“OVIDIUS” UNIVERSITY – FACULTY OF LETTERS

Department of English Language and Literature

BACHELOR THESIS

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE IN IAN

MCEWAN’S NOVEL “THE CEMENT GARDEN”

Author:

Supervisor:

CONSTANTA, 2018
Declaration

I hereby declare that this bachelor thesis, entitled “Childhood and adolescence in Ian McEwan’s

novel “The cement garden””, is a result of my own work and that I used only the cited sources.

Name and Signature:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, PhDr…………….., not only for his patience and time, but

also for his guidance and valuable advice which were essential to the completion of this work.
ABSTRACT

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to focus on Ian McEwan’s novel “The Cement Garden”,

concerning the theme of childhood and adolescence. It attempts to compare and contrast the

dominant themes and narrative strategies the author explores and employs in these novel,

focusing on the theme of childhood and adolescence.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Childhood and adolescence as a theme in english literature

3. Ian Mcewan´s works and their context

4. The cement garden

4.1.Introduction

4.2.Plot

4.3.Characters – an analysis

4.4. The overall atmosphere of the novel

4.5.Family background as the source of conflicts

4.6.The imposed order vs. Collapse of norms

4.7.Childhood – adolescence transition period, loss of innocence

5. Conclusion

6. Bibliography
 1. INTRODUCTION

Ian McEwan is an author, who certainly should not be put into one category of writers, as

the topics and his literary style change with almost every piece of his work. At the beginning of

his career, he gained the nickname “Ian Macabre” owing to his choice of topics including

murder, death, rape, violence or incest, and his depiction of them as something ordinary.

McEwan sees the motives for writing his shocking first stories caused by his childhood

introversion and withdrawnness. “Like a man who had been alone too long, [his characters] had

much to tell” (Mother Tongue).

According to Groes, the early McEwan’s work forms an intricate part of the entire oeuvre

and an important foundation without which the later work could not have emerged. It also

contains many of the themes and obsessions that he continues to explore, in a more subtle and

refined way, in the later works (Groes). Naturally, McEwan’s writing style has developed and

become less shocking and directed more to the problems of contemporary society. Even though,

the range of his topics is considerable, some of them seem to be McEwan’s favourite, recurring

in more of his books. One of these is the theme of childhood and adolescence.

Since McEwan has undergone significant changes throughout his literary career, so has

his approach to the theme and to the child and adolescent characters of his books. For the

demonstration of these changes, I chose to write about the dark and gloomy The Cement Garden

(published 1978). The novel represents the macabre beginnings of McEwan’s work. It portrays

children as unhappy victims of a dysfunctional family, isolated from the outside world.

The thesis is divided into five main chapters. The introduction is followed by the chapter, which

briefly summarizes the occurrence of the theme of a child, childhood, adolescence and
upbringing within English and American literature. The next parts are devoted to the novel

examined and the treatment of the established topic within it. These chapters are dived in: an

introduction of the novel, where a family background is outlined, a brief summary of the plot and

an analysis of the characters. I’m discussing about the overall atmosphere of the novel, the

family background as the source of conflicts, about the transition period that comes between

childhood and adolescence. The last chapter of the thesis concludes the outcomes of the previous

parts .
 2. CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE AS A THEME IN ENGLISH

LITERATURE

The childhood as a term is hard to define, mainly from the perspective of its duration.

Georgieva claims that psychologists and Children’s Studies specialists agreed that “childhood”

refers to a set of experiences and behaviour, characteristic of the earlier part of our lives, meant

to prepare us for adulthood and active life (Georgieva). The way the topic is represented in

literature depends on changes in society and the conception of childhood itself during different

time periods. Certainly, the understanding of childhood varies by class, gender, time and region.

Children have been appearing in literature often and for a long time; first significant

examples can be seen in Elizabethan lyrics or in the work by Dryden and Pope. However, as a

real and self-reliant theme, childhood arose with the novel and the Romantic Period. During the

first half of the eighteen century, children were still perceived as unimportant and useless

versions of adults, but in the second half of the century, the common opinion had changed, and

the interest in children rapidly increased.

The Romantic writers were influenced by Rousseau, who had promoted his belief that

children were originally innocent and important by themselves, not merely as miniature adults

(Williams 212). In his poems, William Wordsworth praised mostly the communion between

children and nature. For William Blake, the period of childhood represented innocence, although

children lost it very quickly, while interacting with adults. Generally, it was believed that

childhood was a celebration of pure mind and soul, imagination, sensibility and inborn goodness.

Georgieva remarks that soon, childhood became a favourite theme of the sentimental novel and
the poverty and misfortunes of guiltless, insightful and virtuous children were an object of

considerable import and frequent discussion in the works of many writers (Georgieva). Whereas

the Romantic poets portrayed children in an optimistic background, Dickens and other novelists

were mainly focused on the cruelty suffered by the kids from urban England. According to

Coveney, “the first novel in the language with its true centre of focus on a child” (127) is Oliver

Twist. Dickens offered a detailed picture of contemporary society through the eyes of the

children in more of his novels. He could be considered a typical representative of the Victorian

novelists.

Women writers such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, among others, tried to depict

sexual discrimination, which was customary at that time. Jane Eyre, from the book of the same

name, or Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss, had to struggle a lot to assert themselves

within society. And yet, for all their hardships, children of both genders were generally perceived

as being infinitely happier than their elders. Almost one hundred years after the publication of

Emile, George Eliot depicted childhood in the same idyllic and nostalgic terms as Rousseau, as

Williams observes (213).

The second half of Victoria’s reign brought many social reforms and spread of education.

Therefore, more books intended for children were produced. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and Peter Pan written by J.M. Barrie, both

represented the mood of that era, when adults longed to get back to carefree young age. An

important representative of children’s literature from the United States was Mark Twain. In his

books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the children are showed as happy by their disposition,

but struggling with restrictions of society.

 In the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud influenced authors by stressing the importance

of infantile sexuality and Oedipal impulses. By consequent removal of the Victorian taboos, the

child/adolescent in fiction became more complex, realistic and less lovable (Williams 214). For

example, Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a

Young Man, reflected the awakening of sexual desires, and the latter also the Oedipal complex

and its influence on the development of a child.

Post-war literature portrayed children and adolescents of various kinds who were very

often the narrators of their own stories. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger can serve as an

example. Poems from that time period depicted the children suffering during the war. Moreover,

a new kind of books emerged – personal diaries, written by the children themselves (The Diary

of Anne Frank).

The twentieth century is also the period when Ian McEwan wrote his first works. During

the seventies, he published two collections of short stories, and his first novel, The Cement

Garden, where childhood and adolescence play a huge part. The novel is often compared by

critics to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In the dystopian story, the children also struggle to

establish their own rules in a place without any grown-up authority. During his literary career,

McEwan’s attitude to children has undergone a significant change. Byrnes says that babies and

children appear in his short stories as remote, vulnerable and victimised (191). That applies to the

portrayal of the siblings from The Cement Garden as well. Since then, a child is perceived more

as a promise of redemption in McEwan’s work (The Child in Time) and childhood as a period of

endless fun (The Daydreamer).

The study of childhood in literature continues up to the present time. Nowadays, children

are seen as important predecessors of adults. They are, and probably will be, the subjects of
many books and researches. The history of childhood as a literary topic is suitably summarized

by Georgieva:

Today, childhood is seen as essential for the critical understanding of the literary

production of the nineteenth century and the Victorian period. In addition, the nineteenth

and the twentieth centuries saw the steady emergence of a real literature for children,

either for their instruction or entertainment. Thus, the child became either the central

subject or object of plethora of writings since the eighteenth century (Georgieva).

 3. IAN MCEWAN´S WORKS AND THEIR CONTEXT

As its title suggests, this section should provide basic information about Ian McEwan’s

literary career with the emphasis on the mentioned novel that I will later discuss, as well as on

the context within his writing.

There is no doubt that in his third decade of writing, Ian McEwan has established himself as

one of the “most accomplished, and most controversial, writers of his generation” (Ryan 203).

This writer, who entered British literary scene in the mid-1970s with a collection of short stories,

First Love, Last Rites (1975), has been highly praised for his unique, precise prose style, yet

considered to be rather shocking or even morbid for his obsession with obscenity and the

macabre, “dissecting his characters with the clinic precision of a pathologist” and therefore

“repeatedly running the risk of antagonizing or offending his readers, and of attracting the charge

of compliance with everything from which he should recoil” (Ryan 203). This characteristic well

corresponds to the rather gloomy tone of his first piece of a full-length fiction I will later take a

closer look on, The Cement Garden (1978), which was well received both by critics and the

reading public.

