-out prefab in his neighbourhood, also makes obvious the constructed character of the idea of a house and its interior. In becoming aware of the arbitrariness in declaring the space within four walls “the bedroom”, Jack highlights the performative factor in furnishing and inhabiting a house. This proves that a room and its interior has to be read as a reflection of its inhabitant’s character – or the state of a group of siblings trying to make a living deprived of the ordering and restricting control of their parents.

8.2.2. The Decaying Garden

The growing disorder within the house mirrors a decay with view to social norms and rules. Furthermore, this decay is also present in the house’s garden. As has been described, out in the garden nature is winning back ground. In the course of the story, the concrete paths in the garden further crumble, it gets hard to “find the steps under the weeds and thistles and the pond was a curling piece of dirty blue plastic” (CG: 104). The idea of Korrespondenz between the exterior setting and inner processes is thus further fulfilled in the portrayal of the decaying garden. The overgrown paths in the garden do not only mirror the decay and violation of socially acceptable behaviour within the children’s realm but also represent a metaphoric imagery of a struggle fought by the children: the struggle between culture and nature. The father tried to cultivate and suppress nature in the garden by implementing concrete paths and paving stones in his garden. After his death, the suppressed nature resurrects and “[w]eeds pushed up through the cracks in the paving stones” (CG: 16). With the death of the person imposing cultural restrictions on a natural environment, nature wins back ground and violates the father’s normative measures. In the same way, natural desire wins ground in the children’s life as with the mother the regulating power vanishes. This aspect of the struggle between culture and nature will be further developed in the analysis according to Lotman’s theorems.

35 8.2.3. Lost in time

Malcolm (2002: 63) describes that McEwan’s first novel “depicts a collapse of norms, rules, and order”, which is true for the house as well as for their daily lives. As has been described, Jack experiences the house to fall asleep with his mother’s death; consequently, the children abandon what one would understand as a daily routine. They do not have regular meals anymore as for “a week after the burial we did not eat a cooked meal. Julie […] came home with bags of shopping, but the vegetables and meat she bought lay around untouched until they had to be thrown away” (CG: 67). Instead, they eat “bread, cheese, peanut butter, biscuits and fruit” (CG: 67) and allow their youngest brother to gorge himself “on bars of chocolate” (CG: 67). The family bonds seem dissolving as each of the siblings spends his days independently “slipping into slumber” (Childs 2006: 37). Sue, as has been described before, spends the days of their parentless summer school holidays reading in her locked room since “there’s nothing else to do” (CG: 88). Her elder sister Julie continues with sunbathing on the crumbling rockery of her father’s garden: “She lay on her belly, head cradled on her forearms and face turned away from me towards the waste land next door where great clusters of stinging nettles were dying of thirst” (CG: 40). The persisting summer heat does not only tan Julie’s skin dark brown, but also has a paralysing and even narcotic impact on house and children. Jack describes his day as a wandering on a fine line between sleeping and being awake. “I woke in the late morning, masturbated and dozed off again. I had dreams, not exactly nightmares, but bad dreams that I struggled to wake out of. Some afternoons I fell asleep in the armchair even though I had only been awake a couple of hours.” (CG: 77). As the house gets lost in disorder and decay, the children seem to get lost in time too; as Malcolm (2002: 54) observes, it seems as if narrator Jack “has lost any connection with any established, external scheme of things” and the characters only refer to their own scheme of time: All temporal specifications are linked to an “internal frame of reference” (Malcolm 2002: 54) and are only meaningful to Jack and the rest of the family. His temporal locations are limited to expressions like “in the early summer of my fourteenth year” (CG: 9), “shortly before my fifteenth birthday” (CG: 20) or “three weeks after mother died” (CG: 75). The children themselves articulate their feeling of being lost in time as Julie states, “I lost all sense of time. It feels like it’s always been like this. I can’t really remember how it used to be when Mum was alive and I can’t really imagine anything changing” (CG: 123). Narrator Jack also talks about his blurred perception of time, saying, “Except for the times I go down into the

36 cellar I feel like I’m asleep. Whole weeks go by without me noticing, and if you asked me what happened three days ago I wouldn’t be able to tell you” (CG: 123). This aspect enhances the isolated situation of the children and as they do not seem to adhere to any given standards of time, they suspend themselves from moral rules imposed by society. The children diverge from a regular daily routine and let the days drift by. However, the absence of social control within the children’s isolated house leads to more extreme forms of transgressing social borders.

8.3. Transgressing Social Borders

As Malcolm (2002: 8) states the children in The Cement Garden “slide into anarchy” and manage to “escape from all authority and traditional moral and social standards”. This leads to events within the house that are generally considered taboo. According to Maletzke (1996: 97) taboos exist in every culture as strict prohibitions: “Gegenstände, die man nicht berührt; Orte, die man nicht betritt; Wörter, die man nicht ausspricht”. Taboos thus establish codes of behaviour that are present in every culture and members of these individual cultures practice and accept these taboos unwittingly. Taboos are passed on from parents or teachers to the next generation, often unconsciously, and they declare what is right and wrong, which behaviour is appropriate, which not and which topics one talks about and which topics are only dealt with in private (Schröder 2003, online). The word taboo, which stems from Polynesia and was brought to the Western World by James Cook in 1777 (Schröder 2003, online), thus describes an unwritten law which prohibits to talk about or do certain things, because of a society’s conceptions (Schröder 2003, online). Taboos are not only unwritten, they further carry no direct penalties „beyond the anxiety and embarrassment arising from a breach of strongly intrenched custom” (Mead 1934: 503). Therefore, the breaking of a taboo is not implicitly followed by a codified penalty; instead, feelings of shame and guilt follow and the offender of a taboo is penalised by isolation and avoidance by the community. Taboos are divided according to two primary categories: non- verbal taboos prohibiting inappropriate behaviour and actions, and verbal taboos declaring topics about which one should not communicate or only communicate in specific discourses (Schröder 2003, online). They all share the same function: “das soziale Handeln in den jeweiligen gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen entsprechend zu regulieren, die (positiven und negativen) Extreme abzustecken, Orientierungsmuster und Verhaltensschemata zu bieten, auch Eigentum zu sichern, also die soziale Ordnung zu festigen” (Betz 1978: 146). This last aspect, securing social order, is essential for the analysis of The Cement Garden . As has been

37 described before, social norms are absent and seem to be no longer effective within the secluded realm of the siblings. Repeatedly, the children, freed of any parental control, transgress social borders and break taboos. Even before their mother dies the children break taboos. By enacting what is in German called “Doktorspielchen” with their younger sister Sue, Jack and Julie show taboo behaviour as they investigate Sue’s body, even her “little flower made of flesh” (CG: 11). Furthermore, Jack uses the imagery of Julie’s fingers between her sister’s legs as an arousing fantasy for masturbating. With the death of the mother, however, the house falls in decay and with it social norms seem to apply no longer. The mother’s burial itself is a “breach of social norms” as Malcolm (2002: 63) declares. One of Jack’s dreams offers a generic expression of the decay of regulating norms: I saw the corner of my bed and some of my clothes. In a large armchair at the side of my bed sat my mother staring at me with huge, hollow eyes. That’s because she’s dead, I thought. She was tiny and her feet hardly touched the floor. When she spoke her voice was so familiar that I could not imagine how I could have forgotten it so easily. But I could not understand exactly what she was saying. She used a strange word, ‘drubbing’ or ‘brudding’. ‘Can’t you stop drubbing,’ she said, ‘even while I’m talking to you?’ ‘I’m not doing anything,’ I said, and noticed as I glanced down that there were no clothes on the bed and that I was naked and masturbating in front of her. My hand flew backwards and forwards like a shuttle on a loom. I told her, ‘I’ can’t stop, it’s nothing to do with me.’ ‘What would your father say,’ she said sadly, ‘if he was alive?’ As I woke up I was saying out loud, ‘But you’re both dead.’ (CG: 87f)

As Jack transgresses from his dream back into reality, he declares the reason why the house is falling into anarchy and why the children no longer adhere to social norms: the parents are both dead, there is no regulating power present within the house and thus the children enact taboo behaviour. Also Tom, the youngest brother starts to transgress social norms and expectations. After being beaten up in school (CG: 43f) he decides that he would rather be a girl because, “you don’t get hit when you’re a girl” (CG: 43). Tom does not remain with wishing, he starts to transform himself and thus blur the boundaries between genders. His sisters enthusiastically dress him up as a girl through cutting their own skirts shorter and giving him a wig “fair and thick with curls” (CG: 70). Jack watches the scene as a silent and unseen observer and notices: “How easy it was to become someone else. […] They are only clothes and a wig, I thought, it is Tom dressed up. But I was looking at another person, someone who could expect a life quite different from Tom’s.” (CG: 70) Through cross-dressing, Tom transgresses one essential border of society: the border between male and female. This border is one of the major means of orientation in social life.

38 As Tom first metamorphoses into a girl in his outer appearance, the six-year-old boy in the course of the story regresses into the state of babyhood. When Jack returns home from his excursion to the snooker hall with Derek, he finds Julie and Tom in the living room (CG: 98). Julie is rocking Tom on her lap and he is sucking his thumb wearing a napkin tied around his neck like a bib. Julie explains to Jack that, “Tom wants to be a little baby” (CG: 98) and as she carries Tom up to her bedroom, Jack finds the old brass cot from the cellar right next to Julie’s bed: “It was all made up ready, with one side down. I was annoyed to see the cot and the bed so close together” (CG: 99). The relationship between Tom and Julie develops into one of mother and baby, as Jack observes, and Tom’s regress to babyhood solely depends on Julie’s attention: “Other times he [Tom] tore his bib off and ran outside to play with his friends and would not be a baby again till he came back inside and found Julie” (CG: 101). Furthermore, Tom also seems to change physically into babyhood as “his eyes grew larger and further apart, his mouth slackened and he seemed to sink inside himself” (CG: 101) whenever Julie treats him like a baby. Jack becomes an interested observer of Tom’s metamorphosis into a baby and Julie’s metamorphosis into a mother. “I could not resist watching them together” (CG: 102), he says. “I trailed after them, fascinated, waiting to see what would happen.” (CG: 102) Tom does not like to share Julie’s attention with observer Jack and shouts at him one evening as he follows them again up into Julie’s bedroom: “‘Go away! You go away!’” (CG: 102). Julie, however, seems to detect that Tom is not the only one being jealous with regard to her awareness. As Jack tells Julie about his concerns that playing baby would harm Tom, Julie replies, “’I think someone is jealous’” (CG: 102). This constellation suggesting Oedipal desire is only one aspect of the complex psychological patterns present in The Cement Garden . At the end of these merged forms of desire and jealousy stands the final violation of social norms, the incestuous intercourse between brother and sister, Jack and Julie. First, however, the psychological implications deserve a closer investigation.

8.4. A Psychological Reading

According to Malcolm (2002: 51) the novel is “a psychological study of adolescence”. On this level, it involves complex patterns of tabooed desire and sexual practices. The central position of this psychological net inhabits Jack. There can be detected an Oedipal conflict due to Jack’s hostility towards his father; the first sentence of the novel already supports this reading, as Jack, the narrator, opens his story by stating: “I did not kill my father, but I

39 sometimes felt I had helped him on his way” (CG: 9). Furthermore, Jack admits that he made sure that his father carries as much of the heavy cement bags as he did (CG: 13), although he knew that this was dangerous for his father, who suffered from a heart condition. To Jack, his father’s death is not more than a “little story” (CG: 9). The fact that his father’s death coincides with his first ejaculation, “a landmark in my own physical growth” (CG: 9), is more important. According to Ryan (1994: 20) the patriarchal father not only dies while Jack is experiencing his first ejaculation upstairs in the bathroom, but Jack then manifests his triumph over the father’s hegemony in the house through erasing the impression his father’s dead body had left on the wet concrete (CG: 18). The Oedipal constellation involves not only envy towards a powerful father, but also desire for the mother. One scene in the novel is suggestive of a desire Jack feels for his real mother: Jack feels guilty after behaving coldly towards his mother and returns back home from his way to school. He stops in front of the window, watches her through the window, but then runs away when she calls out for him (CG: 24f). According to Malcolm (2002: 51) this scene reflects the Oedipal longings for and rejection of his mother. Apart from this scene, however, Jack’s desire is fixed on his sister Julie, which adds a further complex notion to the Oedipal construct in The Cement Garden . As Ian McEwan himself declares, he wanted to establish “a situation in which the oedipal and the incestuous are identical” (Hamilton 1978, quoted in Childs 2006: 35). McEwan explains that through removing the controlling power of the parents, “the oedipal and the incestuous are the definite emotions” (Hamilton 1978, quoted in Childs 2006: 35). For Jack, these emotions are embodied in his sister Julie. He feels his incestuous desire for his beautiful older sister and Julie develops into a mother figure as she not only mothers baby Tom, but also “assumes control of the household to become the undisguised, though not undisputed, mother substitute, looking after her brothers and sister” (Roger 1996, quoted in Childs 2006: 39). The blend of the incestuous desire for his sister and the Oedipal desire for a mother figure in the person of Julie becomes obvious in their final love scene: “She took a nipple between her fingers again and found my mouth. As I sucked and that same shudder ran through my sister’s body” (CG: 126). Like a breastfeeding mother, Julie offers her nipple to Jack, who is not only her brother, but also her lover in that moment of their incestuous unification. Thus, Julie embodies two desirable female figures for Jack: first, she is an object of Jack’s incestuous sexual desire, which becomes obvious in several scenes; there is a sexual element in Jack’s tickling attack on July, which makes her pee her bed. According to Roger

40 (1996, quoted in Childs 2006: 39) this attack is “suggestive of rape”. A more explicit sexually loaded scene between Julie and Jack offers Jack’s rubbing sun lotion on Julie’s back: “I knelt between her open legs and squirted from the tube a pale, creamy fluid on to my palm” (CG: 40). As Jack rubs his sister’s sun-tanned shoulders with lotion, he can “just make out her breasts, obscure in the deep shade of her body” (CG: 40f). The reference to the act of masturbation is obvious in the choice of words and Jack flees “as soon as her legs were adequately coated” (CG: 41) from the garden into the house and hurries “upstairs to the bathroom” (CG: 41). Secondly, Julie assumes the position of a mother within the parentless household and thus fulfils Jack’s Oedipal desire. “Violation follows upon violation”, Malcolm (2002: 63) states describing the children’s indifference towards social norms and taboos they constantly transgress within their secluded realm in their house. As has been said, it started even before their parents’ death in secretly playing doctor in Julie’s bedroom; after both parents are dead, the mother’s burial in a cement-filled trunk in the cellar is a “breach of social norms” (Malcolm 2002: 63) that is followed by a house descending into “domestic entropy” (Ryan 1994: 23) and all four children abandoning a daily routine, drifting through time and space reading or masturbating. The final violation, however, is the worst taboo to be broken: the incest taboo. According to anthropology, incest is “almost universally condemned and is usually viewed with horror” (“Incest”, online). The incest taboo involves that “the closer the genetic relationship between two people, the stronger and more highly charged is the taboo prohibiting or discouraging sexual relations between them” (“Incest”, online). Thus, sexual intercourse as performed by Jack and Julie is highly condemnable. As Sigmund Freud outlined, the aversion against sexual intercourse between members of one family is not a naturally given instinct. In contrast, Freud (1974, online) argues that a human’s first sexual longings are regularly incestuous. The incest taboo exists to prohibit this natural human desire. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined a more elaborate concept of the incest taboo in human society: Lévi-Strauss (1984: 73) shows that different attempted explanations for the existence of an incest taboo were either concerned with natural or cultural sources. The taboo was either viewed as an instinctive repulsion or as a purely societal restraint. Lévi-Strauss (1984: 65) rejects the first approach: “[e]s besteht keinerlei Grund, etwas zu verbieten, das auch ohne Verbot nicht Gefahr liefe, begangen zu werden“. Thus, if there was a natural reluctance against incestuous relationships such a strict prohibition would not be necessary. Lévi-Strauss (1984: 73) does not view the taboo as either caused by nature or social restrictions; he rather

41 understands the incest taboo as a transformation: the transition from nature to culture. Lévi- Strauss (1984: 73f) argues: “[Das Inzestverbot ist] der grundlegende Schritt, dank dem, durch den und vor allem in dem sich der Übergang von der Natur zur Kultur vollzieht [...] und das Verfahren, mit dem die Natur sich selbst überwindet“. As the children are freed from parental control and excluded from any form of society, natural human desire prevails over the social taboo. As the series of violations started with playing doctor in Julie’s bedroom, it also finds its endpoint in the same room. The final act of transgressing social norms starts with naked Jack following Tom’s moans into Julie’s bedroom (CG: 118). He settles down with his brother, who is naked as well, in the cot and they start talking about their dead mother and Tom’s games with his friend Michael with whom he dresses up: “Sometimes we were Mummy and Daddy and sometimes we were Julie and you and sometimes we were Julie and Derek” (CG: 120), Tom explains their role-plays. Lying next to his little brother who has already regressed to babyhood, Jack himself also craves for a state of being free of responsibilities and obligations. As Julie finds “two bare babies” (CG: 121) in the cot in her room, an intimate approach of brother and sister starts. Julie undresses “briskly” (CG: 122) and they sit on her bed together, separated only by the small pile of clothes between them. As Jack and Julie are getting closer, Julie’s boyfriend Derek is presented as an intruding outsider in their talks. Julie tells Jack that “’Derek’s known for ages’” (CG: 122) about their mother in the trunk in the cellar. “’What upsets him is that we don’t let him in on it. […] He wants to be one of the family, you know, big smart daddy. He’s getting on my nerves.’” (CG: 122) Jack and Julie are not only getting closer through declaring Derek an outsider, they also move closer physically. Julie moves a little closer, Jack touches her arm “the way she had touched mine” (CG: 122), Julie locks her fingers into Jack’s, Jack takes Julie’s other hand, Julie stretches out her leg across Jack’s knee and finally they hug each other and “our arms and legs were in such a tangle that we fell sideways on the bed. We lay with our arms round each other’s necks and our faces close together. For a long time we talked about ourselves” (CG: 123). Brother and sister are approaching each other’s bodies gradually, step by step they are getting closer to their final climax. This approach is narrated with the same neutral voice that is not only a dominant feature of The Cement Garden , but also of McEwan’s early short stories. As Malcolm (2002: 15) states it is “very hard to detect any moral judgement of characters and situations […] the characters are what they are and they do what they do”.

