“And what was bothering them? Their personalities and their past, their ignorance and their fear, their timidity, their disgust, their lack of entitlement, experience or easy manners, then the end of a religious ban, their English and their social class, and the history itself” (McEwan 119). Throughout the novel On Chesil Beach, author Ian McEwan constructs an exploration that considers the role of identity, social influence, and ideology in the lives of two individuals. Through these two main characters, McEwan reflects on instances where individuals are torn between their personal desires and societal pressures. Faced with these, everyone feels the influence of the surrounding society as a universal or incontestable natural law. Through their struggles, McEwan problematizes the role of regional hegemonies in colonizing individuals and examines how ideology elevates regional norms to universal morays and effectively eradicates free will. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Edward, McEwan's main male character, spends most of the novel thinking about ways to escape life in his "squalid family home" (45). . At a crucial moment in his passage to adulthood, Edward feels "his own being, the buried core of it that he had never paid attention to before, coming into sudden, harsh existence, a point of light that he wanted no one else to know” (90). After this rite of passage, nothing is the same for Edouard and his class put “a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, on their side as well as his” (91). From that moment on, he considered himself an adult and capable of as yet unknown ascents, and “he was just impatient for his life, the real story, to begin…”. . .” (94). While the tendency in character analysis may be to focus attention on internal conflicts or family relationships, McEwan explicitly steers readers away from this and toward Edward's attempts to climb the social ladder. . McEwan tells us that Edward not only willingly and easily adapted to his girlfriend's social status, but "he politely took it as his due" (137). This revelation of Edward's rightful feeling shifts our view from Edward's psyche to the context of his socio-economic position. Lois Tyson writes about moving from a psychoanalytic approach to a consideration of Marxist critical theory: By focusing our attention on the individual psyche and its roots in the family complex, psychoanalysis diverts our attention from the real forces that create experience human. . . Power is the driving force behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, arts, science, technology, media, etc. (50).Seen in this light, Edward's desire for Florence has disturbing implications. Although his individual motivation seems based on love, his ideology complicates his intentions. His ideology and self-esteem “prevent him from understanding the material/historical conditions in which [he] lives because [he] refuses to recognize that these conditions have any influence on the way [he] sees the world » (53). . Edward is rooted in a social reality and a way of life that he considers universal and that suits him. He “absorbed these domestic circumstances without recognizing their exotic opulence. . . In fact, he was fascinated, he was living in a dream” (McEwan 146). In fact, it is the good fortune of his fellows thatcondemns Edward to the disastrous outcome of his wedding night. Unfortunately for Edward, the society he has integrated into is overtly, archetypically patriarchal and driven toward power by pride and masculinity. Or, as Tyson explains, it is a “culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.” Traditional gender roles present men as rational, strong, protective and decisive; they chose women as emotional (irrational), weak, caring, and submissive” (83). Furthermore, Edward and those around him “passionately believed that they were right, and they acted on their convictions” (McEwan 144). Once again, Edward's pride keeps him bound by the conventions of ideology that shape his understanding of a natural and universal order. Not only is he entitled to certain things in life, but the power that grants him these rights also requires certain behaviors and beliefs. Fitting perfectly into Michel Foucault's panopticon, Edward produces the behaviors expected by the colonizing hegemony even without their intervention; he has internalized the influence of society in a way that “ensures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 201). As the lovers head to their room, Edward is disturbed by the social estimation of his masculinity reflected by the front desk clerks: "he didn't actually see the young men exchange meaningful glances, but he could imagine well enough” (McEwan 193). . Edward is controlled by the expectations of his peers even without their presence and “bound by protocols never agreed upon or expressed but generally observed” (26). Ultimately, there is no possible outcome for Edward that does not involve access to power and masculinity through sex and the reclamation of his dominant, patriarchal role. And this influence extends, as our narrator's duality of perspective shows, to alter the life of McEwan's other main character. Although it may seem that Florence has an internal psychological problem with sex or sexuality, McEwan makes it clear that she is dealing with a rather larger and more socially involved (involving?) problem than a conflicted psyche. In the bedroom, Florence momentarily disconnects from the social implications of sex and proves that her sexuality is present and healthy although subtle by finding “the beginnings of desire, precise and foreign but clearly her own; and beyond. . . It was a relief that she was like everyone else” (108). McEwan moves readers away from a psychoanalytic consideration of Florence and toward an investigation that includes her social context and the ideological programming she combats throughout the text. Even though Florence hates the idea of ​​sex on her wedding night (or at any time), "she agreed that it was okay to do that and to have that done to her" (37). Andrea Dworkin says of heterosexual intercourse: Sexual intercourse is commonly written and understood as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering and submerging her and at the same time. time penetrating it; and this physical relationship with her – on her and in her – is her possession. (63) The physical sexual act is clearly, for Florence, the culminating event that marks her inevitable loss of self. And yet, even before the attempt at consumption, Florence understands that she has “given up something important, given away something that did not really belong to her” (McEwan 73). In fact, Florence was dominated by patriarchal culture long before Edward in non-physical sexual domination. Dworkin writes that "by being coerced, by social force and money(having nothing herself), she experiences the sexuality of possession: force triggers possession. . . force is the equivalent of fucking in creating the reality of possession” (Dworkin 73). Florence's subordination to her father and then to Edward reflects overlapping possessions as Florence is dominated, commodified, and commercialized. Although Florence and Edward share an awareness of England's waning influence in the world, ironically, they also share the ideology that blinds them. the impermanence of the social conventions of the empire. For them, and common to the colonized, social norms extend beyond the temporal regional context and extend into the future – they see their future defined by the same expectations as their past and their present. Through these two characters , McEwan examines a fundamental paradox of postcolonial theory by "analyzing the ideological forces that, on the one hand, pushed the colonized to internalize the values ​​of the colonizer and, on the other hand, fostered the resistance of colonized peoples against their own values”. oppressors” (Tyson 365). However, McEwan also does something more complex than simply using characters to question the effects of colonization. It also problematizes its location. McEwan effectively prompts readers to think about how colonizing forces are regionally situated in history and constructed by shared myths. While his characters are “trapped in the present moment by private anxieties,” they and McEwan’s readers are keenly aware of being “bound by our history” (McEwan 32, 143). Lois Tyson explains the need for a culturally situated ideology as key to understanding how colonizing influences interact: "However, the tendency of postcolonial criticism to focus on global issues, on comparisons and contrasts between different peoples, means that it is up to each member of specific populations to develop their own body of criticism about the history, traditions, and interpretation of their own literature” (364). Thus, while the immensity of power displayed by a hegemonic ideology appears to express universal essences of right and wrong or right and wrong, they are actually the product of a cultural history that is so dependent on subjectivity that it excludes any extension beyond the scale of a small group of people. Moral and ethical considerations are not only products of cultural influence, but also producers and influencers of culture. Both Edward and Florence are constitutive of the forces acting on them and equally constitutive. But rather than focusing on the individual story of these two men struggling against a historically regional hegemony, McEwan seems to ask: So where is this text? The universality sought in literary study has traditionally been built on the idea that “through the centuries, mass illusions had common themes” (McEwan 144). Readers draw on historical generalizations of ideology to broadly apply social conventions and expectations across contexts. However, McEwan has shown quite effectively that the conventions of a social cluster are specific and context-bound; they are not universal but regional. Tyson explains that “all human events and productions have specific material/historical causes. An accurate picture of human affairs cannot be obtained by the search for abstract and timeless essences or principles, but only by our understanding of the concrete conditions of the world” (50). Or: In others, 1999.