Atonement vs. Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet and Atonement

Romeo and Juliet has always been one of William Shakespeare's most popular and successful plays, even though critics have sometimes dismissed it as an immature or sentimental work. In that respect, Atonement is not sentimental at all but rather grimly realistic, although the love of Ronnie and Cecelia also ends tragically. Both the play and novel have a great deal of seemingly irrational and senseless violence that destroys the lives of the main characters. In Atonement, the violence takes the form of a system that convicts Robbie unjustly of a crime he did not commit, and then gives him a choice of either serving in a war as cannon fodder or staying in jail. Cecilia and Briony also experience the violence of wartime London with regular bombing and endless numbers of badly mangled bodies that flood into the hospitals where they work. In Romeo and Juliet, the violence is the endless feud between the Monatgue's and Capulet's, in which Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation for the death of his friend Mercutio. Great Britain in 1935 was not nearly as repressive and patriarchal as the Italy of the 17th Century which is the setting for Romeo and Juliet. Women had won the right to vote by that time, and were beginning to attend universities or work outside the home, as Cecelia and Briony Tallis did. Unlike Juliet, they were not being forced into arranged marriages contracted by their father, who actually seems indifferent to them.

CONTENTS

TITLE 1

ABSTRACT 2

CONTENTS 3

INTRODUCTION 4

MAIN BODY 5

CONCLUSION 10

RESEARCH JOURNAL 11

WORKS CITED 16

INTRODUCTION

Over 300 years of time separate the settings of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Ian McEwan's Atonement, and naturally the role and status of women changed considerably during that time. Italy in the 17th Century stood much closer in time and culture to the ancient and medieval world where women were the property of their husbands and fathers, marriages were arranged at a young age and individual desires and free choice mattered little in a patriarchal and authoritarian society. Romeo and Juliet insisted on making their personal desires most important, going against the wishes of their families and the beliefs of their culture, although in the end they died because of it. Great Britain in 1935 was an urban, industrialized nation where women had the right to vote and were increasingly working outside the home and attending universities, and they became even more emancipated during the Second World War. Cecilia is a university graduate, for example, who ends up working as a nurse, and her lover Ronnie also graduated from Cambridge, although this was still uncommon for someone from a working class background. He too had aspirations to rise into the professional class and become a physician, and perhaps even to marry Cecilia. Law and society had changed sufficiently by 1935 to permit women and men to make such choices, although Cecilia's family would most certainly have disapproved. Yet women were still not equal to men in 1935, and still possessed less sexual freedom and social and economic power, particularly in a society that was still highly uncomfortable discussing such issues openly. Because of the malicious actions and misinterpretations of a young girl, Robbie is also falsely convicted of rape and sent to prison, and in the end this was the cause not only of his separation from Cecilia but also his death.

MAIN BODY

Romeo and Juliet has always been one of William Shakespeare's most popular and successful plays, even though critics have sometimes dismissed it as an immature or sentimental work. In that respect, Atonement is not sentimental at all but rather grimly realistic, although the love of Ronnie and Cecelia also ends tragically. Shakespeare's play is also an important work of "sexual politics" and the desire of individuals to make a free choice, even if it goes against the will of their family and society (Watts 10). Juliet's father Capulet has the power to turn her into a child bride so his family can merge with the aristocracy, but instead she falls in love with the son of his most hated enemy. No such family feud exists in Atonement, but social class is still important since Cecilia would be marrying beneath her level with Robbie, whose mother was a cleaning lady. Even today, since marriages across class and caste lines are not common, and they were much less so in the 1930s. Like Romeo and Juliet, the attachment between Cecilia and Ronnie was passionate and intense, and in both cases there is no way of knowing if it would have lasted, given the tragic fate that overtook both pairs of lovers.

Both the play and novel have a great deal of seemingly irrational and senseless violence that destroys the lives of the main characters. In Atonement, the violence takes the form of a system that convicts Robbie unjustly of a crime he did not commit, and then gives him a choice of either serving in a war as cannon fodder or staying in jail. Cecilia and Briony also experience the violence of wartime London with regular bombing and endless numbers of badly mangled bodies that flood into the hospitals where they work. In Romeo and Juliet, the violence is the endless feud between the Monatgue's and Capulet's, in which Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation for the death of his friend Mercutio. Shakespeare's play deals with violence as a "masculine construct, and even the definition of masculinity is one of the coordinating topics," since the men are always dueling and brawling in public (Watts 12). In the early modern world of Romeo and Juliet, men still believe that "aggressiveness is a sign of real manliness," and that sexual and physical violence against women was a normal facet of life (Watts 13). Even the elderly Montague and Capulet are eager to join in the public brawls and duels between the families, although when Romeo falls in love with Juliet he tries to become a peacemaker between the families. Nevertheless, the honor code of that society demands that he avenge the death of Mercutio, even though it results in his own exile. In the end, only the deaths of Romeo and Juliet end the feud between Montague and Capulet, and the violent, patriarchal society itself was the real cause of the tragedy.

