Plural Narratives, Suburban Gothicity, and the (Suicidal) Female Body in Jeffrey
Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides
Stamatina Staikou
A dissertation submitted to the Department of English and American Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
2018
To Adranaut
i
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...... ii
Abstract ...... iii
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER ONE:
A Plural Body (Made) of Narratives ...... 11
CHAPTER TWO:
Eugenides’s Suburban Gothic and the Female Body ...... 25
CONCLUSION ...... 42
Works Cited ...... 44
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Yiorgos Kalogeras, for his insightful feedback, helpful suggestions, and persistent support. Also, I would like to thank Professor Zoi Detsi and Professor Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou for participating in my supervisory committee. I feel grateful to Professor Tina Krontiris for the inspiration, the trust, and the encouragement. For the same reasons, I am indebted to Dr. Anastasia Stefanidou, whose help, when I needed it I, will never forget. Many thanks go to my precious friends who are always there for me. Special thanks go to Evi Kalliani, Efi Papou, Xenia Lampoglou,
Erofili Tsouvalidou, Olga Kournioti, Sonia Charalampidou, and Peter Knot, who were always positive I could make the deadline(s). I also wish to thank Yannis Ieropoulos for saving the day at a crucial juncture of this project. This last year would not have been the same without the amazing “Pylaia-Ano Toumpa Photo-team” collective to which I am eternally grateful for everything that we shared. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, without whose financial support, my M.A. adventure in Thessaloniki would not have been possible.
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the function of the female body in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin
Suicides. As I demonstrate, the female body serves as the locus where the novel’s two major constitutive axes converge. The first axis is that of the text’s narrative organization. More precisely, the novel’s central plural narrative voice is interwoven with an abundance of different narrative voices. I locate the drive that produces the novel’s narrative thrust in the centrality of the female body. The second axis has to do with the novel’s generic self- identification. The narrative consciously uses the tropes of the Suburban Gothic, and in doing so, problematizes the female body within the American Suburb, and the Gothic genre. I argue that, while most narrative voices and gothic representations of femininity in the novel ostensibly reproduce the dominant patriarchal ideology, a number of narrative moments insidiously undermine this ideology, therefore enabling a reading of the novel as critical of patriarchy.
Staikou 1
INTRODUCTION
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993. This was the author’s debut novel and an instant success. Six years later, Sophia Coppola, a “debutante” herself, adapted it and directed it for the screen. The film is only one among many instances of the novel’s expanding legacy over the years. A number of reviews, articles, book chapters and dissertations have sought to approach it from an array of different standpoints. Up to this day, the novel has been discussed in terms of its generic identification (Heusser; Dines) and its historico-cultural implications (Wilhite; Dines); it has been the object of comparative examination (Kelly, Iler, Francisco) and adaptationist criticism (Womack and Mallory Kani); it has also been approached through the perspectives of eco-criticism (Long) and trauma theory (Vanyova Kostova). Last but not least, it has been insightfully examined by Debra
Shostak under a combined feminist and narratological light. True, it would be hard for a narrative featuring the suicides of five teenage sisters to go unnoticed. One might even argue that the book qualifies as remarkable on the grounds of this unthinkable multiple suicide alone. Yet the remarkable quality of Eugenides’s novel does not exhaust itself on its sheer thematic extravagance. The wide interest that critics have taken in it, as well as the novel’s growing status as a contemporary classic both attest to this.
My own contribution to the ongoing critical dialogue is, I must admit, the product of enthrallment. It may be that, in the context of literary studies, enthrallment is a menace threatening the heroes of Gothic novels; yet it appears that, sometimes, readers run the same risk, as well. Hence, I was enthralled by The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides’s Suburban Gothic novel, set in Grosse Point—a middle-and-upper class suburb of Detroit—during a period that spans from the seventies to the nineties. More specifically, in The Virgin Suicides, the reader follows the narration of a group of now middle-aged men as they try to reconstruct the lives and account for the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters—their neighbors and secret objects of Staikou 2 desire some twenty years before. Mrs. Lisbon, the girls’ mother, and a rigid Catholic, vehemently safeguards their chastity. These very daughters, minus one—“Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, [who] had gone first” (Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides1 3)—Mrs.
