论文总字数：62160字

摘 要

本文分析比较了《赎罪》和《蛙》二者在赎罪这一主题上所反映出的文化的差异，结合作品中的时空背景，联系地域文化对两部作品在主人公行为、性格和观念上的描述进行分析和推论。

英国当代作家伊恩•麦克尤恩（1948-）的小说《赎罪》描述了第二次世界大战时期的英国贵族少女布里奥妮一生因错误的阶级意识对姐姐的爱人罗比抱有错误的认知，造成姐姐与男朋友的分离并最终双双离世的结果，此后布里奥尼意识到自己的罪行并为此进行赎罪的人生历程。在英国社会扎根深入的基督教伦理和信仰，潜移默化的影响布里奥尼的思维，使得她最终放弃优质生活，选择为自己的罪行进行苦修赎罪。

而中国当代作家莫言的小说《蛙》则讲述了上世纪中国计划生育政策下乡村医生姑姑因自己前半生在因政治需求，进行人流和引产造成诸多婴儿死亡的罪行，在看到死亡婴儿报复她的幻觉的情况下，觉醒到自己的罪行并进行赎罪的人生。姑姑的觉醒是由于中国道教和佛教中的鬼神观念的遗留。这种行为受传统观念的生命观、哲学理念的影响下而产生。

《赎罪》和《蛙》的赎罪主题的展现都受文化的影响，影响《赎罪》这本书的主题的主要因素是英国文化中的基督教信仰和封建阶级意识，而影响《蛙》的主要因素是中国儒释道哲学理念及政治指导下的唯物主义。

关键词：伊恩•麦克尤恩；《赎罪》；莫言；《蛙》；赎罪主题；

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Introduction 1

Chapter One The Root of the Difference in Atonement Consciousness 5

1.1 Briony’s Class Consciousness and Religious Faith 7

1.2 Gugu’s Bioethics and Ghosts Concept 10

Chapter Two Briony’s Self-Punishment and Gugu’s Compensation 15

2.1 Briony’s penance in the hospital 15

2.2 Gugu’s Sacrifice to Clay Dolls 17

Chapter Three Purging Sin and Spiritual Relief 19

3.1 Reversing the Verdict and Briony’s Salvation 19

3.2 Confucian Ethics and Gugu’s Deprivation of Custody 21

Conclusion 24

Works Cited 25

Introduction

Ian McEwan (1948-) was born in a British military family. When he was a child, his parents brought him back to Britain from an overseas naval base, sending him to a boarding school named Woolverstone Hall. In this school, as a sensitive and shy boy, Ian McEwan could not get along well with others well because most of the students around him were rude and unamiable from broken working-class families. With little parental care, he experienced rough and traumatized childhood in the incompatible place. His experience and surroundings provided him with numerous inspirations in his entire life. Most characters in his books have broken lives for a variety of reasons. In 1975, his work First Love, Last Rites was published with favorable comments in the United States and Britain, and it was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award. After that, many of his representative works came out, such as In Between the Sheets, Amsterdam, Atonement, and Saturday, and he won The Man Booker Prize, and American National Book Commentators Association Award Jerusalem Prize respectively in 1998, 2002, and 2011. One of his representative works, Atonement，shows how a girl named Briony lives with psychic trauma after she makes mistakes and atones in her whole life. This story, with a theme of expiation, happened during World War II. The Tallises, who are wealthy and influential in Britain, spend a holiday at a summer resort in a peaceful manor. The youngest daughter Briony Tallis, who is only thirteen years old, witnesses by chance what she should have not seen——her older sister Cecilia Tallis taking off her dress before the young man Robbie Turner who is the son of a housekeeper, jumping into the fountain basin. As a childhood sweetheart, Robbie Turner is shocked and freezes, surprised by Cecilia’s beauty. However, in Briony’s eyes, this situation is seen as the evidence that Robbie Turner wants to humiliate Cecilia Tallis. After Briony steals a glance of the love letter written by Robbie Turner to Cecilia and cousin Lola Quincy is raped, Briony accuses Robbie Turner of being the criminal. The innocent Robbie Turner gets into prison, and Cecilia is disappointed at her families’ accusation because she firmly believes this verdict is unjust. Because of Briony’s mistake, the lovers are forced to separate. Robbie Turner gets a chance of being exonerated from the charge and the price is joining the army and fighting in France; Cecilia Tallis breaks all relations with her family, gives up her comfortable aristocratic life and works in rough circumstances as a nurse. Briony is aware of her mistake and regrets, so she starts her life of atonement. After that, atoning her sin and getting salvation is her greatest wish. In her seventy years of life, her main work is expiation.

Mo Yan (1955-), the winner of the 2012 Noble Prize in Literature, was born in a small town in China, Gaomi. He experienced the three-year difficult period in China in his childhood, undergoing hunger and diseases, and was forced to drop out of primary school because of the Great Cultural Revolution. In 1976, he served as a librarian in the army and started to add his reading quantity. Witnessing numerous great events of modern China, he focuses on the human nature and the meaning of life reflected through difficulties and social upheavals in China. His representative works, Red Sorghum Clan, Big Breasts amp;Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Sandalwood Death, and Frog, bring many awards and nominations including the Mao Dun Literature Awards, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Dream of the Red Chamber Awards. The work, Frog, which wins the eighth Mao Dun Literature Awards, describes the Gaomi villagers’ paradoxical psychological activities where expiation works throughout their lives because of the family-planning policy. The main character, Gugu, who experiences the progress of “sin, self-reproach and expiation” in her whole life, has two totally different identities. One is a professional midwife who delivers thousands of newborn babies and saves plenty of lying-in women, and is regarded as a “living Buddha” by villagers at first, while the other identity is the deputy head of the family-planning group, forcing pregnant women who disobey the policy to abort their unborn children, and she is condemned as the Queen of Hell by others. For her, she is paradox, and her life is trapped in the inescapable self-reproach and endless expiation after she has atonement consciousness.

