The Virgin Suicide Analysis

„The Virgin Suicides”, the debut novel of Greek-American author Jeffrey Eugenides, first published in 1993, is a retrospective relation of now middle-aged men, who investigate the story of five sisters, their teenage years’ obsession. The girls, aged from thirteen to seventeen, daughters of strict Catholic parents, were the boys’ neighbours in the suburbs in Michigan, until one summer of the 1970s, when one of them committed suicide and the rest followed their sister’s steps a year later. The reader, left only with assumptions and blurry, idealised memories of the narrator, is not able to fully discover the reason behind sisters’ act, which triggered numerous researchers to investigate the novel in depth. Lisbons’ suicides were interpreted …show more content…
Thus, the essay will answer the question: how does Eugenides in “The Virgin Suicides” modify this dichotomy and merge two contrasting concepts of a virgin and a harlot? From the “single entity” of sisters, in which boys do not recognise the independent individuals, Cecilia, wielding a card of a Virgin Mary during her first suicide attempt, appear as an embodiment of a virgin, while Lux, shamelessly having sex with anonymous men on the rooftop of her house, manifests the harlot. The ways in which characters of Cecilia and Lux are described by the narrator will be investigated in order to show the duality of female sexuality during adolescent years and the consequences that these expected dual standards had for the young …show more content…
She remains to be defined by narrator and neighbours solely by her suicides, which reflect both sides of the dichotomy that she is subjected to. In her first attempt to kill herself, she slits her wrists in the bathtub of warm water “like a Stoic” (Eugenides), which suggests her presumed philosophical contemplation. Additionally, paramedics that come to rescue her are scared by her “tranquility”, thus the complacency associated with sinless and innocent. These elements show Cecilia as holy and spiritual but although she is “still virginal, […] her developing sexuality endangers her own purity” (Delva). The adjective “drugged” as well as her “yellow eyes of someone possessed” indicate her insanity and diabolicality, connecting her with the side of the sinful and deranged. Moreover, the narrator pays attention her growing breasts and the incompatible with her girly body “odor of a mature woman” she is giving off, which shows that the boys already look at her as on the sexual object, seeing her body as preparing to cope with the “harlot” nature of a woman. Despite this, the act of lifting Cecilia out on a stretcher is compared to the ancient virgin sacrifice ritual: the paramedics become “two slaves” offering “the drugged virgin” to “the altar” with a blessing of “a priestess brandishing a torch”, Mrs. Lisbon (Eugenides). The girl