Literature

Trauma: All Together Now

So, Readers… Nothing like a two-year hiatus, huh?

I’m not going to ask for forgiveness. After burying myself in thesis research for the better part of a year, I desperately needed a break. I won’t promise a regular post schedule, by any means, but I will try to be more faithful about sharing my reading and scholarship thoughts often.

During the time I’ve been absent, much has changed. I traveled to several countries in Europe (*dreamily sighs), I graduated (yay!), worked a dead-end job like a real adult (boo!), walked 100km in France (10/10 do not recommend), and recently moved back to the States, so that I can be closer to my family for now.

Also, during these past two years, I have continued reading, even if my thoughts have been quiet lately. Most of my reading list lately has not been necessarily academic literature, but I have read a healthy few of those, as well.

Of those, the premise of a book I recently revisited has really stuck with me.

‘The Zero,’ by Jess Walter is a novel of more recent years, 2006, and relays the story of a detective in a post-9/11 investigation.

The aim of the novel, surprisingly, does not attempt to give meaning to the events of 9/11, as one might expect of it. Rather, it is a novel of its aftermath. Its particular way of highlighting America’s reaction to the events of that day call into questions ideas of what one might term collective trauma.

A New York Times article gives a wonderful overview of the text, which I pull from here:

‘In a typically mordant moment from “The Zero,” a novel with the temerity to give a disaster site a casual nickname, a boy named Edgar Remy tries to explain why he is mourning his lost father. In Jess Walter’s “novel of September 12th,” that tragedy is, of course, the one that left us with “the burnt tip of the island and the bright hole in the sky” and took the parents of so many children.

Edgar [the main character’s son] is unfazed by having to explain this fiction to his father, who is not dead. No, Edgar isn’t protesting that his father never sees him or lacks the ability to commit. No, he isn’t lying. It’s just that he wants to transcend being literal-minded. Grief is everywhere around him, and Edgar wants to give it a focus. “Ask yourself this,” Edgar says: “What separates me from some kid whose father actually died that day?”

“The fact that I’m alive?” Police Officer Brian Remy asks his son. And although that answer is flippant, the question is deeply felt. Mr. Walter […] is groping for a way to

express the denial and dislocation endemic in post-9/11 America. Edgar’s insistence on rewriting reality is one schoolboy’s way of speaking for us all.’ – Janet Maslin

The ‘denial and dislocation’ feed Walter portrays in his novel are directly related to the idea of a collective trauma phenomenon.

In a psychology paper by scholar Gilad Hirschberger, collective trauma is explained as ‘the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society; it does not merely reflect a [sic] historical fact, the recollection of a terrible event that happened to a group of people. It suggests that the tragedy is represented in the collective memory of the group, and like all forms of memory it comprises not only a reproduction of the events but also an ongoing reconstruction of the trauma in an attempt to make sense of it. Collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space.’

This explanation collective trauma and the resulting ‘collective memory’ firmly sways me to the opinion that this type of ‘group experience’ is actually quite dangerous to society. The idea of collective memory for trauma creates a breeding ground for unproductive nostalgia to set in. It ties people groups to events that have shaped their present, but in unhealthy ways that perhaps prevent them from understanding and observing the tragedy, as someone with an unbiased opinion would be able to.

Look again to young Edgar of ‘The Zero’, whose father is very much alive in the post-9/11 chaos. His personal experience in ‘collective trauma’ has made him nostalgic for the idea of his father’s death.

Not the most productive way forward, I’m sure we can all agree. ‘Denial and dislocation’ are no substitute for healthy responses in the aftermath of trauma. Nor does it produce an attractive coping mechanism.

I can know with reasonable certainty that this coming September 11th, like every year on the anniversary of the day that shocked our nation, many Americans will rightfully grieve for their lost loved ones. They have the burden of a pain that cannot be set aside. I also know, however, that millions of other Americans will post sad pictures and sappy paragraphs about how they remember exactly where they were that day, they remember what they were doing, and how much their lives changed that day.

