The In(de)finite Object of the Gaze: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement with Henry James’s Turn of the Screw

Abstract

This paper dwells on the multiple echoes and points of convergence between Atonement and The Turn of the Screw, a text which has been rather overlooked in the teeming intertextuality crisscrossing McEwan’s novel. Thanks to a sophisticated scenography, the English novelist, just like Henry James, explores both the avidity of the eye and the anxiety it faces in front of what turns out to be an in(de)finite object, the ob-scene that shatters the frame of the scene. Structured around dramatic visual encounters that result in a frenzied escalation, the narrative shows how the fierce determination to protect innocence leads to a crime: the English garden becomes the theatre in which the “romance of the nursery” turns to tragedy. McEwan’s novel, very much like James’s tale, explores the fearful and destructive power of a certainty that too easily wipes away the fogs of doubt; it invites us to think of the spectral not as a marginal phenomenon, but, in the line of “the spectral turn”, as what fractures the word and the gaze. In the wake of James’s tale, the ghostly in McEwan involves the person who lives to tell the story, whether she is engaged in vision or in re-vision. At the point where McEwan seems to part company with James and as the long path to atonement begins, the ghosts continue to unsettle the narrative.