Jeffrey Eugenides 'The Virgin Suicides'

A significant theme of The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is the idea that the decaying house of the Lisbon family is a symbol of the family’s deterioration and downfall after Cecilia’s suicide. The house firstly acts as a safe place for the family to hide from the local community and to escape from their neighbours’ intruding manners. However, as the text progresses, it is evident that the more Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon trap their daughters within the house, the more they are confined and reminded of Cecilia’s death. The house also acts as a shield of protection from onlookers as it disguised what the Lisbon family were truly feeling when they had to go about their daily lives. Throughout the text, there are countless descriptions of the house and its decay. It represents the decaying of the dead body (Eugenides, 160).

This is evident when the group of boys are discussing what the Lisbon girls have in their bathrooms. This aspect provides a sense of comic relief amongst the difficult subject of suicide that the text is centred on. This comedic extract also follows the sadness and tension that the beginning of the text caused with the death of Cecilia, which is certainly needed. “In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn't gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard” (Eugendies, 8). As the text progresses, the young boys begin to understand the difficulties and social pressures of being a female and therefore empathise with the Lisbon girls. “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together” (Eugenides,