I don’t have a neat little bow to help wrap up this blog, no bright and shining conclusion. This isn’t something I have studied extensively or claim to have any expertise in, but I do hold that trauma and grief are personal. True trauma is personal. It may extend a few degrees between people tied by relationships and friendships, but we cannot hold, with grasping hands, onto someone else’s trauma experience and shout about our own anguish. That burden is not ours.

Works Cited

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095989/

https://brill.com/abstract/book/edcoll/9789004347854/B9789004347854_011.xml

http://post45.research.yale.edu/2015/10/traumatic-brain-injury-in-post-911-fiction/

Literature & IT Review

My thesis, currently under the working title “Binaries, Images, & Symbols: The Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” aims to examine the depiction of Janie, the story’s heroine, as an (gendered) Other in her own narrative and to filter a scholarly understanding of the way Zora Neale Hurston authored Janie as an Other through the use binary images and symbols in Hurston’s text. I also propose to contextualise the novel, and Janie’s Otherness, in reference to Hurston’s own life experiences.

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Chapter One, page one, in my own copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God

For my thesis, my main text is Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). However, I also intend to look at other Hurston writings, specifically at her folklore collection Mules And Men (1935) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). I find her folklore collection useful to my thesis in that it also depicts certain animal images found in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s biography will be a practical source in order to glean details of her personal life from Hurston’s own point of view.

I will rely heavily on two collections of critical essays by Harold Bloom, both his Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston (1986) and also, Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ (1987). I will use several essays out of these collections, which look at a wide range of images, interpretations, and stigmas and terms attached to Hurston’s work overall. Of particular interest to me are essays that look at images/symbols in Their Eyes Were Watching God and/or look binary ideas contained in the novel, such as ideas of sexism and sexuality or communal spaces and private spaces which are addressed in Missy Dehn Kubitschek’s essay”‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God“–an essay in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. As another example of the types of work in these collections, Roger Rosenblatt’s essay in Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston, titled simply “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” looks at the Other to Self journey for Janie in the novel. At one point he says “she begins as a minor character in her own life story” (29). I’m extremely excited about this essay in particular, as the marginalisation of Janie as an Other in the novel will be part of my thesis. While most of these essays topically address Their Eyes Were Watching God, others address some of her lesser known works–such as, her folklore collections or her autobiography.

Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1980) will also serve me well, in addition to Hurston’s own biography, as it examines the general reception of Hurston’s work during the Harlem Renaissance, reactions to Hurston herself, looks into influences on her writing style. For example, the chapter entitled “Ambiguities of Self, Politics of Race” discusses personal experiences like her brief and failed second marriage to Albert Prince III, who Hurston would later use as a type-and-shadow for Janie’s third husband in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake. It also provides interesting insight into Hurston’s mid-life and late career, especially into her own doubts and depressions about the results of her life and writing career.

I am also using chapters out of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1989). This work benefits my thesis because of its address on the idea of signification in African-American literature: “It presents a number of illustrative examples of Signifyin(g) in its several forms, then concludes by outlining selective examples of black intertextual relations” (Gates 98). As of now, I’m not certain how intertextuality will surface in my thesis, if at all, but for the sake of responsible scholarship, I think it bears looking into at least. This text also looks at Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a speakerly text and addresses literary devices Hurston used to narrate her novel.

Along with scholarship specific to Hurston and her work, I intend to look at a couple of theorists who were largely influential to the idea of the Self and the Other, since it plays a significant role in my thesis. I will look at Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror stage, specifically using the chapters “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” and “On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question” out of the collection Ecrits: the first complete edition in English (2006). In simple terms, Lacan’s work suggests that the mirror stage is when children recognise themselves in relation to others for the first time, and it is at this point that they form an “I”–a sense of themselves as the Self or Subject.

Of course, I would be remise to address a gendered Self and Other without looking a feminist theory, so I will also rely on excerpts from Hélène Cixous’ “The Newly Born Woman” and her essay “Sorties” out of The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers (1994). In this ground breaking essay, Cixous used binary language to juxtapose terms such as Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature, and Man set over Nature. These language binaries play into Cixous’ idea of l’ecriture feminine (feminine writing) and in her idea of the ways out of male centric authorship. Her essay will feature largely as I discuss Hurston’s use of binary images to create a Self and Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God and to also examine her  narrative techniques.

