On “The Virgin Suicides” and Powerlessness

How Jeffrey Eugenides’s cult classic captures the most devastating human emotion.

Magdalena Styś
Story Lamp Reviews
Published in
5 min readDec 30, 2024

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The cover of “The Virgin Suicides.” Credit: Rakuten Kobo

Book: The Virgin Suicides. Date of Publicaiton: 1993. Genre: Coming-of-age. Publisher: FSG

From the first sentence of “The Virgin Suicides,” you know the Lisbon girls are going to die. The sound of turned pages acts like a ticking clock, letting you know how close you are to the inevitable. But as you continue reading, you discover the book is not really about the Lisbon girls — at least not in the way the narrators claim for it to be.

On the surface, “The Virgin Suicides” is about five teenage girls from a Catholic family, experiencing a sheltered adolescence in suburban Michigan, and how over the course of a year, they all die by suicide. Their story is narrated by a group of middle-aged men, who were infatuated with the girls and are attempting to unravel the circumstances of their suicides, decades after the fact. The lack of the girls’ perspective may be considered a shortcoming — after all, it’s impossible to know the reasoning behind a suicide without the victim expressing it, and the narrators’ explanations of the girls’ incentives are dreadfully banal. But the girls are dead from the beginning of the story, and although the first victim, Cecilia, kept a diary, no one can find an explanation for her death between its pages. The readers’ frustration grows as the narrators end the story with the statement that they “knew” why the girls took their lives, especially as their claim that “the beyond called” to Cecilia and her sisters followed suit isn’t supported by any textual evidence. However, it is exactly that frustration that gives “The Virgin Suicides” meaning, as at its core, the novel is about powerlessness.

Obviously to the reader, powerlessness manifests itself most clearly through the girls themselves. Aged 13–17, raised under their parents’ dysfunctional gaze, the Lisbon girls can barely leave the house by themselves, let alone form meaningful relationships with others. Mary Lisbon’s best friend, Julie Freeman, cuts ties with Mary after Cecilia’s death, with the excuse that “she sort of freaked her out”; Lux Lisbon’s relationships with boys are all chaotic and sensual, devoid of emotional intimacy. Their lack of agency only magnifies as the novel progresses — after Lux Lisbon returns from homecoming past her curfew, the girls are pulled out of school and leave the house only to go to the garden, while Lux is made to destroy or throw out her favourite rock records. In that rigid environment, the unstoppable force of self-inflicted violence seems the only possible solution to the immovable object of parental authority.

Despite keeping their children in a bell jar, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon aren’t formidable parental figures, either. The father’s aloofness and the mother’s neuroticism shine through their haphazard attempts to mould their family into a happy one: Mr. Lisbon pretends he doesn’t know the girls were pulled out of school, Mrs. Lisbon “believe[s] in keeping romance under surveillance” and keeps a supply of food and water in the basement in case of a nuclear attack. Their attempts to discipline their daughters prove themselves fruitless — lacking a support system, they eventually leave the suburbs and get divorced, never fully processing their relationship with their children.

The community in which the Lisbons and the narrators grow up is powerless in the face of tragedy, too — that powerlessness, however, appears more hidden, more avoidant. The milieu of the suburbs is everything you might expect, with debutante balls, meticulously kept lawns and casual racism. When the Lisbon girls start taking their own lives, their neighbours appear almost unaffected; teen suicide prevention campaigns are implemented, leaflets passed around, but toward the end of the novel, the neighbourhood is more concerned with a bad smell hanging above the area than the deaths. After all, it’s not their daughters that died. Adults are afraid, or simply don’t care enough, to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon about their kids; the girls’ school friends and partners prefer to focus their attention on other things. That perceived indifference is not as secure of an armour as it first appears, though; as the narrators interview the Lisbons’ acquaintances, it becomes evident that they feel connected to the girls in their own ways and try various techniques of regaining power in the miserable circumstances. Some claim they “had a feeling” about the girls’ fate; some politicize the tragedy, write it off as a representation of everything wrong with the nation. Not exactly grieving, but also not cheerful, the community finds something to be angry about or shifts its gaze completely while the neighbourhood continues to rot. The trees fall victim to pests, the lake is overtaken by algae, climate change impacts the yearly snowfall; the people, helpless in their fight with nature, connect it to a different situation that made them helpless as the narrators say Cecilia died “spreading the poison in the air.”

Perhaps the least self-aware, the narrators of the novel desperately search for meaning in their memories. At the time of recounting the story, they’re all well into adulthood, “with […] thinning hair and soft bellies,” and yet, they’re unable to cope with the suicides — more specifically, with the fact that they didn’t actually know the Lisbon girls that well. They’ve never gotten to know them well enough to talk about them, so they talk around them: instead of describing the girls’ psyches, they shift their attention to Lux’s tops, grocery lists, contents of Mrs. Lisbon’s medicine drawer. They call Cecilia’s diary “unusual,” pointing out that she “writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity” and simultaneously mirroring that technique in their own narration. They claim to love the Lisbon girls because, just like the Lisbons, those teenage feelings never had a chance to develop; the narrators weren’t given time to learn the difference between love and infatuation. The memory of the Lisbon daughters keeps the narrators paralysed, unable to grapple with the fact that they, just like the reader, will never know what pushed them to commit suicide.

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Story Lamp Reviews
Story Lamp Reviews

Published in Story Lamp Reviews

Book reviews, film recommendations, listicles, passionate rants — if it’s connected to books or films, you’ve found a place here.

Magdalena Styś
Magdalena Styś

Written by Magdalena Styś

Writer, linguistics student, gamedev-in-training. Doesn't shut up about semantics and Walt Whitman. Check out my work at magdalenastys.com.

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