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The idea that Marianne’s family considered themselves superior to himself and Lorraine, too good to be associated with them, had never occurred to him before. He found, to his surprise, that the idea made him furious.
In this quotation, which takes place in Two Days Later (April 2011), Connell reacts to his mother’s suggestion that Marianne doesn’t want to go public with their relationship because he comes from a working-class family. Connell is actually the one responsible for the secrecy around his relationship with Marianne, and it isn’t because of socioeconomic status. Rather, he is afraid to lose social capital in the form of popularity among his peers if they find out he’s involved with an outcast like Marianne. The fact that Connell has never before considered that he could be perceived as being in a lower class than Marianne despite her family’s wealth shows how disconnected social class and popularity are in their high school community. His anger at the very idea is ironic because of his own feelings of social superiority to Marianne.
He and Marianne never talked about money. They had never talked, for example, about the fact that her mother paid his mother money to scrub their floors and hang their laundry, or about the fact that this money circulated indirectly to Connell, who spent it, as often as not, on Marianne.
In Six Weeks Later (September 2012), Connell and Marianne meet up for the first time since their breakup in April. Here, Connell remembers the circumstances of the breakup, which stemmed from a misunderstanding following Connell’s inability to continue to pay rent due to a decrease in hours at his job. Rather than ask Marianne directly if he could stay with her, Connell was conscious of money as an unaddressed discrepancy in his relationship with Marianne and didn’t want to break their unspoken agreement by bringing it up, which led to a (temporarily) relationship-ending miscommunication. This quote emphasizes the importance to the relationship of pretending their contrasting class backgrounds don’t matter, while also revealing how their class differences can have a cascading effect on it.
For Marianne, who doesn’t pay her own rent or tuition and has no real concept of how much these things cost, it’s just a matter of reputation. She would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money.
This quote from Four Months Later (January 2013) comes after the completion of exams to determine the winners of a scholarship that would cover five years of tuition and accommodations at Trinity College. It emphasizes Marianne’s perception of finances as a purely social phenomenon rather than one related to material need. Marianne doesn’t actually need money, but she believes the achievement of winning a prestigious scholarship will boost her social standing among her peers, a stark illustration of how Marianne’s social class changes the way she views not only finances, but also popularity rankings. When she and Connell both win the scholarship in the following chapter, it leads to dramatic material changes in Connell’s life, but only symbolic social changes in Marianne’s.
