Karl Marx and Irish novelist Sally Rooney walk into a bar and discuss the terms of love and labor, perhaps how they’re one and the same. The 2018 novel Normal People, followed by Rooney’s Hulu adaptation, released in 2020, transcends time to reframe Marxist theory not only as modern counter-hegemony but as an interpersonal analysis of modern relationships. Rooney identifies as a self-proclaimed Marxist, and her framework is evident in the people she chooses to portray — they’re young college students who are placed precariously on the edge of social and economic class with no choice but to reach for each other over and over again.
In Rooney’s second novel, through cutting prose, not to be confused with bleak, we meet two high school students in the small Irish town of Sligo who are inextricably bound. Marianne Sheridan is introduced as a social outcast who presents her intellect as a sharp knife to mark her reputation within the high walls of high school society. She embraces her isolation as a shield from the sense of being untouchable, yet our co-protagonist, Connell Waldron, is compelled to understand her from a distance. She’s wealthy, yet emotionally depraved, he’s popular, yet returns to a single mother who is employed by the Sheridans as a housemaid — a tale as old as time as boy-meets-girl but it is complicated by a capitalist reality. Connell finds solace through his intimacy with Marianne as they can shed their social and economic positions, as “he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he’s going to do it, he catches her.”
As they stare at each other across from socioeconomic caverns, Rooney intertwines their narratives as she insists on an anti-capitalist need for mutual dependence that allows people to change people irrevocably. Parallel to socialist discourse and ideology, we know the concept of shared intimacy and change to be true. In reply, Rooney pushes us further to feel for Marianne and Connell as they dance around each other through adolescence and suffer the in-betweenness of a love confined by friendship but denying themselves the ownership of labels.
Rooney’s Marxist influence lies within a depiction of how we carry material and economic realities into our interpersonal relationships. Normal People underscores a very human curiosity of what happens in spite of capitalistic transactions and when we choose to give a piece of ourselves without the isolating walls of possession. In the end, we feel the protagonists’ motivations are not just their own, but the culmination of influence from one another that fuels a common interpersonal ownership. Connell and Mariannes’ relationship of seemingly fated depth with fallouts of equal gravity is a mesmerizing window into the socialist politics of love and maturation. But most importantly, Rooney’s narrative validates the errors and mishaps of our attempts at shared connection by recognizing that the miscommunication and debris of the aftermath, often rendering us in isolation, is in fact what makes us normal people after all.
