The Sister’s Gaze in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001) is a novel structured around some key episodes that gradually shift the reader’s attention to the more self-reflective elements of the text. The centrality of the gaze, the voyeuristic attitude of the characters, and the multiple perspectives force the reader to return to scenes already “seen”, recalling, in the end, the reader’s own gaze from outside the text. The last pages, in particular, because of their manipulation of the events, make the reader the final witness. Starting from Lacan’s theory on the gaze, this article analyses how the traumatic scene observed by the younger sister, unbeknownst to the elder, serves as a mythopoetic device and it is at the origin of the mise en abîme on which the Chinese box structure of the novel stands. The repetitions of the trauma – first with the furtive reading of an obscene letter addressed to the older sister and then with the love scene in the library – mark the gradual prevailing of the imaginary on the real, until the final discovery of the fictionality of the whole story.