Scopophilia in The Virgin Suicides

When reading The Virgin Suicides I couldn’t help but think of Laura Mulvey’s essay on “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure.” Scopophilia and the male gaze seem pertinent to plot advancement. The neighborhood boys have a strange fascination with the Lisbon girls, which they detail when describing their “tattered stockings” or observing Lux having sex on the rooftop. It’s interesting and a bit odd that Eugenides chose to narrate the lives of the Lisbon sisters via the neighborhood boys.

The narration relies on the detailed mental notes that the boys take of the sisters and a few of their rare interactions. The narrators’ scopophilic tendencies provide a fairly objective viewpoint in regards to the novel. The neighborhood boys closely document the sisters’ lives in order to keep track of their observances.  

Unlike in cinema, where we can openly observe and analyze a character, the neighborhood boys must be discreet while watching the Lisbon sisters. The boys’ male gaze is not a perverted sort of gaze that stems from sexual arousal, but rather one that stems from curiosity and a desire to know more about the Lisbon sisters. They usually watch the sisters using binoculars or out of the corners of their eyes, and when they do accidentally meet one the girls’ eyes they are quick to look away. This sort of embarrassment shows that the boys are not necessarily focused on the Lisbon sisters because they find them attractive, but rather because they find them peculiar.

Spoiler Alert: We Already Know What Will Happen

In the opening sentence, the narrator tells us how two of the Lisbon sisters, Mary and Therese die (sleeping pills). Less than thirty pages into The Virgin Suicides, he has already revealed how another of the five sisters will die, as Bonnie's height is explained by the "length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope," and we have already seen Cecilia already commit suicide. The title of the book also says it explicitly: the Lisbon sisters are going to commit suicide. Knowing what will happen changes the tone and the way in which we react to elements within the story.

Instead of being shocked at the girls' suicide, we anticipate their deaths. As I read each new scene I, while not expecting their suicides, I prepare myself for them to come. While the suicides are definitely tragic, they do not jar the reader in the same way they would if they came as a surprise. In a way, their suicides are lessened by the knowledge that they will occur, but the overall tone of the book becomes even more depressing. The overarching tone is one of continual depression rather than tragedy. In the same way there seemed to be a cloud of gloom in the previous texts we read, knowing the fate of the Lisbon girls achieves the same effect; we have the ultimate ending in our minds throughout the entire story.

While I wouldn't consider The Virgin Suicides to be a non-linear storyline, having a glimpse of the conclusion makes non-linear stories come to mind (Memento, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Slaughterhouse Five). In Tarantino's Pulp Fiction for example, the non-linear storyline arouses the viewer's curiosity throughout the story that allows the audience to reach a satisfying moment in the ending when the various storylines finally connect. While the tragic story of the Lisbon sisters is not told from multiple points of view and does not jump around throughout the story as many of the previous stories I have mentioned, we do have a glimpse of the conclusion. In this case however, the effect is opposite. Instead of approaching the ending eager to find out what happens, part of me wishes to not find out more about their suicides while another part of me is still curious.

I think Eugenides may have chosen to present the story in this way in order to really emphasize the horrible things going on in the Lisbon household. Living with extremely overbearing and protective parents, being cooped up in the same house with them, and dealing with the suicide of their youngest sister, is terrible as is. Yet, it becomes even more depressing knowing that this is in the final year of their lives.

Side note: I really enjoyed the use of parenthesis throughout the first half.

-Andrew T

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

Fake Plastic Trees

There’s a short little exchange in the first act. Chance is in the process of telling the Princess his story. He tells her about Heavenly and about the love he had for Heavenly. In the midst of the story the little exchange goes

Chance: “Each time I came back to St. Cloud I had her love to come back to…”

Princess: “Something permanent in a world of change?”

As I read this line I thought of the song Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead:

Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out

She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
He used to do surgery
For girls in the eighties
But gravity always wins

It wears him out, it wears him out
It wears him out, it wears him out

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

It wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out

If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted all the time

All the time...
All the time...

The lyrics really resonated with as well as connected the issues it seemed that Chance had in the play. His constant search for love was probably this search for that consistency in the crazy world around him, and that seems to be a universal need that all humans have.  He struggles to find that between his love of Heavenly as well his love of Princess. And for all of these characters it’s all fake, all made of plastic. They struggle for that consistency whether it’s in the world of acting, aging, or love and can’t seem to find it. Chance looked for that consistency in pills, hash, and alcohol, the only constants for him throughout the play. The last lines of the song remind me of Chance’s “loss” in terms of finding that permanent thing. If only Chance could be who Heavenly wanted, if only he could be who Boss Finley wanted, if only he could be who Princess wanted he may have been able to find that consistency.  Unfortunately for Chance he ends up alone in the fake plastic world he’s created for himself, and it wears him out.  

