Concrete Innocence: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Cement Garden

Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (1978) endures as a pivotal contribution to contemporary British literature, distinguished for its audacious engagement with themes of adolescence, trauma, familial disintegration, and social alienation. This expanded study reinterprets the novel with a heightened scholarly lens, interrogating its historical underpinnings, narrative design, symbolic richness, and psychoanalytic density. Through an interdisciplinary framework encompassing gender theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, the analysis positions the novel as both an intimate portrait of familial collapse and an emblematic commentary on the fragmentation of modern society.