The Virgin Suicides

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

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Background

Literary Context: The Male Gaze

Arguably the most prominent theme in The Virgin Suicides is The Objectification of Women, given that the novel is narrated in the third-person plural and from the perspective of a group of boys who become deeply obsessed with a family of sisters. The boys spend all their free time investigating, watching, and thinking about the Lisbon girls but never interact with them, as though the girls aren’t real people. Not until the novel’s conclusion, after all the sisters have died, do the boys realize they never knew them despite all their efforts. The boys’ obsession is partly a sexual one wherein they fantasize about the girls from afar and thereby objectify them: “[I]t is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney” (142). The boys’ fantasies about what the girls might be like are based largely on a divergence from reality born out of the male gaze. They look at the girls through glass, both literally (through windows) and metaphorically, as though they’re pieces on display in a museum: “The Lisbon girls, on the other hand, were ‘like something behind glass. Like an exhibit’” (216). This objectification continues even after the girls have died, as the boys hold on to their memories, foregrounding the theme of Romanticizing the Past.

The text, while steeped in the motif of death by suicide, is a clear nod to a cinematic theory that Jeffrey Eugenides experimentally transferred to literature. This theory, developed by Laura Mulvey in the 1970s, suggests that film portrays women through the lens of the male gaze and male sexual desires, which results in the objectification of women. The Lisbon girls fit into this dynamic because the lens through which they’re viewed is strictly from the male perspective. The boys never truly know them, and thus, neither does the reader. Instead, the girls are stuck behind windowpanes, and questions about the reasons for their extreme actions are never truly answered. The boys realize this predicament only when it’s too late, and despite their realization of guilt (“Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen” [193]), they continue to pine over and mythologize the Lisbon girls.

Cultural-Historical Context: The Vietnam War and US Suburban Malaise

The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 but is set in 1970s suburban Midwestern America. The setting, a suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan, is the hometown of both the boys who narrate the story and the Lisbon girls, whom they observe and obsess over. A tone of malaise and dejectedness permeates the story’s events and characters’ lives. The town is invaded by fish flies that darken and seem to swallow the sky, the elm trees are slowly removed in an ironic and failed effort to save other elm trees, and the city becomes impoverished and unlivable. The isolation of the suburb doesn’t isolate the youth well enough that they’re unaware of the slow degradation around them, and it becomes a common theory in the suburb that this was the underlying reason for the Lisbon girls’ deaths by suicide.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the US government conscripted thousands of men and sent them to fight in the Vietnam War, a war they didn’t necessarily support. Back in the US, their families protested the war, speaking, singing, and writing about the government’s wrongful actions. Skepticism toward the government and toward authority in general thus grew during this era. Alongside this was a rapid rise in secularism that left many searching for a new type of spirituality, which often took the form of using psychedelics, listening to thought-provoking music, and questioning the world around them. Teens of this era were in many ways commodified and sexualized by popular media of the time, and this is reflected in the novel’s prominent sexual objectification. Rebellion against authority, the status quo, and commonly held beliefs left many youth with unanswered questions. Similarly, climate science was mounting, and evidence that damage was being done was becoming undeniable. The lives of the Lisbon girls, their need to preserve what little precious things they have (such as the elm tree), and their decisions to die reflect this period of extreme change, skepticism, and lack of hope for the future.