Sally Rooney’s cult success as a novelist reached the kind of escape velocity that prompts a whole genre of criticism as a reaction to the success: a lot of people openly hate her prose and many think her politics are all wrong. One of the more popular responses to her books is to question the literary archetype of women it has created: intelligent, thin, White, heterosexual, effortlessly chic, submissive. In other words, the same literary woman we’ve been preoccupied with for centuries.

There are conspicuous hallmarks in her descriptions of women that have turned into their own “I’m not like other girls” spin-off aesthetic. Like the fact that they’re fragile and pretty and intelligent to a fault. They’re beautiful effortlessly, and they’re hypersensitive to the ills of the world around them. You could say they’re headstrong, but they also shatter on contact. In bed, the women are so delicate that they don’t moan, their breath “catches” and they make very small sounds to express pleasure, taking up as little space in bed as they do in the outside world. They’re submissive in sex – which is a sexual preference many exercise with agency – but they’re also docile. They tremble, quiver, and shiver. They whisper and cry silently. The only (memorable) time they voice a request is when they’re asking to be hit. The implications of kink as necessarily stemming from trauma aside, it leaves one to ask: why don’t the women demand other things, in other contexts, more often? Instead, they receive their lovers’ attentions and affections with cold hands, protruding ankle and hip bones, skin that is “fair,” “white,” “flushed,” or flowery in some way, wearing cashmere sweaters that accentuate their perfect breasts, despite the authorial voice insisting that their whole appearance was haphazardly put together as an afterthought.

In response to such discourse over Rooney’s novels, many critics have pushed back against the idea that her women protagonists need to be like anything else. One Vogue piece looking at the women’s thinness was the subject of much debate online: is any author obligated to represent diversity for the sake of it? Sally Rooney is a thin person herself. It would be weird if she tried to “represent” other body types (which would then prompt a different cycle of think pieces about how it’s not her place to write about other body types). Yes, the women are White, skinny, submissive, and problematic, and they have a right to be, because that’s the character and that’s the story. Critical discourse, as it were, suffers from a “Me Syndrome” – the expectation that everyone should be able to locate themselves in the things they consume. In other words, even if the adjectives around thinness were neutral, it wouldn’t read that way because, as Hera Lindsay Bird points out, “it’s hard to depict thinness without glamourising it, because it’s already so culturally prized.”

It's unproductive, therefore, to take issue with the physical characteristics of her characters — so how must we read the work? Sally Rooney is a Marxist who is a novelist, and she is herself unsure as to whether a novel itself can be Marxist. A fair response to her work would be to read her in her own terms, not in terms of what she never claimed to do (writing a feminist heroine who sufficiently meets DEI criteria). Accordingly, a Jacobin article on Normal People made a case for why socialists should embrace what Rooney is trying to do, criticism notwithstanding. She’s trying to portray how capitalism is not just around us, it’s within us, it shapes our interpersonal relationships, our wants, our desires, our fears. A novel by a Marxist novelist needn’t be a polemic about the means of production – it can, as Rooney’s novels do, simply dwell on the quiet devastation that capitalist structures can wreak on people with vastly different material circumstances. It’s in the way they talk to each other: When Marianne and Connell frustratingly break up over what’s popularly understood as a “miscommunication,” it is actually a result of how their class backgrounds inform the way they perceive themselves and interpret other people’s words. Connell leaving town because he couldn’t afford rent was a plea to Marianne to let him stay with her; Marianne’s fractured self-worth from her life of alienated luxury leads her to believe that he was simply leaving her.

The intellectual intention of Rooney’s work, it would seem, is to make a point about alienation in a capitalist society. As a New Left Review piece on Intermezzo pointed out, Sally Rooney’s plots are always a battle between structure and agency. If structure – class, race, gender inequality – wins, it’s a tragedy. If agency triumphs over structural barriers, that’s a comedy (or romance). In the Rooney-verse, agency usually wins, and her novels are all love stories with endings as happy as they can be. It wasn’t until I read that review that it clicked why something still felt off-kilter about her women: the means that the Sally Rooney heroine employs to realize agency paradoxically reinforces the structure.

