Atonement : the Individual Progress of a Female Artist and the Evolution of Literary Conventions in the Postmodern Narrative by Ian Mcewan

T.C. İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı

Yüksek Lisans Tezi

Atonement : The Individual Progress of a Female Artist and the Evolution of Literary Conventions in the Postmodern Narrative by Ian McEwan

Nuria Zinnurova 2501010679

Tez Danı şmanı: Prof. Dr. Zeynep Ergün

Düzeltilmi ş Tez

İstanbul, 2006

DÜZELTME METN İ

Tez içerisinde anlam bütünlü ğünün sa ğlanması için bazı bölümler çıkarılmı ş ve yeni düzenlemelere gidelerek,bazı bölümlere yeni alıntılar ve yeni açıklamalar eklenip akıcılık sa ğlanmı ştır. Birçok cümle yeniden yazılmı ş, bazı paragrafların düzenlemeleri, bazılarının ise yerleri de ğiştirilmi ştir. Bunlara ek olarak tez metninde saptanan gramer hatalar düzeltilmi ştir.

TEZ ONAYI

İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalının 2501010679 numaralı örencisi Nuria

Zinnurova’nın hazırladı ğı “ Atonement : The Individual Prorgess of a Female Artist and the Evolution of Literary Conventions” konulu YÜKSEK L İSANS TEZ İ ile ilgili TEZ SAVUNMA SINAVI , Lisansüstü Ö ğretim Yönetmeli ği’nin 10. Maddesi uyarınca...... günü saat...... ’de yapılmı ştır, sorulan sorulara alınan cevaplar sonunda adayın tezinin...... ’ne* OYB İRL İĞİ / OYÇOKLU ĞUYLA karar verilmi ştir.

JÜR İ ÜYES İ KANAAT İ İMZA

......

• BU KISMA SAVUNMA SONUCUNA ĞÖRE “KABUL”, “REDD İ” VEYA “DÜZELTMES İ” YAZILACAKTIR.

ÖZ

Nuria Zinnurova Atonement : The Individual Progress of a Female Artist and the Evolution of Literary Conventions in the Postmodern Narrative by IanMcEwan

Bu tez, McEwan’ın, insan hayatındaki de ğişik sosyal ve ruhsal yönler ile bir yazarın olu şumu ana temaları içeren ve postmodern bir çalı şma olan Kefaret adlı romanı incelemektedir. Romandaki karakterlerden Briony Tallis, fertlerin birbiriyle ili şkilerinin kopuk oldu ğu bir ailede büyümü ş, ki şili ğini bulma, karde ş rekabeti ve ergenlik gibi ki şisel sorunları olan bir kız çocu ğudur.Babası, ailesi ile ilgilenmeyen, kocalık ve babalık görevlerini yerine getirmeyen birisi, annesi ise hayal kırıklı ğına uğramı ş ve kendisini çatı arasındaki odaya kapatmayı tercih etmi ş bir kadındır. Briony bu durumdan kaçı şı ve kendini ispatlamayı edebiyatta bulmu ştur. Briony, ya şamının de ğişik dönemlerinde; halk hikayelerinin, romansın, modernizmin ve postmodern fikirlerin etkisinde kalmı ştır. Romanda, yazarın ki şisel geli şmenin yanısıra, sanatın konseptıne ve amacına yakla şımının de ğişimini de görüyoruz. Giri ş kısmı, edebiyat tarihine genel bir bakı ş içermektedir. Birinci bölüm, mitolojinin, destanın ve masalların, Briony’nin ilk edebi çalı şmalarını nasıl etkilediklerini göstermektedir. İkinci bölüm, Gotik Edebiyatı ile Kadın Goti ği ve Romantizmin birbirine ve Briony’nin yazarlı ğına etkisini ara ştırmaktadır. Üçüncü bölüm, romanda ilk once Briony’nin acemice yazdı ğı, daha sonra karakterlerin ciddi bir trajediye donü ştü ğü piyes olarak kar şımıza çıkan oyun türünü incelemektedir.Dördüncü bölüm, romanda sık kar şımıza çıkan mektupları ve mektupla şma biçiminde yazılmı ş eserlere yapılan göndermeleri inceleyerek yazmanın gözlemci yönünü ara ştırmaktadır. Be şinci bölüm, modernizmin etkisinde yazılmı ş olan Fıskiyeli Havuzun Yanındaki İki Figür adlı hikayeyi ve modernizmin tekniklerini incelemektedir. Altıncı bölüm, Kefaret romanındaki postmodernizmi ve metinler arasındaki ili şkiyi ara ştırmaktadır. Sonuç kısmı ise

tezin ana amacını sunmaktadır. Romanda , sanata bakı ş açısının nasıl de ğişti ğinin gösterilmesi bir yazarın basit hikayelerden bugüne nasıl geldi ğinin ortaya çıkarılması amacıyla de ğişik edebi türler kullanılmı ş ve birbirine karı ştırılmı ştır.

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement – the postmodern work describing various social and moral aspects of human life and making a formation of a writer one of its main concerns. We meet Briony Tallis, a child struggling with a particular phase of her unresolved conflicts – identity problem, sibling rivalry, pubertal sexuality, a girl who attempts to cope with all the aspects of childhood and approaching adulthood on the background of a family that lacks at- one-ment. Her father remains a shadowy and ineffectual figure throughout the story; her mother who is disappointed in her life chooses to shut herself up in ‘the room in the attic’. Briony finds escape and then realization in the realm of literature. Folklore, romance, modernist aestheticism and postmodernist ideas are shown in the novel to assert their influence upon Briony at different periods of her life. Together with the personal progress of the artist we observe the generic evolution and the progress of the attitude to the concept of art and its function.

The introductory section gives a general review of the development of literary history. The first chapter demonstrates the influence of myths, legends and fairy tales on Briony’s early literary works. The second chapter’s concern is the relation and interrelation of Gothic literature, female Gothic and Romanticism on the back background of Briony’s development as a writer. The third chapter discusses the drama which is present in the novel first in the form of a clumsy play that later turns into a serious tragedy of fictional characters. The fourth chapter analyses the voyeuristic character of the writing displayed through the presence of numerous letters and references to famous novels written in the epistolary genre. The fifth chapter introduces Briony’s story Two Figures by a Fountain, written under the influence of Modernist Aestheticism and discusses the modernist techniques. The sixth chapter investigates postmodernism and intertextuality in Atonement in a much broader context that allows to discover the underpinnings of the philosophy of the postmodernist novel and identify its aims and goals. The conclusion of this study reveals the central argument of the treatise. Different literary genres are used and merged purposefully in the narrative in order to outline

the evolution of the perception of art and the identity of the artist from folklore up to the modern time.

FOREWORD

This thesis is an analysis of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement within the context of the evolution of English literary history. Many people have helped me during the preparation of this thesis. I am indebted to Prof. Zeynep Ergün for her invaluable comments and support with my studies. The Library of Bilkent University have kindly granted permission to use the books in their possession. The preparation of the final draft would not have been possible without the help of my friend Ay şegül Toroser to whom I owe my special thanks. And, finally, I am grateful to my husband Ça ğatay Saraç for his continued interest and support.

CONTENTS

ÖZ...... ii i ABSTRACT...... v FOREWORD…………………………………………..….……..….……….……...vi i CONTENTS………………………………………………………….…….…...... vii i INTRODUCTION. - A Review of Literary History…………………………………...…..………..1 - Atonement: A Metafiction……...……..………..….…………………………5 1. Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales……………………...………………………...….7 2. Drama: A ‘Wrong Genre’? …………………………………………………....…23 3. Female Gothic, Romance and the Romantics……...... 30 4. Epistolary Genre: Popular Voyeurism………………………….…………..…….49 5. Modernist Aestheticism…………………………...... …………………54 6. Postmodernist Novel…………………………………………………………..…60 CONCLUSION………………………………………….…………………….…....73 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………..…...78

INTRODUCTION.

A Review of Literary History.

…at the age of thirteen [Briony] had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself , one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. 1

The writers in different periods had different intention, be it instruction or delight, but there always existed an awareness of the possible influence of art on the reading public. Since this treatise traces an analogy between Briony’s individual progress as an artist and the evolution of forms within the narrative tradition, it is logical to have a general look at the history of literature and the evolution of genres mentioned in the novel in particular. Briony’s fancy for fairy tales and reading her stories aloud goes back to the tradition of oral narrative. The fairy tale which has its roots in mythology and folklore was a part of an oral tradition - tales were narrated orally, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation. Traditionally they were associated with the female tellers, especially old women: Plato in the Gorgias referred disparagingly to the kind of tale – mythous graos , the old wives’ tale - told by nurses to amuse and frighten children. This was possibly the earliest reference to the genre. 2

Collectors such as the Brothers Grimm, Giambattista Basile, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault recorded and quite often fashioned fairy tales according to their tastes. The female character of the storyteller was usually disregarded. Nowadays such masculine dominated fairy tales provoke numerous feminist reevaluations implying the critique of older narratives: among which Angela Carter is the brightest example. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth

1 Ian McEwan, Atonement, London, Jonathan Cape, 2001, p.41. 2 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers , London, Vintage, 1995, p.14.

century the fairy tale came to be associated with children’s literature. Accordingly, fairy tales were altered, usually with violence, incest and pagan elements removed. Moral lessons and happy endings were more common, and villains were usually punished. Performing was also a part of folklore. Before performance took the well known form of a traditional play so-called jugglers and inferior minstrels wandered in early medieval England. Their performances were crude and often immoral as they responded to the demands of people. There were also rude country folk plays, survivals of primitive heathen ceremonials. But the real drama of the Middle Ages grew up from the regular services of the Church. Since the most part of the people was ignorant, did not understood Latin and knew little of the Bible it was necessary that the service should be given a spectacular character. Later they were replaced by the Morality Play. This was a dramatized moral allegory. Though it was extremely moralizing it formed certain stage traditions which influenced the drama of the Elizabethan period. The plays’ main purpose then was to convey information, so the other chief dramatic principles, such as a careful presentation of a human character, were generally disregarded. With the appearance of Shakespeare a play took the dramatic form known nowadays. ‘The novel’ emerged in the Europe of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Michael McKeon points out: The emergence of a distinct new form was affirmed first of all by the authors themselves. Richardson believed he had introduced a new “species” of writing; Fielding claimed a new “kind” or “province.” 3

Both names, Fielding and Richardson, appear in Atonement in the literary dispute between Cecilia and Robbie. With the publication of Richardson’s Pamela , epistolary fiction becomes greatly popular. Many hundreds of epistolary novels appeared in English and French and Italian. But Richardson, no doubt, was one of the greatest practitioners of the genre. The Epistolary genre was still prominent in some 19 th century novels, including Frankenstein , and remained residually in many others but the real golden age of epistolary fiction runs roughly from Richardson to

3 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 , Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 410.

the end of the 18 th century. The period of Romantic Triumph coincides in time with the period of the success of the French Revolution. The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the publication in 1798 of the little volume of Lyrical Ballads which contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The two, though, had different approaches – Coleridge found delight in wonder and mystery, while Wordsworth believed in the simple and quiet forces, both of human life and of Nature. As a poet Coleridge’s great distinction is that he gives a wonderful example to the Romantic sense for the strange and the supernatural, and indeed for all that the word ‘Romance’ connotes at the present day. Poets of the Romantic movement were influenced by the popular type of the romance in that period – Gothic romance. Gothic fiction described mysteries, often involving the supernatural and provoking horror. Its events were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. Young women, either governesses or new brides were its main characters who had to deal with handsome men that excited fear, peculiar servants and weird children. This character of the Gothic explains the great interest in it among women, both as readers and writers. The development of the genre was led by writers such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Regina Maria Roche, and was later adapted by feminist writers like Mary Shelley. Female Gothic evolved through the nineteenth into the late twentieth century; it contained the high literary novels of the Brontë sisters as well as the popular Gothic romances and ‘sensational novels’ of mass print. Gothic romance came to our days in the form of the novels of sexual passion and menace. In the middle of the eighteenth century we observe the revolt against the conventional moralistic approach to art. Modernism adopted an antagonistic position towards society and its established institutions. In one way or another it challenged all authority and confronted conservative bourgeois values. One of the most famous names in early Modernist aestheticism - Oscar Wilde - takes the position that art has nothing to do with ethics: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”. 4 Enjoying shocked Victorian

4 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray , London, Penguin Books, 1982, p.5.

sensibilities he proclaims art beyond everything in the ordinary world, for the artist does not copy life, he creates it. With the triumph of ‘aesthetic truth’ over naïve empiricism in modern times literary fictions are able to have value without laying claim to being ‘real’, and the aim of literature has become not teaching goodness but being good in itself. The works of the famous modernist writer of the twentieth century – Virginia Woolf - had a great influence on Briony. In her works Virginia Woolf developed an innovative literary technique which helped her to reveal women’s experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of society. Briony’s last novel, Atonement , is a postmodern novel. It marks the result of the progress of ‘the novel’ - “the perfected form which earlier kinds of narrative – sacred myth, folktale, epic, romance, legend, allegory, confession, satire – were all striving with varying degrees of success, to become”. 5 In postmodern novel the writer does not impose any ‘truths’ any more. Whereas Modernism seeks closure in form and is concerned with conclusions, postmodernism is open, unbounded, and concerned with process. Its features are uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and ambiguity in any field, be it historical, social or scientific. Besides, the contemporary writer has to deal with the postmodernist paradox of the impossibility of the invention of a new style and the vastness of the cultural and literary sources of preceding human constructs. He/she looks searchingly at the past, and his/her intention is not, as Linda Hutcheon puts it: “a nostalgic return; it is a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past”. 6 In postmodernism the novel as a genre has reached a mature recognition of its existence as a human construct. Its evolution goes on since it cannot stay stable. The novel, as Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in his essay ‘Epic and Novel’ , “…is the sole genre that continues to develop...” 7

5 Robert Scholes, Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, London, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1968, p.3. 6 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, New York and London, Routledge, 1990, p.4. 7 David Duff, Modern Genre Theory , Harlow, Pearson Education Limited, 2000, p.68.

Atonement : A Metafiction.

If asked to make a spontaneous and brief description of McEwan’s novel Atonement , I would point out its extreme self-consciousness about language, literary form and the act of writing, its concern with the power of the creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representation. These are, actually, the basic concerns and characteristics of what Patricia Waugh calls metafiction : Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. 8

The ethical aspects of literature have been reflected on, changed, celebrated, and devalued throughout the history. The bias of literary creation, its function, and its greatness was in different times considered out of the degree of its religious loyalty, morality, didacticism, symbolism, or realism. The historical period we are living through has marked language as “an independent, self-contained system which generates its own meanings.” 9 In consequence, when one sets out to represent the world one realizes that the world as such cannot be ‘represented’, it is possible only to represent the discourses of that world. Atonement’ s concern is the problematic relationship between life and fiction. It is written in the third person, apparently by mostly neutral, but sometimes sympathetic observer. However, the end of Part 3 of the novel bears the initials of the protagonist, Briony Tallis, and a date six decades after the earliest events described. Though the text always hints on Briony’s future professional writing the reader never sure of that till the signing of Part 3 leads him to the conclusion that the first parts of Atonement are a fictional autobiography which is cast in the third person.

8 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, London and New York, Methuen, 1984, p.2. 9 Ibid., p.3.

The Part describing English soldiers fleeing towards Dunkirk is written assumingly from Robbie’s point of view and is interspersed with inner thoughts of his increasingly feverish mind. By describing the war this way Briony, actually, presents her (and McEwan, consequently, his) opinion of war. In the end of the novel there is a brief postscript cast in the first person singular. In it, Briony writes about her illness and 77th birthday. She makes it clear that the text of atoning for her crime described “Atonement” and, therefore, the novel we have just read is about the power and the pleasure of writing, and the challenge of manipulating the reader into believing the author’s opinion. The ideas of the power of writing and the manipulation having been the meta-narrative themes are the main concern of Atonement together with the exploration of the theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction. McEwan’s narrative is parodic, playful and contains both examples and a critique of the conventional literary forms and techniques.

CHAPTER 1

MYTHS, LEGENDS AND FAIRY TALES .