Undefeated

While reading the end of the play, I couldn't help but thinking of a common saying in the NBA whenever a great player nears the end of his career that goes something like this: "Father time is undefeated." Chance says almost the exactly the same thing: "Time--who could beat it, who could defeat it ever?" Yet, despite the inevitability of time, there seems to be a major effort to defeat it and turn back the clocks. Aunt Nonnie seems to sum it up pretty well: "What you want to go back to is your clean, unshamed youth. And you can't." Chance yearns to live in those idealized moments when he is young and with Heavenly. But he can't.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, beauty and love are very strongly tied with with time. It is common, and inevitable, that physical beauty fades with time. What seems new, however, in the play is the notion that "you're too old for a lover." This is especially depressing following Chance's conclusion that love is everything. Chance explains:

"the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don't mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure"

The notion that love fades with time is only later reinforced as Chance gives "back a feeling of youth" to "Middle-aged people" through his "love-making." To Chance, this idea is just a cog in the wheel of the clock of father time that inevitably defeats everyone; time is is an "enemy" that "gnaws away, like a rat gnaws off its own foot caught in a trap, and then, with its foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn't run, couldn't go, bled and died."

While father time is, in fact, undefeated, Chance gives himself something to be happy about that he overlooks. As he points out, "nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36). As everyone succumbs to time we can either focus on turning back the clock (as Chance and Princess do), or as Chance aptly points out, we can focus on creating memories that nothing can take away, not even father time.

-Andrew T

Over-dramatic Actresses

Throughout Sweet Bird of Youth, I was reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch about the game show, "Secret Word," with the recurring guest of the washed-up Broadway star who can't seem to let go of her previous stardom. The Broadway star, called Mindy Elise Grayson, is portrayed by Kristen Wiig.



The reason for my association was primarily caused by of the first lengthy speech Princess Kosmonopolis/Alexandra del Lago delivers. She's obsessed with her own art and own career, and diverges from her previous pattern of regular dialogue to pontificate upon her previous lifetime:

"They told me I was an artist, not just a star whose career depended on youth...There's nowhere else to retire to when you retire from an art because, believe it or not, I really was once an artist. So I retired to the moon, but the atmosphere of the moon doesn't have any oxygen in it..." (p 33).

It's very hard for me to take her character seriously, as she comes off to me nothing more than a superficial alcoholic obsessed with youth and beauty (soap opera material much?). Actually, nearly everyone in this play came off to me as superficial and selfish. But the Princess in particular struck me with her bubble-headed daze and her histrionic, compulsive behavior. She seems to me like the type of person who dwells on the Olay commercials, yearning to look 10 years younger, refusing to compromise with herself and her future.

At the end, when her picture is successful, I'm left deeply unsatisfied. Am I supposed to be happy that her picture breaks records and is successful, despite her doubts? I don't really want to be. It seems too much of a cop-out. I mean, yes I get that ultimately she will age and lose fame, especially with the last line of "the enemy, time, in us all," and that her success is only temporary, but somehow a much more depressing "no-one-wins, especially-not-the-psychotic-actress" ending would have left me a little more content. But I guess a happy ending sells better.

-Carrie

Everyone Pretends

“Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don’t mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure, and nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36).  

 

I think it’s interesting that Chance regards the biggest conflict in life—that is, love—as a performance, because performance is, at its core, powered by imagination. Imagination can be more pessimistically viewed as the vehicle for pretending and, by extension, denial. 

There’s a lot of pretending in Sweet Bird of Youth. The Princess hires Chance to pretend to love her as she pretends that her reputation as the beautiful young star can be immortalized if she hides behind her makeup and aliases wherever she goes. Chance pretends that he still has a chance with Heavenly and that their love is true when in reality, he treats her as nothing more than a sexual object. He wants to pretend that he is successful around the people of his past by using the Princess’s resources; he believes that through this pretending he can get Heavenly back. I wonder what this trend of actors play-acting in real life in the plays we have been reading could be telling us.

While most of the pretending is for less than noble purposes, there are some that seem to have been inspired by benign intentions. That being said, I don’t know what to make of Boss Finley’s final act—pun intended—for his dying wife. He bought her the diamond pendant the day she died to allow her to pretend that she wasn’t close to death, and he pretended with her. The sweet gesture soured, however, when he promptly returned the pendant the next day after she died. He also mentioned that she didn’t stop pretending until the very end, so she must have had a less painful end. So should we pretend? Does it hurt less in the end if we lie to ourselves than if we confronted the reality and the pain of such confrontation head-on?

-Ly Pham