In an interview from 1985 McEwan himself points out he “had been labelled as the

chronicler of comically exaggerated psychopathic states of mind or of adolescent anxiety, snot

and pimples” (Malcolm 5) – it becomes apparent that the author himself was not particularly

happy about this label. As a consequence of that, even though at the beginning of his career his

works featured various taboo or otherwise shocking sexual practises, so far the dark, perverted

and cruel McEwan’s disquieting themes have made way for more introspective human dramas in
his later works. Yet within this context it does not necessarily mean that his writing would suffer

any damage either in terms of its quality or its popularity.

However, according to many critics, although in the following years McEwan produced

several novels wreathed with the most prestigious awards, such as the longed-for Booker Prize

for Amsterdam (1998), it would seem as if some of his writings, particularly the novels written in

the late 1990’s, had lost its attractive features, mainly the previous originality so typical for his

earlier works such as The Comfort of Strangers (1981) or The Child in Time (1987). Malcolm

describes the period of “fumble” as “(the author‟s) moving in a different direction from the one

sketched out in the received wisdom of 1994” (6). But then McEwan came up with his novel,

which will be later also put under discussion, Atonement (2001), and which – from the point of

view of many reviewers and critics – can be regarded as a turning point in his career as well as

an evidence of McEwan‟s literary geniality.

As Malcolm points out, “one does not know what he (McEwan) will do next” (19): whether

it is the exploration of a terrorist menace in Saturday (2005), the conflict between the Victorian

prejudices and the forthcoming sexual revolution of the early1960‟s in On Chesil Beach (2007),

or the theme of climate change in his latest novel Solar (2010). In this sense, Ian McEwan can be

seen as a literary classic with an extraordinary sense of subliminal stress intensity as well as his

characters‟ psychology, and his contribution not only to the English literature remains of great

importance.
 4. THE CEMENT GARDEN

4.1. INTRODUCTION

In 1978, Ian McEwan published his first novel The Cement Garden. The book is gloomy

by its atmosphere and McEwan shocked his readers in many ways, for instance by a detailed

description of a corpse, its rotten smell pervading the whole house, or by leading his young

characters into incest. Although the novel seems to be a very personal story, Jack, the narrator, is

somehow detached. Even though he describes everything in details, he usually does not comment

or expresses opinions of his own. The language is mostly simple, as the language of an

adolescent should be, but frequent examples of complicated structures and sophisticated

vocabulary such as “weary admonition” occur, as Malcolm points out (32). Even though

McEwan is precise in describing the susceptibilities and sheer awkwardness of an apathetic

teenager, he himself admits that his narrative hovers ambiguously between an adolescent

consciousness and that of an adult (Williams 218). Since Jack’s age, at the time he writes the

story, is unknown, the reader cannot be sure if the story is told by a teenager or retrospectively

by a grown-up Jack.

The tragedy of the whole story is deep-rooted in the fact that the family is highly

dysfunctional. At the beginning, everyone is bothered by a pedantic father. Later, after the deaths

of both parents the household lacks any kind of rules. Neither of these circumstances allows the

family to function well, the siblings are irretrievably affected and their story heads towards

catastrophe.

McEwan himself lived under the influence of a domineering parent. In his piece Mother

Tongue, McEwan confesses his own inability to confront his father. He rather saved all the
darker thoughts for his fiction, where fathers are not presented kindly. Especially the one in The

Cement Garden, who needed to have everything under control and without any protests. Owing

to his superiority and unkind behaviour, his children have no respect and no feelings for him.

The main narrator, fifteen-year-old Jack, even describes the death of his father as an insignificant

event for his story and whenever Jack mentions him, it is done with scorn. “He was a frail,

irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his

death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our

disposal” (13). Furthermore, when he sees his father lying dead in the “cement garden”, Jack

does not express any emotion. He stares at the dead body for a while, then smoothes away his

impression from the fresh concrete. Jack metaphorically erases and thereby appropriates the

inscription of his father’s patriarchal power (Wells 35). By this act, he determines himself as the

new head of the family.

On the contrary, the Mother from The Cement Garden is depicted as a submissive, calm

and loving person. She devotes all her time to housework and taking care of her children. Even

though Jack goes through an adolescent revolt and thus does not always treat his mother well, he

has some pleasant memories of her.

When I was eight years old I came home from school one morning pretending to be

seriously ill. My mother indulged me. She put me into my pajamas, carried me to the sofa

in the living room and wrapped me in a blanket. She knew I had come home to

monopolize her while my father and two sisters were out of the house. Perhaps she was

glad to have someone at home with her during the day (31).

McEwan developed a romantic notion that if the spirit of women was liberated, the world would

be healed. His female characters became the repository of all the goodness that men fell short of
(Mother Tongue). Therefore, Jack’s mother seems to be an opposite of the father’s bad character

and the children have feelings only for her.

Even though the parents from The Cement Garden do not act ideally, they are important

as role models for their children. After they both die, the siblings live practically without rules.

When they come to realize it is not functioning well, they subconsciously recreate the family by

taking over their parents’ roles. Unfortunately, their immature personalities are not prepared yet

to act as grown-ups. After getting as far as having sexual intercourse, an intervention from the

outside has to come and return the children back to reality.

Each of the children is in a different stage of childhood or adolescence. The youngest

one, Tom, is still a child and later he regresses back into babyhood. Sue is getting into puberty.

She is a quiet withdrawn girl, who escapes from reality by reading books, mostly about girls of

her age, living better then Sue. Jack already is an adolescent and demonstrates many features of

pubertal behaviour – mostly the negative ones as rejection of authorities, general resistance or

self-obsession. Julie, the oldest of the siblings, is on the threshold of adulthood. She attempts to

act as a grown-up by smoking cigarettes, dating an older man and later by assumption of the

mother role. This chapter of the thesis aims to profile all the siblings through the detailed

description of the two male representatives. Tom is probably the most peculiar character of the

book, constantly trying to find peace in changing his personality. Jack as the narrator is the most

important, for the readers see the whole story through his eyes.
 4.2 PLOT

The story takes place during a hot summer of a non-specified year and it revolves around

a family of six members living in a huge old house in the middle of a gradually abandoned area.

The family is isolated not only by their location, but also socially. They do not have any relatives

or family friends. “There was an unspoken family rule that none of us ever brought friends

home,” reveals the narrator, Jack (26). According to Williams, “the greyness of the prose, its

almost total lack of imagery, and the absence of cultural and historical reference points all serve

to heighten our perception of the drabness and emptiness of an existence seemingly outside time

and society” (220). The macabre atmosphere is completed by the formerly cherished garden,

now covered in cement.

Both the parents suffer from serious health problems. Soon after the sudden death of the

father, the mother is confined to bed. Her illness is not getting better even though she constantly

assures her children that she will be better and their “old patterns re-established” (50). The

siblings quite quickly adapt themselves and successfully keep the household running.

Unfortunately, a few days after Jack’s fifteenth birthday, the mother dies too. The children leave

her body in her bedroom for several days, unsure what to do. Afraid of being separated and put

into custody, they decide to bury their mother by themselves and not to tell anyone. However, it

is impossible to dig outside without being noticed. Jack comes up with the idea to bury the

mother in a trunk in their big cellar, and cover the body with cement. The first part of the book

ends with this morbid scene and foreshadows the consequences of the children left alone.

Without their mother’s moral guidelines, the children quickly lose the sense of routine,

self-responsibility and motivation to communicate with the world outside their house. Each of

them copes with the new situation differently, mostly by trying to escape the reality. The
narrator, now fifteen-year-old Jack, who had started to deny personal hygiene even before his

mother died, now loses interest in everything, except himself and his body. Jack’s regular day

consists of sleeping, masturbating and staring at himself in mirrors. The thirteen-year-old Sue is

most of the time immersed in reading novels or she dreams over travel books. She also regularly

writes letters to her mum, describing how the siblings cope without her. The youngest brother

Tom all of a sudden confesses his wish not to be a boy anymore. With the help of his sisters, he

begins to dress himself as a girl. Moreover, he seeks a substitute for the dead mother and finds it

in Julie. As the oldest one, Julie takes over the responsibilities but sometimes, too certain of her

authority, she becomes quite remote from her siblings. Julie denies the mother role at first, but

she succumbs soon and becomes the new mum of the family.

