Innocence and Experience in "Atonement" and "The Go-Between"

The movement from innocence to experience in both children’s cases is impelled by a self-conscious desire to enter the reality of the adult world and leave their childhood fantasies behind: “Now that I was thirteen I was under an obligation to look reality in the face,” “Goodbye to make-believe!” Briony similarly renounces her simplistic fairytales for “the real, the adult world in which frogs do not address princesses” in the belief that “it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything.” However, it is precisely these innocent childish imaginings, these constructed worlds of perfection, which prevent Briony and Leo from grasping the complex reality of the adult world which they seek to comprehend. Leo’s idealistic world of the Zodiac reflects his perception of the “heavenly bodies”: Marian, Ted and Hugh, whom he reveres with his innate “sense of worship.” Thus his inevitable disillusionment upon the discovery of Marian and Ted’s affair – “Marian the Virgin of the Zodiac – how could she have sunk so low?” – is due to the shattering of his imaginary world by the ugly disorder of the real one. The real world’s “distressing impression of disarray” is symbolised by the “boggy pool”, with its “band of dirty yellow” observed by Leo just after his discovery. Briony has a similar “love of order”, reflected in both the military arrangement of her toys and in her childhood stories, by which “Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so.” This “controlling demon” leads to her incomprehension of the fountain scene – “The sequence was illogical – the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal” – and so her disastrous attempt to superimpose her world of fiction upon reality, for “Order must be imposed.” Therefore it is the sudden shift from the expectations derived from their childhood fantasies to reality itself that lead to Briony and Leo’s loss of innocence: in the former’s case, the lifelong burden of guilt that her crime, stemming from incomprehension and misinterpretation, incurs. Leo, in addition to less-deserved guilt, suffers emotional trauma – “Leo, you’re all dried up inside” – due to the traumatic circumstances of his first encounter with sex, which in his childish innocence he never fully understood: “Ted hadn’t told me what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for showing me, and after that I never felt like it.”

Briony and Leo’s misconceptions, false expectations and ignorance of sex – “like a physical defect” – are due in part to religion, and thus society’s negative depiction of sexual experience (symbolised in the titular quotation by the apple from the tree of knowledge) as synonymous with sin. This automatic fear of knowledge, experience and sex, inherent in original sin, is evident in Leo’s reaction to the Belladonna, which through its name and form indicates temptation – “It looked the picture of evil and also the picture of health… I knew that every part of it was poisonous, I knew too that it was beautiful”. Just as Leo is tempted by knowledge, Briony too seeks the ultimate knowledge and power of the novelist, a concept demonstrated extensively by Atonement’s omniscient narrator (ultimately Briony herself) and stream of consciousness style. “In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.” Briony finds this neatness of novel writing preferable to the chaos – “the messiness of other minds” – inherent in play writing. However, while the solipsistic power and knowledge of the omniscient narrator appeals to Briony, she is at age thirteen “not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.” Although Briony desires the ultimate knowledge of the novelist, her innocence (or perhaps more accurately, ignorance) prevents her from obtaining it: for while her ill-informed notions of sex prevent her from forgiving Robbie, she cannot understand him, and thus the omniscience she seeks is denied. Only at age seventy-seven, with a lifetime of experience and knowledge, is she worthy of the novelist’s power, with which she can finally give Cecilia and Robbie the reprieve they deserved: “As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.” Atonement’s irreligious depiction of the novelist as a superhuman being – “with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God” – reflects McEwan’s atheism (subtly alluded to by “novelists, even if they are atheists”). The Go-Between also features alternative, even heathen religions: black magic, Classical gods such as Mercury (recalling the thermometer and the heat – itself worshipped by Leo), and most prominently “the Zodiac – my favourite religion.” As Leo does not “associate goodness much with moral behaviour” he is repelled from Christianity, as evidenced by his habitual afflictions in church, “a sign that religion didn’t agree with me.” He is further alienated from Christianity by the inflexible concept of sin. The enforced humility; the compulsory shame of original sin conflicts with his pride and desire for greatness: “Why should we call ourselves sinners?... I disliked the leveling aspect of this sinnerdom… I did not want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner.”