Lisbon decides to lock up inside the house after Lux’s (aged fourteen) failure to meet a curfew. A large part of the novel is then dedicated to the boys/narrators’ subsequent efforts to continue to follow up with the girls’ entrapped lives from a distance, as well as to their fantasies of saving the girls from their mother, and their fate. Alas, the girls decide differently.
They become the novel’s eponymous heroines.
No one could ever adequately explain why these girls—bright suburban futures lying ahead of them—had chosen to kill themselves. Near the end of the book, the narrators confess that the only thing they are certain of is “the insufficiency of explanations” (TVS 247). For, the entire suburban community had tried to reach a plausible explanation. Even the media that had ruthlessly fed on the tragedy. But most predominantly, and persistently, it was the enamored boys who had tried to figure out the girls while the latter were alive; and it is the same boys, now turned middle aged men, who insist on doing so, now that the girls have become memories. In their effort to explicate the girls’ mystery the boys/narrators obsessively fix their gaze upon the girls from a distance; originally, from a distance in space, and then, in time. To complete the picture, they find recourse to information gathered from other sources.
In the end, what is truly outstanding about the account of the girls that the narrators gradually build, is the preeminence of the girls’ embodied presence. Even as the girls are reminisced upon as absences, years after their deaths, it is mostly images of their bodily materiality that seem to haunt the narrators.
This preeminence of the female body in The Virgin Suicides will be my focal point of interest in the present dissertation. As I will demonstrate, the female body serves as the locus
1 All quotations refer to the same edition and will be indicated in the text with a page number in parenthesis. Staikou 3 where the novel’s two major constitutive axes converge. The first axis is that of the text’s narrative organization, on which I will elaborate in the first chapter of the present essay. More precisely, the novel’s central narrator is a plural one; a “we-narrator” whose voice is interwoven with an abundance of different narrative voices. I locate the drive that produces the novel’s narrative thrust in the centrality of the female body. The second axis has to do with the novel’s generic self-identification. By this, I mean the self-conscious and systematic recourse to gothic tropes and suburban imagery, which readily justifies the novels’ categorization as a Suburban Gothic—as Martin Dines convincingly demonstrates throughout a relevant article from 2012. At the same time, it is no accident that many of the text’s gothic markers are focused on the female body. As Kate Ferguson Ellis posits, “From its beginnings in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic Genre . . . has enjoyed a complicated relationship with women” (257). It is the perplexities of this relationship in the context of Eugenides’s
Suburban Gothic that the second chapter of my dissertation will try to disclose. Overall, I will argue that, while most narrative voices and gothic representations of femininity inside the novel ostensibly reproduce the dominant patriarchal ideology, a number of narrative moments insidiously undermine this ideology, therefore enabling a reading of the novel as critical of the practices and discourses that perpetuate the oppression of female bodies. In her insightful article, to which I am greatly indebted, Debra Shostak argues that “The Virgin Suicides takes an anti-misogynist stance against its narrators’ point of view by exposing the process by which the girls’ identities are appropriated” (822).
Before I proceed to the discussion of the novel, I find it necessary to elaborate on the generic presuppositions and theoretical premises that inform my study. As far as the former are concerned, I believe that the contextualization of the Suburban Gothic within the wider
Gothic tradition will help the reader to appraise better the particularity of Eugenides’s work, as well as to identify critically the interpretative challenges that it poses. Therefore, in the Staikou 4 following section, I offer a brief presentation of the genre under discussion. As to the theoretical background of my dissertation, this mainly draws on feminist discourses on the female body and (female) sexuality. The range of these discourses is apparently vast.
Therefore, in the section entitled “The Female Body,” I will settle with a short discussion of the strand of feminist theorists whose conceptualization of the female body has defined the way I approach its inscription in Eugenides’s novel. As the reader will find out, I retain a feminist’s skepticism throughout my study, or at least, this is what I have set out to do.
The Suburban Gothic
Even as critics find it hard to reach a consensus as to the most appropriate and inclusionary definition of the Suburban Gothic—as is often the case with definitions—they would, nevertheless, most probably, all agree that this particular cultural mode began to proliferate in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. According to
Dines, the Suburban Gothic “is [nowadays] prevalent across various forms, both popular and
‘serious,’ its tropes are readily identifiable, and its motivations are intelligible” (959). In a tentative definition that seems rather focused on motivations, Bernice M. Murphy delineates the Suburban Gothic as “a sub-genre of the wider American Gothic tradition which dramatizes anxieties arising from the mass urbanization of the United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists” (qtd in Madden 7). It becomes apparent, then, that to better grasp the scope of this cultural phenomenon, one needs to familiarize one’s self with the rubric of the American Gothic, on the one hand, and the configuration of the American Suburb, on the other.
