The Virgin Suicides

by

Jeffrey Eugenides

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Virgin Suicides makes teaching easy.
Lux is the second-youngest Lisbon sister. At just 14, she’s considered the most desirable sister by the neighborhood boys, who keep especially close tabs on her. Lux is also the most adventurous sister, frequently breaking household rules to sneak out with boys. Her parents are opposed to their daughters dating in high school, so she’s forced to keep her romantic liaisons secret, though the neighborhood boys know surprisingly a lot about her love life. However, the only person they talk to who has an actual romantic relationship with Lux is Trip Fontaine, who—even decades later—is reluctant to reveal too much. Nonetheless, Trip tells the boys the story of him and Lux sneaking off together after the homecoming dance—a story that ends with them having sex on the football field before Trip abandons her there, leaving her with no option but to take a taxi home. Her parents are furious, and so begins the period in which the Lisbon sisters are hardly allowed out of the house. During this time, Lux sneaks a number of guys (including several full-on adults) into the house and onto the roof, where she has sex with them while, unbeknownst to her, the neighborhood boys watch from afar. By the end of the novel, Lux has lost a concerning amount of weight, which adds to the overall sense that the sisters are unwell. On the night of her and her sisters’ group suicide, she distracts the boys by starting to unbuckle Chase Buell’s pants, allowing her other sisters time to go through with their suicide attempts. She then goes to the garage and asphyxiates herself in her parents’ car.

Lux Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides

The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Lux Lisbon or refer to Lux Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 141-142
Explanation and Analysis:

It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

It was from Ms. Angelica Turnette, a hospital clerical worker, that we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions (her nonunion pay hardly made ends meet). The doctor’s report, in a series of titillating numbers, presents Lux in a stiff paper gown stepping on the scale (99), opening her. mouth for the thermometer (98.7), and urinating into a plastic cup (WBC 6-8 occ. Clump; mucus heavy; leukocytes 2+). The simple appraisal “mild abrasions” reports the condition of her uterine walls, and in an advancement that has since been discontinued, a photograph was taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at us now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation.)

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

As it circulated in the next few months, this theory convinced many people because it simplified things. Already Cecilia’s suicide had assumed in retrospect the stature of a long-prophesied event. Nobody thought it shocking anymore, and accepting it as First Cause removed any need for further explanation. […] Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Dr. Hornicker
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:

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. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 196-197
Explanation and Analysis:

It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But 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.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon
Page Number: 209-210
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Virgin Suicides LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Virgin Suicides PDF

Lux Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides

The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Lux Lisbon or refer to Lux Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 141-142
Explanation and Analysis:

It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

It was from Ms. Angelica Turnette, a hospital clerical worker, that we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions (her nonunion pay hardly made ends meet). The doctor’s report, in a series of titillating numbers, presents Lux in a stiff paper gown stepping on the scale (99), opening her. mouth for the thermometer (98.7), and urinating into a plastic cup (WBC 6-8 occ. Clump; mucus heavy; leukocytes 2+). The simple appraisal “mild abrasions” reports the condition of her uterine walls, and in an advancement that has since been discontinued, a photograph was taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at us now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation.)

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

As it circulated in the next few months, this theory convinced many people because it simplified things. Already Cecilia’s suicide had assumed in retrospect the stature of a long-prophesied event. Nobody thought it shocking anymore, and accepting it as First Cause removed any need for further explanation. […] Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Dr. Hornicker
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:

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. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 196-197
Explanation and Analysis:

It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But 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.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon
Page Number: 209-210
Explanation and Analysis: