54 pages • 1 hour read
Sally RooneyBeautiful World, Where Are You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Desire and Religion
Ritual and repetition make the patterns that end up defining life and funneling common desires towards a safe abstraction. Eileen recommends Alice read Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” because she also has theorized about the non-physical importance of sex as a human experience. There are also those who direct their unfulfilled erotic longing into religious ritual and devotion. The exclusivity of a romantic relationship mirrors a consecrated devotion to a higher being. Both religious devotion and romantic relationships involve dedication and desire.
After attending Mass with Simon, Eileen admits she finds the Mass “strangely romantic.” Alice responds that the parable of the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair is bewilderingly erotic, maybe deliberately so, as eroticism—more often called eros in philosophical discourse—is a nonrational, almost spiritual drive that, depending on whom one asks, either brings humans down to a common level or helps them transcend their humanity by leading them to divine realities. The two women struggle to articulate eros, sometimes getting only close enough to paraphrase it as a diminished version of itself: sentimentality. Alice remarks, “[P]ut simply, I am fascinated and touched by the ‘personality’ of Jesus, in rather a sentimental, arguably even maudlin way. Everything about his life moves me” (185).
Nevertheless, Alice genuinely grasps after a mysterious love she senses both in spiritual practices and in literary artwork. She posits, “[W]hen we love fictional characters knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us?” (232). Here, Alice senses something beyond eros; such a selfless love, in theology, is usually given the Greek term agape, and it is regarded by Christian theologians to be above—and a completion of—eros. Alice even connects these passions to her own creative process: “It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before” (235). Her words are an unsubtle allusion to the creation mythologies throughout numerous religions.
People can, however, use conceptions of the sacred as maladaptive coping mechanisms. Where Simon may cloister away his emotions with a veneer of spiritual remoteness (part of what other characters might call a “Messiah complex”) Alice sometimes worships a theoretical “goodness,” a dedication that “transubstantiates” her painful emotions into intellectual quandaries. Simon and Alice have more in common than they know: While Alice is desperate for what she calls “lived experience” and meaningful embodiment within material existence, this is not unlike the Catholic idea of the Incarnation, where a personal divinity descends from abstraction to live among humankind for the sake of love.
Aesthetics and Labor as Dialectical Materialism
In their philosophical letters, Alice and Eileen discuss society using Marxist principles as an intellectual framework. They both recognize the paradox of dialectical materialism in real life, pitting the joys of aesthetic philosophy against the arduous reality of a working-class life. They struggle with the lived emotions of enduring a complicated and abstract perspective on life.
Living and appreciating beauty are types of hard work that have been commodified as labor under a pervasive capitalist system. In a civilization that (the two women ceaselessly worry) faces impending and total failure, the only reprieve from the misery of oppression—this reprieve being the enjoyment of the world’s beauty—is unfairly laborious, as people need to put in more effort and desire to uncover the hidden aesthetic moments of life that bring joy. The four friends have wide class differences, especially considering their careers and salaries. The uneven distribution of resources feels like a bad romantic relationship, an uneven balance of desire in which capitalism gains. Even in her individual pursuits, Eileen attempts to capture and preserve unsustainable moments of aesthetic bliss in her “Life Book.” Over time, however, she cannot sustain the amount of labor required to appreciate the leisure of aestheticism.
Aesthetic freedom comes with quality of life, so when the latter declines, the former shrinks, Eileen writes to Alice. She notes that with aesthetic judgment comes a moralizing judgment, and the two women theorize that perhaps the inhumanity of society comes from a panicked sense of doling out justice for past wrongs. Regardless, the four friends tend to find evidence of a beautiful world by abandoning attempts to reconcile philosophical quandaries and simply living in the moment.
The Importance of Subtext in Human Connection
One of the novel’s most prevalent themes is communicative subtext. On their first date, Felix challenges Alice, asking her what “kind of people” she writes about: “She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would even let him win it, as long as he played nicely” (13). Here, Alice recognizes a subtextual question lingering in Felix’s innocent comment. She communicates back to him by way of a familiar look that alerts him of her communicative competence.
Dropping deliberate subtext in conversation requires a sort of manufactured social performance that can appear insincere if the subtext is not appropriately translated. This kind of performativity points to the desire to engage with emotional realities, and vulnerability points to the beautiful, hidden realities of human personal connection. Eileen mentions having to actively “tune in” to aesthetic frequencies, saying, “There was something delicate about living like that—like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me” (162). The importance of emotion and feeling through lived experience is reminiscent of a delicate world that waits for human interaction in the same way that subtext awaits a willing interpreter. Subtext can refer to experiences that cannot be adequately described in literal words, and so a romantic dedication to subtextual communication can add up to a totalizing effect that feels like more than the sum of its parts.
The labor involved in sending and interpreting symbolic subtextual communication can seem worthless for those uninterested in subtextual communication and symbolic theorizing. However, to those who engage with uncovering the “hidden beauty” of the world, just a little effort pays off. For Eileen, the hidden beauty of her childhood home exists in the memories of the “fictive world” she and Lola imposed upon the real-life landscape:
[T]he attic, the staircase, the coat closet. Still these places gave Eileen a special feeling, or at least she could, if she willed, tune into a special feeling that was in them, an aesthetic frequency […] with a thrill of something like excitement (237).
For those who see beauty in the promise of infinite possibility, like Eileen, the never-ending labor of approaching and interpreting—uncovering—beautiful subtexts in a miserable world is a comforting endeavor that pays off in aesthetic multitudes.
Even the author’s writing style conveys the theme. Rooney’s frequent use of the passive narrative voice is a form of subtext deliberately referencing the rising nihilism that young generations feel in a slowly collapsing society. It frames the progress of history as slowing under the weight of political institutions and consumer waste. Rooney also writes dialogue with minimal punctuation, avoiding quotation marks and instead allowing performative nonverbal communication to shine between the written lines. The omniscient narration also enables this extensive subtext in a similar way to Ernest Hemingway’s “theory of omission,” which states that a story’s deeper meaning is implied rather than expressed.
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By Sally Rooney
