Aegis 2012
106
Book Review >>> Whitney Reed
The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. 406 pp.
Acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner, Jeffrey Eugenides has created a new spin on the coming of age novel in The Marriage Plot. The lengthy novel is set in the early 1980s and follows the lives of two main characters, Madeleine and Mitchell, who graduate from university and spend the next year trying to establish their lives as adults in the world. Madeleine is an undisputed romantic attempting to forge her way through an English major’s education at Brown University. Her idealistic, romantic beliefs are constantly opposed by her education as well as her boyfriend, Leonard, who has been diagnosed manic-depressive. The novel is also split in storyline, attributing equal time to Madeleine’s college friend Mitchell, who aspires to find the answers to his religious questionings. The novel does not have chapters, but breaks between the two stories of Madeleine and Mitchell as they attempt to come of age in a world that lures and tempts them away from what they truly want to become. Those who enjoy reading will be thrilled with this novel and its connection to the reader. Madeleine is an English major who spends a good portion of the first half of the novel delving into the complexities of being a reader and making reading a professional occupation. It is impossible for a fellow reader to fail to relate to the common questions and hesitations that follow literary interpretation. Madeleine’s focus on new forms of literary criticism (such as deconstructionism) introduces an examination of the shift in literary criticism during the 1980s. Her entire understanding of literary criticism is shifted when she takes a Semiotics course in her Senior year. This class serves the purpose of developing the defensive character to whom the reader is initially introduced. While Madeleine is attracted to the idea that the writer is the point of authority in a work’s message, she is faced with a more difficult theory that it is the reader’s job to form the message from the work. She points out in frustration at one point in the novel, the theorists, “wanted to demote the author . . . They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers” (42). This introductory conflict of Madeleine’s eventually turns into a larger conflict that hints at Madeleine’s inability to accept the different views in the world. Her sexual relationships and professional development after college are damaged in her attempts to deny the greater problems in her life by romanticizing and refusing to further analyze the potential depths. Madeleine’s relationship with Leonard is also a major theme of the novel, exploring the problems associated with a woman, who is not faced with the taboo of mental illness, but who makes the choice to immerse herself in a world that is previously unknown to people of Madeleine’s upper class and status. Mitchell’s choice to go backpacking across Europe and to volunteer his services in India after college in an attempt to discover his own