The days seems to blend, Jack is not able to tell the date or what has happened the days

before. The siblings live in complete passivity. “[...] the house seemed to have fallen asleep”

(82). Their apathy is finally interrupted by a new member from outside – Julie’s older boyfriend

Derek. When she invites him over, they finally clean up the house, cook a solid meal and begin

to live within rules again. Derek evidently expects some respect from the children. However, no

one, except Sue, who is exaggeratedly nice to him, seems to accept Derek as an authority. Jack is

jealous and threatened by another man and Tom seems to care only about his new “mum”.

Moreover, when Julie finds out Derek is a mama’s boy, she begins to avoid him, and thus he

loses the power completely. He no longer corresponds to the dominant male behaviour Julie is

used to and expects from a man. Therefore, she does not allow Derek to adopt the role of the

father and metaphorically refuses the help from outside. Instead, Julie immerses herself into the

mother role and under her care Tom regresses into babyhood and pretends to be a toddler.
 Meanwhile the cement trunk starts to crack and strange smell is blowing around the

house. The children try to convince curious Derek that there is a dog buried in the cellar, but he

does not believe them and is angry that they constantly lie to him. His toleration reaches its limit

when he catches Julie naked in bed with her brother. Derek is furious and decides to find out

what really is buried in the trunk.

According to Malcolm, this story is a frightening image of human potential. He does not

see the children as evil, but as different from what society and readers are used to and consider

normal and moral (36), which is proved by Derek’s reaction. He calls the siblings sick and brings

the only possible solution – law to the house. While Julie and Jack continue in making love, Sue

informs them that Derek is smashing up the cement coffin, metaphorically, breaking up their

private world. The whole story ends while all the siblings are sitting in Julie’s room together,

talking, remembering their mother and later peacefully falling asleep. After some time, they are

woken up by the lights of police cars.

4.3. CHARACTERS – AN ANALYSIS

Almost all the novels and stories in Ian McEwan’s rich writing career are connected by one

sharing thing which completely changes the stories and their plots. It is the dark atmosphere and the

premonition which accompany the reader through the whole story. “It is an atmosphere of stillness,

a paralyzed sterility disguised as seeming peacefulness which evokes an evil foreboding in the

reader that something terrible is about to happen that will ruin or completely change the characters’

lives, probably for the worse.” (Chalupský, p. 2) Simply said, there is always someone or something

that suddenly appears and alters the life of the main character and his or her family members. The

mood of the novel The Cement Garden is no exception.

The Cement Garden written in 1978 was the first novel published after two collections of

short stories and immediately caused a scandal. Despite the author being called a master of

“short, sharp shock” (Williams, p.217) due to his previous collections of short stories, this

novel was something the reader of the late 1970s did not expect. The novel offers us an

insight into a life of an urban family with four children. From the very beginning it is

obvious that the family relationships do not work very well. We are faced up to the family

in which incestuous topic is introduced, the family with perverted values, and last but not

least, the theme of death connects all the events from the beginning to the end. According

to the correspondent of The Guardian, William Sutcliffe, within the first ten pages of the

story the reader is given:

An object lesson in the art of exposition bringing alive and complex set

of relationships within a six-person family, while at the same time being

filled with event (the death of a father, vaguely incestuous sibling

games, and the protagonist’s first ejaculation), and giving voice to a

protagonist about whom the reader wants to know more.

(http://books.guardian.co.uk/)
First the father, later on the mother dies and all the children are left on their own with the

outer world behind. Julie, Jack, Sue, and Tom are introduced to us as well as their

characters, moods, thoughts, strengths, weaknesses and revolts. McEwan describes all the

elements mentioned with the emphasis to the details and analyses the novel’s heroes and

heroines in his own way. We learn how the children, who were not used to be without their

parents, particularly their mother, bear up against the world of adults, mainly the oldest

ones, Julie and Jack. This story, however, is not the “happy end” sort of book, not even the

plot is affirmative.

The characteristic element of this novel is the usage of a first-person narrative, which is not

unusual in other fictions. Here, however, the narrator is a fifteen year old boy, called Jack,

whose greatest wish is to be an independent adult man. It was undoubtedly a difficult task

for the writer who mainly wanted to attract the adult readers, and not only teenagers. We

witness the journey of the boy through his mind and psyche, which is obviously

traumatised be the events of both parents’ death, even if he pretends the lack of interest.

Ostensibly, Jack tries to tell us the story from the position of an adult man, but due to the

fact he is not the grown-up the reader might doubt about his reliability as a narrator. His

dubiousness is expressed in the situation he seemingly tries to avoid the responsible

position of the narrator. To separate himself from the reality he looks in the mirror which

sometimes gives him the feeling as observing somebody else:

 I frequently stared at myself in mirrors, sometimes for as long as an

hour. One morning, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I was

searching in the gloom of our huge hallway for my shoes when I

glimpsed myself in a full-length mirror which leaned against the wall.

[...] Coloured light through the stained glass above the front door

illuminated from behind stray fibres of my hair. The yellowish

semidarkness obscured the humps and pits of my complexion. I felt

noble and unique. I stared at my own image till it began to dissociate

itself and paralyse me with its look. It receded and returned to me with

each beat of my pulse and the dark halo throbbed above its head and

shoulders. (McEwan, p.21-22)

From the literary point of view, Jack is, undoubtedly, an example of a homodiegetic

narrator. The text itself fully correlates with the narration and gives us the proof that the

narrator experiences the events directly. It also should be introduced as the story of “quasi

initiation”, not only Jack’s but also his two sisters’, which I understand that McEwan does

not try to transform the characters utterly, but that he wants to let them to enter the adult

world and to leave it defeated, being aware they are not ready for it yet.

Following the postmodern principles, saying the possible minimum about irrelevant

matters or events, the setting, time and the role of the family in the outer world is

something the adolescent narrator does not mention. We have only bare clues about all
these things. Due to Jack’s information we know the story takes place in the suburb which

is about to be torn down and slowly but surely being replaced by some modern buildings,

probably office blocks or blocks of flats. Therefore we should assume that the story is

enacted in the 1970s when the great building boom occurred:

As I walked up our street I noticed suddenly how different it looked. It

was hardly a street at all, it was a road across an almost empty junk-

yard. There were only two other houses left standing apart from ours.

Ahead of me a group of workmen stood round a builders’ lorry

preparing to go home. [...] All that was left of the prefabs were the big

slabs of the foundations. (McEwan, p.123)

Not only the decadent surroundings, where the shops and schools seem to be unimportant,

but also the house and the garden, which is intended to be covered by the concrete, inform

us about the uneasiness within the family. In fact, the narrator shares only a little about the

house’s or the garden’s organisation or size as well as about the family relationship.

According to the psychologists a family is the core of the society. It is a family that must

function, and then the society would work well. This family, as, mentioned, seems not to

fulfil its role properly. Despite the fact that all the members meet the outer world, parents

go to work and children attend school, they are rather solitary kind of people. Children

seem to have no friends at school, they are dependent on each other and their parents, the

wider society is something the whole family seems to be marginalised from:

 No one ever came to visit us. Neither my mother nor my father when he

was alive had any real friends outside the family. They were both only

children, and all my grandparents were dead. My mother had distant

relatives in Ireland whom she had not seen since she was a child. Tom

had a couple of friends he sometimes played with in the street, but we

never let him bring them into the house. There was not even a milkman

in our road now. As far as I could remember, the last people to visit the

house had been the ambulance men who took my father away. (ibid. 23)

