The Marriage Plot Read Online Free PDF

existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.
    Madeleine’s final paper for the seminar was titled “The Interrogative Mood: Marriage Proposals and the (Strictly Limited) Sphere of the Feminine.” It had impressed Saunders so much that he’d asked Madeleine to come see him. In his office, which had a grandparental smell, he expressed his opinion that Madeleine might expand her paper into a senior honors thesis, along with his willingness to serve as her advisor. Madeleine smiled politely. Professor Saunders specialized in the periods she was interested in, the Regency leading into the Victorian era. He was sweet, and learned, and it was clear from his unsubscribed office hours that no one else wanted him as an advisor, and so Madeleine had said yes, she would love to work with him on her senior thesis.
    She used a line from Trollope’s Barchester Towers as an epigraph: “There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.” Her plan was to begin with Jane Austen. After a brief examination of Pride and Prejudice , Persuasion , and Sense and Sensibility , all comedies, essentially, that ended with weddings, Madeleine was going to move on to the Victorian novel, where things got more complicated and considerably darker. Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady didn’t end with weddings. They began with the traditional moves of the marriage plot—the suitors, the proposals, the misunderstandings—but after the wedding ceremony they kept on going. These novels followed their spirited, intelligent heroines, Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, into their disappointing married lives, and it was here that the marriage plot reached its greatest artistic expression.
    By 1900 the marriage plot was no more. Madeleine planned to end with a brief discussion of its demise. In Sister Carrie , Dreiser had Carrie live adulterously with Drouet, marry Hurstwood in an invalid ceremony, and then run off to become an actress—and this was only in 1900! For a conclusion, Madeleine thought she might cite the wife-swapping in Updike. That was the last vestige of the marriage plot: the persistence in calling it “wife-swapping” instead of “husband-swapping.” As if the woman were still a piece of property to be passed around.
    Professor Saunders suggested that Madeleine look at historical sources. She’d obediently boned up on the rise of industrialism and the nuclear family, the formation of the middle class, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. But it wasn’t long before she’d become bored with the thesis. Doubts about the originality of her work nagged at her. She felt as if she was regurgitating the arguments Saunders had made in his marriage plot seminar. Her meetings with the old professor were dispiriting, consisting of Saunders shuffling the pages she’d given him, pointing out various red marks he’d made in the margins.
    Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby’s boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called Of Grammatology . When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being “about” something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things. Madeleine said she was going to make coffee. Whitney asked if she would make him some, too.
    College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity. Thus, in the weeks after this exchange with Whitney, Madeleine began hearing