At the age of eleven [Briony] wrote her first story – a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect. 10

A fairy tale enters children’s lives in their most receptive years and greatly influences their imagination and perception of the world. No wonder that one of Briony’s first stories is written precisely in the tradition of folk tales. Possibly, it was just the fairy tales that contributed to Briony’s immense fantasizing . “Fantasy,” says Bettleheim, “fills the huge gaps in a child’s understanding which are due to his lack of pertinent information.” 11 Mature Briony acknowledges that in childhood she lacked the “vital knowingness about the ways of the world”. 12 Supposedly, it was Grace, a charlady, who told the Tallis children the fairy tales that inspired Briony’s vivid imagination and creative spirits. In English families it was, as a rule, some servant woman who used to entertain children by telling stories, like in the case of little Jane Eyre who was influence by the tales: … Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her night-cap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads...13

The personages and the events described in such stories of marvels appeal to the child’s disposition. The child’s mind is fascinated by opportunities a hero in a fairy tale gets from kind strangers, talking animals and fairies. A fairy tale offers the polarization that is easy for the child to understand the world: The manner in which the child can bring some order into his world view is by

10 McEwan, Atonemen t, p. 6. 11 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, London, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 61. 12 McEwan, Atonement, p. 6. 13 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Köln, Könemann, 1997, p.9.

dividing everything into opposites. 14

A fairy tale also offers a solution to the child’s major problem - to bring some order to the inner chaos of his mind so that he can understand himself better. As we know from the novel, Briony’s controlling demon is order. “She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so.” 15 Her room, where toys are lined up neatly, is the only tidy room in the house. The exaggerated tidiness of the room expresses the girl’s inner lack of self-confidence. Briony tries to control the external world when confronted with her inner frustrations and anxieties, so she imposes order on her life, lining up her dolls and toys: Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instruction not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table – cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice – suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaiting orders. 16

Being the youngest and consequently the less confident member of the family, she likes miniature, as if she finds consolation that there are things that are even smaller than her – thumb-sized figures. She knows from the tale that a thumb-sized boy can destroy a giant, so a little girl can also depend on her wit when confronting adults. According to Bruno Bettleheim, fairy tales, as well as “myths and closely related religious legends offered material from which children formed their concepts of the world’s origin and purpose, and of social ideals a child could pattern himself after.” 17 Consequently, young girls dream about the Prince Charming who will one day take them away. Nobody actually thinks that in real life there are no dragons, and a prince would rather rape ‘Cinderella’ than marry her. That was how genteel men often treated servant girls, as Pamela by Samuel Richardson, written in the voice of its low-born heroine, describes a young servant’s long resistance to the attempts of her master - a fine young Gentleman - to seduce her. Atonement is rich in allusions originating from fairy tales, myths, and legends. Together with the problem of the definition of the three I will talk about the things that unite them all and constitute the enchanting, both for children and adults, nature of the oldest metaphoric narratives of humanity.

14 McEwan, Atonement , p. 74. 15 McEwan, Atonement , p. 4. 16 Ibid., p. 5. 17 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p. 24.

A myth is “a story which is not ‘true’ and which involves (as a rule) supernatural beings – or at any rate supra-human beings.” 18 Legends were originally “the stories of lives of saints…The term came to be applied to a collection of such stories.” 19 Also it implies “a story or narrative which lies somewhere between myth and historical fact and which, as a rule, is about a particular figure or person.” 20 Fairy tales belong to folk literature and tell about: …the fortunes and misfortunes of a hero or heroine who, having experienced various adventures of more or less supernatural kind, lives happily ever after. Magic, charms, disguise and spells are some of the major ingredients of such stories…21

What kind of image and social ideal of the female does a fairy tale present that a girl could pattern herself after? Most of them exemplify stereotypical portrayals including the evil stepmother, the wicked witch, and passive female heroines waiting for their princes to rescue them. Women in fairy tales are not traditionally portrayed as powerful on their own. They are only given power with help. Some have guardians, others use magic, and, as in the case of the stepmother and the witch, some achieve their power through their link to the force of evil. It implies that females can be strong if they have a powerful force like evil on their side, as the sorceress in Rapunze l has:

[The garden] was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world. 22

Hence it appears that women who have power should be dreaded. Briony discovers for herself the power of the word and her family accepts that a girl has “a strange mind and facility with the words.” 23 Her writing is her magic and like a mighty witch she uses her “narrative spell” 24 in order to manipulate other people’s lives. A ‘spell’ is also an incantational word or formula; compelling attraction, fascination, a

18 J. A, Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 526. 19 Ibid., p. 451. 20 Ibid., p. 452. 21 J. A,Cuddon, p, 302. 22 Fairy Tales (çevrimiçi) http//www.lib.umd.edu/ETC/ReadingRoom/Fiction/FairyTales/ 1 Haziran 2005. 23 McEwan, Atonement , p.6. 24 Ibid., p.7.

bewitched state, or trance. The word hits at the uncanny power that lies at the roots of the language. When Briony thinks that her love for Robbie is betrayed she uses the power of words to punish him. While the sorceress in Rapunzel punishes the prince through disabling by making him to jump down from the tower into thorns which pierce his eyes, Briony disables Robbie by casting aspersions, after which he is locked up in prison. Briony’s name, which implies a climbing perennial that is highly poisonous, adds much to her image as a sorceress. Besides, this herb was believed to have certain powers. Its fleshy root which can be as big as a human head was used for fertility and abundance. Money placed next to the root was believed to increase. It was hung in a house or garden to protect it against the effects of bad weather, according to some traditions it was dusted over food in order to increase female fertility, which, considering the poisonous nature of the herb, is rather strange. Its folk names are: Bryony, Gout Root, Mad Root, Red Bryony, Snake Grape, White Bryony, Wild Bryony, Wild White Vine, Wood Vine, English Mandrake, Ladies’ Seal, Navet du Diable (French-Devil's Turnip), Tamus, Tetterberry, Wild Hops, Wild Nep, Wild Vine. 25 In fact Briony turns out to be a fertile author, but her art is as poisonous as the herb itself. This climbing perennial resembles a snake, the slippery and nimble reptile, that prefers to hunter in the dark and to which Briony is likened in Chapter Thirteen:

The dry night air slipped between the fabric of her dress and her skin and [Briony] felt smooth and agile in the dark. 26

The herb and the snake also stand for the metaphors of Briony’s vanity and self-involvement, the sins she shares with Satan. Like him Briony intents to compete with God in the art of creating. But her art transforms Robbie into a villain, damages lives, and kills the hopes of the young lovers. In mythology there exists also ‘a serpent woman’ Nina Auerbach talks about in her book:

In her origin, this serpent woman from whom the mermaid derives has a life more triumphant than that of the female demon who crawls through Christian iconography. According to Merlin Stone, she begins as an oracle of the earliest universal divinity, a female God. 27

25 Flowers, (çevrimiçi) http/www.angelfire.com/de/poetry/flowers/briony.html, 20 Aralık 2004. 26 McEwan, Atonement , p. 156.

The serpent woman, or the Sibyl, is the figure of a storyteller possessing the knowledge of the future and the past, the figure who foretells events to come, and gives warnings. Therefore, Briony who is the storyteller has much in common with the legendary prophetess. The Sibyls were usually depicted raising the index finger of their right hand in the classic gesture of the prophet and storyteller. 28 On the day Briony thinks of the uniqueness of every person she also raises her forefinger and contemplates it:

[Briony] raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. 29

The legend of the Sibyl was given the character of a secular romance, and as such it becomes enriched and entangled with folklore about fairy seductresses. The image of a powerful and merciless sorceress, or a witch, or a backstabbing female haunted and scared men’s imagination and found its realization in numerous myths: Vivien enchanting Merlin, Circe turning the lost sailors to pigs, sweet-voiced sirens and the Gorgon. Ian McEwan exploits supernatural female creatures as a metaphor to describe spontaneous Cecilia during the squabble with Robbie by the fountain. She is called now “a mermaid” and then “the frail white nymph” whose “movements were savage” and feet bear. 30 Mermaid, Undine, Melusine, Nymphs, Nereids and Sirens are powerful sexual male constructs, creatures that rouse their imagination. As the reader learns later in the novel, Cecilia not only excites Robbie by her potent sexuality but dares to oppose her family’s disapproval, and finally break up with it displaying her independent character.

Ironically, another sea creature, the mighty son of Poseidon, Triton, whose statue crowns the fountain, is depicted as overgrown by moss, so the water “slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell...” 31 Triton, the personification of the

27 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth , Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 94. 28 Warner, From The Beast to the Blonde , p. 66. 29 McEwan, Atonement , p. 35. 30 Ibid., p. 30. 31 Ibid., p. 28.

roaring waters cannot produce a proper sound. It might suggest that the men in the novel are so weak that their discourse is usurped by the female, the trumpet now is in Briony’s hands. It is her view of the story we are presented. Though Robbie puts his hand flat upon the surface of the water as though to quell the agitated water it goes on roiling disturbed by “the lingering spirit of [Cecilia’s] fury.” 32

… well, she would show him then… Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was his punishment. The unexpectedly freezing water that caused her gasp was his punishment…Drowning herself would be his punishment…33

The words ‘fury’ and ‘punishment’ mentioned together make Cecilia one of the Furies – or Erinyes, the merciless goddesses of vengeance. These divinities personified conscience and punished crimes against kindred blood, especially matricide. Cecilia’s fury is provoked by Robbie. “This was a command on which he tried to confer urgent masculine authority. The effect on Cecilia was to cause her to tighten her grip.” 34 Water cascades from Cecilia’s body showing the strength of her anger, fury and passion. Compared to her, the beefy Triton blows just a thin jet of water through his conch. She gets the fragments of the vase from the water and moves to the house. Robbie watches her wet darkened hair that “swing heavily across her shoulders, drenching her blouse,” 35 which alludes both to the mermaid’s tail and the fury’s serpentine hair. For Briony who sees the scene by the fountain from the window, the sequence of events is illogical: What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It as extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was sleeping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her. Blackmail? Threats?...Cecilia, mercifully still in her underwear, was climbing into the pond, was standing waist deep in the water, was pinching her nose – and then she was gone. There was only Robbie, and the clothes on the gravel, and beyond, the silent park and the distant, blue hills. 36

32 McEwan, Atonement , p. 31. 33 Ibid., p. 30. 34 Ibid., p. 29. 35 Ibıd., pp. 38-39. p. 30. 36 Ibid.,

Briony is sure that “the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal”. 37 It is true, that:

The fairy tale often takes its heroes from the remotest branches of society: the prince and the young swine herd, the despised youngest son or the clumsyboy and the girl watches the heart or tends the geese and the princess. 38

Robbie Turner, the only son of a humble cleaning lady has the boldness of ambition to ask Cecilia’s hand, it makes perfect sense for Briony. This is what she learned from fairy-tales, and what she expected from Robbie when he had rescued her from drowning in the pound. “She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her.”39 On that another summer day, when Robbie took her to swimming lessons, she imagined him to be her prince. The main fairy tale personage quite frequently is the youngest son, an orphan, a despised ‘Cinderella,’ or poor goatherd. Robbie is an unacknowledged sibling in the Tallis house. Though he never accepts it, he feels hopelessly outclassed by his surrogate brother and sisters. Devastated by the miseries of sibling rivalry he feels obliged to assert himself in other ways, like, for example, through achievements in studies. Another form of revenge is his love affair with Cecilia which would potentially provide him with the place of the son-in-law in the family. It is not an accident that Briony mentions a frog in her thoughts about a fairy tale (“the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses” 40 ). This story of the talking frog from the fairy tale Frog King begins with the youngest princess playing with her golden ball (golden ball- golden bowl - vase) close by a well. The frog appears and offers to restore the golden ball to her if she accepts it as the companion who will sit beside her, drink from her glass, eat from her dish, and sleep with her in her bed. In the beginning, Cecilia, just like the princess in the fairy tale, is ashamed of Robbie. She avoids him as a socially inferior in Girton, and does not want him to join them at the dinner. B. Bettleheim in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales says that “in fairy tales frog often

37 McEwan, Atonement , p.39. 38 Max Luthi, Once Upon a Time:. On the Nature of Fairy Tales, New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1970, p.50. 39 McEwan, p. 38. 40 Ibıd., p. 40.

symbolizes sexual fulfillment.” 41 According to him, sexuality’s true beauty is disguised under the frog’s ugliness. Briony, due to her young age, can not apprehend sex’s beauty; on the contrary, for her it has a repulsive quality, and words concerning it are disgusting. While for Cecilia Robbie undergoes a metamorphosis and turns into a prince, Briony sees only the repelling ‘cover’ of a sexual maniac.

Children are usually attracted to the idea that all things are possible in the fairy tale world where all sorts of miracles occur. But the world of the fairy tale is no less fascinating than dangerous, especially for its female and infant personages. Abandonment is the fate of children in most fairy-tales. Abandonment is what Briony suffers in the seeming at-one-ment of the Tallis house. Her father is ever absent and her mother is disabled by her pains. Actually, fathers are very often ineffectual in the fairy tale. It is considered that in “the typical nuclear family setting, it is the father’s duty to protect the child against the dangers of the outside world.” 42 The fathers in the novel – Briony’s, Robbie’s, Lola’s – simply distance themselves from their children. Children in Atonement are abandoned as in most fairy tales. Robbie is an half-orphan, the Quincey children are left to the mercy of relatives who are hardly caring, Briony is nearly neglected. In many fairy tales children are pushed out of the home and forced to live on their own or are deserted in a place from which they cannot find their way back. The Quincey children are forced to leave their home and stay at a house where nobody can show them love and sympathy. Abandonment makes Lola look for sympathy in the hands of the abuser, Paul Marshall. Abandonment makes the twins run in the night in order to find their way back home.

One of the twins’ names is Pierrot. This name immediately brings to mind the famous author of Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose (1697) - Charles Perrault. Besides, we are given an unambiguous hint by McEwan himself when he places both names in one sentence: “Charles, Pierrot’s

41 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p. 231. 42 McEwan, Atonement , p. 206.

grandson and the organizing spirit, would have reserved it for me”. 43 We know that Charles Perrault did not invent these tales, their plots were well known, but he recorded them with wit and style, and of course a moral framework that was in accord with the notions of morality of his historical period. A fairy tale is the tradition that has been shared by countless generations. Perrault’s collected stories display a destiny of a certain genre of literary heritage – either silenced, or deconstructed. The male construct accordingly is dominated by male ideas. This fact makes the reader think again about the reliability of any text, an old legend and a modern text.

While Lola’s father is just ineffectual, her mother, Hermione, sends her away to her sister’s house. She exposes herself dangerously to the possibility of seduction provided with nothing but her mother’s example of making herself attractive to the male. The mother from Little Red Riding Hood provides her daughter with a too attractive red cloak, “a symbol of a premature transfer of sexual attractiveness.” 44 Hermione supplies Lola with perfume, accessories and garments that will make her daughter’s body attractive for men. Another allusion to Little Red Riding Hood can be seen in the situation where Emily Tallis sends her daughter, Cecilia, to pick and arrange flowers for the room that had been occupied by their old Auntie Venus and that now is made ready for the guest, Paul Marshall. Flowers stand for pleasure and sexuality, Paul Marshall acts the wolf. Emily unconsciously wants Cecilia to be seduced by Marshall. We see that the elder generation of women tries to project their way of existing as bodies on their daughters:

[Emily] would track down Cecilia and make sure she had arranged flowers as instructed, and that she should jolly well make an effort for the evening by taking on some of the responsibilities of a hostess and that she wore something pretty and didn’t smoke in every room. 45

Being a good hostess who wears pretty clothes is what they expect their daughters to learn from them. They let Paul Marshall take the aunt’s bed and seduce the vulnerable Lola. Marshall is attracted by Lola’s budding sexuality, she, in turn, is

43 McEwan, Atonement , p. 364. 44 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p.173. 45 Ibıd., p. 70.

curious to understand the nature of the male. Marshall fascinates Lola with potential danger. Like Little Red Riding Hood in bed with the wolf she looks at his legs, big ears, eyes, large hands and the horrible mouth:

It really was a curious face, with the features scrunched up around the eyebrows, and a big empty chin like Desperate Dan’s. It was a cruel face, but his manner was pleasant, and this was an attractive combination, Lola thought. 46

Cecilia’s attention is also attracted to Marshall’s jaw and the hairs thick as animal’s fur: She watched him in profile as he turned his head towards Leon. A long muscle twitched above the line of his jaw as he spoke. A few thick black hairs curled free from his eyebrow, and from his earholes there sprouted the same black growth, comically kinked like pubic hair. 47

Lola is intrigued by the situation, attracted and repelled at the same time. Such a fascination with sex is experienced as the greatest anxiety that is bound to the girl’s unconscious longings for her father, therefore Paul Marshall, being a mature male in Lola’s eyes, acts as her father’s substitute. She has accepted the superiority of the male even before she meets Marshall by fastening a bracelet, the feature of slavery around her ankle:

[Lola] … having liberally applied perfume changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. 48

Further Lola is ‘devoured’ by Marshall. She becomes the prisoner of his stomach, reduced to a lower form of existence, returned to a more primitive level of life. Though both Lola and Marshall are consumers as we understand from their passion for clothes, Lola also is seen as food – a body to devour. By making a deal with Marshall that is consolidated later through their marriage she accepts to live in the darkness of his world. While Little Red Riding Hood is brought to life again, Lola is not granted resurrection. Though in the beginning she falls victim to him, she later

46 McEwan, Atonement , p. 58. 47 Ibid., p.50. 48 Ibid., p.11.

turns into Marshall’s ally in the crime against Robbie and later in greater crimes during wartime.