Tellingly, Eric Savoy begins his chapter on “The Rise of American Gothic” with the following statement: “From the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the Staikou 5
United States” (167). One feels challenged to take this statement a step further, and ask: could it be that the distinctiveness of American literature can be attributed to a diachronically pervasive gothic character? Although Savoy himself does not pose this question directly, he does aver the “odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States” (167). In the following pages of his chapter, his version of an American Gothic proto-canon is found to include the names of such authors as Charles Brodken Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Edgar Allan Poe.
It is important to note, though, that whereas Savoy appears to be at ease with the arguably unquestioned, in his case, use of the term American Gothic, other critics seem to be more skeptical. Teresa A. Goddu, for instance, makes the point that “When modified by
American, the gothic loses its usual referents” (3, emphasis in the original). What would those referents be then, one is compelled to ask? To answer this question I cannot think of anyone more suitable than David Punter, a critic who has contributed vastly to the mushrooming of— ever since the sixties—critical literature on Gothic fiction. In his Literature of Terror, Punter offers a history of the Gothic from its inception in England in the 1760s up to 1996, year of his book’s publication. In it, he sets clear that, stricto sensu, Gothic refers to a constellation of novels that appeared between the 1760s and the 1820s. The most renowned amongst the authors of these novels that he lists are the likes of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mathew
Lewis, C. R. Maturin, and Mary Shelley. As it can be readily elicited, these inaugural gothic texts have indelibly defined the genre’s “usual referents,” to return to Goddu’s observation. In
Punter’s words:
When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an
emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a
prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and Staikou 6
the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most
significant. (1)
Still, for many critics, the recurrence of a number of tropes and the persistence of a certain kind of imagery, such as the ones described above, are not sufficient enough markers with which to impermeably circumscribe a stable, coherent literary genre—if there can ever be one such. According to Fred Botting, the use alone of the definitive article before the term Gothic creates “the illusion that there is a well-defined genre to discuss,” when apparently there isn’t one (1). In his view, the need to insert often an adjective between the article and the noun, as for instance, in the case of ‘Victorian Gothic,’ attests to the “indefinition” of the examined category (1). Interestingly, Punter, inserts two adjectives in order to demarcate the ‘New
American Gothic,” a category in which he accommodates such authors as James Purdy, Joyce
Carol Oates, John Hawkes, and Flannery O’Connor. The prevalent feature of this strand of literary production is its emphasis on psychological strain—often conveyed through the use of first-person narrative—and its uninhibited portrayal of violence and social decay (2-3).
Given that a thorough history of the Gothic lays beyond the field of enquiry of the present dissertation, what I have tried to do so far in this section, is to contextualize the
Suburban Gothic within a greater literary tradition. Although the English predecessors will continue at times to resonate from their haunted castles and dark crypts, the tradition that nurtures the Suburban Gothic is distinctly American. Even if that were not clear enough by now, the adjective suburban alone, which defines this subgenre, should suffice to attest to its
Americanness. For, the suburb, both as a topographical and as a cultural instantiation, is inextricably linked to American post-war history, and no less, mythology. As Robert Beuka contends, while the beginning of the twentieth century in America saw the expansion of the city, the second half of the century would become the era of sprawling suburbanization. “This new type of terrain,” he continues, “dissolved the urban/rural distinctions that had, until that Staikou 7 point, characterized American topography” (1). What came to demarcate American topography from that point on, is, without doubt, the suburban landscape, home to far more
Americans than those living in either urban or rural areas, at the threshold of the twenty-first century (2).
