Tag Archives: relationships

Does the “marriage plot” still work in romance novels?

For generations, a staple of romantic fiction has been a genre called the marriage plot. An underprivileged female protagonist must find a rich, aristocratic husband, or her life will be ruined. Her choices for the future will be to enter a convent or resign herself to spinsterhood.

Amusing scenes in my new romantic comedy, Mick & Moira & Brad, are rooted in post-metoo sexual politics. It’s a “full and frank exchange of views,” as the Brits say. Nevertheless, it’s not a “marriage plot” because Moira’s all-or-nothing goal isn’t a wedding but success in showbiz, provided she’s willing to pay the price of fame. Unlike women of yesteryear, Moira knows the decisions are all hers. But – how to decide?

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is more of a melodrama, also a love triangle, but written years before #MeToo. It’s a story about four friends, which begins when they meet in college at Brown. It updates the question embedded in the old theme. It’s about whether we understand anything about what makes relationships work.

The Marriage Plot is masterful on many levels. At first I wasn’t drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle – Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That’s the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it’s what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre “campus novel.” That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom-com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There’s a similar concept in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. The narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don’t. Things work out or they don’t. They mostly don’t, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgments, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost.

Mick & Moira & Brad is a romantic comedy about post-metoo sexual politics. It’s all up to Moira – but how to decide?

Thinking About Thinking #40 – I Do and I Don’t – Marriage themes in the movies

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Here’s my book review of I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies by Jeanine Basinger.

Basinger is professor of film studies at Wesleyan University, my alma mater, and during her tenure there, she’s been mentor to many of the Hollywood filmmakers who are today referred to as the Wesleyan Mafia. She is one of the most influential of our present-day film historians.

I Do and I Don’t is a critical survey of studio pictures from the silent era up through recent times. Movies in America were formally censored during the ’Thirties and ’Forties, the main reason that even into the ’Fifties, all screen married couples slept in twin beds. The rich ones had separate bedrooms, perhaps for other reasons. But Basinger emphasizes that Hollywood’s view on marriage evolved over the decades for primarily commercial reasons – to appeal to the people – most of them women – who bought tickets.

First off, if you’re considering writing a screenplay about your happy marriage, forget it. Even before the talkies, moviemakers understood that happy couples are just plain boring. Conflict is drama, as Aristotle once said. And the most hilarious romantic comedies are the same, with the volume turned way up.

Basinger tells us that marriage movies are rooted in problems, including money, infidelity, children, illness, death, and forced separation.

In every era, the studios were skilled at giving the audience what it wanted but might not admit – namely stories about their secret fears and suppressed desires. In the movies, any misbehavior, any sin, any abusive behavior can be indulged in, as long as the responsible party is punished before the lights come back up. That way, the audience can leave the theater feeling both satisfied and self-righteous.

Take for example George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib, in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are trial lawyers married to each other and squared off as opposing counsel on the same case. In the famous massage scene, Tracy gives Hepburn a playful slap. She takes it the wrong way, and the scene ends as she gives him a swift kick in the ankle. If that movie were made today, you know her aim would be higher.