Fifteen-year-old Lola expects that her initiation into the adult world will resemble the awakening of Sleeping Beauty (in the Brothers Grimm’s story she is also fifteen 49 ). Marshall will break ‘the spell’ and her transition from childhood to maidenhood will take place. But instead of the kiss there is sexual abuse (spindle penetration). As if to make things more caustic Ian McEwan gives Lola the insufficient male for a lover who has strength that enough only for girls. Briony deconstructs in her novel the fairy tale of a girl waiting for the male to wake her. The male construct asserts that a woman cannot know herself other than by identifying herself with the desire of the man. Therefore, “a little girl’s life can only be lived in the future tense , as woman-to-be.” 50 As if to oppose to this idea Briony chooses her elder sister Cecilia to wake her up, implying that knowledge about sex should come from an elder female.

When Briony was small and prone to nightmares – those terrible screams in the night Cecilia used to go to her room and wake her. Come back , she used to whisper. It’s only a dream . Come back . And she would carry her into her own bed. 51

A fairy tale shows us that mothers love their baby girls but become hostile to their pubertal daughters. The mother feels most threatened by her child’s growing up, because that means she must be aging. “As long as the child is totally dependent, he remains, as it were, part of the parent; he does not threaten the parent’s narcissism.” 52 Emily Tallis is reluctant to part with the infant Briony, she longs for the time when she used to wash and feed her: ...enfolding [Briony ] in the towel, trapping her arms and taking her onto her lap for a moment of babyish helplessness...Emily mourned the passing of an age of eloquence. 53

49 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p. 232. 50 Christiane Olivier, Jocasta’s Children: The Imprint of the Mother, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, p. 73. 51 McEwan, Atonement , p.44. 52 Bettleheim, p. 203. 53 McEwan, p.68.

The selfish sorceress in Rapunzel also wishes to keep the girl to herself and we know what happens when the surrogate mother (the sorceress) belittles the girl’s desire of social and sexual self-assertion. Briony strives to crack her frozen state of childhood dependency through estrangement from her mother and gives herself up to fantasizing. Imprisoned in the tower of proper girlhood she must struggle to bloom through the protective obstacles put by her mother in her mid-life crisis: It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like her own ruin: Briony would surely go off to her sister’s college, Girton, and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day... 54

Emily mourns the period when she was of need, looking after her children, in other words, was active as a body, reproducing and feeding. She knows that she could exist only if she took one of the possible gender roles - the property of, the wife of, the mother of. Otherwise she would be nothing at all. She thinks she exists, though she has spent her childhood as a shadow of her sister Hermione, her children do not take her seriously, calling her by her first name, and her husband hardly appears at home. “Wronged child, wronged wife. But she was not unhappy as she should be. One role had prepared her for the other.” 55 Emily accepts that the role of the wronged wife begins in childhood. She never lived in the field of desire herself, as a girl she was not valued as her brothers were, but she perpetuates this taboo of sexuality in her daughters. Instead she teaches them femininity as the male stereotype of maternity-fecundity.

Fairy tales often portray women in a negative fashion, especially old women: most likely they turn out to be wicked witches. So, Hansel and Gretel assume that simply because they encounter a woman with harsh features, who is physically wizened, ancient, and bent from her years must be a witch. By making old age fearful, fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel promote the superiority of youth. In fact, all fairy tales do, that is why they appeal to children. Therefore, deliberately or not, girls anticipate the day they will outshine the beauty of their

54 McEwan, Atonement , p. 151. 55 Ibıd., p. 148.

mothers, boys look forward to destroy their fathers and to sire themselves. Young people in the novel are not the exception. Leon refuses the offer of a leg-up from his father to be independent from him, Briony imagines her mother’s funeral in all colours, Cecilia cancels her mother’s orders to servants, Lola’s revenge on her mother is the most extravagant - her own tragedy, rape, eclipses the family’s shame – divorce.

The loving mother figure in the child’s consciousness is the body that nursed and created a world of oral bliss. No matter how grown up the children are they will save this image of the mother and sometimes project it on other females. Three English soldiers, Robbie, Nettle and Mace on their way to Dunkirk resemble three little boys wandering in the woods trying to return home. Twice they ask old women they meet for food. The first old French woman looks like a witch. “The woman was frail and energetic. She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild look. Her voice was sharp.” 56 Later they understand why she hates soldiers - the First World War took her eldest son’s life and the Second seems to destroy what is left. There is one more old woman Robbie and Nettle ask for water in the village on the shore of the Channel:

She was rather handsome, with dark skin, a proud look and a long straight nose, and a floral scarf was tied across her silver hair. He understood immediately she was a gypsy who was not fooled by his speaking French. She looked right into him and saw his faults, and knew he’d been in prison. Then she glanced with distaste at Nettle, and at last pointed along the street to where a pig was noising around he gutter. ‘Bring her back,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see what I have for you.’ 57

Though the gypsy looks like a witch she agrees to help the two men if they carry out her wish and catch the pig. After some effort they manage to do it. In reward the old woman gives them the food that saves them from starving. The events described above look like a reverse of the famous story of Circe in The Odyssey . On her island in her palace Circe waits for lost sailors to come wandering to her door as supplicants. As a rule they are charmed by her beauty and drink the potions she offers as refreshment. As Circe’s vile drugs take effect, the men begin to change

56 McEwan, Atonement , p. 195. 57 Ibid., p.254.

shape and are soon transformed into swine. The evil and danger appears in the guise of a beautiful woman.

When the loving mother becomes hostile she transmutes in the consciousness of the child into the wicked step-mother or the witch he/she knows from fairy tales. Such a mother or stepmother rejects the child (Snow White ), wants the children die of hunger in the woods ( Hansel and Gretel ), or loves elder surrogate sisters more (Cinderella). The sibling rivalry engendered by such a preference of one child to another by the parent is one of the most popular motifs in fairy tales. Ravaged by sibling rivalry the child exposes the darkest sides of his inner world:

...the new discoveries of psychoanalysis and child psychology revealed just how violent, anxious, destructive and even sadistic a child’s imagination is. 58

The rivalry is among the main concerns of the novel– Ian McEwan describes the anxieties and frustrations of the girls and the different ways they cope with them. Briony, due to her youth, occupies the humblest position among her siblings, and this makes her the most envious. A small child, bright though she is, she feels herself inferior and inadequate when confronted with the complexity of the world. Compared to Lola, Briony is just ‘The Ugly Duckling.’

Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a full two years’ refinement weigh against her, and now her play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing. 59

The two cousins are very different from each other - one is a virtually fluorescent girl whose colouring is vivid while another has dark hair. The girls’ outward difference emphasizes their inward difference. Briony feels a hostility that comes from Lola, she is hurt by Lola’s striving to dominate her little cousin. Lola not only steals Briony’s rightful role in the play, but gains, as Briony thinks, her mother’s favour:

Not only Leon to consider, but what of the antique peach and cream satin dress that her

58 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p. 120. 59 McEwan, Atonement , p. 13.

mother was looking out for her, for Arabella’s wedding? That would now be given to Lola. How could her mother reject the daughter who had loved her all these years? 60

The rivalry that begins in childhood lasts up to their old age. When she sees Lola at the museum, Briony bitterly acknowledges that Lola looks healthier, and that she most likely will outlive her:

As for Lola – my high-living, chain-smoking cousin – here she was, still as lean and it as a racing dog… Near eighty years old and still wearing high heels… But there was also something comic about her – or was I clutching at straws? 61

Briony also bears an ambivalent malice towards Cecilia and Robbie. The two happen to prefer each other and ignore the feelings of the little sister. Nobody expects much from the little child, but Briony avenges the misery she experienced when tormented by rivalry and the feeling that she has been treated unfairly. Fairy tales have taught her that children can count on their own ability and cunning - the badly treated simpleton always proves his superiority to all those who had scoffed and mocked him:

On the simplest and most direct level, fairy tales in which the hero is the youngest and most inept offer the child the consolation and hope for the future he needs most. 62

Later she takes her revenge, not knowing how remorseful she will be of her deed. Though she demands everyone’s affection Briony is just a self-centered child who is unsympathetic to others’ tragedy. She does not regard the Quinceys’ divorce as a proper subject, she insists on Robbie’s guilt though she is not fully confident:

It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her. '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.’ Though she had not turned, or moved at all, it was clear that something was changing in Lola, a warmth rising from her skin and a sound of dry swallowing, a heavy convulsion of muscle inher throat that was audible as a series of sinewy clicks. Briony said it again. Simply. ‘Robbie.’ 63

60 McEwan, Atonement , p. 14. 61 Ibid., p. 358. 62 Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, p. 104. 63 Ibıd., p. 166.

Briony utters Robbie’s name three times. Three is a pivotal number in fairy tales - three brothers, three riddles, three trials. Besides in the Bible number three appears in context with betrayal: “Jesus answered, Will you lay down your life for Me? Truly, truly, I say to you, a rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times.” (John 13:38). She can not resist the temptation of taking revenge for betrayed love and acts destructively against her sibling. Briony follows the traditional line in a tale where a hero/a heroine experiences the crisis in his/her life and finds reconciliation in the end. Most commonly it is a wedding; in Briony’s case it takes the form of the reunion with the family.

In the beginning of the novel we find Briony influenced by a fairy tale and the seeming clarity of the world it offers. It accorded her sense of order based on polarization. Only after she witnesses the scene by the fountain does she realize how complicated the real world is:

…Briony had 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, of what passed between people, the ordinary people she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong. 64

A fairy tale has played its role in her development. It expressed her inner conflicts in symbolic form and suggested how it may be solved. She never challenged the reliability of its content and its message. Like a fairy tale character she had to undergo a period of trial and tribulation, of inner growth through misfortune. She left behind infantilism and became mature. Consequently, she rejected the polarization that dominated her mind and accepted the complexity of life. Being a postmodern novel Atonement refers, directly or by inference to many tales. The novel’s larger part having been devoted to children it would be strange to do without a fairy tale. Where else are the main concerns of childhood - human passions, self-assertion, aggression, frustrations, pubertal sexual desires and the anxiety of separation – better developed than in a fairy tale?

64 McEwan, Atonement , p.39.

СHAPTER 2

DRAMA: ‘A WRONG GENRE’?

Briony changed her mind and faced her sister. ‘The whole thing’s a mistake. It’s the wrong…’ She snatched a breath and glanced away, a signal, Cecilia sensed, of a dictionary word about to have its first outing. ‘It’s the wrong genre!’ 65

Though drama was not Briony’s first test of the pen, it is her first literary work we get acquainted with on the first page of the novel:

The play - for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. 66

Moreover, Briony’s play not only opens but ends the novel. In spite of its fiasco in the beginning the play really takes place in the end of the novel when Briony thinks she can unite with her family with a light heart, after having written down her atonement. We are given a short summary of the play:

At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor – in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on ‘a windy sunlit day in spring’. 67

65 McEwan, Atonement , p.45. 66 Ibid., p.3. 67 Ibid., p.3.

The cycle character of the novel just emphasizes the symbolical importance of Briony’s play. Throughout Atonement we find the ‘reckless passion’ of Cecilia, ‘a wicked count’ Marshall, ‘an impoverished doctor’ Robbie, and, at last, Briony is granted ‘reconciliation with her family’ in the end of the novel. According to Aristotle a tragedy is “an imitation of an action that is serious, of a certain magnitude, and complete in itself. It should have a dramatic form with pleasing language, and it should portray incidents which so arouse pity and fear that it purges these emotions in the audience.” 68 Though the constructions Briony creates are inept and the language is clumsy, her story is complete in itself, has a message, and, the most important, has a claim on catharsis. This we can understand from her verses scattered in the hypotext: This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow. It grieved her parents to see their first born Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne Without permission, to get ill and find indigence Until she was down to her last sixpence. 69 ... My darling one, you are young and lovely, But inexperienced, and though you think The world is at your feet, It can rise up and tread on you. 70 ... For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned, Because Arabella almost learned too late, That before we love, we must cogitate! 71 ... Here’s the beginning of love at the end of our travail. So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail! 72

The neat pages of her play and strict orderliness of its lines display Briony’s desire to put everything into order. She creates order out of chaos by means of words, by creating narrative: “A world could be made in five pages...” 73 She wishes her world be harmonious and organized:

68 McKean, Keith F., The Moral Measure of Literature, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press Publishers, 1973, p.19. 69 McEwan, Atonement, p. 367. 70 Ibid., p. 16. 71 Ibid., pp. 367-368. 72 Ibid., p. 368. 73 Ibid., p. 7.

A love for order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.” 74

As a girl she does not aware that every attempt to create ‘order’ always demands the creation of an equal amount of ‘disorder.’ Such binary opposition is, in fact, lays in the basis of patriarchal society and its texts which mask the artificiality of these categories by explaining that ‘disorder’ is chaotic and bad, and that ‘order’ is rational and good. Convinced this way Briony, therefore, thinks that ‘divorce’ belongs to “the realm of disorder,” 75 and occupies “the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity.” 76 The order of words and the disorder of feelings come into confrontation later when she realizes that real world is much more complicated. In spite of the obsession Briony shows about the play, its decorations and settings, programmes and tickets, nobody seems to take it seriously. Even Lola pays Briony “decorous, grown-up compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the detection of irony”. 77 It is true, McEwan banters little Briony when he sets the rehearsal of the play in the nursery and places Briony, the writer-director, into “an ancient baby’s high-chair – a bohemian touch that gave her a tennis umpire’s advantage of height” 78 , but both the nursery and a baby’s chair speak of her immaturity as the author. Still, the play that begins in the nursery finally is performed in the library implying that Briony now occupies her rightful place among other acknowledged writers. If one thinks of the word ‘play’ in its another meaning, the ‘game,’ the irony of its double connotation becomes clear, that literary fiction is considered to be a form of a play. “All art is play in its creation of other symbolic worlds; fiction is primarily an elaborate way of pretending, and pretending is a fundamental element of play and games”. 79 Pretending, or acting is one of the pivotal issues in Atonement . Showed as a child’s amusement first, drama turns out to be the way the characters act in everyday’s life. Almost

74 McEwan, Atonemen t, p. 7. 75 İbid., p. 9. 76 İbid., p. 9. 77 Ibid., p. 34. 78 Ibid., p. 10. 79 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction , London and New York, Methuen, 1984, p. 34.

every personage of the novel, deliberately or not, pretends to be what he/she is not. The miserable Emily Tallis pretends that she loves her husband and her sister’s children. Jack Tallis tries to play the patriarch’s role, though without success. Lola prematurely puts on the guise of an adult. All the Quinceys are, actually, good actors:

However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this boded well for The Trials of Arabella: this trio clearly had the knack of being what they were not... 80

The children who have to pretend a lot in real life, naturally, are not eager to take part in one additional performance. Consequently, they simply tell Briony that they hate plays, delivering the self-evident truth that “it’s just showing off.” 81 On this Briony reminds the twins of one of the indisputable authorities of the genre: ‘Do you think Shakespeare was just showing off?’ Pierrot glanced across his sister’s lap towards Jackson. This warlike name was faintly familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the twins found their courage in each other. ‘Everyone knows he was.’ ‘Definitely.’ 82

The presence of Shakespeare in the novel functions as that of a guide, as well as a father for Briony; his spirit is deliberately summoned by the girl to use his invoked presence to confirm the validity of what she is doing. Further in the novel we find not only the references to his characters - Yorick, Hamlet, Viola, Malvolio, but the scheming and plot worth of the Bard’s pen. Briony’s melodrama leaves the pages of her play and, in a seaming haphazard manner, is carried out by the involuntary actors. Before the fateful night the twins run away is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else’s, partly in Lola’s scheming.

