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

in [his] own life for [mania]” (Grose, “Questions for Jeffery Eugenidies), and by exaggerating these emotions and logical connections, he created a fairly realistic depiction of the logic of someone who is manic.
True representations of mental illness (meaning the author writing about their experiences with a mental illness) are rare in literature, although many famous authors are said to have suffered from it. Eugenidies uses mental illness as a plot point and to examine his characters and their treatment of mental illness. Madeleine’ s mother and sister’s reaction to finding out that Leonard takes lithium and has bipolar disorder represent fear from all of society towards the mentally ill and the aversion to having anything to do with it. Madeleine’s mother tries to convince her not to marry Leonard because Madeleine would have to put up with the mental illness for the rest of her life. Madeleine seems convinced, however, that because she was only aware of the illness for some of the time she knew Leonard, that at some point the illness would go away and he would go back to how she knew him before. This trope is one seen in books today, where mental illness is magically “cured” by love. Eugenidies challenges this but doesn’t face the end game of mental illness, choosing rather to have Leonard disappear on his own accord, giving Madeleine a happy ending because he’s no longer in her life.
The Marriage Plot is self-aware of its use of the “madwoman in the attic” trope, and examines how it applies in modern life. The mentally ill are often closeted by their families, even today, 30 years after the novel takes place. TV Tropes defines this trope as, “when a character with mental problems, and often some physical deformity, is locked away because s/he will never fit into society” (tvtropes.org, “Madwoman in the Attic”). However, rather than being forcibly locked away by his family, Leonard locks himself away of his own accord, showing a self-awareness uncommonly seen in books featuring mentally ill characters.
Leonard himself is ashamed of his condition and makes every effort to keep it a secret from everyone he knows. This behavior is encouraged by Leonard’s belittling visitor when Madeleine first visits him in the hospital. Henry’s connection to Leonard is never revealed, but judging by Leonard’s unquestioning agreement with his statements, one can assume they’ve known each other for a while. Henry says that Leonard “manufactured a little mental illness to get in [to the hospital] and get some help” (Eugenidies 122), hinting at another popular belief that mental illness is often faked and only the “crazy people… [with] mental illnesses… [like] schizophrenia” (Grohol, “Top 10 Myths of Mental Illness”) are the ones who need help because everything else isn’t life-threatening.
Henry also antagonizes Madeleine by suggesting that by being a “a psych major… [who’s] read a lot of Freud” (123) that he knows everything there is to know about mental illness. This can be related to a common generalization of mental illness as a one-dimensional thing, something that is the same experience for everyone and something that can be treated the same way for everyone with it. Beliefs like, “you don’t need therapy. Just take a pill” or, “a person can treat themselves with positive thought and prayer” (Powell, “Dispelling Myths on Mental Illness”) aren’t necessarily incorrect 100% of the time, but generalizations don’t convey the truth about how mental illness can be and is treated.
Often times the way a person manages their illness is unique, involving a combination of thing like cognitive behavioral therapy, prescription medication, a good support system, coping methods, and self-awareness. Some mentally ill people may manage their illness without therapy or psychiatric medications or through purely holistic methods, but claiming these methods are the universal cure-all is just as misleading as claiming that one kind of psychiatric drug or one method of therapy will help every mentally ill person fix their problems. Since mental illness is caused by such a large variety of things like environment, genetics, and personality (Weir, “The roots of mental illness”), the treatments tend to be just as varied.
Madeleine has an argument with her mother after her mother finds out about Leonard’s illness. Madeleine’s sister snoops in Leonard’s medicine and finds out that he’s taking lithium and makes assumptions from there. Madeleine’s mother sends her (Madeleine) an article written by a woman who was married to a man with bipolar disorder. This reaction to mental illness mirrors the one seen in life, because when people discover that someone they know has a mental illness, they see them completely differently. Before the illness becomes know, the mentally ill person is just “normal”, but after its revelation, everything the person does is thrown under the microscope of being caused by the mental illness. The relation made in the observer’s head about the mentally ill person’s motive, or reasoning behind their decisions, changes. Before someone in known to be mentally ill, everything they, whether it’s reasonable or not, is assumed to be reasonable. Mental illness, or as Michel Foucault called it, madness, is the lack of reason. The mentally ill are assumed to not be motivated by reason, but by some other, unknown force, or unreason.
Foucault’s study of what reason is and how its developed in human society relates the the ostracization of mentally ill. The farther unreason is pushed from what is generally believed to be reason, the more unreasonable it becomes. The underlying currents of how “the other” becomes “the other” are the fear of unreason and the unknown. Reason is a web that connects mainstream society together unconsciously, and deviations from this web either cause the web to grow and become accepted beliefs, or are expelled as madness.
