I recently finished The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, which was lent to me by a dear friend. I’m very persuasive, it’s my fatal flaw, and so when I read a review before the actual book saying that it was a misogynist fantasy, I decided I also disliked it. But when I read The Virgin Suicides for myself, I couldn’t help but change my opinion. The book presents a story of young girls through the eyes of the boys who are attracted to them. The male gaze works as a storytelling tool instead of a way to minimise the girl’s identities.
Using the male gaze gave an insight into teenage boyhood. They’re curious, scheming, and inexperienced. Their innocence contrasts with the restless subject of their adoration, the Lisbon girls. These girls live in confinement, kept to themselves under the watchful eyes of their strict parents. My favourite part of The Virgin Suicides was an object of continuous description in the story, the house. Jeffrey uses language to show the reader, starting from the first suicide, the house going to ruin and eventually becoming a shrine to the first sister who took her life. I believe the house became filthy and broken down because the remaining Lisbons wanted it to remain the exact same as after the first suicide. The house became a metaphor for teenage life and the struggle to grow up while clinging to childhood.
It is not a secret that the interests of teenage girls are often made fun of and seen as shallow. There are two ideas of how women should act, childish or nurturing. Ever since secondary schools were invented, a new area has popped up in the middle of those two ascribed roles, adolescence. Movies, TV, books, and other mediums have attempted to define the ideal teenage girl. A key quality of the stereotypical teen is an affinity for trends which makes the ideal teenage girl an impossible pinpoint. When an ideal to strive for is undefined, it is up to the individual to define themself. We now have teenagers looking for their purpose in songs and movies and books and things deemed frivolous because they have nothing to do with trying to fit into a societal role.
In The Virgin Suicides, the boys describe their awkward state of not being a child and not yet a man, and the ways the Lisbons try to fit themselves into this world as well. As the house falls into disrepair and becomes more run down, so do the girls. They revert to a girlhood coded animal nature. At the end of the book the narrator says he believed the girls were beyond life, but I believe they were just teenagers full of pent-up rage. After the first suicide, the girls make an unspoken agreement to remain the same, they cling to the past and so in this space of resistance, we see the house begin to fall apart the same way the girls do.
The girls cling to the past, their childhood, by letting the house sit. At the end, the boys find the party from the beginning of the book in the basement while exploring the house. It had been left as it was while everything got dusty and corroded. The girls go to immense trouble to maintain their sister’s house, the way it was before she was gone. But time goes on and they also try to balance their memories with a fastly approaching future. Lux and Therese show their maturity, Lux makes herself known by having sex on the roof of their house and Therese was on track to attend an Ivy League university. While this is happening, the room begins to leak, and a horrible smell begins to permeate from the house. The house is connected to the girls as they move on, time wears on it, a constant reminder to them of moving away from Cecilia.
I can’t speak to the growing up experience for boys, no matter how many books there are written about it- and my goodness there are so many, I’ll never have that experience. But I can speak to the experience of being perceived by boys. The conclusion of the book is that there will never be a definitive answer to why the girls went through with it. I believe it was the unbearable weight of being constantly observed as they experienced bare vulnerability in front of all the people treating their lives like a drama. There is a desire to be released from perception, to be above it and able to just exist, the Lisbon girls never had that, and the weight of that life was suffocating them.