‘In crime writing, the guilty are justly punished.’ Explore the significance of punishment in two crime texts you have studied. Remember to include in your answer relevant detailed exploration of authorial methods. [25 marks] JUNE 2018
Some of the guilty are not punished at all in Atonement, such as Paul Mason and Lola. The former is guilty of a violent assault and completely avoids any punishment by the law, is able to marry his victim and thrive as a businessman. Lola is not punished for failing to reveal the truth of what happened when she was raped, thus allowing Robbie to be punished unjustly when he is imprisoned, separated from Cecilia and his mother and killed at Dunkirk. It is wholly unjust that Paul Marshall should escape punishment. Additionally there are other adults who are also tainted and yet escape justice. For example, Bryony’s family and the local police are guilty of listening to the word of a thirteen-year-old and accepting it without any concrete evidence. Bryony, guilty of a false accusation, does receive punishment. She forgoes an education at Cambridge to serve as an auxiliary nurse during the war where she witnesses the frightful suffering of the soldiers returning from Dunkirk. Although she attempts to expiate her guilt by writing her book in order to atone, she acquires fame and fulfilment in her later family life. So one of the significant aspects of her punishment is that it would appear that she has a choice. Because of this we can say that her punishment is just, as she does not suffer a life-long punishment.
The Ancient Mariner, however, is punished for the rest of his life from the moment he betrays nature by killing the albatross. His fellow crew members, who are only tangentially complicit in his crime, are unjustly punished with physical torments and death. They are given no second chance, whereas the Mariner is offered redemption when he recognizes how beautiful the natural world is around the ship. He then goes on to endure what could be regarded as a life-in-death sentence having to tell his story indefinitely or else suffer “a woeful agony”. This may be regarded as an unjust punishment as it is never ending. However, it can be argued that this burdensome mission is a blessing, totally cancelling his punishment. By telling his story, the Mariner is given the gift or “strange power” of being able to save others, including the wedding guest, as is implied in the last two lines at end of the poem. He is “shrived” by the Hermit, but obtains forgiveness and redemption from God and he deserves to be treated in this way because he is a completely changed man. When he embarks on this new life he is accruing grace rather than being punished. By the end of the poem, the scales of justice are rebalanced – not by man but by a higher power. This is because most of his experiences are not those of an ordinary man. They are supranatural, and therefore deserve Divine Justice, and thus he is given the compulsive urge to tell his story and the possibility of restoring his life to harmony.
There is a parallel longing to restore harmony by atoning in Atonement, but Bryony does not look for or find any easy redemption. The guilt of her wrongful accusation follows her for the rest of her life, although, as we have already suggested, this may have been intermittent. A possible reason for this might be that, in a legal sense, she does not really commit a crime. She is guilty of stubbornness, misapprehension and retreating into a make-believe world - which, unfortunately, has fatal consequences. The neglect she received from her parents during her childhood and early adolescence (in common with Lola) does allow for some mitigation in her case. She believes that she is speaking the truth when she accuses Robbie, but her reason is clouded by the fevered workings of her imagination and it is also possible that protracted acquaintance with her fictional creations have allowed her to become distanced from the real world. For example, we learn in Part Two of the fake drowning incident when Robbie was nineteen which was motivated by an unrealistic schoolgirl crush. This was stymied as a result of witnessing his later passion for Cecilia, and this may have led to her vehement accusation. Briony’s love would have been transformed into “disappointment, then despair, and eventual bitterness” [220]. The sense of betrayal may also have been compounded by Robbie, as the son of a servant, being her social inferior. But she is too immature to realize that spiteful resentments can ruin lives. It is therefore just that she is punished, even though she deserves some sympathy because of her youth, emotional instability and sensitive nature.
