Images of Children in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Year 2014, Volume: 11 Issue: 1, 125 - 147, 01.05.2014

Murat Sayım

Abstract

This paper discusses that the image of the children has a function as vehicles
to reveal the intimate and close relationship between themselves and adults who
victimise children under the oppressive authority for their social and ideological benefits
in McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden. The image of childhood is a social and cultural construction. As Pifer asserts “for novelists this image has undergone radical
transformation since the nineteenth century, when Charles Dickens and his contemporary
Ariès translated the Romantic idyll of natural innocence into touching versions of ‘poor
children’ set adrift in a harsh and inhumane world.”10 As the child image has changed
from period to period, its reflection has been altered in fiction as well.

 

Keywords

Children, Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Images of Children in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

References

• Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996). Childs, Peter, (ed.), The Fiction of Ian McEwan: a Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006). Dodou, Katherina, “Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel,” in Adrienne E. Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (London: Palgrave, 2012, 238-250). Gavin, Adrienne E., “Unadulterated Childhood: The Child in Edwardian Fiction,” in Adrienne E. Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Gillespie, Gerald, Romantic Prose Fiction, (Amsterdam; J. Benjamins Pub, 2008). Holland, Patricia, Picturing Childhood the Myth of The Child In Popular Imagery (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). L.Brown, Meg, and Kari B. McBride, Women’s Roles in the Renaissance (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005). Lessing, Doris, The Fifth Child (New York: Vintage Books, 2013). Lynn, Dorree and Cindy Spitzer, Sex for grownups: Dr. Dorree reveals the truth, lies, and must-tries for great sex after 50 (Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications, Inc., 2010) Lynn, Dorree,”Positive Aspect of Incest and Ian McEwan’s Cement Garden,” Email to M.S., April 19, 2012. Malcolm, David, Understanding Ian McEwan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). McEwan,Ian, The Cement Garden (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Mendel, Gerard, Son Sömürge Çocuk (Decolonizing the Child) (‹stanbul: Kabalc› Yay›nevi, 1992). Pattison, Robert, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008). Paulin, Tom, “Abandoned Prefabs: Recent Fiction,” in Encounter, 52:1, January 1979, 49-50. Pifer, Ellen, Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture, (Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 2000). Randolph, Vance, Roll Me in Your Eyes: Unprintable Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume I, Folksongs and Music, (Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1992). Ryan, Roberts, Conversations with Ian McEwan (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Slay, Jack, Ian McEwan (Detroit: Twayne Publishers, 1996). Sigmund, Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [translated by A. A. Brill] 3rd edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913). Thatcher, Margaret, “Woman’s Own Magazine,” The Sunday Times, retrieved from: http://briandeer.com/ social/thatcher-society.htm, on 05 March, 2013. Taylor, Victor E. and Charles E., Winquist, Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Taylor & Francis e-Library edition (London: Routledge, 2002). Tyler, Anne, “Damaged People: The Cement Garden,” in New York Times Book Review, November 26,1978, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/mcewan-cement.html, on 15 February, 2013, p.92. Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: The King and His Court (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).