Title: Purloined letters in Ian McEwan's atonement
Author(s): Heta Pyrhonen
Source: Mosaic (Winnipeg). 45.4 (Dec. 2012): p103. From General OneFile.
Document Type: Article
Full Text:
In Ian McEwan's Atonement, letters function as a key plot device. Reflecting on his awkward
behaviour around Cecilia Tallis, Robbie Turner realizes that he is in love with her. He drafts a letter to
Cecilia to explain his awkwardness in which he impulsively adds his true feelings: "In my dreams I kiss
your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long" (86). Robbie writes a
courteous message in longhand, but accidentally puts the frank draft in the envelope. He gives his
epistle to Briony, Cecilia's teenage sister, to deliver. Briony secretly reads the note and is shocked. The
same evening the Tallis family discovers other startling information in a letter: their visiting twin
cousins have run away. During the search the twins' adolescent sister, Lola, is raped. Briony is
convinced that Robbie's letter proves that he is the rapist. Her statement is decisive in sentencing
Robbie to prison, even though he is innocent.
Numerous other letters shape the plot of this novel. During his imprisonment Robbie keeps up his
relationship with Cecilia by means of correspondence. Later, the grown-up Briony understands that she
misinterpreted Robbie's note. She writes to Cecilia expressing her wish to be reconciled. At the same
time Briony receives two letters that help her decide what she should do to atone for her crime. Lastly,
during a confrontation Briony promises Robbie to write letters that will clear his name, but she never
does. These promised but unwritten letters are as important as the actual letters, for they reveal how
Briony understands the act of atonement. Her idea of atonement is grounded in her understanding of
what being an author means. Thus the novel compares communication between its characters with
communication between authors and readers.
Critics have noticed that Atonement refers to a specific intertext, namely, E.A. Poe's "The Purloined
Letter." (1) They also perceive its use of motifs familiar from classical detective stories. The Tallis
estate is the scene of a crime in which the detective looks for the criminal among a closed circle of
suspects. In the first part of the novel there are suggestions that a crime will be committed, placing
readers in the position of armchair detectives by inviting them to wonder what crime will be committed
and by whom. Briony assumes the role of detective, although she concedes that she is among the
transgressors (156). Readers learn early on of Briony's wrongdoing but the epilogue has a surprise in
store, just as does the ending of a detective story. The thirteen-year-old Briony, who is an aspiring
writer, understands the detective's role as dealing with the secrets of the human heart (40). She pictures
herself as a detective of humanity. She is piqued about the problem of other minds: what can one know
about another person's consciousness? How can one imagine someone else's mind given the limitations
of one's own mind (36-37)? Briony's understanding of the detective's method reinforces the links
Atonement shares with "The Purloined Letter," for the ability to imagine the workings of another mind
is essential for Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and this theme forms a focal point of his story.
In light of the identification of "The Purloined Letter" as an intertext, it is surprising that the functions
letters serve in Atonement have not yet been probed. This essay argues that reading these two texts
together provides a key to the ethical issues raised by this novel: guilt, taking responsibility for one's
actions, and atonement. In contemporary criticism, "The Purloined Letter" has become inextricable
from Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.'" Thus, it is not surprising that Brian Finney
mentions Lacan while discussing Briony's theft (79). I examine the itinerary of this letter as well as
other missives in the novel by placing my analysis in this well-known psychoanalytical context. This
choice is grounded in the richness of Lacan's observations, which enable the study of the letter's
circulation as a concrete event with tangible consequences and as a signifier of unconscious desire.
Lacan differentiates between its literal message and its unconscious impact on the intended and/or
accidental recipient. He maintains that the letter affects the community by organizing interpersonal
relationships on the basis of what the characters think they know about its private communication (3132). His point is that the letter's organizational impact derives from the way the characters' unconscious
desire directs their actions. Keeping these ideas in mind, I study how Robbie's letter to Cecilia works
privately and communally. The analysis then shifts to consider the grown-up Briony's moral
deliberation after she has realized that the letter had mastery over her. Briony chooses to atone for her
crime by writing a novel. She wants to understand what happened, why, and how the events influenced
those involved. Briony holds such an attempt ethically more valuable than a public admission of having
given a faulty statement. By substituting her novel for the required letters, Briony invites readers to join
the community whose task is to consider fiction as an avenue for confession and atonement.
Barbara Johnson observes that "The Purloined Letter" closes with a reminder of its status as literature.
