30 Years of The Virgin Suicides
Thirty years ago, American author Jefferey Eugenides published his debut novel The Virgin Suicides. First appearing as a chapter in The Paris Review years prior to its publication, the story was released to mild critical acclaim. Decades later, the novel is now heralded as a landmark in coming of age fiction, more potently the tale of the Lisbon sisters has been canonized in the collective consciousness of girls online. Set in the haze of 1970s American suburbia, the tale of five sisters who all commit suicide has found its heyday in the midst of a tumblr generation and continues to capture the adornment of young women online to this day.
I think I was maybe 14 or 15 years of age when I first read The Virgin Suicides. In spite of the falsity of my perceived self-determination at the time, I was led to buy a copy after being captured in the choke-hold of mid 2010s tumblr inspo of which the book was a necessary staple. That copy is close to 8 years old but could pass as an original version of an ancient text. Upon returning to my old copy for this piece, I was surprised to discover annotations I’d made years ago as I’d predicted the longevity of its words. It’s been read cover to cover countless times over, squashed into multiple bags, lent out to friends and friends of friends yet has somehow still made its return, though in a dishevelled state. The spine is cracked, the paper is now a burned tea-stained colored and the pages are curling at the edges as if to flirt with the temptation to cave in on itself. Standing now amongst the clutter on my bedroom windowsill, the physical structure somehow still holds up and the story contained within it, mimics a similar cultural perseverance.
Sometimes the most commanding, culturally defining stories can come from the most unlikely of voices. This book is a dramatic tragedy which unveils the inscrutability of teenage girlhood but Jeffrey Eugenides was just a guy attempting to write his first novel. Where did such a story come from and why exactly does it continue to resonate? Speaking of the book’s inception, Jefferey Eugenides recalls that the idea for the novel was inspired by his nephew’s babysitter who in her youth had attempted suicide, all of her sisters had. In a video interview with The Paris Review, the author states, ‘I was curious about it, I tried to ask her questions as to why but she couldn’t say anything, all she could say was we were just under a lot of pressure’.
The Virgin Suicides is a tale shrouded in mystery, a greek tragedy for the modern adolescent girl. It is a story shaded by loss, it’s written in the detritus of fruit flies which are scattered across the landscape, a jaded suburbia, haunted by the ghosts of mid-century conflict, anguished by the pressures of failing industry. The Lisbon sisters emerge as a product of their environment, at an impasse along the path from girls to women. They seek an escape route through suicide, a final assertion of agency against their circumstances which appear hopelessly predetermined, a life beyond the grips of their control. As the title of the novel suggests, the plight of the protagonists, held under the knife of their parents' protective impositions, symbolizes some sort of tragic conservation of their youthful femininity, warded from the decaying of time and experience – the final nail in the coffin of their stunted adolescence.
Halted at the tail-end of their girlhood, the Lisbon sisters exist only in the memory of the teenage boys who live in their town. It is through this point of view that the characterization of the girls is constructed and the story unravels. We follow the narration as a memory jigsaw is pieced together: spottings across bedroom windows, the slight brush of shoulders in the school hallway, a time capsule of knick-knacks, love letters, worn-underwear, the totem of a Virgin Mary prayer card. The gossip and objects which craft the image of the girls is held down through memory but destabilized by imagination. By telling the story from the omnipresence of a Greek chorus, Eugenides detaches the reader from the girls through a gender binary, our peephole is through the eyes of the teenage boys caught in the contingencies of lust and speculation. To rehash a popular theoretical term exhausted to death online, this paradigm lends itself quite literally to the pernicious dazzle of the male gaze. But rather than obfuscate the female characters of a sense of voice, the othering of the Lisbon sisters proves to illuminate the central theme of the story - the elusivity and sheer alienation of being a teenage girl.
In a recent piece in the Guardian, Eugenides responds to the assumption that the collective male narrative reifies his own POV as a male author, subjecting the experience of femininity in the novel to a series of misinterpretations and lack of understanding. Such readings of the novel in this way derive from larger debates surrounding the never-ending quest for authenticity - who is the rightful authorial voice, who has the ability to tell what stories? The redundancy of such a question is self-evident here, as the spatial distancing between the girls, the boy’s narrative and thus, the reader is precisely the point. The abject spectacle made of the Lisbon sisters who are held at a distance acutely symbolizes the inexplicable - the void of suicidal ideation, the loneliness of an impenetrable despair and how all of this exists in the mystery of the unknown. Besides, such criticisms of falsifying authorial representations are proven defunct once the impact of the book on a generation of young women is even briefly taken into account. In defense of the novel’s narrative positioning, the author identifies how this grey zone allows for the reader to elicit their own imaginations of the Lisbon sisters.
