Something that Bugged Me

I’m disgusted by The Virgin Suicides so far. As someone who has spent years volunteering with a suicide hotline, I’m pretty infuriated and exhausted by accounts of suicide that romanticize the act, describe beautifully tranquil bodies, and employ flowery language to turn tragedy into a peaceful piece of art that depicts a virginal girl “hurling herself from the world.” Not only does it attempt to pull pleasure out of another’s suffering in a voyeuristic and more-than-slightly sexual way, but I also think it’s pretty dangerous in how it misrepresents and idealizes suicide, considering some of the novel’s readers are inevitably going to be people considering the act as an outlet.

In any case, when I popped open the file in dropbox titled “vs_race,” I was really excited to read a critique of the straight white maleness of the book. The article wasn’t quite what I thought it would be and I think it missed some pretty obvious opportunities for criticism, but I still enjoyed it, nevertheless.

The biggest point that I think the article missed was the racial element to the insect “infestation.” The author makes the connection between bats and Eastern Europeans later, but failed to consider the insects as a metaphor for race. I think there is a pretty long history in gothic fiction of pest infestations being used as an expression of racism and xenophobia. I mean, the most famous film adaptation (Nosferatu) of one of the most famous gothic novels (Dracula) is nothing more than anti-Semitic propaganda that uses a rat infestation as a metaphor for the invasion of a racial Other.  I’m attaching a scene from the movie that captures that xenophobia and white horror at the prospect of nonwhite invasion.

Anyway, it especially disappointed me that the author missed this potential point of criticism because it would have given him the opportunity to acknowledge and discuss the housing discrimination that black Americans faced. While I find his discussion of Eastern/Southern Europeans in the book interesting, I think a far more poignant argument would have been one that considered how the use of the bug infestation within the novel invoked the history of white fear at the prospect of black (“nonhuman”) neighbors “invading” the neighborhood.

by Jack Flynn