The problem isn’t that the women are skinny, White, and fragile. The problem – rather, the confusion – is how neither skinniness nor Whiteness nor fragility (all valued cultural currencies) are not factors in Rooney’s larger critique of capitalism and love.

Materially speaking, these characters do have a lot of agency – but, for some reason, the novel’s universe pretends that they don’t. Sylvia in Intermezzo, for instance, suffers from an accident-related injury that doesn’t allow her to have penetrative sex. We’re specifically informed of the fact that she can still feel pleasure: still, she renders herself sexless by virtue of, seemingly, her inability to play her part in the mechanics of strictly heterosexual sex. Even when Peter attempts to initiate some kind of intimacy with her, he’s rebuffed. But, in a moment that is supposed to reflect complete vulnerability, Sylvia opts to give him pleasure instead. Almost as if she’s punishing herself by depriving herself of pleasure. Almost as if the inability to fulfill the heteronormative script makes her worthless – certainly a head-scratcher for a reader probably accustomed by now to the commonsensical fact that there are other ways to be sexually intimate. The structure isn’t the foil in this case: the foil is the character’s own perceived lack of agency. And this might be a critique of fragile White femininity – except for the ending, which is arguably worse.

At the end of Intermezzo, there is an easy solution to the love triangle involving Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi that was staring everyone in the face – a throuple – but somehow justified, again, within a strangely conservative framework. Naomi, the hot, sexually adventurous young thing (for this is mostly the extent of her characterization) will fulfill Peter’s sexual needs; Sylvia, whose quiet intelligence and restraint practically float out of the pages, will satisfy his intellectual needs. The division of sexual and emotional labour, between two women, for a man. Their own subjectivity is so absent from the story that it’s hard to tell why Peter means so much to each of them, or what they think of each other, for them to happily get on board with this abrupt, even convenient, happy ending.

Then there is Margaret, an almost-divorcee in a passionate love affair with Ivan, who is nearly fifteen years younger than her. Ivan is constantly amazed that a woman wants to be “kissed by him,” and it’s as though this passive voice extends into the relationship itself. Margaret feels desired by being kissed by Ivan. Ivan feels desired by confirming that Margaret wants to be kissed by him. Age and life experience gap notwithstanding, there is still a pursuer and a pursued, no thwarting of the heterosexual dynamic nor even adequately questioning who really holds power in such a dynamic; the characters find agency because of the structure.

The throughline in most of Rooney’s novels is that love, with all its blandest and predictable tropes, saves us from this world. Love is the radical force that her characters wield as shields against neoliberalism’s emptiness and loneliness. However: this works if you’re White, skinny, and fragile and, as a woman, actively lean into those qualities rather than go against the grain. In Marianne and Connell’s case in Normal People, they only fully overcome structure – their class differences – when Connell gets to rescue Marianne in a cartoonishly muscular way (threatening her abuser that he’ll kill him). They’re happy in their new domesticity after this. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, two best friends are saved, in the end, not by each other but by their respective will-they-won’t-they lovers – in a bafflingly traditional, gift-wrapped, happy ending with marriage and babies on the horizon for each of them. This is a novel with lengthy email exchanges between the two best friends, where they wonder about their own privileges given the awful state of the world. What unfetters them from these anxieties is just an honest conversation with their respective men-friends, ushering in a transition from situationship to relationship. Despite having so much, the women in Sally Rooney’s novels surrender their agency to the men as a way of sticking it to the structure.

It helps that Sally Rooney’s deadpan prose, which has been compared with Hemingway’s, is so lush in its handling of intimacy that it really does feel like romantic love might save us. But in reality, romantic love – in late stage capitalism’s hyper-commodified world – might only save the ones with the most romantic capital. Which is to say, desirability is a thing, and race and body types and cultural scripts act as romantic phenotypes determining someone’s chance of success in the commodified world of dating apps and DM-sliding love. It’s great for Rooney’s heroines that their clothes sit on them flatteringly at all times and their pale skin flushes in various attractive colours – a plus that they’re naturally like this, effortlessly so, and even self-aware to boot. Capital reproduces itself through self-awareness.

In other words, the trouble is: all of these women seem like they’re incapable of making choices about themselves; they sort of just let things happen to them, and when the thing happens to be a man, they like it. And while it is true that that is uncomfortably true of almost all women in some form or another, the question with Rooney’s novels in particular is: why? For a literary style so concerned with the forces of societal structures on love, don’t these White, thin, beautiful and intelligent women at some point, purely logically, have to benefit from being who they are?

As this piece on Beautiful World, Where Are You observes, Sally Rooney is dealing with eminently relevant themes: heterosexual love at a time of hetero pessimism. It is a theme deliciously ripe for unpacking – how can heterosexual love be redeemed? But the way the women are, this is a question that is eventually reframed as: how can heterosexual love redeem women in pain? It seems to say, in a world where everything is commodified and terrible, the heavenly feeling of being loved can soothe the pain. Unfortunately in real life, love itself is commodified through dating apps and a desirability index that, at the end of the day, makes us treat ourselves as objects on a scale of hot or not – a scale to which Sally Rooney’s women seem completely immune.

Here, then, is why it all feels so off-kilter about the White skinny rosy skin thing: these are qualities that, outside the text, help the Rooney girls acquire the means to their escape from a capitalist hellscape. Leaving out such a fact about structural forces, while dwelling so heavily on structural forces, doesn’t just feel like a cop out: it is a literary sleight of hand to invent the new “universal” character. Modern literary criticism has just grappled with the idea of the universal human story centering a White man. Now, here is a new novelist of a generation who, in the name of interrogating such structures, reinforces them through the successor to the universal White man: the universal White woman. In this case, she is so passive because she acts as a kind of societal blank slate; a thought experiment to see what happens when a woman by virtue of her gender and class alone falls in love. The way to overcome class alienation is to psychosexually submit to a man; exercise agency against the structure by giving up agency. Thus partnered up, they become the perfect women – ahead of all others in the pecking order. The patriarchal bargain. It’s no wonder that Sally Rooney’s books are so often compared with Jane Austen’s: there too are heroines trapped in the agency-structure paradigm. Austen’s heroines find a compromise between the two – they love as individuals and get married as 19th century women. It is the 21st century now, and the defining literary heroines of our times don’t get married, but they love like 19th century women.

Sally Rooney, on the other hand, is firmly a 21st century progressive. As one of her generation’s foremost intellectuals, she is one of the only authors with such a magnitude of reach and popularity to use her voice and platform to say what other can’t: calling Israel’s aggression in Palestine a genocide. “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are witnessing an unfolding genocide,” she said, at a reading of her new novel Intermezzo, taking the time to emphasize the irreparable loss of a single life, let alone 40,000, as is the current death toll in Gaza. She is someone with agency, who pushes back against the dominant structure.

However, Marianne, Frances, Bobbi, Alice, Eileen, Sylvia, Margaret, and Naomi – the women in her novels, who are inseparable from her own politics, given that they come from her brain – are women who seem to feel very sad about the structure, but don’t do much to push back. Is it fair to read Rooney’s characters with Rooney in mind, and feel confused? In her close read of Rooney’s books, Andrea Long Chu writes: “the reader who searches for the author within or behind the work is also doing precisely what the characters in a Sally Rooney novel learn to do: She is refusing to see the novel as an abstract quantity. She is insisting that it is a relationship between people.” In Sally Rooney’s worldview – both in real life and through her fictional heroines – the novel doesn’t really have a material impact on changing the world for the better. That may be well and good, but like the very themes of her books, capitalism and societal forces seep into everything: there is never such a person, artifact, or phenomenon that is untouched by society’s hand. The very passive women in her fiction create the platform that Rooney uses to very actively speak about things she cares about. Which is why, faced with the facts that readers in a hyperconnected, hyperreal world cannot separate the idea from the person, it’s not entirely unfair to ask: if Sally Rooney is the voice of a generation, why are her women like this?