The Marriage Plot

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

When Madeleine enrolls in semiotics 201, it is in an effort to resist the academic mainstream in favor of what feels to her like a countercultural movement: critical theory. As the popularity of French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida sweeps campus, Madeleine grows eager to join in—ironically, her attempt to resist the norm draws her into another kind of conformity, as she adopts a fad and then organizes her personal life in accordance with its tenets. Setting out to construct a dating life that goes against the traditions upheld by authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot (and her conventional parents), Madeleine finds Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse—another work of post-structuralist theory—and instantly applies its sensibilities to her own love life. The book argues that love is, in truth, a perpetual state of anticipation for love to arrive. In this way, all love is unrequited, and a lover never fully attains the object of their affection. Madeleine comes to feel as though the book’s philosophies are indisputably true.