At the time this novel was written most of the families had their own fixed hierarchy where

the members acted according their given roles. These thoughts still partly persist until these

days and hence, from the psychological point of view, each person in a family has its exact

role. Mother represents the “housewife”, who looks after the house, and the “emotional

leader”, who holds the family together and also forms merely positive inner atmosphere

among all the members. Adolescents expect that she would carter to an emotional harmony

that she would be kind, efficient, optimistic, always willing to help. Father is understood as

someone who has a role of the “breadwinner”, as an “instrumental leader” who rather

focuses on reaching the whole family’s goals. Teenagers demand their father to be a skilled

organiser of the family life, advisor, the emotional support for the members and largely

they want to see him in the position of mother’s helper, not only with the housework but

also with the children’s education. Friendliness, courage, faithfulness, optimism,

 deliberation and the suitable strictness are the qualities admired. Son, positively influenced

by the father can easily fulfil his own “man’s role”. Observing his father he imitates the

relationships to other women, not only in the family but also in the outer world. He will

probably look for his female partner similar to his mother. This is even emphasized due to

kind, supportive and loving family atmosphere where the gratuity outweighs the

punishment and where there is the father’s interest. Daughter, on the other hand, identifies

with her mother; a kind of “women’s bondage” appears here but only if the mother is

positively accepted by the father. If not, the daughter tends to identify with her dominant

father and later on she projects her regained habits onto her own relationships. The men in

the family also escalate the daughter’s, sister’s, self-confidence as a woman. They set her

the “male mirror” and she is able to practise all the female tricks on them. The supportive

father often becomes the model for choosing her male partners. Adolescents evaluate their

family according to the mutual cooperation among all the family members. The more the

teenager is aware of his or her family position the less hostility and intolerance he or she

shows. (Čačka, p. 305-323)

Small children, four or five year old, differ from the adolescents in the way that they are

influenced by their milieu more. On the contrary to the almost grown-ups, who are partly “out of the

nest”, they are not able to look after themselves and the sentimental peace among parents and them

is one of the requirements of a healthy mental development. As well as teenagers small children

tend to identify with the parent of the same sex, they imitate the parent unwillingly but also

knowingly. According to Sigmund Freud, this is the age when the child learns to accept his or her

sexual role and the desire for the parent of the opposite sex appears here, too. It is the time when the

Oedipus or Electra’s complexes occur:

 The Oedipus complex in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a stage of

psychosexual development in childhood where children of both sexes

regard their father as an adversary and competitor for the exclusive love

of their mother. Freud considered the successful resolution of the

Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles and

identity.

The Electra complex is a concept found in Psychoanalytic theory that

attempts to address issues of female development. Freud referred to it as

the "feminine Oedipus attitude" in his own writings. It was later

renamed the "Electra complex" by his contemporary Carl Jung.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/)

Still talking about small children, the role of the father at this age is approbatory and

streamlining. He should also be the punishing authority, but mainly he teaches the child to

understand norms and rules of the society. Mother, on the contrary, is the one who protects,

hugs, deplores, and develops friendly relations to other people. To sum it up there should

be said: “The father leads to the society and the mother to the people.” (Čačka, p.88)

All the members of this white, lower middle-class family are rather socially aloof, the

atmosphere of this estate is distressing. The parents never offer their children the
opportunity to become less alienated from the others and to get more involved into the

outer world. McEwan gives us the access to the lives of these people “as he puts each child

under the unnaturally intense microscope of which Jack is the lens.” (http://www.literature-

study-online.com/) The way the adolescent narrator shares his thoughts and views with the

reader is unusual. Much information that an adult reader should be interested in is left

unsaid. For example, we do not know exactly how old the parents and some of the children

are, where they work, go to school or what disease killed the mother. It could be a result of

Jack’s way of thinking which influences his narration. Sharing the possible minimum of

information about their lives Jack could be compared to any other teenagers. According to

the developmental psychology teenagers experience the feelings of insecurity and they are

in the constant fight not only with the others but also with themselves. It is caused by the

fact that they are excluded from the children’s world but are not included to the adult’s

world yet. They rumble between these two life’s periods waiting for a hint but all they need

is the surrounding’s patience and understanding. An example of Jack’s inner fight

connected with the feeling of embarrassment appears when two workmen come to their

house with some cement, “I stood up and held the comic out of sight. I wished I had been

reading the racing page of my father’s paper, or the football results.” (McEwan, p.9) Lack

of speech, sharing any of their feelings with parents and avoiding all responsibilities give a

true picture of teenagers, too. Jack, however, affects the reader of his hostility not only

towards his own family but also to the whole world. Typical teenagers share as much as

possible with their peers but Jack, as well as his other siblings, does not. He seems to be

letargic, apathetic, unemotional, and unsocial. He, as a hero, seems to be the anti-hero at

the end and invites compassion.

To be the hero means, among others, to be an ordinary man, who is pure and prevails all

the difficulties, despite fighting against the odds. Each hero also has a villain, a foe, who

tries to defeat him. The anti-hero, on the other hand, does not necessary have to be a

villain, but has some of his features. What is more, some of the readers should sympathize

with him as it should be somebody with noble goals which are usually tried to be reached

by villain-like methods. “Also, an anti-hero is someone who although is the protagonist of

the story, shows traits which are in contrast to those of the traditional hero, such as

cowardice.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/) Considering Jack is only fifteen, a question about the

children’s purity comes up to our minds. Where has the ideal of the Rousseau’s youth

gone? Comparing Rousseau’s Émile to Jack would be a very interesting task as they both

grow up in different countries, therefore cultures, times, conditions. According to Rousseau

the aim of education is to learn how to live, and this is accomplished by following a

guardian who can point the way to good living. (http://en.wikipedia.org/) Émile has

somebody to look up to, somebody who looks after him, not so Jack. Émile is educated to

cooperate with the people, not so Jack. Émile is the youth who in his fifteenth certainly

knows how to behave and no temptations cannot harm him, not so Jack. It is obvious that

Jack, despite trying to prove that he is the grown-up, reminds totally unprepared for the

role within the society.

Being brought by the parents, at least a little, Jack is able to obey the general rules.

Nevertheless, the break-point in his life, and the other siblings’ lives, is the successive
death of both his parents. As the book is separated into two parts, the author devoted the

whole first part to a description of the sudden death of the father and to the whole “dying

process” of the mother. The father’s partial disability and the consciousness of his

weakness turn his manners and behaviour on the level of fury and anger. Moreover, he is

aware of the fact that nobody looks up to him. His oldest son, Jack, symbolizes the threat

for his family status and therefore he does not like him very much. Not always, however, is

the hate mutual. Jack, the one who forms his identity, likes some of the father’s manners

and sometimes looks up to his manly behaviour. Moreover, a kind of cooperation and male

bondage occurs time to time, too:

My father counted them (the paper sacks of cement), looked at his

clipboard and said, “Fifteen.” The two men grunted. I liked this kind of

talk. I too said to myself, “Fifteen.” [...] Apart from his infrequent, terse

instructions we said nothing. I was pleased that we knew exactly what

we were doing and what the other was thinking that we did not need to

speak. For once I felt at ease with him.” (McEwan, p.10, 17)

It is not only Jack but also Tom who the father “competes” with. At this point it is not

because of the family status, Tom seems to be an emulator in his eyes:

 Tom was scared of his father and kept well behind me. Julie had told me

recently that now Father was a semi-invalid he would compete with

Tom for Mother’s attention. [...] So simple, so bizarre, a small boy and a

grown man competing. [...] And he was strict with Tom, always going

on at him in a needling sort of way. He used Mother against Tom much

as he used his pipe against her. “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” or

“Sit up straight when your mother is talking to you.” She took all this in

silence. If Father then left the room she would smile briefly at Tom or

tidy his hair with her fingers. (ibid, 13)

Nevertheless, the “I-narrator” was so “kind” and donated the whole first chapter in

memory of his father. The story itself, and the first chapter, starts with the words: “I did not

kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.” (ibid, p.9) Is this note a

kind of regret about his father’s death or just a flat, unemotional reaction to an unexpected

event which occured? Is it a demonstration of a typical teenage behaviour? Even if Jack

knew he should not provoke his father, not to talk back, not to be nasty, as the father was

advised to relax and not to get angry, he did everything to do so. Although being aware of

the father’s weak health, he does not help him much with pulling out the full buckets of

cement from the cellar window on an extremely hot day. He wants his father to work

exactly the same way he does and does not give him any free time to have a rest. Later on,

trying to avoid the hard work himself, Jack locks up in the bathroom and masturbates. He

absolutely prefers his sexual desires, during which he imagines his older sister Julie, to

other values. Under the pressure of all thoughts coming up to his mind, he reaches his first
real orgasm. Unfortunately, at the same time his father has a heart attack and dies face-

down in the wet concrete. High symbolism is used here, as the torch is passed from the

father to the oldest son who becomes the head of the family. The father’s death and the

first orgasm seem to be the most important moments in Jack’s life. After the whole family

recovers from the unexpected death and the father’s body is taken away in an ambulance,

Jack, the master, returns to the garden, to where the heart attack took place and cleans

everything up. “I did not have a thought in my head as I picked up the plank and carefully

smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete.” (Ibid., p.19) Jack intents

disposing of the father’s impression in order to show his maturity. This is for the first time

he is able to do something without asking his father for permission and, more importantly,

there is no father who should protest against it. By this act the father’s existence was

smoothed away for ever.

