Themes of The Virgin Suicides
Insufficient Memories
The narrators, now approaching middle age, continue to try to “find the pieces to put [the Lisbons] back together,” going so far as to travel around the country to interview former neighbors about their memories, including Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. At several points in the novel, they refer to pieces of evidence they have collected (including photos and diaries), the perspectives they have gathered, the knowledge they have collected—but none of it is enough for them to bring back what was lost or to prevent the Lisbon suicides
Religion
Religion plays an important role in the story of the Lisbon girls. Mrs. Lisbon, the girls' mother, is a deeply religious character who forces her will onto the rest of the family. The book is basically saying religion is the number one key thing in life that everyone should be apart of. The girls are not allowed to wear any makeup, or wear revealing clothing. They are only allowed out of the house to attend school during the week or church on Sundays. Her belief on the dogmas of the Catholic faith is represented by the image of Virgin Mary printed on a plastic card. Obviously, she would rather keep her daughters virgins, and at home. However, the evolving society that the Lisbon live in is making her attempt at preserving her daughters' virginity quite futile. Cecilia constantly wears a wedding dress, announcing in defiance of her mother that she is on the verge of giving up her virginity. Lux, the promiscuous one, despite being jailed inside her own home she ends up losing her virginity on a football field and having sex with random guys on the roof of her home.
Superficial Vision
Throughout the novel, the boys admit their inability to do any justice to the Lisbon girls' story. Yet they continue to try to describe the truth of the girls' lives. Their increasing dependence on visual data becomes a symbol of the boys' ability to catalog the details of the Lisbon girls' lives without ever sounding their depths. The emphasis on sight reflects a essential physicality, a gaze that stops at the skin. The boys have no more idea what goes on inside the girls' minds than they can see the girls' thoughts or look through the impenetrable walls of the Lisbon home.
Ordinary
Presenting the girls as ordinary, the novel knowingly tests the distance that humans tend to create between themselves and disaster. The girls kill themselves with ordinary objects, and see destruction where others saw simply tools. By portraying such mundane horror and asking what went wrong, the novel forces the reader's gaze inward.
Characters of the Virgin Suicides
- Cecilia Lisbon - Cecilia, the youngest of the Lisbon girls, age thirteen, is precocious and shy, and known even by her older sisters as the weird one of the family. In her first suicide attempt she slits her wrists during one of her baths, and begins the Lisbon cycle of tragedies. Her second, successful suicide attempt was when she jumps onto a spiked fence from the second story of her home.
- Lux Lisbon - Lux, the second youngest of the Lisbon girls, age fourteen, is devious, sexy, slim, adventurous, eventually promiscuous, and a secret smoker since the age of twelve. She is the most desirable one out of the Lisbon girls. Lux appears to act clearly and deliberately, leaving the neighborhood boys to wonder about her real plans. Lux's subsequent failure to make curfew after homecoming is what results in the sisters' confinement to the house. Lux kills herself by sitting in the garage with car running, getting poisoned from carbon monoxide.
- Bonnie Lisbon - Bonnie, the middle child in the Lisbon, age fifteen, has a washed out complexion and much taller than any of her sisters. She’s compliant, skittish, quiet, and very virtuous. As the Lisbon family’s relationships deteriorate, she starts sitting on the porch just before dawn, looking more emaciated each day, to recite the rosary. She hangs herself to end her life with her four other sisters.
- Mary Lisbon - Mary, the second oldest of the Lisbon girls, age sixteen, is proper, poised, and spends hours in front of the mirror. Her hair is the darkest of the sisters, and she has a slight mustache and a widow's peak. After her unsuccessful suicide attempt on the night of June 15th along with the other girls, Mary spends a month sleeping and obsessively showering while everyone seems to await her death. She dies a month after her sisters by overdosing on sleeping pills.
- Therese Lisbon - Therese, the oldest of the Lisbon girls, age seventeen, is scholarly, and captivated by science. She reads, grows seahorses, attends science conventions, and aspires to attend an Ivy League college. Physically, she is more awkward than her sisters, and is described as having a heavy face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and two left feet. She committed suicide from a combination of sleeping pills and gin.