Scheming is used by the females in the novel as a form of ‘writing’ their own stories. While Lola’s mother “had recently plotted her way out of a marriage, into what she wanted everyone to call a nervous breakdown” 83 , Lola has plotted her way

80 McEwan, Atonement, p. 10. 81 Ibid., p. 11. 82 Ibid., p. 12. 83 Ibid., p. 65.

into a marriage. When Briony comes to the rescue of her cousin the explanation of what happened is not Lola’s but Briony’s: “It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.” 84 Her positive identification of the rapist is not confirmed by Lola, moreover, we are even allowed to suspect that this flirtatious child knew perfectly well that the attacker was not Robbie. The less willing Lola is to admit the truth the greater Briony’s confidence gets in her own story, whose impact on reality is so disastrous for Robbie. Both girls, actually, invent what they see while believing that what they see is what is really there. The narrative points are contrasted and overlapped all through the novel. Cecilia and Robbie have different viewpoints of the same events, and Emily Tallis creates ‘truth’ according to her own values just as much as the other characters do. Each character’s social identity and, consequently, values, provide his or her story. Whereas Emily despises policemen and Robbie, her husband sponsors Robbie’s education. His own father, Harry Tallis, being the son of a farm labourer he sympathizes with Robbie’s inferior origin. Robbie and Briony when reconstructing the events of the past both re-invent the past. These overlapping perspectives intensify the reader’s sense of the diversity of narrative viewpoints, so there is no the version he/she can trust.

The events on the supposed day of the performance are set in a stagelike background. Architecture and setting here act as decoration as well as symbols. The tragedy begins in the house and then moves to the garden. Later it is “an artificial island in an artificial lake” 85 near a fake temple, that only emphasizes the determinate character of the drama and the cast. The Tallis house was built by Briony’s grandfather, Harry Tallis, who wished his house to represent certain values, like the solidity of the family, the unit of the parents and children living under one roof. But there are facts in the family history that make the reader think that this is a façade hiding less reassuring truths. Cecilia, having a tedious time in her parents’ house busies herself with a family tree, but finds out confusing facts on the paternal side where suspicious among men, and common-law marriages take

84 McEwan, Atonement , p. 166. 85 Ibid., p. 163.

place. changes of surnames The relatives on her mother’s side are, on the contrary, ‘a baffled and severe folk’ for whom her parents used to give Sunday lunches: These were awesome occasions worthy of the ancient silver service; the venerable great-uncles and aunts and grandparents were Victorians, from their mother’s side of the family, a baffled and severe folk, a lost tribe who arrived at the house in black cloaks having wandered peevishly for two decades in an alien, frivolous century .86

The real situation in the Tallis house displays the absence in the family of strong emotional ties, so elevated in the Victorian period. The myth of family at-one-ment is demolished just like the fake temple the visible decay of which implies corruption and hypocrisy. Briony who visits her home on her seventy-seventh birthday admits that: “The building itself surely embraced more human happiness now, as a hotel, than it did when [Briony] lived here.” 87 Writing for the theatre, unlike writing a novel, is not a completely domestic form of production. Since Briony calls herself “writer-director” 88 she intends to be at the head of the production. To stage a play is a courageous step for a girl of thirteen. To think of a woman playwright who would have to conduct the public control of the process of production and performance. They would present a threat to the carefully maintained dominance of men. Laying aside directing, women in England in Shakespeare’s days were not even allowed to act in plays. As for the nineteenth century, there comes to mind Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park , the novel to which Atonement owes many intertextual borrowings. The group of young people decides to amuse themselves by staging a play because, as Jane Austen writes in the novel: “…a love of the theatre is so general, an itch for acting so strong among young people...” 89 The performance is never carried out but causes hot discussions, especially concerning the girls’ acting in the play: “It was a very different thing. – You must see the difference yourself. My father wished us, as school-boys, to speak well, but he would never wish his grown up daughters to be acting plays. His sense of decorum is strict.” “I know all that,” said Tom displeased. “I know my father as well as you do, and I’ll take care that his daughters do nothing to distress him.” 90

86 McEwan, Atonement , p. 50. 87 Ibid., 365. 88 Ibid., p. 32. 89 Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, (Çevrimiçi), http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/subjects- women.html, 25 Kasım 2004. 90 Ibid., 25 Kasim 2004.

When Briony is aware of her failure as a producer she tears to pieces the poster she painted for her play the day before. One of the pieces has a form of triangle: “Cecilia smoothed the jagged triangle of paper and thought how her little sister was changing.” 91 The triangle standing for femininity symbolizes Briony’s disappointment in sentimental melodramas and in the genre itself. On that day she realizes the advantages of the fiction, so when she is seventy seven she can say: “… it was entirely my fault the rehearsals fell apart, because halfway through I had decided to become a novelist.” 92 But she had her excuse; no play can be compared with fiction for the extend of freedom and power of manipulation it gives its author: A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader – no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no , pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village, no streets, no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. 93 One of the reasons Briony has been disappointed in drama is that drama is a story without a story-teller. As Jeremy Hawthorn puts it: “The reader interprets the poem, novel or play; the actor interprets the role he is assigned and the instrumentalist interprets the music.” 94 So, the designed play would have been a direct presentation in which the actor’s talent would have a direct effect on the audience, and in which, consequently, Lola would give her vision of Arabella, and the twins their vision of the family tragedy.

91 McEwan, Atonement, p. 44. 92 Ibid., p. 369. 93 Ibid., p. 37. 94 Jeremy Hawthorn, Criticism and Critical Theory, London, Edward Arnold Publishers, 1984, p.16.

СHAPTER 3

FEMALE GOTHIC, ROMANCE AND THE ROMANTICS.

But there was no one. The dark shapes of the widely spaced trees across the park made [Briony] hesitate. Someone hated her, that had to be remembered, and he was unpredictable and violent... The nearer trees, or at least their trunks, had a human form. Or could conceal one. Even a man standing in front of the tree trunk would not be visible to her. For the first time, she was aware of the breeze pouring through the tops of the trees, and this familiar sound unsettled her. Millions of separate and precise agitations bombarded her senses. When the wind picked up briefly and died, the sound moved away from her, traveling out across the darkened park like a living thing. She stopped and wondered whether she had the courage…95

The extract is taken from Chapter Thirteen of the novel, the chapter that is characteristic for its thrilling and tense depiction of the night that changed utterly the lives of the characters in the novel. The twins, Jackson and Pierrot run away, their sister, Lola leaves the house in desperation, so the adults have to wander in the darkness in search of the troubled children. Briony, in spite of her youth, is also among the seekers and is sure she shares “the night expanse with a maniac”. 96 Her dramatical imagination depicts the malice hidden in the darkness of the park:

The was nothing she could not describe: the gentle pad of a maniac’s tread moving sinuously along the drive, keeping to the verge to muffle his approach. 97

Briony imagines herself a heroine of a Gothic romance, like one of Ann Radcliffe’s, where harmony is disrupted and the heroine is subjected to all kinds of ordeals challenging her sense and virtue. But in The Mysteries of Udolpho it is later said that most of Emily St. Aubert’s fears had no ground.

[Emily] expects to see banditti steal out and attack her – the danger is, like most others in Udolpho , greatly exaggerated by the excesses of the imagination and, in the end, poses no real personal threat. 98

95 McEwan, Atonement , p. 162. 96 Iibid., p.156. 97 Ibid., p.156.

Briony’s fascination with the Gothic is justified. Because of Mrs. Radcliffe the Gothic novel has come to be dominated by women – written by women, read by women, and choosing as its central figure, a young girl, the Gothic heroine. What is, then the Gothic and why does there appear such a concept as the ‘Female Gothic’. J.A. Cuddon gives the following definition:

A type of romance… Most Gothic novels and tales of mystery and horror, intended to chill the spine and curdle the blood. They contain a strong element of supernatural... 99

The attempt to define the Gothic requires to acknowledge its complex, problematic status as a category first. By glancing through the motifs that are pivotal in Gothic fiction we can try to elucidate the concept. These will include “crime”, “blood”, “castle”, “vengeance”, “abduction”, “rape”, “suicide”, “wedding”(usually forced), “twins” among others. In other words, the Gothic systematically represents “otherness”. This Gothic “other” is broadly consistent with some of the most ancient categories of otherness in Western culture.

Male Female Limited Unlimited Even Odd One Many Right Left Square Oblong Straight Curved Light Darkness Good Evil

From the two, the list beginning with ‘female’ and ending with ‘evil’ contains elements generally associated with the Gothic. Since the eighteenth century women writers have written a great deal of work in the literary mode called the Gothic. Ann

98 Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, p.31. 99 J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, pp. 355-356.

Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Regina Maria Roche, Clara Reeve, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte contributed much to English romantic fiction via “the eccentricities of woman’s fantasy”. 100

Atonement opens with an extract from Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, whose heroine, Catherine Morland, as well as her friend Isabella, are the devoted readers of Gothic stories. The young women associate themselves with a Gothic heroine who challenges conventional notions of woman’s passivity and simplicity. They travel with her to distant countries, venture through doors, experience the thrill of contact with the preternatural. Catherine visits her new friends in Northanger Abbey, and when left alone she explores its dark narrow passages. Symbolic of female genitalia the narrow passages imply the young woman’s search for her sexuality repressed, even condemned by the contemporary society. Catherine’s imagination fascinated by the horror stories of Ann Radcliffe, pictures the crimes of her unpleasant host, General Tinley. The influence of reading is such that the distinction between the fictive and the real is blurred, but the great irony here is that Catherine is not far from the truth about the General who does not turn to “be the wife-destroying Montoni that she fancies from her reading, but he is ruthless in forcing Catherine out on the open road destitute and unprotected.” 101 Catherine is shamed and reprimanded by young Henry Tilney in the extract quoted in the beginning of the novel for being too imaginative. By using such a quotation, Ian McEwan seems to send his message to Briony, since her imagination makes her commit a crime of which she will repent all her life. Stephen Bruhm in his book Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction also writes about the dangers of imagination:

Literature seeks to move us through intense stimulation, but that stimulation can be dangerously excessive. It can make us slaves of our own imagination. 102

100 Ellen Moers, Literary Women, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985. p.100. 101 William H. Magee, Convention and the Art of Jane Austen’s Heroines, San Francisco, London, International Scholars Publications, 1995, p. 67. 102 Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.p.32.

The ‘rational’ mind of a male seems to be frightened by the potent danger of the workings of a mysterious female energy that nurtures her imagination and its destructive effect on male order. Emily St. Aubert’s father makes much the same point in his warning to his daughter on excessive imagination. Another reason for the great appeal of the Gothic for women, writers as well as readers, is its being a metaphor of feminine powerlessness. Its heroines are often found in strikingly motherless situation and entrapped by a hostile patriarchal culture. The walls of the castle are the metaphor of the strict boundaries first of a proper English girlhood, then of chaste womanhood, and Gothic foreign villains represent the mental and physical threat originating from the male represented as doubly ‘other’. The Tallis house seems to be copied from the dreary remote mansions of Gothic stories. Morning light, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the Tallis home – barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, leaned-paned 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’. 103 …There was no sound. The walls, the paneling, the pervasive heaviness of nearly new fixtures, the colossal fire dogs, the walk-in fireplaces of bright new stone referred back through the centuries to a time of lonely castles in mute forests. 104

The female children, Briony and Cecilia, and their mother, Emily are imprisoned behind the thick walls of the house. Cecilia, unlike her mother, had the chance of being educated at Girton, but having returned she feels its pressure again: “since coming home, her life had stood still, and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.” 105 Little Briony finds her way of liberation in the only possible way of social activity for her, in writing. If she could not go out she would find escape in her inner world of fantasies:

She had vanished into an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface, the protective crust which even, or specially, a loving mother could not penetrate. 106

Their mother, ‘locked up’ in the bedroom, can wander about the house only in her imagination like a ghost invisible, but all-knowing.

103 McEwan, Atonement, p. 19. 104 Ibid., p. 145. 105 Ibid., p. 18. 106 Ibid., p. 68.

Only the truth came back to her, for what she knew, she knew. The indistinct murmur of voices heard through a carpeted floor surpassed in clarity a typed-up transcript; a conversation that penetrated a wall or, better, two walls, came stripped of all but its essential twists and nuances. What for others would have been a muffling was to her alert senses, which were fine-tuned like the cat’s whiskers of a old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification. She lay in the dark and knew everything. 107

The out-side life reaches her only in the form of muffled voices and she hears how the walls of the house creak and weigh on her. “Her father-in-law’s intention, she supposed, was to create an ambience of solidity and family tradition.” 108 But in the myth of a happy and solid family deconstructed by Briony, Emily Tallis, supposedly a descendant of a noble Victorian family, feels how the walls of the house shrink and restrict her space to the limits of a bedroom. “Shrinking, everything was shrinking.” 109 Emily thinks that education could affect Cecilia in a negative way: “One day Leon might bring home a friend for Cecilia to marry, if three years at Girton had not made her an impossible prospect...” 110 Emily had a different kind of education:

She had been educated at home until the age of sixteen, and was sent to Switzerland for two years which were shortened to one for economy and she knew for a fact that the whole performance, women at the ‘Varsity, was childish really, at best an innocent lark, like the girls’ rowing eight, a little posturing alongside their brothers dressed up in the solemnity of social progress. 111

When Emily thinks about her childhood, an “overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony”, she compares that quiet girl to a “ghost” 112 , a metaphor which emphasizes the exclusion and solitude she suffered in the world of the unsympathetic adults. She could have been dreaming in her youth of marriage as a reward ( like the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert ) for proper behaviour, of which she is an ardent advocate, but her marriage to an important civil servant, Jack Tallis, who has exhausting responsibilities in London, turns out to be a failure and a fake.

107 McEwan, Atonement , p.66. 108 Ibid., p.145. 109 Ibid., p. 64. 110 Ibid, p.64. 111 Ibid, p. 65. 112 Ibid., p. 150.

The absent father, Jack Tallis, whose London duties along with other more genial preoccupations that keep him off the scene imposes his rules on the family members and their life style like an invisible omnipotent God:

He had precise ideas about where and when a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply – notions as self-evident to him as natural justice. 113

But he fails to control the situation, and the result is a disaster. Chaos begins to reign also in the fatherless families depicted in Jane Austen’s novels. So, the young generation of Bertrams takes occasion to stage a play, but:

[Edmund Bertram] fails to see how profoundly the family circle has been disrupted already, first through his father’s absence, and then, in an attempt to fill that void, through the introduction of the Crawfords. 114

As for the noisy and disorderly Price household - Mr. Price has authority not in himself (he is drunken and largely absent) but in his title as father.

[Fanny] could not respect her parents, as she had hoped. On her father, her confidence had not been sanguine, but he was more negligent of his family, his habits were worse, and his manners coarser, than she had been prepared for. He did not want abilities; but he had no curiosity, and no information beyond his profession; he read only the newspaper and the navy-list; he talked only of the dock-yard, the harbour, Spithead, and the Motherbank; he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross. 115

Jack Tallis’ seclusion in his library when he is not in London also resembles Mr. Bennet’s remoteness from his family.

[Jack Tallis ]organized nothing, he didn’t go about the house worrying on other people’s behalf, he rarely told anyone what to do – in fact, he mostly sat in the library. But his presence imposed order and allowed freedom. Burdens were lifted… it was enough that he was downstairs with a book on his lap. 116

Being under the strong impact of the Gothic romance, Briony fills the vacancies originating from the absence of the parents with her own constructs. Her play, The

113 McEwan, Atonement, p. 46. 114 Paula Marantz Cohen, The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth- Century Domestic Novel, The University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 68. 115 Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, (Çevrimiçi), http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/subjects- women.html, 12 January 2005. 116 McEwan, p. 122.