42 An instance of moral judgement only appears when Derek enters the bedroom just in the moment when Jack closes his lips around Julie’s nipple (CG: 124). “Now I’ve seen it all”, (CG: 124) he comments the scene with a mournful voice and continues as a representative of social norms: “’It’s sick,’ he said loudly, ‘he’s your brother ’” (CG: 125). With another “’Sick!’”, he smashes the door behind him leaving the two siblings in their compromising posture. As has been described before, breaking of a taboo is often not penalised by a legal sentence; instead, shame and guilt as well as isolation and avoidance are the penalties awaiting those breaching an established taboo. Derek displays an expectable reaction after finding two siblings engaged in incestuous intercourse: he reacts with horror and disgust. Jack and Julie, however, do not embody the shame they should feel after Derek caught them in this compromising position. Instead, Julie locks the door and they resume their slow conquest of each other’s body. “Derek had been in the room such a short time that now it seemed as though we had imagined him” (CG: 125), Jack states. Thus, the siblings keep on going exploring each other’s body and suddenly Julie sits on top of Jack, “took hold of my penis and pulled it into her” (CG: 125). They have to break a last boundary as “[t]here was something soft in my way and as I grew larger inside her it parted and I was deep inside” (CG: 125) and Jack and Julie violate the last and most serious taboo by having sex. As has been outlined, the transgression of the incest taboo sets the dramatic endpoint to a series of violations of social norms. With this final violation, the children’s secluded life in the isolated house ends as “Julie’s boyfriend Derek and then the authorities arrive to break up Jack’s somniloquy, the family, and the concrete in the cellar” (Childs 2006: 37). In the moment Jack and Julie start to make love, the house is shaken by a “deep regular pulse, a great, dull slow thudding which seemed to rise through the house and shake it” (CG: 126). After their last violation of social norms, Derek shatters their mother’s tomb in the cellar, "the invisible foundation of their lives" (Ryan 1994: 20) with a sledgehammer and with their mother also regulating powers return to the secluded house. These regulating powers approach the house with “a revolving blue light” (CG: 127) on their cars that enters the house through the bedroom window before the authorities come up the path to the children’s house. The four children await the return of a normative system to their abandoned universe of the nuclear family in Julie’s locked bedroom, gathered around Tom’s cot in which he awakes. Julie gets the final sentence of the novel, kissing Tom with the words, “wasn’t that a lovely sleep” (CG: 127). The children’s regress to a dozed off life has come to an end, they awake from the dream they were living – freed of any parental control, living according to their own

43 rules. In the end, however, the sibling’s unification as a love-making couple is predominantly a means of keeping the family together and restoring traditional family roles within a house that has abandoned all kind of order (cf. Roger 1996, quoted in Childs 2006: 40). McEwan (1978, quoted in Childs 2006: 35) had the idea that “in the nuclear family the kind of forces that are being suppressed – the oedipal, incestuous forces – are also paradoxically the very forces which keep the family together”. Consequently, McEwan (1978, quoted in Childs 2006: 35) concluded, “if you remove the controls, you have a ripe anarchy in which the oedipal and the incestuous are the definitive emotions”. McEwan’s approach corresponds with Freud’s theory that the incest taboo exists in order to suppress an instinctive desire and that the first sexual desires in teenagers are regularly incestuous. With view to Levi-Strauss’ approach, the children reverse the transformation embodied in the incest taboo: they venture from culture back to nature as they overcome the taboo and have incestuous intercourse. As the children allow their repressed desires to be fulfilled, they simultaneously “adapt, and adapt to, the role models that the removed adults provided for them” (Childs 2006: 34). Julie has developed into the mothering figure of the abandoned house; in her incestuous unification with Jack, the siblings become “mummy and daddy” (CG: 120) making love in the bed next to Tom’s cot. Although the children seem to establish a traditional family structure, first their resurrected mother and then normative forces bring an end to their lives in the isolated house far away from norms and regulations of society.

8.5. Applying Lotman

In Lotman’s theory, borders play the central role within artistic texts. In the preceding chapters, a number of transgressions of social norms and boundaries have been recounted. To apply Lotman’s theory, it is necessary to identify the topological, the semantic and the topographical spheres that are separated by these borders.

8.5.1. Inside vs. Outside

As Lotman suggests, literary space is first separated topologically by oppositions, such as ‘high vs. low’ or ‘inside vs. outside’. These oppositions are semantically loaded and physically represented in the topography of the narrated world. The topological opposition I would like to postulate for The Cement Garden is the opposition ‘inside versus outside’. As has been described in length before, the family house is the central place of action. The house is presented as the children’s “insulated domestic retreat” (Ryan 1994: 19) conveying feelings of isolation and claustrophobia. The isolated situation of the children’s house is heightened by

44 its setting within an “apocalyptic landscape” (Ryan 1994: 20). Not only are the house and its garden representatives of decay and abandonment; the whole area is cleared of houses “knocked down for a motorway they had never built” (CG: 21). Thus, not only the house, its interior and its garden belong to the topological pole of inside but also the entire desolate area carries the connotation of desertion and decay. The inside of the house is the place where the children slip into a life of slumber and “domestic entropy” (Ryan 1994: 23), social norms are neglected, and the children drift into a somnambulistic existence. The garden is also characterised by decay as “the rockery was disintegrating and overgrown” (CG: 38) and in the surrounding area, the few houses that remained “stood on wide aprons of cracked asphalt where weeds were pushing through” (CG: 22). Already before the parents’ death the house and the property symbolise a secluded inside. “No one ever came to visit us. Neither my mother nor my father when he was alive had any real friends outside the family” (CG: 21). As this quote shows, inside is identical with the house and the nuclear family, while the rest of the world and everybody coming from there represents the outside. When the father was still alive, he even planned to build a wall around the property; this would have given the secluded and isolated situation of the family a physical representation. Even without a wall, the family’s property is perceived as a closed entity isolated from society. While the inside of their private universe is depicted in detail, describing “the plates and cups covered in green mould” (CG: 78) or the “wasps in the kitchen feeding off rubbish” (CG: 112), the large cellar with “a number of meaningless rooms” (CG: 12) or their dead mother’s bedroom with “an alarm clock which still ticked” (CG: 50), the topological outside remains a vague idea. The story relies on the reader’s world knowledge indicating that the children’s lifestyle is far from what is considered ‘normal’. The only occasion when homodiegetic narrator Jack leaves the property and accompanies Julie’s boyfriend Derek into the Snooker hall is an unpleasant experience. Entering the snooker hall and watching Derek play, Jack soon feels sick and wants to leave the place (CG: 96). As Derek and his friends Chas and Greg plan to make Jack, “this miserable bugger laugh” (CG: 96), he even is on the brink of crying: “[…] water was collecting in one eye, and though I snatched at the tears as soon as it rolled out, I knew they had seen it” (CG: 97). This experience shows that Jack does not feel comfortable in this place outside the children’s excluded realm. Being in the outside world makes him feel sick and even causes him to cry. Thus, he does not belong to this outside world.

45 Except for this excursion, the outside world is only present within the children’s realm through Derek. Julie’s boyfriend can be seen as the personification of a regulated and norm- adapted society. In his appearance, Derek is very polite, neat and correct: “He was very tall and looked like he was dressed for a wedding – pale-grey suit, cream-coloured shirt and tie, cuff-links and a waistcoat with a small silver chain” (CG: 84). On top of his festive attire, Derek wears a black moustache that “looked so perfect that it could have been made of plastic” (CG: 84). As his outward appearance suggests, Derek shows good behaviour for example at dinner with the children: “Derek sat perfectly upright. He spread a red and blue handkerchief over his lap and when he had finished he dabbed at his moustache with it. Then he folded it up carefully before he put it in his pocket.” (CG: 85) Derek’s neat appearance, wearing “polished boots” (CG: 105) and smelling of perfume (CG: 105), represents the counterpart to the children’s disorderly life. Furthermore, he is the one questioning the children’s lifestyle and thus trying to impose rules and social norms on the household descending into chaos. Derek remarks on Tom’s cross-dressing, calling Tom “an odd one” and warning that his “’putting on girls’ clothes […] could affect him in later life’” (CG: 105). Derek also remarks sceptically on Tom’s regress into babyhood. “’A bit early isn’t it? For Tom?’”, (CG: 107) he asks as Julie has put her little brother to bed at a time suitable for babies but not for six-year-old boys. In the end, most importantly, Derek is the one condemning the incestuous intercourse between Julie and Jack as he finds them in flagrante delicto in Julie’s bedroom. “’It’s sick […] he’s your brother’” (CG: 125), Derek disgustedly reminds the siblings of the breach of taboo they have just committed. Derek as a representative of a society dominated by rules and norms is an outsider in the children’s realm. The children let Derek feel his status as an intruder several times: Derek whistled softly through his teeth as he smoothed down the cement. While his back was to us Julie winked at me and I pretended I was about to kick Derek in the backside. Sensing something, Derek said without turning round, ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘No, nothing,’ we said together and we began to laugh. Derek came towards me with the trowel. To my surprise he sounded hurt. ‘Perhaps you’d better do it,’ he said. (CG: 114)

Although the children have finally shown Derek their secret in the cellar – however, still pretending that the cement tomb is concealing a dead dog – Julie’s boyfriend remains an ‘alien element’ within the siblings’ community. In the final scene, Julie reveals that her attachment to the family is far stronger than that to her boyfriend. In fact, she wants to protect the nucleus family from the an interrupting force from the outside. As Jack and Julie are already in her bed and naked, Julie states that

46 ‘He [Derek] wants to be one of the family, you know, big smart daddy. He’s getting on my nerves.” [...] Julie shook her head and locked her fingers into mine. “He wants to take charge of everything. He keeps talking about moving in with us.’ She squared her shoulders and puffed out her chest. ‘What you four need is taking care of.’ (CG: 122)

Derek is willing to bring back order and adherence to social norms into the children’s house. Derek thus tries to take over a role within the family that was vacated by the parents’ death.

8.5.2. Vacant roles

The father’s authoritative demeanour is not only obvious in his treatment of the garden; within the family, he represents the patriarchal power. It is not only the smallest child Tom, who is “scared of his father” (CG: 12), the whole family acts submissively towards the father. This becomes obvious in the practice of having “a few running jokes in the family, initiated and maintained by my father” (CG: 14) as Jack narrates. These jokes, however, only work in one direction, against Jack’s pimples, Sue’s invisible eyebrows or Julie’s athletic ambitions. Since these jokes were “stage-managed by Father, none of them ever worked against him.” (CG: 14f). The father shows a similar favour for neatness and order as has been detected in Derek. This becomes obvious in father’s garden, which he “had constructed rather than cultivated” (CG: 14). He deprived the garden of its natural character by installing “narrow flagstone paths” (CG: 14) and forces Tom to “’[w]alk up it properly’” (CG: 14). The flowers, he chose “for their neatness and symmetry” (CG: 14) and he would not allow anything in his garden that tangled. Since his heart attack hinders the father to continue controlling the garden, nature starts to win back ground, the father resolves a “fascinating violation” (CG: 16): It became apparent, probably through my mother, that the plan was to surround the house, front and back, with an even plane of concrete. My father confirmed this one evening. ‘It will be tidier,’ he said. ‘I won’t be able to keep up the garden now’ (he tapped his left breast with his pipe) ‘and it will keep the muck off your mother’s clean floors.’ He was so convinced of the sanity of his ideas that through embarrassment, rather than fear, no one spoke against the plan. (CG: 16)

Through covering the whole property in concrete, father plans to finally win his fight against nature in his garden. The stimulus for this decision is to have it tidier; thus, the father’s obsession with order and neatness is further underlined. While the father’s energy is mostly taken up by imposing limitations and order on his garden, the mother is a regulating power for their children. This is most obvious in a dialogue in which the mother confronts Jack with the unhealthy consequences of his excessive masturbation. The talk starts with Jack’s mother sitting on his bed in the morning in a way as

47 “to trap my arms inside the bedclothes” (CG: 26). Forcing him to lie there and listen to her, she delivers her message, worried about his very large pupils and the bags under his eyes, that if he would “carry on the way you are, you’re going to do yourself a lot of damage” (CG: 27). Avoiding the term masturbation, Jack’s mother tells him that “’[e]very time … you do that, it takes two pints of blood to replace it’” (CG: 28). Mother’s attempt to set limits to Jack’s excessive masturbation was unsuccessful, since he carries on to do it “once or twice a day” (CG: 31), but he is hunted by images of “two pint milk bottles filled with blood” (CG: 31). With respect to Jack’s abandonment of all “rituals of personal hygiene” (CG: 20), his mother also tries to bring him back under her control: “In her quiet way my mother reproved me continuously, but I now felt proudly beyond her control” (CG: 20). Mother’s power as a controlling organ starts to decrease already then; with her death, it vanishes completely. As the controlling organs within the house die, outsider Derek tries to bring the house and the children under control. He does not only wish to become one of them, but he also tries to direct their lives back into the right channels and make them adhere to socially acceptable behaviour again. However, as he finds Julie and Jack in their incestuous unification, he brings back authoritative power to the house through legal forces.

8.5.3. Order vs. Disorder

I have defined the topological pole of inside including not only the house and garden, but also the abandoned area around the house, which further indicates the children’s secluded- ness from the outside, meaning a regulated society. This topological opposition can be semantically interpreted as an opposition of ‘disorder versus order’ or more precise ‘nature versus culture’. In the same way as nature wins back ground in father’s garden after his death, the children let their natural desires spread freely after mother’s death. As has been described before, Freud (1974, online) suggests that the first sexual desires in teenagers are incestuous and that the incest taboo was installed culturally to prohibit this natural human desire. Furthermore, Lévi-Strauss (1984: 73f) outlined that the incest taboo marks a transition from nature to culture – a process that is reversed by the children’s behaviour. As the controlling organs are removed from the children’s lives, they move away from culture back towards natural desires. The topological pole ‘inside’ thus represents nature as natural growth and desire wins back first the garden and then the house. Thus, the house becomes dominated by natural forces from which it should actually protect its inhabitants. The missing authoritative organs are then re-implemented from the outside, first, in person of Derek, in the end, through

48 legal forces. The consequences of this last aspect, however, are not narrated anymore; the consequences of their last transgression are thus omitted in the discourse. However, similarly to the weeds that refuse to stay buried under paving stones in the garden, the mother resurrects from her cement tomb, with Derek, who smashes her trunk, helping her on her way. Already before, the mother reclaims admittance to the entropic house. In contrast to “The Fall of the House of Usher”, which represents an intertextual pre-text to The Cement Garden , the mother does not really resurrect from the dead. However, she gradually appears to find her way back through a fine crack in her tomb Jack detects: “I noticed that running diagonally across the surface was a hairline crack which forked at one end” (CG: 80). This fine track first allows the smell of mother’s decaying body to spread through the house. Jack starts to notice the smell, which was “sweet and faintly rotten” (CG: 100). Sue reveals the source of the smell: As she opens the cellar door, “[t]here was something sweet, and beyond that, or wrapped around it, another bigger, softer smell that was like a fat finger pushing into the back of my throat. It rolled up the concrete steps out of the darkness” (CG: 108). The smell is omitted by mother’s trunk that “looked like it had been kicked” as the “middle bulged right out. The surface of the concrete was broken by a huge crack in some places half an inch wide” (CG: 108). According to Ryan (1994: 21) the burial of the mother in the basement "only enhances her power" and she becomes a "gargantuan, enveloping presence". One consequence of mother’s presence through the stench is that Jack finally stops masturbating (CG: 100). As he first notices the smell, he gives up his excessive masturbation and thus, his mother finally wins control over him and his desires. While their mother not actually returns from the dead like Madeleine Usher, the children get that impression as they are staring into the broken-up trunk: As I stared the surface formed itself briefly into a face, an eye, part of a nose and a dark mouth. The image dissolved into convoluted surfaces once more. […] For a moment we were very excited, as if we had discovered that our mother was in fact alive. We had seen her in her nightie, just the way she was. (CG: 109)

Thus, regulating forces do not only enter the house from the outside but also the mother returns from her trunk and wins back some control.

8.5.4. Transgression by the heroine

Identifying the semantic interpretation of the topological opposition ‘inside vs. outside’ as the contrast ‘nature vs. culture’, the central transgression of the border should be once more identified: as suggested before the breach of the incest taboo represents the final and fatal border crossing. This border crossing is also physically represented as Jack

49 deflowers his sister Julie: “There was something soft in my way and as I grew larger inside her it parted and I was deep inside” (CG: 125). Still, Jack cannot be seen as the agent hero who ventures from one topological pole to the opposite; instead, Julie is the one in agency. As she develops into the mothering figure within the house, she is the one allowing their siblings to move towards the border separating culture from nature. She and Sue help Tom on his way to become a girl, she also fosters Tom’s regress to babyhood as she brings up the cot from the cellar and positions it close to her bed. She also initiates their love-making as she “caught me by the arm and steered me towards the bed” (CG: 122) as Jack tells. Furthermore, the actual defloration is also controlled by Julie as she “sat astride me, took hold of my penis and pulled it into her” (CG: 125). Thus, she is the one who initiates the siblings’ parallel defloration, their incestuous sex and the final transgression of the border between culture and nature. Even their sexual position indicates that Julie is the one in command.

8.6. Benefit for Interpretation

A spatial interpretation of The Cement Garden offers a clear structure to interpret the complex setting: topographically, the children are left alone in a desolate area and allow their family home to dissolve into chaos and slumber. Thus, one pole of the topological opposition is identified as ‘inside’ since the children encapsulate themselves from the rest of society and only adhere to their instinctual tribes instead of socially imposed rules. The house’s dominant function, according to Bachelard (1964: xxxi) is to provide shelter to its inhabitants. Although the house’s inside is dominated by decay and rotten food, the house helps the children “to keep the family together” (CG: 81) and shelters them from being split apart – at first. In the end, however, the house cannot longer protect the children as it is entered by the authorities from the outside. The opposing pole, ‘outside’, is merely present through Derek and his attempts to re-introduce norms and rules in the children’s household. Furthermore, it has been shown that McEwan uses the house and its interior to not only mirror the decay with respect to socially accepted behaviour but also the implicit struggle of the opposing poles culture versus nature. The motive of Korrespondenz between the outer setting and the character’s inner world is thus applied in The Cement Garden . Ian McEwan has been aligned with muted postmodernism, meaning an ambivalent status between traditional and innovative writing. In The Cement Garden , this ambivalence is seen in the spatial construction of the fictional world: On the one hand, McEwan uses the traditional idea of Korrespondenz between the emotional status of characters and their immediate surrounding. The decay of cultural rules within the remaining family is mirrored in

50 the decay of the house and the triumph of nature over culture visible in the family’s garden. On the other hand, innovation also finds its way into this early McEwan novel: He does not only deal with taboo subjects and thus deviate from classical storytelling, but also deconstructs the idea of the sheltering house. The house that seems to shelter the family from outside intrusion turns into a place of decay and deviation from social norms. With the spatial analysis on the basis of Lotman’s theorems, the basic conflict of culture vs. nature has been outlined. Furthermore, it has been revealed that Julie is the hero-agent within this story who commits the final transgression that causes the children’s world to collapse through the intrusion of authoritative powers. The spatial analysis finally outlined that McEwan uses the house not in the conventional vertical concept but rather through the distinction of inside vs. outside – a concept that again reappears in the next novel to be analysed, Atonement .

51 9. The Form and Function of the House in Atonement (2001) 8 With Atonement , the second novel to be analysed in this thesis, a fundamental change in McEwan’s writing has been observed: the author finally escaped the “usual charge of being macabre or bizarre” (Childs 2006: 5) and “cemented his claim to be the foremost British novelist of his generation” (Childs 2006: 144). The novel is centred on the pursuit of a young writer, Briony Tallis, to find atonement for “her crime” (Atonement 2007: 162) she committed in her childhood and thus sent an innocent man, Robbie Turner, to jail. She accuses Robbie, the cleaning lady’s son, of raping her cousin Lola in the hot English summer of 1935 in the park surrounding the Tallis’ country estate. Thus, thirteen-year-old Briony also brings an end to the just flourishing love affair between him and her sister Cecilia, who, in consequence, breaks with the family. Still, some features of McEwan’s characteristics are continued in Atonement : “[he] remains fascinated with the forbidden and the taboo, which he continues to describe with non-judgemental precision” (Finney 2004: 69). Troublesome adolescence, first love and first sexual encounters, rape or the horrors of war can be classified as typical McEwan features, which have in part already been observed and described in The Cement Garden and are present again in Atonement . The first part of the novel shows affinities to the “classic country-house novel” (Clancy, online, quoted in Wolf 2001: 297) in the tradition of Jane Austen, and can also be read as a love romance between Cecilia and Robbie, incorporating the motive of “ amor vincit omnia ” (Wolf 2001: 297). Part Two, then, is set within the cruelty of the Second World War, focusing on Robbie’s fight for survival in the retreat of the British Army to Dunkirk, while parallel Briony in Part Three is training as a nurse in a London hospital, treating wounded soldiers returning from France in the year 1940. Thus, references to the historical novel are added. The coda, titled “London, 1999” (351) and representing seventy-seven-year-old Briony’s revelation that she actually is the author of the novel the reader just read, finally joins – together with many metareferential allusions throughout the text – metafiction to the pastiche of genres present in Atonement . This mixture of genres, which Nünning (2000: 189) termed “Hybridisierung”, is only one feature labelling Atonement a prime example of current English narrative writing. It exemplifies what has been termed the prevailing domain of English fictional writing, a “muted postmodernism” (Broich 1993) and can therefore with Wolf (2001: 298) be categorised a “problematic novel”, combining realistic story-telling and postmodern self-reflexivity.

