Essay
A* Atonement Exemplar Essay 7
‘McEwan suggests that Briony’s crime can easily be forgiven because she is just a child.’ To what extent do you agree with this view?
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Atonement practice essay 7‘McEwan suggests that Briony’s crime can easily be forgiven because she is just a child.’ To what
extent do you agree with this view?
Arguably, the understandable misunderstandings made by a child in an adult’s world
together with Briony’s isolated upbringing establish compelling grounds to advocate the view that
the protagonist’s crime can easily be forgiven because she is just a child. Nevertheless, it is
important to consider the extent to which Briony is still culpable, in view of Robbie and Cecilia’s lack
of forgiveness, in addition to whether it is Briony’s atonement which makes her forgivable, rather
than her young age.
Immediately, McEwan establishes a sense of danger about Briony’s age which ultimately
leads to the disaster; we are told that ‘Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the
nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably’. With themes of adulthood
vs childhood proving a recurring aspect of McEwan’s works (featuring heavily in The Child in Time for
example), we see here how Briony’s ambiguous life stage in Part One lays the foundations for her
crime. The verbs ‘crossed’ and ‘recrossed’ really highlight the precarious nature of Briony’s age and
how although she is still a child physically, she tries to think like an adult. This is important when we
consider the series of events which follow the exposition of Briony’s character, as McEwan immerses
the protagonist in a completely alien realm, that of the ‘as yet unthinkable sexual bliss’. To a great
extent, Briony’s view of sex as ‘unthinkable’ is what leads to her crime, yet we can hardly see her as
culpable for misunderstanding Robbie and Cecilia’s relationship because ‘only chance had brought
her to the window’. It could be argued that Briony’s assumptions about the scene at the fountain –
that Robbie resembles the villain from one of her moralistic tales – make her a victim of puberty and
hence mere circumstance, as Briony cannot be blamed for interpreting events in the way she does.
This view is further supported by Briony’s desire to see the world around her as material for her
fiction writing, which makes her as ignorant of other people’s feelings around her as any person
aged 13 would be. Her misunderstanding of the scene at the fountain is clearly demonstrated by her
‘writerly’ (Barthes, 1970) narrative style at this stage in the novel, as she tries to shape our reaction
to Robbie at the fountain so as to view him as a predator who ‘raised his hand imperiously’. It is
impossible to hold this against Briony, as she relates the events in a way which she genuinely
believed was the truth. This mistaken view of the adult world is again evident in Briony’s excessive
reaction to both Robbie’s letter to Cecilia – in which the expletive ‘cunt’ is accidentally included in
the letter – and to their lovemaking in the library. The two events combined lead to Briony’s
diagnosis of Robbie as a ‘maniac’, which in turn makes the protagonist’s crime inevitable as she
invents Robbie as the perfect villain to satisfy her love of writing. It is crucial that we view this word
in the context of Briony’s age because if she was older, then the misunderstandings which give rise
to this particular diagnosis of Robbie would never have taken place. As a result, Briony’s age
arguably makes her crime very understandable and victimises her as an outsider forced to survive in
adult world.
Throughout Part One, McEwan employs ideas from fate and determinist ideology to create
the circumstances which precede Briony’s crime. The creation of the word ‘maniac’ to brand Robbie
can be seen as evidence of the use of such ideas when we consider the consequences of the word; it
firmly establishes Briony’s motivations for incriminating Robbie, as she feels that ‘she must first
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