Trials of Arabella was designed to instruct its spectator, professing that love which is not build on good sense was doomed:

The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor – in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on ‘a windy sunlit day in spring’. 117

The plot of this play could be borrowed from a dozen romances, written by women, which contain a wicked foreign count to test a heroine, and a happy wedding on a spring day to reward her in the end. Briony’s desire is to provoke her brother Leon’s admiration by means of the performance. He occupies her erotic dreams, playing the role of a hero-lover, a careless rake, a noble lord, and a Prince Charming altogether:

There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, everyone of which featured Leon. 118

Leon is good natured, smells of pipe smoke, has a thick fountain pen in the pocket of his jacket and is a success with women. Even his mother can not resist his charms:

She could be angrier with him if he were not so sweet-natured and content and surrounded by successful friends. Too handsome, too popular, no sting of unhappiness and ambition.119

Though it is her older daughter, Cecilia who helps her to run the house and cope with the servants, her usefulness does not prevent Emily Tallis from valuing the male child more, the fact that brings to mind another mother figure, Mrs. Price, who values only her male children favoring especially her eldest son, preferring him to Fanny who is her actual helpmeet.

Briony insists on taking the part of Arabella herself, because “no other possibility had crossed her mind, because that was how Leon was to see her,

117 McEwan, Atonement , p.3. 118 Ibid., p. 4. 119 Ibid., p. 64.

because she was Arabella.” 120 The semi-incestuous love for the elder brother shares its place with the adoration for a father. Briony envies her father’s attachment to Robby. Longing for the father’s love together with sibling rivalry appear to be among the other things that prepare the ground for her false evidence: They had provided for all manner of pleasant things for [ Robbie], the Tallis family: the very home he had grown up in, countless trips to France, and his grammar school uniform and books, and then Cambridge… Together the Tallis children would see this brute off, see him safely out of their lives. They would have to confront their father, and comfort him in his rage and disappointment. 121

Briony decorates her life with the paraphernalia of Gothic stories; her secret treasures possess the disguised meaning rooted in psychoanalysis and the vast mythological and cultural store of the world.

Another was 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, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting; a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf. 122

Secret drawers and removable floorboards add mystery to the romantic fiction and excitement to Briony’s colorless life. An old tin petty box is reminiscent of the box the first mortal woman in Greek Mythology, Pandora, was given and its evil contents she let free. This is one of the primal myths of patriarchal epistemology, one that teaches what female curiosity can lead to and gives another example of the female, like Eve, as the origin of men’s mishaps. This time it is Briony who engenders evil and her art is a Pandora’s box. As Freudian symbols a safe opened by six secret numbers and a diary locked by a clasp represent female genitalia and virginity, the concepts referring to Cecilia and Lola, and the young girls’ loss of virginity. A secret drawer is a womb implying the fertility of Briony as a writer. The fact that Briony keeps a diary again raises the matter of woman’s restricted access to literary production, and how “they have turned so often to private forms never

120 Ibid., p. 13. 121 McEwan, Atonement , p.158. 122 Ibid., p. 5.

intended for public consumption”. 123 Briony’s notebook written in a code of her own invention challenges the male’s God-given priority of mastering the word because in patriarchal ideology the word/logos in the male-female opposition have always been seen as masculine and the world it orders as feminine. So, the Word towers above the world with masculine authority, like the mind masters the body. In a society marked by male power, women are just “bodies.” Briony feels that she becomes imprisoned in her body, now sexless, but which will awaken the interest of the other in the nearest future. One day she observes her body with new interest:

She pushed her knees out straight before her and let the folds of her white muslin dress and the familiar, endearing, pucker of skin about her knees fill her view. She should have changed her dress this morning. she thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But what an effort it was… She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. 124

Entering the disturbing period of puberty, Briony discovers that she has to bring forward the proofs of her femininity, like Lola, otherwise, she is sexless. As many little girls before her, she is going to be trapped in her body, to become woman-as- object, to exist only when attracting the appraising gaze of a man. Unconsciously Briony tries to avoid this prospect by trying to master her body and especially her finger, the metaphor for a pen. This ‘fleshy spider’ on the end of her arm is the instrument of the shaping of the text, the sign of her authorship. This straightforward allusion to Arachne, the weaving spider and the metaphor for female art, displays once more Briony’s desire to produce her own story from her point of view. McEwan emphasizes the etymology of the word ‘text’ from Latin texere, textum ‘to weave’, ‘woven’.125 Besides, spider and her web imply the uncanny nature of the language – danger it presents. A squirrel skull that Briony hides beneath her bed alludes to Yorick’s skull in Hamlet , the play that has everything to attract a Gothic writer: a castle, a ghost, a madwoman, a family secret concerning a murder, violence and incest. The ghost of a father in Hamlet relegates his role to his son and thus

123 Duff, Modern Genre Theory, p. 252. 124 McEwan, Atonement, p. 35. 125 J. A.Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms, p. 907.

shapes the destiny of a whole community, but in Atonement , both the father and his son, Leon are incapable to create their own text, and this enables Briony to usurp this role and to create her own text – through her words, and shape the destiny of the family. A ghost as a symbolic element is also exploited by McEwan in Chapter Eight when Robbie goes through the park to the Tallis house to attend the dinner party. A white shape he sees on the bridge at some distance is taken by him for a ghost:

Ahead of him, about hundred yards away, was the bridge, and on it, he thought, picked out against the darkness of the road, was a white shape which seemed at first to be part of the pale stone of the parapet. Staring at it dissolved its outlines, but within a few paces it had taken on a vaguely human form. At this distance he was not able to tell whether it faced away or towards him. It was motionless and he assumed he was being watched. He tried for a second or two to entertain himself with the idea of a ghost, but he had no belief in the supernatural, not even in the supremely undemanding being that presided over the Norman church in the village. 126

The ghost turns out to be Briony. Her ghost-like shape is a metaphor for a child as a solitary, isolated figure against the background of the myth of a happy family. Besides, it symbolizes the fears adult feel about the irrational and unpredictable behaviour of “an imperfect adult”.127 This reminds the reader of one of the most known child-ghost, Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights whose hand clings to Mr. Lockwood’s and whose most melancholy voice sobs – “Let me in – let me in!” 128 Briony’s status as a child and a female has marked her as the humblest in the hierarchy of English culture. She longs to be let in the social order where male rationality reigns. Mr. Lockwood does not believe in the supernatural, neither does Robbie. Only after Mr. Lockwood has read Catherine’s diary does the girl manage to slip into his dream while he is asleep, in other words when his mind is free of its warden – rationality. Briony’s writing, or the claim for authorship, acts as an attempt to destroy the ambiguity of being a marginal figure, of being a ghost, and the metaphorical Other of the Gothic fiction. As Eugenia C. DeLamotte claims:

...many Emilys, Emilias, Matildas, and Julias who stand, in their interchangeability, for

126 McEwan, Atonement , p.93. 127 Penny Brown, The Captured World: The Child and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in England, N.Y. and London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 3. 128 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, London, Penguin Books, 1992, p.20.

woman – the true “separated one” at the heart of a social order whose peculiar disorder it is to make her the fearful Other. 129

The situation of marginality brings together Briony and Robbie, who come to be the secret allies under common oppression (one is a female child and another is socially inferior) and, simultaneously, are rivals for the love of a patriarch ( Jack Tallis ). Both find the way of liberation in knowledge. Many characters in Gothic fiction are in pursuit of knowledge; they draw aside veils, lift palls, venture through any door they happen to find ajar and force their way through many that are not. Robbie’s desire to study medicine seems to have claims similar to Victor Frankenstein’s:

…for Robbie the matter was simpler and more personal; his practical nature and his frustrated scientific aspirations would find an outlet, he would have skills far more elaborate than the ones he had acquired in practical criticism, and above all he would have made his own decision. He would take lodgings in a strange town – and begin. 130

Ironically, Robbie takes the shape of Frankenstein’s monster himself when, after having found the twins, he is guiding them back to safety:

As the shape took form the waiting group fell silent again. No one could quite believe what was emerging. Surely it was a trick of the mist and light. No one in this age of telephones and motor cars could believe that giants seven or eight feet high existed in crowded Surrey. But here it was, an apparition as inhuman as it was purposeful. The thing was impossible and undeniable, and heading their way. 131

Briony’s accusation turns Robbie to the monster and his social identity just makes it easier to give credit to the girl’s false evidence. Hence, Robbie is made a scapegoat, a Frankenstein’s monster who “represents among other things, the Other constructed by repression in the patriarchal symbolic.” 132 ‘The Other’ or ‘the Double’ is one of the most perplexing and sinister aspects of duality, like the monstrous or metamorphic duplicate of the original, like the twin. The twins in the novel, Jackson and Pierrot Quincey represent the dyad structure:

Twins are the special case of duality in its mode of self-contradiction, the non-resolving

129 Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 28. 130 McEwan, Atonement, p. 91. 131 Ibid., p. 182. 132 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic , Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, p.178.

dyad. Since they are not ‘polar opposites’ they will not resolve into a final and harmonic unity. Twins are parity and disparity, but equality – never. 133

Raia Prokhovnik argues that such dyad structures proceed in dichotomies that prove extremely resistant to reform, like man/woman, reason/emotion. Such dichotomies, she says, “represent fundamental polarities, fixed deep within Western philosophy and reflected in the structure of our language.” 134 Atonement has a contradictory approach to ‘duality’: it has typical dyadic actions of antagonizing, motifs of rivalry and competition, the fluid and enigmatic nature of twinhood – One-and-Other on the one hand, and on the other hand, the novel seems to challenge the dominance of dichotomy in our culture. As one of the novel’s reviewers stated: Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now. One of the things it can do, very subtly in McEwan’s case, is to be androgynous. This is a novel written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a ‘male’ subject, and there’s nothing to distinguish between them. 135

Androgyny, the unity of male and female essences is also represented by the twins, because one of them misses a triangle of flesh from his left ear lobe. Still, duality is a luring mode of thinking for criticism, since the dual and ambivalent nature of art itself suggests that Briony tries to duplicate the original through creating her image of reality. What is the issue here is not dichotomy as one mode within a range of modes of thinking but: ...it is the repressive effect on other modes of thinking that the dominance of dichotomy has exercised over the past two hundred years. This dominance is in urgent need of criticism and remedy. 136

‘Gothic romance’ is a combination often used by critics along with ‘Gothic fiction’ and the ‘Gothic novel’. The reason lies in the general character of this literary form, be it the chivalric romance in the Middle ages, the aristocratic romance during the Renaissance, or bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, it is always ready to turn up and feed on readers’ new hopes and desires because:

133 John Lash, Twins and the Double, London, Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 6. 134 Raia Prokhovnik, Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 20. 135 Eds. Jonathan Noakes, Margaret Reynolds, Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature, London, Vintage, 2002, p. 185. 136 Prokhovnik, p.21.

The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy. 137

In the fictional world of a Romance all men are either princes or villains, and all women are either good girls, whom one marries, or bad girls, who provide fun. Briony tries to transfer the world of a Romance, its rules and its archetypes by deconstructing her real life, and using literary clichés as the means of describing others’ thoughts, feelings and intentions. Naturally, the adult world happens to be much more complicated than the idea a little girl could get about it from a Romance. But even her ‘progressive’ sister Cecilia cannot help thinking within the framework of the romance when she meets Paul Marshall for the first time, when a young heroine is expected to feel some symptoms, the precursors of the awaiting love affair:

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for a first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life – with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. 138

Many scholars speak about the relation of ‘gothic’ and ‘romantic’ to one another. Like Michael Gamer, for example, who says that: ...reception of gothic writing – its institutional and commercial recognition as a kind of literature – played a fundamental role in shaping many of the ideological assumptions about high culture that we have come to associate with “romanticism.” 139

Others go further by stating that:

First, “Gothic” is a poetic tradition. Second, “Gothic” and “Romanticism” are not two but one. Third, “Gothic” is not one but two: like the human race, it has “male” and “female” genre. 140

137 David Duff (Ed.), Modern Genre Theory , p. 99. 138 McEwan, Atonement, p. 47. 139 Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 2. 140 Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic , p. 3.

Indeed, the unbiased reader might assume that many famous works bespeak a close relation between Gothic and Romantic: Coleridge’s Christabel , Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci , Lamia , and The Life of St. Agnes , Shelley’s Alastor – all are replete with Gothic paraphernalia: fatal women, haunted castles, bleeding corpses, and mysterious warnings. In other words the Romantics knew and appreciated the works of Gothic writers: …for early Gothic “romance’ is almost exactly contemporary with the literature we now call “Romantic”. Today’s Romanticists may have difficulty in declaring the Gothic inconsequential, for Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were writing in the 1780s along with the first generation of Romantic poets, who knew their work well. Coleridge not only read but reviewed The Romance of the Forest , Udolpho, The Italian , and The Monk … Shelley began his career with a couple of Gothic novels, published while he was still at Eton. 141

With the Romantics Briony shares her exhibitionism and exaltation of the ego, since she wants her environment to be aware of her singularity as a gifted author. As Robert Lance Snyder puts it: “For the Romantics, then, the gift of language entails the challenge of individuation and is the very sign of man’s protean singularity.” 142 But together with elevating a poet there are new attitudes and definitions we are indebted to the Romantic Movement that is of imagination, spontaneity and organic form. The concept of imagination, that is so pivotal in Atonement , lies in the heart of the Romantic theory of aesthetics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the author of its best-known formulation:

The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. 143

So, for the Romantics while imagination marked the poet or genius, the normal people had to content themselves with mere fancy. Moreover, Keats is “certain of

141 Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic , p.1. 142 Ed. Harry R. Garvin, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, London and Toronto, Associated University Presses , 1980, pp.. 24-25. 143 McEwan, Atonement, p.53.

nothing but the holiness of the Heart and the truth of Imagination”.144 That sounds utterly ironical in the light of what “the lava of the imagination”145 of a young girl causes. Robbie’s surname, Turner, alludes to the progressive late Romantic landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 –1851) whose work heavily influenced the Impressionists. His art was known for its the emotional, exotic, fantastic, bizarre, and sublime character. With Romanticism, the role of the artist as an individual genius replaced the idea of the artist as an illustrator of Biblical stories and ancient myths. If the previous movement of the Augustans had the idea of a pleasant landscape as a scenery that had been ‘improved’ by human intervention, the Romantics with their insistence on raw feelings wanted just the opposite. They wrote poems about wild rugged mountains, vast semi-savage wildernesses, ruins, and stormy seas. No wonder that it was “the eighteenth-century poetry that had almost persuaded [Robbie] he should be a landscape gardener.” 146 Enchanted by feelings and sensations in romantic poetry landscape he travels to the most picturesque places in England: Lying partly across them were some of his hiking maps, of North Wales, Hampshire and Surrey and the abandoned hike of Istanbul. There was a compass with sighting mirror he had once used to walk without maps to Lulworth Cove. 147

Lulworth Cove is the prime Dorset attraction with its coastline, challenging hills, and famous Fossil Forest. Hampshire is known for its beautiful parks, besides the fact that it was in Hampshire that Jane Austen, whose books are among Robbie’s favorites, found inspiration to write such classics as Pride and Prejudice , Emma , Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility . The abandoned hike to Istanbul might have been the intention to follow the example of Byron who made his trip to Constantinople by way of Smyrna with his friend Hobhouse. Robbie’s fancy for Nature originates from the works of the Romantics who popularized the notion of spending time ‘getting back to nature.’ Passion for Romanticism does not conform to Robbie’s rationality. To reconcile the two he has to get through hardships.

144 Ibid., p. 20. 145 Ibid. , p.20 146 McEwan, Atonement , p. 92. 147 Ibid., p. 82.

Another major theme of the Romantics is art. Among numerous symbolical art objects, like the temple and fountain, there is also a vase that was given to Uncle Clem, Jack Tallis’ brother; by the people he had saved during the First World War and which was delivered to the Tallis family after his death. The vase is characteristic for its fickle meaning. The art object that survived a war is broken in a petty squabble. During the war it symbolized man’s courage; later to the lovers it has come to symbolize Cecilia’s virginity, the losing of the wholeness, as well as art’s fragility. The broken vase will later meet an even worse fate, and this premonitory damage echoes what happens to other fragile objects highly valued but easily ruined, such as Cecilia's virginity, and life itself during war. The shattered art object acts also as a symbol of art’s inconstant nature. John Keats’s poem Ode on a Grecian Urn is another example of a literary work that considers the paradoxical dilemma of art’s value while exploiting an art object as a symbol: Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thou express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme … O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sa “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 148 The vase depicted above is ‘still unravish’d’ while the Tallis vase symbolizes the temporality of passions and transcendent values. Once broken, it is never mended, in spite of Cecilia’s attempts to put the pieces together, thus symbolizing her deflowered virginity.