The story of Atonement is set in the background of Britain in the 1930s, while the characters in Frog are set in a Chinese country village in the 1970s. There is much distinct contrast in time, region, culture, and ideology in these two works, but the main characters Briony and Gugu have similar expiation process. Briony regrets and feels guilty after she realizes her sins, and she atones in the hospital and finally fails to finish her atonement in trying to reverse verdict. Gugu firmly believes she has no sin, but she starts to expiate in the way of sacrifice to clay dolls and also fails after she has hallucinations of frogs attacking her all the time. These contrasts are led by different cultural factors, and these factors are the objects of research.

Comparative study on the theme of expiation about Atonement and Frog is meaningful and valuable because few of scholars compares Atonement with Frog. Since Atonement was published, many scholars began to publish papers on analyzing its narration and theme. In Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan's Atonement, James Phelan puts emphasize on how readers judge this novel from its narration when the author mixes a factual account of transgression with a fictional account of atonement. He argues that, though art can carry out its own patterns of transgression and atonement, it cannot – and should not be expected to – atone for transgressions that occur beyond its boundaries. And Aura Sibisan discusses the issues of representation and the presence of historical event in A Manifesto Against Failures of Understanding: Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It concludes that the systems of representation make people construct their meaning of the world, which is a subjective one, because human knowledge is subjective. But Bruno M. Shah focuses on the theme of atonement, opposing the idea that fictive literature bears the task of atonement for postmodernity well in The Sin of Ian McEwan's Fictive Atonement: Reading his Later Novels. In 2009, domestic scholar Tang Chunhua initially focused on the difference in atonement in her thesis Confession and Atonement: A comparative Study on the Theme of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Tie Ning’s Da Yu Nv. She claimed that the Westerns holds the evil is inherent while the Chinese believes the evil means immorality. When Frog was published, domestic scholars started to analyze characters’ confessions and crimes. For example, Zhao Wanzhu analyzes that confessions and atonement are results of “the guilt feelings culture” while retribution is a reminder of salvation. And Wang Mengling explores the result of atonement in Frog, claiming that a sinner must live on, suffer torment, and atone until death. To an extent, these studies provide a possibility of compare the theme of expiation in Atonement and Frog.

Atonement is considered to be one of the famous Ian McEwan’s novels after it is adapted into a movie. Since its publication, it has received great attention from literature field. Most of the studies focus on its special narration and postmodern traits. Although many Chinese literary works convey the same theme, the comparative studies on the theme of expiation in Atonement and Chinese novels are scarce. As the winner of the Mao Dun Literature Awards, Frog presents a profoundly theme of expiation and a distinct Chinese social background, which is applicable for comparative literature studies.

This research, using the method of parallel study of comparative literature, compares and analyzes the theme of expiation on aspects such as atonement consciousness, the action of atonement and the result of atonement, aiming to demonstrate that social conceptions on the basis of the native culture decides the reason of atonement, the way of atonement, and the standards of judging the result of atonement. In this thesis, the fundamental differences in British and Chinese culture are summarized after typical plots of these two works are selected and analyzed against the British and Chinese conceptions.

Chapter One focuses on the root of atonement consciousness. On the one hand, it analyzes the different conceptions that cause Briony and Gugu to commit their respective crimes. Been influenced by the deep-rooted social consciousness of Britain, the noble Briony possesses prejudice against the son of a housekeeper Robbie Turner. This prejudice forms the foundation of her accusation of Robbie’s crimes without evidence. As a devoted follower of Marxism and Maoism, Gugu firmly believes materialism and that embryos do not have life so that she executes abortions with no mercy. On the other hand, this chapter explains the cultural factors which lead to the appearances of atonement consciousness. Because the Christian sense of right and wrong is gradually accepted by Briony, she starts to realize her accusation is the evidence of her own crime. Living in an environment where Buddhism bioethics and ghost conceptions have rooted for more than three thousand years, Gugu cannot escape the influence of these conceptions and gives up materialism, and she turns to believe that she commits the crime of murder.

Chapter Two discusses the actions of expiation. In Atonement, Briony utilizes self-punishment as her way of atonement. She gives up an educational opportunity at Cambridge University, and instead opt for physical work in the hospital like her sister Cecilia, in order to get rid of her sense of guilt momentarily. This action is influenced by the theory of penance which is part of the classic works of Christianity. Gugu chooses to marry the skillful clay-doll maker Hao Dashou and sacrifices to clay dolls every day. Her sacrifice can be linked to the theories of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, which are the dominant sources of Chinese traditional social ideologies. In a sense, what leads to the differences in the actions of the two characters is the different religious theories.

Chapter Three explores the standards of expiating successfully. Both Briony and Gugu fail to purge their sins and get spiritual relief in the end, and the definition of purging sin and getting spiritual relief is different in the two cultures. For Briony, being forgiven by her victims is the symbol of purging, and her salvation is her final spiritual relief according to the Bible. For Gugu, compensating what her victims have lost is the way of purging sin, and obeying her conscience which comes from the theories of benevolence in Confucianism and brings her spiritual relief.

This research concludes that these two novels reflect the British and Chinese cultures by means of illustrating stories about atonement. In the 1970s, Chinese people’s conceptions were guided by the government and their communities, meanwhile the traditional philosophy and religion, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, had their strong influence. The British people in the 1930s, whose conceptions inherited the theories of Christianity and feudal monarchy, atoned for their particular reasons and in their particular ways. The cultural differences between Britain and China lead to the diversity of the theme of expiation.