Incest is one of the important elements in this novel. It is probably caused by the alienation

of the children, Julie, Jack and Sue, that they often play incestuous games during which

they examine their bodies and they mainly focus to the private body parts. Largely, it is

Sue who is being examined by the two others, but it is Julie about whom Jack dreams

while he masturbates. Even if they do not say it, the mutual desire between these two

siblings is noticeable from the beginning and they both want to have sex and, by thus, to

gratify their oestrus.

Since the father’s death certain changes in the every day life and in the characters’

behaviour are visible. All of them are more relaxed and even happier. The mother seems to

be more satisfied as well. The atmosphere is not as thick as it used to be and especially the

two teenagers, Jack and Julie, abuse their unusual freedom. Jack is mainly occupied with

his body and spends a lot of time in the bathroom. Unfortunately, he does not have a bath

or a shower there, and soon he begins to stink. Hygiene is something excluded from Jack’s

life, and neither his mother nor his older sister are able to force him to wash himself. He

would do it only if he wants to do so and this knowledge gives him an enormous power

over his new life where no authority interferes. He might have thought of this to be a sign

of his maturity, but his behaviour would be compared to that of a spoiled child and is rather

disgusting. Julie, on the other hand, looks after herself more than necessary, later on, she

starts to date somebody. To behave like this when the father was alive was something

unimaginable. She shares many experiences with her mother and they seemed to be very

close and relaxed with each other. A very tight female bondage appears here. The mother

seems that she finally started to live through her oldest daughter and her adventures. The

other two siblings, Tom and Sue, seem to live their lives in an unchanged way. Even if

Tom is freed from the constant father’s attention and exhortation, he is too small to

understand the changes, and the introverted Sue seems not to care about it. She liked her

father, she was probably the only one who cried for him when he died. Due to the fact that

she is described by Jack as a rather solitary person it is difficult to suggest what does she

go through. On the outside she pretends nothing has happened, keeps in her inner world

and focuses on reading instead.

The close relationship, the above mentioned female bondage, between the mother and her

daughter Julie becomes more apparent when the mother becomes ill. Jack, as well as the

others, does not know much about it as Julie keeps it in a secret. The lack of

communication among all the family members is something that causes many problems

and arguments. Julie enjoys the situation, because now it is her who becomes the head of

the family, which irritates her brother very much and hence his constant teenage opposition

increases even more. Julie is asked by her mother to look after the household while she is

in the hospital and, later on, when she comes back home again, Julie is asked to continue in

it. The mother is seriously ill and denies the doctors’ help. She wants to spend the rest of

her life with her children and she does so. The cancer, or whatever disease it is, causes that

she is really weak and therefore does not leave her bed for a long time before her death. In

contrast to these days when people are not afraid of talking about their illnesses and cancer

is something what people informed about widely, the mother behaves rather selfishly not

telling the children about her troubles. Perhaps it is the way by which she tries to protect

her family but the lack of communication causes many problems, again. As she is not able

to come out from her house she is forced to ask Julie to do more and more for her; she

communicates with the outer world, mainly with the teachers, through letters which are

brought to school by Julie. It is also Julie who has to do all the shopping, to pay the

invoices and to do many other things connected to the everyday life of a family.

Suddenly, the centre of the house moves from downstairs to upstairs because the children

want to be as near to their mother as possible. All of them, except Jack. The initial

euphoria after the father’s death, the feeling that he is the head of them all, has passed
away and he, realising it is not an easy thing to rule, chooses to live his life in seclusion.

He closes up in his world and builds up a high emotional barrier, a wall, around himself.

Rarely does he leave his fortress, even if he is aware of the fact that he is alone, that he

needs his family and his mother. His mental condition becomes worse, he is rather

lethargic and prefers day-dreaming to real experience. Nightmares follow him at nights and

less and less does he distinguish the reality from the dream:

I was being followed by someone I could not see. In their hands they

carried a box and they wanted me to look inside, but I hurried on. I

paused for a moment and attempted to move my legs again, or open my

eyes. But someone was coming with the box, there was no time and I

had to run on. Then we came face to face. The box, wooden and hinged,

might once have contained expensive cigars. The lid was lifted half an

inch or so, too dark to see inside. I ran on in order to gain time, and this

time I succeeded in opening my eyes. Before they closed, I saw my

bedroom, my school shirt lying across a chair, a shoe upside down on

the floor. Here was the box again. I knew there was a small creature

inside, kept captive against his will and stinking horribly. (McEwan,

p.27)
What do all the nightmares symbolize? There are many clues from the youth’s life there.

The stinking creature should be Jack, as his sub-consciousness advises him to obey at least

the possible minimum of hygiene. On the other hand, the stinking thing should symbolize

Jack’s consciousness which reproaches him for his dirty thoughts, and his behaviour. The

captivity of it might be connected with the house itself, which is understood as a prison for

all its inhabitants.

The Cement Garden’s seems to be quite perverted. Above mentioned Oedipus complex

occurs here mainly due to the both sons who dislike their father and therefore they try to

protect their mother against him. The love of the youngest child, little Tom, seems to be

exaggerated after the father’s death as he does not have to share mother’s love with his

father anymore. Whenever possible he wants to hug her, to sleep with her in one bed, he

demands her constant attention. Even after her death Tom is not willing to accept it and

wants to lie next to her and hug her dead body again. The other influence of Freudian

psychology is striking here. It is the one of the incestuous behaviour of the three siblings,

and mainly of Jack and Julie. All the fantasies Jack dreams about fulfil at the end of the

story when he is seduced by his sister.

After the mother passes away Julie demonstrates her power again as she locks the bedroom

the mother has died in and does not want to allow anybody to come in and see her. Jack,

however, as the second important person in the house forces his sister to let him see their

mum. Later on, these two have to tell the younger ones the sad message. In contrast to their
father’s death, nobody wants to accept the fact that their mother has just died. Jack’s

regained position, however, does not allow him to suffer as much as his mother would

deserve, nevertheless, he is not able to face the pressure of all those circumstances and

when alone he allows all his feelings to come up: “For a moment I perceived clearly the

fact of her death, and my crying became dry and hard. But then I pictured myself as

someone whose mother has just died and my crying was wet and easy again.” (ibid, p. 53)

The confused Jack does not know how to behave and it might be the shock that the narrator

tries to extricate from the character and describes his suffering as it would be somebody

completely different.

One of the strongest passages in the book occurs at the end of the first part, when Jack,

Julie and Sue have to decide what to do next with their mother’s dead body:

Towards the end of the next day, Sue said, “Don’t you think we ought to

tell someone?”

I said, “If we tell someone...” and waited. Sue said, “We have to tell

someone so there can be a funeral.” [...] “If we tell them”, I began again,

“they’ll come and put us into care, into an orphanage or someting. They

might try and get Tom adopted.” [...] “But if we don’t tell anyone”, said

Sue [...] ,“what do we do then?” [...] Julie said, “We can’t leave her in

the bedroom or she will start to smell.” Sue was almost shouting.

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

 “You mean,” I said to Julie, “that we shuldn’t tell anybody.” [...] Julie

said, “If we don’t tell anybody we’ve got to do something ourselves

quickly.” (Ibid., pp.57-59)

The insufficient communicativeness before the mother’s death has caused that the children

are lost in the reality and do not know how to behave. On the other hand, all their

arguments should be understood as an act of unity and love. The worst thing which could

happen to them is their separation. Even if the reader should be disgusted he should feel

sorry for the children at least a bit. The way they behave is not their fault only, it is closely

connected with the whole family and their previous upbringing. They were taught to act

together, to support and defend themselves against the others. Julie, however, as an almost-

adult person, who is supposed to decide, does not want to rid of the freedom, the power she

has over all her siblings and decides to bury their mother into the trunk down in the cellar.

Because of this wrong decision she fails in the role of the family leader right at the

beginning of their solitude and later all the members suffer from the consequences.

