In 1977 the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit published Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, a study of the ephemera of the proto-fascist interwar German paramilitary, the Freikorps. He analyzes the letters, memoirs, propaganda, and prose of the Freikorps officers in order to understand fascism’s psychic logic, in particular the role of women in the unconscious of fascist men.
Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement is many things at once: melodramatic romance, war story, novel of manners, modernist revival, metafiction. The novel’s wartime setting in conjunction with its status as a metatext position the reader to interpret the text with a broadly psychoanalytic framework and in particular with the many insights contained in Theweleit’s text.
In Atonement’s postscript we learn that the entire text, written in a third person omniscient voice, was actually penned by one of its own characters, Briony Tallis. This oft-discussed “twist ending” forces the reader to reconsider the entire text in light of this revelation, particularly that the interior thoughts and even some of the actions of the characters are wholly inventions of Briony’s imagination. Indeed, Briony is an archetypal unreliable narrator. But what interests us is not whether this or that element of Briony’s text “really” happened, but rather that all of the principal characters, in particular the centerpieces Robbie and Cecilia, are inventions of Briony, perhaps some form of wish-fulfillment, but psychic inventions regardless.
A brief recap of the plot: the novel starts in England, 1935. Briony Tallis is a thirteen-year-old girl raised in a wealthy family. Robbie Turner, the son of their housekeeper, is a student at Cambridge, poised to study medicine. Robbie discovers romantic feelings for Cecilia, Briony’s older sister and his longtime friend. Robbie writes a letter to Cecilia expressing his feelings, and recruits Briony to deliver it. He “accidentally” sends the wrong version of the letter, an uninhibited version containing explicit sexual desire (“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt.”)
Briony reads the letter before delivering it to her sister and, being still a child, interprets Robbie’s desires as essentially aggressive, even violent. She thinks of him as a “maniac.” Later, she walks in on Robbie and Cecilia having consensual sex, which she again interprets as an instance of Robbie’s violence.
Later, Briony’s twin cousins run off from the family dinner, and in the midst of the search for them she observes their older sister, her cousin Lola, being assaulted. She decides that the assaulter is Robbie. Briony squeals on Robbie and he is sent to prison. Robbie’s dreams of becoming a doctor are crushed, his rights and freedoms are stripped, and most acutely his relationship with Cecilia is destroyed before it can really begin. This is, in a loose sense, a reenactment of castration: Briony says “No more!” to Robbie’s male sexual desire.
Robbie is sent off to prison, only to be released a few years later at the start of World War II in order to enlist in the army. Meantime Cecilia has cut off all contact with her family over the incident and has become a nurse. She and Robbie exchange letters throughout the war to stay in contact. Later, Briony too becomes a nurse at age eighteen, forgoing her dream of attending Cambridge.
In Theweleit’s framework, fascist men divide women into “white nurses” and “red women” in their psychic schema, a sort of instantiation of the Madonna-whore complex. The white nurse is virtuous, patriotic, unthreatening, and sexless, both in the sense of non-erotic and in the sense of lacking the phallus. The red woman, conversely, is transgressive, communistic, threatening, and both sexualized and sexed; the red woman castrates. Theweleit writes:
In a historical sense as well, then, the white nurse is an emblem for the bourgeois woman’s renunciation of her female body. The nurse’s is a dead body, with no desires and no sexuality (no ‘penis’). She unites in herself the opposing poles of mother and sister, burying all of their dangerous enticements inside: the fiction of a body, which men need in order to not feel threatened. [1]
We can read Briony’s change of life plan as a denial of her real desires in the face of her guilt. Briony strips herself of power (her writing, her career ambitions) in order to atone for what she did to Robbie, which we can consider in some sense an act of castration, of rebuking him for his perceived sexual transgression, sending him to prison where he is denied practically any and all power and freedom. She turns her aggression in on herself in essentially an act of self-castration; Theweleit reminds us that “a nurse is also a castrated doctor.” [2]
Briony has hitherto conducted herself in a selfish, narcissistic way. She orders her cousins around when she forces them to act out her play; she at a young age has grandiose visions of becoming a famous writer. In her ultimate assertive act, she sends a young man to prison essentially out of spite. Now, as a nurse, she has chosen to submit to power, rather than keeping it all for herself. She consciously allows herself to become sexless, powerless, unthreatening, in other words, the white nurse.
These nurses are highly disciplined and docile: “[T]here was the constant and pervasive anxiety the trainees shared about making mistakes. They all lived in fear of Sister Marjorie Drummond, of the menacing meager smile and softening of manner that preceded her fury.” [3] They must submit to every command of Sister Drummond and of the doctors.