She asks: "What does this mean, if not that the letter's contents--the only ones we are allowed to see-are in another text? That the locus of the letter's meaning is not in the letter, but somewhere else?"
(234). By placing Atonement in the context of Poe's story, I have already answered this question; yet
this path merits further exploration. The novel's epigraph is taken from Jane Austen's Northanger
Abbey, inviting readers to read the novel in its light, but there are other obvious intertexts as well.
McEwan has identified L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between as an influence (qtd. in Finney 72), and the
novel cites Elizabeth Bowen as an inspiration (314). In my view, Bowen's The House in Paris provides
a pertinent point of comparison. What these two novels share with Atonement is the focus on an
adolescent who, by furtively reading a letter addressed to someone else, is drawn into a web of adult
love relationships thwarting his personal development. To conclude the essay, I consider Atonement as
a "letter" to readers: the ethical impact of this missive is revealed in the comparisons that the above
identified intertexts encourage readers to make.
The first part of Atonement describes a summer day in 1935. Frustrated by the day's events and longing
for a rite of passage to adulthood, Briony sees her chance when Robbie asks her to deliver a letter to
Cecilia. Earlier in the day Briony has witnessed an intriguing scene between Cecilia and Robbie, the
meaning of which has remained obscure for her. Now she reads the letter furtively in order to learn
their secrets (113). The planned rite of passage turns into a stumbling block. However, Briony thinks
Robbie's letter is shockingly indecent. It thwarts her aspiration to identify imaginatively with another's
mind.
Briony gives the letter to Cecilia in their mother's presence. This scene resembles the first scene of theft
in Poe's "The Purloined Letter": an exalted lady--most likely the Queen of France--reads a
compromising letter addressed to her. Her husband arrives, and she hides the letter by leaving it in full
view on her table, trusting that no one sees what is under their noses. She is dismayed, however, to
notice that Minister D--appraises the situation and steals the letter while she looks on helplessly. In
Poe's scene, knowledge is power: the King is ignorant of the sexual and political intrigue played out
behind his back, while the Queen errs in thinking that the King's ignorance ensures the ignorance of
others as well. In witnessing the full or partial blindness of the others, the Minister seizes the
opportunity to place the Queen in his power. As Lacan points out, the letter organizes the tensions
among the characters on the basis of knowledge so that the interpersonal field is structured as a
triangle: at its apex is a person who is ignorant of the tensions shaping the situation (the King); on the
triangle's right-hand side is a person who is partly cognizant and partly ignorant of these tensions (the
Queen); and on the left-hand side is a person who not only knows the causes of these tensions, but also
perceives what the other persons know about the situation (the Minister) (32, 44). (2) For Poe, this
position of knowledge is one of analysis and self-reflection, and it enables the person occupying it to
wield power over others.
In McEwan's adaptation of this scene, the mother occupies the King's position of blind ignorance. She
is wondering whether their guest, the industrial magnate Paul Marshall, would make a good husband
for Cecilia. If Mrs. Tallis knew about the budding romance between Cecilia and Robbie, she would
object. She thinks Robbie unsuitable for Cecilia. Cecilia occupies the Queen's position of partial
knowledge and partial ignorance. She reads the note but checks her elation because she wants to keep
the mother ignorant of her intimate affairs. Having read the letter, Briony (mistakenly) thinks she
occupies the Minister's position of knowledge, and thus of power, but at this stage she does nothing.
Like Minister D--, Briony believes that having the letter gives her an advantage over others. Yet, as
Lacan shows (42), the custody of the missive places its owner in a symbolic chain that is foreign to her:
contrary to what she thinks, she can neither control the letter's meaning nor its effects. To her dismay,
Briony learns of this fact only when it is too late. She stumbles upon Lola right after Lola has been
raped. Robbie's letter makes Briony conclude that he is the rapist. The self-confident Briony begins to
wield her power by accusing Robbie of the crime. Her testimony rearranges the interpersonal
relationships. We find a similar shift in Poe's story, but while Dupin manipulates the situation behind
the scenes by stealing back the Queen's letter from the Minister, Briony launches an open attack. She
snatches Robbie's letter from Cecilia's room. Then she hands it over to her mother and the police.
Cecilia finds herself in the position of ignorance. Even though she is present, she does not notice
Robbie's letter circulating from hand to hand until it is too late. Although Briony assumes she is acting
like a detective, her deed moves her to the position of partial knowledge and partial ignorance: she
knows about Robbie's letter, but she does not know that it is a false clue. Lola has hinted at having been
attacked earlier in the day, but Briony does not pay attention. Lola's rapist, Paul Marshall, reads
Robbie's note and seizes the opportunity to scapegoat Robbie. Lola plays along.
