이언 매큐언의 『속죄』: ‘집’의 정치학

Abstract

This essay attempts to examine some implications of spaces created in Ian McEwan's Atonement, mainly drawing upon such concepts as “social space” and “spatial codes” from Henri Lefebvre's theory. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre insists that every space implies and contains social relations within it, refusing a general understanding of space as a socially, politically independent background. I argue that the concept of space in this novel, especially the Tallis Home is firmly lodged in the dominant discourse of the British society of the day. I intimately further argue that the Tallis Home actively reinforces and reproduces it. In doing so, I aim to review critically some of the existing arguments of Atonement. Their attempts have been made to locate this novel in the stream of the traditional great British novels. However what has been less explored is the interrelationships between the characters and their home itself The gist of my argument is that the Tallis Home is not a neutral background. Rather, it is fully pocked with the dominant social orders such as class consciousness and sexual discrimination forcing the family members to comply with it‘s codes implicitly or explicitly. Their obsession with order leads to a series of disaster. The family members who internalize home's spatial codes separate and exclude the Other and even engage in bringing about the World War. As Lefebvre asserts that subjects inevitably accede to their space and to their status by accepting existed specific codes, no characters in this novel are free from the patriarchical and imperial binary codes. My finding is that Tilney's Hotel as the transformed space of the Tallis Home is unfortunately still the political space operated by the capitalism failing to embrace the Other. In this point of view the atonement has multilayered meanings including atonement for the love broken by the politics of 'home', the absence of 'home', and the Other excluded from home's violent spatial codes.