Thesis For The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides written by Jeffrey Eugenides is narrated by the “male-gaze” from the perspective of a group of boys in the same suburban neighborhood in Detroit as five girls, the Lisbon sisters. Said girls have been sheltered basically their whole lives due to their strict parents, Ronald Lisbon and his wife. This factor makes the girls that much more interesting to the neighborhood boys. These boys are now in their adulthood, 20 years later, as they tell the story of the girls and their individual suicides (and attempts) that occurred when they were once teenagers. One of the major themes in Eugenides book is the attempt at happiness and how easily it can go away if not true happiness.

The novel starts with Mary Lisbon and her very own

Though I am going to refrain from listing every single one of them, for your sake and mine, I will talk about the main points. To start on a low note, I want to touch on the dynamic aspect of the Lisbon sisters suicide attempts. In news nowadays it is not often, or ever for that matter, that you hear about suicide in such ways that the book portrayed. It was a shock to me that none of the girls in the book had killed themselves by use of a gun. Well, until I remembered the novel was set in the 1970s. This was briefly after the enactment of the Gun Control Act. Their methods of suicide were mixes of statics and dynamics. “Hanging down amid the half -deflated balloons were the two brown and white husks of Bonnie’s saddle shoes,” (Eugenides 209). This is still a common way of suicide in todays day and age. One of the more outrageous ways that one of the sisters took their life was by way of an oven. “Mary put her head in the oven,” (Eugenides 208). Suicides committed with firearms didn’t increase until the 1980s. Along the topic of suicide dynamics, the number of youth in the nation that committed suicide was much different than what it is now. Try comparing just under 9 suicides in every hundred-thousand people to 5.5. While this does not exactly seem like a big difference off the bat, it was more shocking to me that the levels have settled down as opposed to