Beyond these print sources, I will use online databases, such as Academic Search Complete and JSTOR to access scholarly journals, articles, and other materials that I may need during the months I work on my thesis. Also, as I included in a previous blog post, there is a film documentary on Hurston by PBS which I may look into as supplementary research and to engage in a different medium of scholarship around this amazing author.

Textualities ’17 Conference Live Blog: Panel 5

As we all have various jobs as participants of the Textualities ’17 conference, my task is live blogging. Thus follows the blog account for Panel 5 of the 2017 UCC School of English Textualities Conference.

Our lovely Lauren McAuliffe is acting chair. After she introduces everyone, Josephine Fenton presents first on Living Rooms & Enda Walsh.

Josephine says that the idea of a room in Walsh’s works is hugely important to the idea of his plays—not excluding the way a theatre acts as a dark room full of people staring at another smaller ‘room’ on stage.

She says: “The room in which the play is set is as important as the play.”

Her presentation surveys various staged of productions of Enda Walsh’s dramatic works, including: The New Electric Ballroom, The Kitchen, Arlington: Isla, The Walworth Farce, Disco Pigs, and Penelope.

Something which strikes me as interesting in her presentation is the idea of light and dark in the various rooms of his plays.

Performance spaces seem to influence the interpretation of his plays, and Walsh seems to intend that.

Josephine closes by saying that performance spaces seem to influence the interpretation of his plays, because “Rituals happen in specific places.”

Second in this panel is Lena Schulte, presenting on Ireland’s connections with Germany, partly due to her German nationality.

Her research looks at three German companies that moved to Ireland in the 1900s and the way that has influenced relations between Germany and Ireland.

An owner of one of the of three companies wrote a book which addressed Catholicism, travel, and culture, which influenced much of the perception of “similarity” between the countries and increased German immigration in Ireland.

Lena calls this the “trap of similarity;” a paradox that she say insinuates culturally similar countries in which it would be easier for immigrants to ignore cultural differences.

Her closing remarks include her desire to find out at what age German immigrants have, and continue to, come to Ireland and for specifically what reasons. Did they come as entrepreneurs? To work in established businesses? Why did they choose to bring their business? What age did they come to Ireland? Did they stay?

The panel’s third presenter, Patrick Gibbons, is looking at “Old Stories in a New Ireland.”

His current research focuses on the change between new and old Ireland, considering legal, artistic, diasporic, and several other elements.

After giving a brief history of events that caused “New Ireland” and also the dispersion of Irish citizens to America, Patrick states that the historiographical response to these events was to draw on (literary) works from the 17th and 18th century, rather than creating new works.

He shows this harkening back, if you will, was catered to by publishing companies in both Dublin and New York, causing these older texts to be readily available to a general public.

The ultimate effect of reviving these works this brought into question identity, both for Irish Americans of the diaspora and newly founded Irish Republic citizens.

Patrick asserts that the older Irish tales his research has considered in the 19th century and 20th century serve as a bridge to “Old Ireland.”

His closing remarks include a reminder that he has not nailed down a definite direction for his thesis; however, I find his research so far highly interesting.

Fourth and finally, our panel speaker is Rebecca Murray. Her presentation focuses on Reason and Sensibility.

She’s looking at the work of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and at the transition from Reason to Sensibility.

She draws on the way in which Wollstonecraft influenced Godwin’s work and his transition from a man of reason to a man of sensibility. She says, “Wollstonecraft really understood knowledge alongside feeling.”

During the lives of both writers, society was undergoing a large amount of change. Godwin was writing when power was beginning to shift from Monarchy/aristocracy to general public, and this is reflected in his both his political and fictional writing.

Godwin seems to embody seems to embody the transition from a man of feeling to a man of theory. Rebecca will look at Godwin’s text Caleb Williams and Political Justice. Her Wollstonecraft texts are A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. 