With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which dropped into water and tumbled to the bottom in a synchronous, see- sawing motion, and lay there, several inches apart, writhing in the broken light. 149

148 Ed. Elizabeth Cook, John Keats, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 288- 289. 149 McEwan, Atonement, p. 29.

The triangular piece of the vase, this simple and graceful symbol of femininity escapes from the grasp of the male into the deep waters of the fountain, but the quarrel itself provokes the sexual awakening of the two. When Briony observes the lovers by the fountain she sees them in the light of a “daily romance,” 150 as she once thought herself to be a sentimental heroine in a love story with Robbie as her lover. The Romantics create numerous images of sentimental young heroines in their poems. These heroines are mere properties, characters imprisoned in male texts. To name just a few: To Helen by A. E. Poe, or Lucy by Wordsworth, To Isadore . Little Briony conform the romantic archetype of male texts so her feelings when she sees her play ruined by Lola and the twins seem to echo The Talking Oak by Alfred Tennyson: Briony knew her only reasonable choice would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with pink ribbon straps…151

Alfred Tennyson’s heroine also runs to sleep by the oak:

“She left the novel half-uncut Upon the rosewood shelf; She left the new piano shut: She could not please herself.

“Then ran she, gamesome as the colt, And livelier than a lark She sent her voice thro’ all the holt Before her, and the park.

“And here she came, and round me play’d, And sang to me the whole Of those three stanzas that you made About my ‘giant bol’;

“I wish’d myself the fair young beech That here beside me stands, That round me, clasping each in each, She might have lock’d her hands.

“Yet seem’d the pressure thrice as sweet As woodbine’s fragile hold, Or when I feel about my feet The berried briony fold.

150 McEwan, Atonement, p. 38. 151 Ibid., pp. 14-15.

“Tis little more: the day was warm; At last, tired out with play, She sank her head upon her arm, And at my feet she lay.

“Her eyelids dropp’d their silken eaves. I breathed upon her eyes Thro’ all the summer of my leaves A welcome mix’d with sighs. 152

The same exaltation we see in E.A. Poe’s Annabel Lee , whose heroine’s name echoes Briony’s Arabella who sacrificed a lot for love’s sake:

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL LEE; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. 153

The Fair Maiden in the works of the Romantics is usually opposed to the Femme Fatale. The romantics preserved the dual view of all women as saints or sexual sinners where the latter should be scared of. The girls in Atonement have to choose one of the imposed roles and vainly try to identify themselves with the Nice Girl or the Naughty Girl. Among the girls Lola is, perhaps, the most sexualized. Her surname, Quincey, invites the reader to draw the parallel between her and Lucy in Dracula , who is an extremely attractive young woman whose physical beauty captivates several suitors, Quincey Morris being one of them. The scene of Marshall presenting Lola a bar of chocolate refers to Dracula’s seduction of Lucy: ‘Bite it,’ [Marshall] said softly. ‘You’ve got to bite it.’ It cracked loudly as it yielded to [Lola’s] unblemished incisors, and where154 was revealed the white edge of the sugar shell, and the dark chocolate beneath it. Vampirized by Dracula Lucy turns into a wanton creature of ravenous sexual appetite. Lola also displays playfulness about her desirability by an adult of which he makes her aware. But she is not aware of the danger that awaits her. Firstly she is attacked by Marshall supposedly in her room when she is alone and gets scratches and Chinese burns as a consequence, later he rapes her in the park under cover of

152 Alfred Tennyson, “The Talking Oak”, (Çevrimiçi) http://textual.net/authors/ , 12 Mayıs, 2005. 153 Ibid., 12 Mayis 2005. 154 McEwan, Atonement, p. 62.

the dark. One of the most famous horror stories referred here, Bram Stoker’s Dracula , is a novel that indulges the Victorian male imagination, particularly regarding the topic of female sexuality. As it was said before women effectively had only two options: she was either a virgin, a model of purity and innocence, or she was a wife and mother. If she was neither of these, she was considered a whore. Open sexual desire was threat for society. So Lola’s vivid colours and budding sexuality provokes sexual abuse. White sugar and chocolate, scratches and blood suggest the exchange of bodily fluids and aggressive side of sexual intercourse. In her demonic state, Lucy stands as a dangerous threat to men and their self-control, and therefore, she must be destroyed. Men see no other option than to destroy her, in order to return her to a purer, more socially respectable state. Lola has another prospect – her ‘shame’ is eliminated through marrying the abuser. Exploiting female sexuality McEwan actualizes male fears and male fantasies. Untraditionally, he shows not only women but men also suffering from displaying sexual desire: Robbie Turner expresses his lust for Cecilia and is punished via female - Briony. Rewriting the history of literature McEwan could not omit Gothic romance in a novel that has a female writer as its protagonist. He uses the prototypical Female Gothic romance elements as an intertextual material. Since the Gothic is usually considered to regard gender difference and oppression it accords with the story of the main protagonist of Atonement , Briony Tallis. The confusing landscape, gloomy architecture, and villainous patriarchal figures, mysteries, and the supernatural of the Gothic are inserted in the centre of Atonement . Consequently, McEwan not only rewrites but allows reconsidering Female Gothic in the light of the twentieth century feminism and analytical theories from psychoanalysis to the generic approach.

СHAPTER 4

EPISTOLARY GENRE: POPULAR VOYEURISM .

A savage and thoughtless curiosity prompted her to rip the letter from its envelope – she read it in the hall after Polly had let her in – and though the shock of the message vindicated her completely, this did not prevent her from feeling guilty. It was wrong to open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything. 155

The samples of epistolary genre we call letters are among other important components of McEwan’s story-telling art. The letter’s nature is ambiguous: on one hand it is considered the most direct, sincere and transparent form of written communication. But the letter is simultaneously recognized as the most playful and potentially deceptive of forms. In Atonement letters are of great importance. The author makes the characters’ letters and partly epistolary narratives the central elements into his novel. The first mention of the letter as a genre appears in the description of Cecilia reading Richardson’s Clarissa :

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 pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson’s Clarissa .156

Cecilia reads Clarissa without taking in a word, rejecting, unconsciously, the male’s representation of the inner world of a young woman. The author of Clarissa thought it his duty to offer a warning to young ladies, as the title-page declares, that the book was designed to show “the Distresses that may attend the Misconduct both of Parents and Children in relation to Marriage.” T he novel’s another concern is the patriarchal system of inheritance.

This theme together with the name of the elder daughter of Tallises alludes to Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress . Like Clarissa, Cecilia is put in the position of a pseudo-male – standing for the patriarchal inheritor of the name

155 McEwan, Atonement, p. 113. 156 Ibid., p. 21.

and social identity. Critics argue about the reality of a psychological portrait of a female that Richardson gives in his novel. So, Robert Rogers claims that sentimental love religion that begins with Richardson’s Clarissa :

…combines the chivalric conception of man’s love for woman as “the fountainhead of virtue” with the mainly Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, bourgeois postulation of marriage as salvation. Thus women good or bad, acquire the theological epithet, “angel,” and the battle of the sexes takes on some of the trappings of religious moral didacticism. 157

April Alliston openly calls the novel “the enshrinement of dead women.” 158 Indeed, by introducing one of the orthodox male texts into his novel McEwan emphasizes that the male authors have assumed patriarchal rights of ownership over the female characters. Hence, we have a wide range of bookish heroines as anorexic Clarissa, or Cecilia, an heiress the displayed on market.

However, Richardson’s use of the letter as his primary narrative form marked a new phase in Western culture – the rise of the private sphere. A letter, in fact, is an emblem of the private. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook states that, “the letter is intimately identified with the body, especially a female body…”159 Accordingly, when the private and intimate becomes public something disagreeable happens, as in the case of Robbie’s letter to Cecilia. The young man attempts to write a letter of excuse. While trying to articulate his feelings he scribbles the stark truth at the bottom of his letter: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.” 160 The letter plays its trick on Robbie: obsessed by other’s secrets Briony opens the letter, and its contents convince her of Robbie’s ‘madness’. Thus Robbie’s casting Malvolio in a college play is nothing but a prefiguring of his doomed fate as a lover. The intertextual dialogue with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the reference to Countess Olivia’s sour steward, Malvolio is made just more prominent due to the eroticism, open and disguised, of the two letters. When Malvolio reads Olivia’s, as he thinks, letter he exclaims:

157 Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970, p.129. 158 April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in the Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1996, p.5. 159 Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1996, p. 6. 160 McEwan, Atonement, p. 86.

“These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s; and thus makes she great P’s.” 161 Besides the play of words implying female organ and the act of urination Olivia’s letter has many obvious sexual phrases, like the closing line: “See that would after services with thee,” 162 services being a word with strong sexual connotations. Malvolio is one of the most pitiful characters in Twelfth Night . He is the sullen, self- obsessed melancholic, who cannot join in the fun and debauchery enjoyed by Feste, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew. “The social status of Malvolio as steward is insisted on throughout the play. He is the chief officer of Olivia’s household, but always a servant, an employee, and never a noble figure like Olivia, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew…” 163 Being socially inferior to Cecilia upsets Robbie also, but Malvolio’s social-climbing and dreams of nobility through his marriage to Olivia is very much exaggerated as it is used in comedies. Nevertheless, the introducing of such a character as Malvolio distinguishes Twelfth Night among other Shakespeare’s comedies. It is a sad comedy, or black, if you like. Briony’s curiosity that is associated with an old lust for knowledge ends by Robbie’s fall into disgrace. While in Twelfth Night Malvolio is driven mad, Briony with the help of Lola diagnoses Robbie a sexual maniac. Malvolio is kept in a dark place, and Robbie is shut up in the prison for several years. If Robbie had a chance he could have said as Malvolio in the final scene: “Madam, you have done me wrong,/ Notoriously wrong,” 164 and Olivia echoes his words: “He has been most notoriously abused.” 165

McEwan makes references not only to other texts but cites the texts inside. Robbie and Cecilia kept apart by prison and then war resurrect their love in their letters. Robbie frequently quotes from memory Cecilia’s letters to him especially, Cecilia’s call that is pivotal throughout the novel - Come back . In their letters they create another world, the world full of love and hopes, as opposed to the real, full of injustice world. Cecilia, Robbie, and Briony shape and are shaped by their narratives. So the young lovers accept that they “had been making love for years –

161 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will , London, Macmillan Education, 1985, II. 5. 90. 162 Ibid., II.5.158. 163 Maurice Charney, All of Shakespeare , New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 76. 164 Shakespeare , Twelfth Night, or What You Will , V.1.330-31. 165 Ibid., V. 1.381.

by post…” and they understood “how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters.” 166 When Robbie first realizes that he has fallen in love with Cecilia he reflects: “He had spent three years dryly studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now in solitude, he was worshipping her traces…while he languished in his lady’s scorn.” 167 McEwan emphasizes here how strongly literary stereotypes influence humans’ lives, the way they think and act.

At her work over the last draft of the atonement Briony uses the archives containing the letters written by soldiers during wartime, as well as love-letters of Briony and Robbie. Also, she donates the “bundle of letters Mr. Nettle wrote her about Dunkirk.” 168 Though she uses epistolary, in other words the first source together with, supposedly, newspapers and historical records, the penetration of the private thoughts of the letters cannot be guarantee the authenticity, but who cares. As a result we have reconsidered by Briony presentation of war.

There is in the novel a letter which has a claim on verisimilitude. It is signed CC (Cyril Connoly). Under the name of the real person McEwan presents the critique on Briony’s short novella Two Figures by a Fountain , which she took to Horizon :

…she wrapped her story in brown paper, took the bus to Bloomsbury, walked to the address in Lansdowne Terrace, the office of the new magazine Horizon, and delivered the package to a pleasant young woman who came to the door. 169

Briony waits for an answer from Horizon for several months and when she seizes waiting, it finally comes. Though the author of the letter writes that: “our letters of rejection are usually no more than three sentences long,” 170 and encourages Briony for further writing she gets ultimately aware of the stark truth she tried to conceal by writing her foolish novella about “light and stone and water.” 171 The harmless rejection letter appears as a significant personal indictment for her – “She

166 McEwan, Atonement , p. 250. 167 Ibid., p. 84. 168 Ibid., p. 359. 169 Ibid., p. 281 170 Ibid., p. 314. 171 Ibid., p. 320.

had been caring it in her pocket during her shift and the second page acquired a crab-like stain of carbolic.” 172 The blood-like stain on the letter reminds Briony of the crime she committed one hot summer night in 1939. “If the girl has so fully misunderstood… how might it affect the lives of the two adults?” writes Connoly in his letter, “Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion?” 173 The letter reminds Briony that she would never get rid of the weight of this guilt unless… Unless, perhaps, she writes the final letter - her atonement. It is Robbie who asks her to do it.

Then you’ll write to me in much greater detail. In this letter you’ll put in absolutely everything you think is relevant. Everything that led up to you saying you saw me by the lake. And why, even though you were uncertain, you stuck to your story in the months leading up to my trial. If there were pressures on you, from the police or your parents, I want to know. Have you got that? It needs to be a long letter. 174

As we know the letter Robbie asks Briony to write about the things relevant to his trial turns into a novel, Atonement .

Again and again McEwan uses letters woven into his omniscient narrative as a narrative medium on their own. This combined texture allows us to observe processes in his characters’ minds better. The features of a written letter provide McEwan with a means of dramatizing the constraints in his characters’ lives. Letters are mediators. They appear in the lives of the characters and influence their destinies. A letter is easily, sometimes even readily, misinterpreted. Its documentary nature allows it to be used as a weapon, and this, actually, happens in the novel. The letters are considered to be the substitutes for direct contact, so McEwan uses them and the gains are ultimate - variety of perspectives and such description of the interactions between people the author could not get at any other way.

172 McEwan, Atonement , p. 320. 173 Ibid., p. 313. 174 Ibid., p. 345.

CHAPTER 5

MODERNIST AESTHETICISM.

To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design – this would be an artistic triumph .175

With the beginning of Modernism at the turn of the 20th century writers began to break from traditional techniques in order to create something new and representative of the changing times. They wanted freedom from the rules of academic art, as well as from the demands of the public. Great transformations also happen to Briony and her understanding of art. After the bitter disappointment in her previous literary ideals Briony turns over a new leaf in her life story. She breaks off the relations with her family, and following Cecilia’s example comes to London to become a student nurse. Neither the general historical strain in pre-war England, nor the pressure of the dehumanizing conditions of nurse-training keeps Briony from writing.

Her new short novella is called Two Figures by the Fountain and reflects, as she thinks Modern sensibility. Her imaginative powers seek release from old dependencies and find it in Modernist techniques. If seen through historical prism Briony’s individual crisis which results in abandoning traditional concepts of plot and character reflects the general crisis of the western culture that engendered Modernist movements:

Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from Romanticism, reaches formal crisis – in which myth, structure and organization in a traditional sense collapse…176

175 McEwan, Atonement , p.281. 176 Malcolm Bradbury, James McFarlane (Ed.), Modernism: 1890-1930 , London, Penguin Books, 1976, p.26.

