Let's talk about literature.

The Grapes of Wrath: Poor People Suffering Under Unjust Capitalist System Make Really Angry Symbolic Grapes

Wicked: SJW Badass Undone By Unjust Totalitarian Society and Ten-Year-Old With Bucket of Water, Is Tragic As Fuck

Moby Dick: Captain Is Dick to Symbolic Whale

Life of Pi: Bullshit Story About Tiger Taken As Legit By Unsuspecting Reader, Reader Is Strangely Okay With This

The Kite Runner: Kabul Local Is Dick to Friend, Atones By Running Symbolic Kite

Perfume: Look At This Creepy Talented Fuck: The Oderiferous Edition

The Poisonwood Bible: Religion Is Poison and Your Country's A Dick: The Africa Edition

To Kill A Mockingbird: Society Is Racist, Classicist, and Sexist, Also Kills Innocent Birds

Heart of Darkness: Imperialist Shit Trippy As Hell, I Want Out

Crime and Punishment: Sympathetic Creep Tries To Forego Conscience Through Murder And Fails: The Russian Edition

Hamlet: Complexity of Moral Dilemma Undoes Charismatic Intellectual

Macbeth: Sympathetic Creep Tries To Forego Conscience Through Murder And Fails: The Scottish Edition

King Lear: Bad Character Judgment Undoes Idiot King, Established Order Falls Apart

Romeo and Juliet: Love Is Great And Then You Die. Or It Dies. Either Way It's Terrible

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Love Is Like A Dream: Fickle, Random, and Trippy as Fuck

Pride and Prejudice: You Can Marry For Love And Be Filthy Rich!: Every Girl's Fantasy, Admittedly

Les Misérables: Isn't Suffering Ennobling and Beautiful?: A Christian-Friendly Love Story

East of Eden: Moral Complexity Subverts Garden of Eden Bullshit

Of Mice and Men: Cruelty Kills, Er, Cruelly

The Phantom of the Opera: Look At This Creepy Talented Fuck: The Musical Edition

The Magic Mountain: Sanitorium Is Trippy As Hell, I Want In

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Superstitious Bullshit Causes Vicious Cycle of Suffering, Is Hilarious

Great Expectations: Oppressive Class System Is Full of Shit, Protagonist Slowly Realizes

A Tale of Two Cities: Oppressive Class System Leads To Violence, Also Poignant Redemption of Drunkard

Harry Potter: Boy Wizard Fights Evil Wizard In Battle Between Good and Evil, Is Better Than It Sounds

Love In the Time of Cholera: Love Is A Lot of Things But It Ain't True Pal: A Love Story

The Scarlet Letter: Symbolic Letter Screws Up Local Woman's Life, Also Patriarchy

The Odyssey: Very Long Trip Home For Dick Protagonist

Frankenstein: Science Makes Me Uncomfortable I Think It's Evil: A Symbolic Cautionary Tale

Dracula: Sexuality Make Me Uncomfortable I Think It's Evil: A Conservative's Musing

Stargirl: Unconventional Girl Gets Bitch-Slapped By Conventional Society, Says Sayonara

The Casual Vacancy: Vacuous Small Town Bullshit Has A Death Count, No Joke

Dear Reader of Fine Literature,

     What you're doing on my blog in the first place is a complete mystery, but since you're here already, it would be rude of me to leave you without a recommendation. So, for your reading pleasure: The Virgin Suicides.

     This book is, surprisingly enough, about virgins who commit suicide (okay, the virgin thing doesn't apply to all of them, but you get the idea). Except-- it's about so much more. This book is about family and love and community and beauty and life and death. It's about femininity and masculinity and everything in between. It's about the way one person can change so many lives. And yes, it's about suicide. But I'm getting to that.

     Let's talk about love first. You wouldn't think love would be easy to find in a book so blatantly about death, but the beauty of The Virgin Suicides is in the moments of life and love between morbid discussions. The love is in the way the Lisbon sisters cared for each other and in how they preserved Cecilia's memory, no matter how strange they might have found her. The love, however misplaced, is in how eager the neighborhood boys were to help the Lisbon girls escape the terrible lives they were being forced to live. Love was in the way the deaths of Cecilia, Lux, Mary, Bonnie, and Therese wrecked their parents-- pain of that kind cannot be felt without love first.

