In
this essay I shall be examining the socio-cultural
context of The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (1948
- ). Once placed within context, an examination of the
internal worlds of the bereaved children will follow.
Attention is given to events from the perspective of Jack,
the adolescent narrator and an exploration is made of how
the individual interior world of each child fuses into
the others and forms a highly alternative and esoteric
family culture. A subsequent comparison between the
shared psychological network of the children and the
outside physical environment will explore the tensions
between this dysfunctional family and the wider society
from which the children are marginalised. The conclusion
will determine how effective the novel is in its
portrayal of events within the children's mental world as
they endeavour to cope with bereavement in an adult-free
milieu.
The novel opens with a sense of guilt and a feeling of
unhappy self-containment which introduces the prevailing
atmosphere of The Cement Garden. Jack, the
fifteen year-old protagonist, with his masturbatory
habits, lack of personal hygiene and 'attitude' is
arguably fairly typical of a male adolescent. However
McEwan distorts this possible normality by focusing on
elements of physical bodily functions and darker mental
processes which lends the children and the universe they
inhabit the feeling of ordinary actions and responses
becoming sordid, intense and grotesque.
The first sentence of the novel expresses Jack's feelings
of reluctant guilt towards his father's death:
I did not kill my
father, but I sometimes think that I helped him on
his way. (p.9)
McEwan thus catapults
the reader directly into the tormented mental world of
Jack. We then only observe the external world of Jack and
his siblings from his single viewpoint. All is filtered
through his lonely and questionable perception. McEwan
thus leaves it to the reader to analyse the action of the
novel from the filter of Jack's nave, twisted but
prevailing perspective. This creates a sense of the
claustrophobia that pervades the boy's world. The
discomfort that readers feel parallels and prepares them
for Jack's anguished, alienated and contained inner world.
The family, even before the parents' death, is divided
within itself and isolated from other people. Thus Jack's
lonely voice lends the narration an air of obsessive and
unhealthy emphasis on the very factors that create,
generate and sustain the isolated obsessions dominating
this family.
The writer's concentrated narrative makes the cultural
and social location of the family difficult to determine.
We know they are disassociated from mainstream society as
a family unit, but individually they attend work and
school, so what makes them different as a group, and in
what way is the family different from wider society? We
are told that they are a white family living on the
decayed outskirts of an unnamed British city. We are not
told the father's occupation, but we are told that they
had no friends or visitors within the locality. They are
possibly a sunken middle class family who have found
themselves in a bleak and hostile social environment and
so they keep culturally aloof, and socially distant from
it. From the domestic family perspective McEwan creates
the notion of dysfunction and shared mental distress as
he puts each child under the unnaturally intense
microscope of which Jack is the lens.
When the reader steps back from the distracting emphasis
of Jack's gaze it is apparent that much about him is
challenging but relatively normal. He torments his
younger brother Tom, is confused by his feelings for
older sister Julie, he masturbates copiously and does not
get on with his father. He is vulnerable, selfish and
unsure - nothing very unusual about this except his and
the rest of the family's response to the father's death.
Their response to it at an emotional level is
disturbingly identified by a textual silence. Indeed at
no point during the narrative is the family's mode of
bereavement or grieving process discussed. Nor is the
impression given by the writer that it has been addressed
at all - the family simply carry on without Dad. Thus the
family is not only subjected to this unresolved grief but
they remain socially and physically disassociated from
other people against a decaying and desolate cityscape.
The geographical landscape the family inhabit is not
given a specific description but certain aspects of it
are implied. The crumbling garden, and the air of urban
degeneration gives the atmosphere of a post-modern
hotchpotch of weeds, wasteland, modern high rise flats
and dilapidated, dated prefabs - a squalid but diverse if
sketchily drawn environment. There is no sense of
community or continuity, but rather shadowy shops,
schools and services which seem to operate from outside
the family's world. They have no sense of time or place
and have little mention in the text. These allusions to
material services and surrounding are the essential but
barely visible mise-en-scene, which is purely functional
for the characters' existence. Indeed the family could be
living in post second world war austerity Britain, or in
a post nuclear shambles. This largely implied sense of
dereliction reflects the insecurity and desolation that
forms Jack's mindscape following the father's death.
