Jeffery Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

       The title of The Marriage Plot comes from a research paper written by Eugenides’s main character, Madeleine Hanna, a lit major at Brown University in the eighties. Madeleine’s essay asserts that “The Marriage Plot” is a lost form in contemporary literature. Madeleine considers matrimony—and the drama that surrounds a protagonist’s choice among suitors—to be the compelling force of classic romances. Since society no longer reveres “the institution” of marriage in the way it once did, she speculates as to whether a contemporary novel could generate anything like the same gravity with the stakes having changed—that is, with everything meaning so much less than it used to.

     Eugenides’s novel asks the same question. The Marriage Plot mimics a Victorian structure insofar as the book’s tension arises over questions of whom Madeleine will fall in love with—maybe even marry. Generally, the book seems to be a re-affirmation of this traditional form, a reassurance that contemporary literature can still be about marriage—even in an age when the stigma of divorce is lessened.

     Adding to the complexity of Madeleine’s questions about the weight of marriage is the book’s setting. Eugenides depicts the young adults of the early eighties as a generation glad to have avoided the “whiplash” that followed the rocketing sixties, but still meaning to push envelopes of their own. Madeleine, near graduation, studies Jacque Derrida and semiotics. She meets students who insist that books have nothing to do with real life, that all of language should merely be considered a self-referential vacuum.

     Just as Madeleine struggles with questions about the reality of love, her two potential lovers—Leonard, a biology student, and Mitchell, a religious studies major—wrestle enigmas of their own. Leonard tries to make sense of his manic depression, Mitchell yearns to understand God. The novel’s three themes (love, faith and mental health) taken together suggest that Eugenides has something to say in general about the validity of a mind’s internal experiences. I suspect that the book is an acknowledgement of the way things can weigh heavily on one’s soul, even if those things (and even if the soul itself) can be found to be deconstructable.

     Take that, Derrida.