Marianne in High School
In high school, Marianne is considered strange and deeply undesirable, in part because of the way she dresses and presents herself. The narrator explains that "She wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn't put make-up on her face. People have said she doesn't shave her legs or anything. Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself in the school lunchroom, and she went to the girls' bathrooms and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink." Her clothing choices reflect a certain rejection of social norms, as well as gender norms: Marianne is generally uninterested in looking the way women are expected to look in her social milieu. At the same time, these choices also reflect a desire to protect herself. Marianne is accustomed to rejection and disgust, and she wears her clothing like armor. The thick soles of her shoes, and even the hair on her legs, form a barrier between herself and the outside world. As Connell reflects, the schoolwide fascination with the story of Marianne removing her shirt has much to do with a desire to see beneath this armor, and beneath Marianne's shell of invulnerability. After she and Connell strike up a relationship, she does shave her legs before going to his house for the first time—a sign that she is willing to embrace certain gender norms in order to be seen as attractive, but also a sign that she is willing to let down her guard around Connell.
Marianne's Garden and House
The visual imagery that Rooney uses to describe Marianne's family home helps portray her wealth, as well as her family's values (that is to say, presentation and ostentation). Connell notes that the house's gardens feature a "tennis court and a large stone statue in the shape of a woman." Her home itself is a white mansion with a large driveway. It is inaccessible and distant, just as Marianne herself can be. It is also extremely out of place in rural, relatively rustic Carricklea: the Sheridans live a luxurious but strange life, cut off from their broader community. The stone statue of a woman can be understood to represent the Sheridans' expectations for Marianne herself: they would prefer her to be appealing and lifeless, rather than imperfect, human, and lively.
Abuse
Rooney uses sound and sense imagery to render the Sheridans' abuse, as well as Jamie's, vivid and frightening. Alan "jabs the phone harder into [Marianne's] sternum, hurting her." Later, attempting to intimidate Marianne, Jamie "drops a glass on the floor and it shatters," so that when Connell tries to intervene, "glass crunches under his shoe." When Denise tries to frighten her daughter, she too uses sound to do it, as if using auditory threats in order to hint at the possibility of physical contact—in her case, instead of breaking a glass, she "struck the table with her open palm." Later, when Alan attacks her in her room, Marianne "hears a cracking noise when (the door) connects with her face," and then experiences a "ringing...not so much sound as a physical sensation, like the friction of two imagined metal plates somewhere in her skull." In this final moment, auditory and tactile imagery actually converge, almost as if sound itself has ceased to be a mere threat and become a physical danger.
Marianne's Eating Habits
Rather than ever explicitly mention that Marianne has developed an eating disorder, Rooney uses images of food to show the reader that she is simultaneously preoccupied with food and deprived of it. At college, when this relationship to food is nascent, Marianne eats "a tangerine and a piece of unbuttered toast" for lunch. In Sweden, this self-starvation spirals, and Rooney vividly portrays the tortured way that Marianne eats a single pastry, "in lavish sugary mouthfuls that congeal around her teeth," allowing it to "dissolve in layers on her tongue." Interestingly, Rooney uses tactile rather than taste imagery here, as if, despite her hyper-focus on food, Marianne is experiencing it at a strange distance, without the immediacy of taste. When Marianne's mental health has improved, she begins to eat and even enjoy food again. When Connell offers her an ice lolly, she accepts and finishes it. Marianne licks the lolly "down to a slick bulb of vanilla ice cream, gleaming in the light of the bedside lamp."
