I really like Ian McEwan’s novels. Before reading The Comfort of Strangers I had read Atonement, and found both to be interesting and engaging. McEwan’s stories are often dark and sinister, turning everyday moments into tragic events. There is something about the way he describes chaos and violence that is almost poetic, however disturbing the situation might be. As I began reading The Comfort of Strangers, I was instantly drawn in by McEwan’s style, but I was waiting to stumble across the story-altering twist, the piece of information that would drastically change the meaning of everything before it. With twelve pages left in the book, the twist came on page 115 when Caroline shows Mary the wall of pictures of Colin.

I’m not usually the type of person to yell at the characters in horror movies or books, I don’t usually tell them to leave the dark, scary basement, but McEwan made me care about Colin and Mary, and as Mary saw the pictures on the wall, I wanted her to run as fast as she could away from the crazy woman next to her. Even though I had expected things to go badly for Colin and Mary, when everything went downhill I wasn’t expecting how horribly wrong it would become. I was expecting some sort of confrontation between Robert, Caroline and Colin, but I was not expecting it to end in death, or at least not death in such a gruesome manner. Colin’s murder removes any of the romanticism that sometimes accompanies death in fiction; there are no dramatic final words, no tearful goodbyes. Because the story shifts to Mary’s perspective, we drift in and out of consciousness with her and miss Colin’s final breath, making his death even more sinister.

I think McEwan’s main accomplishment in The Comfort of Strangers is the message he presents regarding the dangers of travel. His characters go off to Italy to rediscover the strength in their relationship, and instead find themselves facing down death. It is this idea, that any traveler at any time in any place could easily fall victim to a dark and sinister death at the hands of someone more familiar with their surroundings that adds a truly chilling overtone to the entire story. Anyone could take a wrong turn and end up in a dark alley with an unsavory character, but that’s not exactly highlighted in any of the travel brochures that promise fun times and beautiful scenery. Colin and Mary wanted an authentic experience so much that they were unable to see the danger their new authentic acquaintances represented.

Gender

Gender plays a major role in many novels. Novels often portray men and women in their traditional roles. There are some things that we as a part of modern-day American society associate specifically with males or specifically with females. For example, baby girls are bought pink outfits, and boys are expected to prefer playing with cars over Barbies. Gender roles are the normal behaviors that are associated with either being male or being female. They are the standards that society uses in order to determine how men and women behave. Gender roles do not just appear in literature, but they also play a major role in psychology. We can use the psychological standpoint and observe, critique, and figure out the characters that we read about in novels.

In the novel The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, there are many gender issues that appear. A major focus seems to be around the character of Robert. Over the course of the novel, he tells many stories of his childhood. Robert tells of his father and the strict rules he enforced on him and his sisters while growing up. Robert’s father was very old fashioned. He would not let his daughters wear make-up or go sockless for a long time. He also favored Robert, and taught him that it was important to grow up to become a very masculine—macho—man. Robert faced many traumatizing moments when he was a child. One example is when girls mocked him because he slept in the same bed as his mother when he was ten years old. This is an example of castration anxiety. Robert does not want to appear weak or emasculated because of any such incident. Castration anxiety is part of Freud’s psychoanalysis theory, the “Oedipus complex”. This explains that a child longs for the parent of the opposite sex and feels a sense of competition with the parent of the same sex. Robert sleeping in the same bed as his mother and questioning his father is a case of this Freudian theory.

The concept of “Old World” versus “New World” ideologies also ties into the gender discussion. The “Old World” views society as patriarchal. The man or father is the one who does manual labor, makes money, and takes care of the decision making for the family. The woman or wife is expected to cook, clean, and take care of the family at home. Age separates the two different belief systems. The concept of the “New World” has the man and woman on almost even footing, with the woman is portrayed as having a job, or making bi decisions, or even dominating the relationship. The Comfort of Strangers is a novel which contains all of these thoughts on gender and assumptions, and it makes understanding some of the characters a bit simpler by breaking them down to a psychological standpoint.

Ian McEwanWhen we started The Comfort of Strangers, I had a little history with Ian McEwan. I read Atonement (as did most teenage girls, I think) in high school, and I had only a small inkling of his apparent tendency towards perversity (If you’ve read Atonement, no explanation is necessary) in his writing. In that novel, Robbie’s unintentional switch of his letters to Cecilia, one innocent, one not-so, also leads to his death, but in a way that is less shocking, and I think less horrifying than Mary and Colin’s in The Comfort of Strangers. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that I realized the intensity of Atonement and the starring role played by misunderstanding and perversity in that novel.

