Feminist Readings: Gender Roles & Stereotypes

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Gender Roles & Stereotypes in Atonement

The characters in Briony's childhood stories seem to conform to conventional gender roles. Robbie is portrayed as a hero throughout Atonement. Portraying Cecilia and Briony as nurses seems to conform to conventional images of female carers.

Confirming to gender roles

Briony’s childhood stories are centred around characters who strongly conform to the gender roles prevalent in children’s fiction of the era.
Her heroines tend to be princesses whose stories end happily in marriage. They also tend to be rather passive figures while the male heroes are depicted as saviours: Arabella is “bed-bound” (p3) after contracting cholera when she is brought back to health by her “medical prince” and another princess is saved from drowning by a “humble woodcutter” (p38).

Briony acting out fantasies

Briony even tries to make these fantasies a reality, deliberately falling into a pool to force Robbie into the role of saviour and to allow her to adopt the role of rescued maiden who swears her “love” for her knight in shining armour.

Comparing presentation of gender

In Part Four, we learn that an older Briony is the ‘true’ author of the novel we have been reading. We're invited to compare younger Briony’s assumptions of how men and women should behave with older Briony’s representation of gender.
- E.g. you could argue that even the older Briony continues to depict Robbie as a hero. We see him in the role of rescuer when he leads the twins back to the Tallis household the morning after they have run away and the Robbie of Part Two is portrayed as a leader, entrusted by Mace and Nettle to guide them safely to Dunkirk.

Is Briony distorting reality?

Readers should perhaps consider whether Briony is distorting reality by portraying Robbie as such a noble and heroic figure.
- Can her depiction of Robbie be trusted, or is it too close to the fairy tale heroes she fantasised about as a child?
- Has she created an idealised version of Robbie as a way of atoning for her “crime” against him?

Conventional female carers

The portrayal of Briony and Cecilia as nurses may be seen as a conventional representation of women as carers.
There is a clear gender divide in Briony’s hospital, with men as doctors (or soldiers) and women as nurses. At various times, Briony adopts the role of mother (“she cradled their filthy heads against her apron”) or sweetheart (playing along with Luc Cornet’s notion that she is a girl from his village in order to provide comfort in his final moments).

Strength of female nurses

However, the role of nurse is shown to be physically demanding and emotionally gruelling, requiring great reserves of inner strength.
Briony is described as developing an “impersonal tenderness” which means that she could “do her work efficiently” (p304), demonstrating the ability to detach herself emotionally from her patients.