Chapter One The Root of the Difference in Atonement Consciousness

In both novels, how characters become aware of their mistakes takes almost half of the length each book. There are many descriptions related to behaviors and mental activities. The similarity is that the main characters, Briony and Gugu, believe that their deeds are right at first and change their attitudes when they realize their deeds have resulted in irrevocable consequences. But there are some differences in the details of their atonement consciousness. Also, these differences reveal the influence of native social conceptions on people. What can be demonstrated is that people’s atonement consciousness is culture-dependent. Young Briony Tallis, in Atonement, is a self-righteous girl who indulges in fantasy and lacks rational thinking. These personality traits enable her to tend to be controlled by her own speculation and be indoctrinated by secular principles. As an aristocratic girl, in her subconsciousness, she has prejudice against the son of housekeepers, Robbie Turner. After speculating many nonexistent facts, Briony conclude that Robbie Turner is the criminal and she provides perjured evidence. This finally enables innocent Robbie Turner to be put in jail, which leads Cecilia who loves this young man to break with her family. Consequently, Robbie and Cecilia start their tragic life and die in desperation because of Briony’s faults. After Briony grows up and accepts a more integrated understanding of right and wrong, she has atonement consciousness. But Gugu, in Frog, is an unyielding woman who firmly obeys the commands of the Chinese Communist Party. No matter how tough the assigned tasks are, she will fulfill them at all costs. When her superiors need a midwife who learns the latest and scientific methods of delivery, Gugu overcomes all the difficulties to become an eligible doctor, and tries her best to help all the villagers give up superstitious delivering methods. She successfully finishes this task and increases the survival rate of infants, and therefore is respected by the villagers. When her superior appoints Gugu as the deputy head of the family-planning group, she mercilessly forces women to abort and is regarded as the Queen of Hell. While Gugu has illusions that the dead infants crazily attack her, she came to believe that her deeds are not right, which provides atonement consciousness for her.

However, the reasons why Briony and Gugu think they make mistakes are different. Because they live in different eras and places, they are influenced by different social conceptions. Briony’s class consciousness and her faith lead to her atonement consciousness, while Chinese traditional bioethics and ghost conceptions result in Gugu’s atonement consciousness.

1.1 Briony’s Class Consciousness and Religious Faith

In Atonement, half of the writing describes why Briony committed perjury and how she realizes that she has made a mistake. According to the novel and the social background of 20^th century Britain, the root of Briony’s atonement consciousness is class consciousness and religious faith.

The Tallises are new aristocrats, while Robbie Turner is a housekeeper’s son who comes from the working class. According to the plot of novel and the family tree Cecilia introduces, the ancestors of Tallises are “irretrievably sunk in a bog of farm laboring”, and the great-grandfather opens “his humble hardware shop” which is the first contribution to social status. With efforts of many generations, the Tallises own manors and servants, and become new aristocrats in Britain. However, Robbie Turner is the son of their housekeeper, relying on his master’s aids before he graduates from Cambridge University. This big difference enables Briony and Mrs. Tallis to show a class consciousness. Although the Tallises treaded Robbie Turner favorably, providing funding for his higher education in Cambridge University, they still hold a sense of superiority in an obscure way and keep the stability of aristocratic stratum as their responsibilities when they confront any possibilities of breaking orders. Many plots imply Briony’s sense of superiority.

“A taste for the miniature was on aspect of an orderly spirit…But hidden draw, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organize world denied her reckless possibilities of wrongdoing.” (McEwan, 5)

This class consciousness is rooted in British culture. Briony is inevitably affected under such social circumstances. According to English Aristocratic History, after the Norman Conquest of England in 11^th century, new feudal hierarchy was institutionalized by WilliamⅠthe Conqueror. Afterwards, more than 1,400 vassals were directly subordinated to the kings, and the sense of hierarchy was rooted in aristocracy and common people in the next 1000 years. This conception becomes a sense of superiority in noblemen’s mind because they dominate politics and economy in the country, while commonalty has to earn their living by working for them. In order to maintain their dominant positions, their marriages were the chances to acquire higher political status and economic power, which also kept the stability of the aristocratic stratum. Likewise, it boosted the idea that nobilities were higher than any other social stratum, and this idea was passed down to the whole society. This class consciousness is not only stuck with the aristocratic stratum but also accepted by other classes, so that some prejudice and conservative conceptions appeared in marriages and the social intercourse. Although the aristocratic stratum has undergone unprecedented changes, evolving into a mixture of the old landowning aristocracy, the capitalist class, the representatives of middle class from 1880, this conservative class consciousness was retained. For a long time, British aristocracy usually claimed kinship and contact with people who were in the same stratum. Imperceptibly, they despised the lower classes when they discussed marriage and social intercourse. For instance, young couples who leap across boundaries eloped because there was no way of getting legal marriages. In these circumstances, Briony believes Robbie is not equal to Cecilia and he should be extremely brave to beg for Cecilia’s love.

“…standing by the basin’s retaining wall was her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A proposal of marriage. Robbie Turner, only the son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, Robbie who had been subsidized by Briony’s father through schools and university, had wanted to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine had the boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia’s hand.” (McEwan, 38)

Different from what Briony imagines, Robbie and Cecilia are just in a state of exchange conventional greetings, although they fall in love with each other without expressing their love. What comes next confuses Briony completely because of her class consciousness. She believes Cecilia is humiliated by Robbie because it seems that Robbie orders Cecilia to undress and enter the basin. Actually, Cecilia voluntarily jumps into the water, picking up fragments of the vase which is broken by Robbie.