Although Bryony may deserve some sympathy, it is Robbie and Cecilia who deserve our absolute sympathy. They are punished more than any other character even though they are the most innocent. Robbie seems to be continually concerned about his predicament. Before this delirium in the cellar, in an earlier section of Part two, when he is twelve miles from Dunkirk, he considers the “pure state” [228] he would attain if all the stains of guilt were wiped away. But this longing for justice is tempered by the realization that he would have to accept Briony back into his life. He concludes that the absolution would be for her alone as he “had done nothing wrong” [228]. Later in Part Two, in the cellar, when he is “too exhausted to sleep” [261] he becomes profoundly cynical. Returning to the faithful Cecilia seems to him as uninspiring as a mathematical equation. Robbie no longer has any understanding of the nature of guilt and decides that, “Everyone was guilty, and no one was” [261] and, by this reasoning, even Briony is innocent. Compared to the innocent boy whose leg was blown off, he is guilty and to return to give him a decent burial would be like “the guilty [burying] the innocent” [262 – 263.] The end of Part Two does seems to be more hopeful. He repudiates the arithmetical image of Cecilia waiting for him like one part of a sum. However, we have yet to be informed at this point in the novel that the literary conventions will be subverted by the metafictional ending and that Robbie’s deliberations about guilt are a construct of Briony’s imagination – an attempt at atonement for what she did.
In Part Three, through her imagination, we get to know a side of Briony’s personality which is hopeful and appears to be honest. She longs for forgiveness and before meeting Cecilia in Balham, hopes that she can re-establish her pre-allegation relationship and regain the innocence of her past life as a “beloved younger sister” [329]. However, as on many occasions during the novel, we feel detached from the drama of her life, as we are viewing it through her unreliable narrative, which is revealed at the very end of Part Three. At this stage of her life, we are witnessing the seventy-seven-year-old Briony’s decline into mental frailty – as if she is entering a second childhood. However, before the end, in the emotionally charged atmosphere of the Balham flat – despite being an imagined scene – she describes Robbie in a state of frenzy, threatening to kill Paul Marshall and “[break Briony’s] stupid neck” [341]. Her re-creation of his state of mind here brings him down off an impossibly high pedestal, making him more credible to the reader. In addition, as Anne Rooney and Lyn Lockwood have pointed out [in Atonement, York Notes p. 60], “To fulfil Briony’s wish for atonement, it’s important for her to have an empathetic portrayal of a man whose life she has ruined.”
In contrast, it is not easy for us to empathize with the Ancient Mariner because most of his experiences are not those of ordinary men. At the beginning of his voyage, however, he confronts a form of the natural world that we would all recognise. The storm-blast which struck the Mariner’s ship, with “o’ertaking wings”, brings with it a form of Nature that is “tyrannous and strong”. This suggests that the arrogance and vaulting ambition of mankind will founder and be checked by the awe-inspiring omnipotence and the terrifying elements of our natural world. It is not long before the Mariner and his fellow sailors are punished for their hubris, in the unforgiving glacial grip of ice, which is “mast-high”. Shortly afterwards, when they reach the Pacific, they learn how lethal it can be to be becalmed. For attempting to master nature in this way, the Mariner and the rest of the crew are justly punished. However, Coleridge’s poem is not confined to the primary realm of the physical world of nature. Although he maintains a reverence and awe towards the natural world, he is drawn also to an exploration of the spiritual world; in particular to an investigation of sin, suffering and salvation.
It would appear, during the superstitious time in which the poem is set, that the sailors imagine the cross-shaped huge bird to be a sign from God. This is implied in their hailing it in God’s name, “As if it had been a Christian soul”. It could be said, therefore, that the killing of the bird represents the sin of crucifixion, with the bird becoming a martyr. It is therefore a sin against God as well as against nature, and cries out for justice.
Following this wicked, irrational act, we are taken on a journey towards the dark mysteries of the supernatural, where “death-fires danced at night” and the water burned in striking colours, “like a witch’s oils”. There is an invisible spirit accompanying them, “Nine fathom deep”, who is not a guardian angel, but possibly some form of avenging spirit. We then encounter the most significant and symbolic representative elements of the supernatural - the nightmarish figures on board the spectral ship, Death and Life-in-death. These elements intensify the punishment of all the mariners. It is as if we have arrived at the gates of a grotesque hell, where fate is decided on the throw of dice. It seems, at this point in the poem, that the fickle crew – who are complicit in the crime – are given the less punitive release of death. In contrast, the Mariner must live on to face a living hell. However, as we have argued above, this is later transformed into a sort of humane purgatory.
The way each “lifeless lump” expires is dramatically highlighted by the onomatopoeic word “thump” and, as they depart, the “whizz” of the souls leaving their bodies parodies the sound of the Mariner’s shot of his cross-bow, emphasizing his guilt. But, after an inconsolable period of hellish isolation, “a spring of love gushed from [his] heart” when he sees the “happy living things”, that he had previously despised, transformed in the frosty light and he is able to “[bless] them unaware”. It is this act of spontaneous charity and selflessness that begins to break the spell and leads to his spiritual rebirth.
