‘It’s not like this with other people’: Deconstructing the Normative Romance Novel through Sally Rooney’s Normal People
Open Access
Author:
Quaid, Meghan
Area of Honors:
English
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Claire Mary Colebrook, Thesis Supervisor Matt Tierney, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Sally Rooney Normal People feminism Jane Austen romance novel bildungsroman Pride and Prejudice Austen Industry Irish
Abstract:
This thesis works to explore Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People within the contextual environment of the genre of the novel as well as the focal point of the marriage plot and the detailed relationship between the novel and the arc of an individual’s life. Rooney’s work is inherently tied to the history of the women’s writing tradition and how the romance novel is the model for a woman’s life path. My interest in her work and more specifically this novel was piqued by how she takes into consideration what it means to exist as a female writer in a genre that plays such a role in solidifying gender roles. Romance novels are not necessarily looked to in order to see how a woman must act but because of how successful the genre is the woman within the romance novel has become the pinnacle of womanhood. Thus, the relation between what a novel is as a normative genre (how it attempts to guide one’s life) and the increasing need for normality is created. Because the female body is gendered body with maternal characteristics inherent with to their being, the failure to achieve a certain normative behavior is
pathological. By reading a novel that includes romance but is not necessarily about romance as a simple romance novel is an injustice to the text’s intricacies. There is a specific way in which a novel about romance can and should be read.