My previous statement was true, I did only have a small inkling of the author’s tendency towards perversity, but I’m not sure that I can explain why I didn’t better grasp the theme of the novel. The Comfort of Strangers was perhaps more shocking because Colin’s death is more violent, and intimate. Robbie and Cecilia died because of World War II, Colin has no such grand end: his death was not caused by septicemia as the result of a gun-shot wound, and he did not drown when the Germans bombed Balham station in London. I cried when I read Atonement, but I felt no such compassion for Colin or Mary. I think I threw the book across the room when I finished it. I was disgusted by them, and even more so by Robert and Caroline.

Mary and Colin’s relationship compared to Robbie and Cecilia’s is much less moving, and the latter pair, though they make no claim to perfection, is more pitiable and attractive because of what they suffered and the strength of their love. Colin and Mary are rather annoying, and Robert and Caroline are in no way an attractive pair, yet Colin and Mary find themselves inexplicably drawn to them. After this novel, I don’t feel inclined to give Ian McEwan another chance, although I have yet to decide whether Atonement redeems him.

Given the difficulty of articulating a single definition of feminism, it is simplistic to argue that The Comfort of Strangers threatens feminism as a whole. Its subject matter is on the surface quite controversial – a battered woman becomes complicit in her abuse by engaging in sadomasochistic sexual play, which leads ultimately to her transformation from victim to perpetrator when she orchestrates the ritual killing of a young man on holiday – but is it anti-feminist? I was intrigued by such accusations. I was unable to find specific objections to the text, but after a bit of reading about Second Wave feminism, I was able to glean what the critique might be.

McEwan presents complicated female subjects that repeatedly fail to comply with patriarchal norms. Through his portrayal of Caroline, McEwan defies typical representations of sexualized women as described in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic. He highlights the notion that the ‘personal is political’ and complicates any attempt at an impersonal sexual politics. Finally, he links Colin and Mary’s failure to communicate (i.e. their silence) with their ultimate demise – exposing a larger question: “If silence is complicity, what form should speech take?” given the post-structuralist evaluation of language itself as patriarchal. It seems that even as McEwan identifies patriarchal norms, he subverts and/or problematizes them. Perhaps, then, rather than posing a threat to feminist ideology, The Comfort of Strangers is often damned because it exposes a weakness.

While part of McEwan’s literary genius is his ability to infiltrate the psyches of complex characters, he pushes the boundaries of politically correct male authorship by encroaching on the forbidden territory of women’s experiences. He, of course, doesn’t stop there. He universalizes sexual perversions, emphasizing sadomasochism, but including voyeurism, exhibitionism and scopophilia. While The Comfort of Strangers predates Judith Butler’s declaration of the performativity of gender, the rise of queer theory and politics necessitated a permissiveness of alternative/non-heteronormative sexualities. For obvious reasons, proponents of queer theory resist any inhibition of sexual freedom. They do so, often, by locating sexual desire within the domain of the inalterable - the “natural”. Therein lies the weakness and indeed the perceived threat to feminist ideology. If sadomasochism is a wide spread, if not universal, component of sexual desire, if it is natural, what does that imply about the patriarchal system of male dominance and female submission that the perversion replicates?

Camera "Had Robert been following them around with a camera? Was he following them now? Mary shrugged and glanced back. Colin looked back too. There were cameras everywhere. Suspended like aquarium fish against a watery background of limbs and clothes, but Robert was not there. 'Perhaps,' Mary said, 'he thinks you have a nice face.'(97) Due to Robert's creepy and inappropriate use of a camera, Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers" made me thinks a lot about the relationship between photography and travel. Although Robert isn't using his camera during travel, because he himself lives in Venice, the couple looks around suspiciously to see if Robert is spying on them, and, in doing so, notice the vast array of cameras at every turn. When traveling, we use cameras to help us remember the trip once it is over, for apparently, our own memories are inept. In addition, photographs act as proof; by taking a picture of a person in front of a certain church, one can prove that this person did in fact exists, as did the church, and that they were once together.