It comes as no surprise that an evolution of such proportions drew the interest and fueled the intellectual vigor of novelists, film-makers, critics and scientists. For, the latter half of the previous century witnessed an outpour of discourses relating to the suburbs. Suffice it to mention that during this period, a whole new discipline under the label “Suburban Studies” was introduced into the academy for the purpose of investigating the looming challenges, and sometimes, dooming realities of suburban life. One of the most central relevant discourses, and, also, one of particular pertinence to the present study, has to do with the positioning of women within the suburban milieu. Beginning with Betty Freidan’s now classic The Feminine
Mystique (1963), an immense corpus of texts of different kinds has been produced to address this issue; many of these texts articulate an often fierce polemic against the impossible conformity of suburban life and the multi-faceted oppression that it has tended to impose, particularly on the female portion of the suburban population.
One of the fields of everyday life where the oppression of women has always been seen as most intense is that of sexuality. Some critics have described the oppressive suburban conformity in spatial terms giving rise to the notion of “Containment Culture.” This notion refers to “the American policy of containing both the international influence of the Soviet
Union and the threat of the atomic bomb” (Runquist, 3). According to this dogma, sexuality was to be rigidly contained lest it should be used by the enemy as a channel through which to infiltrate the American (patriotic) family (Rubquist, 8). I have chosen to refer to this particular approach to the suburb in my short discussion of the latter, as I believe that it is pertinent to my discussion of The Virgin Suicides that will follow. Although my own research does not Staikou 8 focus on Containment Culture per se, I believe that this notion provides a useful framework for the explication of the suburban phenomenon2.
The Female Body
The short discussion of the theorization of the female body that follows begins with the acknowledgement that there is not a singular, all-encompassing theory of the female body, as there is not one regarding the body in general. Instead, there are multiple theorizations of the female body, especially ever since many second wave feminists made it their privileged point of focus. The fervent engagement with the female body on behalf of feminists should be seen as part of a conscious effort to reclaim the female body from either the mystificating obscurity, or the outright rejection that male thought had traditionally condemned it to. The perils though, that the female body was, and to a large extent, still is confronted with under this theoretical male regime, are not theoretical at all. They are readily attestable, every day perils that result in the containment of the female body within areas of culturally permissible behaviors, and in its severe punishment in cases of transgression.
To talk about a female body is necessarily to talk about sex. When Simone de
Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (283), what she established for current and future generations of feminists is that (biological) sex does not equal gender. “Woman” in de Beauvoir’s thought is a category that describes the social construction of gender; or, as later feminists put it, its discursive constitution.
But even as it was made clear that sex and gender are distinct categories, a number of fundamental presumptions were for a long time left unchallenged. Two of the most important are the following: firstly, that of a binary gender system; Butler’s seminal Gender Trouble
2 In The Virgin Suicides there is only oblique reference to suburbanites’ fear of either communism or “the Bomb.” Mrs. Lisbon appears to have stored large quantities of canned food in the basement, which was to be used as a nuclear shelter in the feared event of a nuclear holocaust; on the other hand, surprisingly (?), only one communist appears to reside in the entire suburb. Staikou 9 decidedly helped to change the way gender is conceived of ever since its publication. More specifically, gender has henceforth become a much more fluid and inclusionary category than what the “men”/“women” bipolar distinction allowed. Gender fluidity has made room for queer subjectivities to emerge from their status of social marginalization and sexual censorship. Of course, the battle is an ongoing one. Secondly, the schism between sex and gender had caused many feminists to view sex as a strictly biological category: as the clearly defined constellation of anatomical and physiological characteristics. Butler again contested this idea. In her view, “sex” is, from the start, normative” (Bodies That Matter, 1).
Elaborating on this idea, she writes: “[S]ex is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize “sex” and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms”. In Butler’s view, this compelled materialization is a performative process that works in the service of “the heterosexual imperative.” It is in this sense that the discursive materialization of sex is linked to gender performativity (Butler, Bodies that Matter
2). In Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler describes gender performativity as the process through which, the body, in compulsively reiterating a number of gestures and acts, becomes its gender. It does so, within a confining regulatory frame; the one she terms as heteronormativity, which is directly likened to the “heterosexual imperative” mentioned above. According to Butler’s theorization, heteronormativity is the total of hegemonic discourses that mark the limits of the acceptable, intelligible, and by extension, viable (sexual) body; namely, of a body which is recognizably “masculine” or “feminine,” and necessarily heterosexual. However, even within the imposing ubiquity of these hegemonic discourses, gender performativity, Butler posits, may become a process of contestation of gender norms and of radicalization of desire, exactly because gender, seen under the light of performativity, Staikou 10 is never truly fixed; nor is the alleged boundary between a distinctively “feminine” and
“masculine” body. In fact, the existence proper of such boundary is radically contested.
