Fiche de révision : Innocence and Guilt in Atonement

📋 Plan du Cours

1. Le plaisir et la déception chez Heaney
2. L’innocence de Briony et ses erreurs
3. La révélation du chapitre onze
4. Emily face à son passé familial
5. Classe sociale et rapports de pouvoir
6. La faute tragique de Briony

📖 1. Le plaisir et la déception chez Heaney

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• glut : “Glut” is a relatively rare word used by Heaney and also by Keats in “Ode on Melancholy”.

★ À maîtriser

• The speaker’s childhood innocence makes the disappointment seem like a real calamity and intensifies the emotional suffering caused by apparently small events. - Heaney

• In Heaney’s poem, tasting the first blackberry brings intense sensual pleasure, thorn pricks add mild pain, and discovering the “rat-grey fungus” turns the experience into undiluted pain.

Compléments

• In “Ode on Melancholy”, Keats uses “aching Pleasure” to present pain and pleasure as inseparable.

• The poem’s ending combines the gloomy rhyme “red / not” with the speaker’s bitter despair: “I always felt like crying It wasn’t fair.” - Heaney

💡 Astuce mémo

La découverte du fruit gâté transforme le plaisir de la cueillette en douleur

📖 2. L’innocence de Briony et ses erreurs

★ À maîtriser

• Briony’s innocence and naivety magnify her disappointment and shape her mistaken interpretation of events.

• Influenced by the letter, Briony interprets the library encounter through her naivety, believes Robbie is a “maniac”, and thinks he is assaulting or raping Lola; her ignorance of adult relationships leads to devastating consequences.

Compléments

• In Atonement, Briony’s childhood disappointment is explored in depth by the adult Briony narrator, who vents her frustration on the nettles and sublimates it into a chymic exploit.

💡 Astuce mémo

L’innocence de Briony enfant s’oppose à la complexité des relations adultes

📖 3. La révélation du chapitre onze

📝 Points essentiels

• At the dinner table, Robbie fears the revelation of the letter in which he used the word “cunt” and the fact that he and Cecilia had sex in the library.

• Although Briony has a letter and the reader expects it to be Robbie’s letter, the twist is that it is the twins’ announcement that they have run away.

💡 Astuce mémo

La lettre attendue de Robbie est remplacée par celle des jumeaux

📖 4. Emily face à son passé familial

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• to weave : “To weave” signifie « tisser »; le cours donne aussi le nom “weaving”, qui signifie « tissage ».

★ À maîtriser

• Emily sees a pattern between being wronged by her sister Hermione as a child and viewing herself as wronged by her husband Jack as an adult.

Compléments

• Emily sees Hermione’s life as imposed upon her own, but the course warns that it is too simplistic to say childhood determines adult life.

• Emily’s childhood feels like a ghost that haunts her, while her ten-year-old self seems tangible and close enough to touch.

• Emily compares her relationship with the past to “shot silk”, an image suggesting a complex weave.

💡 Astuce mémo

Le passé d’Emily est un fantôme qu’elle peut presque toucher

📖 5. Classe sociale et rapports de pouvoir

📝 Points essentiels

• McEwan depicts the social realities of upper-class England in 1935 and the position of women within it.

• When Leon returns, he takes the role of “the master of the house”, snatches the phone from Emily, tells her to sit down, and turns his back to her to speak to his father, leaving her excluded and alone.

📖 6. La faute tragique de Briony

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• hamartia : Hamartia is a fatal flaw connected to a character’s downfall or undoing.

★ À maîtriser

• Briony’s pride in her creative imagination is presented as her fatal flaw; she thinks the adults see her as “a genius, a god”.

• Briony treats life as fiction, imagining herself as both author and character and believing her creative ability gives her special powers.

• Briony’s pride and mistaken accusation against Robbie lead her to ruin his life and leave her tormented by guilt.

Compléments

• Briony congratulates herself on her “wise grasp” of her own ignorance, but the child’s pseudo-maturity hides her failure to understand life beyond the nursery.

• Briony’s choice to call her act a “crime” indicates guilt and acknowledgement of the gravity of her accusation against Robbie.

💡 Astuce mémo

L’orgueil de Briony nourrit son erreur, puis sa culpabilité