In writing this tale, Eugenides shows that one need not go back in time to write a novel about marriage, for just as in the Austen canon, the main crux of this story revolves around the question of who will marry whom. The above quote is great, because I suspect it reflects a tongue-in-cheek challenge that Jeffrey Eugenides put to himself when writing The Marriage Plot, a modern novel that revolves around marriage, but which faces the very plot difficulties mentioned above: gender equality and divorce-along with the giant elephant in this story’s fictional room: mental illness. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time,” (22). You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? …Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. “In the days when success in life had depended on marriage and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.
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