How To: Read Sally Rooney
#2 | ‘Normal People’ is just young millennials having (political) sex.
Welcome to the second instalment of a new series!
On ‘How To’, I engage with unconventional literary criticism on works, ideas, and authors that persist, are admired, or inspire emotions. It’s a way of making meaning and collecting feelings.
Other Editions | How To: #1 Read Elena Ferrante
I have a favourite essay about Sally Rooney. I even have a favourite line about her work (from a different, non-favourite essay) —
“…Rooney, the 33-year-old Irish novelist known for her exacting, witty portraits of the romantic and sexual entanglements of Dublin millennials, broke out in 2017 with her debut novel.”
As a wannabe literary and cultural critic of modern times, I think about Normal People (2018) a lot. If I may be so bold, this is a rare instance where the adaptation — I watch the show at least once a year since its release in 2020 — tops the written work. The “exacting, witty portrait” of Connell and Marianne’s “entanglement” is brought to life on screen with nuance and care, and creative camera work1.
It is easy to pass on the show and the book as great YA (Young Adult novel/series). It’s less easy to explore what makes Normal People — and much of Rooney’s work — specifically, complicatedly, and fundamentally great: young millennials having (political) sex.
Amia Srinivasan, in the book The Right to Sex (2021) — also a favourite — recalls an incident where a famous philosopher once said to her that “he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free.” Srinivasan asked him what his wife would say to that.
Sex — as something we have and something we do — is laden with meaning. Srinivasan writes,
“Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public [and political] thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.”
How does Rooney, then, make sex, which is so important to Connell and Marianne’s story in Normal People, radical? Does she succeed?
Some answers may be found in Anastasia Baucina’s 2020 article in Jacobin called ‘How Sally Rooney Gave Normal People Radical Politics’. Baucina notes that Rooney’s characters are rooted in the economic and political contexts of post-crash Ireland, and that “the dynamics of contemporary capitalism press upon [them]...”
Money, Rooney’s Connell2 says, is “the substance that makes the world real.”
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Rooney herself said,
“It would have been really difficult for me to write about young people leaving home in the west of Ireland, moving to college, and not confront the economic disparities that were emerging at that time, like the stripping back of protections for people from working-class backgrounds who were going to college. I don’t think I would have been able to really explore what was going on in those characters’ interior lives without being sensitive to the changes that were happening outside (emphasis added).”
If Connell and Marianne’s class difference is apparent at the get-go — emphasised and expanded upon within the economic and political worlds that they move in — pressuring their relationship to the extent of a break-up — when Connell has to return to Sligo one summer because he is unable to afford rent in Dublin — so why should it not always already be present during sex?
Baucina — in line with Srinivasan’s argument — writes that the sex that Connell and Marianne engage in is complicated “because of the ways heterosexual sex has been used to reinforce capitalist, patriarchal and religious norms,” and while sex may be seen as transformative, communicative, and even healing3 in Normal People, it also exists in relation to abuse and violence.
The sex that Marianne has with other men is presented — and often read — as markedly different from the sex that she has with Connell. “Marianne engages in kinkier sex with these [other] men and the experience is coded as harmful and as a form of self-punishment…” Baucina notes, making a connection to the abuse that Marianne faces at the hands of her brother.
But if capitalism, class, money, gender, patriarchy… and power are all present in her interactions with Connell, is sex with Connell really different/free? Can sex truly be free, even in (what has been titled) a “Marxist love story”? And why does nobody seem to discuss whether the sex that Connell has with other women is different? Why must we scrutinise and psychoanalyse Marianne’s every sexual experience, experiment, or adventure?
There are no easy answers (yet).
Baucina offers —
“…Marianne and Connell exist together not separately, it’s their dynamic which is the subject of the novel and Rooney gives relatively little time to their lives outside of their relationship… Perhaps it is in this rejection of individual narratives, in the insistence on interrelation and mutual dependence, that we see anti-capitalist [and radical] influences (emphasis added).”
Srinivasan, in her theorising of sex on screen, is less forgiving. In the chapter ‘Talking to My Students About Porn’ in their aforementioned book, she quotes from a 1982 conference concept paper4, which called for the acknowledgement of sex as “simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.”
Srinavasan explores the arguments of anti-porn feminists from the mid 1970s and how they sit with contemporary discussions, especially among university students, on porn (which, in our age, is ubiquitous). On porn’s “world-making power”, she offers,
“To say that it is porn’s function is to effectuate its message is to see porn as a mechanism not just for depicting the world, but for making it. Porn… [for anti-porn feminists] was a machine for the production and reproduction of an ideology which, by eroticising women’s subordination, made it real (original emphasis).”
Now, I am not linking the sex in Normal People to porn, to be sure, or saying that it necessarily functions that way in the audience’s minds. What I am saying is: sex on screen is vested with some authority5, and that it has the power to produce and reproduce the relations of power that it may claim to (only) depict.
I guess what I am asking, on watching/reading Normal People, is: if sex isn’t free, can it at least be freeing?
Also read:
For the uninitiated, here’s the blurb of the book: Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation — awkward but electrifying — something life-changing begins.
There is something to be said here about men written by women, but I digress.
“Rooney presents sexuality as a transformative, healing, complicated form of communication for both characters, and the series faithfully follows suit…” writes Eleanor Stanford in ‘‘Normal People’ Takes Sex Seriously’, published in The New York Times, 2020.
Diary of a Conference on Sexuality (1982), which, according to Srinivasan, came to be known as the Barnard Sex Conference, held in New York.
I am immensely interested in Srinavasan’s arguments on authority and power in the internet age. She writes,
“The internet blurs the distinction between power and authority. Platforms for speech — previously allocated to radio stations, TV shows, newspapers, publishing houses — are now overabundant, infinitely available and practically free. Without any formal grant of authority, individual speakers can amass great power… To what standard, if any, should we hold those who wield such power?”