However, before he is ultimately rescued, it is appropriate that the ship, a vessel of so much suffering and pain, should capsize and sink “down like lead”, reminiscent of the dropping down of the albatross. In the rescue boat, the pilot’s boy recoils in horror from the sight he has seen and imagines that the Mariner resembles the Devil, signalling that his spiritual journey is by no means complete. When he appeals to the hermit to “shrive” him, conscious that his inner torment still persists, the holy man forces him to tell his story. From this confession he gains some consolation, but he soon realizes that he can never live a normal existence. From time to time his disgust at his past crime builds up to such an extent that he is forced to select a suitable listener to recount his story. Towards the end of the final section, he imparts the lesson of what he has experienced to the wedding guest. By being deprived of love and joy, the Mariner has come to appreciate how spiritually necessary the qualities of companionship are. He has told his story not only to relive the suffering he still experiences, but to teach others the importance of what he has learned. Only through love and reverence for all living things “both great and small”, which God has made, can man truly be restored to peace and harmony with his existence.
This moral bequest to the wedding guest is equivalent to an ecological plea to safeguard the environment and all living creatures. However, there is a wider spiritual and supernatural significance which extends beyond our world. The wedding guest is both “sadder” and “wiser” at the very end. This implies that he has been profoundly shaken by the Mariner’s strange gift of language. The “power of speech” has given meaning to his otherwise pitiful and isolated existence. It is this gift which has transformed his punishment into something resembling a humane purgatory. Coleridge has achieved this not only by the power of his language and imagination, but by the ballad form itself. He was very much aware that if the imagination is completely untethered, there can be dangers. Consequently, he secures himself against this risk by constraining his imaginative fervour within strict conventions. Like in the old ballads, his story is simply told, with an emphasis on certain striking situations, plainly stated, and not described in detail. He breaks down the barrier between the natural and the supernatural, and it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins. The story is told by suggestion as much as by actual narrative. Although the poem is visionary, its imagery is not hazy, but particularly vivid. For example, the “rich attire" of the slimy creatures in the sea is described as “Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,/They coiled, and swam; and every track/Was a flash of golden fire.” Here the simple rhymes, monosyllables, arresting caesura and the satisfying enjambment, which flashes us forward, combine to create a vision which is both beautiful and supernatural. These masterful techniques help to neutralize the Mariner’s punishment and guilt.
The agony of his guilt, however, still returns from time to time, and then the mariner must tell his tale, as he has just done to the wedding guest. The mariner says that certain faces impel him to tell his story. It eases his soul to pray in church, surrounded by others praying. His parting message to the wedding guest is that a man who loves well also prays well (and he who loves best also prays best). Love and prayer are closely connected, because God loves all things and people. The wedding guest is stunned by the mariner’s revelations and rises the next day both sadder and wiser.
Therefore, because of his crime against nature – symbolized by the slaughter of a bird - the Mariner’s punishment is just – but only because he does not receive a perpetual punishment. By the end of the poem he is spiritually renewed. He has the reward of being returned to his church community, where he can socialise and partake in communal prayer. The Mariner’s powerful story therefore requires us to reassess our understanding of the very concepts of crime and punishment. The poem is a profound learning experience for the reader as we come to share both the Mariner’s intense emotional suffering and his beatific grace, recognizing, at the same time, that what he has gone through is completely outside our own experience. Consequently, justice is meted by a higher authority – above mankind – and this is both fair and uplifting.
In conclusion, we can see that the heavy weight of crime and wrongdoing has dragged some characters – innocent and guilty – down. On page five of Atonement we are told that [Briony] “did not have it in her to be cruel”. This is obviously ironic, although, looking back at her suffering from the perspective of the epilogue, it is possible to regard the brief episode of cruelty as being incongruent to the character of Bryony we get to know during the long period of time after this brief event. For a brief period of time, Robbie and Cecilia suffer. Bryony has some consolation for all the guilt she experiences and the Mariner, after all his mental and physical anguish, is also consoled. Therefore, it can be said that suffering is by no means confined to the guilty or the innocent in these two texts, although it must be admitted that some of the innocent do suffer considerably and maybe even more than the guilty.
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