Eugenides' Marriage-Plot Puts a Modern Spin on Romance

Recently, Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffery Eugendies' third novel, The Marriage Plot, transported me to Regean-era America, where three Ivy League undergraduates are faced with the impending future; life after graduation.

A fan of Eugenides since The Virgin Suicides and a devotee of Middlesex, I almost expected to be disappointed, but this re-imagined love story is poignant, pertinent and far-reaching. 

In many ways Regan-eara America's economy and today's struggling economic circumstances are mirror images. Current college students undergo a heightened “what next” phenomena because they are not guaranteed a job after graduation.

Regardless of the state of the economy, life after college is a daunting task. College is only a petri-dish community, whether we are in 1980 or 2011, and the real world is just waiting to dash the idealists and raze the realists. Suddenly the neighbors who throw loud parties, the quarter-eating washing machines, and the vending-machine meals seem sweet and safe.

Eugenides' characters, Madeline, Leonard and Mitchell, are facing similar circumstances at the novel's onset as three Brown undergraduates on commencement day, facing an uncertain future. These characters come alive; they breathe across the pages. Their identities are undefined and their beliefs untested. Readers feel the wonder of spirituality, the danger of giving too much in romance and the breathless flush of unfolding sexuality.

The novel's title makes a direct connection with one of Eugenides' protagonists, Madeline,  whose senior thesis grapples with the roles of the “marriage plot” in modern novels. Drawing on authors like Jane Austen, Theodore Dreiser and the Brontes, Eugenides compares and contrasts the socially repressed Victorian Age to the socially sanctioned excess of the modern college experience.

Eugenides characters face mental-illness, religious disillusionment and enlightenment. They take the cliched post-graduation backpack through Europe, encountering debauchery, sex and feminism, eventually reaching convention in the post-graduation marriage.

However, unlike Austen-era works that inspired the novel's title, this story does not end with the culminating marriage, but continues after. With unflinching prose, Eugenides describes being robbed, both fiscally and of faith; his characters are humiliated and hurt, warped, and wonderfully human.

According to Madeline, the marriage plot was the driving force of the novel until 1900 when they both petered out.

The marriage plot works as a literary device only when conflict, and humor, with a wedding-cherry-topping, is readily consumed by the reading masses. According to Madeline, Dreiser ended the marriage plot with his novel, Sister Carrie, by sending the heroine, Carrie, through adultery with Drouet. From promiscuity Carrie fell to an unsanctioned marriage with Hurtwood and took a final flight to the Hollywood stage. When women began outwardly protesting the strictures of a male dominated world, the marriage plot commentary became unnecessary, uncouth, and essentially dead. 

As I read this book, I wondered whether Madeline's assertions were true; or was that Eugenides' point, that she wasn't?

Yes, a modern novel is a polaroid of current society; a frame frozen in time, one image of many lost and discarded potentials. Some modern novelists, like Jane Green or Anita Shreve, write about love inside divorce, infidelity and other untenable events; a modern woman's marriage plot. Granted, other modern novelists write political and social satire for maximum effect.

Was the original “marriage-plot” meant as an authentic plot-line, or as a good-humored poke at society?

The infamous Miss Austen ended her plots with flowers and wedding veils, even the clannish Brontes granted love to their suffering characters. However, Austen and the Brontes were not writing epistles to the gorgeous romance of their time. A modern reader might find Austen or a Bronte old-fashioned, sweet and breathtakingly romantic, in fact the stories are comedies akin to the naughty, sometimes mocking Shakespeare, whose plays were farces mimicking the cruelty and exaggerating the foolishness of high-society and social rules.

However, people read marriage-plot novels, continuing to read Austen and Bronte in schools and homes across the world. Could the marriage-plot-line really be dead if the classics, are still read, for all the high-handed, flowery language?

While hardly a classic, the already infamous Twilight saga is another a marriage-plot with attractive youth. Boy woos girl, boy declares his undead love, boy and girl live happily-ever-after, at least as the story is written. Therefore, not only are classic marriage-plots still read, but the literary device is still in employ.

Marriage creates drama; so does an engagement, a birth, promiscuity and a divorce. Life is drama, or a stage, as Shakespeare said. This enigmatic playwright from the heart of England knew that dramatic flair enhances entertainment. Video games, films and television are progressively more violent, with more desolate landscapes and heart-rending situations; these are forms of escape from reality, just like reading. As long as there is drama in entertainment, the marriage-plot won't go anywhere, even as the social landscapes inevitably change.

One unchangeable however is my vivid memory of studying the seven basic story plots in high school English. I also remember my teacher, a thirty-ish blonde in sensible heels and nylons, saying:

“ Seven plots or one, there are justifications for each. The question is, how detailed is the plot?”

Here Eugenides completely re-paints the marriage plot for today, a time when a woman's marriage is not planned between parents or necessitated by poverty, age and desperation. Men and women attend college together and enter the workforce together; women can file for divorce and men can stay at home raising children. Today a Jane Austen marriage still works for a nostalgic or  for word lovers. 

Stories are retold, in fact there is no story untold. Stories reflect life and humanity; a cycle of patterns. The marriage plot still exists, but the details are different; the shape of the pattern stays the same, but the colors change.