IS IAN McEWAN’S PROTAGONIST IN ‘BUTTERFLIES’ A PEADOPHILE?

In the context of the twentieth-century, books on sexuality, such as Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, emerged to document the late nineteenth and twentieth- century phenomena of the classification of the different types of sexuality and sexual perversions, as well as the effects it can have to marginalize figures in society.

In “Butterflies” McEwan dissects the definition of what it means to be a paedophile through an alienated and marginalized character. McEwan flirts with boundaries of societal definitions of what it means to be a paedophile, when his protagonist starts off by innocently buying the girl a doll, then an ice cream, then taking her for a walk- all because he doesn’t want to be alone.

However the story takes a more sinister turn when he eventually asks the child to touch him- It is suggested that he does this because he craves the touch of another person, rather than the child’s specifically.

In this way the objective reality of society’s definition of a paedophile is pitted up along- side the protagonist’s subjective reality. In the end the protagonist seems more like an opportunistic paedophile rather than a clinical one.