8 McEwan, Ian (2001/2007). Atonement . London: Vintage. In the following quoted with the abbreviation A and the page number in parenthesis: (A: 3). 52 The wide spectrum of literary techniques covered between the poles of realism and postmodernism also mirrors Briony’s development as an author: writing herself through “a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism” (A 41). The literary techniques intermingled in Atonement span from a realistic tradition over a modernist approach on the consciousness to a postmodern metafictional revelation. As Wolf (2001: 304) outlines traditional realism is present through a multitude of visual details and “semiotic transparency” which, for example, allows to judge a person’s character by his personal belongings cluttered in the space he inhabits. McEwan also employs a modernist mimesis of the mind through the typical modernist technique of “enter[ing] a mind and show it at work” (A 282). Furthermore, the employed multiperspectivity in observing one and the same event through different focalizers is a technique ‘borrowed’ from modernism. Finally, McEwan applies a final postmodern “turn of the screw” (Wolf 2001, 307), questions the ontological opposition of reality and fiction and leaves the reader with the unanswered question: “But what really happened?” (A 371, quoted in Wolf 2001: 308). The hybrid qualities of Atonement in artfully combining “the postmodern shock of the final chapter as opposed to the traditionally shaped narrative of the main plot” (Albers and Caeners 2009: 707) have been sufficiently analysed by literary criticism 9. In this thesis, the analysis of classic story-telling elements and the self-reflexive way in which McEwan uses them will be carried out with view to spatial constructions. The setting of the main part of the novel will be of special interest as the Tallis home can be read in the tradition of the country house novel.

9.1. The Setting: A Family Home

As Finney (2004, 68) observes, McEwan in Atonement replaces the claustrophobic setting as present in The Cement Garden by a wide range of places, spanning from “an upper- class household in pre-War southern England, to the retreat of the British Army to Dunkirk, to a wartime London hospital, ending with a coda in 1999.” However, as this thesis focuses on the role of houses in McEwan’s writing, the prime object of interest will be the Tallis’ country estate and thus a similar setting as in The Cement Garden is presented: a family home. The reader perceives the house first through Cecilia Tallis’ eyes, revealing an unconcealable ugliness in the building which tries to connect itself to a tradition it has never belonged to as it is only forty years old: “bright orange brick, squat (plump), lead-paned

9 e.g. cf. Albers and Caeners (2009), Finney (2004), O’Hara (2011), Pilar (2005), Wolf (2001). 53 baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as ‘charmless to a fault’” (A 19). The original Adam-style house, that used to stand in the place of the Tallis’ home, was destroyed by fire and it was the Tallis’ grandfather who erected the building in line with his taste for “all things solid, secure and functional” (A19). The country house demands being set within vast parklands which are also present in Atonement . Cecilia leads the reader through the surrounding garden of the Tallis’ home, “along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods.” (A 18) The grandness of the estate is indicated by having a river and a wood running through the Tallis’ lands. Cecilia’s hasty run across the estate continues, depicting to the reader further typical elements of the surrounding garden:

The cool high shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks enchanting. Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland – sold off to a local farmer to graze his cows on – and came up behind the fountain and its retaining wall and a half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.” (A 18)

Several typical elements of the country house garden are depicted here: beside the woods, which indicate the vastness of the house’s park, the ha-ha has already been classified as the boundary dividing cultivated from wild nature. In Atonement , the ha-ha also separates the areas dominated by wood and river from the garden closer to the house, which is dominated by the fountain, a reproduction of high-culture architecture. Elements of the original Adam house are also still present at the Tallis’ estate represented through an “artificial lake and island with its two stone bridges supporting the driveway, and, by the water’s edge, a crumbling stuccoed temple.” (A 19) Entering the house through the front entrance, crossing the black and white tiled hall and accessing the drawing room, Cecilia, at first harsh with the house’s outside ugliness, perceives a scenery of beauty, observing:

the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains [...] framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and grey mottled terrace where camomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks.” (A 20)

After the grandeur of the estate has already been hinted at by the vast parkland and the drive which leads Cecilia up to the main entrance, the inside of the house adds further elements of the country house tradition to Atonement’s setting: an entrance hall, a drawing room furnished for welcoming guests – representing a public space within the private realm of the house –

54 and large French windows allowing the morning sun to flood the room and in the same way giving view to the parklands outside. The inner structure of the house, furthermore, shows the typical separation of not only public and private life, but also of “upper and lower orders of society” (Tristram 1989: 25). While the ground floor accommodates the entrance hall, the drawing room, the library and the dining room, the bedrooms are located “at the top of the stairs” (A 96) on the upper floor and thus public and private rooms are separated vertically. Following Cecilia into the kitchen, the social segregation between owners and employees becomes visible, as she “pushed through the baize door and strode along the chequered tiled corridor to the kitchen” (A 103) where cook Betty and her helps are preparing dinner in the baking kitchen. Through the baize door, Cecilia crossed the dividing boundary and thus the vertical division between the servant’s realm and the rest of the house. Given this first impression of the major setting, Atonement can be placed within the tradition of the country house novel. A number of intertextual references, possible predecessors and influences have been associated with Atonement , or as Cormack (2009: 70) puts it, “Atonement is haunted by a host of English novelists”. The adult world seen through a child’s eyes trigger references to Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (cf. Childs 2006:130). Mullan (2003, quoted in Childs 2006: 142) further links The Go-Between’s “country house summer swoon” to Atonement’s setting in a heat wave. According to Lee (2001, quoted in Childs 2006: 137) McEwan’s imaginative heroine Briony recalls Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September “with its restive teenage girl in the big house”, while the broken Meissen vase is reminiscent of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl . Virigina Woolf’s influence is traced in the novel not only within “Bryony’s [sic] style and signature” (Marcus 2009: 90) after her modernist awakening as an eighteen-year-old writer, but, according to Childs (2006:130) McEwan’s “method of shifting perspective strongly recalls Woolf’s writing”. Referring to The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, D’Angelo (2009: 89) calls attention to a potential 18 th century literary predecessor, sharing Briony’s “tragic flaw” (“Hamartia”, online), her hamartia : a perception impaired by literary imagination. Beside all these references drawn from the novel, the country house motif clearly points towards a tradition most prominently featured in Jane Austen’s novels and resumed by “twentieth century works such as E. M. Forster’s Howards End and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ” (Hidalgo 2005: 83). With Hidalgo (2005: 84), Austen can be identified as “the central influence at work” and author McEwan also supports such a claim. The connection to Jane Austen is not only based on the country house motif, but also implied at the very beginning of the book through its epigraph. Beside the fact that McEwan

55 himself called Atonement “my Jane Austen novel”, as he told Jeff Giles in an interview for Newsweek (cf. Hidalgo 2005: 83), the opening epigraph taken from Austen’s Northanger Abbey sets the novel’s main concern with the boundaries of reality and fiction, as the author explains:

What are the distances between what is real and what is imagined? Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey , was a girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction that she causes havoc around her when she imagines a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things. For many, many years, I’ve been thinking how I might devise a hero or heroine who could echo that process in Catherine Morland, but then go a step further and look at, not the crime, but the process of atonement, and do it through writing—do it through storytelling, I would say. (Reynolds and Noakes 2002: 20)

But not only Catherine Morland’s distorted perception of reality lead McEwan to aligning himself with Jane Austen; Austen’s mastery of the country house setting inspired McEwan. This mastery can be found in the eponymous novels Mansfield Park (1814) and Northanger Abbey (1817) as well as in the estates Norland in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Rosings and Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Donwell Abbey in Emma (1815). Thinking of his Jane-Austen novel, he “did have a notion of a country house and of some discrepancy beneath the civilised surface”, the author stated in an interview (quoted in Wells 2008: 102). Having placed Atonement in a line of tradition with Jane Austen and the country house novel, it is important to look at the way how McEwan alludes to this literary motif: as Hidalgo (2005: 84) summarises, “the use McEwan makes of the country house is ironic”. As Morrison (2011, online) observes, contemporary writers are “drawn to stately homes”, naming next to Ian McEwan Sarah Waters and Allan Hollinghurst and they are attracted by “the space it offers for everything to happen under one roof”. The country houses that appear in these contemporary novels are, however, “far from gentle and venerable”. Morrison (2011, online) indicates that the modern-day country house novel does no longer oblige to depicting the artistic finery and social power of their settings as representatives of their owner’s wealth. Instead, writers, such as Ian McEwan, set out to reveal the inflictions hidden behind a crumbling surface of grandeur that actually is not more than a failed replica. McEwan’s ironic allusions to the country house setting are first visible in the house’s ugliness which harshly contrasts with the “fine and useful arts as well as architectural beauty” (Kaleque 2005, online) which are frequently displayed in Jane Austen’s homes. Austen’s homes are not only equipped with “elegant furniture [that] enhances the grace of a home, and at the same time reveals the taste of the inhabitants” (Kaleque 2005, online), but Austen also “idealises her homes as moral worlds, where […] the traditional values and virtues are

56 observed” (Kaleque 2005, online). This is visible in Elizabeth Bennet’s first perception of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice: the beautiful grand estate causes delight as she “had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (Austen 1813/2006: 271). Kaleque (2005, online) in his analysis of Austen’s homes observes a “correspondence between outward beauty and the inner life” and thus, the appearance of a country house is read as a mirror for the owner’s aesthetic sense, his education and social rank. The Tallis “family background is anything but distinguished” states Hidalgo (2005: 84) as the grandfather, who built the Tallis home, did not descend from landed gentry or another higher social class, who used to populate the traditional country estates. In contrast, he “grew up over an ironmonger’s shop and made the family fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps” (A19). A further ironic reference can be seen in the fountain, which becomes an important place of action later in the story. The half-scale reproduction of the Triton-fountain in Rome in the same way as the house seeks connection to a tradition to which it never belonged. The pretentious character of the fountain is underlined by its insufficient function: Bernini’s intention must have been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the water slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic slime hung in dripping points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. (A 28)

The replica proves insufficient, maybe caused by Triton’s situation being located to “an alien northern climate [...] a long way from home” (A 18). Reconsidering the portrayal of the drawing room, Cecilia observes as a focalizer, further allusions to the pretentious character of the house become obvious: the Gothic fireplace is “almost new” and accommodates pot plants, the harpsichord is “unplayed, untuned” and the “rosewood music stands” (A 20) are also unused. Thus, the whole furniture aims to create an impression of the inhabitants that does not correspond with their real life. This aspect is epitomised in the family portrait that hangs in the dining room and shows a pale and thin-lipped aristocratic family. “No one knew who these people were, but it was likely that Harry Tallis thought they would lend an impression of solidity to his household.” (A 126) With Hidalgo (2005: 84) the house can be read as “something of a fake”, desperately seeking to connect itself with a tradition long lost, as is symbolised by the missing connection between the remaining structures belonging to the original house. In the same way as the pavilion by the swimming pool imitates features of the temple, the temple should show parallels to the original Adam house “though nobody in the Tallis family knew what they were” (A 73). The relationship of the temple to its missing point

57 of reference, the original house, is compared to that of “a grand society lady” (A 73) who left behind an orphan, the “crumbling stuccoed temple” (A 19). In depicting the present state of the formerly Tallis home, McEwan incorporates a final ironical twist: the Tallis home survived the Second World War, as Briony returns there to celebrate her seventy-seventh birthday, but it had been turned into a hotel. This hotel carries the intertextually interesting name “Tilney’s hotel” (A 363), referring back to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey once more. Young Henry Tilney is the one discounting Catherine Morland’s Gothic-influenced fantasies about his father General Tilney in the quote that constitutes Atonement’s epigraph. The addressed General Tilney, furthermore, can be judged a ‘brother in mind’ to the Tallis’ grandfather, as he “fills his house with expensive furniture, not because he likes it but because it will make the right impression” (Hayward 2000, online). This first analysis of the spatial setting of Atonement showed that McEwan engaged with the tradition of the country house novel, but used it in an ironic, disenchanting way. In a similar way, the semiotic transparency McEwan uses in the depiction of the central house will be analysed in the following, investigating how tradition and innovation are synthesised in this respect.

9.2. Reading the Rooms: Space as Mirror at Work

Analysing why writers throughout history consistently chose country estates as settings for their stories, Morrison (2011, online) states that “the house of fiction has many rooms, but country house fiction has more rooms than most”. The rooms, precisely the private rooms, of the Tallis’ home seem to offer the reader a glimpse into the personality of their owners and thus offer semiotic signs that turn the occupied room into a readable text. The concept of Korrespondenznatur has been described before as “Seelenspiegelung in der Landschaft” (Dethloff and Neuschäfer 2005: 23) which is in this analysis transferred to private rooms as mirrors of one’s inner state of being.

9.2.1. Briony’s Room: “a shrine of her controlling demon”

The first room the reader is led into is Briony’s – and it is also the most telling one. Being introduced as the “only tidy room upstairs” (A5), Briony’s room and thus, her character is right from the beginning positioned in contrast to the rest of the family. There has to be something special about this thirteen-year-old girl whose bedroom is described as “a shrine of her controlling demon” (A 5). Briony’s desire for order is symbolised in her model farm, consisting of animals, “all facing one way” and imitating “a citizen’s army awaiting orders”

58 (A5). This is a first reference to Briony’s flaw that will lead to her crime: as Albers and Caeners (2009: 716) state, “Cecilia and Robbie’s fate is impaired by Briony’s subconscious wish to move everyone around her like puppets on a string”. In the same way as she turned the heads of her miniaturised animals, Briony wants to order everything around her – and “[w]riting is her way of ordering the world” (Marcus 2009: 88). Thus, Briony’s room mirrors one of her dominant characteristics: her passion for order which together with her over-active imagination will lead to her fatal misjudgement. Briony’s love for order is accompanied by a “passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp” (A 5). Bachelard (1964: 78) classified a taste for secrets a human capacity and identified drawers with false bottoms as “organs of the secret psychological life”. It is emblematic that Briony hides her diary within her secret drawer: as she is keeping her secret notes safe within this chest, she will later in the novel secretly draft the story of Robbie raping Lola in her imagination. Thus, the secret drawer in Bachelard’s sense symbolises Briony’s secret inner life. Similar to her secret hiding places – she also hides a tin cash box under a floorboard beneath her bed where she keeps collected things such as a mutant double acorn or a squirrel’s skull (A 5) – also her imaginative world is only filled with innocent, unproblematic tokens and stories. Soon, however, her imaginative world will be filled with unsettling insights in the adult world which will turn her orderly worldview upside down. All the passions mirrored in her room are satisfied in the pursuit of story writing as it “not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm” (A 7). Based on these insights into her private realm, Briony can with Finney (2004: 70) be characterised as a girl who is “an author first and a girl on the verge of entering adolescence second.”

9.2.2. Cecilia’s and Emily’s Rooms: “What squalor and disorder” While Briony nurtures her controlling demon within her bedroom, her sister Cecilia lives within a turmoil of “unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays” (A4) and thus represents a counterpart to her little sister. As Briony’s room mirrors her inner passions, Cecilia’s chaotic room also represents her troubled inner life. As Briony on her frantic search for the “purloined letter” (Finney (2004: 79) in a typical free indirect discourse phrase exclaims: “What squalor and disorder her sister lived in!” (A 177). Briony has to find her way through kicked-off shoes and dresses that lay in a tangle on the floor to reach

59 Cecilia’s dressing table and to fetch the letter representing a “[c]linching evidence, cleanly independent of her own version” (A 176). Wondering about the “impulse that prevented Cecilia from replacing the caps and lids and screwtops of her make-up and perfume” (A 177), Briony finds that her sister – though ten years older – has something “hopeless and helpless” (A 177) about her. Indeed, Cecilia on the inside is in a similar chaotic state as her room conveys: she does not know how to continue with her life and is paralysed in a state of ambitious restlessness and comfortable boredom.

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand […] as she read her way through Richardson’s Clarissa . […] She could not remain here, she knew she should make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities […] No one was holding Cecilia back, no one would care particularly if she left. It wasn’t torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. […] Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it” (A 21f)

In remaining in a state of undecided laziness, Cecilia seems to have lost control over her life in the same way as she has over her room: She is unable to bring order and plans into her life, possibly caused by the same impulse that prevents her from cleaning up her room. Together with the undecided plans considering her future, Cecilia senses a growing tension between herself and Robbie Turner, a further aspect of her life she needs to ‘clear up’:

And there was Robbie, who exasperated her with his affection of distance […] They had known each other since they were seven, she and Robbie, and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she felt it was largely his fault […] she knew this was something she must clear up before she thought of leaving (A 22).

Originally Cecilia had returned home for Cambridge with a feeling that “her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company” (A 20). As it turns out, however, Briony is absorbed with her story writing, while her mother keeps nurturing her migraines in the solitude of her darkened room and her father remained in town for business reasons. When Briony thinks of her father she describes him as the fixed point around which the household settles: Although he solely sits in the library, contributing nothing to household affairs, “his presence imposed order” (A 122). The absence of the parents strikes parallels to The Cement Garden : In the same way as the abandoned children in the earlier novel deviate from social and moral rules, Briony with her wrong testimony acts morally reprehensible. The outcome in both realms of children left to their own – in the heat of the summer – is the same: a transgression of moral boundaries, as will be analysed for Atonement later in this thesis.

60 As Briony’s room is described as the only tidy room upstairs, her mother Emily Tallis also lives in a realm of disorder. Her bedroom is Emily’s place for retreat when one of her migraine attack becomes apparent. Therefore, it is kept in a cool state of darkness, allowing the children “to tell from across the far side of the park whenever their mother had a migraine by a certain darkening at the windows” (A 48). In excluding herself frequently from family life, she was failing in motherly qualities, which led the children to call her by her first name. Emily’s room is “as spectacularly squalid” (A 20) as Cecilia’s and this chaotic state mirrors the same failure in both women: a lack of control. As Cecilia cannot bring herself to ordering her future life, Emily has lost control over her illness: she is subjected to the pain acting like “a caged panther” (A 63) in her head. Similar to Cecilia, who spends her days sprawled over her bed and reading, Emily Tallis rests motionless on her bed in the darkened bedroom. Both women are kept in a state of passivity, which is mirrored in their rooms descending into squalor. With the room of the Quincey twins Jackson and Pierrot – Emily’s nephews, staying with the Tallises in order to prevent them from their parents’ divorce drama – another room is depicted in its dramatic mess. Their room was a pitiful mess of clothes, wet towels, orange peel, torn-up pieces of a comic arranged around a sheet of paper, upended chairs partly covered by blankets and the mattresses at a slew. […] The impression was of closeted boredom punctuated by contests and schemes – jumping between the beds, building a camp, half devising a board game, then giving up. (A 99f)

The pitiful mess corresponds to the children’s troubled state as “refugees from a bitter domestic civil war” (A 8) between their mother, Emily Tallis’ younger sister Hermione and their “meek, evasive” (A 8) father Cecil. The length of their stay at the Tallis’ home is as unspecified as the children’s knowledge about what is going on between their parents. The boys’ discomfort has caused Jackson to wet his bed, as “troubled small boys far from home will” (A 32). Thus, the twins’ room is a further example of direct correspondence between inhabited space and the state of being – in this instance, of two nine-year old boys, trying “to construct an existence out of nothing in a strange house” (A 100).

