Normal People

Marianne is Connell’s friend and intimate. Although she initially seems more self-possessed and worldly—from a wealthy family, she affects an amused and indifferent distance from the cliquish social world of their small-town high school—she has her own vulnerabilities. Her assured façade conceals a deep self-loathing, a result of her dysfunctional family background. This self-loathing manifests itself most powerfully in her sexual relations with men, and Connell must learn to navigate her masochistic impulses while also not fully giving in to them. 

While Marianne wakes Connell up to his introspective, loner side, Connell wakes Marianne up to the realization that she needs people. Though her social manner is less shy than his, she is also a lonelier character, even when surrounded by friends at Trinity. She does not depend deeply on anyone, and she views herself as a person apart, whether loathed or envied or both. Connell rescues her from this burdensome feeling of separateness, and she finds at the end of the novel that she enjoys being “a normal person.” She can now walk down the street and feel that she is a part of the world, in all of its glancing incidental beauty. 

Lorraine, young and single, is Connell’s mother. She had Connell when she was just a teenager, and Connell has never known his father. Unconventional yet loving, Lorraine brings stability to Connell’s life. 

As a single mother in a small, conservative town, Lorraine has learned how to think for herself and to decide on her own moral values. Her individualism shows most clearly in her feminist defense of Marianne and in her shame at her own son’s behavior, when Connell decides to take another, more socially acceptable girl to the Debs Ball. 

Denise is Marianne’s mother; like Lorraine, she is referred to by her first name throughout the novel, though this seems to imply an icy distance rather than an offhand familiarity. Although Denise does not appear often, she has a destructive effect on Marianne. Denise is the inverse of Lorraine; though also a single mother, she is no freethinker or feminist. Denise has internalized the values of her deceased abusive husband as well as the values of a patriarchal, religiously conservative culture. She shuns her daughter and favors her bullying son, Alan. 

Because of her wealth, Denise feels superior to more modest citizens like Lorraine, who works as Denise’s housekeeper, and she keeps all uncomfortable self-awareness at bay. Though isolated, she tells herself that she is “normal” because she lives in a big house, even though the townspeople view her as peculiar. Ironically, Denise’s concern with appearances and brittle adherence to conventional patriarchal values make her isolated and odd. These values have hurt and warped her, and they have destroyed her family, but she clings to them because they are what she knows. In the end, Marianne sees her mother in a new light—as just another person out in the world—much as Marianne comes to see herself.