“What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It was extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her. Blackmail? Threats? Briony thought she should spare herself the sight of her sister’s shame.” (McEwan, 38)

Briony’s misunderstanding finally leads to prejudice and terrible impressions of Robbie Turner, and meanwhile she believes her sister Cecilia needs her protection when she encounters such threat. When Robbie Turner asks Briony to deliver a love letter to Cecilia, Briony reads the letter without permission and is shocked by the erotic words. Naturally, she concludes that Robbie Turner is “Maniacs”, which makes her to insist on accusing Robbie as the criminal who rapes Briony’s cousin Lola without any witness. Due to Briony’s perjury, the real rapist escapes punishment; Robbie Turner gets in jail as a scapegoat, is conscripted to the French battlefield and dies before the Dunkirk Evacuation; Cecilia cannot forgive Briony’s deed, and she breaks up all relations with her family.

After Cecilia disconnects from her family and works in the hospital as a nurse. Briony, as she grows, gradually learns the moral principles which are guided by Christianity ethics. Since Briony lives in a circumstance where Christianity permeates all aspects of the culture and as the people around her follow and spread Christian conceptions every day, it is easy for her to be assimilated by people around her especially as she does not plan to refuse these conceptions and faith. When Briony accepts the Christianity faith and manages herself according to the moral norms of Christianity ethics, she comes to understand the conception of conscience and guilty. In the Bible, the judgement of conscience is the voice of the Lord. The sentence in which Christ ever warned the people who do not have conscience is that “But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Bible, Mat. 6. 23). And in terms of the depiction of Corinthians 8.10, the basis to ethically judge behavior is conscience. For Briony, when she understands the meaning of conscience, she realizes the irreparable consequences she brings to Robbie and Cecilia. They should have lived peacefully and have a promising future, but Robbie struggles in prison and on the battlefield and Cecilia works in one of the toughest jobs. Her conscience is tormented and lives uneasily every day. She knows she has a serious guilty which has been mentioned in the Bible. “ Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.” (Bible, Psm. 5. 6) “ For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” (Bible, Mat. 15. 19) Briony provides false witness and deceit, and these make her suffer from the sense of guilt after she realize she was wrong.

“Throughout the day, up and down the wand along the corridors, Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy……If he had been fighting in France, he might already be captured. Or worse. How Cecilia survive such news? If something happened to Robbie, if Cecilia and Robbie were never to be together. Her secret torment and the public upheaval of war had always seemed separate worlds, but now she understood how the war might compound her crime.” (McEwan, 278)

Therefore, the class consciousness leads to Briony’s guilt and the Christian faith leads to her guilty feeling which results in her atonement consciousness.

1.2 Gugu’s Bioethics and Ghosts Concept

As the main character of Frog, Gugu, whose life runs through expiation, is an extremely paradoxical individual who witnesses the social upheaval of China. On the one hand, she devotes herself to becoming a respectable midwife who saves thousands of newborn babies and lying-in women, and she is thus recognized as the “living Buddha” by villagers. On the other hand, because of the family planning policy, she personally aborts children strictly, taking out numerous embryos from pregnant woman who violates the family-planning policy. At first, she firmly believes that her abortions are correct, but she finally feels guilty towards those babies and pregnant women who die of induced abortions. This change reflects a transformation in her thoughts. Considering that she lives in a special era, when social ideology was experiencing a complex change, Gugu is educated to believe in Marx materialism in her first half of life, as she takes Chinese traditional conceptions of and Buddhism from people around her at the same time.

According to the depiction in the novel, Gugu was born in the 1940s when western philosophy and Chinese philosophy collided and mixed. After 1840, some western theories were introduced into China, such as democracy, science, and Marxism. As the daughter of a member of the Chinese Communist Party, Gugu witnesses plenty of communists contribute their life to oppose aggression, persisting in the fight and struggle for a more peaceful environment. Her ideology is influenced by her environment, education, value orientations, and her experiences which make her firmly believes in Marxist materialism. Even though her father died for his revolutionary cause, she is still keen to realize his unfinished ambition. After the Chinese Communist Party won the War of Liberation and founded a peaceful country which had been expected by Chinese people for more than 100 years, most Chinese people widely regarded Marx Materialism and Maoism which formed the Party’s action guides as the official ideology, including Gugu. For example, she actively accepts the tasks assigned by the Chinese Communist Party to learn scientific methods of midwifery, and she becomes the first professional midwife in the entire township, replacing those old midwives who use superstitious methods. Also, she considers that obeying the Party’s commands is her honor and betraying them is one of the most shameful actions. When Gugu encounters the situation that her boyfriend Wang Xiaoti flees towards Taiwan and she is accused of betraying the Party, she even tries to prove her innocence by committing suicide, slitting her left wrist, and leaving behind a note: “I hate Wang Xiaoti! I have always been a Party member, and I will die a Party member.” (Mo Yan, 208) Because of this idea, Gugu respects those people who are revolutionaries or descendants of revolutionaries but looks down to those landlords who are portrayed as needing be struck by the Party. When Gugu delivers the first baby after she graduates, she expresses her regret: “her first ought to have been the son or daughter of a revolutionary, not a landlord’s mongrel.” (Mo Yan, 43) Thus, she completely believes in the instructions of Communist Party, treating job assigned by her superior as the most significant career tasks, as she gradually gains a special ideology——to obey the Party’s command without condition. It is not surprising to see that Gugu executes the tasks of aborting extra fetus rigidly with no hesitation after she is appointed the deputy head of the family-planning group. If she catches any women who go beyond one pregnancy, she will force them to abort without mercy.

