The Marriage Plot

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, substance use, and sexual content.

Madeleine Hanna wakes up on the morning of her graduation from Brown University, hungover and having slept very little. The buzzer of her apartment sounds: Her parents have arrived as planned to go out for breakfast. Madeleine delays as long as possible before finally heading downstairs to the alcove of the building where she has forced her parents to wait.

They walk to a coffee shop that Madeleine chooses because it will be populated by students whose countercultural aesthetic her parents disapprove of. As they eat bagels and drink coffee, her mother spots Madeleine’s friend Mitchell Grammaticus outside and asks Madeleine to invite him to join them. Mitchell and Madeleine have not spoken in months, but Madeleine complies. As Mitchell chats with her parents, Madeleine worries about where she will spend her summer: She had planned to move in with her boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, at the Pilgrim Lake Laboratory in Maine, but they broke up three weeks ago. She does not reveal this to her parents.

The narrative shifts back in time: Madeleine decides on the topic of “the marriage plot” for her senior thesis—a device used in 19th-century English novels such as those by Jane Austen and George Eliot. As she gets deeper into the work, she eventually grows bored, and in her final semester, she enrolls in semiotics 201. Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida has become popular across campus, and Madeleine decides that she will hop on the bandwagon. The seminar is taught by Professor Zipperstein, and a student named Leonard captures Madeleine’s attention.

As she begins to notice Leonard around campus, Madeleine reflects on the boyfriends she has had at Brown up to this point, including Billy Bainbridge, who was obsessed with circumcision, and Dabney Carlisle, an aspiring model whom she met in an acting class.

Madeleine finally speaks to Leonard after class one day: She vents her frustration about a verbose and pretentious peer named Thurston Meens. As Madeleine rants, Leonard asks her to get coffee, and they make their way to a diner far from campus. In subsequent classes, however, Leonard does not speak to Madeleine. Then, he disappears entirely. Madeleine becomes increasingly eager to see him again and discovers that one of her roommates knows him. The roommate throws a small dinner party, inviting Leonard.

After dinner, while Madeleine washes dishes, Leonard invites her to see a film by Italian director Federico Fellini that is playing the next Saturday. Madeleine waits all week for the phone call that Leonard promised, which finally happens on Friday night.

Before the film, they meet for dinner. Afterward, they walk aimlessly until Leonard confesses that he is leading them to his apartment. They spend the next three days having sex, and Madeleine realizes that she is falling in love. She spends more and more time with Leonard, surprised that she enjoys what a good listener he is. They fall into a routine whereby Madeleine heads to the biology lab to retrieve Leonard after finishing her studies each evening. They argue over whose apartment they will spend the night in. On a particularly warm day in May, Madeleine dresses with care and prepares a picnic. Arriving at Leonard’s studio, they immediately fall into sex, and she tells Leonard that she loves him. He grabs the book of theory that Madeleine is reading—A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes—and points to the sentence “I love you.” Madeleine responds by throwing the book at Leonard and storming out.

The narrative returns to graduation day. Mitchell is preparing to travel to India when fall arrives, and he admits to himself that he is undergoing a kind of spiritual crisis. He recalls meeting Madeleine four years earlier at a toga party. Mitchell had not wanted to attend the party and, out of protest, wore no toga. He noticed Madeleine because she kept dipping out of the party to check on her laundry. They became friends when Mitchell made a habit of stopping by Madeleine’s dorm. Often, another guy was with her, but Mitchell was certain that none of them were people whom Madeleine was dating. After a year of stopping by to see Madeleine, Mitchell abruptly stopped, fearing that Madeleine was out of his league.

However, they bumped into one another when they were sophomores, and Madeleine invited him to travel with her to her parents’ home in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. There, Mitchell was a hit with Madeleine’s parents; he decided one day that he would marry her. On a few occasions throughout the long weekend, he thought that Madeleine might kiss him, but she never did. After the trip, they rarely saw each other, though Mitchell constantly left notes for Madeleine at her dorm until he saw her on campus one day with her boyfriend Billy.