At age thirteen -- the same as Briony at the beginning of Atonement -- Juliet seems more mature and practical than the sixteen-year-old Romeo, who falls in and out of love quickly. Cecilia and Robbie are older, since they are both university graduates by the time the McEwan's novel opens, but Cecilia is still a virgin while Robbie did not even dare to approach her because her social class was much higher than his. Juliet, in contrast, lives a far more cloistered life than the Tallis sisters, since she is still literally under the control of her father and protected in her virginity by male relatives like Tybalt and the household servants. They would have been within their traditional and customary rights to have killed Romeo on the spot had they found him in her bedroom. In theory at least, as an adult woman in 1935, Cecilia has the right to choose her own husband, even though marriage with Ronnie might have meant a break with her social-climbing and hypocritical family. Free love and personal choice in marriage partners is "historically, a relatively recent phenomena, and more localized geographically than we may at first think," since many cultures had no real concept of it in the past (Watts 16). They believed in arranged marriages, dowries, bride prices and contracts, with women and children as the property of their fathers and husbands. In addition, the nuclear family with both parents employed and living in a middle class suburb is not the traditional family at all, even in the West, but a 20th Century development. In history, romantic love was thought to be based on sexual desires that did not last long, and that marriage was too important an institution to be left to individual choice.

Great Britain in 1935 was not nearly as repressive and patriarchal as the Italy of the 17th Century which is the setting for Romeo and Juliet. Women had won the right to vote by that time, and were beginning to attend universities or work outside the home, as Cecelia and Briony Tallis did. Unlike Juliet, they were not being forced into arranged marriages contracted by their father, who actually seems indifferent to them. Briony also imagines herself becoming a great writer like Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf, which would not have been possible for Juliet even if she had survived and gone on the spend the rest of her life with Romeo. As an adult, Briony will become a famous novelist, if not one of the truly brilliant and inspiring writers of history. Women and men were not fully equal in 1935, and this society was still very sexually repressed and semi-Victorian in its morality. As a thirteen-year-old, Briony knew little about sexuality and also had a morbid imagination. She was narcissistic as well and only slowly came to realize that "other people are as real as you, and only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value" (McEwan 38).

Robbie Turner is the son of a servant whose education at Cambridge was paid for by the Tallis family, and while there he fell in love with Cecilia Tallis. Unlike Romero and Juliet, the two lovers are not from the same social class, and even though the Tallis family lives in a country house like the landed gentry, in reality they made their money in manufacturing. They have a picture of an aristocratic family on the wall which they claim are their ancestors, but no one really knows who they are. Like the Monatgue and Capulet families, the Tallis's are from a commercial background and now aspire to copy the manners of the nobility, but they do not (and cannot) go so far as Capulet's forcing his daughter into an arranged child marriage with the Count Paris in order for his family to join the aristocracy.

Unlike the stern patriarchs in Shakespeare's play, Sir Jack Tallis is a senior civil servant in London who never appears in Atonement at all. His marriage to Emily is a polite fiction and both engage in their own affairs, and hardly have any communication with each other. He will later divorce Emily and end up living with his new wife in a house in Bloomsbury, which was also the neighborhood inhabited by Virginia Woolf and other famous writers of the 1920s and 1930s. In the Tallis household, the women appear to be dominant, especially Cecilia, which was definitely not the case in Romeo and Juliet. Robbie had plans to qualify as a physician, but a tragic fate intervened in the form of Briony Tallis and a false accusation of rape.

Briony is the real villain of the novel, but also its writer, although perhaps her actions against Robbie were really unintended, and she imagines that she will be able to make up for them in the future. This never happens, though, except in her imagination. She did not understand the letter Robbie sent to Cecilia and thought that "something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help" (McEwan 106 -- 7). She imagined that Robbie had raped her sister and that he also raped Lola, so her testimony caused him to be sent to prison. Lola also plays a villainous part by failing to reveal that Paul Marshall raped her and that Robbie was falsely accused. She later marries Marshall because he is a wealthy industrialist who has made great profits from the war, ignoring the fact that he is literally a rapist who should have gone to jail instead of the innocent Robbie. In fact, Robbie would have remained locked up for many years had he not been given the chance to volunteer for the army during the Second World War.

In 1939 when the war begins, Briony attempts to make up for her crime by training as a nurse instead of going to Cambridge University, and by the time of Dunkirk evacuation she is a probationary nurse in London. At the same time, Robbie has been wounded in the battle and was having difficulty finding his way to the evacuation point. Other enlisted men follow him because he is a university graduate and speaks like an officer from a middle or upper-class background, although with his criminal record Robbie would naturally have had no chance of being promoted. Briony imagined that he was finally rescued at Dunkirk and reunited with Cecelia, who was no longer on speaking terms with anyone in the Tallis family. Five years later, in 1944, Briony wrote that she had met both of them, but they did not forgive her. She has also started working on the novel about them while employed in the hospital, but had not yet found a publisher.