9.2.3. Robbie’s Room: “squashed under the apex” The depiction of rooms is not limited to the grand Tallis’ home; the reader is also allowed a glimpse into Robbie Turner’s realm, representing itself in a similar chaos. Comparing the rooms the Tallis family inhabits with Robbie’s private space, which is “squashed under the apex” (A 81) of his mother’s bungalow, social differences become apparent. The depiction of Robbie’s realm conveys impressions of smallness and confined 61 spaces: the place he calls his study is a “cubicle wedged between” his “small bedroom” and his bathroom (A 78). The so-called study is “little more than a corridor […] barely six feet long and six feet wide” (A 81), and in there Robbie does not work at a proper desk, but at a “knife-scarred kitchen table” (A 81). The restricted space together with the attributes “small” and “wedged” convey the modest circumstances in which Robbie and his mother Grace Turner live. The restricted dimension of Robbie’s private space is further underlined by his inhibited view out of the window. In order to perceive the “improbable colour” of the early- evening sky framing a Fauvinist-style landscape, Robbie has to “stand up […], bend his knees and twist his neck” (A 78) to perceive a little portion of it through his “skylight window” (A 78). This way of perceiving natural beauty contrasts with the Tallis’ estate which allows to take in the Surrey Hills with their “motionless crowds of thick crested oaks” (A 38) and their softened greens through “wide open windows” (A 38). Though the spatial dimensions Robbie lives within differ greatly from those of the Tallis family, the cleaning lady’s son shares with Cecilia and Emily Tallis the disorder in his room. The bed is unmade, clothes lie in a discarded mess and the towel is spread on the floor – this chaotic scenery presents itself “disablingly sensual” (A 80) to Robbie Turner. His arousal within his chaos that alludes to sexual events, which did not take place, is supported by the summer heat that baked the bungalow’s roof (A 78). As Childs (2006: 142) observes, McEwan uses the motif of summer and the accompanying heat frequently: in The Cement Garden the persisting heat has a suffocating effect similar to that in the hot summer of the year 1935, the setting of Atonement . Mullan (2003, quoted in Childs 2006: 142) interprets Leon Tallis’ quote, “‘I love England in a heat wave. It’s a different country. All the rules change’” (A 128), as “dramatic irony” since “[r]estraints have already begun to collapse”, as Cecilia and Robbie have transformed from childhood friends into first-time lovers and the evening is about to be abruptly ended by a sexual attack. This aspect will be further intensified later in this thesis, analysing the breaking of rules and boundaries. Returning to Robbie’s room, the 23-year old man’s chaotic inner state, which is mirrored in his room, seems to be rooted in unsettling sexual longings. He finds himself in a confused state, as he is ‘having a crush on’ Cecilia, but at the same time feels rejected and humiliated by her after the scene at the fountain. His desire for Cecilia leads him to worshipping a book because her fingerprints were on it (A 84), adoring her body’s moles and pallor (A 81) and finally to typing the obscene letter, containing the word ‘cunt’, which will later become a “typographical demon” (A 114) to Briony and a paving stone of the fatal path

62 leading to her crime and his discredit. Similar to Cecilia, Robbie also is at the crossroads of his future life: after abandoning his interest in landscape gardening, Jack Tallis agreed to help with the fees for medical school and application forms are already waiting to be filled on his table (A 83). Still, the prospect of studying medicine “suggested to him, not adventure and a fresh beginning, but exile” (A 83), exile from Cecilia. Thus, Robbie’s inner turmoil mirrored in his untidy room is caused by his new and jumbled feelings for his former childhood friend, who is “familiar like a sister […] exotic like a lover” (A 130). The analysis of the different rooms in this ‘house of fiction’ and their relationship to their owners suggests a direct and obvious correspondence between the appearance of the room and the inner state of its inhabitant. A dichotomy between order and disorder has been found, grouping Cecilia, her mother, Robbie and the twins on one side of the scale, while Briony is the only one inhabiting an orderly realm. This usage of the interior of rooms as vehicles of semiotic transparency furthermore aligns Atonement with a realist tradition, as it makes the rooms easily readable tools for characterisation. The close reading of the rooms would, at first sight, confirm Finney’s (2004: 70) observation that the long Part One lulls the reader into “the security associated with the classic realist novel” with “deep, rich characterisation” (Childs 2006: 143).

9.2.4. Turning the Postmodern Screw: Korrespondenz Revaluated

As McEwan turns the postmodern screw in the very last part of Atonement and thus questions the ontological status of the whole novel, also the seemingly straightforward characterisations associated with space need to be revaluated. According to the reading of the rooms, Briony is the character imposing tidiness and order upon her surroundings. In contrast, the other characters, portrayed through their chaotic private realms, would be the ones causing trouble and turmoil. The opposite is true: Briony, with her pathologic strive for order is the one jarring the characters’ world, dramatically changing Robbie’s and consequently Cecilia’s fate and thus causing the greatest form of disorder. This is caused by her ignorant transgression of the boundary between reality and fiction, as will be analysed in the following. In the same way as he undermines the country house motif, McEwan also partly subverts the seemingly straightforward mode of characterisation through inhabited space. How Briony’s striving for order brought about the very opposite will be shown in the following with the help of Lotman’s theory about the topological spheres that are separated by a central border within literary texts.

63 9.3. Applying Lotman

Similar to The Cement Garden , the central spatial distinction present in Atonement is the boundary between inside versus outside. This is not only true on the level of the house, but also on the level of inner and outside world in relation to the hero-agent, as will be shown in the following.

9.3.1. Inside vs. Outside

The situation of the Tallis’ home is similar to that of the abandoned house in The Cement Garden : surrounded by vast parkland, the Tallis home seems to be remote from the rest of the world. This “relative isolation of the Tallis house” (A 5) keeps Briony “from girlish intrigues with friends” (A 5) and contributes to her immersion in narrative worlds, constructed in her imagination, manifested in her writing. This constellation already alludes to a fundamental spatial division into ‘inside versus outside’, which I argue is at the core of events in Atonement .

However elegant the old Adam-style building had been […] the walls could not have been as those of the baronial structure that replaced it, and its rooms could never have possessed the same quality of stubborn silence that occasionally smothered the Tallis home. […] There was no sound. […] Her father-in-law’s intention, [Emily Tallis] supposed, was to create an ambience of solidity and family tradition. A man who spent a lifetime devising iron bolts and locks understood the value of privacy. Noise from outside the house was excluded completely […] (A 145)

This quote shows the qualities of the modern building devised by an expert for privacy: it aims at manifesting family community in the inside, keeping them safe from disturbance from the outside. The remoteness of the house is further underlined by juxtaposing the country estate with the city London. Paul Marshall, the friend Leon brings from London, attests “how wonderful it was to be away from town, in tranquillity, in the country air” (A 49). The sealed off world of the Tallis estate is thus connected with positive attributes, offering tranquillity and relaxation in contrast to the city, which is connected to business and work. Ironically, it is Paul Marshall, the one cherishing the country’s peacefulness, who brings violence and abuse to the formerly haven of tranquillity. According to Hidalgo (2005: 83) the character of Paul Marshall embodies a further parallel to Jane Austen, this time to her novel Mansfield Park : Marshall represents the “sexual predator from London” in the same way as Henry Crawford does in Austen’s novel. The traditional Victorian perception of the home has been described as a protection from society “regarded as an infection” (Tristram 1989: 232). The sexual threat impersonated in the

64 “adulterer” (Tristram 1989: 265) was an especially feared form of intimidation of the peaceful haven of household. The Tallis house built on the principle of safety and unity could still not protect its inhabitants from the adulterer Paul Marshall, who was brought in from the city. Paul Marshall, however, is not identified as the invader in the Tallis’ realm; instead, Robbie Turner is blamed since Briony perceives him, with the help of her cousin Lola, as “a maniac” (A 119), a word that “has the weight of a medical diagnosis” 10 (A 119). To Briony, Robbie represents a threat to their household and to her sister in particular, whom she wants to protect from this “incarnation of evil” (A 115). Robbie indeed acts as an illicit intruder of the house as Cecilia perceives his entrance through the front door to borrow a book:

he was standing outside asking in a loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow a book. […] Robbie made a great show of removing his boots which weren’t dirty at all, and then, as an afterthought, took his socks off as well, and tiptoed with comic exaggeration across the wet floor. […] He was play-acting the cleaning lady’s son come to the big house on an errand. (A 27)

Robbie acts is if he was penetrating an invisible border – the one between the outside garden and the inside of the house – by entering through the front door. As Cecilia interprets it, he plays on their social distance, crossing from his realm, the garden, where he was “weeding along a rugosa hedge” (A 19), into the lordly house. This border-crossing from the outside to the inside is just a fake-penetration since Robbie, as is later revealed, “was without social unease […] He had spent his childhood moving freely between the bungalow and the main house. Jack Tallis was his patron, Leon and Cecilia were his best friends” (A 86). When the point of focalisation changes to Robbie, the reader learns that he removed his socks because they were “holed at toe and heel” and “odorous” (A 84) and he wanted to hide them from Cecilia’s eyes. In consequence, he felt “an idiot […] padding behind her across the hall and entering the library barefoot” (A 84). This reveals that his unease in entering the grand house is not based on social boundaries, but stems from his arousing feelings for Cecilia whom he wants to impress by behaving polite and civilised, but he fails to do so. Still, his entering the house can be read as a crossing from the outside to the inside, but without a violation of boundaries, and thus indicating the presence of inside and outside worlds in Atonement . The division between an inside and an outside world is also present in the very last part of the book containing Briony’s metafictional revelation and her return to her childhood home. As she is driving out of the city to attend her birthday party at the hotel that used to be the Tallis home, the way there is not depicted. Seventy-seven-years old Briony falls asleep as

10 „A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis.“ (A 119) With John L. Austin’s (1962) idea of doing things with words, this passage can be interpreted as a performative speech act: Lola through naming Robbie a maniac makes him a sexual pervert. 65 the car enters the motorway and wakes up only shortly before arriving, when “we were on a country road” (A 362). Briony’s return to her former home through a passage of sleep enhances the impression of the house’s remote location. Sleep transfers her from the city back to the rural place of her childhood. Thus, her trip can also be interpreted as a time journey since she will soon find herself watching the first enactment of Trials of Arabella , the melodrama she wrote at the age of thirteen – at a time, when she found herself confused between reality and the fictional worlds she created in her imagination. Perceiving the estate as an enclosed entity excluded from the outside world is just a first physical realisation of the topological opposition of inside vs. outside; the actual dichotomy is centred on Briony herself as will be outlined in the following.

9.3.2. Aggressor and Transgressor: Some Difficulties

So far, the topographical opposition present in Atonement has been identified as the dichotomy of inside vs. outside. This assumption is based on the physical distinction between the isolated situation of the Tallis home and its inhabitants in contrast to the outside world that is present through allusions to the city of London and an outsider who visits from there. In the person of this outsider, Paul Marshall, a first form of transgression can be identified: as the adulterer coming in from the city he does not only transgress to the inner space of the Tallis home, but also performs the worst kind of transgression by raping Lola. However, Atonement’s story structure imposes some difficulties on interpreting the transgressions of boundaries. Concentrating on Part One of the novel, Robbie initially seems to be the aggressor and the transgressor of boundaries. It starts with the transgression into the house, crossing from the outside space (garden) into the inside space (house) by means of performing the role of an illicit intruder due to differences in social status. Second, Robbie transgresses the boundary of good manners by sending the obscene letter to Cecilia – which is delivered by Briony from the outside to the inside of the house and thus also transgresses the boundary between the two poles.

[…] it was only when she reappeared, on the far side of the second bridge, and was leaving the drive to take a shortcut across the grass that he stood suddenly, seized by horror and absolute certainty. […] Sure enough, within seconds, a distant rhombus of ochre light containing her outline widened, paused, then narrowed to nothing as she entered the house and the door was closed behind her. (A 95)

This passage does not only depict Robbie’s moment of epiphany when he realises that he sent the wrong, the “ruined” (86) version of his letter, featuring the indecent word; it also depicts the letter’s crossing the border between inside and outside. After the arrival of the letter,

66 Robbie soon follows and ventures into the inside of the house, after a moment of reflection at the seeming border, the front door.

Even when he reached the front door, his mind was not made up, and he loitered several minutes under the porch lamp and its single moth, trying to choose the less disastrous of two poor options. It came down to this: go in now and face her anger and disgust, give an explanation which would not be accepted, and most likely be turned away – unbearable humiliation; or go home now without a word, leaving the impression that the letter was what he intended, be tortured all night and for days to come by brooding, knowing nothing of her reaction – even more unbearable. […] He put his hand over the bell push. Still, it remained tempting to walk away. He could write her an apology from the safety of his study Coward! The cool porcelain was under the tip of his forefinger, and before the arguments could start around again, he made himself press it. (A 131)

The front door, a gateway between the realms of outside and inside, represents a point of decision-making for Robbie. He chooses to confront Cecilia after he sent the ‘purloined letter’ and commits another transgression: in the sexual unification with Cecilia he penetrates a further border by deflowering her. The rape of Lola, which Briony erroneously blames on Robbie, is the final and worst transgression, offending all moral and legal rules. This transgression, however, cannot be connected to Robbie’s presumed venture across social boundaries as this event is not rooted in the digression of social realms, but in the basic understanding of right and wrong of a society. Thus, considering the implications of border crossings reveals that Robbie does not fit the perpetrator profile. Besides this aspect, also the following parts of the novel disclose that Paul Marshall was the real rapist and it becomes obvious that Robbie’s alleged final transgression was as feigned as his first transgression into the house. Robbie did not violate a social boundary by entering the house in the first place, as he “had always had the freedom of the house” (A 27) and was unacquainted to social unease. He did also not perform the transgression of moral and legal boundaries by raping Lola, since Briony wrongly blamed him due to her confusing reality and fiction. Thus, it can be stated that Robbie is not the character performing the transgression of the central border, since social distance is not the core topic of Atonement . Reconsidering Paul Marshall as the character performing the transgression in Part One of the novel does also not meet the semantic interpretation of the topological opposition inside vs. outside. The fact that Paul Marshall is responsible for the worst transgression in the novel becomes only apparent in retrospective; considering Part One only, the reader is left to speculate about the true offender. Still, Marshall can also be taken into consideration as a possible ‘anti-hero’: as has been described, he represents the adulterer from the city intruding the country estate. He furthermore gains access to the children’s realm on the house’s first

67 floor. Paul Marshall appears in the nursery’s doorway and enters the room greeting the Quincey twins and Lola, whom he finds “almost a young woman, poised and imperious, quite the little Pre-Raphaelite princess” (A 60). There follows an obviously sexually connoted scene in which Paul Marshall is watching Lola licking and biting the chocolate bar he invented (A 62). Already in this incident, Paul Marshall is approaching closely to the boundary of sexually harassing an underage girl, which he later offends in the darkness of the nightly garden. Although this event represents the central catastrophe, the process of writing the novel wants to atone for another crime: Briony’s false testimony that causes lives to change dramatically. Therefore, the rape is not the central transgression Atonement is built upon and the central anti-hero is not Paul Marshall but Briony.

9.3.3. Imagination vs. Reality Brought up on a diet of imaginative literature, she is too young to understand the dangers that can ensue from modelling one’s conduct in such an artificial world. When she acts out her confusion between life and the life of fiction, the consequences are tragic and irreversible – except in the realm of fiction. (Finney 2004: 69)

The topological inside-outside-dichotomy refers to a more abstract topographical realisation that is centred on Briony: it is the distinction between Briony’s literary imagination, representing the inside, and reality, representing the outside pole. This interpretation is justified by the fact that the confusion between reality and fiction is the novel’s central topic: this is already indicated by the epigraph which refers to Catherine Morland’s fictional “dreadful […] suspicions” (A 1) she is entertaining about her host caused by the Gothic novels into which she indulges herself. Briony, in the same way, perceives the world around her through the lens of fiction. As Albers and Caeners (2009: 714) observe, “[Briony] lives […] in an idealised world of her own imagination and translates her aestheticised thinking on to reality, thereby ultimately confusing the two.” The reason for her confusion between the two worlds lies with her passion for order which she can fulfil in story writing as in a story “you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world” (A 37). Thus, it can be stated that the dichotomy of inside and outside carries the semantic implications of order and disorder, which were also present in The Cement Garden . Imposing narrative structures on reality is Briony’s way to cope with the disorder of the outside world she cannot understand properly.

68 9.3.3.1. The Window Gaze: “Two Figures by a Fountain”11 Misinterpretations start with Briony’s misreading of Cecilia’s and Robbie’s encounter by the fountain. The reader, in a form of dramatic irony, has already perceived the encounter through a third-person authorial instance and knows what really happened. Briony, in contrast perceives the scene through the nursery’s window, gradually zooming in on the two characters like a camera’s eye: It was a scene that could easily have accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle. Some miles beyond the Tallises’ land rose the Surrey Hills and their motionless crowds of thick crested oaks, their greens softened by a milky heat haze. Then, nearer, the estate’s open parkland, which today had a dry and savage look, roasting like a savannah […] Closer, within the boundaries of the balustrade retaining wall was her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. (A 38)

The nursery’s open window represents the frame not only for the picturesque landscape but also for the drama to develop by the fountain and Briony’s perspective on it. With Senn (2000: 57) the window functions as the interface between inside and outside as well as a framing device for the observer’s gaze, symbolizing human’s “limited interpretation of ‘reality’” (Senn 2000: 68). Briony’s interpretation is at first guided by narrative patterns of a tale she had written herself about “a humble woodcutter” who saved and married a princess. Thus, she judges the scene by the fountain a “proposal of marriage” since “what was presented here fitted well” (A 38). Referring to nineteenth century literature, Senn (2000: 40) states that the window as a border further separates the known from the unknown world, meaning the opposition between the known inside and the unknown, possibly dangerous outside. In this sense, Briony’s gaze out of the window can be read as a projection of her known inside world of literature out on the unknown world of adult life and love relationships. With reference to Virgina Woolf’s writing Senn (2000: 47) furthermore depicts the window as a border “reflecting the unbridgeable gap between the interior lives of human beings”. Briony, due to her distance in space, but also in age, does not understand what happens between Cecilia and Robbie and she neither can interpret the feelings that lead to their outward actions. The metaphorical connotations a window in a literary text conveys are manifold, as has been shown before. In the fountain-scene, the gaze through a window indicates Briony’s perception of the world: it frames her view as an observer, emphasises the distance – spatially and emotionally – between observer and observed object and is also emblematic for the “border between reality and fiction” (Senn 2000: 76). Thus, Briony’s window gaze mirrors the central concern of Atonement : the transgression of the boundary

11 This is the title of the short story 18-year-old Briony writes and sends to the literary magazine Horizon. It is a first attempt on (re-)writing her past and thus the first of her drafts claiming atonement. 69 between fiction and non-fiction. Reading the window as a “metaphor for art itself, exhibiting a selective and alienated perspective of ‘reality’” (Senn 2000: 160), the relevance for Atonement is further underlined, as Briony’s art is writing and the construction of fictional stories. Therefore, the window can also be interpreted as a metaphor for Briony’s perspective of reality – altered through her imagination. This is the first instance of Briony fitting reality into fictional worlds, but it will not be the last and this scene “anticipates the crucial moment when Briony will commit her crime” (Hidalgo 2005: 86). The proleptic character of the fountain scene is further intensified as Briony has her “first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now […] and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong” (A 39). Briony does not only experience a realist awakening, but shortly after gets to appreciate the possibilities of modernist writing as she declares that “she could write a scene like the one by the fountain. […] She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view.“ (A 40) Briony as the implied author keeps her promise as the motif of the window gaze repeats itself and the Tallis home becomes a Jamesian ‘house of fiction’ with numerous focalizers standing by windows. Cecilia finds herself standing by the window of Paul Marshall’s to-be-room, watching her little sister outside in the park as she begins “to disappear among the lakeshore trees that surrounded the island temple” (A 46) in the same way as Briony had watcher her before. In the next chapter, Lola as the focalizer arrives in the same room as Cecilia did before and she also looks out at Briony standing by the water’s edge, right “beyond the temple” (A 56). As the author of the book, Briony made herself the one being watched by different characters from different perspectives. Despite their different perception, all beholders share the direction of the view: from the inside to the outside. This can be read as an embodiment of the spatial dichotomy present in Atonement : Briony on the inside interprets events on the outside by applying her imaginative world-reading and thus imposing an orderly explanation on a reality she cannot understand. The boundary between the two realms is the window allowing to perceive only a restricted portion of the world. Thus, the dichotomy of fiction (created in Briony’s head) and non-fiction (happening in the outside world) finds a spatial correlative in the positioning of the three protagonists of the central scene, Briony, Cecilia and Robbie.

