The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), set in the early 1980s, follows a love triangle among a group of recent Brown University graduates. As the 20-somethings forge a path into adulthood, they explore the dynamics of love and commitment while wrestling with ways to imbue their lives with meaning and make a purposeful mark on the world. The title references a plot trope common to 19th-century British novels, such as those by Jane Austen, in which the pursuit of a suitable marriage is a young woman’s primary goal.

Eugenides, a native of Detroit, Michigan, is the author of the highly acclaimed novels The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), both set in Detroit and its suburbs. Middlesex was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, and The Virgin Suicides was made into a feature film in 1999. His story collection Fresh Complaints (2017) was named a New York Times Notable book and a Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. The Marriage Plot also received numerous accolades: It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and was also named Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, The Seattle Times, Publisher’s Weekly, and others. Eugenides has taught creative writing at Princeton and New York University.

This guide refers to the 2011 hardcover edition published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of mental illness, substance use, suicidal ideation, addiction, illness, and sexual content.

Language Note: The source material includes some offensive language referring to mental illness, including the word “madman”; such terms appear in the guide only in direct quotations. The source text and guide use medical terms such as “manic” to describe the experience of bipolar disorder.

Plot Summary

The novel is structured in a non-linear fashion; the following summary is presented largely in chronological order. The novel opens on commencement day at Brown University in early June 1982. Madeleine Hanna wakes with a hangover to the buzzer of the apartment she shares with two other students. Madeleine’s parents have come to visit. Having broken up with her boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, Madeleine has been in a funk for the past few weeks. The previous night, her roommates convinced her to join them at a party. The details of the party are revealed via flashback scenes. Madeleine walks her parents to a nearby coffee shop to have breakfast as planned. They run into Mitchell Grammaticus, a one-time friend of Madeleine’s with whom she has had a falling out. Her parents eagerly welcome Mitchell to join them. Silently, Madeleine worries about what she will do now that college has ended: She had planned to spend the summer with Leonard, who was awarded a research fellowship at Pilgrim Lake Laboratory in Maine. She does not inform her parents of the breakup.

As Madeleine and Mitchell depart together from the coffee shop, the narrative provides the backstory of how they came to be friends and how they had a falling out. Since they met during their freshman year, Mitchell has been in love with Madeleine, watching patiently as she dates three other guys, the latest being Leonard. Leonard and Madeleine meet in semiotics 201, a course in which Madeleine enrolls after growing bored with the subject of her senior thesis—“the marriage plot,” a trope found in 19th-century novel’s like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Leonard draws Madeleine’s attention because of how strange and seemingly anti-social he is. Madeleine and Leonard fall into an intense relationship in the final months of college, quickly falling into a rhythm of spending each night together. Madeleine also becomes obsessed with A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, a theoretical work that becomes not only the subject of her final semiotics paper but also a model for her romantic life. On a warm day in May, Madeleine tells Leonard that she loves him, but Leonard cannot vocalize his love for her. Instead, he points to the phrase “I love you” in Madeleine’s copy of Barthes, which she then throws at him and storms off.

In the present, Mitchell and Madeleine prepare, separately, for the commencement ceremony. Mitchell is preoccupied with the morning’s encounter with Madeleine, and Madeleine thinks about her lack of post-graduation plans. As she is about to leave her apartment, Madeleine receives a phone call from a friend of Leonard’s: Leonard has been hospitalized after experiencing a mental health crisis. The friend reveals to her that Leonard has bipolar disorder. Madeleine rushes off to commencement as planned and stops by the post office, where she retrieves a rejection letter from Yale’s graduate program. She joins the march to the ceremony but then ducks out, hails a taxi, and rushes to Leonard’s side. The two reconcile, and Madeleine decides to move to Maine with him in the fall as planned.

Mitchell and his friend Larry plan to spend a year abroad. Larry will be completing an internship with a professor in India, and Mitchell, consumed by religious theory, hopes that the trip will serve as a kind of spiritual journey that will make him a selfless and enlightened person. They depart for the first leg of the trip—Paris—in early fall. The night before leaving, however, Mitchell bumps into Madeleine at a bar, and the two end the night with a kiss.

