For, as Barthes recognizes and Eugenides himself suggests through his characters’ emotional struggles, “There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally” (224). Eugenides inhabits their minds and hearts from an omniscient, all-knowing perspective grounded in the intellectual atmosphere of Brown University, the author’s alma mater, as well as in the religious, social, and sexual conventions prevailing in the early 1980s.Īs I argue, Eugenides seeks not so much to reinvigorate the tired trope of marriage as to interrogate its foundations by “return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join” (Barthes 224). The three of them keep crossing paths during college, then part after graduation as they try to find their way in the real world and forge their own identities. With narrative detachment, Eugenides traces the sentimental education of three Brown University students in the early 1980s, during the heyday of deconstruction: the “incurably romantic” (3) Madeline Hanna, her spiritually inclined friend Mitchell Grammaticus, and her brilliant but manic-depressive boyfriend Leonard Bankhead. These codes inscribe a prefabricated system of desires-the system of popular culture, mass media, and advertising-which, to recall Umberto Eco’s famous statement in Postscript to The Name of the Rose, makes it impossible to talk innocently about love (Eco 532-33).Ī Lover’s Discourse figures prominently in Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot (2011), a nuanced exploration of the lived experience of love as well as of the various discourses on it. Moreover, “no love is original,” being “born of literature, able to speak only with the help of its worn codes” (Barthes 23). In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), Barthes points out that, “Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of Expenditure: they spend the word, as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere” (154). As such, “love” is what Roland Barthes calls a “socially irresponsible word,” by turns a “sublime, solemn, trivial word” or an “erotic, pornographic word” (148). “Love” gets thrown around a great deal in our consumer culture, being overly identified with pleasure and self-gratification, rather than suffering and self-giving.

He responds, “I’d love one.” The look of hurt on the woman’s face says it all. While he is struggling with this, the waitress comes up and asks if he would like another beer. In a TV commercial depicting a young couple in a bar, the woman says to the man, “I love you.” He tries to respond several times with the same words but just cannot get the words out.

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