Anti-Climacus

When I first came across it I had the assumption that I would have a significant amount to say about this Hairpin post about The Marriage Plot. As it turns out I don't. I have two much smaller things to say:

1. It's remarkable to me the correlation between negative-ish reviews of the book and reviewers who are convinced Leonard is nothing more than a DFW stand-in. In physical description, perhaps. But unless one thinks that "intelligent man who is attractive to women" must stand in for someone in the author's own life and could not possibly be an original or semi-original* creation (paired with, naturally, "intelligent man who has trouble with women"). I don't think Leonard's being an aspiring scientist was accidental, nor do I think the book's ambivalence about whether Leonard was a good scientist was accidental.

2. The thrust of the post, which is that Madeleine is rendered as nothing more than a somewhat vacuous female object to be possessed and/or fought over by men (except for the inconvenient fact that Leonard and Mitchell don't fight over her, ever**), mistakes the novel's bigger themes for failures of characterization. All three of the main characters go through different phases and identities over the course of the book, in search of something to which they can attach themselves--e.g. Madeleine from literature to critical theory to Leonard; Leonard from being a slacker to high achievement to hospitalization to science; Mitchell from Madeleine to academia to world travel to mystical religious enlightenment. Most importantly, all of these attempts to attach oneself to some cause or person fail. This failure, this ruling out of possibilities, is not itself taken in a particularly judgmental way: Eugenides treats it as the process of leaving the world of college and becoming an adult. Madeleine's being rich and beautiful confers on her no more or less advantage than Leonard's being brilliant.

I will leave aside questions about whether it's a faithful recreation of the female experience (about which I would be hopeless to comment anyway) and opt instead to reiterate as conclusion that I think all of the main characters are treated in approximately the same way and given something like the same general character arcs. There may be (and are) flaws in the novel, but I'm not sure that's the one to be looking for.



*Look: Leonard is probably a stand-in for DFW on some level. This does not make "the character of Leonard is obviously a working out of Jeffrey Eugenides' massive jealousy towards and fixation on DFW" a good argument, unless one happens to think Eugenides is not a very good author or unable to use that 'imagination' thing some people have. Javier Cercas in Soldiers of Salamis has a conversation with a Chilean author by the name of Roberto Bolaño who happens to live in Blanes, Spain, where the real Bolaño lived at the time. Even so, I am confident that the character is primarily a fictional creation, whatever real-world facts may be borrowed in the narrative. I am equally confident about Leonard.

**And, in fact, the one conversation the book ever mentions between the two of them is not about Madeleine at all which a. is not what Madeleine thinks and b. is a sort of delicious reverse Bechdel Test.