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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Virgin Suicides, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal
Coming of Age and Nostalgia
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty
Summary
Analysis
A Greek chorus of neighborhood boys rehashes the details of Mary Lisbon’s suicide. She was, the boys clarify, the last Lisbon sister to take her own life, dying from an overdose of sleeping pills just like her sister, Therese. When the paramedics arrived to put Mary on a stretcher, the boys were already used to seeing them pull up in the ambulance and saunter inside—they knew the two men wouldn’t move as quickly or with as much drama as paramedics do in movies. And the paramedics themselves knew exactly where to go in the Lisbon house because they’d been there several times before, as all of the Lisbon sisters had died by suicide within the last 13 months.
The first thing that strikes readers about The Virgin Suicides is that it’s narrated not by a single character but by an entire group of boys. The function of this narrative device isn’t immediately clear, but it still establishes a sense of voyeurism that will run throughout the rest of the novel. As the neighborhood boys begin to tell the Lisbon sisters’ tragic story, readers feel as if they themselves have been swept up in the drama. Right from the beginning of the novel, then, the narrative invites readers to participate in the neighborhood’s morbid fascination with the Lisbon family and its misfortune.
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The boys narrate the Lisbon sisters’ tale, explaining that Cecilia—the youngest—is the first daughter to die by suicide. Of all the Lisbon sisters, she stands out the most, since she always wears a vintage wedding dress cut short above the knees. When she slits her wrists in the bathtub in June, the paramedics are so stunned by her troubling, nearly lifeless serenity that they hesitate before lifting her out and putting her on a stretcher. When they finally move her, they find a laminated card depicting the Virgin Mary clutched firmly in Cecilia’s hands.
Cecilia is the first Lisbon sister to attempt suicide, but the novel has already made it clear that she won’t be the last. In fact, it has already been established that all of the Lisbon sisters will take their own lives. But readers don’t yet know why this is the case. To that end, knowing that all of the sisters eventually die by suicide only makes readers more curious about what will happen to the girls throughout the rest of the novel. In a way, readers are in the same position as the neighborhood boys—that is, confused and eager to understand what drives the sisters to suicide.
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The Greek chorus of neighborhood boys interrupts itself to explain that they’ve tried to put all of the photographs related to the suicides in chronological order. As they peruse the various pictures, they often quote people from the neighborhood, whom they’ve interviewed about the Lisbon girls in the intervening years—they’ve even talked to Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon about their daughters. They then pick up their story again, talking about watching Mrs. Lisbon get into the back of the ambulance with Cecilia while Mr. Lisbon follows in the family station wagon, obeying the speed limit all the way to the hospital.
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Therese and Bonnie Lisbon are both away when Cecilia cuts her wrists in the bathtub, but Mary and Lux are in the neighborhood. They come running home and enter the bathroom to see their sister’s blood curling in the bathwater. They then go outside and hug in the yard while Cecilia is taken away. All the while, the boys watch the two sisters while men from the local Parks Department work nearby on one of the neighborhood’s dying elm trees, spraying insecticide on the infected limbs. A picture of this elm tree is visible in a picture of the Lisbon house, which is “Exhibit #1.” Because of the ruthless fungus brought on by Dutch elm beetles, the tree has long since been cut down.
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There are five Lisbon sisters: Cecilia is 13, Lux is 14, Bonnie is 15, Mary is 16, and Therese is 17. The boys don’t understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon have made such beautiful daughters. Mr. Lisbon is a math teacher at their school and is, by most accounts, quiet and reserved, though none of the boys know him very well outside of the classroom. Boys, after all, aren’t allowed in the Lisbon house.
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The only neighborhood boy who manages to infiltrate the household is Peter Sissen. Because he helped Mr. Lisbon install a scale model of the solar system in his classroom, Mr. Lisbon invites him over for dinner. Throughout the meal, the Lisbon girls—except for Bonnie—kick Peter under the table and shoot him looks. At one point, he excuses himself and goes to use the bathroom upstairs, glancing into the girls’ rooms and bringing back stories of seeing their underwear on the floor, their old stuffed animals, and even a bra hanging on a crucifix. He also finds Mary’s makeup, which she has hidden in a sock beneath the bathroom sink. Along with lipstick and concealer, there’s some wax in the sock, which signals to the neighborhood boys that Mary waxes her upper lip.