In her thesis, Rebecca would like to look at links between literary works and political works. According to her, Godwin believes that “Reason should reside in man’s own morality, not in institutional law.”

As at the end, of every Panel, our audience has the chance to participate in a Q&A session.

Zora Neal Hurston: An Introduction to the Supreme

Definition of Supreme:

  1. highest in rank or authority

  2. highest in degree or quality

  3. ultimate or  final

The word ‘supreme’ carries a lot of authority and stakes a pretty incredible claim. While I’ve used supreme in my title for this blog in a half-joking way (and mainly because I think it makes an impressive title and really fits the image), in many ways I do believe Zora Neale Hurston is the supreme black, female author of the world to date.

As I’m gearing my Master’s thesis around her, now, renowned novel Their Eyes Were Watching God my opinion may be slightly biased, but I do hope to prove, or at least cause you, dear readers, to consider Hurston as a “supreme” author.

Zora Neale Hurston, born in 1891, knew how to make an impression. She is described as someone who could so charm people with her wit and stories that they would offer help in anyway she needed it. Not shy of taking up those offers, what Hurston needed most was patronage. However, the idea of writing on a patron’s penny left many of her fellow African-American writers sour.

She wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a time rich with the celebration of black culture, but also, unfortunately, a time when America’s black citizenship felt that they were being asked to prove their humanity. They did so through the arts, and so, Hurston was seen by some Renaissance participants as a puppet to her Anglo-American patrons. As a result, she suffered discrimination from her contemporaries.

Today, that discrimination is firmly their loss. Hurston was brilliant. During her career of more than thirty years, Hurston published four novels, two folklore collections, an autobiography, short stories, and a number of essays, articles, and plays (Boyd).

However, what some people may not know is that, though she’d already begun writing, Hurston went to university for an anthropology degree and worked under Franz Boas, an anthropologist who was the first to really practice the idea of field work. One has to wonder and speculate if his influence and her anthropological roots are what inspired her to go to Florida, Jamaica, and Haiti in order to write both Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). She also wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her most well-known novel, in Haiti in a matter of weeks.

Eatonville, Fl.–the small town wherein much of the novel takes place–mirrors Hurston’s own childhood, as well. Though born in Alabama, Hurston’s family moved to Eatonville, Florida when Hurston was still quite young.

Established in 1887, the small community was the nation’s first incorporated black township. Hurston described it as, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse” (qtd. in Boyd).

Hurston’s personal experience with living in an incorporated black township/community certainly gives credence and authority to her novel’s reality, just as her field time in Florida,  Jamaica, and Haiti lend a more authentic tone to her folklore collections.

[There is a quant (albeit dated, in some ways) documentary on Hurston’s life which I saw part of some years ago on PBS. I’ve included a short youtube clip of the documentary, but you should also be able to purchase the full version from baybottomnews.com if you’re just really inspired to get to know more about her.]

Beyond the credentials I’ve touched on, a webpage dedicated to Hurston’s memory and biography provides a wonderful timeline account of her life and work. Please spend some time browsing the website if you’d like more information.

As Hurston’s work was not popularised during her lifetime, partly due to the discrimination of her fellow Renaissance writers, at the time of her death she was living in poverty. She was laid in an unmarked grave, sadly, as she left no money for a headstone.

Fortunately, some years later–in 1973–Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, found her grave and commissioned a stone that reads “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”

The epitaph, to me speaks to the quality of her work; especially as it was commissioned by another black, female author whom some would argue eclipsed Hurston. However, since its reissue in paperback form in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become arguably the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the cannon of African-American literature (Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston).

Her work has proved enduring, relevant, and powerful. Her command of oral tradition translated to written word is magnificent; her use of symbolism absolutely masterful… I feel indebted to Walker for her “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” an essay which really sparked the revival Hurston’s work, but, for me, Hurston will forever be the ultimate, the Supreme, African-American author.