Leonard’s lack of reason is seen when he’s depressed or when he’s manic, and although the madness takes different forms, in the eyes of the reasonable, it’s one madness, bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, or manic-depression as it was called back then, is a reasonable name given to something that is unreasonable, to make it less scary to a reasonable population. The extreme moods seen in a person with bipolar disorder are unreasonable: how can someone who would normally have little energy, little motivation, and little hope suddenly turn and become someone with an abnormal amount of energy and sky high ambition? These two forms exist as one entity, one person with bipolar disorder. Science tries to turn the unreasonableness of manic-depression into something involving an unbalance and abnormality of chemicals and genetic predisposition, and continues to be motivated to research it. Modern science attempts to explain unreason with reason, two (seemingly) incompatible realities.
Science has succeeded in thoroughly explaining many things, and as a force of human determination, science will not rest until it has explained everything, even things that actually cannot be explained. The human understanding of the world changes with science, and even if the world itself does not actually physically change, our relationship with it does when we understand it differently. Epistemologists often argue that knowledge doesn’t lead to one single truth, but just a different understanding of the truth. What is true is what we understand to be true. When the Earth was the center of the universe, that was true. When the solar system became “known” as heliocentric, that was true.
Our understanding of mental illness is the same in its lack of a single truth. When madness is caused by sins and demonic possession, that’s just what’s true. Now madness is an illness caused by genes and chemicals and cerebral processes, so that’s true. In the future madness may be attributed to some other cause, and the theory of mental illness will no longer be true, or accepted as truth.
In a social sense, mental illness is often thought about by the reasonable neurotypicals, or those who aren’t deemed mad or mentally ill and therefore motivated by reason, in respect to their own relationship to someone with a mental illness, not to their relationship with mental illness and unreasonableness itself, without the middle man. As unreasonableness is more fully understood and reasonably explained, more people who before wouldn’t allow themselves to be thought of as mad accept the reasonable parts of mental illness as a part of their selves. The line between reason and unreason become seemingly blurred because of this: people who most days are considered reasonable and fall within the unconscious net of mainstream human reason, can sometimes “suffer” or be motivated by unreason. No longer is our population divided by those who are reasonable and those who lack reason, and instead our net of reason grows rapidly with the concepts of the unreasonable becoming reasonable facts. Acceptance of a large fraction of formally unreasonable thought has led to the greatest renaissance of mankind and our net of reason grows exponentially.
The Marriage Plot was written in 2011 but takes place in 1982, 30 years apart. It accurately depicts the social climate surrounding mental illness, although some of the more accepting attitudes of the author come through in the liberal attitudes of the characters (this could also be attributed to the fact that the characters are all college students, too). It serves as a quasi-retrospective look at how attitudes towards mental illness have changed, even in that short period of time. Even treatment of mental illness has grown significantly: insurance policies have expanded their coverage, and more resources like therapists are available, especially to college students. The Internet has had an obviously role in the acceptance of mental illness in the web of reason. Mentally ill people have a platform to speak anonymously and freely, and their stories and facts about mental illness are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection.
The Internet generally promotes expansion of the web of reason. Any innovation in communication, from trade routes developing in Eurasia to the printing press and global literacy rates rising, expedites the growth of what is considered reason. More people have a chance to stake their claim on why something formally unreasonable should be considered reasonable, and their audience is free to comment and argue until the claim becomes solid enough to be accepted into reason. The Internet allows free speech to take place in a globalized environment with no restrictions, and may just become the ultimate tool in expanding our web of reason. The Marriage Plot takes place in a pre-Internet world, right before the Internet makes it big. It shows the circumstances in which the Internet arrived were just right for that sort of revolutionary technology. The Marriage Plot shows that the young adults of the time were restless and rebellious, like most young adults are, and that they were just waiting for a change and an opportunity like the Internet in order to expand the web of reason and search for new ideas.
The search for new ideas is exhibited in Mitchell’s character as he travels through Europe and India, trying to find a set of religious beliefs that he can get behind.

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

reason.
The Marriage Plot exhibits the connection between the expansion of reason in the last 50 years and the changing attitudes towards mental illness. It uses the distrust of reason and the abandonment of traditional truth to explain the new reasoning brought about when people start to distrust institutions like the government in that time period. Reason is rediscovered in the mentally ill, and unreason becomes reason. Changing attitudes towards mental illness can be explained through the new reasoning behind mental illness- that it’s caused by physical things like chemicals and genes, not by spiritual things like character or lack thereof. The new reasoning behind mental illness attempts to make unreason reasonable.