The “marriage plot” of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage
Plot is explained in an English class at Brown University in the
early-1980s, the place and time of the story. Seventy-nine year-
old Professor Saunders, a holdover from the days before
deconstruction, French feminism, semiotics, and other abstruse
theories arrived on campus, interprets the novel this way: The
novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had
never recovered from its disappearance. 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. The great
epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good
for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it
completely. What would it matter if 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?
… [M]arriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the
novel. In former times,