70 9.3.3.2. The Bridge as a Place of Transformation: “until something significant happened”

Briony’s misreading finds a literal realisation as she illicitly opens the letter Robbie writes to Cecilia and starts constructing the story “she fashions around her life and imposes on others” (O’Hara 2011: 78). Before she receives the letter, Briony positioned herself upon the bridge supporting the driveway to the house: In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and when she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened to her. […]. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance. (A 77)

Thus, Briony deliberately chooses the bridge as the place where her life should start to change and become more interesting. The bridge as a literary symbol carries connotations of not only connecting two separate realms but also representing a transition from one state of being to another (Redling 2008: 56). Briony finds herself at a point of transition since she wants to leave behind her state as a playwright, its “shallowness […] the messiness of other minds, the hopelessness of pretending” (A 74) as she was furious about the divergence between the play she imagined and the poor acting qualities of her cousins. Briony realises that story writing is the form of expression that suits her orderly spirit best, since in writing the creation of a world is “entirely on her command” (A 35) comparing it to the power she imposes on her finger through commanding it to crook. These reflections on the power of her mind mirror how inner thoughts and ideas lead to outside actions. As Briony demanded, something happens to her on the bridge: Robbie approaches her and asks her to deliver his letter to her sister Cecilia. With this letter “something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal” (A 114) is introduced into Briony’s life as she finds out after opening it. The bridge also symbolises a place of transition to Robbie: while walking through the park towards the house, he decides that “his adult life had begun” (A 91) as he imagines himself at the age of 50 as “the knowing doctor he would be by then” (A 92). Interestingly, Robbie as a focalizer describes planning his future with the phrase “[t]here was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero” (A 91). This indicates that Briony is not the only one creating stories about reality and hints to the fact that “we all are narrated, entering at birth into a pre-existing narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we inscribe our own narrative/lives” (Finney 2004: 79). There is another instance of Robbie venturing into Briony’s territory of creating stories around real people: in Part Two on his way to Dunkirk, Robbie tries “to understand this child’s mind” (A 229) and creates an explanation for her wrong testimony. He remembers a day when he was giving ten-year-old Briony swimming 71 lessons by the river and Briony jumped into the water and forced him to save her – “because I love you” (A 232). To Robbie, she must have “nurtured a feeling for him” (A 233) and then felt betrayed when she read his letter and got “confirmation of the worst” (A 233) in the library. Then, she found “an extraordinary opportunity in the dark, during the search for the twins, to avenge herself” (A 233). Thus, Robbie plots a story of Briony as love-sick girl seeking revenge and sending him to jail for rejecting her feelings. In the same way as Briony narrativised him, he tries to find an explanation through narrativizing her. However, these instances have to be read with view to the fact that Briony is the story’s author. She might have incorporated Robbie’s acts of narrativisation to justify herself by showing that she is not the only one using imagination to make sense of reality. Briony’s story of Robbie begins as she reads the obscene letter: “she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh, and to frame the opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life” (A 114). As she reads the letter, the narrative already begins to form itself being “the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil” (A 115). It is important to note that Briony reads the letter “in the hall after Polly had let her in” (A 113). She is inside the house when she starts constructing her story around Robbie, while Robbie is outside walking towards the house. This reinforces the dichotomy of inside and outside as Briony again constructs a story on the inside about a person on the outside.

9.3.3.3. The Library: Figures Projected onto Books The fears concerning “some principle of darkness” (A 114) that has entered Briony’s life and threatens her sister are further confirmed in the scene Briony observes in the library: she finds Cecilia and Robbie in a sexual encounter and misinterprets it as a violent attack. This scene is the most emblematic for the core topic of the novel – perceiving reality against the backdrop of literature.

[…] she passed the library door which, unusually, was closed. […] In memory – and Briony later gave this matter some thought – she had no particular expectations as she placed her hand on the brass handle and turned it. But she had seen Robbie’s letter, she had cast herself as her sister’s protector, and she had been instructed by her cousin: what she saw must have been shaped in part by what she already knew, or believed she knew. At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. (A 122f)

The closed door of the library already hints at the fact that within this enclosed space something secret is taking place. This connotation of secrecy might trigger Briony’s curiosity and cause her to cross this boundary and enter the inside space of the library. As Briony in

72 retrospective analysis herself, her perception of what she would see soon had been prefigured by the ideas she had been constructing about the dangers Robbie imposed on their household. Importantly, her view is impaired in the library by darkness as she cannot see anything at all at first. The two figures in the corner only gradually become visible to her which does not hinder Briony to keep constructing her story:

When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. Though they were immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realisation of her worst fears that she sensed her over-anxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books. (A 123)

Briony herself provides a symbolic reading of the scene that presents the two figures in front of the books as a projection of Briony’s imagination. Moreover, Cecilia and Robbie’s position can also be read in the sense that the two just anthropomorphised out of the books behind them since they are according to Cavalié (2009: 129) “avatars of Briony’s literary conscience”. Briony perceives the scene as a fight and this reading arises from the books that prefigured her conception. She has already started to create the story and thus, she wants the following events to fit the ordering principle she has compiled. One can even read the library as an illustration of Briony’s mind: it is stuffed with literary works and Briony tries to allocate the two lovers to a genre section, choosing not romance but crime. The library can thus also be seen as a symbolic representation of Briony’s inner life. The library as a symbolic space has been used in literature in manifold ways and therefore its function in Atonement should be analysed more closely. The library is a physical representation of knowledge and scholarliness. It is a symbol of order, since the library is the place where knowledge is organised and order is its basic ideal. (cf. Dickhaut 2008: 43) In contrast, libraries can also become places of disorder when they adopt labyrinthian features, as seen in the library in Umberto Eco’s Il Nome della Rosa (1980). The monastic library in Eco’s novel also features another symbolic trait of the library: it symbolises the making of literature as texts are build upon other texts and this intertextuality finds its symbolic representation in the library space. Furthermore, Foucault (1988, quoted in Stocker 1997: 82) describes the library as the place where the imaginary resides: “es entfaltet sich säuberlich in der lautlosen Bibliothek mit ihren Buchkolonnen, aufgereihten Titeln und Regalen, die es nach außen ringsum abschließt, sich nach innen aber den unmöglichsten Welten öffnet“. This idea of the library as a space encapsulated from the outside world, but harbouring in it endless worlds of literary imagination plays along with the opposition of inside and outside world present in Atonement . As Stocker (1997) observes in different literary works, the library often

73 represents a closed space dominated by order and opposed to the chaotic world. A prime example is the library in Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung within which the central character Peter Kien created a seemingly better place: “ein Ort […], der so vollkommen, so sorgfältig, so wohlgeordnet ist wie der unsrige ungeordnet, missraten und wirr ist“ (Foucault 1988, quoted in Stocker 1997: 125). This strive for order mirrors Briony’s central trait of character and the semantic dichotomy of an ordered inside versus chaos in the outside world shows further parallels to Atonement . According to this observation, the library in Atonement represents an inside space as it is dominated by fiction and order, just like Briony’s imagination. With the two lovers, reality intrudes the realm of fiction – an aspect that further parallels with Canetti’s first novel. In the person of Kien’s housekeeper and later wife Therese physical desire enters the enclosed space of the library. Consequently, Kien’s world is shaken and his life gets out of control (cf. Stocker 1997: 286). In a similar way, with Robbie and Cecilia sexual desire and thus occupations of an adult world intrude the room of stories that mirrors Briony’s inner life and distresses her deeply. In the dichotomy of inside versus outside spaces present in Atonement , the library – regarded as a “Zufluchtsort vor dem Chaos der Welt” (Stocker 1997: 290) – is an inside space connected to Briony and the imaginative world, the real love story belongs to the outside reality. The chaotic world with which Briony finds herself confronted is “an area of adult emotion” (A 113): from her unacquainted outsider position, Briony interprets Cecilia and Robbie’s behaviour on the basis of the wrong literary foil. Briony uses her preconceived story to impose order on incomprehensible events. Or, as O’Hara (2011: 78) describes, she “refers to her own backlog of narrative schematics in order to interpret the ambiguous behaviour of the couple. As with Don Quixote and his famous windmills, Briony’s vision of the scene is rendered comprehensible” as it is a story, a metier she knows well. O’Hara (2011: 78) further associates the story Briony constructs around her with the wish for “obscuring the mystery of otherness”. This refers to Levinas’ (2003, quoted in O’Hara 2011: 80) concept of “the epiphany of the Other”, meaning the way the other presents itself ignorant of its preconceived image the observer nurtures. Briony does not have such an epiphany in Part One as she continues narrativizing Robbie and finally transgresses the border by giving a false testimony.

74

9.3.3.4. Transgression by the Heroine The sexual attack on Lola is the climax of Part One and the trigger for Briony to commit her crime by finally transgressing the border between her imagined world of fiction and reality. The attack takes place after it is revealed that the twins ran away. Search parties are formed combing through the vast parkland, while Briony focuses on the thought that “there was a maniac treading through the night with a dark, unfulfilled heart – she had frustrated him once already” (A: 157) and ventures out into the dark as well. In a retrospective comment, Briony reflects on how she “could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a resume of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened” (A 162). Nothing would have happened, because there would have been no central event, in Lotman’s sense, without her border crossing. Briony, however, does go out into the dark and disturbs the attack on Lola on the artificial island close to the temple. What she first considers to be “the bush that lay directly in her path” (A 164) begins to break up and she gradually realises that she is not watching “some trick of darkness” (A 164) but a “person who was now backing away from her” (A 164). That was what her eyes showed her; her imagination, however, immediately completed what was “her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her” (A 166):

Briony said, ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ […] After many seconds Lola said in the same weak, submissive voice, ‘Yes. It was him.’ Suddenly, Briony wanted her to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the victim’s curse, close his fate with the magic of naming. […] ‘It was Robbie, wasn’t it?’ The maniac. She wanted to say the word. Lola said nothing and did not move. Briony said it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of fact. ‘It was Robbie.’ (A: 165f)

Briony’s wish to seal the crime is an indication of her love for order which she does not lose throughout the years as also seventy-seven-year old Briony admits in completing her atonement that she “always liked to make a tidy finish” (A 353). The magic of naming is taken up again, as Lola in calling Robbie a maniac used the performative power of language again, Briony now wants her to name her attacker. While Lola repeatedly expresses her doubts that it really was Robbie, the case is solved for Briony: “As far as she was concerned, everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past. […] Now she saw, the affair was too consistent, too symmetrical to be anything other than what she said it was.” (A: 168) Her strive for order is fulfilled by identifying Robbie as the adulterer and the symmetry of the story is her evidence for truth – this even replaces her eyes as instruments of reception: “It

75 was not simply her eyes that told her the truth. It was too dark for that. […] Her eyes confirmed the sum of all she knew and had recently experienced” (A: 169). This is, however, not yet the point of Briony’s transgression, as the attack itself takes place outside which is not Briony’s preferred realm. The real event, Paul Marshall’s attack on Lola, belongs to the pole of reality and correspondingly takes place outside. Briony cannot perceive this real event properly, as her vision is not only impaired by her active imagination, but also by the darkness which renders it impossible to identify the offender. Similar to the window and the darkness in the library, the blackness of the night symbolises a hindrance for Briony to see reality clearly. In order to still make sense of the world around her she accommodates “chaotic reality with a tidy narrative of her own design” (O’Hara 2011: 77). For committing her final transgression, Briony returns to the spatial surrounding that mirrors her inner life: the library. With her mother, Briony walks to the library “to have the first of her formal interviews with the police” (A 179). In there, surrounded by literary works, she is recounting her own fictitious accusation.

’You saw him then.’ ‘I knew it was him.’ ‘Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.’ ‘Yes, I saw him.’ ‘Just as you see me.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You saw him with your own eyes.’ ‘Yes. I saw him. I saw him.’ Thus her first formal interview concluded. (A 181)

Briony transgresses the border as she commits a legal offence in giving a false oath to the police. Before, her confusions and wrong accusations were only constructed in her mind or shared within intimate conversations with Lola – and thus took place in some form of inside world. With her official testimony she transfers them into the outside realm of reality and thus her confusion influences reality dramatically. In retrospect, Briony acknowledges her crime and her transgression as she recognises that “the words that had convicted him had been her very own, read aloud on her behalf in the Assize Court” (A 325). Briony transgresses the border between her imagined world of well-fitting narratives (inside) and the real world (outside) by telling a lie, which is “less a lie than a misconstruction of the adult world she has been observing with the predatory eye of an aspiring novelist” (Finney 2004: 80). The inside- outside-division is once more taken up as Robbie, with the twins in his arms, returns to the house and “a reception party” (A 182) assembles in front of the door: “Briony did not know how the decision was made that they should all go outside to wait for him. […] It might have been that Mrs Tallis did not want the polluting presence to step inside her house.” (A 182) 76 The house is now re-valued as a safe harbour standing against the threatening forces from the outside – but against the wrong suspect. Briony’s transgression causes the downfall of several characters. Briony watches, again from the superior viewpoint of her window as Robbie is led out of the house by two inspectors handcuffed: “The disgrace of it horrified her. It was further confirmation of his guilt, and the beginning of his punishment.” (A 184) After having projected her imagined world onto reality, Briony now uses reality as a confirmation of her constructed story of Robbie. The framing device for this final misjudgement in Part One is again the window. In consequence, he is “diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly over-sexed, and in need of help as well as correction” (A 204), sent to prison and bargains “an early release in return for joining the infantry” (A 203). Cecilia’s letters carry him through prison and war and tell him that she “had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents, brother or sister again” (A 205). As he fights in France, she becomes a nurse treating the wounded soldiers returning from the battlefields. Only the last part of the book reveals that Robbie and Cecilia “never met again, never fulfilled their love” (A 371). This is the guilt Briony has to live with and tries to atone for in writing her “fifty-nine-year assignment” (A 369).

9.3.3.5. Inventing a Happy End: Transgression Reloaded Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy. […] All she wanted to do was work, then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless, she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable. (A 285)

Briony does not only try to bury her guilt in repression and humble work, but “attempts to use fiction to correct the errors that fiction caused her to commit” (Finney 2004: 69). As is revealed in the last part of the novel, Briony set out to describe the crime in which she, Lola and Marshall conspired: “I’ve regarded it as my duty to disguise nothing – the names, the places, the exact circumstances – I put it all there as a matter of historical record” (A 369). Shortly after stating this, Briony, however, admits that she gave Cecilia and Robbie a happy ending in her final draft which the two lovers actually did not see:

All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecelia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. […] How could that constitute an ending? (A 370f)

Again, Briony overlays what really happened with an invented story to constitute an ending that fits her literary understanding of giving her readers “hope or satisfaction” instead of

77 serving “the bleakest realism” (A 371). This shows that Briony’s confusion of reality and fiction persists: she keeps blending the two, but this time with a different outcome. In contrast to her first transgression of the boundary between fiction and truth which brought a dramatic end to Cecilia and Robbie’s flourishing love story, Briony now presents them with eternal love: “As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love” (A 371). Alluding to the motif of preserving beauty eternally through art, which William Shakespeare prominently featured in his Sonnet 18 (1609/2010, online), Briony tries to atone for her crime by giving Cecilia’s and Robbie’s love an eternal place in literature. Briony violates the border between imagined and actual events again by inventing the happy end for the two lovers. The persistence of her confusion is also mirrored in the inside- outside-dichotomy later in the novel: in Part Three, Briony leaves the hospital, where she is a training nurse, behind, to visit first the wedding of Lola and Marshall and second her sister Cecilia in her apartment in South London. First, the church in which Lola “marr[ies] her rapist” (A 324) is of spatial interest since it looks “like a Greek temple” (A 323) and thus bears resemblance to the place where the union of Lola Quincey and Paul Marshall started: by the island temple on the Tallis’ estate, the place of the sexual harassment. Briony, while watching the ceremony, uses a spatial metaphor for describing how the truth about what happened in that hot night in 1935 is “steadily being walled up within the mausoleum of their marriage” (A 325). From the wedding, Briony walks towards her sister’s apartment equipped only with a “crumbling bus route map dated 1926” (A 318) and feeling very insecure:

She was surprised how clumsy and self-conscious she was, after all she had learned and seen. She felt inept, unnerved of being out on her own, and no longer part of her group. For months she had lived a closed life whose every hour was marked on a timetable. She knew her humble place in the ward. […] It was a long time since she had done anything on her own. (A 319)

Leaving behind the inside-world of the hospital and venturing to the suburbs of London causes Briony to feel insecure. She has to leave the ordered world of her working routine behind and confront the outside, where she gets lost in unnamed streets and without any sufficient help from the outdated map. Briony seems to be lost in the real world, since the order of her acquainted realm is missing – this is a repetition of what Briony experienced as a thirteen-year-old, when she could only make sense of the adult world by projecting her stories upon it. The cyclical structure of the novel, that mirrors Briony’s process of atonement in re- writing her draft repeatedly, becomes apparent when seventy-seven-year-old Briony returns to

78 her childhood home to celebrate her birthday: she is surprised by the first enactment of The Trials of Arabella , her play with that the novel started. The show takes place in the old library and Briony finds that “all the books were gone from the library, and all the shelves too” (A 366). Can this spatial correlative be interpreted in the way that Briony finally left behind her swaying between the real and the imagined world? No, since she – again, standing by the window and observing the outside world (A 371) – ponders on the possibility of having “Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella ? It’s not impossible” (A 372) at the very end of the book. Now, however, Briony uses her harmatia to do good to the people whose lives she altered for the worse, despite the fact that “fiction cannot absolve or undo transgressions that have taken place in the real world” (D’Angelo 2009: 88). Thus, in her atonement, Briony still blends the worlds of fiction and non-fiction.

9.4. Benefit for Interpretation

Reconsidering the spatial aspects analysed in this chapter shows that the spatial setting of Atonement mirrors the novel’s subversive character. The grandeur of the Tallis home is as fake as the impression of a realist work, spiked with modernist techniques the novel conveys in its first three parts. McEwan does not only take up the tradition of the country house novel by setting Atonement in a country estate, but makes it “a parody in Linda Hutcheon’s sense – ‘repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity’” (Cavalié 2009: 123). McEwan’s ironic usage of the country house motif has been outlined as well as the seemingly straightforward semiological relationship between rooms and their inhabitants has been unsettled in a re-reading: the character inhabiting the most orderly room is the one most obsessed with order, but causes the greatest disorder in the family’s world. Still, the usage of a Korrespondenz relationship between a character and its environment as an instrument of characterisation aligns McEwan with the realist tradition; however, the author does not just reuse this technique but rather “enter[s] into a conversation with tradition” (Cavalié 2009: 120) which is also true for the country-house-setting. With the analysis based on Lotman’s understanding of the structuring function of space, it has been shown that the topographical dichotomy of inside vs. outside correlates with the more abstract division between fiction vs. reality. These two realms furthermore could be linked to the semantic qualities of order vs. disorder. Briony, the character identified as anti- hero transgressing the border between inside and outside, imposes order on a chaotic world trough story-telling. Thus, disorder is linked to the events that really happened, while order

79 relates to the fictitious stories Briony creates out of reality. Narratives are Briony’s way of ordering the world, which positions her in stark contrast to Henry Perowne, the protagonist of McEwan’s ninth novel Saturday .

