46 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanLessons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Roland Baines
Content Warning: The source text depicts a nonconsensual sexual and romantic relationship between a minor and an adult.
Roland is the protagonist of the story. His relationship with Cornell was a defining moment in his life. After Roland tells Alissa about Cornell, when visiting her parents in Germany, she observes, “She rewired your brain” (194). In less blunt terms, Roland expresses the same sentiment in a poem when he says that “on a sleepless night she springs up out of the dark […] She won’t go away” (24). Cornell’s sexual contact defines Roland’s early life. Cornell warped both his understanding of sex and romantic relationships. As Roland admits to Alissa later: “I left school early and drifted through scores of jobs. I’m rootless” (193). Roland spends much of his 20s and 30s trying to come to terms with, but also rediscover, the type of one-sided and sexually prolific relationship he had with Cornell.
When Roland meets Alissa, it seems some of this trauma might be put behind him. In committing to Alissa, and having a child, Roland is able to arrest his search for a past sexual idyll and settle down to a more mature way of life. After Alissa leaves him, Roland is once more plunged into a search for something lost. For years afterward Roland enters a series of short-term relationships, unable again to commit because he still, on some level, longs for Alissa. As he says, after letting another relationship fizzle out, “the commitment was too great […] he was waiting” (206).
In the end, Roland does find some kind of redemption. Meeting with Cornell in 2001, following a call from the police, Roland slowly starts to come to terms with the damage she did and how this fed into problems with Alissa. This process reaches a climax nine years later. Roland proposes to and marries his longtime female friend and former romantic partner, Daphne. Although their time is cut short by her cancer, Roland’s more pragmatic relationship—distinct from those with either Cornell or Alissa—shows that Roland has finally laid the ghosts of his past to rest.
Alissa Eberhardt
Alissa is a writer and Roland’s ex-wife. Once she has become famous, a newspaper article describes how she “made the sort of scary leap many women only dream about” (283). This leap, to leave Roland and her son young Lawrence for the sake of her career, defines her character throughout Lessons.
In 1989, Alissa explains her choice to Roland when they meet by chance in Berlin. As she says: “I had to make something in my life, something more than a baby. I was going to achieve what she [meaning Jane] wouldn’t or couldn’t” (237). Alissa is driven by a desire to avoid what she perceives to have been her mother’s fate. According to Alissa, Jane neglected and abandoned her talent and destiny as a writer to look after a family. In many respects Alissa is vindicated. Her first novel is hailed as a “masterpiece,” and she becomes Europe’s preeminent novelist. In telling a version of her mother’s story in The Journey, Alissa symbolically redeems her mother’s voice, which had otherwise been lost to domesticity.
However, Alissa pays a price. Instead of bringing any kind of understanding between herself and her mother, her writing only deepens the resentment between them. Their feud reaches its climax when Alissa writes a scathing memoir about her childhood, In Murnau, which accuses Jane of giving her a loveless upbringing. Alissa similarly alienates herself from her son. When Lawrence is a teenager, she sends him away, saying, “I’m being firm” (323). Alissa cuts herself off from all family ties and connections. As Roland observes when visiting her, “she had no one, no family. No close friends […] She lived in a dark cement bunker of a house, waiting to die alone” (467).
Alissa tries to remedy this situation toward the novel’s end. Old and dying from cancer, she tries to reconnect with Roland and her son. It is, though, too little, too late. She has become a stranger to Lawrence, who no longer wants to see her, and Roland recognizes in her only a pale shadow of the woman he once loved.
Miriam Cornell
Miriam Cornell was Roland’s piano teacher, who assaulted him and coerced him into a sexual relationship. When Roland has his first piano lesson, she unfastens his belt and the top of his shorts to tuck in his shirt. As the novel says, “From the beginning, by assuming authority over his appearance, especially when she unbuttoned his shorts, she established complete rights or control, mental and physical” (64). Cornell takes Roland’s clothes to humiliate him and establish her dominance. This is also seen in subsequent lessons when she threatens to make Roland wear “a frilly pink frock […] belonging to her niece” (64).
In addition to using violence at times, pinching and hitting Roland, she uses psychological manipulation and abuse, including threats and humiliation, to get her way. It is unclear whether such control is merely a means for obtaining what she wants or fulfilling in and of itself, and the reason she singles out the vulnerable child Roland.
Such control does not end when Roland is slightly older. When he plans to stay with her, Cornell tells the 15-year-old Roland, “I’ll lock your clothes in the shed” (250). What Roland believes is a “sexy game” in fact represents Cornell’s fetish for humiliating and molding him. Cornell may be contrite about her behavior when Roland meets her in his 50s, in 2001. She says that she had acted inappropriately because of a devasting breakup and abortion. She also explains that her sadism was a cover for the depth of her feelings, and that she would plead guilty to any charges made by Roland to avoid the embarrassment for him of a trial. It appears then that Cornell might have changed. However, it remains uncertain as to whether her expressed regret and explanations are sincere or still yet another form of manipulation. Namely, it is unclear if is she trying to manipulate Roland’s emotions and elicit sympathy to ensure that he does not press charges.
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