At the end of Atonement, Briony is 77 years old and suffering from vascular degeneration that will result in dementia and ultimately death. She is not treated with much compassion by the busy physician, who tells her that it will not be as bad as Alzheimer's disease before calling in the next patient. Briony then reveals that Cecelia and Robbie never met again in real life, and that both died during the Second World War, just as Romeo and Juliet died shortly after being secretly married. She explained that writing a fictional ending in which they lived happily ever after was "a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end" (McEwan 351).

CONCLUSION

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was actually ahead of its time in predicting that the future would consist of free men and women who chose their intimate and romantic attachments based on their own free will, rather than allowing these choices to be made by the authoritarian and patriarchal family. These changes were still in their infancy in the 17th Century, and only became the norm 200 years later as more Western societies became urbanized and industrialized and the size of the middle class increased. This also coincided with the abolition of slavery, serfdom and other forms of un-free labor, and with the rise of the women's rights movement. By 1935, at least in countries like Britain, women had received voting rights and increased opportunities for higher education and employment outside of the domestic sphere, although most of the social, political and economic power was still in the hands of men like Sir Jack Tallis. By the sexual double standards of the time, he was free to desert his family and carry on an affair with another woman, although this would not have been permitted to his wife and daughters. Both Cecilia and Briony Tallis do have chances for education and careers that would not been available to Juliet, and perhaps even to have relationships with people who were not part of their social class, although as Briony's actions against Ronnie revealed, they still suffered from sexual repression and sheer ignorance about sexuality far more than men.

RESEARCH JOURNAL

Gender Roles, Marriage, Sex and Culture in History

There is of course no simple answer to this question since the definition and purpose of marriage have varied greatly over time and across cultures. For most of human history, except in some tribal or matriarchal societies, marriage was an institution that existed to protect, control and exploit women and children by male heads of households. In other words, marriage was literally a paternalistic and patriarchal institution by law and by decree of religious authorities. By Roman law, for example, the head of household (paterfamilias) was the governor of the women, children, slaves and servants under his roof, and controlled their labor and property -- even their physical persons. Real traditional marriages, including those in colonial North America, were arranged by the families of the young people concerned and could not be approve without the permission of the fathers of the bride and groom. They were a way of controlling resources and property, especially land, creating a bind between two families or even settling disputes. Women would bring dowries into the marriage, which was often "the biggest infusion of cash, goods, or land that a man would ever receive," and the male head of household had the use rights to it since married women did not own property (Coontz, 5). Needless to say, women in traditional households performed cooking, cleaning, spinning and childcare, which they learned from their mothers.

In a world where almost all economies were based on agriculture, control and ownership of land meant power, and the male head of household also controlled the labor of women and children under his command. A larger family meant a larger labor supply, although the patriarch was also responsible for finding suitable mates for his daughters (along with dowries) and setting his sons up in some occupation or profession so they could become independent householders. To modern students, all of this might seem shockingly alien and authoritarian, but before recent times, this was the nature of marriage in most cultures in the world -- arranged marriages with no divorce and the father was the lord and master of his domain. Early feminists in the 19th Century who thought that traditional marriage had much in common with slavery were not exaggerating. Perhaps husbands and wives in these arranged marriages would grow to feel affection for each other over time, but it was not essential that they did nor was it the main basis for marriage even in the Western world until 150-200 years ago. Even today, marriages still have these economic features, such as the need for two incomes, although the emotional, sexual and romantic bonds are far more important in modern times than they ever were in the past.

In Europe just 100-200 years ago, the average age of marriage was much higher than in the 1950s and 1960s, while the birth rate had been in decline for over 100 years. Young men were unable to leave their parents household and marry until they were in a position to set up their own households, and poor men were often not able to do this at all, or not until they were in their late-20s and early-30s. In North America, Canada, Australia and other colonies, where land was cheap and abundant for white males, the age of marriage was lower than in Europe and family sizes lower because men were better able to establish their own households sooner, and in larger numbers. Therefore the entire cult of domesticity in the postwar period and the Baby Boom was actually exceptional and an aberration, not at all the historical norm (Coontz 4).

By law, the age of marriage in the past was also much lower than today (often age 11 or12), to allow for arranged marriages between older men and prepubescent girls, and in general women were usually younger than their husbands -- even much younger in the case of older widowers. Such arranged marriages were really engagements and not consummated until the young woman reached puberty, but they indicate a fundamentally different concept of marriage from one based on love and the free choice of two people. That simply was not the case at all in most times and places, and marriage was more of an economic arrangement -- or even a political and military one in the case of the upper classes, royalty and aristocracies.

In China, which still has a one-child-per-family policy, ultrasound is used to detect the gender of the fetus, and because sons have always been far more valued than daughters, the girls are being aborted in larger numbers. Indeed, this is also a problem in South Korea and other Asian countries, but in China, boys now outnumber girls by 117 to 100 (Coontz 3). In other industrialized countries, however, like Germany, Italy and Japan, the main concern of governments today is that not enough children are being born to even reach the level of the replacement rate. These are all modern (or postmodern) problems, because in the past women died younger than men due to complications of childbirth, and most people did not even live to age 60.