However, one must also question the disadvantages of using a camera while traveling. If one is simply seeing everything through the lens of a camera instead of through his or her own eyes, is the experience as significant? I would have to argue that no, it is not. For example, although I would hesitate to ever give him such advice, Robert could have creepily enjoyed seeing Colin more if he had just watched him in person, instead of spending the time taking pictures to fascinate over back at his house. The photographs themselves work almost as masochistic tools; we are able to look back and long for something that we never quite saw, because we were too busy photographing. This does not only pertain to Robert—I think there’s a bit of this desire to long for something in all of us. The role of photography also takes place in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” which compares quite easily to McEwan’s novella. In the end of Mann’s text, Aschenbach dies while a camera stands idly on the beach, with no one to take a picture of him. Although the significance of this camera is debatable, I personally believe that Mann is making a point of showing how those who are important to Aschenbach, at this point being only Tadzio, will not remember him. Because there is no one there to take his picture, there is no proof. Thus, if based on my understanding of the camera in “Death in Venice,” this book is not as similar to McEwan’s as is often said. While McEwan seems to be mocking photography during travel, Mann perhaps believes that the photographic proof of a person having been in a place is necessary, for, otherwise, the circumstance will be forgotten, and fade into travel oblivion.

            Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers makes a variety of statements about not only travel, but the nature of relationships between men and women, as well as presenting a theory on the presence of sado-masochistic desires in almost every person. Colin and Mary, a couple with a series of relationship problems, sleep in separate beds and have grown cold towards each other. While their meeting with Robert and Caroline at first rekindles romance and ends their enigmatic lack of intimacy, these characters soon prove deadly for the travelling couple.

            Robert, a strange and aggressive though somewhat charming local, lures the couple into what slowly becomes an odd and unsettling relationship. His tales of his stern, violent father and the refuge he sought from his kind and caring mother provide a backdrop for his sadistic tendencies. His wife Caroline, though seemingly fragile and submissive, appears to be somewhat more aware and in control than the other characters, including even her husband. This is clearly evidence of Caroline’s masochism and the pleasure she derives from her situation.

            When related to the topic of travel, The Comfort of Strangers appears to be an indictment of tourism. This is communicated through the fact that McEwan does not once mention the name of the city (Venice) in which the story takes place, asserting that the events of the novel could have befallen foreigners in any city. The obscure death of Colin, when looked at objectively, is the result of his and Mary’s desire to travel and to change things in their stagnant relationship. This same desire is part of what attracts them to Robert and Caroline. While Robert and Caroline are clearly the story’s aggressors, the passivity of Colin and Mary, as well as their flawed relationship, play a significant part in their tragic fate.

A Hotel Room

When reading The Comfort of Strangers, I found myself making awkward, incredulous faces and yelling out loud, "What's wrong with you?!" Everytime the novel gets creepier, our main characters relax more, avoid more. "We're on holiday" seems to be a mantra for a fatal lifestyle, and the fact that they are on vacation, away from the reminders of daily life, seems to let them slip into an idleness, a laziness that lets Colin die.

Now that I think of it, I'm really finding a strong connection between death and traveling in this class - what is it about going away that kills all these characters?

Is it the ways in which they travel? Are Mary and Colin that different from Daisy Miller and others? If so, it is obviously in their strangeness and overt sexuality. McEwan throws in some weird stuff about gender and maturity/immaturity, and the travel connection is, we see again, what allows these characters to delve into these deep psychological ponderings, and to partake in pleasures spiked with fear and pain.

Setting this location in "what may or may not be" Venice is a way for McEwan to explore the weird insides of his characters. In specific, he constructs the hotel room as vehicle to sin. That is to say, traveling renders these characters vulnerable to expressing and exploring their sloth and lust. We gasp at Robert and Caroline's sado-masochism, but aren't Colin and Mary doing the same thing? When they wake up at Robert's house, naked and confused, they're hardly concerned. Instead, they accept further food and wine, allowing themselves to be literally and metaphorically drugged. When Mary wakes up frightened from her realization about the photograph, she's speechless, and they hardly discuss it. (I'd be at the consolate immediately!) Though it seems to creep her out, she lets it go. But, she's in a hotel room, a temporary place that supplies strong feelings of impermanence, and in a way the structure itself invites her to indulge in indifference. One might even suggest that she somehow takes pleasure in her fear. Smoking pot on their balcony, the two indulge in their apathy, even in a city that has so much to exlpore and offer. "On holiday," everything is done for you: your linens are cleaned by a maid, your food prepared by others (your entire vacation hijacked by a crazed, violent couple...) The fear Colin experiences swimming out to Mary on their one day at the beach subsides immediately; it seems like he should have been angrier or more tossled by the event. If we want to think of it this way, we can explore interiors as reflections of the exterior. Not to be in bad taste, but I can't help but think of Bobst library: does its open design almost invite suicide, or at least open an easier opportunity than other buildings might? Likewise, hotel rooms inspire lust and laziness, balconies a feeling of hope and escape (that work towards keeping Caroline trapped where she is), Robert's inherited house and furniture a constant reminder of his traumatic upbringing and therefore as violent, and generally, being driven by others in boats, taxis, etc. renders you trapped and without control of your destination.