- Mr. Lisbon - The father of the Lisbon family. A lean, retiring man with a high, boyish voice, Mr. Lisbon teaches math at the local high school. He has been a teacher for as long as anyone can remember, and he seems to enjoy his job and to throw himself into his work. Although he loves his daughters, he finds them to be complete strangers. Despite his accommodating nature, he often feels lost amid the flurry of femininity at home. Mr. Lisbon is intimidated by his domineering wife. He is unable to even try to challenge her opinion or change her mind. As the novel's tragedy unfolds, Mr. Lisbon withdraws further into his private world—he eats lunch in his classroom alone at school, he watches baseball obsessively, and after Homecoming he seems unaware of his wife's decision to keep the girls at home, as his fragile hold on reality begins to slip.
- Mrs. Lisbon - The mother of the Lisbon family. Mrs. Lisbon, a vehement, forceful matriarch, is the de facto head of the Lisbon household. With steel- wool hair and glasses, she bears little resemblance to her five daughters, leaving the boys to wonder how she could have produced them. She rules the house with an iron fist, strictly supervising the girls' activities. She is permanently suspicious of the outside world, with a firm belief that girls are best and happiest at home under a mother's watchful eye. Despite her forcefully maternal rhetoric, however, Mrs. Lisbon seems progressively uninterested or unable to attend to the physical welfare of her daughters, taking to her bed for weeks after Cecilia's death. Her housekeeping, fully average as the novel begins, rapidly disintegrates after the first suicide, as the house becomes a jungle of open cans, half-eaten food, mail-order catalogs, and dust.
- Trip Fontaine - The high school stud. Trip emerges from a simple childhood to become the most handsome boy in high school. Fully aware of his masculine power, Trip takes great care of his appearance. Trip cares little for school, and instead takes regular trips to his car to smoke marijuana and run a minor drug business on the side. Constantly, there’s young girls swooning at his every move. When Trip meets Lux and falls overwhelmingly in love, Trip has no idea how to pursue her, having always been the one pursued. Though he interacts with the neighborhood boys, Trip is not one of them, and is not part of the novel's narrative voice.
- The neighborhood boys - The narrators of the novel. "The neighborhood boys" are young teenagers from the same suburban neighborhood where the Lisbon girls live. They look back on the suicides from middle age, where they are still deeply haunted by the girls' deaths. The boys give the novel its unique point of view. They narrate the story as a way of making sense of the girls' actions, motives, and desires over the course of their final year of life. Aside from being in early teens with little experience of the outside world, these neighborhood boys have several points in common. First among these common points is an uncontrollable fascination for the circle of blonde teenagers that live in their suburban neighborhood. This attraction is driven by a curiosity that is obviously sexual, at least during the first half of the book. However, this curiosity evolves along with the story and turns into an all-out investigation set to discover the secrets of their blonde neighbors.
Plot Diagram
- Cecilia cuts wrists in bath.
- Small Chaperoned party for her recovery.
- Cecilia jumps out of window and impales self.
- Cemetery workers go on strike.
- Neighborhood boys snoop through Cecilia's diary.
- Period of mourning.
- Girls return to school and act as if nothing happened.
- Trip Fontaine falls in love with Lux.
- Trip doesn't make any progress with the Lisbon parents.
- Lux sneaks out into Trip's car and gets grounded.
- Neighborhood begins to remove "dangerous" objects.
- Lisbon girls keep to themselves even more.
- Trip Fontaine convinces Lisbon parents to allow daughters out to the homecoming dance with the neighbor boys.
- Trip and Lux get crowned homecoming king and queen.
- Trip and Lux make love on the football field.
- Trip abandons Lux on the football field.
- Mrs. Lisbon pulls girls out of school.
- Girls confined.
- Lux begins hooking up with random men on roof.
- Lux has a pregnancy scares, the doctors lies and says it was indigestion problems.