“Child, I’m afraid that you might be as slow as they say, after all. Gugu is a member of the Communist Party, a member of the Consultative Conference standing committee, and deputy head of the family-planning group. How could you expect me to be the first to break the law? I want you all to know that even though I suffered unjust treatment, my heart is as red as ever, and will never change. Alive I’m a party member, dead I’ll be a Party ghost. I go where the Party sends me. Xiaopao, your wife’s thinking is a problem. She can’t tell which is hot, the ashes or the fire. You need to be clear on matters and not get any crazy ideas. People have begun calling me the ‘Living Queen of Hell’, and I couldn’t be prouder. I’ll take a bath and burn incense before delivering babies for those who follow family-planning policy, but I’ll deal mercilessly with those who go beyond one pregnancy-every last one of them!” (Mo Yan, 175)

Because of this ideology, Gugu’s bioethics also is affected by materialism which is advocated by the Party at the same time. She believes that babies’ lives start at the time when they left their mothers’ bodies. Gugu illustrates this idea with sentences such as: “Before it was ‘out of the pot’ it was just meat, and it needed to come out one way or another. But once it was out of the pot it was a human being, even if it had not arms and no legs, and was protected by national laws.” (Mo Yan, 200) Gugu does not assume compulsive abortion to be an improper deed. Hence, she thinks it is reasonable to obey the family-planning policy and mercilessly execute embryos which belongs to pregnant women who disobey the family-planning policy, even though she is always pleaded by people. In her life, she executes more than 2,000 unborn children which even leads to several accidental death of pregnant women. Wang Renmei accidentally died on the operation table because of excessive bleeding when Gugu executes the abortion; Wang Dan died on her way of escaping because of premature birth when she resists arrest by Gugu; Geng Xiulian is drowned in the river when she tries to evade captures from Gugu. Although most of the villagers and families condemn Gugu’s action, treating her as a demon, she still is convinced that her actions are right and continues to carry out her duty.

“Family planning, controlling our population growth. I’m not afraid to be the villain, someone has to be. I know you all want me to die and go straight to Hell. Well, we Communists don’t believe in such places, and materialists have nothing to fear. And I wouldn’t be afraid even if there were such a place. Who would go to Hell if not me?” (Mo Yan, 151)

However, it is impossible for Gugu to escape the influences of Chinese traditional bioethics which is related to Buddhism, because she spends all her time contacting people who agree with traditional bioethics more or less. In about 67 A.D., Buddhism arrived in China and its conceptions gradually combined with Confucianism and Taoism in about 620 A.D. Its Religious doctrines influenced the Chinese culture, including literature, philosophy, folk custom, and arts. Several primary propositions of Chinese traditional bioethics come from the conceptions of Buddhism, including the inadmissibility of abortion. In the idea of samsara, fertilization is the beginning of life, which explains that abortion is equivalent to murder. Meanwhile, prohibition against taking life is one of the ten Buddhist prohibitions. Anyone who intends to kill human beings ought to get punishment. According to Vinaya, people are clearly banned from abortion. Although she treats the policies of the government as the most important matter, this theory is accepted by Gugu to an extent, and she cherishes all human being’s lives. When Gugu sees the midwives without any knowledge of scientific methods use improper deliver skills, she angrily condemns and says: “If you finish, there would be two corpses lying on that kang.” (Mo Yan, 29) She agrees with the prohibition of taking life, but she does not believe embryos have lives. Nevertheless, this proposition objects to her concept but still impresses on her subconsciousness.

What makes Gugu to suddenly have the guilty feeling and expiation consciousness is the Chinese ghost concepts. According to Chinese ghost concepts which are related to Taoism and Buddhism, people’s souls do not vanish but turns to eternal ghosts after they die. These ghosts are believed to have supernatural power which can act on living people, so Chinese living people have reverence toward ghosts, especially for those ghosts who died because of unnatural factors. Ghosts of people who were killed by others are likely to become demons, wander around and revenge their murders. Chinese people associate some inexplicable things with ghosts who are persecuted to death. This fear has been preserved in generations of Chinese people for more than four thousand years. They are afraid of revenge from ghosts because they do not have many effective methods to wipe ghosts out and it is difficult to escape. After executing abortion plenty of times as a midwife, self-examination caused by these Chinese ghost concepts can appear any time, since abortion conflicts with the duty of a midwife. Once her self-examination shakes her ideas, she doubts whether she should still persist in materialism. As a paradoxical person, she intentionally agrees with materialism but also accepts Chinese ghost conceptions consciously. According to folk customs of Gugu’s hometown, frogs are symbols of Children, because the pronunciation of its sound is similar to children’s. In that place, villagers even sacrifice to frogs in order to beg for conceiving babies. At first, Gugu treats it as superstitious beliefs, but once she has an illusion, seeing countless frogs chasing and biting her, tearing her clothes, this custom gradually impresses on her mind. She speculates that these babies who are aborted turn to frogs and intend to punish the killer. After that, Gugu is afraid of frogs, starting to regret conducting abortions, giving up her faith of materialism. As she thoroughly turns to agree with the ghost conceptions, she begins to reflect that her executions are wrong.

“Gugu said that in all her years as a medical provider, travelling up and down remote path late at night, she’d never once felt afraid. But that night she was terror stricken. The croaking of frogs is often described in terms of drumbeats. But that night it sounded to her like human cries, almost as if thousands of newborn infants were crying. That had always been one of her favorite sounds, she said. For an obstetrician, no sound in the world approaches the soul-striking music of a newborn baby’s cries. But the cries that night were infused with a sense of resentment and of grievance, as is the souls of countless murdered infants were hurling accusations. The liquor she’d drunk, she said, left her body as cold sweat.” (Mo Yan, 247)

After that, Gugu always sees the illusions that frogs cry like babies, tangling her at night. It becomes a kind of inescapable torment for her. In order to get rid of illusions, Gugu repents her wrong, and tries her best to atone. This is the symbol of Gugu’s expiation consciousness.

