The Virgin Suicides Analysis

In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” Nathanael falls in love with the object of his desires, the devastatingly gorgeous Olympia. Nathanael worships Olympia for her beauty, her muteness, and her lack of opinion. Eventually though, Nathanael realizes that Olympia is an automaton and has no substances because she is constructed merely to be the most perfect looking woman. Similarly, In Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides, The Lisbon sisters are worshipped solely for their bodies prohibiting them from having outward, recognizable personalities and lending to the community idolizing and fetishizing them. The sisters are given their identity by those around them, rather than choose it for themselves, and the boys in their suburb turn the girls into their own form of Catholicism. The boys both elevate the sisters to hypo …show more content…
Cecilia’s wedding dress “had sequins on the bust she didn’t fill out, either Cecilia herself or the owner of the used clothing store, had cut off the bottom of the dress with a jagged stroke” (Eugenides 24). The fact that Cecilia didn’t fill out the bust, and had cut the dress like a child suggest her overall innocence and prepubescent mind and body. The boys comment that Cecilia is weird, yet she is idolized because she represents, in the purest form, the untouchable, virginic Lisbon. The boys never speak to Cecilia, and after her death, their minds fill the holes that not knowing her had left. In doing so, the boys create a glossed over and photoshopped image of Cecilia according to what they want her to be, not who she was. Cecelia is the first to be idolized, but the boys’ turning Cecilia into an idol in death is the catalyst for the boys fetishizing the remaining sisters in life. The boys fetishize the sisters by dehumanize them and morphing their bodies together, but also by breaking their bodies down. “An image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads” is one of the ways the boys find fit to describe the