Compromise as Ideology, Affect, and Aesthetic in Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends

This article asks what kinds of subjectivities materialize under a culturopolitical order that not only necessitates but celebrates compromise. Reading Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends through Chantal Mouffe's critique of liberal democracy, I track how protagonist Frances absorbs, to her detriment, its hegemonic ideologies. I argue that Frances's masochistic tendency to consent to subpar conditions, whether in her political life or private, nonmonogamous one, is a perverse strategy to recover lost agency. By agreeing to her pain, she neutralizes it and sustains the political status quo. Furthermore, compromise is dual: it functions as a political principle for the characters and as a formal aesthetic for Rooney who blends radical self-critique with the traditional romance plot. I contend, extending Rachel Greenwald Smith's observation, that this hybridity allows the reader to feel at once intellectually challenged, sentimentally gratified, and politically awakened. The novel's heteroidealist ending, which equates a private love story with the possibility of universal relationality, serves as a literary release valve. It attests, formally and thematically, to the difficulty of becoming unstuck from generic conventions.