The Virgin Suicides, written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published in 1993, is a remarkably astute novel focusing on the lives of the doomed Lisbon sisters, five young teenage girls who all commit suicide to the horror and bafflement of their family and neighbours. Set in a wealthy suburb in late 1970s Detroit, Eugenides reveals everyday middle-class American suburban life as a site of repressed fear and violence, with willful ignorance playing a catalytic role in its dynamic.
Suburban disillusionment is a constant motif throughout the novel, demonstrating the fragile nature of the neighbourhood’s community, and the hollow promise of the American Dream ideal. The desperation of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants to live the typical American life, with a nuclear family and comfortable home, is emphasised by the repression of their European identities and roots. In order to better assimilate to white American identities, families of Italian, Greek, and Polish origin seek to abandon their ethnic pasts.
However, in doing this they arguably allow themselves to conform to the criteria of the quiet suburban life, one of which is refusal to acknowledge any crack in the idyllic facade of their community. Despite this, the girls’ suicides challenge the deep-rooted suburban belief that wealth and privilege can provide protection from any hardship or sorrow. They act as social disruptors and consequently alienate themselves from the neighbourhood that lacks the courage to recognise their suffering.
Furthermore, the tragedy of the Lisbon sisters did not have to be a tragedy; the girls are ultimately sacrificed because of the neighbourhood’s obsessive desire to protect their community by choosing sameness and safety over reality. The neighbourhood tries to explain the suicides away as an anomaly or something related to the apparent sickness “at the heart of the country”, but refuse to see the issue for what it simply is. Ironically, the one thing the sisters craved the most was the exact same thing the neighbourhood aspired to: a life full of normality.
The Virgin Suicides reveals the mundane and comfortable suburbia to be teeming with hardship and suffering, contradicting the narrator’s nostalgic and romanticised version of it. In highlighting the illusory nature of the suburban neighbourhoods, Eugenides underscores the false sense of security, freedom, and support within those environments. Similarly, the unknowability of the people closest to us prompts the reader to question their own lives and the transparency of them.
Book Cover of “The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides