The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Chances are that this reader would like most any book that mentioned on its first page Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austin, George Elliot, and the Bronte sisters. Jeffrey Eugenides in his newest novel, The Marriage Plot, not only mentions all these authors, but shows via one of his three lead characters that he has been deeply influenced by them all. The setting is the graduation ceremony at Brown University in the spring of 1982, and Eugenides adopts in turn the voices of each of his three main characters who are about to begin their new post-graduate lives. Interestingly, his most convincing voice is that of a female character, Madeleine, whose primary interest is in Victorian literature. “She’s become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.” Madeleine is pursued by two young men, Leonard, whose dual interests are biology and philosophy, and Mitchell, who is fascinated by religious mystics and people like St. Teresa and Albert Schweitzer whose focus is simply doing good in the world. Most likely, each of the three characters is a side of Eugenides himself, and so it is no wonder that each speaks convincingly.

As in his meticulously researched novel, Middlesex, Eugenides displays a deep understanding of the topics that interest him. In this novel these topics are manic depression, mysticism, and the role of the marriage plot in Victorian and pre-Victorian literature. He also manages to show his understanding of and sympathy for feminism, both through the voice of Madeleine and the rather clumsy attempts of his male characters to rise above, or at least be ashamed of, their sexism. 

Eugenides reminds us that women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain and restricted from participating in politics, and that it was under these conditions that Victorian women writers wrote their books. 

Seen this way, eighteenth—and nineteenth—century literature, especially that written by women, was anything but old hat. Against tremendous odds, without anyone giving them the right to take up the pen or a proper education, women such as Anne Finch, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, and Emily Dickenson had taken up the pen anyway, not only joining in the grand literary project but, if you could believe Gilbert and Fubar, creating a new literature at the same time, playing a man’s game while subverting it. Two sentences from The Madwoman in the Attic particularly struck Madeleine. “In recent years, for instance, while male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism which Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ accurately describes, women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have probably not experienced its analog since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era. The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feel hopelessly belated: the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitely emerging.”

But if Madeleine is attracted to the intelligence and relative independence of the women writers she so admires, she is nonetheless driven by the need to be recognized by the men in her life whom she still sees as intellectually superior. The summer after her graduation from Brown, instead of throwing all of her efforts into her own life and post graduate studies, she instead goes off to a biology think-tank with Leonard who has a fellowship there for the summer. And she does this in spite of the fact that on the very day of graduation, she discovers that Leonard is a manic depressive, and has (not for the first time) been committed to a psychiatric hospital. 

It is hard to imagine anyone trying to live with and care for someone who is manic depressive, and even harder to imagine a young woman in her twenties taking on this awesome responsibility. Eugenides takes the reader through a single summer of Madeleine trying to be the partner and caregiver of Leonard as his disease and the medication he uses to treat it lead him into a more and more isolated existence. Desperate to hide his illness from the scientists and co-fellowship students at the think-tank, he becomes ever more dependent on Madeleine, hating her to leave him even to play tennis or go to the city. “He didn’t want her to leave. If Madeleine left, he would be alone again, as he’d been growing up in a house with his family, as he was in his head and often in his dreams, and as he’d been in his room at the psych ward.” 

Meanwhile, Mitchell, the third voice in this story of young people struggling to find themselves in a complicated and unjust world, is traveling through India, reading religious mystics and trying to follow the example of St. Teresa. His character is the one least developed in this novel, and the least convincing. His quest makes him seem both younger and more naïve than the other characters, and yet it is primarily through him that Eugenides is able to give the reader some political commentary. Mitchell’s desperate but unrequited love for Madeleine, coupled with his yearning for purity and enlightenment, make him into an almost comic character, but one who nonetheless plays a pivotal role. He is perhaps more the actual mouthpiece for Eugenides that either of the other main characters.

In the end, I can’t say that this is a great or even a really good novel. I think Eugenides tries to do too much, too fast, and I have a hard time believing that his characters could really go through all the changes they do in a single summer. Perhaps he should have given them a few years to experience such life-changing events. Nevertheless, this is an interesting story, and Eugenides a gifted storyteller. It will leave you with much deeper understanding of the marriage plot and its role in both Victorian and contemporary novels, and perhaps give you a deeper understanding of the disease that is labeled manic depression.

