Transcending the Text: Briony's Battle for Authorship in Atonement

Indianapolis, IN

Ian McEwan's Atonement presents a meta-level relationship among author, reader, and characters. Tucked between layers of language throughout the novel, the reader discovers evidence of Roland Barthes's theory that an author must figuratively die in order for a reader to inject his or her own meaning into a text. However, instead of focusing on this fatal author-reader relationship, McEwan showcases a variation of this theory in which he appears to indirectly pose the question of how a literary character fits into the authorship dynamic. Extending Barthes's Death of the Author,  McEwan discovers that only one person-either the author or the character-can survive and assert authority over a text when a character composes a novel within a novel. This notion of conquering the author is exhibited throughout the course of Atonement when McEwan's character, Briony Tallis, takes on an authorial voice of her own, and transcends the text in which she is trapped by composing her own novel on McEwan's pages. Although she is a product of McEwan's imagination and linguistic artistry, the aspiring thirteen-year-old writer rebels against her creator by engaging in a battle for equal authorship rights with him. Through her interactions with patriarchal language throughout the novel, Briony is able to formulate her own bold writing style-signaling McEwan's defeat in the fight for authorial legitimacy, and exhibiting the rising importance of female authors in a formerly male-dominated literary canon.