Works Cited:

Boyd, Valerie. “About Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston: The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston, 2015, http://www.zoranealehurston.com/about/index.html. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Mirriam-Webster. Dictionary. 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supreme. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Zora Neale Hurston. The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston. 2015, http://www.zoranealehurston.com. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Gothic Detour: Others and Authors in Joyce’s The Dead

Alright, confession time.

I may be working toward an MA in Modernities and researching various Modern/Postmodern literatures, but my favorite genre of literature is generally Gothic. Hands down, no contest. Give me a Bronte sister or Stoker any day. So, having an opportunity to combine my love for Gothic with my research interests is an opportunity I’ll happily take.

In one of my courses, we recently read James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ from his book The Dubliners (you can read ‘The Dead’ online here). I will be the first to concede and agree that Joyce is a modernist writer–he hugely influenced modernist writing in Ireland. However, one can read ‘The Dead’ and easily identify Gothic elements throughout, especially if one considers spatiality in the work.

Joyce makes use of Gothic spaces several places in ‘The Dead.’ Gothic spaces often involve closed doors/rooms, long or secret passageways, old and/or haunted living areas, and images of dark vs. light. He adheres to these ideas when he plays with enclosed, claustrophobic spaces–such as the downstairs pantry and, later, the drawing room, which must have its door kept closed so there was room for dancers: “[Gabriel] waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet” (Joyce 203).

He also makes the home Gothic in other ways, likening it to House of Usher– nodding to Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’–and describing dark stairwells and long, empty hallways.

The hall though is perhaps the only translatable element of the Gothic into Joyce’s modernist meaning in ‘The Dead.’

Joyce uses the hall as a liminal space (something which Gothic writing relies on) in the story. He presents audiences with a moment between a married couple, Greta and Gabriel, occurring in the hallway which raises questions of Authorship.

In the scene, Gabriel stands in a “dark part of the hall” and gazes up the staircase at his wife (Joyce 240). She, too, stands in shadow so that Gabriel recognizes her from her terra-cotta and pink skirt, which seems black and white because of the dark:

She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. […] He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. (Joyce 240)

The idea of Authorship here concerns Gabriel’s reading of his wife. In his mind, he moves her to a symbol, a muse. He creates her as an object which he could project his own meaning on. [As a question outside of what we’ve been discussing, do you think that Joyce might be parodying or commenting on the woman symbolic of Ireland?]

Reading further, as they walk to the hotel they’re staying in for the night, the idea of Greta as an object seems to excite his sexuality:

The blood went bounding along his veins and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous. She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. (Joyce 243-244)

To me, these lines are both painfully awkward and a little creepy. But academically, they only pose problems as far as Authorship and Others are concerned.

Gabriel interprets Greta’s grace and mystery to suit the fiction of his own mind. He does not consider, does not question what might cause her to put on the attitudes he observes. Later in ‘The Dead,’ Joyce forcefully makes Gabriel realize Greta’s alterity when she presents to Gabriel her own fiction.

After they reach their room, Gabriel senses Greta’s preoccupation and attempts to draw her out of her melancholy to adhere to his fiction. He finds that she’s been dwelling on the memory of a young man from her past who she thinks died for her. This swiftly causes him to have a realization of the Other (as one might imagine, Gabriel wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about his wife pining over another man). This encounter with the Other causes him to examine her history, to wonder what it was apart from him. He also begins to dwell on other histories, on the vast number of the dead, and his own mortality in the grey winter of Ireland…

And that’s where Joyce ends ‘The Dead.’ We don’t know what the longterm consequences of Gabriel’s moment with the Other are, but I applaud Joyce for letting that future remain unauthored.

Hopefully, this post has intrigued a few minds. If you have unanswered questions, I’m sorry–I wrote this post more as a discussion than as an argument or a critique. Please do feel free to comment or contact me with any questions, though.

Also, there is a movie adaptation of ‘The Dead.’ I’m not sure how accurate it is to Joyce’s writing, but it certainly captures a feeling for the Gothic in this clip of the film!

 

Works Cited:

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Paladin Grafton Books, 1989.