Other critics, for their own part, have emphasized the ways in which the culturally intelligible “feminine” body is produced as natural from the female body. Drawing on
Foucault’s notion of the “docile body,” Sandra Lee Bartky goes on to demonstrate the disciplinary practices that are especially exercised on the female body. The critic distinguishes three categories of such “disciplines”: “those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures and movements; and those directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface” (132). Bartky manages to graphically show how dieting, beauty products, make-up, or high-heeled shoes are all employed in order to make the female body conform to a model of “femininity” that, in the final analysis, serves the perpetuation of patriarchal values, and by extension, women’s oppression.
In Eugenides’s fictional suburb, the imperative on the female body to be “feminine” is pervasive. However, as the previous brief discussion has shown, it is not the case that
“female” as a category stands for something purely natural, or biological, as opposed to
“feminine,” which is demonstrably constructed or cultural. This is why, in my discussion, I have chosen to talk about the female body rather than the feminine one. Because I wish to keep to the fore Butler’s idea that the female body is already a discursive construction, yet, without losing track of the fact that in order for the female body to be acceptable and viable as such, it needs to appear and be codified as “feminine.”
Staikou 11
CHAPTER ONE
A Plural Body (Made) of Narratives
As it has been already mentioned in the introduction, in order to unfold the story of the five Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—Eugenides employs a first- person-plural narrative voice.3 In effect, this plural narrator conveys the story of the girls—the novel’s “master narrative” of sorts—by synthesizing the boys/narrators’ perspective with a great number of peripheral micro-narratives. A large portion of these micro-narratives consists of information which the girls’ parents, schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, or even doctors shared with the boys/narrators after the girls’ death. These pieces of information appear inside the text in the form of testimonies or interviews, in direct or indirect speech.
The narrators’ story also makes room for a great number of written texts-within-a text to be included: diary entries, medical files, newspaper articles, shopping lists, song lyrics, and more. At points, the narrators even refer to certain “exhibits” and “documents”—as they like to call them—such as, for instance, a number of photographs, or Therese’s chemistry write- ups, which allegedly rest in the disposal of an implied narratee4 who might like to have a look on them.5
What the narrators aspire to do in collecting all those bits and pieces of fragmentary knowledge regarding the girls, is to create an image of them, as complete as possible, in much like the way someone strives to make a puzzle out of its scattered pieces. In order to achieve this, the boys/narrators had no other way but watch the girls from a distance. The truth is we never get to learn why it was so difficult for them to come to a closer contact with the girls,
3 As many have observed, this rather unusual narrative voice echoes the one in Faulkner’s “A Rose fore Emily.” 4 Referring to a photograph of the four Lisbon girls taken on the day of Homecoming, the narrators characteristically plead: “Please don’t touch. We’re going to put the picture back in its envelope now” (TVS 119). 5 Of course, such appendix of tangible evidence is, in reality, non-existent. Staikou 12 say, at school, where the girls were not under Mrs. Lisbon’s surveillance. What I am insinuating is that the boys had probably chosen, if unconsciously, to desperately love the girls from a distance. As I will argue later on, this was not simply because they were helplessly romantic souls.
After all, as Luce Irigaray suggests, voyeurism is a distinctively male way of desiring.
Once a woman enters the dominant, that is male, “scopic economy,” Irigaray continues, she is automatically relegated to passivity. She becomes “the beautiful object” (26). However, the boys, for their own part, claim to be driven by a genuine desire to truly come to know the objects of their silent passion, as they indicate in the following statement: “[W]e felt that if we kept looking hard enough we might begin to understand what they were feeling and who they were” (65, emphasis is mine). Peter Brooks bases his important Body Work upon the following premise: desire, which is always sexual, as he emphasizes, is also desire to know.
Therefore, he conceives of the body as an “epistemophilic project” (5). Making the above statement, the boys seem to imply an analogous “epistemophilic” impetus. However, it must be noted that this does not, in any way, free the girls of the passivity which Irigaray refers to.
