After the Victorians: The Historical Turning Point in McEwan's On Chesil Beach

What is it about?

This paper examines the reception of Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach (2007), which was widely seen as an affirmation of the end of repressive Victorian values in the face of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. What my analysis does is to question this argument by placing McEwan’s engagement with the Victorian era into the context of modern English literature, particularly Lytton Strachey, John Fowles, and A.S. Byatt. I show that McEwan is an advocate of a recurring hypothesis amongst modern English authors which holds that today’s values are in fact a continuance of Victorian values – that we are the “other Victorians,” as Michel Foucault proposed – rather than a break with them. The key to reading this theme in the novel, I argue, comes from setting it in the context of McEwan’s work as a whole, in which he repeatedly argues against the false morality that is imposed on history through the notion of the “turning point.”

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