Lacan observes that the ascendancy the letter gives to its holder depends on the interpersonal role it
constitutes for this person (46). Although Dupin may have read the letter, its contents are never
disclosed. He is aware that its message is secondary to the power the letter accords to anyone
possessing it. Further, stealing back the letter depends on Dupin's ability to imitate his antagonist: he
can conjecture how the Minister thinks and feels as well as how he would act were Dupin himself to act
in a particular way. In contrast, Briony clings to the content of a letter whose meaning is unclear to her.
Unlike Dupin, she is too young to assess the letter from the viewpoints of its sender and recipient. She
accidentally witnesses an intimate scene between the lovers, but interprets it as an act of violence (123).
Her conclusion is that Robbie is a sex maniac and that Cecilia needs protection (113-15). Although it
would seem that the letter's signifier is almost too obvious, Briony's sexual ignorance shows that she
still is more child than adult, a fact that makes her false statement understandable and underscores the
tragic difference between Atonement and "The Purloined Letter."
These private and interactive realms point to the two levels on which Robbie's letter functions. As a
private communication, the letter is effective. Cecilia recognizes her own desire in the letter, which
frees her from restraint (111). Robbie's "Freudian slip" (the "wrong" letter) is beneficial for both the
sender and the intended recipient. In Slavoj Zizek's words, the letter reaches its destination (12): when
Robbie arrives, Cecilia takes him into the library, where they make passionate love. In contrast, the
letter's effect on its accidental recipient, Briony, is shattering. One would expect that the adults were
capable of understanding the letter, but their response mirrors Briony's reaction. Richard Pedot
observes that "it is as if the letter's addressee could not be Cecilia [...] but everyone else" (152). The
disclosure of its signified underscores the fact that the letter's public significance is altogether different
from its private meaning. It is disruptive, as it contains material the upper-class community finds
distasteful and difficult to communicate. Not only is the word "cunt" a taboo, but so is any overt
expression of sexual passion. It provokes the community to react. The legal process demonstrates the
letter's public meaning. Briony's false statement and class prejudice turn her version into the truth. The
rigidity of the legal system comes as a surprise to Briony. Dupin knows what Briony does not: only the
possession of the letter sustains power. As he says, "with the employment the power departs" (9). The
consequences of Briony's use of power are out of her reach: Cecilia breaks off ties with her family, and
with Robbie's prison sentence the case is closed.
The young Briony sees herself as a detective of human nature, but once she grows up, she realizes that
she made a mistake. She made herself believe in Robbie's guilt and she acted on this conviction. The
adult Briony has to come to terms with her past. Zizek argues that a letter reaches its destination only
when its recipient understands that its literal message is not what is at stake. What matters is the way
the recipient receives the sender's desire. This desire Zizek associates with what he calls a stain that
escapes signification: it marks a libidinal force that is difficult to articulate. If one is the recipient of
such desire, then what counts is the degree to which one recognizes oneself in it, because such
recognition determines one's response (12). The adult Briony is preoccupied with exploring why she
persisted in blaming Robbie. The workings of her young mind are one mystery she wants to solve, not
to mention probing how Robbie and Cecilia's minds worked under duress. Here is one reason why
Briony thinks that making amends has more to do with understanding than with action. Her goal is to
place herself in the detective's analytical position, which she now associates with taking responsibility
for her actions. In her view, this position is that of the writer, because the writer can reflect on events
from multiple perspectives.
The adult Briony writes a conciliatory letter to Cecilia, but receives no answer (282). At the same time
she herself receives two letters that affect her actions. The first is from her father, disclosing that Lola
will marry Paul Marshall (284). Briony attends Lola's wedding uninvited, for she has realized that
Marshall was Lola's rapist. She fantasizes about confronting the couple, but does nothing. Briony then
goes to meet Cecilia who, unexpectedly, is with Robbie. An argument follows during which Robbie
insists that Briony write three letters. She must write to her parents as well as a solicitor about recanting
her statement. She must also report in writing to Robbie about all she has done to restore his reputation.