Chapter Two Briony’s Self-Punishment and Gugu’s Compensation

In the theme of expiation in literary works, methods of atonement which characters choose is an essential part of the novels. In Atonement and Frog, both Briony and Gugu try their best to expiate their guilt, although they choose different ways. Briony does self-punishment in the hospital, and Gugu chooses to compensate the victims. Briony willingly gives up her comfortable life, and instead does tough physical labor which she never images before, which is a kind of penance in essence. Gugu, as a midwife who takes away thousands of unborn baby’s lives, compensates towards them on the basis of Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian theories.

2.1 Briony’s penance in the hospital

In the last part of Atonement, Ian McEwan describes the life in which Briony works as a probationary nurse in the hospital during World War II. There are plenty of plots which show miseries of the wounded, hardships of the nursing service, and the strict management of the nurse system. These depictions reflect the way of expiating and the changing process of mental activity. Briony gives up her high-class aristocratic life and an educational opportunity at Cambridge, in order to experience what Cecilia suffers after breaking off relations with her family. At first, it is hard for Briony to adjust to nursing work: she continually makes mistakes which cause endless criticism from Sister Marjorie Drummond; tedious and heavy cleaning work makes her exhausted; she gradually forgets her self-identity because of the rigid daily schedule. Although this experience is stressful and tedious, she still does not want to leave because there’s little time for her recalling her guilty, and this makes her feel better. Sometimes, Briony misses her family and comfortable life when she reads letters from home at the end of the working day, but she insists on working in the hospital as expiation because she cannot get rid of her feeling of guilty.

“This was her student life now, these four years, this enveloping regime, and she had no will, no freedom to leave. She was abandoning herself to a life of strictures, rules, obedience, housework, and a constant fear of disapproval. She was one of a batch of probationers-there was a new intake every few months-and she had no identity beyond her badge. She emptied and sluiced the bedpans, swept and polished floors, made cocoa and Bovril, fetched and carried-and was delivered from introspection. At some point in the future, she knew from listening to the second-year students, she would begin to take pleasure in her competence. She was happy to have little time to think of anything else.” (McEwan, 274)

Working in the hospital like Briony’s sister Cecilia is a way of self-punishment as atonement, because she cannot eliminate the consequence she caused the victims. This self-punishment enables Briony to alleviate her self-accusation tentatively in a way. In order to alleviate the suffering from the sense of guilt, she decides to take self-punishment. Choosing this way of self-punishment as expiation is affected by the idea of penance and asceticism advocated by Christianity. In the previous chapter, what has been illustrated is that Briony accepts the Christianity faith and realizes her guilty. In Christian brief, penance after being conscious of sin and guilty is a religious attitude. People who have sin and guilt should repent and ask for forgiveness. And, in Of Justification by Faith, Calvin explained that without forgiveness no man is pleasing to God. It means they still need to accept suffering from a sense of being guilty. During the Holy Week, penitential activity is particularly common. On the other hand, penance can be a kind of religious rite. For example, in Anglicanism, private confession of sins to a priest, which has been provided for in the Book of Common Prayer, is a form of penance. Actually, the essence of penance is an action of self-discipline, such as giving up sensual pleasures. Usually Christians hold that asceticism which includes renunciation of material possessions and physical pleasures is the way of getting redemption and salvation. Since justice is core in Christianity, penance is a method of achieving justice by self-punishment, self-judgment, and self-discipline. Influenced by asceticism, Christians will perform fasting, continence, abstaining from alcohol or tobacco, or other privations in order to finish penance. Therefore, being impacted by this conception, as a girl who immerses in the Christian culture, Briony decides to expiate via the approach of penance which is influenced by asceticism voluntarily, in order to rid herself the sense of guilt and acquire forgiveness.

2.2 GuGu’s Sacrifice to Clay Dolls

According to Frog, when Gugu retires, she decides to get married to Hao Dashou who is a skillful clay-doll maker, because she needs his craftsmanship in producing customized clay dolls. These clay dolls are designed according to Gugu’s imagination of babies who are aborted, in order for her to atone. She sacrifices to these clay dolls all the time. Actually, this sacrifice ceremony is handed down from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. As a Chinese woman who experiences a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society and a socialist society, it is inevitable for Gugu to get rid of the influences of Chinese traditional view, while the theories of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism constitute the core of Chinese traditional views. On the basis of Taoism and Buddhism, there is a nether world where ghosts should live. People’s souls become ghosts and enter the nether world after they naturally died. Some of them live in the nether world forever, and some of them stay there temporarily and wait for being reborn in new flesh. For those ghosts living in the nether world, according to Confucianism, their life is similar to that of the world where the living stay, in that they need food, money, residences and other necessities which help them to stay decently in the nether world. This view is regarded as a request for morality. If people want to conform to secular norms, providing offerings and sacrifice to the deaths are essential. The Doctrine of The Mean, one of the Confucianism classics, argues that: “They served the dead as they would have served them alive; they served the departed as they would have served them had they continued among them.” (ZiSi, 35) This is regarded as the principle of serving ghosts in Chinese traditional views. However, for those ghosts who died unnaturally, they cannot stay peacefully in the nether world and be reborn in new flesh. There are two reasons: ghosts who died without complete bodies will be disabled in the nether world according to the view of serving the dead as the alive; their resentment and grievance lead them to choose to revenge rather than be reborn. Unless their grievance is moved, they are less likely to stop their revenge and go to be reborn. With this idea, the rites for releasing souls from purgatory is widely accepted, including setting up an altar for prayers. This rite belongs to Taoism etiquette, with using incense and praying on bended knees being the most basic ritual of it. This etiquette is for communicating with ghosts and appeasing them effectively.

