The Virgin Suicides: A Story Of Desperation

The Virgin Suicides is an american novel written byˈJeffrey Eugenides and published in 1993. It is the first novel written by Jeffrey Eugenides, it is a tragedy novel. This novel deals with adolesence, love, death. The novel tels the story of the Lisbon sisters, from a Puritan family from Grosse Pointe, a wealthy suburb of Detroit in the 70s. Ronnie, mathematics teacher, and his wife, ms Lisbon, have 5 daughters : Cecilia who is 13 years old, Lux 14, Bonnie 15, Mary 16 and Therese 17. The life of this apparently uneventful home is turned upside down when Cecilia tries to kill herself by cutting her veins, then a few weeks later commits suicide by throwing herself out of her bedroom window.

Trying to take control of the situtation of the situation, the mother takes her daughters out of school to cut them off from the influence of a harmful world. The novel recounts the attempts of the young neighbors of the Lisbon sisters to communicate with them, and especially to understand, years later, the mystery of these barely known girls. In this novel, Eugenides used the past tense to tell the story of the Lisbon girls, the narrator is a collective 'we,' a group of young men who speak in one voice. They were once in love with the Lisbon girls, and are now, some 20 years later, trying to piece together the story of their deaths.

This leads us to the question : to what extent The Virgin Suicides shows he teenage angst ? To answer that question, I will talk about the representation of adolescence in The Virgin Suicides and the character of Lux Lisbon. To begin with, this novel deals with the teenage angst: these girls are rebellious: the youngest sister, Cecila Lisbon, cut her veins in the bathtub and was taken in charge by the paramedics. Her psychiatrist suggested her parents to let their daughters throw a party, in which the neighbhorhood boys who are the narrators, attend that party. During the party, Cecilia goes upstairs and kills herself by throwing herself out the window onto a iron fence spike. Since the suicide of Cecilia, the boys become obsessed with her firstly, then the girls. After that tragic episode, their mother, Ms Lisbon, a very religious person, decides to limit her daughters outing.

This is where the descent into hell begins. That’s where Lux attracts the attention of Trip Fontaine, the popular guy at school though the family keeps a low profile after Cecilia’s death and try to stay quiet about it, and almost never leaving the house. That’s when Trip asks the girl’s dad, if he can take Lux to homecoming. The parents agreed to let the girls going out on a group date with Trip and three of his friends. This is how the mother lengthens her daughters' dresses for the high school ball, now more than four following the suicide of the youngest. They then appear covered and immaculate in their white drapes of good religious puritan girls. Once they’re out of their house, the girl seemed normal. Mary dances while Lux and Trip hide under the blearchers to make out.

When it is time to go home, both of them were nowhere to be found. The others went home. Trip took Lux to the football field where they had sex. That is after that night the girls are locked in the house by their parents, and even not allowed to go to school. Lux has sex with random people on the roof and she even fakes a burst appendix to go to the hospital for a pregnancy test which was negative but she learned that she has HPV.

During Christmas, Mr Lisbon loses his job and it affected the family as well. That is the moment where the family is really decomposing itself. Time is passing, and the girls start to leave some mysterious messages and Virgin Mary cards in the neighborhood. The boys call them on the phone and the sisters suggest them to meet on the night on June 16, to plan their escape.

Lux greets them and tells the boys that she will wait in the garage while her sisters finish their packaging to escape. But the sisters were actually killing themselves in the moment: onnie hangs herself in the basement, Mary puts her head in the gas oven, Therese takes a lethal dose of sleeping pills and Lux leaves the car running in the garage and dies from the carbon monoxide. It's exactly one year after Cecilia's first suicide attempt. Mary was the only one who was saved. She lived for a month and she made her own escape by overdosing on sleeping pills. To understand the story, this novel is showing us the teenage angst firstly after the suicide of Cecilia.

The suicide of Cecila unleashed something at the girls. What did it unleashed? Anger. Rebellion. This is the moment where the girls start to change, they do forbidden things such as having sex before marriage which is a sin in a such religious family (with the case of Lux having unprotected sex with random people or even using her own birth control). The physical sexualization of young girls disturbs the collective gaze, in contrast to that of boys, the transfiguration pours here into the childish, refusing a frontal reality. A blindness of the hypersexualization of the body, however present, which highlights all the perversity of a civilization far from being civilized.

The isolation of the girls led them to suicide, suicide is a way to express their freedom, by killing themselves the girls would be free and not locked up in a house with tyrannical parents. We can also talk about another meaning on suicide: the elm trees: in the neighborhood where the Lisbons live, all the elms are dying because they are affected by the dutch elm disease: the girls would watch the cutting from their upstairs window. The trees and the sisters are both dying, the girls are dying mentally, emotionally and physically but they stay quiet about it. They endure it. Since there is the dutch elm disease, we can talk about contagion. Since dutch elm disease is a contagious disease, it can pass from a sick tree to a healthy one hence becoming sick. The neighbors viewed Cecilia’s suicide as contagious. They avoid the Lisbons because they don’t want their children to start thinking death or suicidal thoughts. The neighbors believe that Cecilia’s death is the reason why the other girls killed themselves.

I also wanted to talk about the characters of Lux Lisbon, who is, in my opinion, the most characterized rebellious teens of the lisbon daughers. Firstly, Lux is a latin word which means “light”. There is a contrast between Lux herself and the fact that lux means light; the word light is sacralized whereas Lux Lisbon is a sinner.

The only escape of Lux is the roof where Lux makes love at nightfall, in defiance of her rigorous education. In comparison to her sisters, Lux views herself outside of the claustrophobic confines of her parents care. They may mean well and may view her safety as their top priority, but as is the case with many people discovering their own sexuality for the first time, Lux turns into Lust. She plays provocative footsies under the dinner table with the guest Peter and openly charms male service workers. She even finds a way to blow the mind of the Casanova ˌkæsəˈnəʊvə lover Trip Fontaine with a kiss to rock his young little world.

Mrs. Lisbon makes Lux throw all her rock records into the fire. Not long after, Lux begins having sex with random men on the roof of her house. We don’t know how she met them, since she is always in her house, but her nighttime activities are the narrator’s sex education by watching Lux through binoculars.

Lux is clearly getting desperate. There's an empty, sad quality to all this sex. The boys think she's obscene. She has some weird birth control measures that involve a bottle of Coke or vɪnɪɡə(r) when she can't get real contraceptives. At one point, she has to fake a burst appendix to get to the hospital so she can have a pregnancy test. She's not pregnant, but she's gotten HPV.

To conclude we can say that adolescence in the Virgin Suicide is presented as the teenage angst through different processes: breaking the religious codes, being rebellious with Lux Lisbon such as having sex outside marriage which is a sin in religion, smoking or suicide. Suicide is a meaning of freedom for the Lisbon girls, it freed them from their tyrannical parents.

A violent and radical reaction which then works on a devastating spiral in which the sorority will respond with more violence, suicide. The ambient puritanism of the 1970s in this small region of Michigan is shaken, causing the codes of so-called morality to be shattered to have only broken pieces of teenage life crushed by the weight of obsolete mores.