The Virgin Suicides

Loss and grief have a profound effect on the lives and outlooks of the Lisbon family, and their responses to Cecilia’s death are extreme and unhealthy. Even before Cecilia’s death, a sense of grief for a dying world pervades the family, particularly Cecilia, which presumably leads to her death by suicide. This loss of the opportunity for a healthy future is something that all youth of the time felt but that Cecilia exemplifies. After her death, this sense of grief compounds and multiplies, and her entire family loses its sense of purpose and hope.

The grief of the Lisbons takes many forms, some that are typical and others that become intense and destructive coping mechanisms. Mrs. Lisbon refuses to discuss what happened with anyone and shuts herself inside her home, urging her daughters to do the same and eventually forcing them to do so. Mr. Lisbon seems half gone: He acts strangely and, like his wife, refuses to discuss what happened to his daughter. The parents’ unhealthy response to Cecilia’s death and subsequent neglect of their other children leads to Cecilia’s sisters being unable to cope with their own grief and sinking further and further into despair.

Rather than reach out for support or rely on one another, “grief made them wander” (49), and Mr. Lisbon finds that he no longer recognizes his own children. He proceeds to act as if they don’t exist, driving to school on his own and acting unaware when they disappear from school. One night, he even hallucinates the ghost of Cecilia standing at the window and proceeds to close it in a panic; he then realizes that his daughter is Bonnie standing there, but all he sees is the one who died. He eventually loses his job, and once he stops leaving the home, the level of isolation and deterioration only increases. The house itself reflects the emotions of its occupants, as it rots, becomes overgrown, and starts to give off a lurid stench.

The neighborhood’s response to Cecilia’s death is equally strange. The suburb has not experienced death since World War II and doesn’t expect to see it in a child dying by suicide. They blame every source possible, including the fence that Cecilia landed on, which leads to its removal. They desperately clear the fish flies off the houses and streets in an attempt to eliminate the dank, deathly mood. The school hosts a day of mourning, which Mr. Lisbon scoffs at in his interview years later: “‘Try decade,’ he told us” (102), referring to his perception of the day’s length. While the neighborhood focuses on Cecilia, the living Lisbon girls are slowly forgotten, and even the boys who watch them fail to approach them or do anything helpful. The girls lie in wait for someone to save them, keenly aware of the boys who spy on them, but no one ever comes.

The motivation behind the boys’ desire to tell the story of the Lisbon girls is their romanticization of the past, which illustrates the depth and intensity of their obsession. The boys narrate the story from middle age and clearly have continued to pine over, fantasize about, and wonder about the Lisbon girls, whom they knew barely and briefly decades earlier. As adults, the narrators seem deeply unsatisfied with the state of the world: “With the elms gone, too, only the runt replacements remain. And us. We aren’t even allowed to barbecue any longer” (241). They admit that whenever they make love to another woman, they fantasize about Lux: “It is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney” (142).

The boys spend every free moment thinking about and uncovering as much about the Lisbon girls as possible, including how they smelled, looked, tasted, and felt. The boys realize with guilt that they never knew the Lisbons beyond the surface level because they always observed them from the sidelines, but nevertheless, the girls’ impact on them was lifelong. They remember each gaze, each word, and each movement with pristine clarity, as if it were yesterday. These memories apparently never faded, remaining at the forefront of the boys’ minds forever: “Any second an upstairs window might open, breaking its seal of fish flies, and a face would look down at us for the rest of our lives” (200).

In adulthood, the narrators comment on how the world has changed since they were teens, although much of this is unreliable and comes across as rose-colored nostalgia: “Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week” (161). This overly positive view of youth as a time when the world was better is a common notion in the minds of many adults as they pass into middle age, and the boys are no exception. When the Lisbon girls died, it was more than just their bodies that died; it was the death of decadence, of no consequences, and of caring only for the present. Their deaths likewise became a statement about what would happen to the world and its purity and goodness if left to neglect and rot the same way the girls were. The deaths of the Lisbon girls foreshadow humanity’s slow killing of itself through greed and a lack of willingness to use foresight.