Wet Newspaper

Getting punched went with the territory. Between adolescence and adulthood, I got hit hard a couple of times a year. One day, I walked through the doors of my school and got sucker-punched by a boy I thought was my friend, who knocked me down and started to kick at my head. I got away, I didn't tell. Another time, at a different school, I was jumped by three guys who thought me too gay to be suffered to walk home. My nose was spectacularly broken when I fought an older kid who'd called my sister a Paki but who, really, I just hated and wanted to hurt. I promise, I wasn't especially violent or particularly vulnerable. In my part of northern England, throwing punches fell within the scope of the socially possible.

I grew up between Macclesfield and Congleton, smallish country towns with decayed industries and a crust of professional wealth that commuted to Manchester. I've not been to Sligo, the county in western Ireland where Sally Rooney grew up and where she sets the early and intervening parts of Normal People, but there's a lot I recognize in its portrait of provincial youth.

Like Rooney's Carricklea, Congleton is the sort of place from which people move away, their lives at home suddenly ending "with no conclusion."1 It's the kind of place where poverty tends to be grinding rather than desperate: a documentary sort of town. Congleton and Carricklea both have one terrible night club and dozens of pubs. They also share a social world in which ordinary life regularly tips into violence.

In Normal People, violence is most often done to Marianne. The novel's critics have written a lot about sex and violence, especially the scene in which Marianne asks Connell to hit her and he demurs, setting off yet one more painful separation. As Jordan's and Claire's essays demonstrate, such scenes raise important questions about the novel's attitudes toward sex and sexuality. But I want to dwell for a minute on the violence that's gone unmentioned in our cluster of essays.

Marianne is the victim of intimate violence at home. We see this when her brother Alan terrorizes her, spits on her, throws bottles at her, and then, chasing her upstairs, smashes her face when he tries to break open her door. Earlier, Marianne has opened up about her home life to Connell:

You would never hit a girl, would you? she says.

God, no. Of course not. Why would you ask that?

I don't know.

Do you think I'm the kind of person who would go around hitting girls? he says.

She presses her face very hard against his chest. My dad used to hit my mum, she says. For a few seconds, which seems like an unbelievably long time, Connell says nothing. Then he says: Jesus. I'm sorry. I didn't know that.

It's okay, she says.

Did he ever hit you?

Sometimes.2

The difficulty with these scenes, especially for people like me who love Normal People and want to defend it, is that they seem to imply that Marianne is into masochistic sex because she's been beaten into feeling worthless. And this leads to Jordan Stein's reasonable objection that Normal People "has exclusive interest in BDSM as a window into its heroine's distressed state of mind." In this reading, Marianne lets Jamie (ugh) and Lukas (puke) hurt her because she's already been traumatized by beating and bullying. In this way, the novel flirts with traducing a complex, liberating, and often queer sexuality into the abject symptom of heteropatriarchal suffering.

The novel's plot tends to sustain this reading, with Marianne's violent childhood at home developing later, in Dublin and Sweden, into failed attempts at masochism — sexual encounters that reliably make Marianne come but which lead to no sustaining intimacy. The novel's central love story, ambivalent though it is, also seems to bear that out. Far better than Jamie (ugh) and Lukas (puke) is the evanescent vanilla utopia of life with Connell. Here is the man who says he wouldn't hit a girl, then doesn't. Here's the man who scares Alan off and then declares to Marianne, "No one is going to hurt you like that again" (259). Here is the man whose love allows her to "submit willingly, without violence" (265).

I, too, love Connell and his big gentle face. But there's a problem with describing Normal People's romance as a battle between pacific submission and traumatized rough stuff. The problem is that there are precious few parts of this novel's world that ever escape the possibility of physical harm. With the possible exception of Lorraine's car, there's no place in Normal People wholly "without violence," no place from which BDSM or anything else can be comfortably judged as the regrettable symptom of a pain one might live without.

In saying this, I'm — like Sarah Brouillette and Gloria Fisk in this cluster — pushing against the redemptive arc of the romance genre, but also against particular qualities of Normal People itself. One of the loveliest things about Rooney's writing is her deft hand with the sweet and the vulnerable. In one scene, about a third of the way in, Marianne and Connell fall asleep holding hands; a moment before, they've rather awkwardly talked about how Connell might have "changed, you know, as a person" (95). A few pages later, they're having sex and Marianne's body feels to Connell "so small then and so open," which I consider a pretty damn good way to describe what it's like to penetrate someone you love (100). Read on a minute and Connell's embarrassed by Peggy's attempts to manufacture a threesome, a moment that ends with him discovering a newly private part of himself, shared only with Marianne, "which doesn't seem to have a name and which he has never tried to identify before" (104). None of these moments are narrated without irony. All of them leave room for doubt and judgment. But all of them share a spare and unaffected tenderness that few prose writers can carry off — and fewer still outside the short story form.

So when I say that violence suffuses Normal People, I don't mean it washes the whole thing dark. I mean it's a novel in which, just a few pages on from Connell's discovery of his most private self, he and Marianne are alone, and she says she would've gone along with the threesome if he'd wanted. Then this happens:

You shouldn't do things you don't want to do, he says.

Oh, I didn't mean that.

She throws her hands up, like the issue is irrelevant. In a direct sense he understands that it is. He tries to soften his manner since anyway it's not like he's annoyed at her.

Well, it was a good intervention on your part, he says. Very attentive to my preferences.

I try to be.

Yeah, you are. Come here.

She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. 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. He doesn't know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it.3

Beyond the bad banter, there's more than one frightening thing in this scene. There's the young man's fear of a desire, outside himself, which he intuits but only just. There's the fear of knowing yourself to be needed, without conditions. Above all, there's the fear of not knowing oneself — especially, of not knowing oneself to be the kind of man whose hands tingle at the thought of hitting a girl.

Connell, as we know, doesn't hit anyone. But the tingling he feels appears to be general across the country. When Marianne learns that Paula Neary sexually assaulted Connell she feels "unearthly, possessed of a violence she had never known before." She speaks "in a voice like hard ice saying: I would like to slit her throat."4 Later, thinking about the "object of loathing and derision" that is Marianne's ridiculous posh boyfriend, we learn that "Connell had compulsive fantasies about kicking Jamie in the head until his skull was the texture of wet newspaper."5 The visceral language in such passages makes us suspect them of metaphor. These aren't actual desires, we might say, just ways of expressing deep feeling. But that judgment, fine in itself, must be measured against the fact of Connell's violent mugging. It must be poised against Marianne's sexual assault by a man at a school fundraiser. It must be held next to Marianne's claim, sad in its grab at insouciance, that "there are worse things than getting beaten up."6

Provincial towns have no monopoly on violence. Normal People has no body count. Connell leaves for New York not because he can't keep his tingling hands from hurting his lover but because he's selfish enough to believe that he and Marianne really have done enough good for each another. Still, when it came to reading this romance, I found myself back inside a world in which the gap between violence and violent emotion feels as thin as wet newspaper. In such a novel, the problem isn't so much that BDSM gets misdescribed as cruelty; it's that every part of life, erotic and otherwise, begins to feels like waiting to be punched on the walk home. In another writer's hands, this literary world would be marred by melodrama. In Normal People, the persistent presentiment of harm is at once the key to Rooney's representation of provincial youth and her claim to the brutal erotics of power long secured for the romance by writers such as the Brontës, Lawrence, and Bowen.

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Matthew Hart is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Literature (out from Columbia UP in August 2020), president of the Modernist Studies Association, and co-editor of the Literature Now book series.

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