Soon, she realises that the role of the head is sometimes very difficult and allows her

younger brother, Jack, to cooperate with her and to help her, especially when she needs to

take the body of their mum down to the cellar. In order to protect Sue and Tom, Jack and

Julie are supposed to cooperate and work quickly and precisely. Despite being aware of

what are Jack and Julie about to do, Sue refuses to help, as she understands burying their

mum in the house as a bad thing. She is the only one who thinks that somebody else should
be informed about what has happened and that their mother must be buried properly. The

cement used for covering of mother’s body brings us back to their father who bought

fifteen packets of it and did not manage to use it before he died. Jack mentioned it at the

very beginning, saying, “I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my

sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.” (Ibid., p. 9)

Since their mother is buried a new organisation of the family is created, but it is not able to

work for very long time. The role of parents falls upon Julie and Jack, who are the oldest

and the most suitable. Despite becoming allies their cooperation fails soon. Both of them

are strong personalities who want to rule everything in their own way and because they are

not able to find any possible compromise, discuss problems and do not know how to

communicate they start to behave in rather a hostile way. Soon they begin to act in the

same way as their parents did when alive. Sue with Tom start to fulfil the role of the

children and the mood in the house changes as well. Although, they try to live their lives as

if nothing has happened it is a very difficult task for all of them. The whole house seems to

fall asleep and all the children start to live in their own way.

Tom, the youngest and the weakest member of the family, begins to experience what

psychologists would call regression. It is the state of mind caused by frustration and causes

that people move backwards in their behaviour. According to the psychologists regression

is one of the defending reactions of human’s ego. (Nakonečný, p. 463) In Tom’s case, he

behaves as he is an infant after the mother’s death. He demands nursing and full-time care
of nobody else but Julie, who substituted the role of the mother. Everybody in the house is

surprised with Tom’s change at first, but Julie who quickly tires of all his demands and

who refuses to control him all the time greets this modification, and accepts the game by

which she admits her immaturity. She moves the cot from the cellar to her bedroom as

Tom does not want to sleep in his bedroom on his own anymore. Fortunately this state of

mind does not last for long, but instead of improving himself and moving his behaviour to

the level of four year old boy again, he wants to dress up like a girl and asks Julie and Sue

to help him to realize his demand. Due to Julie Tom becomes a crossing between a wild

child and a baby house pet. (http://www.literature-study-online.com/) The only one who

does not agree with it is Jack, who thinks it is against nature to dress up a boy into the

girl’s clothes. The others do not care about his opinion and are happy because Tom seems

to be in a better mood. Julie would do anything to get rid of her little brother’s constant

attention. Since this time Tom spends most of his time playing outside with his friends.

Sue, the least featured, introverted sort of person, who is not old enough to rule with her

older siblings, but is not a baby anymore, becomes even more introverted and in order to

come with the whole situation she decides to write a diary to her dead mother. The diary

itself is very important to her and she takes it with her wherever she goes. Sue is an

extremely careful observer and notes down everything that is happening in the house or

with her brothers and sister. The diary is the only connection with the woman she loved the

most and she probably feels it as a duty to inform her about everything. She might imagine

her mother to be in the house as a ghost who reads everything she writes. Sue does not

want anybody to know about her newly acquired role within the family and is really
annoyed when Jack finds out her secret. Not only the diary but also reading merely occupy

her during the holiday. Even if she was a keen reader before her mother’s death, now she

reads more. The world of books helps her to escape from the dreadful reality, from the fact

that she is an orphan. Though Sue is probably only twelve, she seems to be the most

responsible and moral person in the whole house. From the literary point of view, Sue is

introduced as a static character as she is characterized by a very restricted range of speech

and action patterns (http://www.uni-koeln.de/). In case she suggests anything there is

nobody who would accept her suggestions and therefore she does not express herself. She

is rather passive and lets Jack and Julie to do anything they want to.

Tom and Sue occupy themselves in their own way, Jack, however, feels he has nothing to

do and therefore spends most of his time sleeping, or as there was mentioned above,

daydreaming. Instead of proving that he is trustworthy and deserves the role of the head he

occupies himself with his body and masturbates as much as possible. Sue, who can not

stand his behaviour any longer, gives him a trashy science fiction novel as a birthday

present, which he, amazingly, reads and likes. Moreover, he identifies with the hero and

after some time he reads it again. The younger sister thinks that he is about to start reading

as well, but the book is probably the first and also the last one he would ever read. It is

another undoubted sign of his juvenile behaviour, non-definition of his interests, as he does

not know into which world does he want to fall into: “I liked it here in Tom’s bed. [...] I

gave up the cot to Sue long before that, when I was two, but lying in it now was familiar to

me – its salty, clammy smell, the arrangements of the bars, an enveloping pleasure in being

tenderly imprisoned.” (McEwan, p.132) At the beginning Jack introduces himself as a

young man who will become an adult soon, but the more he tells the story the less active

role does he act in it. Despite having noble ideas about his new life, after the father’s death,

he realises how difficult task it is to rule and to be responsible for everybody and

everything and soon he gives up all his effort. He becomes even more moody, hostile,

reserved and his nightmares come back. He is also very proprietary of the members of his

family. He cannot stand anybody from the outside world coming closer to his siblings. He

accepts Tom’s little friends. Sue represents no menace as she has no friends, except her

books. But, unfortunately, his secretly admired Julie started to see somebody, which

irritates him.

Jack focuses almost all his attention to Julie and describes several events and adventures in

her life. Sometimes, the reader should be awed by her dynamism and by all the changes

she comes through during the story. Before her mother died Julie had been given the access

to the family bank account and she had it ever since. She is the one who gives pocket

money to her brothers and sister, who decides what to buy, and also she is the one who

abuses this situation by buying many things for herself without telling the others, or at least

Jack, or asking them for permission. After all the initial enthusiasm, quickly she realizes

how demanding her new role is, and in order to escape the every-day-reality she starts to

date somebody without telling anyone at home. Jack and Sue find this out by discovering

some new, very expensive shoes in the kitchen and are very angry, as they think that she

bought them by herself, that she stole money from their bank account. She explains them

this is not true and tells them it was a present.

 “What’s that?” I said, looking across the room. Almost concealed under

a chair was a long cardboard box with its lid half off. [...]

“Ah!” Sue cried, “that’s Julie’s.” [...] Inside, embedded in white and

orange tissue was a pair of calf-length boots. [...]

“Where did you get these?”

“In a shop,” Julie said without turning round.

“How much?”

“Not much.” Sue was very excited.

“Julie!” she said in a very loud whisper. “They cost thirty-eight

pounds.” [...]

“Who gave them to you?” [...]

“A bloke.” (McEwan, p. 80)

Since this time the new person is introduced to the family. Whoever it is, he is seen as

somebody who is not welcome in there, who disrupts their unity and whose impact is

rather disturbing. The author himself comments on the boyfriend and his role in the novel

as on somebody who is supposed to enter the world of the children and breaks it.

(http://www.litencyc.com/) And this is exactly what he has done.

The partner’s name is Derek. Jack describes him as the only child, a snooker player, a very

smart person who is particular in good manners and smart clothes. Derek fell in love with

Julie not only because of her beauty but also because of the independence she has. She is

his true opposite which might attract him even more. Later on, Julie describes him as a

good boy who: “lives with his mum in his tiny house. I have been there. She calls him

Doodle and makes him wash his hands before tea. [...] She told me she irons fifteen shirts a

week for him.” (McEwan, p.134) Derek wants to become friends with all the members of

the family. He has no problem with Tom, as he is not any threat and Sue is very nice and

friendly and likes him since they have first met. The only hostile person among all of them

is the possessive Jack. Due to his family status, it is him who substitutes the role the role of

the father, of the person to whom Julie’s boyfriend is supposed to be introduced. Jack is

really furious about the stranger who has jumped into his life and turned it upside down.

Derek does not like Jack either. As somebody who extremely looks after himself, Derek

disapproves Jack’s clothes and hygiene, if there is any, and is not afraid of telling him so.

Even if the teenage boy pretends he is not interested in what his rival says, secretly he

thinks about Derek’s words and slowly but surely begins to look after himself properly. It

is not because of Derek but because of Julie, who, as Jack hopes, probably likes clean and

smart men. Not only Jack’s hygiene does Derek influence, but also his attitude to tidying.

Thinking about what has been said, he examines his room and finds that: “On the floor

were Coca Cola tins, dirty clothes, fish and chips wrappers, several wire coat-hangers, a

box that once contained rubber bands. I stood up and looked at where I had been lying, the
folds and rucks in the yellowish-grey sheets, large stains with distinct edges. I felt stifled.”

