Department of English

This thesis draws upon Normal People by Sally Rooney as a foundational text for understanding the elusive yet emotionally-destructive situationship. I contextualize my analysis of the situationship between Marianne and Connell in the historical situation of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, revealing the situationship as a reaction to broader social upheaval. To define the unique structure of the situationship, I employ Lauren Berlant’s theory of Cruel Optimism to explore its affective underpinnings. I then investigate the power structure of the situationship, assigning roles of “inferior” and “superior.” With these theoretical concepts in mind, I engage in separate close-readings of Marianne and Connell’s reactions to their painful breakup during university. I first unravel the origins of Marianne’s devalued self-concept, pressuring its relation to the collective culture of shame in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. I then work towards a characterization of Connell as the romantic precariat through his pervasive experience with economic instability. I parallel each character’s struggle with individual insecurity to expose the inferior/superior assignments in the situationship as rooted in its cyclical structure of shame. In outlining the cycle of shame, I break the situationship into three phases: the provocation of insecurity, the subordination as the inferior, and the assumption of affective shame. By focusing on a novel oriented towards a global audience, I argue that Rooney’s insights about the situationship resonate far beyond Ireland. Over the course of this thesis, I contend that the development of the situationship signals changing conventions of modern love in Western culture at large.