Finding these requests justified, Briony agrees. The letter Briony has received, however, makes her go
back on her word. It is from a literary editor who offers advice for improving Briony's manuscript. This
feedback is decisive for Briony: "Together, the note to her parents and the formal statement would take
no time at all [...] She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an
atonement, and she was ready to begin" (349). Dated 1999 and marked with Briony's initials, her text
ends here.
This text is followed by an epilogue consisting of an entry in Briony's diary. Up to this point, we
readers have thought that we have been following a biographical account that truthfully traces the
complex turns of past events. The fact that the novel has an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator,
located outside and above the story world and focalizing events from a variety of perspectives, supports
this interpretation. For us readers, the epilogue's surprise twist is that the text we have just read is
Briony's manuscript. A greater surprise is that her novel departs from reality: Robbie died at Dunkirk,
while Cecilia died in a bomb attack on London. After the summer of 1935 Briony never met them, nor
were the lovers ever reunited. Except for Briony's letter to Cecilia, no attempt at reconciliation was
made. Re-evaluating their reading experience, readers perceive that Briony has invented Robbie's
request that she write the three letters. Although Briony thinks such a request justified, she never writes
them, either in real life or in her novel. Instead, she spends almost sixty years working on her
manuscript until it has the form we have just finished reading. To conclude this list of readers'
adjustments, the epilogue discloses that Briony has drawn on the correspondence between Robbie and
Cecilia during Robbie's prison sentence and war service. Briony maintains that imagining herself in
their stead justifies her use of these letters. She resorts to the same act of reading private
correspondence that originally led to her false accusation.
Relating Briony's decisions to "The Purloined Letter" helps us analyze how she strives to regain the
power of the analytical position. Unwittingly, she imitates the actions of Minister D-. After stealing the
letter, the Minister alters its appearance: he turns it inside out, re-addresses it to himself, tears it almost
in half, and re-seals it with his own seal. (This seal gives him away, for who would write to himself?)
The original message and address are hidden inside the letter, while the Minister's handwriting and seal
dominate its front and back. Similarly, Briony re-packages Robbie's note and the lovers'
correspondence by embedding them within her novel, which has the revelatory epilogue as its seal,
disclosing her authorship. Readers may therefore regard Briony's novel as the letter she imagines
Robbie, had he survived the war, would request of her. Emphasizing her role as a novelist, Briony is
comparable to Dupin and the Minister, who are poets.
In the epilogue, Briony explains the reason for favouring fiction over a legal statement: Lola cannot be
forced to testify against her husband. However, both a public confession and the publication of Briony's
book would make Briony vulnerable to legal proceedings by the Marshalls. Briony neither publicly nor
privately confesses to her false statement, nor does she ever clear Robbie's name. Her novel is
published only after her death. In her novel, she probes her transgression, mentioning love of order,
imagination, and a tendency to fit others into fictional moulds as reasons. Yet she sees her inability to
gauge other minds as the ultimate reason. In her youth she could neither place herself in another's
position nor understand another from within. She resembles Poe's prefect of police in that she is unable
to imagine how minds that are different from hers work. In contrast, Dupin's investigative method
relies on "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent," which he describes in
the following way: "When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is
any one [...] I fashion the expression of my face [...] in accordance with the expression of his, and then
wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with
that expression" (15-16). The adult Briony considers fiction to be the medium of atonement because in
her estimation only fiction uses this strategy of imaginative identification. Her decision to write a novel
instead of a legal statement is based on what narratology calls the difference between Homo Sapiens
and Homo Fictus: in reality we can never enter another person's consciousness, while in fiction we can
describe it in detail (Keen 59). The narrator-Briony employs techniques of modernist literature for
representing consciousness as a means of imaginative identification. She vividly portrays the
awakening of love in the minds of Robbie and Cecilia as well as Emily Tallis's class prejudice, and the
young Briony's melodramatic mind. Briony's bravura narrative performances are the love-making scene
in the library and the description of Robbie's meandering thoughts during the retreat from France. If
making amends depends on a writer's ability to place herself in another's position, then Briony's novel
proves she has achieved her goal.
The novelist Briony insists that the truth fiction articulates can be exchanged with the truth one seeks to
express in reality. She considers fiction superior because fiction makes it possible to order events and
represent consciousness; therefore, fiction explains and elucidates events better than facts. For
example, try as she may, she does not have enough information to understand the enigmatic scene by
the fountain, which she accidentally witnessed. In her novel, she can fill in the gaps in her knowledge.
She justifies her divergence from reality with the consolation of her novel's happy ending and by the
immortality it bestows on the lovers (370-72).