The nurses are organized essentially as a military formation but without guns, without the agency to carry out violence; in other words, without the phallus. The nurses are so thoroughly controlled that McEwan (writing as Briony) goes so far as to liken them to infants wholly dependent on their mother: “In fact, she had narrowed her life to a relationship with a woman fifteen years older who assumed a power over her greater than that of a mother over an infant.” [4]
Equally important is that the white nurse is not given a name. Theweleit notes that the typical Freikorps officer almost never gives names to the women of his memoirs and novels, even going as far as to mention his wife without speaking her name, if he bothers to mention her at all. Similarly, the nurses in Briony’s ward are stripped of their Christian names, those names which mark them as individuals. They are only referred to by their surnames, e.g. “Nurse Tallis” rather than “Briony.” “It was set out clearly in the handbook, though no one had guessed how important it was considered to be… She reread and committed to memory the commandment: in no circumstances should a nurse communicate to a patient her Christian name.” [5]
Under the direction of Sister Drummond, stripped of her first name, Briony must carry out elaborate sanitization procedures:
The war against germs never ceased. The probationers were initiated into the cult of hygiene. They learned that there was nothing so loathsome as a wisp of blanket fluff hiding under a bed, concealing within its form a battalion, a whole division, of bacteria. The everyday practice of boiling, scrubbing, buffing and wiping became the badge of the students’ professional pride, to which all personal comfort must be sacrificed. [6]
For Theweleit, these procedures serve not just a basic health function, but also an ideological or psychic one: they reproduce the white nurse’s image of purity:
All of that is signaled, in the end, by the nurse’s uniform. ‘White’ signifies untrodden ground; no stream of red has ever been let loose within that uniform, never a stain on its fabric. The nurse is a blank page and condemned to remain so, if she is to function as a terrain for male fantasies. [7]
In fact, at one point Sister Drummond orders Briony to wash her face for precisely this reason: “There’s a good girl. Now go and was the blood from your face. We don’t want the other patients upset.” [8] All of these procedures and regulations force Briony to repress her own subjectivity. If nothing else, they make her so busy and exhausted that she doesn’t have time to think and act as an autonomous individual:
Physical discomfort helped close down Briony’s mental horizons. The high starched collars rubbed her neck raw. Washing her hands a dozen times a day under stinging cold water with a block of soda brought on her first chilblains. The shoes she had to buy with her own money fiercely pinched her toes. The uniform, like all uniforms, eroded identity, and the daily attention required--ironing pleats, pinning hats, straightening seams, shoe polishing, especially the heals--began a process by which other concerns were slowly excluded. [9]
But even after all this, Briony’s symbolic self-castration, her indignation at Robbie and Cecilia turned inward, does not bring the peace that she hopes:
All she wanted to do was work, then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless, she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable. [10]
We learn in the postscript that in reality Robbie dies of wartime injuries on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia is killed in London by Nazi bombs during the Blitz. Briony never sees either of them again; the last she sees of either of them is the incident in which she sends Robbie to prison.
However, in the main body of the novel, Briony, the narrator, creates an alternate timeline in which she travels to Cecilia’s apartment and confronts her and Robbie. She comes to apologize for what she did, to atone to the extent that is possible: she will officially recant her original testimony to the family, the courts, and whomever else Cecilia would like. When Briony confronts Cecilia, she is surprised to find that Robbie is there, too; he and Cecilia have been living together (remember, this is only in Briony’s mind).
When Robbie finds Briony in his residence, his first impulse is anger; he threatens violence. The scene plays out as so:
“I don’t know why you let her in.” [Robbie says to Cecilia.] Then to Briony, “I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your stupid neck here and taking you outside and throwing you down the stairs.”
If it had not been for her recent experience, she would have been terrified. Sometimes she heard soldiers on the ward raging against their helplessness. At the height of their passion, it was foolish to reason with them or try to reassure them. It had to come out, and it was the best to stand and listen. She knew that even offering to leave now could be provocative. So she faced Robbie and waited for the rest, her due. But she was not frightened of him, not physically. [11]
We can see here that Briony’s training as a nurse has taught her how to deal with male anger. When, as a child, an unusually bold child at that, Briony was confronted with what she perceived to be Robbie’s unpredictable, explosive violence (to Briony, Robbie is “the maniac”), she reacts in turn with resentment of her own.
But now that Briony is older, more aware of the ways of the world and, importantly, a nurse, she has learned to repress, or at least control, her own emotions. From Briony’s thought process we can see that this is an active, conscious process:
Her immediate concern was not to cry. At that moment, nothing would have been more humiliating. Relief, shame, self-pity, she didn’t know which it was, but it was coming. The smooth wave rose, tightening her throat, making it impossible to speak, and then, as she held on, tensing her lips, it fell away and she was safe. No tears, but her voice was a miserable whisper. [12]
Cecilia steps in and caresses Robbie, calming him down so that Briony can leave in peace and carry out her tasks to try to set things right. At this crucial moment, the emotional climax of the novel, Briony acts as a white nurse: unthreatening, placating, sexless, even motherly. Recall that we know that this scene did not occur “in reality” at all, as per Briony’s admission in the postscript.
Thus, while the entire novel must be considered in some sense Briony’s own psychic fantasy, this scene in particular is more so than the rest: it is not merely distorted reality, or reality as reconstructed by Briony’s own psychic processes, but rather is wholly constructed out of nothing. As the culmination of Briony’s journey from brazen, irresponsible little girl, to nurse, to the young woman who sets things right, we can read retroactively that this is all along what Briony wanted to achieve by becoming a nurse.
Notes
[1] Theweleit, p. 134
[2] Theweleit, p. 132
[3] McEwan p. 254
[4] McEwan, p. 259
[5] McEwan pp. 255-6
[6] McEwan, p. 256
[7] Theweleit, p. 134
[8] McEwan, pp. 292-3
[9] McEwan, p. 259
[10] McEwan, p. 269
[11] McEwan, p. 322
[12] McEwan, p. 321