80 10. Form and Function of the House in Saturday 12 (2005) With Saturday , the last novel to be analysed in this thesis, Ian McEwan again aligns himself with literary tradition. As it is set on a single day, it is compared to “the modernist day novel such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virgina Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)” (Brown 2008: 80), and also finds a more recent predecessor in American writing with Don de Lillo’s Cosmopolis . McEwan, however, in his ninth novel does not utterly follow the structure of “examin[ing] for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” that Woolf suggested in her essay “Modern Fiction” (cf. Green 2010: 59). The day, a Saturday as indicated in the title, is 15 th Februray 2003 and thus the day of the “biggest display of public protest ever seen” (S 69) against the impeding invasion of Iraq, set in the capital city London. The mind on display, furthermore, is neither ‘ordinary’, since protagonist Henry Perowne is a “reflective neurosurgeon” (Green 2010: 60) and Ian McEwan, an “expert on the human mind”, follows the physical and psychological journeys of “an expert on the human brain” (Kemp, quoted in Childs 2006: 145). Perowne is not only an excellent neurosurgeon, but a character extensively blessed in life: with a loving and professionally successful wife, to whom he feels still attracted, his musically gifted son Theo, who is with only eighteen years already furthered by great exponents of the Blues genre, and a prize-winning poet as a daughter, who is about to publish her first collection of poems. This “impossibly perfect social unit” (Wallace 2007: 473) furthermore resides in an “opulent townhouse” (Wells 2010: 113) in central London over which Perowne presides like a “freehold landlord” (Wells 2010: 113). He drives a posh car, a Mercedes S500 by which’s luxury he is “no longer embarrassed” (S 75). Ross (2008: 77) attests the Perowne family an “almost comically formidable panoply of professional skill, literary and artistic distinction” that sounds just too good to be true. However, this seemingly perfect family set-up is soon to be disturbed by an invader from the city streets and thus, Saturday embodies a conflict Rennison (quoted in Hillard 2010: 140) identifies as a central concern in McEwan’s writing: “the intrusion of brutal, inescapable reality into comfortable lives”. After Atonement has been classified a partly historical novel engaging with World War II, McEwan set the 2005-novel Saturday in the immediate present: the historical background to this “day-in-the-life narrative” (Childs 2006: 144) are the 9/11 attacks and the impeding war on Iraq. Already the novel’s first scene is emblematic for this historical backdrop and the

12 McEwan, Ian (2005/2006). Saturday . London: Vintage. In the following quoted with the abbreviation S and the page number in parenthesis: (S: 3). 81 overarching terror-angst as Perowne watches a plane on fire descending into Heathrow and immediately associates it with terrorism. Perwone’s experience in the dawn of his Saturday constitutes the first of the book’s five chapters that structure the story and the day into night, morning, afternoon, evening and night again. This structure corresponds with the build-up of tension in the five acts of a classical drama (cf. Lusin 2008: 87). Traces of modernist, and in specific Virgina Woolf’s writing have already been detected in Atonement , McEwan’s foregone novel. In Saturday , McEwan proceeds with the modernist technique of “look[ing] at the world through individual perceptions” (Green 2010: 71) by employing Henry Perwone as the central focalizer figure in a third person narration using free indirect style. Perowne’s daily activities, as Marcus (2009: 95) outlines, show parallels to Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway : Perowne’s shopping for the family reunion with his daughter Daisy coming from Paris and his father-in-law, the famous poet, John Grammticus from his French chateau parallel Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for the evening party. The use of frequent flashbacks in both novels allows glimpses into the protagonist’s biographies. Furthermore, the novels share the feature of having the “world seen by the sane and the insane, side by side” (Marcus 2009: 95), embodied in the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway and neurologically ill Baxter in Saturday , whose encounter with Perowne after a car accident leads to the final climax of the novel. The engagement with modernism might be a parallel between McEwan’s consecutive novels Atonement and Saturday ; their chief characters, however, are diametrically different. An overactive imagination and immersion into fictional world is Briony’s harmatia that makes her commit her crime; Henry Perowne in contrast is a “rational, prosaic figure” (Childs 2006: 146) who can hardly immerse himself in imagined worlds and has a difficult time with the reading assignments his poet-daughter prescribes for him. Perowne represents in terms of literature an “incarnation of the Arnold’s art-loathing ‘philistine’” (Wells 2010: 121) as he doubts the existence of ‘literary genius” (S 66) and counts himself as living proof that people indeed can live without stories – an argument that does not only counter his daughter Daisy, but the understanding of man as “story-telling animal” (Swift 1984: 53). McEwan’s two protagonists seem to represent inhabitants of the separate worlds of C. P. Snows (1959/ 2001) Two Cultures, meaning humanities on the one hand and science on the other hand. But not only in intellectual terms, the placement of the two characters differ; also in spatial terms, Henry Perowne’s stately house is situated within a different surrounding than young Briony Tallis’ childhood home, namely the city.

82 10.1. The Setting: A Family Home While isolation and remoteness are the common features of McEwan’s houses analysed so far, Saturday , in contrast, is situated within the vibrant city of London. This aspect offers new perspectives on the house and its interaction with its immediate surroundings. Before this aspect will be analysed, the house itself as the central locus of action will be examined. Henry Perowne’s family bliss with an intact, loving marriage and two unproblematic, talented children has already been depicted. The Perowne’s home thus shelters a family that represents the Victorian ideal of the “family hearth […] celebrated as the virtuous bower of bliss and sanctuary from the corruptive competitiveness of the outside world” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2011: 2). In Victorian times, the “vaunted microcosm” (Kohle und Gutleben 2011: 2) of the happy family represented the cultural ideal and was modelled after the royal example of maternal figure Queen Victoria and her family. The Perowne’s house is thus filled with warmth and love and fulfils Bachelard’s (1964: xxxi) understanding of the house as a “felicitous space”. In Bachelard’s (1964: 27) sense the house should thus be characterised by qualities like intimacy and safety, protecting its inhabitants against the “storms of the universe”. The presentation of the Perowne home is consistent with the required facilities of a comfortable family home: as Henry awakes in the dawn of Saturday next to his wife Rosalind he finds the bedroom “large and uncluttered” (S 4). Later in the day, the living room on the ground floor with its heavy curtains that are “closed by pulling on a cord weighted with a fat brass knob” (S 181) guarantees him a soothing silence, remote from the urban life outside the windows. As Perowne tries to perceive this very room through the eyes of intruder Baxter he outlines the wealth the Perowne’s home represents to the derelict from the streets with “the two bottles of champagne” on the table, “the belittlingly high ceiling and its mouldings” opposite to “the cherry wood floor” covered with “Persian rugs” and the “muted lamps” illuminating the “Bridget Riley prints flanking the Hodgkin” and the “careless piles of serious books” (S 207). Ross (2008: 79) compares Saturday to E.M. Forster’s Howards End on the basis of the “house as a key thematic locus”: in the same way as Howards End does it to Family Schlegel, their house represents to the Perowne family “a sanctum of cultured enjoyment and affection”. Daughter Daisy, as she returns from a half-year absence in Paris, is stunned when she re-enters her family home: “My God, this place is even larger than I remember” (S 184). The grandeur of the house is also indicated by its sheer height, as it builds

83 up at least three storeys, since Perowne describes his son Theo “deeply asleep on the third floor” (S 65). Reading the Perownes’ home as a means of characterisation, it can be said that the family bliss is mirrored in the house’s interior: the cleanliness and unclutteredness of the rooms corresponds with the harmony in which the family lives; the wealth at display within the living room mirrors the intellectual richness of the family members. In contrast to Atonement where the seemingly direct semiological relationship between room and character is subverted, the straightforward Korrespondenz in Saturday is maintained.

10.2. Applying Lotman The loving family in Saturday’s climactic fourth chapter reunites and assembles in the living room, a “shared loving area with its street level access” (Wells 2010: 120) and the place where outside brutality intrudes the Perowne home. The precondition for this intrusion is a border zone, where inside and outside meet – two of these border zones are present in Saturday .

10.2.1. The Door: A “mundane embattlement” The Perowne’s house emanates wealth and mediates well-being, two features that need to be protected. On his way down to the kitchen in the basement, Perowne reflects on the house’s impressive safety devices: On his way to the main stairs, he pauses by the double front doors. They give straight on to the pavement, on to the street that leads into the square, and in his exhaustion they suddenly loom before him strangely with their accretions – three stout Banham locks, two black iron bolts as old as the house, two tempered steel security chains, a spyhole with a brass cover, the box of electronics that works the Entryphone system, the red panic button, the alarm pad with its softly gleaming digits. Such defences, such mundane embattlement: beware of the city’s poor, the drug-addict, the downright bad. (S 36f)

The entrance door thus represents to Perowne a means of modern embattlement and a promise for keeping his home safe from the city’s criminals. The door as it presents itself to Perowne is a prime example of a guarding and insuperable border, although the outside world is only a door away. The entrance door thus represents the interface where outside urbanity and the intimate inside meet. As has been described before, the door represents not only the interface between a threatening outside and a safe inside world, but also divides the realms of private and public life. In her introduction to the sociology of city and space, Löw (2007: 38) describes that our social life is structured by processes that emerged in the last centuries, especially through industrialisation and urbanisation. These fundamental ordering systems include the core family as primary form of living, social distinction on the basis of class and 84 milieu and a separation of private and public spheres. These two spheres are, according to Löw (2007: 38) emotionally loaded as the private sphere offers protection while public space may raise fears. Within this dichotomy, the door symbolises a passage of transition, when the person leaves the public behind and arrives at its private state of being. This function as passage becomes also obvious in the scene when Perowne leaves the house behind for the hospital to operate Baxter: he and Rosalind “are standing by the front door with its triple locks and the keypad’s comforting glow” (S 238), kissing goodbye. In this scene, however, the passage from the inside to the outside is a “clarifying pleasure” (S 241) for Perowne since his house’s safety has been destroyed. This aspect will be outlined with further depth later on.

10.2.2. The Window: A Proleptic Glimpse Atonement ended with old Briony’s gaze out of the window of her former childhood home. In a sense, McEwan takes this position up again in the beginning of Saturday as Henry Perowne awakes in the dawn and stands by the window perceiving the city outside. The parallels to Mrs Dalloway have already been mentioned and can be complemented with this opening passage: Woolf’s story as well starts with a reference to a window, as she remembers the sound of the opening French windows of her youth in Bourton. According to Senn (2000: 84), Mrs Dalloway thus opens a window to her past and the reader joins her in “looking at her memories”. With the window scene at the beginning of Saturday , the reader shares Henry Perowne’s view of the city as it lays there glittering in the night time. The window has already been analysed in its function as a border: in Atonement , it separated the two worlds of Briony’s fiction-ridden perception and reality on the outside; in Saturday , the window again severs inside and outside, but this time literally as it stands between Perwone’s family life in the house and the outside world of the city. Similar to the door, Perowne’s window in Saturday can be perceived as a border separating the spheres of private and public life. A first notion of the two contrasting worlds is given as Perwone opens the window of his warm bedroom and the “February air” (S 4) that pours in from the outside causes his skin to tighten (S 4). While this first contact with the outside world leaves Perowne untroubled, the next intrusion will unsettle him deeply. Again framed by the window, a spectacle on the nightly sky becomes visible to Perowne which he first identifies as a “meteor burning out in the London sky” (S 14) than corrects his assumption “to the scale of the solar systems” (S 14) and presumes a comet “with the familiar bright core trailing its fiery envelope” is crossing his vision of field. As he understands that the fiery object is travelling on the same route he has taken many times in descending down to

85 Heathrow airport, Perowne understands that he is watching a plane on fire and typical 9/11- associations are evoked:

[…] the scene construed from the outside, from afar like this, is also familiar. It’s already eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed. (S 16)

This nightly vision of the Russian cargo plane that “flew right into his insomnia” (S 180) leaves Perowne in a “turmoil” (S 22) since he thinks that he just watched a terrorist attack on his city, as he will tell his son Theo shortly after (S 31). The window frames Perowne’s observing gaze and indicates, as has been outlined before with Senn (2000: 68) human’s limited interpretation of reality. On this basis, Perowne’s window gaze can be compared to Briony’s observation of the fountain scene: in the same way, Perowne does not understand what he sees at first and then comes up with an interpretation of reality based on experiences that altered his perception. Perwone constructs a story of terror around the burning plane, while it is later discovered that a mere technical defect caused the fire on the cargo plane and nobody was hurt. This first perception through the window, however, establishes one form of outside intrusion Henry Perowne feels confronted with: terrorism as an impeding threat to Western population. Besides this threat of a political scale, Perowne is on this Saturday also faced with intimidation of a smaller scope: “domestic menace” (Wells 2010: 112) spawned by his very own city. A proleptic glance on this dark side of the capital he lives in is again given through Perowne’s bedroom window:

At first sight they look like two girls in their late teens, slight and with pale delicate faces, and underdressed for February. They could be sisters, standing by the railings of the central gardens, oblivious to passers-by, lost to a family drama of their own. Then Perowne decides that the figure facing him is a boy. […] She shrugs him off. She’s agitated and crying, and undecided in her movements […] She wants the boy, she hates him. His look is feral, sharpened by hunger. Is it for her? […] Repeatedly, her left hand wanders behind her back, to dig under her T-shirt and scratch hard. She does this compulsively, even as she’s crying and half-heartedly shoving the boy away. Amphetamine-driven formication – the phantom ants crawling through her arteries and veins, the itch that can never be reached. Or an exogenous opioid-induced histamine reaction, common among new users. The pallor and emotional extravagances are telling. These are addicts, surely. A missed score rather than a family is behind her distress and the boy’s futile comforting. (S 59f)

This window scene also claims a comparison to the scene by the fountain in Atonement : In the same way as Briony, Perowne is now watching a young couple from his window. Again, he has troubles to decide what he sees as he is zooming in on the two figures on the square. He

86 follows their drama in the same way as Briony did with Robbie and Cecilia. But, in difference to Briony who confides on fictional stories to interpret the scene, Perowne uses his medical knowledge. He reads the outward symptoms with medical precision and comes up with a statement that sounds like a diagnosis, that those two on the square are drug addicts and their addiction must be the cause for their little drama. It seems like McEwan uses this scene to underline the diametrically opposed characters he placed at the centre of his consecutive books: an over-imaginative girl in Atonement , a rational, science-guided surgeon in Saturday . Furthermore, this scene observed through his window allows Perowne a glimpse of the dark sides of the city and is proleptic as it suggests his later encounter with another representative of this outside sphere.

1.1.1. Inside vs. Outside With the door and the bedroom window, two border zones have already been identified that suggest a topological opposition of ‘inside versus outside’, as present in the two previous novels. The Perowne’s house as the central location has already been depicted in contrast to the outside world from which it is separated by two central boundaries, the window as framing the perspective on the outside world, and the heavily armed door. The inside space offers typical qualities like warmth and safety, which a house should, in Bachelard’s sense, guarantee to its inhabitants.

10.2.2.1. Inside Spaces: Safe and Ordered One scene in the novel is characteristic for the inside qualities the house represents to Perowne, as he returns home from his shopping trip: he opens the door and Theo’s statement after Perowne told him about his “scrape” (S 151) with Baxter comes to his mind: “’You humiliated him. You should watch that. […] Also, Dad, I can’t believe we’ve lived here all this time and you and Mum have never been mugged.’” This statement nags at Perowne briefly “but the half-hearted effort to recall itself fades as he steps into the warmth of the hall and turns on the lights; a mere light bulb can explode a thought.” (S 175) The warmth and the brightness of the house disperse the budding feeling of threat after the clash with Baxter and ensure Perowne’s feeling of security within his inside realm. The house, however, is not the only inside space Perowne inhabits: his car and the operating theatre are as well presented as inside space which convey safety and comfort to Perowne. As he cruises the city in his Mercedes on the way to his squash match he reflects on how he shamelessly “always enjoys the city from inside his car where the air is filtered and

87 hi-fi music confers pathos on the humblest details – a Schubert trio is dignifying the narrow street he’s slipping down now” (S 76). Out on the streets, Perowne still feels disconnected from the outside world and his perception of the humble street is modified by the classical ‘soundtrack’ that accompanies his drive. With Childs (2006: 148) Perowne’s experience in his car can be interpreted in the way that he “is cocooned from the world […]”. However, this seemingly isolation in the protected space of his car is “about to crash” (Childs 2006: 148) as he is approaching his accident with Baxter, when his “cocoon is ruptured” (Groes 2009: 106). The operating theatre where Perowne as a neurosurgeon “is privileged to actually see inside the skull” (Green 2010: 62) represents to him another inside space where he feels at home. In executing his operations, he never feels insecure: “once busy within the enclosed world of his firm, the theatre and its ordered procedures, and absorbed by the vivid foreshortening of the operating microscope as he follows a corridor to a desired site, he experiences a superhuman capacity” (S 11). The adjective “enclosed” describes the operating theatre as an inside world, the qualities Perowne associates with his work place are order and control, as becomes apparent when he arrives at the clinic on Saturday night to operate Baxter. He experiences the “neurosurgical suite” as “[h]ome from home” where “he can control outcomes” and finds “controlled conditions” (S 246). Besides the quality of safety associated with the family home, ‘order’ and ‘control’ are added to the semantic connotations of inside-spaces. Considering the aspect of order, a further spatial setting should be considered that is only present in the novel through Perowne’s memories of his childhood home and the ‘regime of order’ his mother commanded there:

Order and cleanliness were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. A book he was reading would be back on the hallway shelf upstairs as soon as he put it aside. The morning paper could be in the dustbin by lunchtime. […] Surely it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre. (S 155)

Perowne’s favour for order is traced back to the cleanliness of his childhood home and manifests the semantic connotation of inside space. Thus, in Lotman’s sense, within the topological opposition of inside vs. outside present in Saturday , the inside-pole can be linked to the semantic interpretations of safety as well as order. The topographical realisations of these semantic connotations is found within home and in the workplace – thus within the private sphere as defined by Habermas (1993: 48) as including the family realm and the individual’s occupation. How these inside-qualities are contrasted in the outside world will be shown in the following.

88 10.2.2.2. Outside Spaces: Threatening and Chaotic At first, there is no opposition visible in the depiction of Perowne’s elegant townhouse and the perception of the outside world by which it is surrounded: the modern city represents itself as a place of pleasure. This perception will soon be altered, however.

