cowardice hold her back from doing what was right. Was she a great person? No. She was a control freak,
she twisted and turned Robbie and Cecilia's fate in reality and in her story. However, her story is more of a
sad story than anything else. She knew Robbie and Cecilia wouldn't forgive her, and she couldn't even
forgive herself. She lived alone and died alone, and I can't hate her because I pity her so much more then I
dislike her for being a coward.
Proof:
1) Briony wasn't an evil mastermind pulling the strings behind an elaborate revenge plan:
She was precocious and sexually uneducated, "... no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the
existence of that part of her to which -- Briony was certain -- the word referred" (107) and she had literally
just become self-aware, "Was everyone else really as alive as she was?" (34). This idea of revenge was her
own portrayal of what Robbie might have thought of her, and not necessarily and definitely not absolutely
the truth, because it was Briony herself that wrote Robbie considering that her acts were for vengeance, we
know this because "Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940." (350). He couldn't
verifiably have thought these things if Briony was simply recreating his thoughts from her own imagination.
That she had acted maliciously as a child is unfounded because she genuinely didn't understand what she
was doing, just like she didn't understand the danger she put Robbie in by pretending to drown that day,
"'You went under the surface, I couldn't see you. My clothes were weighing me down. We could have
drowned, both of us.'" (218), but Briony did come to realize her mistake in blaming Robbie, "She was like a
bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind
because so many preparations have been made on her behalf." (150) Briony simply didn't have the have the
courage to go back on her word! " She did not think she had the courage, after all her initial certainty and
two or three days of patient, kindly interviewing, to withdraw her evidence." (159) Two or three days! It
took her a few days to realize that something was wrong, but she didn't want to be 'a silly girl who had
wasted everyone's time' (160). Instead, she deliberately carried through despite her doubts, knowing she
was 'never pressured or bullied' (160). Rather than be courageous, " She trapped herself, she marched into
the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on
making her own way back." (160).
So we know that she was just an ignorant young girl too afraid to go back on what she thought was the
truth, at the time. Briony didn't know anything about healthy sexuality, or sexuality at all. If she didn't
understand initially the effect of her accusations, and then grew to realize, how could it have possibly been a
malicious act from the start?
2) While I love and dread equally thinking about existentialism, particularly the writing of Albert Camus,
existential thought doesn't really apply to Briony's accusation or her view if the world - because she never
lets go, which is what existentialism is all about:
She was a victorian girl through and through, prim, proper and ignorant to even the notion of sexuality. She's
naive about marriage: "Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue
rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong uinion." (8). She wants to
control her family into what she views as right, for example Leon, "Her play was not for her cousins, it was
for her brother, to celebrate his return, to provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless
succession of girlfriends, toward the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the
countryside" (4) She's truly a child in every sense of the word, desperate for the perfect ending she deems
fit. "She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so." (4). While I know
Roman specifically said that he grew fond of her near the end, this childish need for 'the promise of lifelong
union' never really leaves Briony's thoughts. In the end, she still made Robbie and Cecilia, "..still alive, still in
love, sitting side by side in the library" (350). She admits this to us in the end, saying, "The problem these
fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of
deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350). If Briony could have had it her own way she would have
chosen that ending as reality, the one in which Robbie and Cecilia were still alive to love. This isn't the truth,
and only she can make it true within her own mind and the mind's of others to atone for the fact that Robbie
and Cecilia "never met again, never fulfilled their love?" (350). Just like when she was a child, too afraid to
admit that she was the 'bride with cold feet'(150), she became "too old, too frightened, too much in love
with the shred of life I have remaining" (350). She asks us directly, "How could that constitute an ending?"
(350). She goes on to rationalize this "I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of
kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair," (351) but I think it's more kindness to herself than to Robbie
and Cee who have already lived their horrible fate, with Robbie having died at war and Cecilia by a bomb
within the same year (350).
Going back to existentialism, Briony couldn't have been an existentialist, because like stated in Albert
Camus' The Stranger or L'Etranger, "It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me
of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my
heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me
realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still." I don't have a page but it was basically the second
last page, and was about him accepting his death by execution. Existentialists accept.Existentialists look into
the dark void of the universe and accept it. Briony "took a stand against oblivion and despair," (350). She
never let go, she never forgave herself, and yet controlled her universe as "God" (350) until the very end.
3) With her impending dementia, "The process will be slow, but my brain, my mind, is closing down. The
little failures of the memory that dog us all beyond a certain point will become more noticeable, more
debilitating, until the time will come when I won't notice them because I will have lost the ability to
comprehend anything at all" (334), all Briony can do now is look back at her life. Like I asserted in my first
points, Briony is a coward, and in my second, Briony's need for control is what never allows her to let go. I
can't really dislike her in the end, because her life was more sad than anything else - a sad confused girl
grown into a sad lonely old woman, who's only liberation is that she will be able to forget her crimes.
So, was Briony admirable in any way? Maybe in that she deluded herself until the very end. Or that she
learned and lived the rest of her life trying to make up for her cowardice, but the reality is that she never did,
and never could. The day she felt the wrongness in the pit of her stomach and held her tongue was the day
she became irredeemable. When you know something, deep within and make the choice that you know is
the wrong one, it's too late. Does she deserve forgiveness? No. Pity? Probably. She definitely deserved to
be able to let go, but what damned her -- her stubborn cowardice -- is what never allowed her to set herself
free. I think that's profoundly sad.
The real blame here should be set on the adults in Briony's life that so neglected and yet coddled her.
Encouraging her writing but not teaching her right from wrong. Briony wasn't the only one at fault, the
parents in her life abandoned her almost of much as they abandoned Robbie by not defending him and by
not being there for her, which is why I blame them for what happened more than I blame Briony - a
forgotten child. I truly pity her.
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