Jack is lonely both as an individual and as a family
member. He appears to have no friends and he is largely
dependent on his sisters, whom he does not really like,
for company. His nightmare (p.26) gives a synchronic
insight into Jack's interior world. At this point in the
novel Jack's father is dead but his mother is still alive.
In his dream he is being followed by a nameless human
presence with an animal-like entity carried in an open
box which the presence wants to show him. Jack is very
afraid of what he might see. The captive animal stinks
and as Jack does not wash he also smells and so a
connection is established between him and the nightmare
entity. One possible interpretation is to infer that Jack
is the animal and like it he is captive within the static
stink of his own environment - to stay is miserable but
to leave is terrifying. Thus the animal reflects the
sense of entrapment and terror which dictates his life
and dominates his mind. This dream sequence is the focal
demonstration of the ennui and frustration that haunts
his mental world.
Conversely one could construe the human presence as a
manifestation of Jack's repressed remorse. The animal is
a captive symbol of the dark grief-driven impulses that
he wants to share with others and so release his own
tensions that the trapped, unnatural animal symbolises.
One can argue that his final incestuous act with his
sister is a perverted catharsis of his pent-up and
confused anxieties in a world where an unnatural nest of
bereaved children construct their own subjective
normality.
There is no one in whom Jack can confide and it is no
accident that McEwan has Jack's mother read him a lecture
on the evils of self-abuse. This only heightens his
anxiety and so makes his behaviour towards her and
everyone else more abhorrent, and thus the behavioural
spiral sharpens and the anxiety level rises. One realises
that the adult world represented by his mother and late
father has never offered him the support that he needs to
become less alienated from his peers and more integrated
into his albeit isolated family. Jack is trapped in a
bulwark of remorse, loneliness, distress and confusion.
Thus he is already mentally debilitated and vulnerable to
the further trauma of his mother's death.
The other children also have no normal model of grieving
processes in which to respond. Therefore it is fear of
the unknown, not love for each other which prompts the
older children to conceal their mother's corpse to avoid
the unknown fate of what they see as a very dark adult
world. However the concealment of her body works on Jack
at a mental, emotional and cognitive level, and impacts
on his brother and sisters in an equally profound and
macabre manner.
Ostensibly, Julie, his seventeen year-old sister, seems
more resilient than Jack. Although we only see her
through Jack's eyes she appears to be both more
authoritative and more equivocal than her brother. She
assumes the parental role so that the younger children
Sue and Tom see her in a maternal role. Tom, the four
year-old youngest child especially sees Julie as a mother
figure, which as will be discussed later, has very
profound consequences for the family. However, despite
their differences Jack and Julie become allies in a
situation wherein they often also become hostile to each
other. Their sense of alienation and fragmentation
perversely draws them together because their unique role
and loneliness literally pushes them together and becomes
their ultimate bond.
The new bereavement now propels Jack into a deeper
journey through his own traumatised psyche. His clear
mental distress prompts the reader to question how
reliable Jack is as a narrator. He is an outsider, even
in his own family, and although his perception is very
subjective he does show a high degree of self awareness.
It is his conscious introspection which persuades or
deceives the reader into somehow believing in Jack's
story and in his anguished mental world. McEwan hints at
Jack's ability to be simultaneously involved and yet
removed as a narrator. This is illustrated in a telling
sequence where Jack bifurcates himself from himself and
so demonstrates that although capable of being spiteful
and cruel he is able to see through his own confusion and
show some neutral insight. Jack's dual narrative role as
that of perpetually distressed youth and occasionally
objective observer. There is a passage in which his
reflection in a mirror becomes a doppelganger for both
sides of his nature. McEwan illustrates this dichotomy:
I stared at my own
image till it began to disassociate itself and
paralyse me with its look. (p.20)
McEwan affords the
reader some clues into Jack's mental state and the
structural purpose it serves within the narrative
framework. Jack is at once the voyeuristic watcher within
the family whose function is to relate the story to the
reader. He is also the occasionally objectionable but
objective family member who stands back and sometimes
invites the reader to judge the common-sense versus the
subjective sides of the story. This is exemplified by
Jack's mental agony as he deliberates over the normality
and morality of his and Julie's actions:
It was not at all
clear to me now why we had put her [his mother's
corpse] in the trunk in the first place. At the time
it had been obvious, to keep the family together. Was
that a good reason? It might have been more
interesting to be apart. Nor could I think whether
what we had done was an ordinary thing to do. (p.81)
As the eldest child
Julie becomes the family head following the mother's
death. Although she is initially more responsible and
level-headed than Jack she is also much less perceptive
and analytical than him. As a surrogate mother Julie is
clearly out of her depth. The focus of her attention is
her demanding four year-old brother Tom, but it is her
responses, not his behaviour, which reflects the inner
world of the children. If the grieving processes had been
unsatisfactory and inadequate following the father's
death, the children's secret internment of their mother
becomes a grotesque parody of the closure procedures
necessary for natural grief.
