Expectations were inevitable; I LOVE Jeffrey Eugenides' works. His works haunted me. I dreamt of the Lisbon sisters during those days I was reading The Virgin Suicides. I guess I found myself liking the movie (which, truly, has fantastic imagery and incredible music/scoring) because that book was outstanding. I reread parts of Middlesex while I was still reading it. I raved and raved and decided that Jeffrey Eugenides is up there, with my Haruki Murakamis and Ian McEwans.
It took several years before Eugenides got to produce a third novel which I had to address at some point: I purchased a collection of short stories edited by him, My Mistress' Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro.
In this compilation of shorts, Eugenides wrote and probably pre-empted the novel he was working on:
"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name".
In a way, I do not really want to think that The Marriage Plot definitely gives love a bad name though I have to agree that the spoil of love stories is that they are pretty much standard-issue. As I pointed out to my friend a few chapters before I would finish the book, "The Virgin Suicides opened with the suicide of a young girl, while incest anchors the story of Middlesex as early as the first, second chapter. Where is the hook, that moment?"
I initially found that "hook" in the early part although I was hoping it would catapult the narrative that way. See --- this is not exactly a spoiler, I hope --- the novel establishes "the marriage plot" which is basically and notably a foundation of many Victorian novels, ie Austen, Eliott, Thackeray (in Vanity Fair, obviously), etc. The marriage plot is, yes, about the quest of these heroines to find their respective Mr Darcy's and then get married. Simple. I read Vanity Fair years ago, and this thick book of satire is about Becky Sharpe's (mis)adventures in easing her way into the English society which will be secured by means of a "good" marriage. Pride and Prejudice begins with the unforgettable line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" and that the marriage plot is initially being plotted by Mrs Bennett, the mother of the heroine.
When you think about it, growing up our life is geared towards the marriage plot: the sequence of school-career-marriage. We want to go to good schools so we can grow up in a "good" crowd, that can lead us to a "good" career, which pretty much puts us in a certain status whether we are "marriageable" or not. Seriously. It all narrows to finding that partner whom we will marry, have kids with, and live with in "little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tack" as that Malvina Reynolds song goes.
Basically, The Marriage Plot establishes this as the mindset of its heroine, Madeleine Hanna. Although on the outside she seems like the perfect girl in the 1980s with Victorian sensibilities, the conflict is that she is really desperate. Finally finding her "guy" in the character of Leonard Bankhead, she is the epitome of "I want this relationship to work!". On one side, there is Mitchell Grammaticus, the guy who is truly in-love with her. He distracts his, uh, heart from romantic disappointments hence he searches for some light through some frantic religious quest.
I have to agree with this, though: occupation is the best distraction.
But of course, things are not perfect with Madeleine and Leonard. Leonard's dysfunction is a given which I guess symbolizes that not all men (or say, partners) are perfect: they come in some twisted form of impairment that is either inherent or almost uncompromising. Hence, Madeleine and Leonard's love story is about the entire dance of "make it work", some pushing and shoving, until finally someone makes that one big final push.
When you think about it, the marriage plot is but an image of a love story because --- it is universally acknowledged --- love is deemed "real" through the validation of an institution, the population. Getting and being married, frankly, can be a status symbol. It's like having your relationship status being "Facebook official", you know?
The inclusion of semiotics and criticism and many references to Nietzsche, etc. may be due to the college setting, that period when people liked to quote the published and the revered, to take the side of the criticized. But the plot, in itself, is a representation of everything. The book is an approach to the semiotics of the marriage plot, anyone's love story. No matter how you complicate the plots and the demons of the characters, I did come to conclude that, oh well, we all have the same love story --- whether it ends one way or another. The subplots just make the difference, the intentions are one and the same.
The Marriage Plot is not really about love gone wrong; it's about what love is in its many forms, set against the intellectual background of the university, against the Victorian novels, against multiple perceptions. Eugenides opens the book, and somehow gives a peek at how things will go, through an excerpt from the The Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime":
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife
In the end, of course, in the name of love, the two boys --- Leonard and Mitchell --- decide what is good for Madeleine. And this good thing for Madeleine is something I told a friend years before she got married, those years she was, er, confused: "The problem is, you were never truly single".
So that, of course, is the solution to every marriage plot that is failing: it fails because the people in it never went through the process of being alone, of being just themselves. And naturally, the most enlightened ones are the ones who make the great move of drifting away, those who are insane enough to explore the world, to explore the madness in themselves, those who are willing to live by leaving.
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