36 pages • 1 hour read
Normal People
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Abuse and Dysfunction
Marianne comes from a cold and dysfunctional family that views domination of women as normal behavior and where victim-blaming prevails. Her brother bullies her with the tacit encouragement of her mother, who was herself bullied by Marianne’s father while he was alive. Rather than feel empathy for her daughter, Denise despises Marianne because Marianne’s victimhood reminds her of her own. She tells herself that Marianne invites Alan’s bullying by being cold and unlikeable. By allying with Alan, Denise puts distance between herself and her own suffering.
Marianne understands intellectually that her family is abnormal and that they treat her unfairly. Even so, this treatment is what she knows, and she repeats it in destructive sexual relationships. These relationships reinforce her idea that her family cannot be that strange—and she cannot be that special—because other people treat her as badly as her family does. To Connell, she dismisses her dark involvement with Jamie as mere sexual role playing, making it sound as if she has more volition and detachment than she does. Connell realizes that there’s “something frightening about her, some huge emptiness at the pit of her being” (247).
Although Connell succeeds in rescuing Marianne from her family, he does not entirely rescue her from her masochistic impulses. The most that he can do is love her in spite of these impulses and try to work around the “emptiness” that he perceives: “He knew how to give her what she wanted [as a lover], to leave her open, weak, powerless, crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her; he could let her submit willingly, without violence” (258).
Connell encounters abuse, albeit of a milder kind, at the hands of a powerful adult: In high school, he is sexually targeted by his economics professor, who later propositions him outright when he is a college student. He feels shame and confusion around the professor’s very open flirtation with him, and he can’t discuss it with his peers. In their very first conversation—at Marianne’s initiative—he and Marianne discuss the predatory professor. As a victim herself, she perceives and empathizes with Connell’s discomfort.
Power Imbalances
Normal People explores power imbalances both at the relational and the global level. Sometimes, the two are clearly linked, as with Marianne’s involvement with Jamie, a wealthy and bullying boy whose father happens to have been instrumental in the recent financial crisis. Jamie’s toxic mixture of entitlement and insecurity springs from his privileged background, and his destructive behavior toward Marianne mirrors his father’s destructive impact on the world. In spite of his boorishness and lack of redeeming qualities, Jamie has an outsized influence on Marianne’s group of friends, even those who seem to superficially know better. Marianne’s friend Peggy, for example, likes Jamie while also regarding him as “kind of a fascist” (139); Marianne realizes that Peggy’s shallowly feminist dismissal of Jamie conceals a deeper adherence to the values of power and money that he embodies.
At Trinity, Marianne and Connell must contend with a bullying capitalist system, as embodied by Jamie and students like him. They must come to terms with the fact that even in their spheres of academic achievement, they are not completely exempt from the effects of capitalism. Although Connell’s scholarship brings him financial security and freedom, he feels distressed by how it isolates him from his fellow students: He now must eat at a special dining hall, where he is served by poorer students. For her part, Marianne does not need the scholarship money that she wins, a fact that makes her feel as detached from her surroundings as Connell does. She has a sense of herself as unfairly blessed and benefiting from a rigged system, a feeling that helps to fuel her self-destructive impulses.
In Marianne’s and Connell’s hometown of Carricklea, a different power structure is at work, which has less to do with wealth and status and more to do with conventional small-town values. The culture values fitting in, being a team player, and not taking oneself too seriously, a modest but rigid attitude that can also enable bullying and brutality. In Carricklea, Marianne is openly assaulted by an older man, and Connell is openly sexually targeted by a female professor. In both cases, the people around them make jokes rather than stand up to the predators. They both discover that social pressure causes people to laugh off or remain silent about abuse.
The suicide of Connell’s high school friend Rob, moreover, causes Connell and Marianne to realize that in this power system—just as in the power system at Trinity—the people on top of the social ladder can suffer just as much as the people at the bottom. Connell remembers Rob as a boy who was desperate to be liked, and Connell perceives this need as the source of Rob’s unhappiness.
Intimacy
For Connell, becoming involved with Marianne presents several risks. He risks social embarrassment, since he is popular in their high school and she is an outcast. Some aspects of the relationship are also new and frightening to him, even when he and Marianne are far away from their high school and peer group. Having defined himself as an agreeable, modest part of a herd, the realm of intimacy is a new one for him. Marianne’s awareness of his feelings and desires forces him to be aware of them also.
Connell senses that when he is with Marianne, he can talk about anything and also do anything to her; he does not have his usual sense of boundaries and propriety. He is thrilled by Marianne’s intellect and perceptiveness, while also frightened by the darkness at the core of her being.
Marianne finds intimacy challenging for different reasons. She has defined herself as a loner just as Connell has defined himself as a part of a herd, and becoming involved with Connell forces her to acknowledge that she needs other people. Because she comes from an abusive family, she associates dependency with danger, and she has a sense of herself as abnormal. She is afraid that baring her darkness to Connell will frighten him away, and she believes several times over the course of the novel that she has done so. She comes to understand, however, that the complexity of her and Connell’s bond is what makes it both resilient and frightening.
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