What Is Jeffery Eugenidies's The Marriage Plot?

Jeffery Eugenidies’s novel The Marriage Plot is a limited review of the life of a person living with bipolar disorder and the stigma surrounding mental illness. The story is about three college students in the 80s involved in a love triangle: the main character, Madeleine, loves her mentally ill boyfriend Leonard, while Mitchell stays hopelessly in love with Madeleine. Leonard’s anguish due to his manic-depression, as it was called at the time, causes much hardship for Madeleine. Madeleine’s mother tries to stop her from marrying Leonard, treating him like someone dangerous rather than someone who’s ill, representing the underlying attitudes of society as a whole towards mental illness and the mentally ill.

A section of the book is devoted to examining what’s going on inside Leonard’s head while he’s manic. Although the reasoning for Leonard’s inappropriate behaviors feels organic, after a while it begins to look like Eugenidies may have just been checking off common manic behaviors. Eugenidies says that he “tried to find correlatives

Although in the 80’s America become more conservative because of government changes, it also started to decline in general religiosity. Mitchell was raised Catholic, majored in religious studies in college, and worked at a Catholic mission in India after college. He ended up attending Quaker meetings while staying at Madeleine’s house after Leonard leaves, and seems to find some peace with the openness and positivity of the religion. Modern Catholicism is a pretty negative religion, even in the 80’s during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The 80’s were a time when new ideas where explored and old ideas were revitalized. Dwindling faith in the government virtually disappeared, and unreason started to become reason much more quickly, because of the lack of trust in