Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides

            My goal this semester is to study structure in the novel, both overall and granular. This might not have been the best novel to read first! I see a general structure based on the suicides of the five Lisbon girls, starting with Cecilia and ending with Mary, both of whom try to kill themselves twice, with the other three sisters committing suicide all at once near the end of the novel. The structure lies beneath an obscuring stream of consciousness storytelling style, combined with the narrators’ constant undercutting of their own reliability. Even as the narrators tell us one fact, they contrast it with someone else’s idea of what happened, leaving the reader no firm foundation to understand any of the events. The chapters divide the novel into sections that mark the Lisbon girls’ transition from normal members of society into isolated and doomed objects of morbid fascination.

            The structure makes me consider whether inevitability is built right into this novel, but of course memory makes everything that happens seem inevitable after the fact. Once Cecilia makes her first suicide attempt, her family’s reaction seems to lock the other girls into the same fate. The Lisbon parents drive the events leading to the deaths of Cecilia’s sisters, but the narrators, who are remembering their experiences as teenage boys, paid almost no attention to the parents at all, so we’re left to deduce almost everything about them. All of the young people in the novel seem to consider parents more or less faceless obstacles, but everyone treats Mrs. Lisbon in particular as a monolith, as though she merely stands there in the way and everyone batters themselves to death against her.

            Of course, the unreliability of the narrators makes me want to figure out what really happened, what went on in that household to drive five young women to kill themselves, to pick apart the layered stories and lies and hearsay and misinterpretations and decide on the truth. But it seems clear that the structure of the novel performs its work extraordinarily well if that’s not possible. The collage-like nature of the novel echoes memory in its fragmentary scraps of contradictory images colored by emotion and hormones and self-justification and regret. The constant references to the various photographs and exhibits collected by the narrators give the work a scrapbook feeling. And the neglectful curators have lost some of the pieces, while allowing others to decay or fade.

            I’m aware I’m talking about two different things here. One is the granular structure, as the story moves along sentence to sentence. The other is the overall structure, the way that events are bookended by Mary’s suicide, so that we know from the beginning that all of the girls will die. Setting up the novel this way puts the reader’s focus squarely on how this happened, what really happened, how it could be possible for such a horrific tragedy to unfold. Everyone must have seen it coming, yet no one stepped in, not until the narrators showed up on the last day with a too small car, when the remaining four sisters already had plans in place to kill themselves. Didn’t they? There really was no escape from that house, was there?

            Upon rereading the beginning of the novel, I was surprised to find that several of the sisters were away at camps and so on, not just out of the house, but out of their parents’ control. They really were allowed fairly normal lives until Cecilia’s suicide. And I was surprised to notice on rereading that the house was originally going to be put up for sale because the family had grown too big for it, making the decline, disrepair, gutting, and sale at the end especially sad. The house and the family echo each other, another beautiful structural method, one that reminds me of my favorite definition of the gothic novel, by Sarah Rees Brennan: “girl meets house.” Ultimately that’s the key to this novel, because in a gothic novel, a girl encounters a house and overcomes its trap, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, but none of the Lisbon sisters can escape this particular house, even when they can escape to roam the town at night.

            How can I avoid seeing Pride and Prejudice, the gothic novel gone right, in these sisters and their controlling mother and vaguely dissociative father? If Mrs. Lisbon had tried to marry them off rather than prevent them from ever coming into contact with the opposite sex (and failing abysmally at that) the story might have had a Darcy and a Bingley, and more importantly, a Pemberley and a Netherfield, instead of the ludicrous dreamboat Trip who “scores” on the football field’s goal line with Lux, triggering the lockdown that leads to the end of all of them. Mrs. Bennet seems like a lot less of a dope once Mrs. Lisbon comes around. Lock your daughters down like criminals or prey and all you get is Wickham.

            I credit author Joan Aiken with giving me a taste for the modern gothic novel, while Sarah Rees Brennan articulated her ideas about the genre in online discussions and illustrated the ways much of modern young adult fiction stands firmly on that foundation, both in its supernatural or paranormal subgenres and in realistic young adult fiction. What could be more about coming of age than the gothic novel? I’m considering pursuing the modern gothic for my essay semester all of a sudden. My own writing constantly investigates these themes and I’m endlessly fascinated by the ways young women and their houses in fiction enact freedom and adulthood—or their opposites—upon each other.