     And beauty. Let's talk about beauty. The Lisbon girls were beautiful, that's not in doubt. It was one of the things which made their deaths so tragic. Cecilia was beautiful, with her ethereal eccentricity; Lux was beautiful, with her mysterious physicality; Bonnie was beautiful, with her quiet dignity; Mary was beautiful, with her subtle poise; and Therese was beautiful, with her sharp intelligence. Each girl supremely different, but each girl undeniably beautiful. Beauty can be found in everything, and Jeffrey Eugenides makes that easy to see.

     Finally, death. We can't end a discussion about a book called The Virgin Suicides without talking about death a little bit, so here it is: in fiction, death doesn't have to be sad. It doesn't have to be happy either. It can be whatever you want it to be and it can be nothing at all-- that's what makes it fiction. The thing to remember is that literature can mimic the real world, and vice versa, but, with a book like this, some things are better left in an alternate universe.

Peace and blessings, Sarah

     Foreshadowing is one of the fiction author’s classic dramatic devices. That big "eureka" moment one gets when understanding a particularly subtle piece of foreshadowing or the feelings of dread when recognizing what will likely be a vicious indicator are unparalleled in literature. I'm not sure you could call what happens in The Virgins Suicides "foreshadowing." It's more blatant statement of fact. The novel opens with "On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide...." Like I said, not exactly subtle. If you define foreshadowing simply as something that foretells a future event/plot point, then yes, it does do that, but this kind of explicit use of foreshadowing in which the author flat out tells the reader what's going to happen is highly unconventional. 

     With such important details given away freely at the beginning of the book, it's the little things that stick out and catch the reader's attention. Small allusions to the girl's fate that unsettle more than anything else: describing the homecoming dance as the "best of their lives," the descent into the basement on the night of Cecilia's party and then the night of the triple suicide, Dr. Hornicker's insistence to continue therapy due to his belief that certain families have high instances of repetitive suicide. In a book in which the reader wasn't aware of the ending from page one, these allusions would be strange and not understood until the climax of the novel. As it is, these tiny moments lend to a greater feeling of unease and impatience as the book builds, instilling in the reader a feeling much like those shared by the doomed Lisbon sisters.

Word Count: 275

     When scouring The Virgin Suicides for traces of popular themes and motifs, one can look at the Lisbon daughters' sensational deaths and unremarkable lives and see a disconnect. A viable theme, then, could be that the American obsession with happiness and suburban tranquility is deeply unhealthy and can, in fact, mask something much darker underneath.

     The community surrounding the Lisbons is one that is obsessed with suburban ritual. They pride themselves on their outward appearances, while prying into the personal lives of neighbors and attempting keep others out of theirs. Following Cecilia's death, the neighborhood "banded together," attempting to keep the Lisbon house in a state of semi-repair-- removing the fence Cecilia impaled herself upon, taking out trees assumed to be on the decline, offering sympathy dinners and pastor consultations. Then once they assumed their duties to be filled and the issue to be resolved, they stop their efforts. The community focus on what is proper far outweighed the human response of what is good. They contented themselves with doing what was expected, and were satisfied they had done all they could for the Lisbons. However, it was this suburban hell which led to the deaths of the five Lisbon girls. The continual facade of being the pinnacle of mental health and well-adjusted Christian values was stifling for Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese and it was what killed them.

     The only person in the book who saw this from the beginning and who was as disillusioned by the charade of American happiness as the girls was Old Mrs. Karafilis. She is saddened by the loss of young life, but is not surprised by it, to the point where the boys of the neighborhood suspect her of communicating with the Lisbon girls somehow, but Old Mrs. Karafilis simply knows that the suburbs' idolization of the ideal Americana is unsustainable. Eugenides knows this as well. He is warning that the forgery of happiness is self-destructive and will prove fickle and fatal in the end.