Briony's novel is her account to Robbie of what she has done to clear his name. Because Robbie and
Cecilia are dead, Briony substitutes readers as recipients instead of the lovers. She invites them to
consider whether the novel fulfils its task as a vehicle for atonement. Yet the identity of the novel's
recipient remains an intriguing question. Does Briony ultimately address the novel to herself in a
fashion similar to Poe's Minister, who re-addressed the stolen letter to himself, re-closing it with his
own seal?
Briony's novel is a secular confession, addressed to one's neighbour instead of to God. Typically, in
secular confessions the confessor reveals shameful and guilt-provoking things that she has committed.
The truth about the confessor emerges in and through the confession. What unites writers and readers in
this discourse, observes Elke D'Hoker, is the desire for truth because truth, rather than repentance or
contrition, is the prerequisite of forgiveness (32-33). Here truth refers to the confession's authenticity,
understood as candidness, self-awareness, and fairness. The novelist Briony scores well using the
criterion of authenticity. She identifies the pervasive sense of guilt as her motive for writing: she did a
terrible thing in sending an innocent man to prison. She analyzes her personal shortcomings ruthlessly,
admitting to the jealousy that Robbie's letter caused. Comparing authors to God-like figures, Briony
wonders who has the power to forgive her. She concludes that her sixty-yearlong quest for atonement is
what matters. The confession positions Briony as her own judge. In D'Holker's view, Briony's
satisfaction with the last draft proves that she has reached the truth and can thus stop confessing (4142).
We must weigh this conclusion against the fact that Briony does nothing to revoke her legal statement.
Robbie's name is never cleared. James Phelan reminds us that, although fiction illustrates ethical
dilemmas, it has no power to right wrongs-- and one cannot expect it to. Thus, he thinks that Briony's
attempt at atonement is seriously flawed, although one cannot deny her persistence or good will. One
may even say that she enjoys the decades-long fictional confessing without ever really having to
confess (331-32). Writing a legally valid statement would take only a fraction of the trouble it takes
Briony to polish her manuscript.
Briony's novel has other serious moral flaws. Its ending shows that the story she envisions for the
lovers resembles a sentimental romance. By changing the facts, Briony pushes aside death and the
disconsolate lack of atonement in favour of romance. David K. O'Hara commends Briony's narration
for "attend[ing] to Robbie as an other self, with a reality of his own" (92). Yet the modernist narrative
techniques Briony uses to describe Robbie's consciousness acquire a dubious hue. As an author, Briony
radically blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator by assuming the right to Robbie's voice
and subject-position. As regards historical events, critics such as Dominick LaCapra hold that the
conflation of the victim and perpetrator's roles is morally unacceptable. LaCapra emphasizes that the
requirement for doing justice to the victim is to make sure that one confuses neither one's voice nor
one's position with the victim's (102-03). As an author, Briony erases Robbie's voice altogether-- except
for his note to Cecilia. While she quotes at length from Cecilia's last letter, she provides only
paraphrases of Robbie's correspondence. Consequently, readers come into contact with Robbie only
through Briony's representation.
With his analysis of Poe's story, Lacan wants to demonstrate how the purloined letter functions as a
signifier of the unconscious. The characters' shifting from one position to the next shows that
unconscious desire directs their actions (52-53). Breaking out of this repetitious structure would require
that a subject take responsibility for the way the Other's desire--an external desire instilled during early
childhood--has shaped her. Bruce Fink locates the ethical motivation of the Lacanian subject in a
(psychoanalytical) process during which the subject probes the Other's desire, finally reaching the point
where the subject becomes her own cause: she comes to be where the Other as language and desire
once dominated, a deed that frees her to shape her fate (xii-xiii, 68). With her confessional novel,
Briony attempts to reach this point by inserting herself in the detective's analytical position. Instead, it
confirms the outcome of Poe's story, which shows Dupin sliding from the analytical position to the
position of partial insight, partial blindness, for not only is Dupin enticed by a handsome reward (14),
but he also has a personal stake in the affair. When he snatches the Queen's letter from the Minister's
apartment, he leaves in its place a copy with a message of revenge (23). Briony resembles Minister Dand Dupin in that she lets her own interests dominate. The editor's feedback arouses her ambition by
challenging her to turn the events into a novel. This personal agenda makes it impossible for Briony to
reach the analytical stance: she is stuck on rehearsing the past by compulsively rewriting her
manuscript.
