Marriage received significant treatment in the English novel of the nineteenth century. A reader of Austen, Eliot, or James can find sustained and compelling work on the subject of marriage. Madeleine Hanna is one such reader. For her senior thesis, she has chosen to study the marriage plot in Austen, Eliot and James.
II.
A student at Brown (Class of 1982), Madeleine is majoring in English "for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read." <1> This affection for reading is tested when she takes a course in semiotics; Barthes, Derrida and Eco are on the reading list, while Baudrillard, Deleuze and Foucault all might come up for discussion. <2> It is at the semiotics seminar that Madeleine meets Leonard.
Leonard Bankhead is actually studying biology, and is in the semiotics course from an intellectual curiosity about the theory of language. Acting on their mutual attraction, Madeleine and Leonard begin a romantic relationship. Leonard begins to share aspects of his emotional life with Madeleine, but without mentioning one thing in particular: Leonard has been diagnosed with manic depression.
The depression dates back to his high school days in Portland. "That was the odd thing about Leonard's disease, the almost pleasurable way it began ... the Disease ... cooed to him. It said, Come closer. It flattered Leonard that he felt more than most people; he was more sensitive, deeper." His family, well-aware of Leonard's moods and laziness, are not too concerned when one day he refuses to leave his room. I thought there was straight-faced comedy in how his sister, seeing him seemingly stricken in bed, asks Leonard: " 'Are you faking?' "
Leonard is not faking. In his near future, he will have psychiatric episodes serious enough to require hospital care. He and Madeleine will break up, get back together - and - they will get married. But all of this (the marriage, incidentally, ends in its own kind of divorce) is without having attended to that one other person in a romantic triangle with Madeleine and Leonard.
Mitchell Grammaticus is a student in religious studies, with a personal interest in Christian mysticism. His "relationship with Madeleine Hanna - his long, aspirational, sporadically promising yet frustrating relationship" has been complicated by Mitchell's unrequited love for Madeleine. A few months after Brown graduation, Mitchell leaves the country for an extended period. Among other things, Mitchell is then left "offstage" while the events that lead to Leonard and Madeleine's marriage play themselves out. When Mitchell does return to the country, it is to take up his role in the conclusion of the narrative.
III.
The novel The Marriage Plot is set at a time when the beginning of the 1980s in America coincides with its characters graduating from college. As a subject for a senior thesis, the marriage plot stays in academia, while Madeleine Hanna and her suitors move on to their new adult lives. That passage into adulthood is told to us by Jeffrey Eugenides with ardency and irony, often in fine measures.
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<1>Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Marriage Plot (2011). Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
<2>To "love literature in spite of the false doctors who try to cure [you] of it". (Allan Bloom, Love & Friendship (1993).
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