Themes of The Marriage Plot
Love is the Worthiest of Pursuits - Love is what is holding these three characters together. A looking at it like love can conquer anything. In the end though, irony occurs, Maddy ends up being single and a strong character nonetheless.
Companionship as Salvation - There is a constant want, which turns into a constant need for someone else to be by one's side. Nobody feels complete without a partner.
Female Roles - Madeleine is our strong character whom thinks she needs a boyfriend to complete herself, but by the end of our story, we see she is just as powerful, maybe even more powerful than she once was being single and independent.
Growing Up – Pain or Pleasure - All throughout our lives we are constantly growing and growing. The spurt of growth from college into the real world is our biggest step and we need to be aware and conscious over every path life throws at us.
Companionship as Salvation - There is a constant want, which turns into a constant need for someone else to be by one's side. Nobody feels complete without a partner.
Female Roles - Madeleine is our strong character whom thinks she needs a boyfriend to complete herself, but by the end of our story, we see she is just as powerful, maybe even more powerful than she once was being single and independent.
Growing Up – Pain or Pleasure - All throughout our lives we are constantly growing and growing. The spurt of growth from college into the real world is our biggest step and we need to be aware and conscious over every path life throws at us.
Characters of the Marriage Plot
Madeleine Hanna - The tall, ambitious, beautiful and mostly moral young woman slightly out of step with the freedoms of her time. She was brought up by a private university president and his always-proper wife; she tries out different aspects of her personality through various college boyfriends.
Leonard Bankhead - Leonard had a dysfunctional childhood in Portland, Ore., with alcoholic parents and late-breaking academic success. Leonard suffers from manic depression and is the wild card and the proper heart of his novel. He is the one most desired by Madeleine.
Mitchell Grammaticus - The Greek-American like the author himself in his youth, volunteers as a gap-year helper with Mother Teresa in Calcutta as he searches conflictedly for spiritual enlightenment, seems very close to home for Eugenides.Mitchell's middle-class youth outside Detroit left him sartorially challenged, but it was firm enough to launch him into a philosophical study of religion.
Leonard Bankhead - Leonard had a dysfunctional childhood in Portland, Ore., with alcoholic parents and late-breaking academic success. Leonard suffers from manic depression and is the wild card and the proper heart of his novel. He is the one most desired by Madeleine.
Mitchell Grammaticus - The Greek-American like the author himself in his youth, volunteers as a gap-year helper with Mother Teresa in Calcutta as he searches conflictedly for spiritual enlightenment, seems very close to home for Eugenides.Mitchell's middle-class youth outside Detroit left him sartorially challenged, but it was firm enough to launch him into a philosophical study of religion.
Archetype Analysis
Heroine- Madeleine Hanna, an intelligent and exceptionally beautiful protagonist, is a Heroine archetype in The Marriage Plot. A heroine is the chief female character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities.The Marriage Plot is a pretty straightforward novel about a girl caught between two different boys, the “safe” choice and the “rebellious” choice, the titular “marriage plot.” In the end, she ends up alone and independent so we see how strong she is through everything. Madeline Hanna’s desire to become a feminist scholar of 19th-century literature. Madeleine reads like a Victorian heroine. She is preoccupied with class-related manners and conventions; she is, through most of the novel, largely disinterested in the physical aspect of sex. Despite her preoccupation with romantic love; she feels and probably is intellectually inferior to both of her male love objects.
Point of View Analysis
The Marriage Plot moves between the viewpoints of the three characters, but is mostly told from Madeleine and Mitchell's perspectives. The novel is introspective. Eugenides inhabits the minds of each of the points of this love triangle in turn.
In an interview, Jeffrey Eugenides is asked “Was the character of Mitchell in “The Marriage Plot” based on a younger Jeffrey Eugenides?” He replies, “The one part of Mitchell’s story that comes close to my life is that I did take a lot of religious studies courses in college and got very interested in religion. I thought about converting to Catholicism, even though I was brought up as a Greek Orthodox. I thought I wanted to become a scholar of religion, but I chose not to do that, and to pursue writing. In a very grandiose, self-dramatizing way I thought of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, rejecting the priesthood and becoming a writer in the same way. That’s the level to which Joyce influenced me. It’s amazing because it changed certain decisions in my life. That is my point about “The Marriage Plot”: you read books and they change your life.”
Eugenides switches points of view among Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard, edging the plot forward slightly as he fills in the back story.
In an interview, Jeffrey Eugenides is asked “Was the character of Mitchell in “The Marriage Plot” based on a younger Jeffrey Eugenides?” He replies, “The one part of Mitchell’s story that comes close to my life is that I did take a lot of religious studies courses in college and got very interested in religion. I thought about converting to Catholicism, even though I was brought up as a Greek Orthodox. I thought I wanted to become a scholar of religion, but I chose not to do that, and to pursue writing. In a very grandiose, self-dramatizing way I thought of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, rejecting the priesthood and becoming a writer in the same way. That’s the level to which Joyce influenced me. It’s amazing because it changed certain decisions in my life. That is my point about “The Marriage Plot”: you read books and they change your life.”
Eugenides switches points of view among Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard, edging the plot forward slightly as he fills in the back story.
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