The marriage plot by jeffrey eugenides6/21/2023 ![]() ![]() That fewer people are judging themselves against traditional measures of success, or longing for a nuclear family. That fewer people are entering long-term romantic relationships, or seeking public validation when they do commit. But the real conservative bugbear isn’t that fewer people can afford to get married it’s that fewer people actually want to. It’s hard enough these days for most young couples to rent a flat, never mind spend hundreds of pounds on a cake. That young people are tying fewer knots has triggered angst in certain quarters, though it’s hardly surprising. Marriage rates have since plunged even lower. Its heroine, reading English at Brown University, has to choose between two different men while studying virtuoso marriage plotters Jane Austen and George Eliot. What will become of the marriage plot in art and literature as the actual marriage rate declines? It’s a question we’ve been asking for decades Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2011 novel The Marriage Plot offers a postmodern spin on the issue. I researched some of the finer points, but I was largely able to rely on the knowledge I’ve absorbed from decades of media immersion, from books and poems, from paintings and song lyrics and movies. ![]() That’s how I could write a novel about a wedding without ever having been to one. We acquire this familiarity as much from art as from life. Everyone knows at least the basics of how their culture gets hitched. It brings together people who don’t normally meet, and occasions heaps of conflict. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |