The Violence of Softness: Why "Normal People" Should Not Be Romanticized in a Post-Romantic Capitalist Era

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

In a cultural moment where vulnerability is often aestheticized and emotional chaos is mistaken for depth, Normal People emerges not as a subversive tale of intimacy but as a polished symptom of post-romantic capitalism. Beneath its muted cinematography and whispered exchanges lies a deeply regressive narrative that reinforces hegemonic gender roles and repackages patriarchal dominance as emotional complexity.

Connell, with his physicality and brooding silences, is not a man in crisis—he is the reiteration of male passivity coded as virtue. Marianne, portrayed as the “smartest woman he’s ever met,” is merely a mirror for his self-discovery. She is not loved for her essence but consumed for her ability to reflect back his latent sensitivity, his unspoken traumas, his potential to be better. As Andrea Dworkin warned, women are often mistaken for landscapes of redemption rather than recognized as autonomous subjects. In Normal People, Marianne’s suffering becomes a device for Connell’s growth. Her self-effacement, her masochistic tendencies, and her repeated returns to a man incapable of consistency are romanticized as tragic intimacy, not seen for what they are: symptoms of systemic gendered conditioning.

The series does not question the structures that make love impossible; it aestheticizes their effects. In a post-romantic capitalist world, where intimacy is outsourced, compartmentalized, and performative, Normal People does not break the mold—it reinforces it. The characters do not transcend their context. They fester within it, mistaking pain for authenticity, and dysfunction for passion.

Marianne’s trajectory is particularly violent in its subtlety. Her intelligence is never allowed to become power. Her desire is always mediated through the male gaze. Even when she leaves, it is with the quiet dignity of someone who accepts being invisible. She is, in the end, a well-behaved woman in an ill-behaved world. And that is not liberation—it’s tragedy.

What the show presents as “normal” is precisely what should be refused. The failure is not individual, but structural. Normal People fails to imagine alternative modes of love, relation, or subjectivity. It rewards resilience within normative violence instead of revolt. In a world where subjecthood is constantly eroded by objectification, where relationships are saturated with power imbalances disguised as romance, this kind of narrative does not soothe—it sedates.

To romanticize Normal People is to accept the limits imposed on us by a culture terrified of radical love, of women as subjects, and of emotional autonomy. It is to capitulate to a system that prefers women hurt, mute, and in love with their own erasure.