Thus, it is not surprising to see Gugu sacrifice to clay dolls. After she believes she has murdered children, she always sees children’s ghosts possessing frogs, torturing her as punishment. Because she is influenced by the aforementioned views, Gugu naturally believe that the reason why this punishment happens is those unborn children’s revenge against her. To get rid of the illusions (ghosts’ revenges), she tries her best to compensate them and help them to be reborn in new fleshes. Hence, she is married to Hao Dashou, designing clay dolls according to their parents’ appearances, in order to provide complete bodies for them, which can help them to live healthily in the nether world. In three of her rooms, all of the clay dolls are placed on little squares which sit on a big wooden rack. She lights three sticks of incense on an altar in the center of the room every day, falling to her knees, bringing her palms together, and muttering prayerfully. In these sacrificial ceremonies, Gugu provides offerings for those unborn children and comforts their emotions by praying, since Gugu believes that they can leave for wherever they are fated to be reborn once they have reached spiritual attainment.

Chapter Three Purging Sin and Spiritual Relief

Ian McEwan and Mo Yan illustrate the result of atonement in their novels. Both Briony and Gugu fail to expiate after they try their best to atone. Briony not only does self-punishment in the hospital but also strives for reversing the verdict of Robbie Turner; Gugu sacrifices to unborn babies and delivers a child who is regarded as a reborn one for Chen Mei. Nevertheless, Robbie does not get his justice, while Chen Mei has mental disorder after Gugu takes away her child. Briony and Gugu fail to purge their sin in the end.

In the theme of expiation, whether characters expiate successfully or not as the result of atonement is a non-ignorable selection in literary books as the result of atonement. Hence, a standard which is for judging this result is necessary. In consideration of remedying consequences and getting rid of guilty feelings, purging sin and getting spiritual relief are the sign of expiate successfully. However, in different social backgrounds, the definition of purging sin and obtaining spiritual relief is different.

3.1 Reversing the Verdict and Briony’s Salvation

In the second chapter, it has been discussed that Briony’s penance in the hospital is her action of expiation. Actually, Briony also makes efforts to help Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis’ life return to normal. She knows the only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened. She looks for other witness who can provide effective testimony for the court, including Lola, Danny Hardman and Mr. and Mrs. Tallis. Unfortunately, Danny Hardman has died previous to this; Mr. and Mrs. Tallis do not want to reverse the verdict because they refuse to become enemies of the real criminal Paul Marshall who is one of the most influential businessmen in Britain. He owns a chocolate company which is the main provider of military supplies in World War II. Even the victim, Lola, does not mind who hurts her, and gets married to the criminal Marshall as a way of escaping her miserable original family as soon as possible, which means it is not possible for her to accuse him. This situation does not change in the following decades. Robbie Turner never gets his justice from the court. What compounds her crime is that Robbie Turner dies in France because of Septicemia before the day of Dunkirk Evacuation and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed the Balham Underground station. Even though there are so many difficulties they have experienced that fortune might come to them，the lovers, Robbie and Cecilia, finally cannot realize their dream—to live together and side by side on a South London pavement. This situation indicates that Briony has no opportunities to acquire forgiveness to purge her of sin. Suffering from her sin, she struggles for spiritual relief all the time. She writes a novel on the basis of her own experience when she is nearly at the end of her life. In this novel, she confesses her sin, identifying the real criminal, and makes up a happy ending for Robbie and Cecilia. Briony hopes the public could know her crime, so that her soul would be saved from the sin and its consequences. However, this novel cannot be published before she dies, because the influential Marshalls will easily make all the publishers who want to publish this novel go bankrupt. Her attempt is frustrated. Thus, Briony failed to purge her sin and obtain spiritual relief.

According to Briony’s failure, it can be argued that the symbol of purging sin successfully is forgiveness. All of what she intends to do is for acquiring forgiveness by Robbie Turner to repair the relationships between Cecilia. This notion comes from Christianity. Human beings with original sin can get forgiveness from God through Christ's sacrificial suffering and death, in order to help human beings to reconcile with God who provides grace of creation for them. This theory forms the fundamental principle: people who need to purge their sins successfully should be forgiven and reconciled with victims by personal effort such as repentance and asceticism. Therefore, if a person wants to purge his nor her sins, obtaining forgiveness and reconciliation is necessary. Briony is not able to purge her sin because she cannot get forgiveness and reconciliation from Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis. In addition, providing a happy ending to Robbie and Cecilia is a key method of getting spiritual relief, since only this can save her soul from Robbie and Cecilia’s tragedy. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, saving of the soul from sin and its consequences is defined as salvation in Christianity. Historically, salvation is considered to be caused either by the grace of a deity by the independent choices of free will and personal effort; or by some combinations of the two. It is only possible through Jesus Christ. Its religious doctrine argues that Jesus’ death on the cross was the once-for-all sacrifice that atoned for the sin of humanity. After getting salvation, human beings gain liberation from sin and the suffering associated with the punishment of sin—i.e., “the wages of sin are death.” (Bible, Rom. 6. 23). Thus, this notion provides a theory that salvation is the path to spiritual relief.