(ibid, 127)

After Derek is invited, but not accepted, into the family he starts to ask more and more

questions and becomes more and more suspicious of the condition of the family and the

dead parents. The more he asks Julie for further information the less Julie likes him.

Suddenly, she realizes he should usurp her authority and being aware of what mistake she

has done by inviting him into their house she wants to break up with him: “He wants to

take charge of everything. He keeps talking about moving in with us.” (ibid, 134) That is a

fatal mistake. As soon as he understands what a nasty game Julie plays with him, he has a

strong feeling of being abused by her, he decides to discover the secret which is held in the

household. Even before, he blamed his girlfriend of not telling him the truth, as there was a

nasty sweet smell all aroud the house. Trying to persuade her to tell him what it is, she has

never done it. Later on when he is pretinacious, they tell him they have buried their dog

down in the cellar. Hoping this would break all the barriers between him and the others, he

helps them to repair the cracking concrete to avoid the smell to come up. Unfortunately,

the only result of it all is that they have integrated more than before. “We had not been at

all careful with Derek. Often what was in the cellar did not seem real enough to keep from

him. When we were not actually down there looking at the trunk it was as if we were

asleep.” (ibid, 127)

As mentioned before, the whole novel finishes by an incestuous encounter after Jack is

seduced by his sister, Julie.

“You sweet little thing.” She stroked my head. Her white cotton blouse

was unbuttoned down to the swell of their breasts and her skin was a

deep, dull brown. [...] The sweet, sharp smell of her perfume wrapped

itself around me and I sat there grinning foolishly, staring into her eyes.

[...]

“Go on,” she encouraged, “don’t be afraid.” (ibid, 132-133)

Unfortunately, they are surprised by jealous Derek. He is terrified by the whole thing and

moreover, he is shocked that they make love right next to the cot with their sleeping

brother. Instead of apology he is faced to the hostility and apathy of them both and he is

sent away followed by Julie’s words: “Actually, it’s none of your business.” (ibid, 135)

After this he runs down the cellar, breaks open the trunk of cement where the mother is

buried and fetches the police. While listening to the strokes into the mother’s concrete

sarcophagus, Jack and Julie continue making love and being aware of the coming end of

their shared living they enjoy the last moments of their mutual presence. They stop just as

the police arrives and they all gather in Julie’s bedroom. It is probably a kind of saying-

goodbye-ritual. Julie, demonstrating her head role for the last time, calms down little Tom

who has just woken up, saying: “There! Wasn’t that a lovely sleep?” (ibid, 138) Then they

wait quietly in her room till somebody comes in and takes them away.
All the characters’ transformations should be assessed negatively because none of the

children has made at least a positive improvement, which is understandable. Facing such

demanding events and life situations without sufficient previous experience cannot be

managed successfully. The children seem to alienate to the outer society even more after

burying their mother in the cellar and even if they pretend to live their lives as nothing has

happened they lose out. Both, Julie and Jack, do not get their parental roles under control.

Jack, more than before, starts secluding himself and becomes only the morose and hostile

narrator. Julie, in spite of all the freedom, does not know how to act in the real world. Not

only Jack but also Julie seem to be lethargic which graduates with their sexual act as they

are aware of the fact they have nothing to lose. Apathy is the word that characterizes all the

siblings, their state of mind, their transformation result. Sue bears up with the situation in

her own way. She becomes an introverted bibliophile, whose suggestions and protests

vanish in the sinister atmosphere. Tom, too small and too weak to defend himself, is being

transformed by Julie. By her behaviour she causes that he becomes half a spoiled child,

half a wild creature.

 4.4. THE OVERALL ATMOSPHERE OF THE NOVEL

It may appear from the very first sentence of The Cement Garden: “I did not kill my

father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way” (McEwan 9), that one can easily get the

feeling this is rather an uncomfortable text and that the author has a lot of uneasy topics in store

for his readers. The story and especially the central idea of four suddenly orphaned siblings who

conceal their mother‟s dead body in a cement trunk in the cellar are certainly unsavoury.

Moreover, based on its sterile language, the immoral behaviour of the characters as well as the

desolate and isolated environment they live in, the novel evokes the atmosphere of Gothic tales,

namely, as Malcolm observes, Poe‟s The Fall of the House of Usher and Hitchcock‟s Psycho

(52). The setting, the local details, such as Jack‟s nightmares, or even the act of the mother‟s

entombing himself clearly echo the gothic elements. Accordingly, most of the motifs from

McEwan‟s early short stories can be found here, such as scenes of deviant behaviour, morbid

imagery and gruesome details. Yet these are put together into a functioning compact unit which

is both repulsive as well as – according to The New York Review of Books – “irresistibly

readable” (Malcolm 45). From this perspective the readers can be slightly disgusted at first sight

but – in terms of the book‟s message – there is certainly more than meets the eye.
 4.5. Family Background as the Source of Conflicts

The theme which should be mentioned first as it strikes the readers from the very

beginning of The Cement Garden is the one of the dysfunctional family. The most significant

contribution to this disharmony is undoubtedly on the side of the father, an “unloved and

unlovable” (Malcolm 45) man who can be described as a domineering person, even a sadist,

psychologically terrorising the rest of the family. His tyrannical approach towards his wife and

children is well reflected in his rather one-sided sense of humour since any attempt of his being

made subject of a joke is strictly suppressed. The father also sets up something like a list of

official jokes based on humiliating others, and usually followed by an obligatory laugh: “There

were a few running jokes in the family, initiated and maintained by my father. Against Sue for

having almost invisible eyebrows and lashes, against Julie for her ambitions to be a famous

athlete, against Tom for pissing in his bed sometimes, against Mother for being poor at

arithmetic, and against me for my pimples(...)” (McEwan 15). Not only do these jokes predicate

a lot about the father‟s complicated personality – a strongly authoritative leader on the one hand,

yet more likely an insecure coward on the other hand, one unable either of feeling empathy or of

showing any parental love – but they inevitably result in a lack of communication and,

consequently, in dysfunctional relationships between the members of the household. What is

more, one‟s disgust at the father comes to fulfilment when he or she learns about his perverted

jealousy of his youngest son, “mollycoddle” Tom, as expressed in Jake‟s comment: “So simple,

so bizarre, a small boy and a grown man competing (for mother‟s attention)” (McEwan 13). In

this sense, it is not surprising that the reader (along with the children) feels almost relieved when

the father passes away, while, ironically enough, ferociously cementing the garden.
 As for the character of the mother, the most significant word she can be described with is

frailty, both physical and emotional. In order to avoid the father‟s attacks – for the sake of the

family – she voluntarily assumes a passive role and soon after her husband‟s death it becomes

apparent that she as well is not able to maintain her parental responsibility. The disease she

suffers from remains unspecified; with respect to the symptoms it can be a cancer, yet in the

figurative sense the submissive mother sickens for pathological dependence on her domineering

husband – as if after his death she had lost her meaning of life. As her illness proceeds, she keeps

underestimating her health condition, irresponsibly neglecting the care of her children who

remain abandoned after her death. In this sense, Jack and his siblings can be regarded as victims

of their uncaring and unhealthy family background.

 4.6. The Imposed Order vs. Collapse of Norms

Another theme we find in this novel is the one of an unnatural order which is imposed on

people from outside. This goes hand in hand with the above described theme of a dysfunctional

family, for the order is mostly represented by the patriarchal world “which, in its conceitedness,

uncritically believes in the infallibility and unquestionable rightfulness of an exclusively male

view of the world” (Chalupský 3). For example, the father in The Cement Garden is obsessed

with a compulsive need to confirm his power and to gain control over the other family members

– this obsession is well reflected in his trying to destroy the weeds widely growing in his

anxiously cared about garden. Accordingly, there is an obvious parallel between the weeds – the

irrepressible will to live – and the children who are in constant pursuit of getting out of the

despotic oppression. Another important aspect which should be taken into consideration is the

preserving of the deceased mother‟s body in the cellar. Not only does this express “the

teenagers‟ fear of being put into care”, but it can also be seen as a “creation of an isolated,

surreal micro-world” (Bradford 21), an establishment of a new order free of any parental or

social authority as a contradiction to the one impersonated by the father.

The collapsed hierarchy is replaced by a new, alternative one, marked by the lack of any limits.

