Analysis of Briony's potential commitment of crime in Chapter one, Part one

In the first chapter of Atonement, the author reveals the characters of the protagonist Briony by describing her reactions to an affair other than the one that involved her crime. Briony is a unique yet immature girl; her unrealistic fantasies and perfect sense of order are not only fulfilled in her writing but she also likes to decide other people’s lives in real world. The depiction provides readers with a profile of her personalities and thus foreshadows her reasoning in the following irreparable deeds.

Briony’s difference from other people tells her unique mental world, which validates her future unusual behaviour. Her room was the only tidy room upstairs (5). The distinction of her personal space to others’ reveals her inviolable uniqueness. Actually, she was the relative isolation of the Tallis house according to the author. She had lots of secrets in her room that were all well-kept but there was no need for her to do so because “no one wanted to know” about her secrets; they did not “merit hiding” (5). Briony’s detachment from her family members labels her as a distinguished outsider and thus lays the foundation for her unusual deeds.

However, unique as Briony was, she was childish. Her immaturity plays an important role in her later commitment. Mrs. Tallis said that Briony was still that little girl not gone from her mother, from her infancy. Briony’s reliance on her mother to go over her works shows her dependence on others and she could not yet be responsible for all her choices and deeds. In addition, when Briony had already tried to write plays and novels, she did not even know what a melodrama was (8). Her lack of basic knowledge of literary creation is another sign of her immature figure. Briony thought everything from too a simple a perspective. She only “began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution” when she encountered difficulties during rehearsal (16). Her life had been too monotonous that she did not have enough stimulation to grow mature. Her childishness forebodes her commitment in the later chapters because she could not understand the affair between adults.

While she lacked real experience in life, she had an inner world full of wonders. Her imagination pushes her towards her crime. After she learnt that Leon would come to visit in summer, she “burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies” (4). A little news could trigger off her infinite imagination. Moreover, she likes to transfer her imaginary world into words. At the age of eleven when she wrote her first story, Briony realized that “the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told” (6). Nobody was able to disturb or to distract her from her own creation because she was totally lost in her endless imagination that was isolated from the world around her. Even her family realized that she “possessed a strange mind and a facility with words” (6). Her unbridled fantasies again contribute to her crime in the future.

Besides her imagination, Briony’s pursuit of order determines her intolerance to the affair between Robbie and Cecilia. The tidiness of her room, especially the layout of her model farm shows her strict obsession with order. However, she also had an inner sense of order that promoted her to avoid any chaos. When she learnt that the parents of Lola and the twins got divorced, she “did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought” (8). Her indifference to the disordered things like divorce proves her pursuit of order that she did not allow any disarray to distract her. Her superficial understanding of love matters was also shown in the content of her drama. She punished Arabella when she chose an ill-fated love; in contrast, Briony attributed her with a happy ending when Arabella made another choice of her true love (3). Briony had a very clear line between order and disorder and no ambiguity was allowed. Briony’s sense of justice, especially that on love, did not allow her to tolerate the affair between Robbie and Cecilia; her obsession with order played a part in her commitment.

The most devastating factor that leads to Briony’s crime is her habit of imposing her ideas on other people, both in fictional works and in the real world. “Writing stories” gave her “all the pleasures of miniaturization” because “a world could be made” in several pages and a person’s destiny could be determined by a single word (7). Briony liked to manipulate other people’s lives, even though they were only fictional figures in books. However, Briony certainly was not satisfied with imposing her ideas on imaginary people. She enjoyed making decisions for people around her in real life as well. She tried to “guide” Leon “away from his careless succession of girlfriends” and move toward “the right form of wife” of Briony’s own standards (4). In addition, she assigned the roles for Lola and the twins even before they arrived; she had not even thought whether they liked plays or not (12). Her assumption that everyone should think in the same way as she did and her dictatorship of deciding everything for others determined her misdeeds in the future as she listened to no one’s advice but only hers.

Briony did not commit any crime in the first chapter of Atonement but the author provides the readers with a profile of her characters which would later contribute to her commitment. Her uniqueness and immaturity, her fantasy and order and her arbitrary behaviours all foreshadows a Briony that would make an irreparable mistake, guided by those qualities.

*Note: the page numbers in the text might be different because I am using another version of Atonement other than the one assigned.The publictation information:
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. Nan A. Talese, New York: Doubleday, 2001.