- Lisbon house seems desolate.
- Neighbor boys and Lisbon girls have phone conversations by playing music over the phone.
- Lisbon girls send a message to come over later with their signal.
- 20 minutes of waiting, the boys search the house.
- Discover of the sisters' suicides.
- Mary survives.
- Mary kills herself a month later.
- Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon move away.
- Neighborhood boys ponder the mystery of why everything happened on the Lisbon home.
Passage Analysis
"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."
This passage represents the boys' final elegy for the girls they loved and obsessed over. Despite a conscious attempt to reconstruct the events of their adolescence over the course of the novel, the boys realize that they are no closer to understanding the reasons for the girls' suicides. As the boys themselves grow older, their "thinning hair" and "soft bellies" signal the gradual approach of death. They must deal not solely with the lack of insight into the girls, but with the breakup of what little knowledge they have. These crumbling "pieces" are both abstract bits of knowledge and the disintegrating artifacts of the girls' lives that the boys have carefully collected and catalogued. Dismayed by this intrusion of the physical world, the boys in this passage systematically reject the physical categories of age and gender, which have informed so much of the book, as ultimately inconsequential. Instead, the boys nurse their unanswered love, mourning the selfishness of the girls, who disappeared without ever hearing their call or deigning to reply. Sure of the saving power of love, the boys must believe that their cries were never heard. They can never admit the possibility that their cries were heard and rejected, or heard and ignored, and that perhaps suicide is not simply the girls' ignorance, but their deliberate reply.
This passage represents the boys' final elegy for the girls they loved and obsessed over. Despite a conscious attempt to reconstruct the events of their adolescence over the course of the novel, the boys realize that they are no closer to understanding the reasons for the girls' suicides. As the boys themselves grow older, their "thinning hair" and "soft bellies" signal the gradual approach of death. They must deal not solely with the lack of insight into the girls, but with the breakup of what little knowledge they have. These crumbling "pieces" are both abstract bits of knowledge and the disintegrating artifacts of the girls' lives that the boys have carefully collected and catalogued. Dismayed by this intrusion of the physical world, the boys in this passage systematically reject the physical categories of age and gender, which have informed so much of the book, as ultimately inconsequential. Instead, the boys nurse their unanswered love, mourning the selfishness of the girls, who disappeared without ever hearing their call or deigning to reply. Sure of the saving power of love, the boys must believe that their cries were never heard. They can never admit the possibility that their cries were heard and rejected, or heard and ignored, and that perhaps suicide is not simply the girls' ignorance, but their deliberate reply.
Symbols
- Plastic card of the Virgin Mary - The plastic cards of the Virgin Mary on which the girls
scrawl their notes are copies of the same plastic card that Cecilia was found
holding during her first suicide attempt. In the Catholic tradition, Mary was
made pregnant by God in an act of perfect conception, thus giving birth to
Jesus while still a virgin. In keeping with Mary's many roles, the Lisbon
girls' invocation of the Virgin Mary is a complex tale, proposing a number of
possible interpretations.
- Lux's brassiere hanging on the crucifix - Lux's bra represents the girls' latent womanhood. In the
middle of teenage years, the girls are caught between the innocent asexuality
of childhood and the full influence of female eroticism. The bra on the
crucifix symbolizes Lux's sexual rebellion against all rules implied. Lux's bra
draped over Cecilia's crucifix symbolizes the critical narrative tension
between shy, retiring, suicidal Cecilia and vigorous, sexy, mischievous Lux.
Finally, the juxtaposition of lingerie, symbolizing fertility and sexuality,
and the crucifix, symbolizing sacrifice and death.
- Cecilia's wedding dress - Cecilia's vintage 1920s wedding dress is out of place, as is
Cecilia herself. Being 13, the wedding dress is in some ways simply ironic,
reflecting her precocious attempts to play different roles, like death, for
which no one thinks she is ready.
Cecilia's choice to wear the dress to her death suggests a kind of
ritual sacrifice in which a pure maiden's death is offered to please the gods.