Labeling in The Virgin Suicides

Although there is a trend of extreme denial in all the works we’ve read so far, the brand of denial in The Virgin Suicides is the most deplorable. It’s the kind that makes you lose a lot of your faith in humanity. 

 

Clearly, everyone—the narrators, the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon—turn blind eyes to the effects that the Lisbons’ unhealthy, sheltered lifestyle has had on the five sisters. I struggle to understand why they insist on dismissing the girls’ struggle. Then I read Mrs. Denton’s anonymous letter to the newspaper, to which she justified by saying, “You can’t just stand by and let your neighborhood go down the toilet…We’re good people around here” (90). This sounds awfully cold and insensitive. When Cecilia died, the whole neighborhood sent in flowers, but apparently this was just a trite gesture. No one truly cared enough to understand why Cecilia took her life, and after the shock of her death wore off, the neighbors were only concerned with the poor state of the Lisbons’ front yard and how that reflected on the rest of the neighborhood. That’s just it. The neighbors—that is, the grownups—are obsessed with maintaining appearances, the appearance of sanity and tranquility in suburbia. What’s interesting is that they all gossip about each other, and pretty soon, everyone “secretly” knows everyone else’s dirty laundry. But somehow, this two-faced approach to life has become the accepted norm. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, on the other hand, strive to maintain their privacy, and seek no social contact with the rest of the neighborhood. This ironically makes them the most interesting piece of gossip of all. People feel insulted by the Lisbons because they don’t know their dirty laundry; if they don’t know the Lisbons’ secrets, then they can’t leave them alone. This is also why the boys end up collecting so many different versions of the same story about the Lisbon girls; no one knows the real story, so they end up speculating and fabricating the most gossip-worthy theories they can think of.

So to return my original question of why everyone dismisses the Lisbon girls’ struggle, I say they do so in favor of their own selfish curiosity and desire to put a label on the Lisbons like the labels they’ve put on each other. By extension, this may also be the reason why the creepy narrators are so obsessed with the girls. In their relatively privileged boredom—honestly, these kids have way too much time on their hands—they find excitement in their inability to put a label on the mysterious Lisbon girls. They may say they love and care about the girls, but if they did, they would have sought help for them long ago. The problem is, if they had truly helped the girls, that would have dissolved their fantasies and they would have lost their original fascination with the Lisbon sisters. To the boys, the Lisbon girls are nothing more than fantastic images, rather than actual people, and so it never occurs to them that the girls can be helped, never mind that they need help in the first place.

-Ly