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While in the bathroom, Peter Sissen finds a used Tampax in the trashcan. He wants to fish it out and bring it to the other boys, thinking it’s actually quite beautiful. But then Lux knocks on the door, and he guesses by her eagerness to get into the bathroom that she’s the one on her period—the Tampax, he reasons, belongs to her. He comes back to his friends with these tales from the Lisbon household.
Hearing Peter Sissen’s stories about the Lisbon house, Paul Baldino announces he’s going to get into the house himself and see things even more extraordinary than Peter did. Everyone knows Paul’s father, Sammy “the Shark” Baldino, is a mob boss. The family lives in a mansion, and Paul is used to seeing tough Italian American men visit his father at all hours. Paul himself is tough and confident, and though the other boys are friends with him, they’re also intimidated by his presence.
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Rumor has it that Paul’s father built an underground network of tunnels beneath their house, making it easier for him to escape the police at a moment’s notice. The tree in the Baldino family’s front yard was cut down and replaced with a cement stump painted to look real. There’s a metal grate in the middle of the stump, and though Paul tells his friends it’s nothing more than a barbecue pit, they know it must have something to do with Sammy “the Shark” Baldino’s escape tunnel.
As rumors circulate about Sammy “the Shark” Baldino building an escape tunnel, Paul Baldino starts appearing in his neighbors’ basements, crawling up next to their boilers and through their cellars. He claims he’s just playing in the storm drains beneath his house, but the neighborhood boys suspect he’s using the escape tunnel. And this, of course, is how he comes to find himself in the Lisbon house. Having bragged that he would see the Lisbon sisters taking showers, he makes his way into their basement. Nobody seems to be home, so he goes upstairs and enters the bathroom, where he finds Cecilia lying in bloody bathwater. Horrified, he runs downstairs and calls the police.
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At the hospital, the doctors give Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon a laminated card of the Virgin Mary that Cecilia was holding in the bathtub. One side of the card shows a painting of Mary; the other explains that the Virgin Mary has been “appearing” throughout the city and “bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world.” The card urges readers to call 555-MARY. Reading this, Mr. Lisbon expresses dismay that his daughter actually “believes this crap,” even though he and his wife baptized her and had her confirmed in the Catholic church.
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Everyone in town is curious about Cecilia’s suicide attempt, but the local news doesn’t mention it—the story is too dark for the newspaper’s taste. The only piece of genuine news in that week’s paper is about the worker strike at the local cemetery, where bodies have begun to build up because the gravediggers refuse to work until their demands are met. Any information about Cecilia’s suicide attempt, then, comes from hearsay, as everyone in town speculates about what happened. Paul Baldino, for his part, insists to his friends that Cecilia must have cut her wrists while sitting on the toilet seat before moving to the bathtub. “She sprayed the place, man,” he says.
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The boys are at Joe Larson’s house—across the street from the Lisbon household—when Cecilia comes home from the hospital. It’s raining hard, so they can barely even see the Lisbon station wagon as it pulls up, but even Joe Larson’s mom runs to the window to peer out with the boys. Through the rain, they see that Cecilia is still wearing the vintage wedding dress. Apparently, she demanded to have it brought to her in the hospital, and Dr. Hornicker—the resident psychiatrist—thought she should be allowed to have it.
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In the coming days and weeks, the boys watch the Lisbon house for signs of Cecilia. She often spends her days outside on the front lawn, always accompanied by one of her sisters (as if to keep watch over her). But she doesn’t do much—she just lies there in her vintage wedding dress. Meanwhile, the neighbors gossip. Some of the mothers insist that Cecilia must have just wanted to escape her parents’ house. “She wanted out of that decorating scheme,” one mother jokes. One day, two neighborhood women bring over cake. Later, their accounts of how Mrs. Lisbon received them differ greatly from each another—one of them says Mrs. Lisbon immediately sent the girls upstairs and put the cake in the fridge, but the other insists that Mrs. Lisbon was friendly and had a piece of cake with them.