Where to conclude? Should we never travel again? Do we have to be super vigilant and hyper-aware if we want to see Venice? Honestly, I think so, unless we want to invite the kind of "comfort" McEwan gives his characters, who have some intricate psychological issues (but don't we all?). I think I'd rather pay attention to not letting my surroundings get the best of me.

How we dwelt in two worlds.

The daughters and the mothers

In the kingdom of the sons

-Adrienne Rich

In Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, the main characters Colin and Mary are wondering lost around what once can assume is Venice when Mary notices a window display for a bed. There are two dummies “from the same mold” (21) but one dressed in pajamas and the other in a thigh-length nightie. “[The bed] was designed, on the pajama side at least, to resemble the control panel of a power station, or perhaps a light aircraft,” (21-22) and in the upholstery were objects such as a cassette recorder, radio, clock, and telephone. The nightie side, however, was “sparse by comparison” (22) and held items such as a mirror, magazine rack, and nursery intercom. On the street Mary also sees feminist posters; ““The women are more radical here,” [Mary says] over her shoulder, “and better organized,” “(23). Colin replies “They’ve got more to fight for,” (23). In translating she finds that the feminists want rapists castrated and Colin compares it to cutting off a thief’s hand as punishment. Mary responds that it’s a tactic to make people take rape more seriously as a crime and Colin refutes that it’s a way of making people take feminists less seriously. These two details introduce the theme of gender in The Comfort of Strangers. The setting of Venice, where women “have more to fight for” parallels the story’s themes of femininity and masculinity. The character of Robert shows misogynistic, hyper masculine tendencies from the start. He says of the feminists in the city, “These are women who cannot find a man. They want to destroy everything that is good between men and women,” (27). I

deas about masculinity and femininity become more complicated when Robert begins to talk about his childhood and especially his father. Robert describes his father: ““My father was a big man….all his life my father wore a moustache like this” – with forefinger and thumb Robert measured out an inch width beneath his nose – “and when it turned to gray he used a little brush to make it black, such as ladies use for their eyes. Mascara,”” (31). He also says that “Everybody was afraid of him,” (31). His father’s extreme masculinity is contrasted with the feminine act of using mascara. Robert goes on to explain his father’s controlling and misogynistic ways and how he was favored by his father over his sisters. Robert seems to respect his father and his stringent views of gender roles. He also seemed to have an unhealthy attachment to his mother (Oedipus complex) as he slept in her bed until he was twelve years old.

A description of Colin shows that he is more feminine that masculine. He has “slender, hairless legs”, “feet, abnormally small like a child’s”, “narrow waist”, “smooth white skin”, and his hair “fell into curls onto his slender, womanly neck,” (55-56). This depiction is in contrast to Robert who is described as muscular with large, hairy hands.

When Caroline is introduced into the story, she is portrayed almost immediately as submissive and passive. She describes love as “you’d do anything for the other person and… you’d let them do anything to you,” (62). Mary brings up to that she used to be in an all women’s theatre troupe and Caroline doesn’t understand how this could work asking, “I mean, what could happen?” (67). When Mary explains that the play could be about two women talking on a balcony Caroline refutes that, “they’re probably waiting for a man,” (67).

Robert’s overt misogyny is voiced to Colin when he talks of how men are not like they once were: “Now men doubt themselves, they hate themselves, even more than they hate each other. Women treat men like children, because they can’t take them seriously… But they love men. Whatever they might say they believe, women love aggression and strength and power in men. It’s deep in their minds. Look at all the women a successful man attracts…even though they hate themselves for it, women long to be ruled by men. It’s deep in their minds. They lie to themselves. They talk of freedom, and dream of captivity,” (72).

Mary and Colin’s conversations over the four days they remain in the hotel after meeting the couple also seem to center around the idea of gender. They talk about whether men and women experience a similar sensation during orgasms, the politics of sex, patriarchy, their parents’ relationships, and so on. Their conversations then take a more sadistic turn. They “joked about handcuffing themselves together and throwing away the key. The idea aroused them,” (81). “Mary muttered her intention of hiring a surgeon to amputate Colin’s arms and legs…and use him exclusively for sex,” (81) and “Colin invented for Mary a large, intricate machine…the machine would fuck her, not just for hours or weeks, but for years,” (81-82). This theme of sadism and masochism continues when Mary and Colin return to the Robert’s house. There Caroline describes to Mary her and Robert’s sexual perversions. She says, “Robert started to hurt me when we made love…and I had to admit, though it took a long time, that I liked it…It’s not the pain itself, it’s the fact of the pain, of being helpless before it, and being reduced to nothing by it,” (110). This idea of sadism and masochism mirrors the theme of masculinity and femininity to the extreme. Then

