The Virgin Suicides

“Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

The novel contains little dialogue, so when it’s present, it serves a significant purpose. When Cecilia is taken to the hospital after her first attempt, the doctor questions her motivations, given that so much of her life remains ahead of her. Cecilia’s response is telling because it alludes to a larger issue that many youth, especially young girls, of her era felt, which was a disappointment in the world they inherited, and supports the theme of The Death of the Future.

“The Virgin Mary has been appearing in our city, bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world.”

When Cecilia first attempts to die by suicide, she’s found holding a card with the Virgin Mary on the front and this conspiratorial message on the back. The message, along with the symbolism of the Virgin Mary, suggest that Cecilia was commenting on the degradation of the planet and of society and how the only way to avoid degrading with it was to die while still in a pure state.

“He was trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again.”

In describing Cecilia’s death, the text incorporates vivid imagery to convey the severity, shock, and horror of the moment. In dying, Cecilia leaves the mystery of her sorrows to speculation for the rest of time, which the piercing of her heart symbolizes. The white dress she wore is torn, symbolically releasing her from what held her down.

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl […] We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

The boys’ objectification of the Lisbon girls is their defining feature, and their obsession with the girls is their reason for being, even in middle age. Upon reading through Cecilia’s diary, the boys feel as if they’re one with her and with all girls on the verge of womanhood. They realize that they’re merely side-players in the lives of what they consider mysterious and magnificent creatures.

“Grief made them wander.”

The text’s usually lengthy sentences are occasionally punctuated by short ones like this, which tend to stand out and demand attention. After Cecilia’s death, the Lisbon girls cope in unusual ways, as the theme of The Effects of Loss explores, and often wander around the suburb at night, as though their sister’s death has robbed them of direction and motivation in life.

“At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.”

During their interviews years later, both Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon comment on the strange nature of parenthood and how having children doesn’t mean that a parent will know, understand, or even have anything in common with their children. The text emphasizes this even more after Cecilia’s death, when both the parents and children shut down, and no one is capable of supporting each other through their mutual loss, foregrounding the theme of The Effects of Loss.

“The girls, on the other hand, entered through the side door, past the bed of dormant daffodils tended each spring by the headmaster’s slim, industrious wife.”

While the girls are still attending school, they slowly start to slip away from the social world and from the curiosity and attention of their peers. They seem not to want to be seen or spoken to, and their usual practice of entering the school through a side door to avoid attracting notice symbolizes their desire for isolation or privacy. The text also uses alliteration in its imagery of the “dormant daffodils” that grew near the door.

“Most people never taste that kind of love.”

Like the adult boys who narrate the story, Trip Fontaine feels a sort of spiritual obsession with Lux Lisbon and becomes determined to date her. In an interview years later, he admits that he has never since experienced a feeling like that, affirming the boys’ objectification of the Lisbon girls.

“In the past, fall began with a collective rattle in the treetops; then, in an endless profusion, the leaves snapped off and came floating down, circling and flapping in updrafts, like the world shedding itself. We let them accumulate. We stood by with an excuse to do nothing while every day the branches showed growing patches of sky.”

The changing of the seasons illustrates the passage of time in a suburb that, for the most part, is always the same. The leaves begin to fall, signifying that the summer in which Cecilia died is ending, and people of the neighborhood begin to move on with their lives. The imagery in this passage is extremely vivid, describing the way the leaves fell and the mesmerizing effect of this change in exposing the bare sky.

“All the healing was done by those of us without wounds.”

During the school’s delayed day of mourning for Cecilia, the Lisbon girls don’t attend the events and ceremonies, so the only ones who ironically benefit from it all are those who were least affected by Cecilia’s death. Meanwhile, the Lisbon girls fall further and further into despair, and the boys merely watch them from afar; this becomes their biggest regret when they look back on this time in their lives.

“Here you have them as we knew them, as we’re still coming to know them: skittish Bonnie, shrinking form the flash; Therese, with her braincase squeezing shut the suspicious slits of her eyes; Mary, proper and posed; and Lux, looking not at the camera but up in the air.”

Alliteration runs through these lines in a consistent and fluid fashion as the photograph of the Lisbon girls is described with luscious imagery. The little that the photo reveals of the girls’ personalities enhances the boys’ descriptions, as each girl’s pose symbolizes her overall disposition toward the world.

“Gripping one another, pulling each other into the frame, they seem braced for some discovery or change of life. Of life. That, at least, is how we see it. Please don’t touch. We’re going to put the picture back in its envelope now.”