We cannot enter Julie's world as we only see her through
Jack's eyes, but her mindscape is shown by her actions as
the unhappy immature mother figure. It is interesting
that Julie starts to dress Tom like a little girl before
their mother is dead. Jack challenges Julie on thus issue
and she is unsure and defensive about it. She is equally
confused by her own actions when she starts to make Tom
regress into babyhood because she cannot control him. The
reader can see why Julie does this but she cannot. Sue,
the least featured, quietest and third youngest child, is
the one who wants to tell someone about their mother's
death. It is Jack and Julie, however, who warn her that
such an action would mean them going into an orphanage (p.53).
From this point on Julie takes over as the head of the
home with very disturbing consequences.
Sue becomes even more introverted and bedroom ridden and
Julie quickly tires of Tom's demands. Tom becomes a cross
between a wild child and a baby house pet. Jack withdraws
further into his shadowed onanistic world. Sue retreats
into her bedroom and her books whilst their mother's
corpse decomposes and Julie struggles to run the home on
her own idiosyncratic terms.
Perhaps most disturbing is Derek, Julie's boyfriend's,
impact on the family. By the time Derek enters the
household there is a strong dysfunctional culture in
place. Each character has a critical part to play and
whether a family defender or dissenter they play out
their roles. The tension generated between their interior
lives and external actions have mutated into a unique,
perverted and fragile psycho world that will not tolerate
interference.
Indeed so absorbed is Julie into her world that she does
not realise what she is doing when she introduces Derek
into it. At this point the shared perversity within the
family is so strained that they are unable to define
reality. In this sense they have become the mental
casualties of what they have done. The responses of Jack
and Julie have effaced them as people by replacing them
with their mental state and actions based on it. Jack and
Julie are aware of what they have done but their
understanding is not rooted in any form of reality,
except for Jack's occasional and ephemeral insight into
the situation. They know, for example, what the smell is
but can't admit what it is even to themselves. Only Jack
has fleeting doubts when he asks Julie, 'Do you think
what we did was right?' (p.102). The fabric of their self-deception
is so thin to the outsider that Derek is suspicious quite
quickly. Interestingly Julie wants to get rid of him but
not because of the threat he now poses but because she
fears he will usurp her authority. The preservation of
the esoteric family culture and her place at its head has
over ridden any suspicion that anyone would want to do
anything but join it. Thus fear of Derek's rival
authority is the issue for her, not the fact that he will
betray the family. As she explains to Jack:
He wants to be one
of the family. You know, big smart, daddy. He's
getting on my nerves. (p.122)
The following sequence
which describes the incestuous encounter between brother
and sister is not only intense and graphic but cruelly
ironic because in the past Julie has been the object of
Jack's advances and fantasies but now she seduces Jack.
Her response to Derek's interruption and very reasonable
objection to this encounter is to tell him, 'Actually, it's
none of your business.' (p.124). These words in this
situation are absurd and tragic. They sum up the crucial
amalgam of the nave, the deviant and the grotesque
which makes the novel so deeply disturbing.
In conclusion, The Cement Garden takes four
children who are possibly no different to other children
and puts their individual and developmental features
under close scrutiny so that they appear to be magnified
and distorted even before the death of the father which
starts the action and reactions of the plot. McEwan then
puts the children in an almost impossible position as
they attempt to carry on as usual after the death of both
parents. McEwan sets the action in an anonymous derelict
urban environment which he describes in elliptical terms
so that the minimum effective clues are given to the
reader to visualise the flat and cheerless area in which
the family survives. This landscape reflects the
tenebrous confines of Jack's individual mental world and
the family's collective and tormented minds. Through this
complex filter the reader feels the sadness of the
children's fate and the tragedy of the soulless society
in which such events can happen.
Reference
McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. London. Pan Books. 1978
© Nick Ambler, January 2003
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