     Sometimes realism and relatability is what you want out of a piece of literature, and sometimes that piece of literature is The Virgin Suicides, and then realism just makes you sad. The thing about the sequence of events in Jeffrey Eugenides' first novel is that one can easily imagine the horror felt by a community like Grosse Point as a suicide plot among sisters takes five lives over the course of a year. A person reading this book can look at the crushing lives and troubles of the five Lisbon sisters and recognize a friend or an enemy or, most terribly, themselves. A reader may see themselves in the young, eccentric Cecilia Lisbon, in the beautiful, mysterious Lux Lisbon, or in the tragic, overlooked Mary Lisbon. The Virgin Suicides is simply too real. This verisimilitude is what makes the novel so poignant and so powerful. Without the work's essential reality, we would have no ties to the elusive Lisbon girls-- no reason to care about their deaths. But the simple realization that they are humans who forget to do their laundry and argue about who gets to use the bathroom and put candles in the room of their lost sister makes their death so much more painful. Eugenides doesn't want us to forget this. Too often we see death and destruction in our daily lives, to the point where we become desensitized to it. He and his work simply remind us not to forget our fellow beings' essential humanity.  

     Goodness, all of these books are just one religion talk after another. I’m starting to think I’m incapable of reading a book that 1) has mostly happy content, and 2) doesn’t mention God anywhere. It’s just one God-filled bummer-fest after another. At this point, I’d take a book with absolutely zero conflict and no plot if it meant the characters stay happy until the end and has no passages that could be replaced with the main character just screaming “WHY???” at the sky without losing meaning.

     Anyway, I guess I should actually talk about religion in The Virgin Suicides now. One of the most obvious instances of some God-referencing occurs on the second page of the book. Cecilia Lisbon has been discovered after her first suicide attempt, and as the paramedics arrive to save her, they find a laminated picture of the Virgin Mary clutched against her heart. In most Christian religions, Mary is praised as the mother of God, the most honorable and noble of women who elevated the entire female gender to a place of worship for the first time since Eve's original sin. The Lisbon girls continue to reference Mary throughout the novel, writing notes on the same version of laminated card Cecilia used for her first suicide note. There is some complex allegorical stuff going on here. Firstly, the Bible prophesies most of Mary's actions before they occur, just as The Virgin Suicides exhibits some not very subtle foreshadowing as to the outcome of the novel. Secondly, there is a feminist-y point that can be made about how the girls end up simply being symbols for teenage tragedy and the community's morbid obsessions and, similarly, how Mary is simply a vessel for God's will, none truly being their own person. Also, one of the girls is literally named Mary, so take from that what you will.

Word Count: 311

     Following the year of suicides, the world assumed that the Lisbon girls had always planned their deaths and that the suicide of Cecilia, the youngest, was a catalyst for the macabre plans of her older sisters. They assumed that from the moment Cecilia died, the rest of her sisters also decided they were going to die. However, this passage, spoken between the oldest Therese and her neighborhood boy date, from the third chapter of the book, in which the four remaining girls attend their first and only school dance reveals this was not the case:

‘"Do we seem as crazy as everyone thinks?" 

"Who thinks that?"

She didn't reply, only stuck her hand out the door to test for rain. "Cecilia was weird, but we're not." And then: "We just want to live. If anyone would let us."’

     This scene marks one of only two times any of the collective narrators directly interact with the Lisbon girls, and the only time they do so outside of the Lisbon house. The girls' freer and happier attitudes away from the oppressive atmosphere of their parents and other adults contribute to the feeling that their eventual suicides came not from inherent drives shared by all the girls, but rather by external expectations that they cope in certain ways or feel specific feelings. This scene also marks the only time any of the Lisbon girls speaks publicly about the death of their youngest sister. Therese's harsh assessment of her dead sister as "weird" is off-putting, but it does express her disdain with always being referred to as a collective. She hates her community's morbid fascination with her and her sisters and how they simply lump all of the Lisbon's together, as if the actions and thoughts of one were the actions and thoughts of all. It is eventually the "anyone" and "everyone" which Therese so vehemently dislikes in this moment that drive her and her sisters to their death by leaving them no other choice than to escape the weight of their assumptions. But for the moment, at this dance, the girls are free from this stifling life, and the reader gets a brief glimpse at what could have been in one of the most melancholy scenes of the book. 

