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Summary AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE B - CRIME WRITING ATONEMENT NOTES - Ideas on society
AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE B - CRIME WRITING ATONEMENT NOTES On Society
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SocietyChapter 1
In the novel it is stated that Pevsner - the greatest architectural critic of english architecture
stated that the Tallis house was a "tragedy of wasted chances". The house is associated with
privacy and secrecy - "a man who spent a lifetime creating iron bolts and locks understood the
value of privacy".
McEwans book is densely packed with context and intertextuality, almost as if McEwan wrote
the novel attempting to represent English Literature.
The epigraph to Atonement is Northanger Abbey a parody of the Gothic which surrounds the
main character Catherine who is too fantastical. The epigraph ends with Catherine running away
with tears of shame showcasing how fiction and the Gothic is eradicated. Her beliefs are shown
to be fictitious and irrational and she is humiliated due to this. However, in Atonement it is
Briony's fears which end in tragedy which create the substance for the novel . Catherine begins
spinning fairytales due to the dullness of English country life.
The Trials of Arabella is a fairytale which are known for surrounding general archetypes and lack
any deep complexity.
Briony also begins creating a fictitious English landscape due to the dullness of her life.
Briony has a tremendous need for intrigue because she is a writer. In Chapter 1, when we
learn of the squirrels skull she keeps in a box, her need to hide things is revealed. Nothing
in her life is sufficiently interesting or shameful which causes her understanding of scenes
which are normal from other character's perspectives to be heavily dramatised so they
can be the stimulus for her fiction which is lacking in her life.
Part I is quite obviously in a different social and historical light to the rest of the novel. The cozy
isolation of the Tallis's in the country estate can arguably parallel the deluded feeling of
invulnerability felt by the British under Chamberlain in the face of Hitlers aggression in the East.
Fiction can make visible the inequalities in society that ideology works to conceal.
Heat
In English fiction unrelenting heat is associated with deviance. McEwan's first novel, The
Cement Garden, involves a plot of incest between a brother and sister in a house. The novel
surrounds the idea that the summer heat breaks down Englishness causing inner demons which
are usually hidden to be released. Summer heat acts as a threat towards traditional
Englishness.
Briony
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