A Quick Note on 'The Marriage Plot'

A Quick Note on ‘The Marriage Plot’

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel by Eugenides, a modern take on the traditional marriage plot, which relates a period of great self-development in the lives of its three protagonists in a bildungsroman-like manner, to such an extent that I’d really felt that my own odyssey with the characters was reaching its rather abrupt end. Leonard comes to realise that his manic depression is a problem that only he can sort out, Madeline matures from her originally stance as an impractical romantic whilst Mitchell goes on his own period of re-evaluation, done through religious means but not necessarily a religious one. Intelligence eludes off the pages of the work, not only through the hundreds of textual allusions and excerpts (which seems to suggest the importance of literature and textual analysis on the wider scheme of personal development), but also through Eugenides distinct portrayals of matters such as depression. The style of writing, namely re-evaluating events of the recent past from a place in the present also conveyed this overriding sense of analysis. I also found the tri-narrative structure to be rather effective, enforcing the idea that there is always more than one side to the story and so really giving the reader a sense of the wider picture. An inevitable question would surely be how does it compare with the books of Austen, Eliot and that famed literary crowd that it loosely attempts to emulate? In my opinion, due to the loss of the finite, eternal sense of marriage that predominates these earlier works, the interest in the essential marriage plot was limited. Leonard’s mental illness, causing much suffering to his marriage to Madeline seemed less of a problem with the ease of a divorce inevitably lurking around the corner. Dorothea Brooke’s frustration over her own marriage thus would certainly grip the reader more than Madeline’s. However, even though the central plot took a step into the background, I found the emotions and thoughts of the characters, particularly Leonard, to be more than suffice as a substitute. Thus, I would favour ‘The Marriage Plot’ over the most recent marriage plot work I have read, ‘Mansfield Park’. For the latter the marriages at the end seemed to be thrown in to as a last-ditch attempt to create some interest, the disappointing characters having failed in that arena, in essence the marriage plot attempted to create a needed distraction from the other aspects of the work. In ‘The Marriage Plot’ I found it to be the opposite. To conclude, I found Eugenides’ work a pleasant, but nonetheless effective read that I thoroughly enjoyed as a break from the more challenging writers that I’ve attempted this summer. Seeing that Leonard’s manic depression was to me the real star of the work, it seems that the author’s earlier works, namely ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘The Virgin Suicides’ would be suitable in terms of future readings, their explorations of the, often demented, human psyche seeming more apt for readers interested in those themes…clearly if I do eventually read them, I will feed back!