The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [41]
Love had made her intolerable. It had made her heavy. Sprawled on her bed, keeping her shoes from touching the sheets (Madeleine remained fastidious despite her misery), she reviewed all the things she’d done to drive Leonard away. She’d been too needy, crawling up into his lap like a little girl, wanting to be with him all the time. She’d lost track of her own priorities and had become a drag.
Only one thing remained from her relationship with Leonard: the book she’d thrown at his head. Before storming out of Leonard’s apartment that day—and while he lay in lordly nakedness on the bed, calmly repeating her name with the suggestion that she was overreacting—Madeleine had noticed the book lying open on the floor like a bird that had knocked itself out against a windowpane. To pick it up would prove Leonard’s point: that she had an unhealthy obsession with A Lover’s Discourse; that, contrary to dispelling her fantasies about love, the book had served to reinforce those fantasies; and that, in evidence of all this, she wasn’t only a sentimentalist but a lousy literary critic besides.
On the other hand, to leave A Lover’s Discourse on the floor—where Leonard could later pick it up and inspect the passages she’d highlighted, as well as her marginal notes (including, on page 123, in a chapter titled “In the Loving Calm of Your Arms,” a single, exclamatory “Leonard!”)—wasn’t possible. So, after gathering up her bag, Madeleine in one fluid motion had snatched up the Barthes as well, not daring to check if Leonard had noticed. Five seconds later she’d slammed the door behind her.
She was glad she’d taken the book. Now, in her morose condition, the elegant prose of Roland Barthes was her one consolation. Breaking up with Leonard hadn’t lessened the relevance of A Lover’s Discourse one bit. There were more chapters about heartbreak than happiness, in fact. One chapter was called “Dependency.” Another, “Suicide.” Still another, “In Praise of Tears.” The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry … The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?
Good question. Since breaking up with Leonard, Madeleine had been crying more or less all the time. She cried herself to sleep at night. She cried in the morning, brushing her teeth. She tried very hard not to cry in front of her roommates and for the most part succeeded.
A Lover’s Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Madeleine knew all that. The problem was, it didn’t work. She could read Barthes’ deconstructions of love all day without feeling her love for Leonard diminish the teeniest little bit. The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page. She identified with Barthes’ shadowy “I.” She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed. Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it!
In the world outside, the semester, and thus college itself, was quickly speeding toward its end. Her roommates, art history majors