Briony's encroaching dementia returns her to a kind of innocence in its removal of memory and
personality. One can say that her novel is primarily addressed to herself: it has performed its task of
atonement for her. This conclusion invites readers to ponder the difference between a posthumous
roman a clef and a legal statement. What complicates this deliberation is that the principal victim is
dead. In Briony's defense, one may observe that she does eventually confess, although this takes place
beyond the grave. Moreover, her attempt at empathy, although flawed and presumptuous, is an advance
on her younger self's self-indulgent jumping to conclusions. The fact remains, however, that the rapist
gets off free, a scapegoat pays the price, the trust Robbie's mother and Cecilia place in him is never
vindicated, and the community never needs to correct its class-based assumptions.
Atonement reads like a biographical account, largely thanks to its historically accurate depictions of the
retreat at Dunkirk--for example, the suffering of the soldiers and the grim realities of caring for the
wounded. McEwan mentions in his acknowledgments "unpublished letters, journals and reminiscences
of soldiers and nurses serving in 1940" and historical studies as his sources. This material shows that
McEwan, like Briony, has read correspondence not originally meant for him. To be sure, this material is
now in historical archives, available for the kind of study McEwan has conducted. Yet the novel's
biographical feel accounts for many a reader's sense of having been misled once the surprise twist of
the novel's ending is revealed. Why does Atonement conclude by suggesting literature's self-reflexive
folding back on itself? In his critique of Lacan, Jacques Derrida observes that Poe's triangles are framed
by the scene of writing (or narration), insisting that we pay attention to this scene, as it directs attention
to the interpretive interaction between narrators, authors, and readers. What does this self-reflexive
movement say about the novel as a missive to readers, given that it openly invites them to ponder its
narrative framing? The conclusion of Atonement resembles "The Purloined Letter," which ends with a
reminder of its status as literature. But what is equally significant is that both begin with a token of
literariness, namely, a motto (from Seneca in Poe) and an epigraph (from Jane Austen in McEwan). To
conclude this analysis, the opening paratext of Atonement seems a good place to start.
The novel's epigraph from Austen's Northanger Abbey provides a clue to the intertextual evaluation in
which Atonement invites readers to engage: "'Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the
suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? [...] Consult your own
understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.
Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? [...] Dearest Miss
Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?' [...] They had reached the end of the gallery; and with
tears of shame [Catherine Morland] ran off to her own room." The epigraph is from a scene in which
Henry Tilney is chastising Catherine Morland after he has realized that Catherine believes that his
father has murdered his mother. Briony resembles Catherine in failing to distinguish fiction from
reality. Austen treats with irony Henry's idea of a peaceful England without violence or horror.
Although Henry insists that "atrocities" could not take place in England, they can and do occur. While I
believe that Atonement endorses this irony, I would like to draw attention to Catherine's reaction.
Henry's reprimands make Catherine shed tears of shame: he sees in her thoughtless stupidity.
Significantly, when we review Briony's novel embedded in Atonement, we find that shame comes up
repeatedly in the author's assessment of herself and others. For example, as a teenager, Briony regrets
that "nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding" (5), and once her life
has such things, she concentrates her efforts on hiding. The young Briony wagers that the scene by the
fountain made Cecilia ashamed, because Robbie saw her almost naked; Robbie, Briony thinks, was
humiliated by Cecilia's indifference to him. An adult witness, however, would have understood the
scene as foreplay to mutual acknowledgment of sexual desire. In pointing to Robbie, Briony knows that
Robbie will be shamed for being revealed as a rapist instead of the successful young man Briony thinks
he pretends to be. In considering interrupting Lola's wedding with accusations, Briony focuses on the
disgrace it would bring down on the couple. In short, shame, understood in the sense of being exposed
to the gaze of others (Leys 3), appears to preoccupy Briony just as much as guilt.
This construction of a character-narrator fixated on guilt and shame invites comparison with
Atonement's other intertexts, Bowen's The House in Paris and Hartley's The Go-Between. Like Briony,
their child protagonists furtively read letters not meant for them: this transgression turns them into
inadvertent addressees. What strengthens the role of addressee is that this secret deed pushes them into
action with unforeseen consequences. In The House in Paris, Leopold, the offspring of an affair
between a mismatched couple, Karen and Max, is waiting for a meeting with Karen, who has given him
up for adoption. Leopold rummages in his hostess' purse, finding one letter from his adoptive parents
and another from Karen. Reading the former letter without permission, he is dismayed to discover his
adoptive parents' clinical perception of him. Karen's letter delivers another blow, for it consists solely
of the envelope. Just before the meeting, a letter arrives, saying that Karen cannot come. Leopold's
despondent mood changes with the arrival of Karen's husband, Ray. He offers Leopold a home with
them, an invitation the boy accepts, even if it will hurt the adoptive parents. In the novel's end it is
uncertain how mother, stepfather, and son will adapt to the situation, but what is decisive is that
Leopold and Ray face the past.