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

Sometimes I hear about a book for months, even years, before I finally pick it up and give it a try. My students and my serious reader friends have been urging me to read Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, for a very long time, so it may be old news for many of you by now, but having finally read it, I find I just have to talk about it today.

There is so much to be learned from this hefty novel, and while perhaps the most important theme is that of the many children born with ambiguous sexual organs and lumped together under the ambiguous title of hermaphrodite, there is also a wealth of information about historical struggles between Greeks and Turks, as well as about how the American automobile industry has, from its inception, treated its workers, and how the decline of that same industry has decimated cities. It is an ambitious and sprawling novel, but it also has the homey feel of a family story, and my prediction is that once you give it a hundred-page trial, you will be unable to put it down.

The main theme of the novel is announced on page one: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Fortunately for us readers, this twice born being, first named Calliope and only much later renamed simply Cal, found it necessary to trace his lineage and his story back to his grandparents who fled from a war-torn Greek island in the 1920s and landed finally in Detroit where they began their family. And so the first several hundred pages of this novel are about the miraculous escape of his grandparents, their eventual settling in Detroit, and the grimy and tumultuous history of that great American city.

Calliope’s grandfather, Lefty Stephaides, worked first for Ford Motor Company, though the complex of buildings was known to local residents simply as the Rouge.

And then the Rouge appeared against the sky, rising out of the smoke it generated. At first all that was visible was the tops of the eight main smokestacks. Each gave birth to its own dark cloud. The clouds plumed upward and merged into a general pall that hung over the landscape, sending a shadow that ran along the trolley tracks; and Lefty understood that the men’s silence was a recognition of this shadow, of its inevitable approach each morning. 

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. 

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine. 

On the factory floor, my grandfather was trained for his job in seventeen minutes. Part of the new production method’s genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you could hire anyone. And fire anyone. The foreman showed Lefty how to take a bearing from the conveyor, grind it on a lathe, and replace it. Holding a stopwatch, he timed the new employee’s attempts. Then, nodding once, he led Lefty to his position on the line. On the left stood a man named Wierzbicki; on the right, a man named O’Malley. For a moment, they are three men, waiting together. Then the whistle blew. 

Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling around the factory, through clouds of metal dust, its acid fogs, until another worker fifty yards on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds). Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent heads, huge spindles pound steampowered fists. No one says a word.

This description continues for several pages, as eloquent as Charlie Chaplan’s movie Modern Times in expressing the essence of the assembly line and its soul-sucking noise and repetition. We also hear of the so-called social workers Ford sends out to spy on the home conditions of the workers, telling them how to brush their teeth, how to raise their children, whom to avoid if they wish to continue working for Ford Motor. If there are too many families living in one apartment, that, alone, may be grounds for dismissal, since these audacious spies have decided that living in such crowded conditions makes for unreliable employees, and there are always more interchangeable workers to fill the ranks.

This novel would be worth reading simply for it social commentary and its description of the birth, life, and slow-death of cities like Detroit, but equally fascinating is the story of the thousands of children born with two sets of sexual organs.

Because of certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was sometimes difficult to determine the sex of a newborn baby. 

The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in question. You did not tell the parents of a newborn, “Your baby is a hermaphodite.” Instead, you said, “Your daughter was born with a clitoris that is a little larger than a normal girl’s. We’ll need to do surgery to make it the right size. {It was} felt that parents weren’t able to cope with an ambiguous gender assignment. You had to tell them if they had a boy or a girl.

A doctor in one of my classes confirmed that during his early days as a military doctor, determination of sex was done simply on the basis of appearance. If the penis was too small, the baby was pronounced to be female; it the clitoris was too big, the baby was pronounced to be male. Never mind that in the first case, undescended testes would cause a new crisis in adolescence (as was the case with Callipoe), just as hormonal changes during puberty would cause similar crises in the stipulated males who suddenly developed breasts and other secondary sexual characteristics of females. Over hundreds of years, various criterion have been used to determine gender: in the late 1800s looking at gonadal tissue under a microscope was deemed to be the definitive test; if it’s testicular, the person was a male, if ovarian, female. But a later discovery determined “that gender identity is established very early on in life, about the age of two. Gender was like a native tongue; it didn’t exist before birth but was imprinted in the brain during childhood, never disappearing. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”

That there is no tidy answer to this question of male or female, nature or nurture, and that finally it is more a matter of stipulation than discovery emerges clearly over the course of this wonderful book. The only way to get to whole story is to read the book.