10.2.2.2.1. The Renegotiation of the City: A “brilliant invention” Following Perowne’s gaze out of the window wandering over the nightly city, the outside world does not seem in any contrast to his comfortable home. Standing there, Perowne overviews not only “the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden” (S: 5), but he also reflects on his “own corner […] an eighteenth century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes” (S: 5). This passage already indicates the overall attitude towards the modern city of London: to Perowne, the city “is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece” (S 5) and furthermore a place of light and cleanness. Indeed, through Perowne’s eyes the city undergoes a beautification since he perceives the “pigeon excrement hardened by distance and cold” as “something almost beautiful, like a scattering of snow” (S 5) and later on, he compares the intensifying traffic on nearby Euston Road to “a breeze moving through a forest of firs” (S: 38). The typical city noise with the sound of roaring motors on crowded streets are liked to soothing natural experiences – this represents a harsh reinterpretation of the dichotomy of idyllic country versus industrialised and unpleasant city life. This opposition is aesthetically rooted in English Romanticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. The Romantic poets of this time – Coleridge, Blake and first and foremost Wordsworth – “saw little to praise in the social conditions of industrial society” (Bunce 1994: 21) and instead they considered nature as the basic source of inspiration, “ground of life” (Bunce 1994: 21) and thus “nature was elevated to a sacred status (Bunce 1994: 22). This led to a glorification of the traditional rural lifestyle in contrast to the dynamic and competitive urban life which had its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealisation of a “natural state” people should live in, dating back to the eighteenth century (Bunce 1994: 23). Perowne’s perception of the city is not only an inversion of Romantic ideas about city and countryside which persist until today; this portrayal of the modern capital city also stands in contrast to former descriptions of the “darkest London” (Williams 1989: 61) that were also present in McEwan’s early writing. As Raymond Williams (1989) examines the response to the nineteenth century growing cities in English literature, he extracts recurring themes: the

89 city is perceived as a crowd of strangers, within which the individual feels isolated and lonely. One of the central responses to growing metropolis in late nineteenth century English literature is the perception of their capital as “darkest London”. Especially the East End was often seen as “warrens of crime” (Williams 1989: 61) from which an “isolated irrational intelligence of a dark area of crime” (Williams 1989: 61) penetrates the city. This dark or intimidating aspect of city life is as well described by Lehan (1998: 8f) and his depiction of the “Other” within the city. The gradual, even organic, growing of the city generated its diversity as a key attribute of modern urbanity. Work and population, thus, became diversified and this diversity consequently led to the “Other” within the urban community. (Lehan 1998: 8) As Groes (2009: 99f) argues, the London in McEwan’s early stories such as “Butterflies” from his short story collection First Love, Last Rites represents an image of this “darkest London”: there are no parks except for the car parks, the canal that runs in between the factories is brown and becomes the death place of the girl Jane. Furthermore, McEwan describes in this story “how a glass of water from a London tap has been drunk five times before” (McEwan quoted in Groes 2009: 100). This reference to water represents a striking contrast in the portrayals of the city: the fresh water in Saturday is a direct inversion of the unclean water in his earlier story. Thus, it can be said with Groes (2009: 101) that the portrayal of Perowne’s city is the “modernist renegotiation of London” and marks a contrast to former representations of London in McEwan’s canon. In Saturday , McEwan uses a different imagery often attached to urbanity: the city as “the seat of civilisation and culture, and of light and learning” (Groes 2009: 102). Driving back into the city, Perowne notices the city’s beauty at night. He wants to grasp the full scenery with “the abrasive tang of icy fumes” (S: 168), “the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork” (S: 168) and “the red tail lights stretching way ahead into the city” (S: 168). Most importantly, he starts reflecting on the invention and distribution of light that ended the “petroleum age” (S: 168) and made the modern city a place of “rivers of light!” (S: 168). Thus, Perowne conceives the illumination of the modern city as the “final perfection” (S: 168) of urban development. McEwan himself acknowledged this conscious re- representation of England’s capital in an interview with Melvin Bragg (2005, quoted in Groes 2009: 102) by stating that “[i]nseparable from the idea of having a novel right in the present was to do London again, or to do London properly. To get the taste and flavour of it”. As Groes (2009: 108) observes, “Perowne’s city is a clean, light and sanitized Eden, a complete inversion of darkest London.” So far, there seems to be no contrast between the comfortable inside of the Perowne’s luxurious family home and the clean, enlightened outside of the city.

90 But besides the inversion of the former ‘darkest London’, there are “new uncertainties, a new darkness […] brought to the fore in the post-9/11 metropolis” (Groes 2009: 111).

10.2.2.2.2. The Urban Idyll Destroyed: A “condition of the times” As the 9/11-attacks represent the historical backdrop to the novel, the new darkness that Groes alludes to is the looming “international threat of Islamist militantism” (Wells 2010: 112). The omnipresence of this threat becomes obvious as Perowne immediately compares the fiery air plane in the London night sky to the pictures that were etched on public memory eighteen months ago as they showed “unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter” (S 16) and gave “any jet plane a novel association” making them look “predatory or doomed” (S 16). When Henry Perowne tells his son Theo about his unsettling observation in the night sky, his first association as well is with the threat of terrorism: “Theo says, ‘You reckon it’s terrorists?’ ‘It’s a possibility.’” (S 31) Terrorism, however, is not the only issue of global relevance troubling Perowne and intruding his daily life: the impeding United States invasion of Iraq and the prospect of war intensify the climate of fear in which Perowne lives. The world he finds is dominated by “[i]nternational terror, security cordons, preparations for war – these represent the steady state, the weather” (S 32). Through these global concerns, Perowne perceives the urban realm, which he admired as a brilliant and vibrant organism, as being endangered: “London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb” (S 276). These global threats indicate that the outside sphere within the dichotomy is not restricted to the city that surrounds the Perowne home; rather, in the modern globalised society, also threats encompass the whole world and cause the London citizen Perowne to fear terrorism presumably rooted and a war fought in Iraq. This enlargement of the outside world is mirrored and simultaneously made possible by modern means of media broadcasting as media seems to connect private and public realm. The Russian plane “that flew right into [Perowne’s] insomnia” (S 180) passes “from the realm of private occurrence into the public domain” (Currie 2007, quoted in Marcus 2009: 96) through mainstream media. Throughout the day, Perowne displays a kind of obsession with news broadcast. At the dawn of the day, when Theo turns on “the small TV they keep near the stove for moments like this, breaking stories” (S 29) for his father; in the car on Marylebone High Street when “he remembers to turn on the midday news” (S 125); even in the secluded realm of his mother’s care home (S 166) – Perowne follows ‘his story’ of the burning plane

91 throughout Saturday. He allows “every little nervous shift of the daily news process colour his emotional state” (S 180) as it only gradually turns out that the occurrence was a mere technical failure. Perowne himself understands this “compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety” as a “condition of the times” (S 176). Media broadcast, thus, enlarges the outside realm from the closer urban context to a global scale. However, also the more immediate outside world imposes threats on Henry Perowne that contrast with the warmth and safety of the inside spaces. The inverted imagery of the ‘brightest London’ does not give the whole truth. With the window scene in which Perowne observes the drug addict couple on the square, a first hint towards the still present dark sides within the city is given. The square accommodates both realities as Perowne observes through the framing device of his bedroom window:

Henry tries to find reassurance in this orderliness, and in remembering the square at its best – weekday lunchtimes, in warm weather, when the office crowds come from the local production, advertising an design companies bring their sandwiches and boxed salads […] So much divides them from the various broken figures that haunt the benches. […] No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. (S 272)

The two faces of the city are present on the square through the successful, neat office people on the one hand and the “drunks and junkies” (S 272), the petty criminals on the other hand. One representative of the latter group is Baxter. He represents “the marginalized, the derelict” (Ross 2008: 76) who suffers from the degenerative mental disease Chorea Huntington which will eventually kill him and is “therefore free of consequences” (S 210). This aspect makes him a dangerous opponent who emerges from a locus that belongs to the dark parts of the city: Perowne observes Baxter and his two sidekicks leaving a “lap-dancing club” (S 79) before they get into their car and get involved in the “urban drama” (S 86) with Perowne. His mental illness causes Baxter to suffer from “poor self-control, emotional lability, explosive temper” (S 91) and thus he “exemplifies the nightmare of fierce irrationality that repeatedly abrades the taut surface of McEwan’s fiction” (Ross 2008, 86). Baxter can thus be compared to the delusional Jed Parry in Enduring Love who in a similar way penetrates the protagonist’s life and dwelling. With Lehan (1998: 74), Baxter can furthermore be characterised as the “urban uncanny”, referring to Freud’s idea of the uncanny, embodied in the mysterious stranger who steps from the city’s crowd and intimidates Perowne and his family. According to Brown (2008: 87) Saturday thus “highlights the uncanny effects of the return of what is repressed” in a contemporary world dominated by rationalism.

92 Baxter’s irrationality can be linked to the disorder that characterises the urban outside world and finally leads to the aggressive encounter between Perowne and Baxter. As Henry Perowne likes order, his Saturday is also accurately structured in order to fit all planned activities into one day. As he leaves the house, he does not find the surrounding streets in their usual weekends’ emptiness, but masses of people are occupying the streets, participating in the anti-war protests. The crowd is “possessing the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose conveying an intimidation of revolutionary joy” (S 72). Perowne thinks of “cartons and paper cups [that] are spreading thickly under the feet of demonstrators” (S 74) and are littering the streets which he prefers in their morning cleanliness: observing the square from his bedroom window at the end of the Saturday, Perowne finds that “the litter bins have been emptied, the paving has been swept clean” and he finds “reassurance in this orderliness” (S 272). However, the litter is not the primal cause of chaos in Perowne’s life, but the crowd’s possession of the street. Due to the protests, Perowne has to leave his intended route through the city and the whole course of his Saturday is altered. A motorbike policeman stops Perowne on Tottenham Court Road since “the road is closed for the march” (S 79). Perowne, however, keeps driving towards the policeman, “as if by pretending not to know, he can be exempted” (S 79). Indeed the policeman indicates to Perowne that he can cross the actually closed road and this turn leads to the initial encounter with Baxter. As Ross (2008: 90) states the “protest, in fact, feeds directly into the more immediate, personal threat to his safety. It is the rally that leads to his scrape with Baxter’s BMW, impeding his normal momentum”. Disorder has disturbed Perowne’s daily life and it will continue to do so. Summarising, it has been shown that the topological dichotomy present in Saturday is, again, the opposition of inside versus outside, realised in the topographical realities of the private sphere of the family home on the one hand and the surrounding public sphere of the city streets on the other. From these streets emerge the still present representatives of the dark side of London. Moreover, the scope of influence of the outside world on the protagonist has widened dramatically, since public threat has become a global issue in contemporary times. The inside world is semantically loaded with the attributes of safety and order, while the outside world is characterised by looming threat and disorder that leads to the initial encounter that will cause the final border crossing.

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10.2.3. Transgressions: Private vs. Public Realm According to Lotman (1977: 232), the event is the “smallest unit of plot construction” and represents the transgression of a boundary. This first transgression can lead to further events and thus establish a plot. Furthermore, the event is defined as “the violation of some prohibition” and “takes place though it need not have taken place” (Lotman 1977: 232). On this basis, Saturday is based on a plot-construction par excellence: the initial encounter starts with Perowne’s act of transgression as he crosses a closed street and violates the ban on vehicles. This initial event sets in motion a chain of consecutive events that culminates in the final transgression of a representative from the public sphere into Perowne’s private realm.

10.2.3.1. Media Interruptions: An “infection from the public domain” The public sphere repeatedly interrupts Perowne’s private life throughout the novel. The first instance is the appearance of the fiery plane at the nightly sky together with the sight of the Post Office Tower, “an icon for the mass-communication age and emblematic of the public domain unavoidably infecting the private” (Green 2010: 61). The reoccurring sight of this emblem of the modern technologised society mirrors the recurring intrusion of public news into private lives. To Perowne, the tower – “less ugly these days with its aluminium entrance, blue cladding and geometric masses of windows and ventilation grilles looking like a Mondrian” (S 78) – which he perceives at the very first scene of the book represents “a valiant memorial to more optimistic days” (S 4). Those optimistic days were the 1960s when the Post Office tower was built as part of a massive communication network, “designed to survive a nuclear attack” (Wells 2010: 114). The tower was a landmark, visible from almost everywhere in London and symbolised the “epitome of modernity, telecommunications” (Larsonneur 2008: 122). Perowne has an ambivalent attitude towards the permanent engagement with public affairs that is embodied in this tower: on the one hand, he displays an “obsession with round-the-clock news broadcasting” (Groes 2009: 112), deliberately following the coverage of ‘his story’; on the other hand, in the squash hall’s dressing room, he is ambitious to protect his privacy:

Perowne shifts position so that the screen is no longer in view. Isn’t it possible to enjoy an hour’s recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain? He begins to see the matter resolving in simple terms: winning his game will be an assertion of his privacy. He has a right now and then – everyone has it – not to be disturbed by world events, or even street events. (S 108)

94 In the same way as the Post Office Tower re-enters Perowne’s field of vision repeatedly – at the day’s first view out of the bedroom window (S 4), when welcoming his father-in-law in the evening (S 197), at leaving the house to operate on Baxter (S 241) – the outside world enters Perowne’s daily life through modern mass media. This is one aspect anticipating the actual physical intrusion of the outside world through Baxter. The porous borders between private and public life are also indicated in the representation of the square as “a kind of dramatic space” (Wells 2010: 115) for private dramas. As Groes (2009: 112) observes, “it is the city that connects the private with the public” and this function is embodied in the city square Perowne observes from his bedroom window:

People often drift into the square to act out their dramas. […] The square’s public aspect grants privacy to these intimate dramas. Couples come to talk or cry quietly on the benches. Emerging from small rooms in council flats or terraced houses, and from cramped side streets, into a wider view of generous sky and a tall stand of plane trees on the green, of space and growth, people remember their essential needs and how they’re not being met. (S 61)

This “intersection of private and public spaces” (Molesworth 1991: 14) is essential to the construction of the modern city, since within the urban setting public space is constantly used as a stage for private experience. The city is therefore described as a place where “a distinct sense of self undergoes a staging” (Molesworth 1991: 14). As Perowne observes, “[p]assions need room, the attentive spaciousness of a theatre” (S 60) and the city offers this theatrical space in its squares. The city, however, not only is the theatre, but also “creates the theatre” (Mumford 1937: 29) since the diversity of people crowded together in relative small urban space offers the tense potential for disharmony and conflicts. The interference of private and public life leads to Perowne’s car crash and represents the first physical damage of Perowne’s private sphere. As has been described before, the public event of the anti-war protests interferes with Perwone’s planned route through the city and leads him to cross a closed-off road and to the accident with Baxter. The spatial construction of this event mirrors the decisiveness of this encounter for the narrative. The policeman stops Perowne “at the junction of the two roads” (S 79) and Perowne finds himself at the crossroads of the decision-making process whether he ‘illegally’ crosses the road or adheres to the rules. With Winspur (1991: 62) this spatial construction can be interpreted as a “crossroad metaphor for narrative shifts” since the decision to cross the road makes Perowne enter the street that leads to the dramatic encounter. According to Winspur (1991: 60) streets in a fictive world are not mere forms of spatial structure, but lead the character into “a certain

95 direction and point to a certain end”. This is also true for Perowne, since the street he chooses – “the narrow column of space framed on the right by a kerb-flanked cycle path, and on the left by a line of parked cars” (S 81) – leads him towards “important actions and significant consequences” (Winspur 1991: 61), namely the first physical intimidation of impeding threats. His silver Mercedes lures Perowne into the belief that he is “cocooned from the world” and that the “the metal shell of the car” guarantees “isolated protection” (Childs 2006: 148). In fact, “this cocoon is ruptured” (Groes 2009: 106) as Baxter pulls out from the parking row and the two cars crash. The sound of “sheet-steel surfaces sliding under pressure” and the “snap of a wing mirror” (S 81) lead Perowne to believe that his car is ruined: “His car will never be the same again. It’s ruinously altered, and so is his Saturday.” (S 82). What follows is a first restitution of the attacked inside realm of the car as Perowne finds that “there seems to be no damage at all” (S 83). Still, the initial spark has been set and Perwone’s urban drama is about to unfold as Baxter and his two sidekicks get out of the car.

But here on University Street it’s impossible not to feel that play-acting is about to begin. Dressed as a scarecrow […] he stands by his powerful machine. He is cast in a role, and there’s no way out. This, as people like to say, is urban drama. […] Here are the cars, and here are their owners. Here are the guys, the strangers, whose self-respect is on the line. Someone is going to have to impose his will and win, and the other is going to give way. (S 86)

This direct encounter of Perowne and the representatives of the threatening outside world will, however, end in a supposed restitution with Perowne leaving the stage almost unharmed. Before following this drama to its alleged happy end, the two antagonists in this confrontation – Perowne and Baxter – should be analysed with more depth.

10.2.3.2. Hero and Anti-Hero Considering the protagonists starring in this urban drama, Baxter seems to represent Perowne’s antipode. From a superficial point of view, this opposition is quite obvious and also acknowledged by Perowne himself, as he “possesses so much – the work, money, status, the home, above all the family” (S 227) in contrast to Baxter “who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene, and who is soon to have even less” (S 228). Perowne represents the well-educated, professionally successful and affluent bourgeoisie society, while Baxter is the social outlaw, disadvantaged by genetics and social circumstances. While Perowne and his family are depicted as being “hyperliterate” (Ross 2008: 86), Baxter answers Perowne’s question about his training with “I didn’t get on with school” (S 96). To Perowne,

96 Baxter seems like a man who “missed his chances, made some big mistakes and ended up in the wrong company” (S 98). Apart from these obvious oppositions in social standing, Perowne and Baxter can also be described as antipodes on the level of character. Lusin (2008: 86) summarises the diametrically opposed characteristics: „Während Berechenbarkeit und Kontrolle für Perowne höchste Priorität haben, ist Baxter die personifizierte Unberechenbarkeit [...] böse und aggressiv“. Perowne is “a rational, prosaic figure” (Childs 2006: 146) who feels “at home in an operating theatre” (S 155) due to “its ordered procedures” (S 11) and the “controlled conditions” (S 246) he finds there. Baxter in contrast embodies “fierce irrationality” (Ross 2008: 86): due to his condition, “poor self-control, emotional lability, explosive temper” (S 91) together with “sudden, uncontrollable alterations of mood” (S 94) have formed Baxter’s character. His mental disposition makes Baxter an unpredictable opponent, while Perowne’s actions are always rationally controlled. The antipodal relationship of Perowne and Baxter is further exemplified in their responsiveness to literature. Perowne’s rationalised mind keeps him from indulging into invented worlds: “it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained” (S 66). He has so far not grasped what his daughter Daisy names “literary genius” (S 66) and postulates himself as living proof that “this notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t live without stories” (S 68) is simply not true. Baxter, in contrast, is affected by poetry so deeply that Arnold’s poem can transform him from “‘lord of terror’ into ‘amazed admirer’” (Wallace 2007: 478). Uneducated Baxter seems to posses what scientifically trained Henry Perowne lacks: a receptiveness for the power of literary genius. To Perowne, “the actual, not the magical” (S 67) matters. In this aspect, he is not only in stark contrast to derelict Baxter, but also to McEwan’s previous protagonist Briony in Atonement , who was obsessed with imagined worlds. (cf. Childs 2006: 146) Still, Perowne might share a characteristic with Briony since, according to Childs (2006: 147), he is “living a fiction to the extent that he considers himself apart from the violence of the streets, which he spies from his bedroom window, or the horrors of the world, about which he reads in the papers.” This deluded worldview, however, is soon to collapse. With their dominant characteristics, Perowne and Baxter are embodiments of the semantic field they inhabit: Perowne resides within the controlled and safe conditions of the inside world, while Baxter is a representative of the uncontrollable, intimidating darker sides of the outside realm.

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10.2.3.3. First Confrontation: An Urban Drama The first confrontation of Baxter and Perowne is an exemplification of their respective dominant traits of character: rationality on Perowne’s side, irrationality on Baxter’s. When Baxter opens the conversation after the car crash with offering Perowne a cigarette, Perowne’s professional attention is captured by the “persistent tremor” (S 87) in Baxter’s hand. Although the neurosurgeon is aware that “he might be in some form of danger” (S 84) since the “street is completely deserted” (S 84) and the thousands of protestors at the main road are “unaware of him” (S 85), his professional rationalism continues to dominate his thinking. As the three men move precariously close to Perowne and indicate their violent inclinations, Perowne reflects on “some of the current literature on violence” (S 88) discussing its sources. Baxter, in contrast, answers Perowne’s persistence on exchanging their details for insurance matters with “a shout of rage” and surprises Perowne with a hard hit on “his sternum with colossal force” (S 92). Even in experiencing this act of mindless violence, Perowne “remains in a portion of his thoughts a droning, pedestrian diagnostician” (S 91) noting Baxter’s lack of self-control and extreme alterations of mood indicative of Huntington’s disease. With this blow, also Baxter’s intentions change. At first, he wanted to make Perowne pay for the broken wing mirror and educe “seven fifty” (S 90) from the opponent in the posh car. After Perowne resists to pay and is slammed into a door recess, Baxter stops his sidekick from plundering Perowne’s wallet. “’We don’t want his money’”, (S 93), Baxter instructs, and Perowne “understands that honour is to be satisfied by a thorough beating” (S 93). Thus, Baxter turns to a more irrational lust for revenge through physical violence, while Perowne’s rational mind figures out “two immediate priorities” (S 92) for his further actions: he will not fight back, since he lacks expertise, and he will not fall to the ground to protect his head from dangerous kicks. Thus, his rational thinking keeps Perowne from any immediate physical reaction and it is his medical expertise that makes him escape the attack. By engaging Baxter into a conversation about his disease on the basis of his medical authority, Perowne allures the attacker from his original intentions. By questioning Baxter about his family history and the doctor he is seeing, Perowne turns the “fire escape recess [into] his consulting room” (S 95). He offers his medical help, promises “certain drugs” (S 97) that might ease his suffering and thus prompts Baxter to send his two sidekicks away in order to keep his degenerative disease a secret. This leads to the two men deserting the urban battlefield and Baxter’s furious reaction gives Perowne his “opportunity to withdraw” (S 98). Back in “the padded privacy of his car” (S 121), he re-establishes its safety by activating the

98 central locking and thus fortifying his inside space again against the outside forces. This re- establishment of the boundary between the safe inside and the dangerous outside world is, however, just an alleged restitution since the actual intimidation and border crossing is still to come. 10.2.3.4. Second Confrontation: A Domestic Drama The restitution of the boundary after the first confrontation is a fallacy since Baxter strives for restitution of his street authority. Perowne repeatedly reflects on the first encounter throughout the day, since he is aware of the fact that he “abuse[d] his own power” (S 111) as a medical professional.

