Normal People Themes

The themes of Normal People are normality and social status, class, and identity.

Normality: Both Marianne and Connell struggle with internalized societal ideas of what is considered normal and abnormal, finding that these distinctions cease to matter in a relationship founded on mutual authenticity and acceptance.
Social status, class, and identity: Connell and Marianne’s relationship, as well as their individual identities, is affected by the protagonists’ differing social and socioeconomic statuses. Ultimately, however, the novel suggests that class and social status, while not insignificant, need define neither a relationship nor a person’s sense of self.

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Normality

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As the title of the novel suggests, the protagonists of Normal People struggle with what it means to be “normal” in their surroundings and how important their aspirations, and perceived failures, of normality might be in comparison with their love for one another and the integrity of their own senses of self.

In the final section of the novel, Marianne reflects that she is “neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She’s a normal person now.” For Marianne, being normal means that she is able to live her life without being scrutinized and judged by others: on campus, “She walks by and no one looks up.” Most significantly, she is free from the need to punish herself for being “abnormal,” “evil,” “a bad person, corrupted, wrong”—all the things she once believed herself to be and which she sought to confirm through her sadomasochistic relationships with Jamie and Lukas. These beliefs about herself nearly overwhelm Marianne completely at the novel’s climax, after she has asked Connell to hit her during sex and been met with his awkward refusal. Marianne takes Connell’s explanation that he doesn’t want things to be “weird” between them to mean that he considers her to be “weird” as well; she believes that while Connell has been progressing steadily toward normality over the past few years, she has conversely become so abnormal, so socially unacceptable and “degraded,” that even the connection between herself and Connell—one based on a shared sense of near total intimacy and acceptance—has deteriorated, leaving her utterly alone. Connell himself privately observes that there is a “terrible dark emptiness” in Marianne and that she is “missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible.” Nevertheless, Connell feels he would die for Marianne, and it is this feeling that constitutes the source of his own self-respect.

By contrast, Connell’s relationship with Helen affords him the appearance of normality but, in so doing, denies him the authenticity he experiences in his much more intense and complicated relationship with Marianne. Helen is a “nice person” who, like Connell, was popular in school, and Connell believes that “What they had together was normal, a good relationship. The life they were living was the right kind of life.” This assurance of his normality is what gives Connell the confidence to tell Helen that he loves her without fear or shame, but ultimately the illusion is unsustainable: after Rob dies, Connell experiences severe depression and anxiety, which place him well beyond the boundaries of what is considered normal—at least by characters such as Helen, who ends their relationship, or Alan, who refers to Connell as “fucked in the head” and reports that people in town are gossiping about him. Connell’s perceived abnormality also arises in connection to his relationship with Marianne; when Helen questions Connell about why he acts so “weird” around his former girlfriend, Connell replies, “How I act with her is my normal personality . . . Maybe I’m just a weird person.”

Ultimately, Connell and Marianne’s ability to present the parts of themselves that aren’t accepted by others—and that they initially found unacceptable in themselves—is what bonds them together so tightly. The relationships that truly change people, Rooney suggests, are not those that allow their participants to bury the unwanted aspects of their personalities in an appearance of normality, but those that allow us to bring those aspects of themselves into the light: to normalize our perceived abnormalities by allowing them to be seen and accepted with love.

(This entire section contains 604 words.)

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Social Status, Class, and Identity

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Normal People explores the effect of social status and socioeconomic class on the human experience through the relationship between Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan, two young people from a small town in Ireland. Although the emotional and sexual connection between the two protagonists is clear, the difference in their social statuses, in particular, frequently complicates the relationship. At the beginning of the novel, Marianne is a clever loner from a wealthy family and is shunned by her peers. Connell, both an athlete and a good student, is popular at school, but he comes from a working-class background: his single mother, Lorraine, works as a house cleaner at Marianne’s family’s mansion.

After he and Marianne begin sleeping together, Connell’s anxiety about what his friends would think of their relationship becomes intense to the point of making him physically ill, and he likens replaying his memory of telling Marianne he loves her to watching footage of himself committing a crime. This anxiety about social status and “reputation” leads Connell to betray Marianne, in spite of the fact that he feels an emotional intimacy with her unlike any he feels with his friends, with whom he has little in common beyond a surface-level camaraderie, or the other girls he has slept with—encounters that, for him, always felt perfunctory and upsetting. Connell’s sense of identity at this point in the novel is inextricably tied to his social status, as is Marianne’s; while her sense of herself as an outsider, as unlovable and somehow wrong, originates in the abuse she has received from her family from an early age, it is exacerbated by the scorn she receives from her classmates. Her status as an outcast in turn infuriates her abusive brother, Alan, who frequently jeers at Marianne for her friendless existence. Connell, meanwhile, balks at his mother’s suggestion that the Sheridans might not consider him “good enough” for Marianne, due to the Waldrons being working-class.

When Connell and Marianne arrive at Trinity College in Dublin, however, their social statuses reverse: while Marianne quickly achieves popularity among her cosmopolitan classmates, Connell finds himself alone and adrift, an outsider among privileged students who don’t seem to care either about social and political issues or reading their assigned texts. Some of the members of Marianne’s upper-class new social circle, such as Jamie and Peggy, openly scorn Connell’s working-class background, and most of them abandon Marianne when her social status is imperiled by rumors about her sex life. At college Marianne also begins to consider her class differences with Connell for the first time, asking him if he resents her because his mother worked for her family and inadvertently implying to Connell that he is more deserving of the scholarship they both receive because he needs the money more. The scholarship does, in fact, provide Connell with a new financial freedom that allows him to experience the privileges of the moneyed class, such as traveling through Europe and meeting Marianne at her family’s Italian vacation home. Yet for both Connell and Marianne, money comes at its own price: for Connell, the alienation he experiences once he begins living and taking meals in the accommodations reserved for scholarship recipients, and for Marianne, the verbal cruelty she endures from her brother, Alan, and her mother, Denise, even as Denise hands her envelopes of cash.

By the end of the novel, Marianne’s and Connell’s social statuses have largely evened out; their relationship is no longer a secret, and each of them has gained confidence in their individual identity and worth. Their socioeconomic statuses have evened out as well: Marianne has been cut off financially by her family and, like Connell always has, works part-time while attending college. Having achieved this equilibrium in their relationship, however, Marianne and Connell must continue to develop their own identities, and in the final pages of the novel, their paths are set to diverge: with Marianne’s encouragement, Connell will move to New York, while Marianne will remain in Dublin. With concerns about status and class no longer a factor, Marianne and Connell are free to choose both one another and their own independent needs and desires.

Chapter Summaries

Characters