     One of the most interesting aspects of The Virgin Suicides is the narrator. Or, maybe I should clarify: narrators. The story of the tragedy of the Lisbon sisters is seemingly told through a group of neighborhood boys around the girls' ages. The comings and goings of the Lisbon's are observed by a nameless, numberless "we." They describe the effects the suicides had on them while complaining about being unable to read the apparently indecipherable Lisbon girls. They frequently refer to the images and documents they've collected as part of some sort of macabre exhibit or invasive memoir they've curated about the girls-- an invasion of privacy played off as a preservation of the memory of the lost.

     Their avid fascination in Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese is deeply reminiscent of the narration style found in William Faulkner's short story A Rose For Emily. In both works, a group of unreliable outside narrators attempt to gossip and pry their way into the lives of people they find interesting, without looking below the surface for people. These kinds of narrators are obsessed with ideas-- the stories they've heard about their neighbors, but never seem to actually see the subjects of their attentions as human beings. Both Emily and the Lisbon sisters are turned into near mythical creatures by these ideas at a time when their survival was dependent on their need for others to acknowledge their humanity. The dark endings of these women as told by people who don't really know them are terribly sad and can leave the reader feeling dissatisfied at the lack of information but also pleases as they allow for important individual interpretations.

Word Count: 276

     The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides documents a single year over the course of which the five beautiful Lisbon sisters commit suicide one by one as their suburban neighborhood looks on in horror. 

Word Count: 33

     In one of the most important moments of the book for Celie’s development, she is recalling a conversation she had with Shug to her sister Nettie via a letter.

     “Naw, she (Shug) say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love-- and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. 

     “You saying God vain? I ast.

     “Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

     “...Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.”

     Celie seems to have always had very concrete ideas about God. She has been writing to him all these years assuming he was another white man she would spend her life trying to understand and yet another white man whose only goal was to judge her until the day she died. Understandably, Celie has grown disillusioned with this idea of God. She's angry. She's angry that God would have let the men in her life systematically abuse her for decades while he just kept sitting and judging and waiting, silently. God has done nothing for her in all the years she has prayed to him and she's tired. So Celie stops writing to God.

     The passage above is the turning point in which she confesses this fact to Shug. Shug, in complete contrast to Celie, has very different ideas about God. Her feelings, like the woman herself, are much more fluid. Shug sees God in everything and everyone, and she maintains her positive outlook because she believes her God would want her to. Shug appreciates the little things, and feels at peace with her God who she asserts is not a man, let alone a white one. Celie comes away from this conversation feeling conflicted. She sees how happy Shug is with her God, but she can't bring herself to let go of her anger. Some God, no matter which one she believed in, let her believe she had to accept the treatment she received. Celie is left wondering if this is a fact that she can overcome. She thinks of the wildflowers and of the color purple and she thinks that maybe God can mean many things. Any maybe one of those things she can live with.

     A theme easily found in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is that the deconstruction of socially determined gender roles is not absolutely good nor absolutely bad.

     Characters in this novel break stereotypes assigned to their gender left and right. Shug is sexually assertive in a time when such overt behavior was only acceptable for men. Shug and Celie engage in a sexual relationship which blurs the lines of traditional gender roles and sexuality in the South. Sofia is strong and confrontational to both men and women, a trait so vehemently discouraged in her time, she was arrested and indentured for it. Additionally, some of the males characters fall out of their traditionally assigned roles in the face of these women. For example: Harpo's insecurity in his relationship with Sofia coupled with the fact that she is very obviously the physically stronger of the two leads to a "loss" of masculinity on his part.

     Now all of these things are well and good. Women should be allowed to express their identities and not be ashamed of who they are without the fear of persecution. However, Alice Walker makes it clear that this kind of unrestrained patriarchy-smashing can play poorly in the real world where the patriarchy still exists. Shug's sexual assertiveness leads to her branding as a harlot and a tramp. Celie's friendly relationship with Shug leads to her being beaten by Mr. _______ while Shug is away. And Sofia's defiance of the controlling men in her life leads to attempted beatings, a crumbling marriage, and years of forced servitude. Alice Walker isn't advocating for women to give up the fight for the freedoms they deserve, but she is issuing a gentle reminder that the world isn't as bright and sunny as we might imagine in our bubbles of inclusivity and feminism. Basically: Be yourself and fight for what you believe in, but keep one eye open and something sharp in your pocket.