Malcolm describes their house as “allowed to degenerate into a disorder of decayed food and

dirt, while the children spend their days to no traditionally approved of purpose: in play (Tom),

in escapist reading (Sue), in sleep (and) in masturbation (Jack)” (63). Besides, the social rules are

questioned when Tom, supported by Julie and Sue, starts wearing girl‟s clothes. His retreat from

masculinity illustrates the author‟s opinion that gender is something one can choose, a

construction more socially rather than biologically determined. In this sense, Tom‟s transvestism

breaks the general assumptions about who should wear what, the deep-seated idea of appropriate
dressing given by highly polarized male-female world. The act of regression comes to fulfilment

when he reverts to babyhood, demanding to be treated like a helpless infant. What is more, not

only Tom‟s but also other characters‟ sexuality is set free in the final scene of incest between the

two eldest siblings, Julie and Jack. Following the forbidden impulses they confirm their negative

attitude towards society through the breach of an ultimate taboo. Nevertheless, the “old”, norm-

based order is re-established through Derek, Julie‟s boyfriend, who serves as a personification of

the outside world. He seems to be a perfect authority, acting as – in Julie‟s own word – “big,

smart daddy” (McEwan 133). Yet as soon as the readers as well as Julie learn that he in fact is a

weak man (one of many in McEwan‟s books) living with his mother and being told what to do,

the image of an ideal man along with the patriarchal delusion fades away. The children perceive

him as an intruder who, feeling excluded by others, tries to reveal their secret. Eventually, after

he finds out what is going on between Julie and Jack, Derek smashes open the cement trunk with

its terrible content and informs the police, whose arrival will restore the order again.
 4.7.Childhood – Adolescence Transition Period, Loss of Innocence

The author stresses the crucial importance of this transition period between infancy and

maturity in his novel, as a time lag in which not only one’s identity and character but also his or

her lifelong attitudes are created. Furthermore, McEwan perceives the transition period as that of

the loss of innocence, “leaving the haven of infancy behind and being absorbed into the adult

universe of blame” (Ryan 215), since this process can be extremely demanding and frustrating,

whether for the adolescents who enter the treacherous adult world and want to be accepted by

him or for their parents who suddenly have to treat their children as their partners and mentors

rather than as instructors and controllers.

From this perspective, The Cement Garden can be seen as “a psychological study of adolescence

(which) charts family relationships and tensions: between father and son, between mother and

children, among siblings” (Malcolm 51). Jack, the fifteen-year-old narrator, represents a typical

teenager falling into all the possible pitfalls in the period of adolescence, as these are concisely

summarized by his mother: “You can‟t get up in the mornings, you‟re tired all day, you‟re

moody, you don‟t wash yourself or change your clothes, you‟re rude to your sisters and to me”

(McEwan 29). There is nothing to marvel at for Jack has just discovered his sexuality and,

consequently, has indulged in masturbation. He frequently becomes overwhelmed not only by

his sexual fantasies concerning his sisters, but also by waves of quickly changing emotions, not

mentioning the fact that neglecting his appearance is based on the adolescent defiance which has

to cause resentment in others deliberately. All these aspects, Jack‟s moodiness, self-centred

personality and feeling of isolation, compose the character of a teenage boy searching for

identity as well as for an authority which would set the norms and provide a behaviour model but

which, as far as his parents are concerned, is missing. As for the community created by the
siblings after their parents‟ death, it can be also regarded as a teenage revolt with almost

anarchist tendencies against restrictions. Moreover, Ryan believes that from a certain perspective

their community as a whole is based on withdrawal and regression: not only does Tom regress to

infancy, but in a way the children all do, “endeavouring to keep the bubble of childhood intact

and the toils of adulthood at bay” (215). Nevertheless, the bubble bursts eventually and the

reader witnesses the children moving from adolescence to maturity, losing their virginity, a

necessary sign of innocence, in “the climatic or epiphanic moment of initiation after which

things will never be the same” (Ryan 215), the moment represented by Jack and Julie‟s sexual

intercourse.
 5. CONCLUSIONS

McEwan strongly believes in fiction as a medium improving our understanding and

treatment of one another. He reflects this belief in his work by presenting scenarios where his

characters grapple with moral choices, and are placed in hands of the reader for ultimate

judgement (Wells 21). Right from the early age, McEwan’s characters must face a lot of

inconvenience. He does not spare children and adolescents anything, maybe because of the fact

that his own childhood was far from easy. Therefore, McEwan lets the children act in order to be

judged as adults are.

In The Cement Garden, the parents establish a patriarchal structure, with a submissive

mother and a despotic father. McEwan admits that his early prose was influenced by the situation

within his own family. “The drunkenness distressed [mother], but she never dared challenge him.

She was always frightened of [father], and so was I. When I came to early adolescence, I was

like her, too tongue-tied to face down his iron certainties” (Mother Tongue). The parallel with the

siblings from The Cement Garden is obvious. They do not have any respect towards the father,

however, they hardly dare to contradict him and passively accept the rules set.

The lack or the absence of the parental figures unconsciously drives the adolescents to

adopt new roles and become the grown-ups too early. In the The Cement Garden Julie takes

over the maternal function and indicates the importance of a mother within the family. However,

she is too young and not ready to become a mother yet. It is inevitable for her to lapse somehow.

Even though she tries, Julie is still too young and she demonstrates her childishness in many

ways, mainly by denying the help from the adult world, represented by Derek. One of the

recurring topics of McEwan’s work is also the longing to return into one’s childhood, or become

aware of one’s inner child. In The Cement Garden Tom gets back in time literally. Threatened by
reality, he regresses into babyhood, the age associated with a passive accepting of the outside

world and having no worries or troubles. McEwan demonstrates on Tom’s example that the

period of childhood or babyhood is often seen as safe and peaceful. Tom is threatened and

beaten by one of the older kids from his school. Therefore, McEwan deconstructs this idea by

portraying of how violent and evil children can be, mainly towards one another.

Each of the characters from novel seems to be rather self-centred, which is probably

related to their age. Jack is probably the most self-centred of the characters discussed. Basically,

he is only engaged in his body and watching all the changes puberty breeds in him. Sometimes,

Jack attempts to participate in the course of the household, to communicate with his siblings.

However, most of the time he does not bother himself with what happens outside his room or

their house. Jack’s remarkable self-immersion makes him incapable of understanding people

around him and therefore he is unable to integrate himself even within his own family.

The paper demonstrates that Ian McEwan generally portrays his children and adult characters in

quite a similar way. The most evident outcome of the analysis I consider to be the importance of

a good family background and a smooth child-parent relationship, which McEwan implies in

more of his stories. The siblings from The Cement Garden are unable to act according to morals

and expectations of society, since they do not have any model figures present. Their future is not

known, but the readers can assume it will not be a marvellous one. As an author, he looks back to

his childhood happily, perceives this age as such a cheerful period of his life that he even wants

to share it with the readers. McEwan’s vision of childhood is obvious. Parents play a major role

in the early age of an individual and their absence or insufficient guardianship could have

unchangeable consequences and influence children for the rest of their lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell

publishing, 2007.

Grmelová, Anna. ““About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters”: An Intertextual

Reading of Ian McEwan‟s Atonement.” Litteraria Pragensia. Ed. Martin Procházka. Vol.17,

No.34. FF UK Praha, 2007.

Chalupský, Petr. “Atonement – Continuity and Change in Ian McEwan´s Works.” Continuity

and Change in Culture and Literature. Ed. Šárka Bubíková and Olga Roebuck. Pardubice:

Univerzita Pardubice, 2006.

Childs, Peter. “Fascinating violation. Ian McEwan´s children.” British Fiction of the 1990s. Ed.

Nick Bentley. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.

Childs, Peter. The Fiction of Ian McEwan. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Malcolm, David. Understanding of Ian McEwan. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of

South Carolina Press, 2002.

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage Books, 2007.

McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. London: Vintage Books, 2006.

Peterka, Josef. Teorie Literatury pro Učitele. Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Pedagogická

fakulta, 2006.

Ryan, Kiernan. “Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.” An Introduction

to Contemporary Fiction. Ed. Ron Mengham. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

Internet resources

Koval, Ramona. “Books and Writing: Ian McEwan.” Radio National 22 September 2002. 9

February 2010 (Transcript) <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s679422.htm>.

Lee, Hermione. “If your memories serve you well...” The Observer Sunday 23 September 2001.

9 February 2010 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001sep/23/fiction.bookerprize2001>.