Literary Genres & Atonement

English Lit: AQA A Level Atonement - Specification B, topic 9.3.1

Literary Context for Atonement

Atonement can be seen as belonging to different genres of novels.

Atonement can be read as a crime text.
The novel revolves around the sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl and Briony refers to her own “crime” of falsely accusing Robbie.
There is an obvious villain in Paul Marshall and a number of different victims. However, there is no detective figure in Atonement; rather, it is the reader who is placed in the role of detective in having to piece together a ‘true’ version of events from the fragments of different perspectives which we are provided with.

Atonement can also be read as a love story.
Robbie and Cecilia find love despite their different social backgrounds, mirroring the younger Briony’s fairy tale of a princess and the “humble woodcutter”.
However, they are both soon torn apart by forces greater than themselves. The lovers defy the disapproval of family and society in fighting to be together again, and are eventually rewarded for the strength of their love with a reconciliation before the end.

However, Briony admits in Part Four that this version of the story is a fiction, a rewriting of history to provide her readers with “hope” and “satisfaction” (p371).
In reality, theirs is a tragic love story, with Robbie dying in France before a final reconciliation.

The novel can also be considered as a coming-of-age text or as a novel about childhood. We watch Briony grow from a naïve child to an able nurse, as well as witnessing her development as a writer.
Critics such as Frank Kermode have noted the similarities between Atonement and Henry James’ novel, What Maisie Knew (1897), particularly in the way that problematic adult relationships (the novel centres around adultery and divorce) are viewed from a child’s perspective.

Ian McEwan described Atonement as “my Jane Austen novel” in an interview he gave to Newsweek.
There are direct references to Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) in the epigraph and in the choice of the name “Tilney’s” for the hotel in Part Four.
However, as Juliette Wells has argued, in “Shades of Austen in Ian McEwan’s Atonement” there are other connections to be made such as the parallels between the young Briony and the young Jane Austen.