Pushed to the Brink

After reading the first half of The Virgin Suicides, I was actually taken aback by how easily I could relate to the text. I agree with Kate that overall, the book is super male-gazey, but I think that's the point. Eugenides does employ a male narrator who is effectively "gazing" upon the Lisbon sisters, however, I don't think this detracts from the novel as a whole. The story is told as a recollection of memories from the boys, and it is only a partial recollection. The narrator tries to piece together any sort of detail he can to do justice to the Lisbon girls' story, but it isn't enough to bring back what was lost. Also, the boys rely heavily on what they see, and what they perceive, but their gaze is only skin-deep. They have essentially no idea what is going on in the sisters' heads and they also have limited access to the Lisbon home. And by default, we have the same limited access.

The book focuses heavily on the boys' intrigue and fascination with the girls from a distance. Both the boys and the Lisbon sisters have only ideas of each other to dwell on because they have so few actual encounters. Mrs. Lisbon is sure to keep their interactions to a minimum, just as she is sure to keep her girls in line. The girls can't wear makeup, they can't affiliate with boys, etc. Mrs. Lisbon traps the girls in isolation and in effect, makes each of them different from the other girls in the neighborhood. Which we all know is, as an adolescent, the worst-possible thing to be-- "different". The girls are all developing into women, but they are deprived of any sort of autonomy in the process, which is sure to cause some tension.

When it comes down to it, their only possible escape is death. Just as Mrs. Buell says on page 15 (about Cecilia) "That girl didn't want to die, she just wanted out of that house..." We already know that all of the sisters are going to commit suicide, and I hypothesize that Mrs. Lisbon is the one to blame. It will be interesting to see as I read further whether it is the girls' isolation that leads each of them to the brink.

-Kayla

Life Suxxx

“Obviously doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” And obviously, neither have I. So I can’t really relate at all. I can’t comment on my experiences as a thirteen-year old girl, and how/if they may be at all similar to Cecilia’s. However, I felt like there was a weirdly erotic tone to the way Cecilia was described.

I found it interesting to think of Cecilia through Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze, and Butler’s concept of performativity. And honestly, in terms of the male gaze, I don’t know how much is actually there, because after all we mostly see her self-mutilating (You can only be so erotic when it comes to suicidal thirteen year olds).  Yet the way we are constantly told about how all the other children were concerned with how the Lisbon sisters viewed them. In fact, it is revealed to us that many of the boys “had fallen in love with [Cecile], but had kept it to [themselves], knowing that she was the weird sister” and that they all looked up her dress when she rode her bike to see her black underwear. So there is some aspect of a male gaze by the other characters. It’s hard for me to imagine much of an erotic reaction from the reader due to the explicit detail we are given at both of Cecile’s suicide attempts.

In terms of performativity, I think the white wedding dress Cecile wears is quite telling. This young girl is already buying into the expectation of marriage. She is performing her role of a woman, and I think her comments to the doctor indicate this as well. He’s never had to perform the role of a girl. And there is a lot of fascination about girls throughout the book. Whether it’s in terms of the menstrual cycle, underwear, breasts the female anatomy is analyzed, and the role of being a woman is analyzed. Maybe Mr. Buell was right… “That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house”, she just wanted to get out of her role.

-Ameet

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

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.