Briony is under the great influence of the works of Virginia Woolf:

She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itsel, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change. 177

The Waves is one of the Woolf’s most difficult novels. It follows in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. It looks as if Woolf was not really concerned with people, but with the poetic symbols, the changing seasons, day and night, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change. These are the very characteristics given about Briony’s short story by Cyril Connoly in hi rejection letter:

However, we wondered whether [the story] owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf... in other words, rather than dwell for quite so long on the perceptions of each of three figures, would it not be possible to set them before us with greater economy, still keeping some of the vivid writing about light and stone and water which you do so well – but then move on to create some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself. 178 Inspected from this angle the title of Briony’s novel, Two Figures by the Fountain, reveals to emphasize the absence of the presentation of human individuality in the novel. Her characters are not, for example, a little girl or a young man but merely figures, sexless and without any individual features. The characters are, in spite of three streams-of- consciousness, flat and, therefore, reduced to figures. Most of the action in Atonement is seen through windows – the element referring again to Virginia Woolf’s literary works, and To the Lighthouse in particular. The characters in both novels often view the others through the windows of the house. The window allows viewers to see but not necessarily hear or understand the people observed. So, Briony oversees Cecilia and Robbie by the fountain and is confused when their actions do not fit her preconceived, romantic idea of what ought to be going on. From a window Lola sees Briony disappearing behind the bridge to the island, not realizing her cousin dislikes her. Emily Tallis watches her younger daughter walking barefoot in distress . Cecilia contemplates from the hall’s window the park, Robbie working in the garden, and the whole territory of their estate and realizes that she can not stay there any more. By showing

177 McEwan, Atonement, p. 282. 178 Ibid., 314.

the influence of Virginia Woolf McEwan enters into an intertextual conversation with modernism. He shows its impact, both positive and negative, but most often ironies on its dereliction. So, Briony is very proud of her first piece of fiction that reflects modernist ideas, Two Figures by a Fountain , in the beginning but later gets aware that: “she is burying her conscience beneath her stream of consciousness.” 179 Style, she discovers, really has ethical implications, displaying thus McEwan’s attitude towards modernism’s prioritization of stylistic innovation over moral content. The exercise of artistic freedom is considered fundamental for Modernist aestheticism. Therefore it is known for its experimentation, individualism, anti- realism and wary intellectualism. Modernism tends also to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history: just think of The Wasteland , for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse . The features the writings of the Modernist period exhibit fascinate Briony by its experimentation. She is pictured reading Wollf’s The Waves between nursing shifts. Like the modernist writers she believes that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate: The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, [Briony] no longer believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots were too like rusted machines whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony … The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. 180

Ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake, deviation from the norm, or from usual reader’s expectations, rejection of the past and distinguished anti-realism – all these features attract Briony in the beginning, but become later the reason for her disappointment in Modernism: “Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream- three streams-of consciousness?” 181 She gets aware that the world seen through the artist’s inner feelings and mental states very often promotes his/her viewpoint at the expense of the communal. The cultivation of an individual consciousness suits her infantile narcissism but having grown and seen the horrors of war in the hospital

179 McEwan, Atonement, p. 302. 180 Ibid., p. 281. 181 Ibid., p. 302.

change her mind. The exaggerated sacralisation of art in modernism results in the work of art which represents itself, not something beyond. So, Connoly reproaches Briony for her cool observation - viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized, for the open end and for the lack of development:

So much might unfold from what you have – but you dedicated scores of pages to the quality of light and shade, and random impressions. Then we have matters from the man’s view, then the woman’s – though we don’t really learn much that is fresh. Just more about look and feel of things, and some irrelevant memories. The man and the woman part, leaving a damp patch on the ground which rapidly evaporates – and there we have reached the end. This static quality does not serve your evident talent well. 182

The critique of Modernism in Atonement does not contradict with the frequent use of the elements of modernist techniques and references to its major works. On the contrary, McEwan emphasizes that any author can not avoid the influence of earlier literary works and literary tendencies, and later can not stand trying to create something ultimately new. So, having drawn the parallel between Atonement and one of the defining novels of Modernism, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the reader sees the same leading theme explored by the novels’ authors - that is t he development of individual consciousness and the role of the artist. Both writers try to define the artist. James Joyce sees the artist as a necessarily isolated figure, who turns his back on his community, refusing to accept the constraints of political involvement, religious devotion, and family commitment that the community places on its members. By the end of the novel, James Joyce renders a portrait of a mind that has achieved emotional, intellectual, and artistic adulthood. Stephen’s development gives us insight into the development of a literary genius. In McEwan’s deconstruction of the famous Modernist text we observe a portrait of the artist first as a young girl, and then as a mature female writer. But McEwan seems never give the definite answer for the question – what is the author? The portrait by Joyce strikes by the young man’s decisiveness and his confidence of his literary genius, the female character by McEwan looks to be ever-anxious, once even thinking of giving up writing in order to devote her life to nursing wounded soldiers. Joyce’s Portrait displays the popular idea of Modernism when the author takes on the world vs. a person acting as part of a community. His artist, “like the God of the

182 McEwan, Atonement , p. 313.

creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” 183 The image of the city and life within it are also the themes explored by McEwan and Joyce. McEwan presents London as the place where Leon escapes to entertain himself and avoid responsibility. The girls – Cecilia and Briony -also get seeming freedom in the city, they work and live independently, but neither feel free and hardly secure. Briony is afraid of walking by the London streets along, and only her nurse uniform gives her strength to proceed her way. Cecilia finds confidence in her being a ward sister, though she also has to confront the hostility of the city symbolized by her land lady. Modernism does not influence only Briony, Robbie is also interested in Modernist writers. Eliot, Lawrence, Conrad are among his favourite authors. He is under the great influence of a scandalous novel by Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's 184 Lover , “which he had bought under the counter in Soho.” He is attracted to the unprecedented and explicit language used to describe the affair of Constance Reid and Oliver Mellors. Robbie like Mellors, comes from a lower class than Cecilia. This story and its sentiments suggest that the sexual relationship is the most profound of all and that one may be debased either by treating it lightly or by viewing it with shame. The first attitude is seemingly taken by the younger generation in Atonement while the elders, like Emily, treat the subject with shame, even fear. It is no coincidence that Robbie, seeking to excuse his note sent by mistake to Cecilia, thinks of appealing to “a passing impatience with convention” that he associates with “a memory of reading the Orioli edition of Lady Chatterley's 185 Lover ”. Summing up all said about Modernism above, I would like to quote Chris Baldick’s definition: Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde

183 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 233. 184 McEwan, Atonement , p. 132. 185 Ibid., p. 132.

disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles... Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge186 the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.

Though it may seem that the worldview fostered through Modernism is mostly flawed, corrupt, and oppressive, and Modernism has played itself out this literary period had its certain historical and cultural reasons to at one time flourish and then face its failure. Modernism was a natural reaction of the artists in the period between two wars. World War I left spiritual ruins, the rise of cities dehumanized and alienated people, the development of physics and Einstein’s uncertainty principle enlarged alienation from society and loneliness, Freud’s studies on Psychoanalysis drew attention to man’s behaviour controlled by interior forces, taboos and rules that govern self and world. Consequently modernist texts displayed the dehumanization, anonymity of people; attempt to find meaning not in nature but in art itself. Now when Modernism is at an end, we are facing a new period. The name given this period is Postmodernism. The problem of definition of term postmodernism and the revealing its basic notions and fundamental assumptions in Atonement are the concerns of the next chapter.

186 Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms , New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 6

POSTMODERNISM.

[Briony] knew that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been remembered without it. 187

It is hard to define Postmodernism or locate it temporally or historically. Perhaps it will be more correct to start thinking about Postmodernism by thinking about modernism, and the ways it influenced Postmodernism which emerged from it. The two have more similarities than one could suppose. Though Postmodernism appeared as a reaction against the established forms of modernism that dominated literature, it follows most of its ideas like rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, and emphasizing pastiche, parody, and irony. Both modernist and postmodern writers use intertextuality in their texts, like James Joyce in Ulysses , or Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose . Both favor reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity in narrative structures. What distinguishes the two kinds of aesthetics is the attitudes toward these trends, the ways of comprehension. While modernism presents the fragmentation of human consciousness and history as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss, Postmodernism, in contrast, rather celebrates that. It does not think that works of art can provide meaning to the world; moreover, it prefers to question the meaning and truth of grand narratives of humanity. The Postmodern books like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code deconstruct the two grand narratives of Muslim and Christian worlds and challenge the religious truth they assert.

McEwan’s postmodern novel Atonement moves in the world of the English literary history. It deconstructs ‘grand narratives’ while telling the story of a

187 McEwan, Atonement , p. 41.

bright young girl supposedly written down by her and completed at the age of 77. Briony Tallis gives her own interpretation of the family drama on the background of the bigger drama of humankind – World War II. Her narrative is a form of individualized understanding of the personal and public events and does not have a claim on historical truth. Briony gives an account of her personal experience while reconsidering the general tragedy. The well-known historical events are viewed from a different angle. The role of the part in the whole is being studied.

Part One of the novel describes the female part of the Tallis family excited by expectance of Leon, the family’s eldest son. Briony cherishes fantasies about Leon’s admiration at her new play, The Trials of Arabella . Emilia Tallis dreams of a good match for Cecilia with Leon’s friend, Paul Marshall, who is expected to come with him. Cecilia looks forward uniting with the merry companion of her childhood. She spends her vacation by reading Clarissa . The ironic intertextual allusion to the Harlows family becomes evident. Arabella, the melodramatic heroine of the Briony’s play, shares Clarissa Harlow’s sister’s name and thereby places The Trials of Arabella though it lacks, evidently, the psychological complexity of the original, within a literary tradition of sentimentality and sensationalism. Briony wants to take the part of Arabella, but the role of the melodramatic heroine is given to the fifteen- year-old cousin - Lola. Later the same day the rape of Lola by Paul Marshall takes place, so, Briony seems to anticipate the events when she insists on playing the role of the sister of a raped young woman. The postmodern text, Atonement , has none of the lengthy preparation that Richardson provides in Clarissa , its rape takes place later the same day and is sprung on the reader emphasizing the brutality and fatality of the act. This time a modern Clarissa covers her rapist and, supposedly, strikes a bargain that provides a long and socially successful marriage. Robbie – whose name alludes ironically to the name of the real rapist in Clarissa , Robert Lovelace - is charged with Marshall’s crime. Lola’s sophisticated manipulation of the advantage the rape has given her over her rapist displays the sexual morality of the later twentieth century as compared to morality in Richardson’s Clarissa. The affair reminds the reader also of the abuse that takes place in Nabokov’s novel Lolita . A middle-aged Humbert introduces himself as a European of mixed

stock who, at the age of twelve loved and lost a petite fille fatale named Annabel Leigh. Thereafter he preserved a sexual preference for sub teen girls; he calls them ‘nymphets.’ A twelve-year-old Lolita like Lola, is a fatally seductive nymphet. She finally succeeds to escapes from Humbert with a playwright, but cannot escape his revenge and is killed by him in the end of the novel. Nabokov’s novel shows that imagination creates its own reality by giving order and meaning to a subject. The heroes of the two novels, Lolita and Atonement , do not reflect reality but instead they express their own individual reality. Humbert Humbert creates his Lolita, like Briony creates her characters. As Michael Wood writes: “This book is not about Lolita, or only about ‘Lolita,’ it is about the obsessive dream of Lolita which captured the actual child and took her away.” 188 Like Briony, Humbert is, simultaneously, the creator and the murderer. However, the reader is never sure whether the story of the characters is true or whether they are in fact just part of the protagonist’s imagination. The reader creates the novel as well, when one decides what to believe. Both novels remind the reader that fiction is an illusion, and not the reality it may seem. Lolita is a novel pretending to be a memoir, and Humbert gives us every reason to distrust this text, but we end up weirdly trusting it. Paul Marshall’s interest in young girls especially, seems to originate from his youthful memories about his four young sisters. In his light sleep in the Tallises’ house they appear standing around his bedside, prattling and touching and pulling his clothes. When he sees Lola for the first time he is attracted to her looks and compares her in his thoughts to the little Pre-Raphaelite princess. Her decisiveness to part with her childhood is clear for him when he sees her tresses, her painted nails, make-up and rose-water. “You remind me of my favourite sister,” he says to her. Lola arouses his desire not only as a young girl; she is also a prohibited sister- lover. In order to seduce the girl he holds out to Lola a ‘forbidden fruit’- a chocolate bar: “You have to bite it,” says Marshall-Serpent softly to Lola-Eve. The girl bites ‘the fruit’ and her unblemished incisors are stained, her innocence is lost. Robbie is accused of the rape by Briony, who is eager to lay blame on Robbie, a wicked villain, like Robert Lovelace in her scenario.

188 Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, London, Chatto & Windus, 1984, p. 115.

The motive of a child functioning as a mediator, or a courier has certain similarities with child characters of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Henry James’ What Maisie Knew . Briony is a child who becomes involved in an adult sexual relationship that she is ill equipped to understand. Briony depicts Robbie as frequently referring to Freudian Psychoanalysis , and his Tree Essays on Sexuality in particular. Freud’s ideas were still fresh in 1935 and had not come yet to be received as canonical literary texts. Freud’s works were the object of intense polemic, and Robbie’s interest in new and non-conformist texts shows his revolutionary character. He tries to analyze his behaviour and his ambitions. He finds Freudian theory appropriate to explain his frustrations and sexual anxieties. The orthodox psychoanalytic text written in the masculine helps the lost son Robbie to find his place in men’s world. “Landscape gardening was no more than a bohemian fantasy, as well as a lame ambition – so he had analyzed it with the help of Freud - to replace or surpass his absent father.” 189 When the young people, Cecilia and Robbie, become aware that there is something that makes them feel awkward in the presence of each other Robbie tries to articulate this in his letter, at the bottom of which he scribbles the stark truth: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.” 190 According to Freud such mistakes, or parapraxes include slips of tongue and pen, forgetting and clumsy behaviour, and through which we reveal an opinion that we wish to keep concealed. 191 Robbie’s clumsy behaviour is another manifestation of the young man’s repression of his libido. “Physical and emotional demands and desires often come into conflict with forces of reality, including social customs and taboos as well as physical safety and material possibility.” 192 Social customs and material possibility are the clue statements in Robbie’s case. He, no matter how much he denies it, suffers from being inferior to Cecilia. Consequently, he needs some solid theory to protect himself, a son without a father, a man without a fortune.

189 McEwan, Atonement, p. 91. 190 Ibid., p. 86. 191 Leonard Jackson, Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind, Harlow Pearson Education Limited, 2000, p. 37. 192 Keith Green, Jill LeBihan, , Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook , London and New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 147.

“He had his politics to protect him, and his scientifically based theories of class, and his own rather forced self-certainty.” 193 In order to assert himself Robbie utters: “I am what I am” 194 which is a male version of the Viola’s utterance of female’s ambiguity: “I am not what I am.” 195 Robbie resists the sexual fantasies Cecilia’s wet body injects into his mind. He is aware that she is a double taboo for him as a socially superior and a surrogate sister. Since childhood they carry on a sister-brother relationship. McEwan handles the most popular of Freud’s conceptions of human psychology, such as ‘repression,’ ‘the unconscious,’ ‘the Oedipus complex,’ but we observe the ironic reevaluating in Briony’s text. Thus ‘penis envy’ is inversed into ‘cunt worshipping.’ And Robbie’s Oedipal complex is formed under not usual circumstances. At the age when a boy falls in love with his mother and wishes to get rid of his Dad, Robbie’s father, Earnest, walks away from his job as Tallises’ gardener and disappears for ever. Robbie feels uprooted and lost. Though Jack Tallis takes the role of a surrogate father for Robbie in the beginning, he does not stand by Robbie when he is accused of rape. Robbie thinks that his Oedipus complex is satisfactorily resolved when he makes love to Cecilia in the library: “Robbie stared at the woman, the girl he had always known, thinking the change was entirely in himself, and was as fundamental, as fundamentally biological, as birth.” 196 While Robbie begins to identify himself with an adult man he egoistically ignores the consequences of the physical and ‘social’ changes for Cecilia. Briony deconstructs the ‘grand narratives’ – Paradise Lost and Freud’s Psychoanalysis . Her lovers acquire knowledge and sexual experience in the library which is the room that deposits knowledge. Her Adam eats from the tree of knowledge with Cecilia, where ‘knowledge,’ has the meaning that is of human intimacy: the confidence of lovers in the sense of sexual relation. As a result only a male is exposed from the house of the Father. A female, Cecilia, quits it voluntarily. Robbie is shown to take great interest in ‘a great work’ by Freud where the man holds the front of the stage since Psychoanalysis has always been one-sided dealing only with the masculine. Briony takes the same subject (childhood

193 McEwan, Atonement , p. 79. 194 Ibid., p. 79. 195 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night , III. 1.140. 196 McEwan, p. 137.

and the awakening sexuality) and writes down the other sight of the story presenting the development of a little girl who is missing from Freud’s texts. The novel seems to rethink the theory of the unconscious that is revealing of what men expect women to be while not giving any kind of account of what women actually are. Though it was not Freud who brought in the inferiority of women:

But it has to be said that he did everything possible to explain it, make it logical and therefore inevitable. The real trouble is that, once Freud comes on to the scene, the inferiority which could be observed socially took on a scientific appearance; his feminine equations were taken for universally familiar adages. Women still bear scars of them. 197

Consequently, Cecilia, Briony and other females have to submit to men who invent women to fit their own specifications. Cecilia constantly rebels against the conventional expectations from the young woman’s behaviour. She seems to bring forward a new idea that a girl can be clean and yet sexy, desirable and yet not dangerous. While dressing for the evening party she tries on the dresses i.e. the roles the society offers her: a black crepe de Chine dress that makes her an austere woman; another dress of an innocent pale pink colour turns her into “the child of fifteen years before:” 198