The narrative shifts in time to the breakup between Madeleine and Leonard. She stews over whether or not to retrieve the Barthes book from Leonard’s apartment. Fearful of Leonard reading her margin notes, she does. In the days that follow, Madeleine, heartbroken, tries to apply the book’s discourse to her own healing. She had planned to move in with Leonard—who has been awarded a postgraduate research fellowship at the Pilgrim Lake Laboratory in Maine—and attend graduate school at Yale University. However, no acceptance letter from Yale has arrived. Graduation weekend approaches, and Madeleine’s roommates—Abby and Olivia—convince her to go to a party with them.

At the party, the three girls drink from a bottle of champagne. Watching the dancing only makes Madeleine miss Leonard, so she locks herself in a bathroom to cry. Exiting the bathroom, she bumps into Thurston from semiotics 201. They leave the party together, hopping from bar to bar. At the end of the night, they walk to Thurston’s apartment. There, Madeleine tries to perform oral sex on Thurston but cannot complete the act; she begins to cry. Next, she awakens in her own bed—not sure how she got there—to the sound of the buzzing door.

The narrative shifts back to Mitchell: As his freshman year unfolds, Mitchell realizes that most of his peers fail to notice Madeleine. He comes to believe that her beauty is a secret he keeps for himself. He becomes interested in a religious scholarship. During senior year, he takes a seminar called “Religion and Alienation in 20th-Century Culture” taught by Hermann Richter (94). After completing the final exam, Mitchell is called to Richter’s office. Richter praises Mitchell’s astute and original analysis and encourages him to consider further theological studies. Mitchell, having never considered this option before, promises to contact Richter when he returns from India.

On graduation day, Mitchell leaves the coffee shop where Madeleine and her parents are having breakfast to retrieve his roommate, Larry, from their apartment. Mitchell tells Larry about making up with Madeleine only to have her immediately stop speaking to him once again. He tells Larry that she has broken up with Leonard, but Larry responds by saying that he saw Madeleine leave a party the night before with Thurston. They put on their regalia and prepare a joint for the ceremonial march.

Madeleine returns to her apartment to dress for the ceremony, but as she is about to step into the shower, someone named Ken calls. He explains that he is a friend of Leonard’s and that Leonard has been hospitalized after a depressive episode. Ken recounts Leonard’s recent insomnia: He had stopped taking his lithium, initiating a pattern in which Leonard made long, rambling phone calls to nearly everyone he knew. He had learned that he was receiving three “incompletes” and therefore would not graduate. Ken had Leonard committed to the psychiatric unit at a nearby hospital. A rotation of friends has been keeping Leonard company, and Ken asks Madeleine if she will stop by.

Hanging up the phone, Madeleine confronts her roommates, whom she is certain have known of Leonard’s hospitalization. They fight, and then Abby and Olivia leave for the ceremony without Madeleine. Madeleine heads to the procession alone but first stops at the post office. In her box is a rejection letter from Yale graduate school, dated two months earlier, having been damaged and then lost. Madeleine tears up the letter and joins the march to the commencement activities for a few blocks but then catches a taxi to take her to the hospital.

When she is permitted to go to the fourth floor to see Leonard, she finds another student there. Leonard introduces him as Henry, a psychology major. Henry is telling Leonard that Leonard is, in fact, fine, and that he has exaggerated his depressive episode. Leonard then takes a phone call from his doctor, and when he returns, he reports that the doctor says he is not ready to be discharged yet.

Henry leaves, and Madeleine and Leonard talk. She wants to know why Leonard never told her about his bipolar disorder. Leonard says that he has been placed back on lithium and is feeling better, though he is worried about the three incompletes and eager to finish the work. He admits to sabotaging his relationship with Madeleine. She suggests that he work toward beginning his internship in the fall and that she will move with him as planned.