While the text occasionally suggests that the boys are narrating their story to someone directly, this is the only moment in which it fully breaks the fourth wall as though the boys are sitting with someone and sharing their photographs, artifacts, and memories. The boys’ concern for the photograph’s integrity and preservation highlights the theme of Romanticizing the Past.

“We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”

At the dance, Therese talks to the boys and comments on how the girls’ social and physical confinement has trapped them in their despair. The girls wanted a normal life, but after Cecilia’s death, they perceived that the world and even their own parents essentially expected them to vanish or to stay hidden.

“The window shades had closed like eyelids and the shaggy flower beds made the house look abandoned. In the window where the one light burned, however, the shade rippled. A hand peeled it back, revealing a hot yellow slice of face—Bonnie, Mary, Therese, or even Lux—looking down the street.”

After the girls are fully isolated, they quickly become like spectral figures in their own home. Their ghostly shadows are visible behind the curtains at night, and the boys continue to watch the house, doing nothing. The text uses a simile to describe the closed window shades and to personify the house as an entity that takes on the slowly escalating despair of the Lisbons themselves.

“Her thrashing, cries, scowls of agony only emphasized the inertness of Cecilia, whom we now saw in memory as even deader than she had actually been.”

Lux finds a way to escape the house temporarily by faking appendicitis, and her exit from the house on a stretcher contrasts with Cecilia’s exit months earlier. While Cecilia was already gone, Lux is very much alive. Here, the boys allude to the unreliability of their memories.

“Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls’ throats. In the morning, a soft oral thrush had sprouted over their tonsils. The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world’s light seemed dim. They rubbed their eyes to no avail.”

In this extended metaphor, the boys comment on how, after Cecilia’s death, the depression and hopelessness that can lead to death by suicide spread through the family, likening it to the spread of a virus. After being isolated, the girls lose what whimsy and will they still had, instead succumbing to this new contagion. The Lisbon girls’ slow decline illustrates the theme of The Effects of Loss.

“We could imagine what the girls felt inside because we knew what they were eating. We could share their headaches from wolfing ice cream. We could make ourselves sick on chocolate.”

While Mr. Lisbon is still going to work, he brings home snacks for the girls. The boys observe this and then eat something similar in order to share a sense of the girls’ lives and feelings. The boys’ obsession and objectification occasionally verge on delusion, and this is one such instance, because it’s ultimately just a shallow and meaningless attempt to understand the girls without any real connection involved.

“Even the sound of the tub running made us blush, her muffled voice coming over it, complaining of aches while the Black lady, none too young herself, coaxed her in, the two of them alone with their decrepitude behind the bathroom door, crying out, singing, first the Black lady, then Old Mrs. Karafilis singing some Greek song, and finally just the sound of water we couldn’t imagine the color of, sloshing around.”

The imagery in the description of the elderly grandmother of one of the boys palpably and directly conveys the scene. The elongated sentences with several commas, as if to replicate a tangent or enthusiastic speaker, enhances the effect.

“Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.”

The boys’ obsession over the Lisbon girls proves their greatest weakness and flaw, because despite their endless scrutiny of the girls, they failed to see that it was necessary to act and to reach out to them directly. When they finally try to connect with the girls, it’s too late: The girls have already decided to die.

“Any second an upstairs window might open, breaking its seal of fish flies, and a face would look down at us for the rest of our lives.”

As the boys approach the Lisbon home on the night of the deaths, they search for signs of life in the windows. This quote exemplifies the power of nostalgia and how the boys’ enhanced memories of the past followed them well into adulthood, again highlighting the theme of Romanticizing the Past. Each time they interacted with the Lisbon girls, even from afar, those memories were imprinted on them forever.

“The mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls’ lives.”

The boys find Bonnie in the basement, hanging from a beam and already dead. They stare up at her, realizing that they were nearby all along but always failed to act. Bonnie’s death joins Cecilia’s as a mystery whose answer will never be fully found.

“The Lisbon girls, on the other hand, like something behind glass, like an exhibit.”

Even in death, the Lisbon girls are objectified and viewed as angelic, otherworldly, or some sort of mythical prize to be won. The coroner report describes their bodies as pristine and compares them to an exhibit in a museum; ironically, this is exactly how the girls spent their lives, being viewed from behind glass but never approached.

“Still, we do have the image of Mrs. Lisbon turning toward the street and showing her face as never before […] she turned, she sent her blue gaze out in every direction, the same color gaze the girls had had, icy and spectral and unknowable, and then she turned back and followed her husband into the house.”

Although Mrs. Lisbon seldom reminds the boys of her girls, when she returns home from their funeral, the relation becomes clear. She carries the sorrow of all her children, which she passed on to them, and the mysterious quality that the girls shared is evident in their mother as well.