…the public gaze of the stairway mirror as she hurried towards revealed a woman on her way to a funeral, an austere, joyless woman moreover, whose black carapace had affinities with some form of matchbox-dwelling insect. A stag beetle! …the pink was in fact innocently pale, the wasteline was too high, the dress flared like an eight-year-old’s party frock. All it needed was rabbit buttons. 199

Cecilia chooses the green backless gown that makes her feel impregnable, slippery and secure. This time “It was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her full-length mirror”. 200 A mermaid is a marginal creature who does not have to belong to any social niche; it is also a powerful sexual male construct that rouses men’s imagination. Cecilia’s coming out of the fountain’s water and her choice of green (or emerald) alludes to a girl that appears one day before the sight of the amazed Stephen Dedalus in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man :

197 Christiane Olivier, Jocasta’s Children , London, Routledge 1989, p. 4. 198 McEwan, Atonement, p.98. 199 Ibid., p. 98. 200 Ibid., p. 99.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. 201

The combination of full soft thighs and girlish hair and face helps the young man to solve the unsolvable problem of patriarchal society - that is of women’s double nature. A female does not have to be either ‘bitch’ or ‘goddess’. She can have sex appeal and be chaste; therefore Cecilia can be attractive and clean. What the author of the book asserts is that one can not be entirely good or bad. For instance, although it is said about Briony that, “she did not have it in her to be cruel” 202 she acts destructively. Cecilia’s name that is the name of the sainted patroness of music suggests another link to a mermaid, since its close relative is the immodest, tempting, singing siren of the seas. The deep irony of the author lies in the tying together of the image of the siren (mermaid) whose voice is considered dangerous and the saint who is brought into close relation with music and church music especially. Cecilia’s name alludes also to Dickens’s Cecilia from Hard Times . Cecilia (Sissy) Jupe is unlike the other characters in the novel. Especially as she is a member of a traveling circus, we can expect Cecilia to represent “art” and “fancy”. She is a romanticized figure, a girl who wants to carpet the floor of the classroom with painted flowers. Flowers are the symbols of her femininity and youth, but most importantly, Cecilia represents art in opposition to facts and mechanization, preached by her teacher Mr.Gradgrind. Cecilia Tallis is a spontaneous young woman whose room is “a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays”. 203 She is caught between the necessity to replace her mother in the household routine and the desire to leave the oppressing house. Unlike Briony Cecilia prefers chaos in her life, she spends her days in “the stews of her untiedied

201 James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, ( Çevrimiçi) http://textual.net/access.gutenberg./James.Joyce , 30 Mayıs 2005. 202 McEwan, Atonement , p.5. 203 Ibid., p.4.

room” 204 wants flowers to achieve “a natural chaotic look” 205 Cecilia revolts against patriarchy’s strict dichotomy: “...not everything people did could be in correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.” 206 Unconsciously, she shows her protest through the mess in the room and by smoking a cigarette in the hall. Even her fancy for the socially inferior Robbie can be explained as a challenge to her socially conscious parents. Cecilia knows that there is no point in arranging wild flowers, they have their own symmetry. Asked by her mother to arrange the flowers, she spends some minutes making adjustments in order to give them a natural look but the flowers resist falling into the artful disorder she prefers. Cecilia’s fancy for naturalism is another feature that brings her closer to Robbie inspired by 18 th century landscape gardening In the beginning Robbie celebrates the rationality of the society he lives in, its ethic and conventions. Even his fancy with communist ideas shows his need to believe in a certain ideology. Since every ideology, in this case of utopian socialist world that will one day outlive capitalism, is a kind of system or meta-theory. Every meta-theory has its own ‘grand narrative’ - a story that is told to explain the belief system. Robbie needs this belief in a certain system to avoid chaos and to keep order, rationality in his life. His self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, which the society posits as the highest form of mental functioning. He believes in the truth of sciences, therefore, he wants to study medicine and in his dream his study appears as a ‘shrine to science’: Also stacked would be books by the thousand, for there would be a study, vast and gloomy, richly crammed with trophies of lifetime’s travel and thought… On the shelves, medical reference and meditations, certainly, but also the books that now filled the cubby hole in the bungalow attic... 207

He begins to doubt the existence of universal truth and reason when he is at college. Studying Literature and, naturally, ‘grand narratives’ he learns the stories the culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. He accepts that: “…he would be a better

204 İbid., p. 21. 205 İbid., p.23. 206 McEwan, Atonement , p. 23. 207 Ibid., p. 92.

doctor for having read literature.” 208 “He was thinking of the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously warm heart and cool judgment; his kind of doctor would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate…” 209 Robbie’s enthusiasm and passion for knowledge alludes to a personage of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Tertius Lydgate, also a doctor and an orphan: [Lydgate] was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book… But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with grey paper backs and dingy labels – the volumes of an old Cyclopædia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them… The page he opened on was under the heading of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvœ were folding doors, and through these doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely-adjusted mechanism in the human frame. 210

A simple play of words brings us to another ‘doors’ – the vulva – the draft of which “with its bold spread and rakish crown of pubic hair” 211 lays open on Robbie’s table. The picture from the open copy of Gray’s Anatomy plays its trick on the young man’s fate, and, as a result, the wrong letter is sent and Robbie goes to prison instead of University. When World War II begins Robbie is summoned as private. The realities of the war when “The sight of a corpse became a banality” 212 reveal the hypocrisy of the patriarchal society and the artificiality of its morality. Its ethic can not help him to survive in war. Robbie reflects on the crime and guilt, the notions that lost their meaning and became something ultimately relative: But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and piece, to take down the statements of all the witnesses were guilty too. 213

Robbie comes into awareness that, in spite of his intelligence and education he is made a victim. The system victimizes him, and many other young men for its own goals’ sake. He is an abandoned son, a Jesus Christ; his father leaves him alone and

208 Ibid., p. 93. 209 Ibid., p. 93. 210 George Eliot, Middlemarch , London, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 139-140. 211 McEwan, Atonement , p. 94. 212 Ibid., p. 226. 213 Ibid., p.261.

he is crucified, like a little boy whose distorted body he sees in the tree on his way to Dunkirk. In his mind he calls him and other little victims of the war a ‘vanished boy’: He was thinking about the French boy asleep in his bed, and about the indifference with which men could lob shells into a landscape… They need never see the end result – a vanished boy. Vanished. 214

…The corporals didn’t pause for ceremony. They began to shovel in the dirt and soon the boy had vanished. 215

Robbie personifies himself with this ‘vanished boy’:

Three and a half years of nights like these, unable to sleep, thinking of another vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own, and waiting for dawn, and slop-out and another wasted day. 216

The superior hypocrites, like Marshall, make Robbie, and thousands of murdered in war ‘vanished boys’ scapegoats for their crimes. Thus, the title of the novel accords another biblical theme: “On the day of Atonement, the High Priest of Israel charged the goat with the sins of the people and then turned it loose in the desert. He-goat Azazel.” 217 Robbie thinks of the time he will be cleaned of the crime he never did. He wants ‘the vanished boy’ get his guiltless life back, that is why he feels obliged to save all the boys he meets on his way to Cecilia: “He must go and get the boy from the tree… Gather up from the mud the pieces of burned, striped cloth, the shreds of his pajamas, then bring him down, the poor pale boy, and make decent burial.” 218 If he does so - “The prospect was of a rebirth, a triumphant return.” 219 Though there are hints in the novel that neither Robbie, nor Cecilia survived the War, Briony grants redemption for her ‘Jesus Christ.’ In her final construct she makes him return safe from the War to meet with Cecilia:

214 Ibid., p. 202. 215 McEwan, Atonement , p. 225. 216 Ibid., p. 202. 217 P. F. M Fontaine, The Light and the Dark: A Cultural History of Dualism , Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben Publisher, 1989, vol. IV, p. 98. 218 McEwan, p. 262. 219 Ibid., p. 227.

I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. 220

Robbie’s library is carefully depicted: Auden’s Poems and The Dance of Death , Housman’s A Shropshire Lad , Gray’s Anatomy , eighteenth-century poetry, Jane Austen, Eliot, Lawrence, Conrad, Wilfred Owen, and Crabbe. Realism, Romanticism, modernism and rational books of medicine have constructed Robbie’s taste and his outlook on life. Having read the above list the reader begins to recognize a series of connections, like, for example, the reference to Housmam’s themes – “the passing of first love, the parting of friends, the loss of youth, unpredictable and meaningless death.” 221 In A Shropshire Lad Housman explores the helplessness of man in an alien universe, this reflects how the young people in the novel feel, besides, the poem must have struck a powerful emotional chord with Robbie who personifies himself with these ‘lads’ – young soldiers, shepherds and athletes. Having studied Wilfred Owen’s life we discover similar biographic details in Robbie’s. Robbie teaches English in France and Wilfred Owen goes to Bordeaux to teach English at the Berlitz School of Languages, participates in World War I and is killed during the war when his battalion takes over the line west of the Oise- Sambre Canal, near Ors. 222 During these two wars the nation has lost an entire generation of young men. In his poem Anthem for Doomed Youth Wilfred Owen expresses the bitterness of this lost: What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? - Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choir,- The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bulges calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbies. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

220 Ibid., p. 372. 221 E.Housman, A Shropshire Lad , Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994, int., p. ix. 222 Ed. John Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: The war Poems , London:,Chatto & Windus, 1994, intr., p. xi.

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. 223

Briony’s brother Leon is another representative of the young men of the pre- war England. He has the name of the one of the characters in Madame Bovary by the French novelist of the realist school Gustave Flaubert. This reference characterizes him precisely. Léon Dupuis is one of the men Emma Bovary has a love affair with when she seeks release from the boredom of her marriage. He is the lawyer, as well as Leon Tallis by education, since: “He had taken degree in law and was happy to have forgotten the whole experience.” 224 Léon Dupuis is a man without a strong personality. Leon Tallis goes even further in his “pure gift of avoiding responsibility.” 225 When Léon is a law clerk in Yonville, he shares many of Emma Bovary’s romantic preconceptions. He moves away to Paris to study law. When Emma meets him later in Rouen, his time in the city has made him surer of himself. Emma begins an affair with him, but as the affair progresses, they grow increasingly bored and disgusted with one another. Finally when Emma is in heavy debts he can not help her and makes excuses. Men use her all through the novel; society offers her no escape, so she poisons herself with arsenic. In difficult situation Leon Tallis also proves himself to be absolutely inept – “he would not assume his father’s role.” 226 He would not play the host at the dinner party; he would not take the side of his surrogate brother, Robbie, when he is accused. He chooses not to bother. Besides, Madam Bovary , which is a story of a country girl educated in a convent and married to a boring man, reminds us again that idealistic romantic illusions harbored by little girls (in Emma’s case they are taken from Walter Scott), and longs for adventure project in the personal tragedy, in disturbing discordance, when extreme boredom and disturbing limitations of life fail to match the sentimental novels’ sensuality, excitement, and passion. McEwan’s intention is to emphasize that the literary work, every text belongs to a context, to an intertextual structure of relationship. There are no passive borrowings from other texts but the active, dialogic, specific and critical relationship

223 McEwan, Atonement , p. 12. 224 Ibid., p. 108. 225 McEwan, Atonement , p. 102. 226 Ibid., p. 102.

of one text to another. The intertextual dialogue in Atonement takes various forms like allusion, parody, pastiche, citation. The writer disrupts, parodies, ionizes and modifies the literary conventions. We have been explored intertextuality in Atonement in two ways. The first is more practical and is reduced to the studying of the relationship between the text and its pre-texts. Atonement , as we see, is replete with numerous allusions to, and quotations from other writers and books. The second way is more theoretical. The novel exploits also the wider view of intertextuality as the basis of all communication. This dialectical relation called intertextuality provides an impetus for the creation of new texts, and for the evolution of the literary system, which is also among novel’s concerns. Since intertextuality is modified through history, McEwan presents a certain historical period of England and exploits the real historical facts and names; therefore, he asserts that the text belongs to history and history to text. Moreover, it does not only belong to history but also appropriates it to itself. Therefore, Atonement reflects all specific signs of history with its rich but contradictory contents into its own world and, having actively used them it criticizes, challenges and re-evaluates them.

CONCLUSION

“…how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also a God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists.” 227

Writers select and arrange; they construct and deconstruct their works many times; they impose order or create chaos until the moment the literary work is finished and meets finally its reader. Is this not the moment every wrier lives and creates for? From this moment nothing can be changed and all - the book and its characters – begin to live their own lives. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement introduces to the reader among many other complicated characters an imaginative young girl, Briony Tallis, who is also supposed to be the author of the ‘atonement.’ We learn the story of the personal development of this young woman and her formation as a writer. Having read the novel it is easy to find parallels between Briony’s evolution as the writer and the general evolution of fiction as a genre. All through, historical layers of English fiction are invoked - and rewritten. This statement is laid in the basis of this treatise. Briony Tallis wrote a dozen different drafts of the ‘atonement’ the final version of which is dated 1999. Within fifty-nine years she arranged and rearranged the destinies of her characters. As a result we have a novel, complex and sophisticated, composed of different stylistic elements. In the opening chapters Briony writes as if she was a little girl, what she should have felt and thought at that period. It is a viewpoint of a child who is “possessed by a desire to have the world just so.” 228 There are passages which suggest a more mature intelligence at work in the judgments, the reason for that we learn in the end of the novel. The hints are given when the author looks forward to a future time disclosing facts that cannot be known at the moment in time being portrayed. The form of the novel just

227 McEwan, Atonement , p.371. 228 Ibid., p. 7.

emphasizes the multi-layered character of the content. It is a novel about novel and novelist, therefore a metafiction. The title of the novel, Atonement , refers not only to Briony’s crime (real or imagined we shall never know) and her attempt to set it right, but also to any serious writer’s act of unstinting imaginative engagement. We come to this understanding after having read the final part of Atonement where a contemporary voice which is acutely self-conscious and aware of its own act of narration is employed. Such demystification is, perhaps, one of the most progressive characteristics of Postmodernism and of metafiction, especially. “Who would ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books?” exclaims Briony through Robbie’s inner thoughts. “And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know how it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture.” 229 The postmodern writer recognizes anew the facts from human history, but now the details compound a larger picture. Through the prism of a personal experience Atonement reconsiders the social phenomenon like, the evolution of English literature, emphasizes the historicity of any text and reflects the postmodern thinking of the inevitable textuality of our knowledge and intertextuality of all writing. Having come to the end of the productive period of her life and, consequently, to the end of her writing career Briony Tallis questions herself what is writing and what is a writer. In her contemplations she positions the author to the highest position of God. The reader knows that she is dying from vascular dementia; the disease will cause firstly slow loss of memory, the disappearance of words, then language itself, along with balance, all motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. In short, she disappears into oblivion. Thus, McEwan makes his reader recall the declaration Nietzsche made at the end of the nineteenth century that “God is dead,” a statement which theorists then transformed into the statement that the author is dead (Derrida, Barthes, Foucault). When McEwan makes the supposed author of the novel, Briony Tallis, the fictional character herself he deconstructs the idea that the author is the origin of something original, and replaces it with the idea

229 McEwan, Atonement , p. 227.

that the author is also the product or function of writing. Briony is now decentered, shown to be only a part of the structure, a subject position, and not the center. Therefore, postmodern writing does not guarantee the author immortality any more, on the contrary, the text “kills” the author. As Michel Foucault, says: “...a writer’s particular individuality is canceled out by the text, by writing, because we now see “writer,” or “author,” as the function of language itself.” 230 McEwan’s postmodernist revision of the history of English literary thought is not so extreme to destroy or eliminate its ingredients that were at different periods believed necessary for a worldview, such as God, self, purpose, virtue, meaning, a real world, and truth. It is not as nihilistic, and does not display the view that all values are baseless, that nothing is knowable or can be communicated, and that life itself is meaningless On the contrary, Atonement seeks to revise the historical premises and traditional literary concepts in order to understand contemporary art better. It rejects not history as such, but only invites to change the approach in which only the strict data of approved historical texts were allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview. It wishes the reader to accept uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and ambiguity. The critical treatment of different literary thoughts and practice presented in Atonement seeks not only criticize but also to recover their truths and values together with their influence on the formation of the contemporary artist.

230 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, (Çevrimiçi) http://www.michel- foucault.com/links.html#WritingsFoucault , 12 Ocak 2006.

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