Ultra Femininity: The Virgin Suicides
TW: suicide, mental health, sexualization and sexual behavior
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 debut fiction novel. Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in the 1970s, the story follows the lives of the Lisbon sisters; five beautiful, mysterious, trapped, and ultimately cursed sisters: Cecilia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Therese (17). The story is told through the perspective of an anonymous group of adult men, who are reflecting on their eye-opening adolescence and the girl’s suicides. The novel has a 1999 film adaptation of the same name directed by Sofia Coppola.
The Virgin Suicides is a tale of young teenage girls living through the examination of the male gaze, and their perspective on what the American teenage girl should be. In The Virgin Suicides, and in American culture, girlhood and beauty are dictated by the male perspective which has no room for anything that cannot be sexualized.
Spoilers for The Virgin Suicides film and novel ahead.
THE EMBODIMENT OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND AMERICAN BEAUTY
The Virgin Suicides takes place in a small town in Michigan, the picture of the post-war American suburban dream. The Lisbon girls are keepsakes, and sex symbols, but also figures of the boy’s imagination. They’re the embodiment of what American beauty should be–young, thin, blonde, alluring, and sexy, but not in a “used way.” Cecilia is dubbed “the first to go” with her odd aura. Bonnie’s description is none other than an opportunity to point out her mismatched and crooked teeth, and her “nun-like” features. Mary is known for her widow’s peak, and the small hair above her upper lip. Therese was said to be clumsy, with her “heavier face” and her “cheeks and eyes of a cow.” Lux was the only sister out of the five to meet the boy’s expectations and gaze, and she “radiated health and mischief” and was teasingly playful and capturing. The perfect American girl should be fresh and pure, but also somewhat sexually experienced, but virginal. Lux was the light of the Lisbon sisters, and the true embodiment of what an American teenage girl should be.
Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s is the picture of the American dream. A child-friendly religious neighbourhood, a beautiful yet mundane home, and simple, alluring teenage girls that would never dream of losing their virginities until marriage. This is interrupted when thirteen-year-old Cecilia attempts suicide in the bathtub. She is found in time to save her short life, but her suicide in both the novel and film adaptation is portrayed as beautiful, with words describing how her naked and “budding” body looked while she bled, and how the scene is portrayed on screen as enchanting and magnetic, rather than disturbing. This is a perfect example of how the Lisbon girls are portrayed; through their beauty and girlhood. Girlhood in The Virgin Suicides is beguiling and alluring and seductive, with brazzers dangling on top of headboards, and half-used lipsticks next to childhood tiaras. Here, girlhood is not messy, or dark, ordreary, nor is it filled with depressive thoughts, because these things do not appeal to the male gaze the girls are watched through.
Girlhood is not always beautiful, and it is not something to be picked apart by those who do not understand it.
SOCIETY’S OBSESSION WITH TEENAGE GIRLS: WHAT A TEENAGE GIRL SHOULD BE
“On the morning that the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide–it was Mary this time–the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”
The story of the Lisbon sisters is not their own–as it is told from the perspective of the boys across the street, narrating the story as adults. The girls are portrayed almost as creatures; laughing, dancing, teasing, mysterious, and curious about the world. As described in the novel, and portrayed on screen, the girls live in a beautiful mess; canopies over their beds, blankets draped over their floors, brazzers hung from crosses on the walls, and half-used lipstick tubes perfectly placed. The boy’s perspective sexualizes and glorifies these young girls–as they don’t know them, and with their fate, they never will.
The girls are figments of the boy’s imagination. Yes, the girls are very much real, but through the boy’s eyes, they’re pure, yet sexualized creatures that are a mystery to them. The girls are something that the boys can desire and yearn for in their small, white suburban town.
The Lisbon girls represent what society and the male perspective think the girls should be–beautiful, yet simple, mysterious, but not off-putting, desired, but not out of reach. The boys do not really want to know the girls–they want to fix their pain, and save them from their overbearing, religious mother, and their good for nothing father all without realizing that the girls’ lives are not for them to fix, and not for them to save.
THE SEXUALIZATION OF THE TEENAGE GIRL
“He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, or stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassier, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.”
What else is a girl supposed to do, besides apply layers of crimson lipstick, not for herself, but for the males around her? What else is a girl supposed to cry about, besides losing her music and her touch to teenage culture? What else is a teenage girl supposed to want, besides going to a dance, and to ultimately lose her virginity?
The Lisbon girls are portrayed as innocent–yet ironic in the most teenage girl way, secretly, like they won’t give themselves up if not for a price. They are a part of the boy’s imagination; their sexual imagination, but the girls do not have a perspective to their own body, and their own sexual nature. It is instead in the perspective of the teenage boys, erasing any want, desire, or need the girls may or may not have.
Lux is perhaps the most sexualized out of all the Lisbon girls–as she’s described as beautiful in her tube top that her mother always asks her to cover up, yet rebellious in her habit of chain smoking in her bathroom since the age of twelve. In the novel, Lux has a habit of writing boy’s names on her underwear in place of lacey, girl-like lingerie. In the film, we see Trip’s name written on Lux’s underwear–as if it’s giving a hint to Lux’s budding sexuality, and foreshadowing what’s to come in the football field. Lux is the ultimate girl–pure, yet sexually experienced, soft, but rough around the edges, teasing, yet arousing, and playful.
The Lisbon’s girls' suicides are told from the boy’s perspective, narrated adult years later. Instead of the suicides being a defining moment in the girls’ lives, it's a defining moment in the boys’. They’re recreating the girls’ lives through Cecilia’s stolen diary, girlhood memorabilia, and word of the mouth remembrance from the girl’s lives. They never understand that the girls are their own entity outside of their perspective, and that they do not solely exist for their viewing and sexualization.
The readers and viewers never get to know the girls from their perspective. Like the adolescent boys, the readers are oblivious observers to their girls’ real pain and suffering. The readers receive a vague explanation of this agony, which was dubbed “the first to go.”
‘“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets... “Obviously doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”’ Cecilia doesn’t explain the suffrage of being a thirteen-year-old girl, as the experience cannot be understood by the boys and their tendency to put the Lisbon girls on a beautiful and out of reach pedestal of teenagehood and girlhood. Girlhood, to the boys, is alluring and dazzling, but to the Lisbon girls, the readers never know.
“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls. But that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms. Where they went to be alone for all of time.”
The boys, in the end, are calling to themselves. For the Lisbon girls, Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese could not hear them in death or in living.