In The Go-Between, the narrator-protagonist Leo reviews events that took place in his adolescence.
While visiting a friend, Leo becomes embroiled in a love triangle involving Marian, the daughter of his
host family, Viscount Trimingham, and Ted, a local farmer. Marian and Ted ask Leo to deliver their
letters, swearing him to secrecy. One day Leo reads Marian's letter in secret, learning of her
relationship with Ted. In order to "save" Marian, the rattled Leo misquotes Ted's message, inadvertently
causing the disclosure of the socially unequal relationship. Ted commits suicide, and Marian, pregnant
with Ted's child, marries Viscount Trimingham. The adult Leo finds the courage to return to the scene
of trauma after fifty-odd years. Leo learns from Marian that her grandchild is ashamed of his descent
from a pregnancy out of wedlock. She begs Leo to serve for the last time as postman and convince the
grandson of the beauty of his origins. Leo agrees because he hopes this message may revive him.
Readers never learn how the message is received, but Leo shakes the stranglehold of the past.
What simultaneously unites and sets these novels apart from Atonement is that their protagonists'
feelings of guilt and shame lead to action in the sphere where the traumatic events happened. In so
doing, they identify with the element that caused shame and defied signification. Leopold associates
himself with the intolerable shame with which his mother regards him (215, 220), while Leo
acknowledges that it was he who was the go-between for Marian and Ted (265), thus shouldering
responsibility for the events. In Lacanian terms, such a profession means admitting that one was the
ultimate addressee of the purloined letter. The letter finally reaches its destination. In both cases, such
identification leads to a more realistic assessment of one's share. By realizing that he was manipulated,
Leopold understands that he has the right to express his wish to live with Karen (221-23). For his part,
Leo finds himself praying not only for the dead Viscount Trimingham and Ted, but also for himself
(252). This prayer acknowledges the futility of dividing the participants into victims and villains, as the
young Leo did--now he sees the roles do not fit. He is finally able to review Marian's motives and to
analyze his own reactions (261).
As I stated earlier, Zizek associates the desire expressed in the stolen letter with a libidinal force that is
almost impossible to articulate. Identifying oneself as the letter's addressee enables both Leopold and
Leo to place the shame-evoking incident in a web of signification. Consequently, they act as ethical
subjects who no longer are swayed by the desire of the Other. Their review of the situation leads them
to contest social values. They no longer care what others think, but strive to do what they hold right.
Disregarding the disapproval of others, Leopold insists he wants to live with his mother; Ray defies
social stigma by agreeing. As Leo sees it, Marian's "improper" love for Ted was more valuable than
social decorum. Relating these insights to my reading of Lacan, these protagonists contest the way an
external desire instilled during childhood has shaped them. Thus they are near the point where they
may become their own cause, which is accompanied with freedom to steer their fates.
These intertexts throw Briony's decisions into relief. Unlike her fictional precursors, Briony alleviates
her sense of guilt by writing a novel. Admittedly, her act of writing this novel, with all its distortions
and liberties, allows her to deal with the past. Yet, while in the pages of her book she can imagine the
confrontation between herself and the lovers, she is not willing in reality to face the situation in which
she would be held morally and legally accountable. Withdrawing her statement would put her in an
open situation, placing her at the mercy of others without prior knowledge of her confession's
consequences. The decision to atone through writing, I argue, relates to her credo as an author. In her
novel she achieves what she has dreamt of accomplishing all along: "She need not judge. There did not
have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea
that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy
[...] it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story
could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a
story need have" (40). This credo replaces the emphasis on "what you have done" with an emphasis on
"who you are." Briony's goal is not to dwell on the ethical dimension of action, but to demonstrate that
separate identities result from an experience of personal difference. As an author, she is interested in a
person's subjective feelings in all their difference from others, a feature that O'Hara takes as evidence
of the high ethical standard of Briony's authorship (94).
