36 pages • 1 hour read
Sally RooneyNormal People
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Bloodied Faces
Both Marianne and Connell, at different points in the novel, get their faces bloodied. Someone mugs Connell at Trinity; Alan assaults Marianne back in Carricklea, breaking her nose. Their physical injuries lead to a confrontation with their invisible emotional injuries and to a rupture in their usual daily patterns.
After being mugged, Connell shows up at Marianne’s apartment so that she can pay his taxi fare and take care of him. Drunk as well as injured, he acts more hostile than usual toward Marianne’s boyfriend, Jamie. At the same time, he informs Marianne that he has a new serious girlfriend, a medical student named Helen. Connell is raw and lost; he stands out starkly from Marianne’s more socially insulated friends. His bloody face dramatizes both of these underlying realities. Marianne’s broken nose forces a confrontation between Connell and Alan, helping her to finally break away from her family and to admit the extent of her need for Connell.
Marianne’s and Connell’s physical injuries also show their underlying similarity as characters. Both vulnerable and unconventional, they often find themselves colliding with the world, literally and metaphorically.
Domestic Routines
Many scenes take place in kitchens or dining rooms, while the characters perform quiet domestic rituals of one sort or another. Connell helps his mother unload groceries; Connell and Marianne make tea or coffee or breakfast for one another; Marianne hosts elegant dinner parties at her family’s vacation home in Trieste, or more casual drinking gatherings at her own Dublin apartment.
In a novel concerned with normalcy—with the question of what normalcy really is, or whether it even exists—this attention to mundane domesticity is significant. Some of the characters’ domestic rituals are soothing and pleasant, as with Connell’s and Marianne’s quiet morning routines; sometimes, these same rituals, such as with a fight that Marianne has with Jamie in her Trieste kitchen, during which he throws a champagne glass on the floor, set the stage for tension and violence. Sometimes, as when Connell is in the kitchen with his mother—both helping her out and fending off her prying maternal questions—domestic routine becomes a way to avoid difficult but necessary conversations. Regardless, these characters seem most at ease with domestic rituals when they are the least preoccupied by them—when the ritual is an outcome of their togetherness rather than the other way around.
Clothes
Both Connell and Marianne, at different points in this novel, find themselves wearing the wrong clothes; that is, clothes that mark them as separate from the people around them. When Marianne attends a high school social outing, helping to sell tickets to the Debs Ball, she dresses up in a way that earns a mixture of envy and derision from her classmates because her clothes cause her to stand out in a town that values fitting in and being modest. When Marianne is openly assaulted at the end of the evening by an older man, many of her less generous classmates seem gleeful to see her being taken down a notch. They like seeing her elegant appearance become sullied and rumpled.
Conversely, Connell’s modest clothes cause him to stand out at Trinity, a place where wealth and power have more cachet than conservative small-town values. Marianne’s friends frequently mock Connell for his lack of stylishness; when Connell attends his first Trinity social gathering, the host, Gareth, who turns out to be Marianne’s boyfriend, remarks on the backpack that Connell is wearing, which to Connell looks like all of the other backpacks there. Sometimes, characters react to the clothes themselves; just as often, the clothes stand in for something more ephemeral, a felt lack of belonging. Gareth is really commenting on Connell’s general air of strangeness and clumsiness.
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By Sally Rooney