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One prominent theory in the neighborhood is that Cecilia’s suicide attempt was tied to her crush on Dominic Palazzolo. Dominic is an immigrant living with relatives, and he’s desperately in love with a girl named Diana Porter. In accented English, Dominic often tilts his sunglasses toward the sky and mutters, “I love her,” speaking with a grave profundity that impresses the other neighborhood boys. But when Diana left for a vacation in Switzerland with her family for the whole summer, Dominic cursed God, climbed onto the roof while everyone was watching, and jumped off.
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Cecilia—and the neighborhood boys—watched Dominic take his plunge. He survived. In fact, he landed softly in his relatives’ carefully manicured bushes, stood up, and walked away unharmed. Some people insist that his bold act of suicidal love inspired Cecilia to take her own life, especially because Dominic moved to New Mexico shortly before Cecilia’s suicide attempt.
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According to Dr. Hornicker’s initial diagnosis, Cecilia’s suicide attempt was “an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges.” As such, he urges Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to let her—and her sisters—have a bit more freedom and independence. From then on, things change at the Lisbon household. The boys find that they can regularly spot Lux sunbathing in the front lawn. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon even allow the boy who cuts their grass to come inside for a glass of water, though the neighborhood boys never ask him about this because they are intimidated by his “muscles and his poverty.”
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Years later, Mr. Lisbon tells the neighborhood boys—who are no longer boys—that Mrs. Lisbon disagreed with Dr. Hornicker’s advice to give the girls more freedom. But, Mr. Lisbon says, his wife gave up and let them do what they wanted—for a while, at least. By this time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon have gotten divorced, and he admits that he never really agreed with his wife’s strict rules, though he always went along with them.
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Not long after Cecilia returns from the hospital, Mr. Lisbon convinces Mrs. Lisbon to let the girls host a party. Together, the sisters write out invitations to all of the neighborhood boys, astonishing them by actually knowing their names. After anticipating the party for several days, the boys make their way to the Lisbon house as a group. Peter Sissen takes the lead, since he has already been inside. As they wait for the door to open, Peter says, “Wait’ll you see this.” But when they get inside, the boys see that Peter’s descriptions of the house were completely wrong—the house isn’t the messy den of “feminine chaos” that Peter described. Instead, it’s neat and ordinary.
The neighborhood boys are shown to the basement rec room, where they find the Lisbon girls waiting for them. The boys are struck by the realization that all of the sisters are unique individuals—they don’t look exactly alike, and each one has her own facial expressions and general demeanor. Cecilia, for her part, is still wearing her vintage wedding dress, and there are still bandages on her arms. She sits on a barstool a little to the side, and she stays quiet the whole time.
The evening begins awkwardly, with the boys mainly talking to each other and the Lisbon sisters keeping to themselves. Slowly, though, things begin to loosen up, and everyone starts to have a good time—except, that is, for Cecilia, who abruptly gets up in the middle of the party and asks her father if she can go upstairs. Everyone stops to listen. Mr. Lisbon is surprised, pointing out that they threw this party largely for her. But he doesn’t stop her, saying that she can go upstairs if that’s what she wants.
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Everybody listens as Cecilia slowly makes her way upstairs. They stay quiet as she walks on the first floor and then goes up another flight of stairs, at which point they lose the sound of her footsteps. But then there comes the loud, “wet sound” of her body falling from her bedroom window and landing on a spike in the fence running alongside the house.
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Once upstairs, the boys watch as Mr. Lisbon—who made his way out of the house—tries to lift Cecilia off of the fence. Mr. Lisbon doesn’t give up, but it’s clear to the boys that Cecilia has already left the world, even if her eyes are open and her lips are still moving like the mouth of a hooked fish. These things, they know, are just her nerves firing off their last signs of life—Cecilia herself is already gone.