Perhaps, it was in the year 1999 that the image of Lisbon sisters began to form its cultural footprint through the imagination of indie film sweetheart, Sofia Coppola. Like Jefferey Eugenides’ debut novel, the films of Sofia Coppola have harnessed a distinct fanaticism amongst a milieu of young women who grew up on the internet. Also her feature debut, Coppola’s interpretation of The Virgin Suicides is colored by a pastel palette, washed over by shoegaze. The film adaptation illuminates the haze of teenage yearning and the isolation of girlhood central to the novel, all characteristics which would grow to define the style of Coppola’s filmography. Both Eugenides and Coppola were working before the enclave of tumblr aestheticism began to cement itself online, yet they were able to tap into a semblance of something universal and long-lasting, albeit something that has spiraled into a cultural parody that continues to flourish at the risk of eating itself.
Revisiting The Virgin Suicides thirty years on, the references and iconoclasm in the novel and Coppola’s adaptation seem to be uncannily reflected decades later in the tumblr posts of the 2010s. Whether it be the image of a crucifix draped with a brasserie, Bonnie’s history paper on Simone Weil or Lux moodily smoking cigarettes on the rooftop at sunrise, it’s not hard to imagine the havoc the Lisbon sisters would wreak if they too had access to the corners of internet that their admirers populate.
The Virgin Suicides now exists in the paradigm of ‘sad girl’ literature alongside other tumblr hallmarks like Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Images of the blonde-haired Lisbon clan can often be found on the moodboards of ‘tortured girlhood’, next to contemporaries such as Effy Stonem in Skins and Lisa Rowe (played by Angelina Jolie) in Girl Interrupted, all of whom dance with idea of lost innocence, burgeoning sexuality and female isolation. This bricolage of cultural references is usually characterised by categories such as ‘coquette’, ‘girl-blogging’, ‘femcel’ and so on. All individually defined terms in their own right, these aesthetic and rhetorical realms become associated and subsequently synonymous through their adjacent approximation to feminine despair, a central theme of the novel, making it the glue which merges these ‘subcultures’ together.
The criticism which is often leveraged against the milieu of ‘tumblr’ girls who aestheticise even the most traumatic details of their inner lives online, is that it somehow glamorises suffering to a point of trivialisation. The mimetic basis of the internet means that anyone can join the club, but once the devastating particularities of experience become universal, the potential for forgery is ripened. But it would be a wild misreading to assume that the lasting legacy of The Virgin Suicides is merely a dangerous proponent of a suicidal larp.
“You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”
As the iconic line delivered dryly by Cecilia Lisbon as she sits upright in a hospital bed reads: ‘Obviously, Doctor you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl’. The quote rings as some sort of mantra for the book as a whole. It summarizes the basis of the narrative which recognises that the attempt to solve the mysteries of adolescence is a dubious pursuit. In a ceremonious sequence, the Lisbon sisters all kill themselves and we are left with no answers as to why. Instead, we’re compelled to stew over the pertinence of what has been told - the undeniable truth which negates the misunderstandings of its critics: that girlhood is at once dark, beautiful and traumatic.
Trickling outside the sequestered zone of girl-posting, The Virgin Suicides has found a new home base in the wider cultural zeitgeist. As part of their Fall/Winter 2021 collection, Heaven by Marc Jacobs paid homage to Coppola’s adaptation, featuring images of Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon shot by Corinne Day. The pastel tinged hue of teenage malaise was repurposed in a matching blouse and skirt set, a hoodie and a crossbody bag, so that the story once heralded in art and life, could now be celebrated through commerce. Recently at an airport bookshop, I spotted the novel shelved in the section titled ‘Tik-Tok made me buy it’. Copies of Eugenides' story lay next to titles by authors frequented on ‘book-tok’ such as Colleen Hoover, stacked on top of each other like a pyramid scheme for the viral novel. It seems then that the story which launched a cult of melancholic girlhood, distinct in its digitalisation, has unleashed a chain of inspiration across mediums of fashion and film, ultimately rendering its fanbase into a consumer market.
It’s debatable whether the ‘integrity’ of the novel’s fanbase has now been compromised in wake of its resurgence of popularity into more mainstream cultural outlets. If anything, the re-discovery by a younger generation of Gen-Z readers speaks more to the timelessness of the story and the impact it continues to permit in spite of cultural permutations. It is no coincidence then that the novel has inspired the collective imagination of a generation of young girls, young girls who primarily grew up on the internet. The defining trickery of the internet is that in the search for connectivity, one is often left isolated from their surroundings and most devastatingly themselves. Though set in a pre-internet world, the ambience of alienation is central to almost every aspect of The Virgin Suicides. The story makes the insistence that the weight of interpersonal and social conflict is felt most heavily in youth.
By killing themselves, the Lisbon sisters bargained for a twisted preservation of their youth in death. A collective act and attempt to console an unnamed, shared experience of teenage despair. The death of the characters in Eugenides’ novel then becomes a symbolic martyrdom for a generation of girls online who also seek for a method of immortalizing their experience of girlhood. For that reason alone, The Virgin Suicides has solidified itself as a timeless classic which will continue to be passed down through generations of daughters at the cusp of their youth.
Sinead Campbell is a writer and guest columnist for Delude Magazine. You can find more of her work here.