The Virgin Suicides as Case Study

In my A3 conclusion, I alluded to the view of the Virgin Suicides as a case study in human bias. There were several things that led me to that conclusion: the depersonalization of every single character in the book, the plural narrative, the giving away of the ending from page 1 are a few choice examples. I bring this up is in response to the fairly heated class discussion on TVS last Monday. I'll be honest, I was incredibly surprised that a large fraction of the class didn't like the book/thought it was misogynistic simply because I loved it so much. As for the misogyny, I thought the book had as much to do with the propagation of misogynist ideals as Harry Potter was about the mechanics of flying a broomstick - that is, it was entirely a construct of the world that Eugenides created and not something he actually believes to be true.

I saw the incredibly questionable morals and psychological extremities as a device that Eugenides used to further distance the world of the book from reality (not that misogyny doesn't exist in real life, just that Eugenides was trying to create his own brand of misogyny in the book that is distinct from misogyny in reality). Just like a science fiction or fantasy writer uses flying broomsticks and time travel to build a self-reliant world completely unattached from reality, Eugenides did the same using the devices of extreme misogyny and eroticism of suicide.

The reason that Eugenides does that, I propose, is to create a case study; he holds the world he creates at an arms length by making everything extreme to the point of absurdity, and because he doesn't allow us to identify with any of the characters he asks us to wrestle with the ideas of the book purely intellectually. This is the reason I was so fascinated with the novel and the reason I plan on writing on it again for my conference paper. Every page in the book presents a hypothetical that can be looked at in so many ways, and infinitely many conclusions can be drawn from it.

In an unintentional response to the blog post posted before this one, I think that art has no responsibility to society, and especially not pedagogical ones. Instead, I think that humans, as a species capable of producing art, necessarily assumes the responsibility to look at art purely intellectually and not allow said art any pedagogical influence. Said shortly, because we have the power to make art we are obliged to consume it responsibly. In my opinion, The Virgin Suicides is what all art should be: completely detached from reality and controversial in a manner that stimulates intellectual inquiry. (My view of art rests heavily on a Nabokov lecture on literature we read in 111 and Oscar Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; I'd love to go in depth on them but I'm pretty sure I'm woefully over the word count for these posts).