It's a bummer, I think, that Marianne's interests seem to be chalked up to pathology — that she's traumatized, and she thinks she deserves to be hurt, and that's why she wants to be hit, as opposed to Marianne having grown and explored her sexuality and arrived at a place where she's like: here's what turns me on, I ...
Hurt by his detached attitude, Marianne prepares to leave. Connell finally does kiss her, which leads to sex, but when Marianne asks Connell to hit her, he refuses.
Why does Marianne want Connell to hit her? Marianne's previous boyfriend Jamie used to hit her. Which is why when she started dating Connell, she felt like she should be hit whenever she did something to upset him.
Extremely intelligent, Marianne is unpopular in secondary school. Everyone thinks she's “weird”—some people even call her “ugly.” She doesn't have a good relationship with her family, either, as her father used to hit her before he died, and her brother, Alan, still abuses her.
It goes well at first, with both rekindling their previous spark. But then in the heat of the moment, Marianne asks Connell to hit her during sex. This immediately kills Connell's mood.
Mental health
Marianne, on the other hand, has issues of self-esteem. She believes that she is unworthy of love, and in one particularly disturbing sequence asks one of her lovers to explicitly tell her the same. She suffers from abandonment issues and is continuously harassed by her older brother Alan (Frank Blake).
Understanding Marianne as a high- functioning autistic woman offers fresh insight into her character, social interactions, and social growth as the novel progresses; throughout Sense and Sensibility, Marianne learns how to better navigate social rules and survive the neurotypical society of late eighteenth-century ...
The male lead, Connell, played by Mescal, struggles with anxiety and depression throughout the series. His journey into depression is a particularly poignant storyline, shining an important spotlight on mental health struggles in males.
Connell's confusion and insecurity in secondary school leads him to keep his relationship with Marianne a secret because she's a loner his friends consider unusual and ugly. In the book, Connell never interacts with her at school. He never makes eye contact. He barely acknowledges her existence.
Marianne's kink is inextricably linked to her traumatic childhood; if her family hadn't been abusive, she wouldn't want to be hit during sex. Being submissive is, for some people, a healthy way to deal with trauma – although this is not at all what Marianne does.
Despite his obsession with social status, though, Connell eventually finds out that nobody would have even cared if he and Marianne had dated publicly. As a result, he sees that trying to conceal their relationship was pointless and created unnecessary pain.
Lukas is a photographer Marianne dates while studying abroad in Sweden. He isn't very attentive to who Marianne is as a person. Instead, he's more interested in taking provocative pictures of her and playing what he calls a “game” that involves him tying her up and degrading her while she remains silent.
Because Connell and Marianne are young in Normal People and are only 21 years old, at the most, in the end, they have shown signs of co-dependency and are unable to let go of each other.
The series ends where the book does. Connell has to decide where the next part of his life will be, and Marianne realises she doesn't need to follow. “We have done so much good for one another,” she says. They both cry, with love, and it ripples.
Connell starts having sex with Marianne and asks her to keep it a secret.
Marianne's depression expresses her sense of annihilation by Willoughby's betrayal; she is humiliated, silenced, and reduced to nonexistence in psychological terms, in that she feels she had been living a life that didn't really exist, a reality that was a reflection of her own desires.
Marianne's resultant loss of appetite and disinterest in nourishing herself indicates that she is developing an eating disorder. In the midst of Marianne's abuse, Lorraine surfaces as a figure of emotional support though she is not present enough to bear witness to it, or to intervene.
In relationships with other men Marianne discovers an inner need for masochistic sexual intercourse. In this context it emerges that Marianne has throughout her life been emotionally abused by her mother and physically intimidated and abused by her brother.
When Normal People begins, Connell and Marianne live in County Sligo in Ireland. Because both characters are applying for university, they are presumably 17 or 18 years old, and finishing up the sixth and final year of secondary school (high school).
In between, Marianne finds herself in abusive relationships. Her now-deceased father physically abused her, and her brother carries on the tradition when she's at home. Her mother allows it and says Marianne is weak. In dating relationships, Marianne urges men to dominate her, beat her and do whatever else they want.
The Sheridan Family
Marianne's difficult (read: abusive) home life figures heavily into the novel. Her deceased father used to beat both Marianne and her mother; for her part, Marianne's mother is cruel and neglectful, frequently belittling her.
She's neurodivergent – specifically, she is autistic with ADHD. In Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking, Eloise invites us with her on a deep-dive into her life, interests and fears, all through the lens of her neurodivergent mind.
“Being autistic underpins literally everything about me, what I eat, where I go, who I'm friends with, what I'm interested in, what's hard for me,” Eloise explains, “My biggest thing was that I wanted to get across in the book was that I have this brain, and because I'm autistic, this is how I view the world.
3. The first time Connell tells Marianne he loves her, we are told that “She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life” (46).
Marianne's Mother Disowns Her
Marianne's mother doesn't legally disown her, but it's clear that the two no longer have a relationship. In episode 12, Marianne celebrates Christmas and New Year's with Connell's family, who, especially his mother, have come to love and accept her.