Confronting Our Obsession of Teenage Tragedies Through The Virgin Suicides
During the start of the pandemic last year, I was drowning myself in the pile of books I never got to read when my days were still much busier. One of these forgotten reads happened to be The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. True to its acclaim, this debut novel left more than a single thought in my mind when I finished reading it; that I was definitely recommending it to all my friends and that I might have to read it a couple more times because I wasn’t sure I grasped all the important details. Simply said, I had a feeling I wouldn’t stop thinking about this classic for a good while. It made me wonder: was I turning into a typical reader who obsessed over teenage tragedies?
The idea of people romanticizing books or films involving this genre of tragedy, misfortune, and trauma isn’t something foreign to anyone. Some of us may find it hard to admit, but it is a common category of people that we find ourselves falling into. We are prone to binge-watching a new series in one sitting just to finally see the dramatic twist at the end or to hear the tear-jerking backstory of our main character. This trend we find amongst film enthusiasts can be considered to be the equivalent to when readers mull over haunting stories like Eugenides’ novel.
Akin to the narrators of the story – who we can deduce to be the boys living in the neighborhood – we too are consumed with the idea of these adolescents. Adolescents living enigmatic lives we envy for and yet, lives we would never wish to live. Although the young Lisbon sisters of the novel were close enough for the boys to catch glimpses of and heighten their obsession over, they were always out of reach, never revealing to the boys and to the readers who they truly were.
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 treehouse, 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. (Eugenides 243)
At the end of the novel, we become aware that the boys narrating the story are no longer boys, but are fully grown men, evident by their “thinning hair” and “soft bellies.” From their youths to their elderly years, the boys have spent their entire lives fixating over the same five girls and their tragic ends. In spite of the Lisbon sisters committing suicide during their teens, at which these boys were of comparable ages, the memory of who these girls were to them still lingers in their minds. In their boyhood, it was normal to see them looking out their windows to catch sight of the girls at home or to imagine being at the end of Lux Lisbon’s sultry gaze. As adults, they continue to reminisce the memories of the girls by reliving each of their deaths and cherishing the items they left behind. Albeit these being echoes of the past forgotten by most locals, the boys proceed to hold onto them.
It can be said that the obsessive nature of the boys reflects our behavior in society. We have a strong tendency to select plots that feature complex and disturbing pasts over those with plain and customary upbringings. We desire stories with dynamic and round characters, not those with static and flat ones. The image of a brooding man often brings us to the edge of our seats, as we witness the moment he reveals his dark secrets to the young, naive woman he loves. And we relish whenever we see the main protagonist breaking down or fighting to change the ways of their past. Furthermore, we burn with curiosity to know the intentions behind Cecilia Lisbon’s decision to take her life and why her sisters chose to tread the same path.
Nonetheless, despite the whole book revolving around the lives of the sisters, the quotation above uncovers the disappointing truth to the boys’ unhealthy obsession – it didn’t matter to them why the girls killed themselves, all the boys cared for was that the Lisbon girls never answered to their call. Not before their suicides and not when the boys grew into men. Hence, we have to acknowledge the toxicity in which we cling to these characters. We are guilty of sticking our noses in their personal business, but we refuse to be closely involved in any way. Maybe the reason the boys in Eugenide’s novel hold the memory of the Lisbon sisters so dearly is because they aren’t ready to accept the fact that they weren’t what the girls needed; that running away with the boys and beginning new lives weren’t what they wanted. The boys merely observed the girls through their small binocular lenses and were preoccupied with assumptions they made from tiny glimpses. They were obsessed with the mysteriousness of the sisters, secluded in their home with an iron-fisted mother, and the idea of being the ones to bring them out of their misery. The boys, now adults, did not care for the truth, but rather for the memory of the Lisbon girls that would satisfy their continuous obsession.