"...the emptiness of a creature...": The Virgin Suicides

"We could hear her feet right above us. Halfway up the staircase to the second floor her steps made no more noise, but it was only thirty seconds later that we heard the wet sound of her body falling onto the fence that ran alongside the house. First came the Sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filling air." -Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Here is an excerpt from the tragic and elegiac story, The Virgin Suicides, describing the horrific sounds the group of neighborhood boys and the conservative Lisbon family hear from downstairs in their home, as the youngest Lisbon girl falls and impales herself on the fence post.

Looking for an unconventional and twisted story to jump into, this novel’s two powerful words of the title tackled my attention. Set in Michigan during the 1970s, the story focuses on the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters. From the perspective of five anonymous men, who in their youths were infatuated and intrigued by the sisters, I was absorbed by the fascination, curiosity, and shock the suicidal girls’ stimulated within the community. Their behavioral patterns differed and did not correlate with custom suicidal patterns according to the community psychiatrist, and this puzzled me.

In the novel, the community especially the boys, attempted to formulate a theory as to why these girls committed suicide. Investigating and interviewing past community members, the men who knew the Lisbons, tried to piece together the story and tried to reason why the girls took such extreme actions.

Did the world bear too many flaws that they could not accept the world as it was given to them? Could these girls have lost their motivation to live, especially after their precious sister’s death? Perhaps their hearts were overburdened or even worse, empty. Either way, the knowledge that these five charming and unique girls simply gave up is a mysterious elegy.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7sLtYI8vV5M/Th287EnG94I/AAAAAAAAAHw/1Ep2uPQrSdU/s1600/tumblr_kwdlppOuYU1qa9ipuo1_500.jpg

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” –The boys reading Cecelia’s diary and feeling and understanding the girls’ nature.