This condemnation of rigid morality reflects the changing attitudes to religion and sex in the twentieth century as Hartley and McEwan explore the conventions and societies of that “foreign country” – the past. Not only do the novels reveal the mindset of the late Victorian and interwar societies, but also, through the authors’ portrayal of these respective cultures, the contemporary views of Hartley and McEwan in the fifties and twenty-first century respectively. Hartley attacks the moral rigidity of Victorian values, as exemplified by Leo’s mother’s absurd labels “Rather Wrong” and “Very Wrong” for “any course of action that she didn’t approve of.” In the upper-class society of The Go-Between, propriety is all, for “you should never forget yourself.” Emotions are suppressed, as illustrated by the public schoolboy code, which considers intimacy “fraught with peril”. The value of decorum above emotional warmth is exemplified by the Maudsleys’ marriage: “Between Mr. and Mrs. Maudsley I never saw a sign of disagreement; she went her way and he went his… I should hardly have known they were married.” Of all emotions, lust and sexual love are most suppressed, as demonstrated by the atmospheric dinner scene in Atonement. “The effect of suffocation” mirrors the repression of the main characters as beneath the superficial decorum of etiquette, their minds are completely occupied by sex: Cecilia, Robbie and Briony are “lost to the events of ten minutes before,” while “Lola was subdued both by the shock of physical assault and an array of contradictory emotions”. Instead, sex is spoken of entirely in euphemisms: from the incomprehensible “Ted’s a bit of a lad” to “He’s a bit of a lady-killer,” no adult (except to some extent Ted) will explain, or even directly reference, sex to Leo. Briony too is kept entirely “innocent of salacious matters” by the adults of her society, and is similarly mystified by the word “cunt”: “what did the word contain?” “Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence… not even her mother”. Thus children are kept in the darkness of ignorance; a permanent state of enforced innocence, with disastrous consequences: “If only she, Briony, had been less innocent, less stupid.” In the worlds of both novels, women are also expected to be innocent, for in a society that considers the loss of a woman’s virginity a fate “worse than death,” small tokens of independence, such as “being seen with a sandwich in the street”, or wearing practical “tights” for bicycling, are considered “not quite-quite” or “fast”. Shielded from experience and knowledge, for “They weren’t even awarding girls proper degrees”, women’s position in society is represented by Emily. Placid and deferential to her husband’s will, she neither desires nor seeks knowledge, preferring to be ignorant, even of his affair, as “She had sources of contentment… and she intended to preserve them by not challenging Jack.” Similarly, she is later denied access to the obscene letter by the “chivalrous unease” of the “three men’s worldliness.” Hence in a social system that withholds experience and knowledge from women and children, they are neglected: “wronged child, wronged wife.”

However, the primary adult female characters, Marian and Cecilia, both move from sexual innocence to experience, although Hartley and McEwan’s portrayals of the transition are acutely different. Cecilia, through her messy “stew” of a room and smoking of “Bolshevik cigarettes”, is portrayed as a mildly rebellious character. The literature associated with Cecilia and Robbie suggests their subversive nature: Cecilia prefers the “passionate” Fielding, while Robbie briefly attributes his obscene letter to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a very much contemporary novel (written in 1928) which caused a moral outrage with its depiction of an illicit affair between an aristocratic woman and a working class man (the very situation in Atonement). These allusions associate Cecilia and Robbie with the increasing sexual liberation of the 1930s. However, Cecilia’s bohemian posturing and intellectual liberalism has a trite air to it, as Robbie observes: “her endearing attempt to seem eccentric, her stab at being bold had an exaggerated, homemade quality.” The self-conscious intellectualizing of emotion, or “Freudian smart-aleckery,” that both Cecilia and Robbie exhibit reveals their sexual innocence. Symbolically, Cecilia’s loss of virginity (her movement from innocence to experience) takes place in a library as she and Robbie exchange their literary substitutes for real love, their dry academic knowledge for the fruit of knowledge, “a life of facts” for “the facts of life”. This glorious monumental contravention of propriety is eloquently expressed by Robbie: “they had fucked while others sipped their cocktails on the terrace.” A feminist reading would suggest that McEwan, with the perspective of a twenty-first century writer, rejoices in the breaking of convention and in Cecilia’s emancipation from the sexual limitations of women. McEwan’s sympathetic portrayal of Cecilia and Robbie as the “romantic heroes” strengthens this argument, in sharp contrast with Hartley’s portrayal and judgment of Marian, altogether a more morally ambiguous character. Her two symbolic representations, the Virgin of the Zodiac and the Belladonna, reveal the expectations of the virgin-whore dichotomy to which women were subjected: either remain chaste and innocent, or become a “fallen woman”; Eve the sinner; “beautiful” but “poisonous”. Whether due to the conservatism of the fifties (and therefore Hartley) or of 1900, it could be argued that through portraying Marian as “the chief offender”, Hartley, who “thought that Marian behaved very badly and Ted only less badly”, does not challenge the system of female and sexual suppression. However, upon closer inspection it is clear that Marian’s culpability is primarily due to her manipulation of an innocent child, not her sexual freedom. As Leo forlornly reflects, “everything she had done for me had been done with an ulterior motive”. Tragically however, it occurs to him too late that the adults, in their manipulation and neglect, “had treated me badly”, and so Leo bears the full burden of guilt, never realising that “there was something wrong with the system” that had so blinded him.

Thus in the movement from innocence to experience, it is the former, not the latter, that is culpable for the tragedy in the two novels. Experience did not corrupt innocence; the culture of suppression, of imposed ignorance masquerading as innocence, demonized experience: and so our protagonists, “on eating the apple” of knowledge, fall from Eden.