Imagination, Authorship, Others: Atonement

As a research blog, I can think of no better way to begin than to examine and explain my research interests as they now stand. Mainly, I’m concerned with Otherness and Others, specifically in literature, along with the idea of an ethical authorship attached to them.

How much artistic liberty may Authors, fictitious or actual, apply to Others in their fiction? How does one “ethically” imagine and author an Other? And as Authors in our own lives and, thus, our own fictions, can we even attempt to answer that?

These questions first occurred to me while reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. His book remains one of my favorite pieces of 20th Century literature, and also, remains the best way I know how to explain my Author/Other fascination.

McEwan’s Atonement follows the tragedy of a young couple, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, parted because of faults within Briony’s (Cecilia’s younger sister) imagination and Authorship of certain events. At the time of her crime-of-imagination, young Briony had already been identified by McEwan as a prolific writer. We also understand that she had complicit access to adult codes of her time and social class through her father’s library, which she perused at her leisure and which we are to assume, caused her imagination to grow. As a writer, and a child, the fact that she had imagination certainly doesn’t present itself as a problem or a crime; however, at her young age, she didn’t understand the way in which her world functioned well enough to form true interpretations of adult codes or to invent accurate fictions according to those actions. Due to her readings, she was most familiar with stereotypes of social orders within fictitious literatures. This caused her to recreate people, to recreate Others, according to her imagined motives for each.

McEwan illustrates this confusion early in the novel by having Briony witness her sister and Robbie interacting by the fountain on their estate. She read the scene incorrectly, thinking:

There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back.          A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. [….] Robbie Turner, only a son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, […] had the boldness of ambition of ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (McEwan 48)

What appeared to Briony as a possible proposal was actually a quarrel —definitely not the stuff of daily romance, I’d say.

Briony’s misunderstanding of the fountain scene and her authorship of it projected later that day onto a note from Robbie to Cecilia, which she read as an unintended audience. In the note, Robbie explicitly described what he would like to do to Cecilia–causing Briony to encounter an adult sexual code, which in her youth she did not comprehend.

[In an effort for concision, and to prevent this from reading anymore like an essay than it already does (which I am actively trying to avoid!), I’m going to summarize the next points of action quite quickly.]

Briony’s mind created a fiction around the note, because she didn’t understand it, and she concluded that Robbie must mean to hurt her sister. A scene which she later saw in the library compounded this assumption, causing her to accuse Robbie later in the evening of committing a crime of sexual violence against one of her cousins.

Unfortunately, her Authorship was accepted and became her most successful fiction.

McEwan makes sure that as an audience we understand that Briony was functioning under a fiction when she accused Robbie as her cousin’s attacker. The events of that day on a whole caused Briony to cast him as “evil incarnate” in her own melodrama (McEwan 147). Her understanding of upper-middle-class English society (another adult code) prevented her from considering her brother or his equally privileged friend, Paul, as the rapist.

Later, as she matured, Briony realized and fully understood the consequences of that fiction, but by that time, it was too late. Robbie and Cecilia died alone, far apart from each other, during World War II and Briony dedicated her life to “atoning” for her crime.

Essentially, life stinks and we all die. Woo. (Should I have said **spoilers** before now?)

So…

My stance on this is that Briony practiced unethical authorship toward an Other. I classify Robbie as an Other based on his social status in regards to Briony’s own. In the quote I provided from McEwan’s novel, she cites him as the son of the gardener at her family’s estate–social standing is a factor that can identify Others. Her immature categorization of Robbie caused Briony to create a biased fiction.

Trying to agree on or define what an ethical authorship is, at this point, too lengthy and unclear an endeavor to take up. However, my assertion for Authors is that fiction rests on possibilities, not certainties, and that fiction comes from what Others may be. To that end, I suppose this is what I hope to write on for my thesis.

For those who haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it! It was one of the most enjoyable texts I had the pleasure of reading during my undergrad work, and even though I may have ruined a couple of plot points (so sorry), it’s well worth the read!

 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment about the post or contact me with any questions you have. 

Works Cited:

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print.