The Virgin Suicides mines everyday life in upper-middle-class suburbia, intentionally conflating the Lisbon tragedy with a broader sense of decline in the United States. Of course, there’s no tangible relationship between the Lisbon sisters’ suicides and the larger changes sweeping the nation, but everyone in the neighborhood associates their frustratingly inexplicable deaths with the similarly unsettling feeling that the glory days of American prosperity are coming to an end. Part of this dynamic is due to the fact that the novel takes place in a wealthy suburb of Detroit in the 1970s, so its characters are accustomed to life in a well-off community fueled by Detroit’s robust midcentury automotive industry. For this reason, it’s a shock to the novel’s narrators when the country begins to undergo economic and cultural upheavals—after all, comfort and security are all the boys narrating the novel have ever known. As such, their quiet suburban neighborhood becomes the lens through which they make sense of the volatile national changes taking place in the 1970s, a decade that saw a significant economic decline, continued struggles for racial justice, and the country’s messy withdrawal from the Vietnam War.
And yet, while The Virgin Suicides is—in many ways—about what it’s like to process these momentous cultural shifts as teenagers living in a wealthy society, the novel doesn’t address the issues head-on. Instead, it uses the Lisbon suicides as a disruptive event that symbolically shatters the illusion of peace, happiness, and prosperity in suburban American life. Everyone in the neighborhood comes to the same general consensus about the Lisbon girls’ suicides: “Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls.” For some of the boys’ parents, this sickness has to do with “godlessness,” rock music, and “the loosening of morals.” For others, it has to do with “the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots […].” The boys even say that the Lisbon girls effectively “became a symbol of what was wrong with the country.” In a way, then, the suicides shake this wealthy community because they force the neighbors to acknowledge that their idyllic vision of the United States is flawed—if such tragedy is possible in upper-middle-class suburbia, then it’s possible anywhere. And this, in turn, means that the stereotypical markers of American success (a nice home, a nuclear family, a quiet neighborhood) have failed to protect the characters from sorrow and hardship. Simply put, then, the Lisbon suicides challenge the very idea that living in a sheltered, wealthy community provides any real safety or comfort.
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Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Quotes in The Virgin Suicides
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement form which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
Paul Baldino said it was a barbecue, and we believed him. But, as time passed, we noticed that no one ever used it. The papers said the barbecue had cost $50,000 to install, but not one hamburger or hot dog was ever grilled upon it. Soon the rumor began to circulate that the tree trunk was an escape tunnel, that it led to a hideaway along the river where Sammy the Shark kept a speedboat, and that the workers had hung tarps to conceal the digging. Then, a few months after the rumors began, Paul Baldino began emerging in people’s basements, through the storm sewers.
Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of popcorn.
No one else on our street was aware of what had happened. The identical lawns down the block were empty. Someone was barbecuing somewhere. Behind Joe Larson’s house we could hear a birdie being batted back and forth, endlessly, by the two greatest badminton players in the world.
[…] they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees. Now, in autumn, only a few leaves make swan dives from the tops of remaining elms, and most leaves drop four feet from saplings held up by stakes, runt replacements the city has planted to console us with the vision of what our street will look like in a hundred years. No one is sure what kind of trees these new trees are. The man from the Parks Department said only that they had been selected for their “hardiness against the Dutch elm beetle.”
Meanwhile, a local television show focused on the subject of teenage suicide, inviting two girls and one boy to explain their reasons for attempting it. We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth. Their answers sounded rehearsed, relying on concepts of self-esteem and other words clumsy on their tongues.
They maintained that a person who couldn’t run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon’s behavior hadn’t helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.
We still had winter in those days, vast snowdrifts, days of canceled school. At home on snowy mornings, listening to school closings on the radio […], we still knew the vivifying feeling of staying warm inside a shelter like pioneers. Nowadays, because of shifting winds from the factories and the rising temperature of the earth, snow never comes in an onslaught anymore but by a slow accretion in the night, momentary suds. The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars.
In single file, like paratroopers, we dropped from the tree. It was an easy jump, and only on impact did we realize how close the ground was: no more than ten feet down. Jumping from the grass, we could nearly touch the tree-house floor. Our new height astounded us, and later many said this contributed to our resolve, because for the first time ever we felt like men.
Like us, they became custodians of the girls’ lives, and had they completed the job to our satisfaction, we might never have been forced to wander endlessly down the paths of hypothesis and memory. For less and less did the reporters ask why the girls had killed themselves. Instead, they talked about the girls’ hobbies and academic awards.
Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school.
More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry.
[…]
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
