“And what stood in their way? Their personalities and their past, their ignorance and fear, their shyness, their squeamishness, their lack of rights, experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious ban, their Englishness and class, and history itself ” (McEwan 119). Over the course of 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 personal desire and social 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 the colonization of individuals and examines how ideology elevates regional norms into universal morays and effectively eradicates free will. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Edward, McEwan's main male character, spends most of the novel pondering how to escape the life of his "drab family home" (45) . At a crucial moment of coming of age, Edward feels that “his very being, his buried core that he had never attended to before, comes into sudden, sharp-edged existence, a bright spot that he did not want that no one else knew” (90). After this rite of passage, nothing is the same as before for Edward and the class put “a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, whether on their side or his” (91). From this moment on, he saw himself as an adult and capable of as yet unknown ascensions, and “he was simply impatient for his life, the real story, to begin. . .” (94). While the tendency in analyzing a character may be to focus on internal conflicts or family relationships, McEwan explicitly takes readers away from this and directs them towards Edward's attempts to climb the social ladder. McEwan tells us that Edward not only willingly and easily adjusts to his girlfriend's social status, but that he "politely took it as his due" (137). This revelation of Edward's entitled feeling shifts our view from Edward's psyche to the context of his socio-economic position. Lois Tyson writes of a shift 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 distracts our attention from the real forces that create human experience. . . Power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, arts, science, technology, media, and so on. (50). Seen through this lens, Edward's longing for Florence carries with it ominous implications. Although his individual motivations appear to be based in 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 those conditions have any influence on the way [he] sees the world” ( 53) . Edward entrenches himself in a social reality and a lifestyle that he believes are universal and suitable for him. He “absorbed these domestic circumstances without recognizing their exotic opulence. . . In fact he was ecstatic, he was living in a dream” (McEwan 146). In fact, it is precisely the luck of his peers that condemns Edward to the disastrous outcome of his first night ofwedding. Unfortunately for Edward, the society he has entered is overtly, archetypically patriarchal and driven towards power by pride and masculinity. Or, as Tyson explains, it is a “culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles. Traditional gender roles view men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive; they choose women as emotional (irrational), weak, caring and submissive” (83). Furthermore, Edward and those around him proudly “believed passionately that they were right and acted on their beliefs” (McEwan 144). Once again Edward's pride keeps him bound to the conventions of ideology that shape his understanding of a natural and universal order. Not only are they owed certain things in life, but the power that grants these rights also requires certain behaviors and beliefs. Fitting perfectly into Michel Foucault's panopticon, Edward produces the behaviors expected from 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 move towards their room, Edward is disturbed by the social esteem of his masculinity reflected by the reception clerks: "he did not actually see the young men exchanging their significant glance, but he could imagine it 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 a transition to power and masculinity through sex and the reclamation of his dominant and patriarchal role. And this influence extends, seen through our narrator's duality of perspective, to alter the life of McEwan's other main character. While it may appear that Florence has an internal psychological problem with sex or sexuality, McEwan makes it abundantly clear that she is dealing with a rather larger and socially implicated (implicative?) problem of a conflicted psyche. In the bedroom, Florence momentarily disconnects from the social implications of sex and demonstrates that her sexuality is present and healthy if subtle as she finds “the beginnings of desire, precise and alien but clearly her own; and beyond. . . it was a relief to know that he was just like everyone else” (108). McEwan moves readers from a psychoanalytic consideration of Florence toward an investigation that includes her social context and the ideological programming she combats throughout the text. Although Florence detests the thought of sex on her wedding night (or at any time), "she agreed that it was right to do this, and that this should be done to her" (37). Andrea Dworkin says of heterosexual intercourse: Intercourse is commonly written and understood as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, due to which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overpowering her and at the same time penetrates her and her; physical relationship with her – above her and within her – it is his possession of her. (63)The physical act of sex is clearly, for Florence, the culminating event that marks her inevitable loss of self , Florence realizes that she has “let go of something important, given away something that was not truly hers to give” (McEwan 73). Indeed, Florence was dominated by patriarchal culture long before Edward in a non-physical sexual domination. Dworkin writes that “in being constrained, through social force and money (having nothing herself), she experiences the sexuality of possession: the forcetriggers possession. . . force is the equivalent of cock in creating the reality of possession” (Dworkin 73). Florence's subordination to her father and then to Edward reflects the overlapping of possessions as Florence is dominated, commodified, and exchanged. Although Florence and Edward share an awareness of England's growing influence in the world, ironically, they also share the ideology that blinds them. the impermanence of the social conventions of empire. For them, and common to the colonized, social norms extend beyond the regional temporal context and into the future – they see their future defined by the same expectations as their past and present. Through these two characters, McEwan examines one of the major paradoxes of postcolonial theory since it “analyses the ideological forces that, on the one hand, pushed the colonized to internalize the values ​​of the colonizer and, on the other, promoted the resistance of the colonized peoples against their values. oppressors” (Tyson 365). However, McEwan is also doing something more complex than simply using characters to question the effects of colonization. It is also problematizing its location. McEwan effectively gets readers to consider how colonizing forces are regionally situated in history and constructed from shared myths. Although his characters are “trapped in the moment by private anxieties,” they and McEwan's readers are keenly aware that they are “bound by our story” (McEwan 32, 143). Lois Tyson explains the need to culturally situate 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 various peoples, means that it is up to individual members of specific populations to develop their own body of criticism about the history, traditions, and interpretation of their literature” (364). Thus, since the immensity of power displayed by a hegemonic ideology appears to express universal essences of right and wrong or good and bad, they are in reality the product of a cultural history that is so reliant on subjectivity as to preclude an extension beyond the scale of hegemonic ideology. a small group of people. Moral and ethical considerations not only as products of cultural influence but also as producers and influencers of culture. Edward and Florence are both constitutive of the forces acting on them and are also constitutive. But rather than focus on the individual story of these two protagonists fighting 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 “mass delusions over the centuries.” they had common themes” (McEwan 144). Readers draw on historical generalizations of ideology to broadly apply social conventions and expectations across contexts. However, McEwan has demonstrated 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 searching for abstract and timeless essences or principles, but only by understanding the concrete conditions of the world” (50). Or: in other words, all events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge. . . Their relationship is mutually constitutive and dynamically unstable. Therefore the old dispute between determinism and free will cannot be resolved because it is based on the wrong question: “Is human identity socially determined or, 1999.