Colin’s murder is the culmination of it all. Robert kills him because of his own insecurities about masculinity. “Robert must prove that he is not weak like his sisters; indeed he must show that he is like the father, and he must be the father, whom he introjects as the sadistic superego. His conscious drive to destroy Colin, who is for him exemplary of the gender "confusion and unhappiness"(73) that pervades and undermines patriarchal culture, masks an unconscious drive toward his own humiliation and destruction,” (Sadism Demands a Story: Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers).

The Comfort of Strangers

I must admit, though I sensed a hint of darkness in McEwan’s style, I did not see the ending of The Comfort of Strangers coming. I knew that Robert and Caroline’s relationship dysfunction went deeper than the hints that McEwan’s gives the reader throughout most of the novel – Caroline’s physical ailments and disturbing pleas to Colin, Robert’s extreme sexist philosophies, the story of Robert’s past coupled with his pride about his father and grandfathers, etc. But the novel’s climaxing in brutal, sexualized murder by Robert and Caroline shocked me.

It shouldn’t have. As I look back on the novel now, I can trace McEwan’s not-so-subtle hints that the novel will not only end badly, but terrifyingly. McEwan sets up the reader from the beginning, with from disturbing recounts of his childhood and (at first) subtle hints of chauvinism: “sweet things, especially chocolate, were bad for boys. It made them weak in character, like girls” (35).

Originally, I believed that Colin and Mary’s constant reminders to each other that they are “on holiday” spoke more of their tense, strained relationship than set a dark tone. Now, though, I see the repetition of these lines as a literary device used to make the end all the more heartbreaking and ironic: a vacation that should be relaxing and enjoyable takes a tragic turn. I started to consciously suspect a twist after Colin’s swims out to try to save Mary, whom he thinks is drowning. McEwan is telling the reader something –cleverly, but not subtly – through this “false alarm” incident.

So why didn’t I get the hints? Firstly, the ending is truly disturbing; to fully expect it the tone of the whole novel would have to be equally dark. But McEwan builds the suspense brilliantly! I realize now, though, that he tricks the reader into thinking The Comfort of Strangers is a love story. The pages and pages of erotic narratives chronicling the rekindling of Colin and Mary’s relationship are so seductive and romantic! I found myself wanting to be in a foreign city with an attractive and adoring man. McEwan’s brilliant depictions of a revitalized romance make the ending of The Comfort of Strangers all the more surprising and heartbreaking.

.There was always something strange about Robert and Caroline, but the ending really took things to another level. Up until about the ninth chapter, we follow Colin and Mary around as they rediscover their love after seven years, smoking weed and drinking wine and forgetting that they are two separate people. “Their lovemaking surprised them too, for the great, enveloping pleasure, the sharp, almost painful, thrills were sensations, they said that evening on the balcony, they remembered from seven years before, when they had first met” (77). At this point in the story, Colin and Mary have already met Robert and Caroline. It appears that their stay at Robert’s place may have sparked this newfound excitement in their relationship, as Mary becomes strangely obsessed with Colin in a way that wasn’t present at the beginning of the book. But why would this be? Why did they talk about Robert and what was it about him that was unsettling? When Mary wakes up early in the morning trembling, Colin becomes concerned. He gets dressed and goes out with Mary to the patio, only to have her confess her love for him. The strangest part of the episode, however, is that Robert is brought up at the end, pointing out once again the peculiarity of his character and his influence on their relationship. It isn’t until Caroline begins to explain her masochistic tendencies that we identify the reason behind her and her husband’s fascination with Colin and Mary. “I didn’t doubt Robert’s hatred for me. It wasn’t theater. He made love to me out of deep loathing, and I couldn’t resist. I loved being punished” (110). From here, the story takes a quick turn to reach its sick climax. The tea that Mary drank finally takes its effect, rendering her incapable of speech or movement. Colin’s concern to get Mary to a hospital is only greeted by hostility, leaving him to bleed to death next to his helpless partner. The moral of the story is unclear to me, as the fate of Colin and Mary is not in their hands. Perhaps if they had not gone back to see Robert and Caroline they would have missed the whole ordeal, but that is not how McEwan chose to write it. Instead, the themes of romantic love and desire are paralleled against hostility and death, in a way reminiscent of Death in Venice.