3.2 Confucian Ethics and Gugu’s Deprivation of Custody

As a midwife who has retired, Gugu sacrifices to clay dolls in order to promote those unborn children who are aborted by her to live better in the nether world and reborn in new flesh as soon as possible. When she finds an opportunity of giving children to couples who ever experiences compulsive abortion, she catches it without any hesitation. Wang Renmei, the first wife of Wan Zu, conceives a child and plans to birth it secretly, but she is caught by Gugu and died in the operation room when Gugu aborts her son. Thus, her husband Wan Zu loses his son and wife accidentally. Although he gets married with Little Lion several years later, he does not have other kids. Gugu feels sorry for him and sympathizes with Little Lion who extremely wish to raise a child but does not have fertility. When Little Lion hires Chen Mei who lives by surrogacy, Gugu agrees with Little Lion’s illegal activities and actively takes the tasks of delivering the child who belongs to Wan Zu and Chen Mei. Gugu believes that this child is the one who died in Wang Renmei’s uterus and it is reborn in Chen Mei’ womb. After getting this baby, Gugu lies to Chen Mei, telling her that the child is dead, sending this baby to Wan Zu and Little Lion. However, Chen Mei sees through her lie, and tries her best to take back her child, only to discover that she is deprived of her custody is deprived. As a woman who used to despair and now regains hope because of motherhood, she breaks down when she finds she cannot raise her child. Gugu’s action results in Chen Mei’s insanity.

Gugu’s action not only does not pure her from her sin, it only increases her guilt, because her action of depriving the child’s custody kills Chen Mei’s soul. To some extent, the pregnancy of Chen Mei saves her. This poor woman loses her desire to live after she is disfigured in an explosion, but her child awakens her maternal instinct and love of life. She regains the strength of living and all her meaning of being lies in raising her child. However, Gugu destroys her wish which increasingly progress through her pregnancy, hurting this unfortune woman exactly. In order to correct previous mistakes, Gugu does not show kindness and sympathy, when she encounters Chen Mei who begs her to return the child. Even though Gugu knows she is wrong when she executes abortions with no mercy, she is still grimly cruel when she gets another chance to atone. When she causes Chen Mei to go insane, she commits another crime. Actually, she cannot make Wang Renmei relive, while child she sends to Wan Zu and Little Lion is not the dead one whose parents are Wan Zu and Wang Renmei. Wang Renmei and her unborn kid cannot come back any more, which means Gugu’s crime is unchangeable. In addition, from an ethical point of view, compulsive separation of mother and children is immoral. It is regulated in Confucian Ethics: “There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” (Confucius, 416) This family ethics that Confucius claimes is the moral norm which still has strong effects in today’s society. He posed a moral obligation that parents should raise children selflessly and children should have filial piety. This bidirectional duty is not allowed to be interrupted and interfered by others. Anyone who interrupts it is equally disobeying the ultimate requirement—benevolence. This is a severe crime in the circumstance where Confucian ethic dominates people’s beliefs. Perhaps Gugu might purge her sin if she handled the affairs with mercy and compassion. Thus, it can be seen that in the circumstances of China, benevolence is the sign of purging sin successfully.

Like what Gugu has experienced, she feels guilty and wants to commit suicide when she faces Chen Mei. When she reads the script which describes her experiences and expiation, she says: “Play-acting is play-acting, reality is reality. I think that you know that I have to include myself-we all treated Chen Mei badly. My insomnia has returned in recent days. All those crippled frogs that damned little devil brought out come to disturb me at night. Not only can I feel their chilled, slimy skin, but I can even smell their cold stench…” (Mo Yan, 384) This spiritual torture seems to show that she cannot get spiritual relief after she atones. She knows her expiation still does not follow her conscience. In the Confucian notion, there are four elements of conscience: the sense of concern for others, the feeling of shame and disgust, the sense humility and deference, and the sense of right and wrong. Mencius also argues that: “if you did lack concern for the infant, you would not be human. Also, to lack a sense of shame and disgust would not be human; to lack a feeling of humanity and deference is to be ‘in-human’ and lack a sense of right and wrong is to be inhuman.” (Mencius, 413) Gugu’s deprivation of custody goes against her sense of concern and leads to the feeling of shame and disgust, which contradicts her conscience. This results in her failure to get spiritual relief. Therefore, following conscience or not is the standard of getting spiritual relief.

Conclusion

Through this cases study of atonement consciousness, actions of atonement, and the results of atonement, this thesis analyzes factors which influence the theme of atonement in the two novels. In fact, the diversity of social conceptions between China and Britain determines the differences in the literary theme of expiation. According to the previous discussions in this thesis, Christian faith and feudal consciousness are the primary cultural elements which take effect on British expiation style, while socialist ideology, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism work on the modern Chinese theme of expiation. This can be summarized through the difference between the British and Chinese cultures. For modern Britain, its culture is rooted in the Christian philosophy. Ethics, moral sense, even secular rules including feudal system are based on theological theories. Christian faith and moral principles have been secularized in every part of people’s conceptions. But for modern China, its culture continually experiences collision and fusion of Chinese traditional philosophy and Marxism, and social ideology develops into various forms of multicultural integration. People’s conceptions in this period tend to originate from them in parts. Thus, the characters in Atonement and Frogs have many distinct details in their process of expiation, which indicates that the literary theme of expiation is influenced by the native culture.

Works Cited

Confucius[孔子]. Confucian Analects, The Great Learning amp; The Doctrine of the Mean. Trans. James Legge. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House, 2016.

Cross, F. L., ed. “Atonement”. The Oxford dictionary of the Christian church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Easton, M. G. Atonement in Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Edinburgh: T. Nelson amp; Sons, 1897.

Finn, Richard. Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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