Just as the leaves turns greener and the sounds of birds, children’s voices playing, and the smells of fresh mulch fill the air, I have fatefully found myself sinking into the reading of The Virgin Suicides. A deceiving title, though obvious at the same time. This book pulled me in turning the tide within each page. By the end of my exploration, I dwell on how often times I felt myself misunderstanding the writings of Jeffrey Eugenides. See, much of what The Virgin Suicides is, is the exploration and cruelties of adolescence. Before I begin my dissection, a quick summary of the plot:
The Virgin Suicides is the retelling of memories and interviews from a sleepy town in Michigan during the 1970s. The story is narrated from the perspective of a group of teenage boys, wrapped up in the dramas and details of their neighbors, the Lisbon family daughters. There are five of them- all within their teenage years- Cecelia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Therese (17, naturally). We follow along as the boys describe the change in the girls after the youngest, Cecelia kills herself. It is after that they tell us of what lead up to the other four sisters ending their lives as well. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon soon tighten the leashes on their daughters limiting their accessibility to the boys. What ensues is a whirlwind of boy-ish yearning, voyeurism and desire to understand what lead to Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese to follow their younger sister into the afterlife.
Much like a lot of male-told girlhood, much is left up to interpretation. What I failed to read upon purchasing this book was the obvious masculine name that appeared under the tempting title. But I had heard so much about this story, alongside the deciphering of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. These books are interpreted foolishly in much of the same ways, though tell very different stories. Many assume the lack of Lisbon sister perspective to be an injustice to the story, I see it as an aid to our author’s point. Most of what is conjured up from the belongings of the Lisbon girls displays a window into what caused the girls to lose faith in life, only to be glossed over in the retelling of it by a man who only remembers them as a boy. Our job is to decipher what is left unrecognized by the boys, and that is where the author gives up a map to wherever we desire to go. This intrusive defacing of a young girl’s upbringing gives way to insight in how we collectively pick and pull apart each other socially. What thought ends up trailing through my mind is the idea of boyhood and girlhood, which one ends in a better state? Would we rather die young, a screenshot of our glory days, or age poorly and muddled by our youth.
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
By far my favorite aspect of The Virgin Suicides is the way Eugenides pushes past the male-gaze of girlhood and into the realities that it holds. When the young boys want to know everything there is to know about the Lisbon sisters, he has them find out about things that further crumble their portrait of the women. Such as the large supply of Tampax in their cupboard, or their sweaty backs during slow dances, and perhaps their sexual deviancy. The girls don’t end up being truly as pure and full of potential as the growing blooms of the Belle Isle Botanical Garden. In fact, the girls end up being more like the polluted elm trees dying in everyone’s yard, poisoned by gossip. Much like the girls’ protection of said trees, their suicides seemed to me as to be forms of activism. A rebellion against the times, capitalism and everyone’s need to explain them in their own words. Each time someone speaks to one of the girls, they are almost answering a question the Lisbon daughters never asked. Their purpose wasn’t that of a single answer and they challenged each attempt at psycho-analysis with even more perplexing statements. I don’t feel as though any daughter was ending her life with vengeance or any thought outside of themselves, this event wasn’t going to be communal. It was a private decision that Eugenides intended on keeping that way, for as long as their memory prevails. The boyish perspective is to assume this had anything to do with you, the reader.
Unlike most of the endings to the books I like, I enjoyed this ending so much. I fell in love with Jeffrey Eugenides take on the selfishness of suicide. From the outside looking in, suicide appears selfish because we aren’t included in the decision of life or death. Our emotions are merely at the hands of the perpetrators and our primary take away is that we only wish we could be let in. Its natural to find this assumption of suicide to be callous however I appreciate taking that a step forward. Yes, it seems selfish to take your own life, because that’s the intention behind it. The longing for complete control over your own fate, out of the sweaty hands of our misunderstandings. It seems we’re told the only way to escape the patriarchy is in death.