There’s a dense black bruise to the left of his sternum. […] Staring at the discoloured skin helps focus his troubled feelings about Baxter. Did he, Henry Perowne, act unprofessionally, using his medical knowledge to undermine a man suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder? Yes. Did the threat of a beating excuse him? Yes, no, not entirely. But this haematoma […] says yes, he’s absolved. (S 111)

His concerns are thus concentrated on his medical ethics and when he notices a red BMW – the same model as Baxter’s – in his rear mirror his emotions are not dominated by anxiety, but by curiosity: “It’s not impossible that it is Baxter, but he feels no particular anxiety about seeing him again. In fact, he wouldn’t mind talking to him. His case is interesting, and the offer of help was sincere.” (S 140) His son Theo eventually draws his attention to the fact that Baxter might be longing for revenge, as he tells his father: “You humiliated him. You should watch that’” (S 152). This indicates that Perowne still trusts in the safety of his inside spaces and his “positive view of contemporary urban life” (Wells 2010: 111) is prevailing. In fact, just before his home is intruded, Perowne reflects about how everything that has troubled him this day is “benignly resolved”:

The pilots are harmless Russians, Lily is well cared for, Daisy is home with her book, those two million marchers are good-hearted souls, Theo and Claus have written a fine song, Rosalind will win her case on Monday and is on her way, it’s statistically improbable that terrorists will murder his family tonight […]. (S 202)

This positive view of life, however, is shattered when Baxter penetrates the family home. The Perowne’s home was presented “as impregnable as a castle” (Wells 2010: 119), but is easily invaded by the dangers of the outside world personified in Baxter. The two spheres constituting the spatial world of Saturday have been described in detail as the protected inside world on the one hand, and the threatening outside world on the other. With Lotman (1977: 240), Baxter can be identified as the “hero-agent” who ventures to transgress the border between these two worlds. His motives are rather ideological than monetary: humiliation as a

99 means of revenge and restitution of his reputation seem to be the driving force for the invasion of the “opulent townhouse” (Wells 2010: 113). The front door with its “mundane embattlement” (S 36) has been identified as the border zone where outside and inside world meet. Baxter’s transgression into the house by threatening Perowne’s wife Rosalind with a knife is first perceived by the assembled family through Rosalind’s terror: She moves slowly, stiffly, apparently wary of what she is about to find. She’s carrying her brown leather briefcase and she’s pale […] Even though Rosalind is wearing a winter coat over her business suit, he imagines he can actually see the racing of her pulse […] She warns them off with her eyes, with a furtive movement of her hand. It isn’t only fear they see in her face, but anger too, and perhaps in the tensing of her upper lip, disgust. (S 205f)

Thus, Baxter’s actual transgression of the physical border is not displayed since focalizer Henry Perowne only recognises Baxter when he enters the room. In his rational way, Perowne analyses the situation quickly, assessing that Baxter is here with Nigel to “rescue his reputation in front of a witness” (S 210). Perowne furthermore acknowledges his own responsibility for this act of revenge, since he “humiliated Baxter in the street in front of his sidekicks. […] He used or misused his authority to avoid one crisis, and his actions have steered him into another, far worse” (S 210f). After the seeming restitution with Perowne’s escape from the “thrashing” (S 95) follows the actual escalation. As Lusin (2008: 87) observes, Saturday’s structure mirrors that of a classical drama: “Die fünf Romanabschnitte entsprechen in ihrer Zielstrebigkeit und Spannungsentwicklung den Akten eines klassischen Dramas.” In this reading, based on Gustav Freytag’s (1900) theorem’s on the dramatic structure, the first encounter represents the story’s rising action, where the initial encounter of Perowne and Baxter decides the further course of events. The second confrontation in the bourgeois home represents the fourth chapter in the book, the falling action, while the last chapter would be the dénouement, in which the basic conflict is solved. (cf. Freytag 1900) Perowne’s professional mind further fathoms Baxter’s intrusion on a medical basis, reasoning that the prospect of becoming an invalid “writhing and hallucinating on a bed he’ll never leave” (S 211) led Baxter to “assert his dignity, and perhaps even shape the way he’ll be remembered” (S 211) as long as he still is in control of himself. This again exemplifies Perowne’s rationalised character, always remaining in his role as a physician. His rationalised introspective analysis also points out that “[a]ll this talent in this room”, addressing his musically gifted son and poetic talent of his father-in-law and his daughter, is “useless without a plan and a means to communicate it” (S 213). A plan, Perowne can think of, is “to hit

100 Baxter hard in the face with a clenched fist and hope that Theo will take on Nigel” (S 213). This fictional concept again fails due to Perowne’s rational considerations about the fact that he “never in his life has hit someone in the face”, but has “only ever taken a knife to anaesthetised skin in a controlled and sterile environment. He simply doesn’t know how to be reckless.” (S 213f) As well as the assembled talent, also all security systems with which “middle-class citizens such as [Perowne] must protect themselves in their homes” (Wells 2010: 119) fail. The panic button next to the door (cf. S 213), the pepper spray in Perowne’s office, the baseball bat in the vaults (cf. S 208) are all useless for this, “the intrusion of brutal, inescapable reality into comfortable lives” (Rennison, quoted in Hillard 2010: 140). While Perowne is constructing possible plans for reacting, Baxter’s intrusion seems to be “an improvised performance” (S 210). His acts of humiliation seem to be chosen randomly: after breaking Grammaticus’ nose, he threatens Rosalind with a knife on her throat and forces Daisy thus to undress in front of the two invaders and her family. To Perowne, Baxter “seems to be waiting to see what he himself will do next” (S 210) – “a bleak kind of freedom” (S 214) that is granted to Baxter by his medical condition. Embarrassed by the sight of Daisy’s pregnant body, Baxter finds interest in her collection of poems and prompts her to read a poem for him which Nigel demands to be her “dirtiest one” (S 220). Instead, Daisy recites Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and like “an evocative siren song [it] tames the beast” (Wallace 2007: 477), changes Baxter’s mood diametrically and turns his interest away from harming the Perowne family. As Green (2010: 66) observes, it thus is “literature in the form of poetry, not Henry’s scientific knowledge, that thwarts violence”. Henry Perowne tried to distract Baxter by entangling him into a medical conversation and holding out to him the false prospect of a trial for a new drug (S 215). This time, however, Baxter does not allow himself to be deceived and silences Perowne by calling him a liar. Listening to the poem, however, causes in Baxter “a renewed interest in life” (Childs 2006: 146) and he follows Perowne upstairs to get information about this trial. Just before the neurosurgeon’s lie is revealed, Baxter is “deserted a second time today” (S 227) by his sidekick and Theo and Perowne take their chance to overpower the intruder. In a symbolic scene father and son “fling him down the stairs” (S 227) and Baxter is thus returned from the upper stories, associated with “Perowne’s class superiority” (Wells 2010: 121) to his “debased and silenced position” (Wells 2010: 121) of the ground levels of the house towards the border zone between inside and outside world. The intruder is expelled from the inside space in which he does not belong to, but the damage he did to the house’s assurance of being a safe harbour persists. After Baxter is taken

101 away by the ambulance (S 228), the family is left behind traumatised: “No one wants to be alone, so they remain in the sitting room together, trapped in a waiting room, a no man’s land separating their ordeal from the resumption of their lives.” (S 228) Reading the novel as a five act drama, like Lusin (2008: 87) suggests, the last act, the final denouement of the basic conflict is still to come. While the family is having dinner – “not really pretending to have forgotten their fear – they’re simply wanting to survive it” (S 233) – Henry Perowne gets the chance of a final restitution as the hospital calls him to operate on Baxter.

10.2.4. The Restitution

Ross (2008: 76) quotes Ian McEwan himself stating that from his novel The Child in Time on, “I’ve never been really interested in anything other than trying to find connections between the public and the private, and exploring how the two are in conflict […].” With Baxter intruding Perowne’s home, the dark side of the public sphere invaded the private world. The agent-hero, however, is not accepted within the spatial field he ventured into and is expelled brutally, as his “head hits the floor of the half-landing and collides with the wall” (S 228). Baxter pays for his transgression with a severe head injury, “a depressed fracture right over the sinus” (S 232). This injury, moreover, would offer Perowne a possibility for revenge, since in operating Baxter he has his life in his hands. However, this is not the form of restitution for which Perowne seeks. At first, it seems that Perowne could be aiming at restoring the order within his inside world by revenging him and his family. In discussing the events of the evening, Perowne “is undergoing a shift in sympathies” (S 230): he is hardened by the “abrasion on Rosalind’s neck” (S 230) and as his anger on Baxter grows, “he almost begins to regret the care he routinely gave Baxter after his fall” (S 230). As Rosalind asks him about his reasons for accepting the operation on Baxter and whether he is thinking about “some kind of revenge” (S 239) Perowne decidedly denies and explains: “I have to see this through. I’m responsible” (S 239). For Perowne, his restitution means that he will establish himself as being in control again – he will become the agent-hero again within his inside world by performing this operation. Control and order are the dominant features of Perowne’s inside world; these attributes were obliterated by the invasion of irrational Baxter and Perowne is eager to restitute the confidence into his inside world. The return of order is anticipated by the teams of street cleaners who are “cleaning up after the demonstration” (S 243) and whom Perowne passes on his way to the hospital. The traces of the public chaos that caused his initial encounter with

102 Baxter are eliminated. In the same way as the streets are cleaned up, Perowne will re-establish his sense of order and control within his spatial realm. The pure arrival at his professional dominion improves his state of being: “As soon as he steps out into the broad area that gives onto the double doors of the neurosurgical suite, he feels better. Home from home.” (S 246) While Perowne temporarily was a helpless victim during Baxter’s raid on his house, within the hospital “[t]hough things sometimes go wrong, he can control outcomes here” (S 246). Facing Baxter in his house, Perowne could not conceive a promising plan to overpower the intruder – all he comes up with is “fantasising” and he feels trapped in an impotent position, forced to “stand around and wait” (S 213). In the surgical suite, in contrast, as he starts to cut Baxter’s head open, “a familiar contentedness settles on Henry; it’s the pleasure of knowing precisely what he is doing” (S 250) and he finds Baxter’s exposed brain as “familiar territory, a kind of homeland” (S 254) where he knows the safe paths to take. He is in control of his spatial field again and thus a restitution of the boundary between his controlled inside world and the outside seems to be achieved. Still, the incident has altered Perowne’s perception of the outside world lastingly. In the same way as Atonement ends with old Briony standing by the window and reflecting on the legacy of her atonement, Perwone is standing by his bedroom window in Saturday’s last scene. Henry Perowne occupies the same position by the window as he did at the beginning of the book: this appearance of the window does, according to Senn (2000: 88) not only “stand for symmetry and circularity […] but also for opposition and inversion”. Comparing the two window scenes, Perowne’s attitude towards the outside city has changed. Although the air that pours in is warmer than in the morning, “still he shivers” (S 272); while he felt “pleasurable in his limbs, his back and legs […] unusually strong” (S 3) in the morning, he “feels skinny and frail in his dressing gown” (S 275) after this Saturday; while he appreciated the city at his feet as a “brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece” (S 5) in the dawn, he now perceives London as “impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb” (S 276). The novel’s circular structure underlines how Perowne has changed through the “convulsive disruption of his domestic space” (Ross 2008: 78): “All he feels now is fear. He’s weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you’re lead to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose – a knife at the throat.” (S 277) The seeming restitution by regaining power within the controlled circumstances of the operating theatre cannot eradicate the uncertainty Baxter’s transgression caused.

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10.3. Benefit for interpretation

McEwan’s representation of London in Saturday thus corrects his earlier ‘darkest London’ by supplementing it with the traditional vision of the city as a place of light and learning, but new uncertainties, a new darkness, are brought to the fore in the post-9/11 metropolis. (Groes 2009: 111)

Since McEwan’s engagement with tradition and innovation was the starting point for this thesis, Saturday as well shows forms of this involvement: In Saturday , Ian McEwan engages with his own tradition of the representation of a darkest London. He renegotiates this former one-sided portrayal of the capital city, allows both aspects – cultural achievement and place of origin of the uncanny other – to consist side by side. Furthermore, in his treatment of current political issues, McEwan introduces new threats to the scope of urban threats. According to Lotman’s theory on spatial construction of a literary text, Saturday shows the most proto-typical constellation of the novels analysed: the agent hero transgresses from his topographical field of the outside world into another from where he is painfully expelled again. The alleged act of restitution, however, cannot erase the traumatic effect this transgression has on the protagonist, to whom the darker sides of his city are more present now. The depiction of the house in Saturday , moreover, shows the characteristic features of the felicitous place a home should represent to its inhabitants: it is warm, safe and emanates the wealth the family posses in material and intellectual terms. Similar to the Victorian perception of the home as a sanctuary from the insecurities of a rapidly transforming world, the townhouse is perceived as a secured castle that stands against the threats of the modern city. This perception, however, is shattered by the intrusion of the irrational and brutal forces embodied in Baxter and thus, Perowne’s sense of safety and control is ruptured as well. Again, the house does not fulfil its role as a sheltering home.

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11. Conclusion In this thesis, I analysed the houses and their functions in three of Ian McEwan’s novels. The aim was to investigate how McEwan uses the houses with view to plot construction and how his position between tradition and innovation is mirrored in the spatial structure of his novels. The three houses analysed are different with view to appearance and surrounding: First, there is the isolated house of The Cement Garden whose decay mirrors the children’s downfall into socially unacceptable behaviour. Second, I analysed the similarly isolated country house in Atonement that was as fake as Briony’s accusation for which she seeks atonement. Finally, Saturday’s protagonist Perowne resides in an opulent townhouse, situated in the vibrant city of London, which cannot protect its inhabitants against the urban uncanny. Despite these differences I found recurring settings with view to Lotman’s identification of spatial realms in the text: an opposition of inside versus outside was found in all three novels. These topographical realms carry, however, different semantic connotations: in The Cement Garden , the inside realm is connected to disorder while order is imposed on the children’s world from the outside. In Atonement and Saturday , in contrast, order is the dominating force in the inside worlds of Briony Tallis and Henry Perowne, who are confronted with the chaos and disorder of the outside world. This difference can be interpreted as a development in the author’s worldview: At first, disorder and chaos resides within the home, while in the later novels it is a disturbing force coming from the outside. The endpoint of this development is clearly exemplified in Saturday where irrational Baxter unsettles Perowne’s ordered world. McEwan’s transformation from Ian Macabre engaged with the morbid and horrid to an author involved with profound social and historical subjects can also be seen in the portrayal of the houses: decay and disgust dominate the abandoned family home in The Cement Garden ; the country house in Atonement is huge, but characterised by a lack of tastefulness and feigned historicalness; Perowne’s townhouse in Saturday , finally, is a place of cleanliness and wealth representing to its inhabitants a comfortable home. However, this seemingly Victorian ideal of the family hearth represents as little protection to its inhabitants as the other houses do. The home is expected to be “a here from which the world discloses itself, a there to which we can go” (Dardel, quoted in Relph 1976: 41). McEwan’s houses do not fulfil this requirement of providing shelter to their inhabitants from the outside world. In contrast, the houses are the places where the transgressions that change the characters’ world fundamentally take place. This suggests a negative world view and a distrust in the core unit

105 of our society: the family and its home are endangered – either by dramatic incidents within the family or by forces from the outside. The initial question of this thesis was how McEwan as a proponent of muted postmodernism engages with innovation and remains with tradition in terms of spatial setting. This question was answered in several respects. It became obvious that McEwan employs the realist method of Korrespondenz between a character and its immediate surrounding. Atonement represents this engagement with tradition and innovation superbly: the country house tradition is employed and at the same time deconstructed since the Tallis’ home is a fake replica. The situation with The Cement Garden and Saturday is different: These two novels deal with shocking (incest) respectively current (terrorism) topics on a content level. On the level of space, however, both novels are very traditional as they employ a straightforward Korrespondenz between the moral decline and the house’s decay in The Cement Garden and the perfectly happy family and the beautiful family home in Saturday . Furthermore, the deconstruction of the house as a safe place, which is present in all three novels, can also be named as an example of innovative engagement with tradition. My engagement with spatial analysis in McEwan’s work showed that this a field of study largely untouched. As a prospect for future analysis I would for example suggest to investigate McEwan’s portrayal of so-called lieu de mémoire. The analysis of historical places could be a promising field of study with view to novels like Black Dogs or Atonement .

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12. Bibliography 12.1. Primary literature

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113 13. Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache Die vorliegende Diplomarbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Funktion und Darstellung von Häusern in den Romanen The Cement Garden (1978), Atonement (2001) und Saturday (2005) von Ian McEwan. Dieser Analyseansatz wurde gewählt, da die Untersuchung räumlicher Strukturen seit dem ‘Spatial Turn’ ein dominierendes Thema der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften ist, auf die Werke von McEwan, einem der wichtigsten zeitgenössischen britischen Schriftsteller, bisher jedoch kaum angewendet wurde. Die Analyse des Raumes fokussiert auf die drei Familienhäuser, die die zentralen Schauplätze in den Romanen darstellen. Den Ausgangspunkt für die Betrachtungen liefert Ian McEwan’s literaturhistorische Positionierung in einer Strömung, die als muted postmodernism bezeichnet wird und eine Mittelposition zwischen traditionellem und innovativem Schreiben darstellt. Den theoretischen Hintergrund bilden einerseits aktuelle Arbeiten zum ‘Spatial Turn’, andererseits philosophische Überlegungen zum Haus als traditionellem Ort des Rückzugs und des Schutzes. Für die Textanalyse werden Yuri M. Lotmans Theorien zum Raum im literarischen Text herangezogen. Diese Analyse zeigt, dass Ian McEwan in allen drei Romanen eine Opposition zwischen Innen- und Außenraum herstellt, diese semantisch jedoch unterschiedlich auflädt: In The Cement Garden ist der Innenraum durch Unordnung und Tabubruch konnotiert, während die ordnende Kraft von außen auf das Haus und seine Bewohner einwirkt. Im Gegensatz dazu repräsentieren die Innenräume in Atonement und Saturday Ordnung, die durch Kräfte von außen gestört wird. Weiters wird analysiert, wie McEwan die schützende Funktion des Hauses dekonstruiert. Die zentrale Erkenntnis ist, dass sich McEwans Position zwischen Tradition und Innovation auch in der räumlichen Darstellung manifestiert: Während die Themen in The Cement Garden und Saturday schockierend und tabuisiert bzw. aktuell und zeitgenössisch sind, bleibt die räumliche Darstellung der realistischen Tradition treu. McEwan verwendet die Häuser und ihr Aussehen im Sinne einer Korrespondenznatur als Spiegel ihrer Bewohner bzw. der Handlungsentwicklung. Atonement repräsentiert das Paradebeispiel für McEwan’s ambivalente Position zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Die scheinbare Wiederbelebung der Landhaus-Tradition wird subversiert verwendet.

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