According to Brooks again, story-telling, narration (of desire) appears to have a tremendous impact on the desired/narrated body: “[T]hose stories that we tell about the body in the effort to know and to have it . . . result in making the body a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning” (5-
6). Although I could not possibly agree more with the idea of a radiantly signifying body within the text—this is effectively the core of my own argument in this essay—the question still remains as to whether the narrated body can ever truly become an “agent”—understood Staikou 13 as signifying autonomously—or is merely the product of authorial control6 signifying only “as told.” This question is further complicated when the body is female, while the narrator male.7
Whether one likes it or not, sexual difference always imposes itself, an issue to which I will return. For now, I need to formulate the defining questions that inform my research in the present chapter: In the narrative framework of The Virgin Suicides, how and what does the
(female) body signify? Does it always comply with the narrators’ point of view? Does it ever succeed in assuming agency?
In order to thoroughly process these questions it is paramount not to lose sight of the narrated story’s context. At this point, I will turn to Ross Chambers’s insightful use of the notions of point, story, and situation. Beginning from the premise that meaning is not inherent but contextual—a celebrated post-structuralist achievement—he makes the following observation: “Common language,” he says, “has always recognized the contextual nature of meaning through the concept of ‘point’: the ‘same’ story can have a quite different point when it is told in different situations” (3). As he succinctly puts it, situations stand for the pragmatic circumstances within which stories occur. His truly remarkable contribution, though, lies in his suggestion of a need “not simply to read texts in situation (which is inevitable) but also to read in the texts, the situation that they produce as giving them their
‘point’’’ (4, emphasis in the original). In my view, the situation that Eugenides’s novel
“produces as giving it its point” is the Suburban Gothic per se, meant both as a generic instantiation and as an act of narration in the making. What I mean to say is that what we actually read in the book is the conscious effort of the narrators to tell a story; a story that is
6 This question pertains to a vast debate that has been going on in the field of literary theory, one that not even the announced “death of the author” has been able to halt. In effect, Roland Barthes (author of the essay “The Death of the Author”), along with other post-structuralist literary critics, instigated and fuelled this debate. 7 Brooks acknowledges that it is most predominantly female privacy which is intruded by the male gaze (31), and Shostack, drawing upon his argument, makes the same point with regard to The Virgin Suicides (812). At this point, I believe it is important to note the huge contribution of Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” a brilliant dissection of the male gaze in classic films, to the way feminists approach the male gaze in other media, as well. Staikou 14 decidedly suburban and Gothic; also, a story that is decidedly theirs.8 Hence, what gives the story its point is this combination of situatedness and constructedness.
The particularity of the novel’s constructedness rests in the fusion of the main narrative voice—which is plural in its own right—with a profusion of conflating narrative voices that all focus on a plural body,9 thus resulting in a remarkable exponentiation of narrative plurality. Eugenides’s novel constitutes a model for Bakhtinian heteroglossia or multi-voicedness, a feature which, in Jaqueline Howard’s view, is key to the approach of the
Gothic genre, as a whole. Quoting Bakhtin, Howard notes that “heteroglossia enters the
[Gothic] novel through such ‘compositional units’ as ‘authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters’” (2). In her Reading Gothic Genre: A
Bakhtinian approach, the critic makes a pertinent observation: the conflict of different voices inside the Gothic novel enables the reader “to assess the degree to which [the] text’s dominant discourse and its associated moral code may be confirmed or subverted in reading” (3).
Howard starts from the position that, unlike what a number of feminist critics have claimed,
Gothic is not inherently subversive. The subversiveness (or not) of a text is, effectively, an epiphenomenon of the reading process, a position with which I find myself to be in total agreement (4).
