The Marriage Plot

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, substance use, and sexual content.

Madeleine Hanna wakes up on the morning of her graduation from Brown University, hungover and having slept very little. The buzzer of her apartment sounds: Her parents have arrived as planned to go out for breakfast. Madeleine delays as long as possible before finally heading downstairs to the alcove of the building where she has forced her parents to wait.

They walk to a coffee shop that Madeleine chooses because it will be populated by students whose countercultural aesthetic her parents disapprove of. As they eat bagels and drink coffee, her mother spots Madeleine’s friend Mitchell Grammaticus outside and asks Madeleine to invite him to join them. Mitchell and Madeleine have not spoken in months, but Madeleine complies. As Mitchell chats with her parents, Madeleine worries about where she will spend her summer: She had planned to move in with her boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, at the Pilgrim Lake Laboratory in Maine, but they broke up three weeks ago. She does not reveal this to her parents.

The narrative shifts back in time: Madeleine decides on the topic of “the marriage plot” for her senior thesis—a device used in 19th-century English novels such as those by

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