Mitchell spends the year plagued by thoughts of Madeleine, oscillating between a certainty that the two are destined to be together and a belief that he is intentionally cultivating his own heartache. The European leg of their trip spans various nations, including France, Ireland, and Greece, where Larry both breaks up with his girlfriend and accidentally comes out to Mitchell when he is caught in bed with a Greek man. Just before they are scheduled to depart for India, Mitchell receives a letter from Madeleine in which she addresses the kiss and insists that she will never be romantically interested in him. Mitchell departs for India alone, leaving Larry behind in Greece. There, he volunteers at a hospital for the dying in Calcutta (currently known as Kolkata), living in housing provided by the Salvation Army. He vacillates between intense spiritual feelings and berating himself for being unwilling to perform discomforting tasks, such as bathing patients.

Meanwhile, Madeleine and Leonard move to Maine, where Leonard begins his research fellowship. The narrative provides Leonard’s backstory, detailing his teenage depression and diagnosis of bipolar disorder during college. Having stopped taking lithium after his breakup with Madeleine, he has been placed on a heavy dose. The side effects, however, are intolerable—especially the brain fog. Madeleine struggles to care for him, despite her mother’s constant caution against tethering herself to someone with a mental illness. Unbeknownst to Madeleine, Leonard gradually decreases his lithium dosage, convinced that he can live on the verge of a manic state. Soon, his mania takes over, and it is in this state that he proposes marriage to Madeleine.

Madeleine and Leonard are married, much to her parents’ dismay, and they head to Europe for a honeymoon. There, Leonard’s mania grows increasingly uncontrolled, and Madeleine realizes that he has weaned himself off the lithium. In Monaco, he wanders off to a casino one night with a group of Swiss bankers. Madeleine calls his doctor, who insists that Leonard needs to be immediately hospitalized for a psychological evaluation. In a series of manic-driven events, Leonard disappears but is later found by the police and hospitalized. After he is placed back on lithium, he and Madeleine return to the US, moving in with the Hannas until Madeleine can decide what to do. As the summer gets underway, Madeleine applies and is accepted to a few graduate programs, and she decides on Columbia. One day, she coaxes Leonard—despondent, listless, and constantly negative—to view an apartment in the city with her. It is shown to them by a friend of Madeleine’s. After Madeleine convinces Leonard that they should sign the lease, the friend tells them about a party that evening hosted by a mutual friend from Brown. Madeleine convinces Leonard to stop at the party for a while. There, Leonard hides in a bedroom while Madeleine enjoys the party. When she goes to retrieve Leonard, she finds him talking to Mitchell, who has just returned from India. On the way to the train station, however, Madeleine and Leonard argue. Leonard asserts that he wants to divorce Madeleine and then flees. Madeleine, in tears, rushes back to the party, where she seeks comfort from Mitchell, who accompanies her back to her parents’ home in New Jersey.

Madeleine insists that Mitchell remain at her parents’ house, and he moves into an attic bedroom. By contacting Leonard’s mother in Portland, Oregon, they learn that Leonard had fled there but is now living with a friend in a remote cabin somewhere in the state. Madeleine, unsure of what to do, delays making a decision and spends the summer at her parents’ home, insisting that Mitchell remain to keep her company. Mitchell falls into a routine of attending meetings at a local Quaker church. As the summer ends, Madeleine decides to obtain an annulment from Leonard and move to the New York city apartment as planned in order to attend Columbia. Before she leaves, she pursues Mitchell one afternoon in the attic bedroom, and the two have sex. Afterward, Mitchell briefly considers that Madeleine may invite him to move in with her in New York. However, at a Quaker meeting, he recalls the conversation he had with Leonard at the party about religious enlightenment: Leonard, believing that he had had an out-of-body religious experience while in a manic state, described the experience to Mitchell. Thinking back on this, Mitchell realizes that he and Madeleine are not meant to be together, and he allows her to go off to New York alone.