Thus Briony's attention lies in probing subjects' positions as individual identities. I would like to
suggest that this emphasis is symptomatic of a cultural shift involving a move away from the moral
concept of guilt in favour of the ethically freer concept of shame as a prevalent point of reference. Ruth
Leys explains that such a shift steers attention away from questions of guilt and responsibility to more
morally neutral questions of personal attributes (7, 11-12). In this context it is significant that normally
we are not held responsible for who we are in the same way that we can be held responsible for what
we do. Leys observes that in psychoanalytic theories the notion of guilt includes both action and
intention. It encompasses a person's wishes and fantasies because the unconscious does not differentiate
between intention and deed. Thus a person may feel guilt even for imagined incidents and wishes (11,
24). Briony's novel places the onus on the kinds of persons her characters are. Her author's role allows
her to adopt the perspective of a spectator, standing aloof from the traumatic scenes she depicts, while
her use of modernist techniques of depicting consciousness enables her to probe the different reactions
and modes of thought of her characters.
Such a stress on personal attributes is typical of what Leys calls the discourse of shame, which has
become the dominant emotional reference of our day (3-4). By shifting the focus from actions and
questions of agency and intention to the self and its attributes, this discourse makes issues of personal
identity pivotal (11). Thanks to its reliance on the specular, shame reveals a person's deficiencies and
inadequacies to the shaming gaze of others. Shame has this fantasy of visibility and disclosure built
into it. The whole self is the object of the other's disapproving look (128). If Briony admitted to having
given false testimony, then her foolish judgments would be broadcast. The following words come from
the end of her novel: "When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published,
we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers [...] No one will
care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel" (371). By confessing to
her transgression only in the pages of her book, Briony escapes from being made vulnerable to the
disapproving gaze of others. After her death, it no longer matters.
To pull together the pieces of my argument, I maintain that Atonement folds back upon itself in order to
make readers reflect on what Phelan calls its meta-message, a message that makes them aware of their
eagerness to believe in the sugar-coated conclusion of Briony's embedded novel, with its promise of
atonement and survival as well as the bleakness of the actual state of things (335). Paul Crosthwaite
makes a similar claim in reading Atonement as trauma fiction: Briony's revelations present an
unassimilable rupture, which readers must process before they can integrate it into the narrative and
their psychic economies (64). My contention is that the intertextual links activated by Atonement draw
our attention to the crucial differences between the discourse of guilt and that of shame. The novel
makes us consider what it would mean to accept Briony's perspective. If, as Leys argues, the discourse
of shame does not rely on a person's conscious or unconscious wishes and intentions toward another,
but rather on his or her subjective feelings in all their difference from those of others, then the basis on
which we conduct ethical discussions changes profoundly because the question of personal
responsibility becomes moot. Leys writes that "the value of shame [...] is that it is a technology for
ensuring that one person's personal attributes will be different from everyone else's, indeed that it is a
means for producing identity as the experience of pure difference" (185). Briony's novel advocates that
a pressing moral dilemma be processed in the context of the discourse of shame-probing and feeling
into the "otherness of others" suffices as an ethical response, as O'Hara argues (94). But as the novel's
intertexts suggest, this context is too narrow for evaluating its missive to readers. Rather, through these
intertextual relations, Atonement brings to view the contemporary, ambivalent ground on which we
conduct discussions about ethics, including the appropriate terms of atonement. In my view, the novel's
scales tip in favour of viewing atonement as still relying on the personal acknowledgement of
responsibility in the public arena as the best means of respecting the truth.
NOTES
(1/) See Finney 79; Earl G. Ingersoll, "Intertextuality in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between and Ian
McEwan's Atonement" (Forum of Modern Language Studies 40.3 [2004]: 241-58. Print) 252; and
Pedot 152.
(2/) See also Shoshana Felman, "On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of
Psychoanalytic Approaches" in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Ed.
John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 133-56. Print), 145-46.
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HETA PYRHONEN is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. Her books
include Murder from an Academic Angle; Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the
Detective Story; and Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and its Progeny.
This essay probes the intertexts of Atonement, in particular the links it shares with E.A. Poe's "The
Purloined Letter." By drawing on the psychoanalytical context of Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter,'" the essay shows how the theft of a letter affects the novel's protagonist-narrator's writing,
leading to a compulsive attempt to hide her shame.
Pyrhonen, Heta
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Pyrhonen, Heta. "Purloined letters in Ian McEwan's atonement." Mosaic [Winnipeg] 45.4 (2012): 103.
Gale Power Search. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.
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