The Marriage Plot

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

“Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and power.”

Madeleine seeks an escape from the privileged banality of her upper-middle-class life, and she finds it in the post-structuralist theoretical field of semiotics. Her choice of study is motivated largely by a desire to differentiate herself from her parents, and she makes romantic choices on the same grounds, rejecting Mitchell, who is the kind of man her parents would like her to date, in favor of Leonard, whom her parents warn her against.

“Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine’s jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

Mitchell believes that he is privy to insight into Madeleine that she herself lacks: that the fling she is having with Billy is not truly love and that Billy’s presence in her life serves only to keep Madeleine from fulfilling her higher potential. Mitchell’s thoughts reveal his self-absorption and his tendency to conflate true love with religious enlightenment.

“What Madeleine was seeking here, with Thurston, wasn’t Thurston at all. It was self-abasement. She wanted to demean herself, and she’d done so, though she wasn’t clear on why, except that it had to do with Leonard and how much she was suffering.”

Though Madeleine attempts to have sex with Thurston, she recognizes that she does not do so out of any sexual attraction to Thurston himself. Later, after her marriage to Leonard, she will have sex with Mitchell for a similar reason.