Supernatural Elements In The Virgin Suicide

While reading The Virgin Suicides, I was struck by the fetishization of these teenage girls as well as how poorly the community and the Lisbon family itself handled these events. Eugenides' work was a well put together narrative, but frequently lingered for long passages of text on the physical bodies of these children, with the weak justification of being from the point of view of a collection of teenage boys, as if that makes it more acceptable. Moreover, the girls collectively fail to become fully developed characters in the narrative and only serve as a literary device for which the boys' story could be progressed. By the conclusion, I had a strong enough sense of where the narrative had failed the girls as characters and realized as part …show more content…
The original story relies heavily on supernatural imagery and a sympathetic environment, excluding the actual populace, to set the atmosphere and theme of the piece, revolving around death and decay. When writing the conclusion and making a pointed allusion to the girls' mostly passive portrayal in descriptions by the author such as in the reading of Cecilia's notebook (40), however, I realized the potential of an outside force manipulating the events of the story from within. The boys refer to the girls many times with imagery likening them to angels (143) and features heavy religious elements such as Bonnie's coping mechanism (159), the girls' description of their faces as wedding veils (5), and the girls' shrine for their lost sister (185). These passages indicate the obsession the boys exhibit towards the girls as a form of near worship, portraying them as holy even when their actions distinctly are not. The focus of redemption throughout this short story then develops greater meaning through literary context of the original novel by appropriating the existing religious imagery, therefore enhancing the message in relation to the other focus of this critique, that of