Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and closing it behind him. He's not frightened of her, actually she's a pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that he would never ordinarily say.
This quote reveals some of the complexity in Connell and Marianne's early relationship. While Connell certainly holds a great deal of power over Marianne at this stage, he also feels out of control in her presence. He chooses to keep their relationship secret mostly because he fears his peers' judgment, a decision that Marianne, understandably, resents. Yet he also protects the secrecy between them because he finds refuge in it. Connell's popularity at school is predicated (at least as far as he believes) on his repressing his feelings, opinions, and desires. He is able to express all of these with Marianne, and therefore resists sharing their relationship with others, not only because he wants to protect his own reputation, but because he values the space it gives him outside of his normal friendships.
Marianne sometimes sees herself at the very bottom of the ladder, but other times she pictures herself off the ladder completely, not affected by its mechanics, since she does not actually desire popularity or do anything to make it belong to her. From her vantage point it is not obvious what rewards the ladder provides, even to those who really are at the top.
This passage sheds light on Marianne's radical rationality. She is able to resist overwhelming ambient peer pressure, even when miserable, because of her ability to objectively assess which courses of action make the most sense. This analytical tendency is fundamental to her character, and it's a huge part of her particular intellectual outlook. However, the totality of her resistance to peer pressure in high school actually makes her more vulnerable to it as an adult. It is much harder for Marianne to imagine herself as being "off the ladder" when she finds that she has the ability to climb it. Because she is so resistant to arbitrary social norms as a child, her affinity for the slightly different (but more appealing) norms of college life tempt her into destructive, controlling friendships and romances.
Denise decided a long time ago that it was acceptable for men to use aggression towards Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality.
This passage sheds light on the perverse, self-reinforcing mechanics of abuse in Marianne's family. The very tactic that she uses to minimize her family's sadism is seen as proof that she deserves to be subject to it. Marianne's ability to detach is a technique that she will return to in difficult or unwelcoming situations as an adult. But it will backfire: Marianne's skill at withstanding cruelty helps her survive when cruelty is inescapable, but it also makes it harder for her to leave or even fully understand her situation when she is older and has the power to escape.
The passage also touches on a concern that crops up throughout the novel: women's complicity in misogyny. The work as a whole is interested in the overwhelming power of certain systems—not only patriarchy, but also, for instance, the class inequality that causes Connell to feel conflicted about his own upwardly mobile lifestyle. Rooney repeatedly explores the ways in which characters learn to survive or thrive, often abandoning or hurting others as they do so.
He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking.
In most of her relationships, Marianne lacks real power: though other people may be afraid of her, she ultimately lacks the ability to stand up to aggression. Indeed, her relationship with Connell is distinguished by an even more extraordinary willingness to submit. Because she loves and is attracted to him, she feels a real desire to do as he wishes, combined with her typical fear of retribution or rejection. However, the relationship is also distinguished by Connell's unwillingness to subjugate or hurt Marianne. He is actively repelled by the idea that he has such power over another. However, his anxiety around hurting Marianne is often the cause of more harm than good. In moments like the one described in this passage, his panic causes him to react by pulling away from her emotionally and physically. This makes her feel more rejected—and therefore even more willing to be subjugated in order to avoid rejection.
Marianne had just wanted to see someone else all along, he thought. She was probably glad he'd have to leave Dublin because he was broke. She wanted a boyfriend whose family could take her on skiing holidays.
Here, Rooney provides a stark example of Connell's insecurities beside Marianne, and of the miscommunication that plagues both sides of their relationship. Connell initially upsets Marianne by choosing to move home for the summer rather than stay with her. However, he bases this choice on an (incorrect) assumption that Marianne will look down on him for his financial situation. His very unwillingness to talk to Marianne about money, based on his own insecurity, actually damages their relationship. Marianne, in response, strikes up a relationship with a wealthy, privileged classmate—confirming Connell's suspicion that she values wealth in her partners. Without ever consulting Marianne, Connell forms an assumption about her feelings, and treats her reactions as confirmation of his assumptions. In a sense, this is the same pattern of confirmation bias and one-sided communication that characterizes Marianne's familial abuse, though in a very different context.
For Marianne, who doesn't pay her own rent or tuition and has no real concept of how much these things cost, it's just a matter of reputation. She would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large sums of money.
This quote reveals that, despite their class difference, neither Connell nor Marianne is free from a preoccupation with money. Instead, Rooney highlights the absurd mechanisms by which money can come to serve so many different purposes to different people. Connell desires money when he does not have it, because he hopes to pay his rent and tuition. When he comes into a large amount of it, he feels some guilt, but mostly he feels freed from the obligation to think about money at all. Marianne, because of her family wealth, imbues money with a symbolic importance. She sees it as indicative of her wealth or worthiness. She later criticizes her friend Joanna for taking a corporate job in which she must trade her own time for money. It is only after she loses access to her family money, becoming estranged from them, that she is freed from this preoccupation and begins to see money as a mere necessity rather than a loaded symbol. Just as sudden wealth frees Connell from thinking constantly about money, a sudden lack of wealth does the same for Marianne.
He and Marianne can only talk about it over email, using the same communication technologies they now know are under surveillance, and it feels at times like their relationship has been captured in a complex network of state power...
This novel explores issues of power, surveillance, and influence on both macro- and microscopic levels. This particular passage interrogates the potential for privacy and honesty under a wider and much more powerful network of technological surveillance. Despite this surveilling structure, though, Marianne and Connell have some of their most honest and gratifying exchanges via email, suggesting that the existence of surveillance does not necessarily have a direct impact on those being surveilled (at least in the everyday world). Compare this with Connell's realization, at the end of high school, that his peers were aware of his relationship with Marianne. In that scene, Connell suffers because he understands that, while he could have disclosed the truth and survived, his fear of being watched caused him to act with unnecessary caution. In other words, these scenes suggest, self-surveillance and self-censorship can emanate from structures of outside surveillance (whether those structures are technology companies or rude classmates), causing individuals to follow rules and norms without being directly coerced into doing so.
Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. With Helen he doesn't feel shameful things, he doesn't find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn't have that persistent feeling that he belongs nowhere, that he will never belong anywhere.
The pronoun use in this passage illuminates Connell's relationship to Helen: again and again, Rooney uses the words "he" and "his," focusing on Connell rather than Helen. This is because Connell's attraction to Helen comes not so much from a desire to be with her as from a desire to be a different version of himself. Fearing that he is tainted or abnormal, Connell hopes that a relationship with a deeply normal-seeming person will cure him. In attempting to see Helen as a fix to his problems, he actually fails to see her as an individual. He rarely pays attention when she talks, for instance. Connell also believes, at least subconsciously, that his relationship to Helen will serve as a bridge between the working-class, rural version of himself from Carricklea, and the cultured, intellectual version in Dublin. He willingly takes her home with him for holidays and feels comfortable moving between these worlds with her. However, this, too, comes not from any particular characteristic of Helen's—she is, after all, from Dublin, with no relationship to western Ireland—but rather from a vague sense that she is respectable and flexible enough to comfortably fit into Connell's life.
There's something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality.
Here, Marianne considers the forces that have knit together her life from Carricklea to Dublin. The beginning of Marianne's story looks much like a typical rags-to-riches narrative, albeit one where the protagonist is wealthy from the start: she begins friendless and unloved, and then, when placed in an environment where her talents are appreciated, she is adored and admired. However, as she realizes now, both of these experiences were based in others' fear of her. In high school, her classmates treated her with disgust because they were intimidated by her social, sexual, and intellectual guardedness. In college, her peers praise and pursue her, hoping to gain control over her in part because they sense that same guardedness. While others, especially men, see her inaccessibility as something to be feared, and as something with the potential to hurt or take power over them, she sees it as a liability and an instrument in her powerlessness precisely because it seems to invite such domineering behavior.
Connell couldn't think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.
As Connell falls more in love with literature itself, he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the literary scene around him. He finds that, far from using literature as a way to see the world differently or change it for the better, his classmates seem to think of it as an apolitical accessory, helping them seem intellectual and artistic. He is irritated by this tendency, which distills so much of what he finds bothersome in college—that is, the cynical use of important and interesting pursuits as a mere means of signaling belonging in the upper classes. However, his pursuit of writing and reading even when the trappings of the literary world are alienating to him suggests that his interest is a deep one. This passage is also an excellent example of the dry humor that characterizes much of this novel. The circularity of its final sentence is surprising and ever so slightly perplexing, evoking the baffling, ridiculous quality that Connell perceives in the literary community around him.