At this point, I have to draw an important distinction. In terms of quantity, the dominant discourse in Eugenides’s text is admittedly the one conveying the thoughts and memories of the key multiple narrator. From this vantage point, the peripheral micro- narratives are merely complementary to the main narrative line. Yet in terms of ideology, the dominant discourse is one and indivisible, permeating practically all (consubstantial) narrative
8 This is the impact of first-person-narration. 9 The narrators repeatedly refer to the Lisbon sisters as an impenetrable collectivity consisting of inseparable bodies, as if the girls were conjoined twins. In fact, as they inform us, in her own diary, “Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity . . . and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads” (TVS 42). Staikou 15 voices, including the peripheral ones. This discourse is none other than patriarchy. The conformist suburban milieu, more than being a mere (gothic) background, sets the standards of acceptability with regard to gendered and sexual subjectivity. Whereas on a surface level, the book appears to reproduce an endless chain of stereotypes concerning both bodies and sexualities, I argue that there are—few—key moments in Eugenides’s text that function as breaches in the hegemonic discourse of heteronormativity. These moments are in no way nested manifestoes, or outright statements of sorts; rather, they are ostensibly trivial instances when, nevertheless, the body seems to rebel against its hetero-determination and signifies otherwise. Through these breaches in the narrative of heteronormativity, the reader may, indeed, configurate a subversive reading of the novel; that is, a reading of the novel as critical of patriarchy.
But before I discuss some of these moments, first, I would like to stop at a number of instances that showcase the novel’s dominant discourse. Not surprisingly, these textual moments emphatically bring forth the female body. The first such instance comes from the only party that the Lisbon family ever held.10 This social gathering furnishes a great chance for the boys to stop gazing at the girls from across the street, and finally zoom-in, because they are, after all, beyond their wildest expectations, truly invited over the Lisbon house.
Their first impression of the girls is that of a “congregation of angels” (TVS 25). Apparently, mystified by the distance that separated them from the girls, this is how the boys had already fantasized about, and constructed them; but as their initial shock fades, along with it fades the biblical projection that distorts the girls’ real image, and the boys make their first surprising realization: “The Lisbon girls were all different people” (26). In the excerpt that follows, the narrators render their first “objective” description of the Lisbon girls:
10 I will return to this fatal party in chapter two. Staikou 16
We saw at once that Bonnie . . . had the sallow complexion and sharp nose of a nun.
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of
the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. Therese
Lisbon had a heavier face, the cheeks and eyes of a cow, and she came forward to
greet us on two left feet. Mary Lisbon’s hair was darker; she had a widow’s peak and
fuzz above her upper lip that suggested her mother had found the depilatory wax. Lux
Lisbon was the only one who accorded with our image of the Lisbon girls. She
radiated health and mischief. Her dress fit tightly, and when she came forward to
shake our hands, she secretly moved one finger to tickle our palms, giving of at the
same time a strange gruff laugh. Cecilia was wearing, as usual, the wedding dress with
the shorn hem. (TVS 26)
What the excerpt, first and foremost, reveals (via reproducing it) is the preeminent inclination with regard to the female body’s cultural codification: the female body’s almost inevitable sexualization. This is why Lux is the only Lisbon sister who “accorded” with the image the boys had already created for the girls. For, Lux was unmistakably sexy; just as she was supposed to. Another noticeable element is that Lux is praised for manifesting “health” and
“mischief.” It is hard not to stop and think how the former stands out as a cardinal precondition for the female body’s reproductive capacity, while the latter as a prerequisite for the seduction of sexual partners (the myth of the mischievous seductress). Patriarchal sexual economy is best served by a role as predictable and, in a sense, as strictly biological as the one implied above.
Lux’s portrayal, actually, epitomizes woman as sexual object throughout the book.11
At a later point, a peripheral narrator, Trip Fontain—school Casanova and teenage idol—
11 The way Eugenides employs Lux’s sexualized body is something I will examine in the second chapter of my dissertation, as well. Staikou 17 describes Lux as “the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen” (TVS 79). The same boy, describing a family photo of the Lisbons, one that he came across during a chaperoned visit to the latters’ house, evokes an image of Lux as a typical Lolita: “Before a
Ferris wheel, Lux held in one red fist a candy apple whose polished surface reflected the baby fat under her chin. One side of her sugar-coated lips had come unstuck, showing a tooth”
(114). Tellingly, when Lux’s body is not sexualized, it is awkwardly medicalized: for instance, the narrators take pride in possessing a medical report that breaks Lux’s body down to “a series of titillating numbers,” such as her body temperature or the population of her leukocytes. The report even contains a “photograph taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at as now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation)” (TVS 155). This description violates every conceivable boundary of privacy. As a matter of fact, in this particular instance, the male gaze literally enters the female body. Nevertheless, no matter how deep inside the female body the male gaze penetrates, it appears that it is not “penetrating” enough to “see” and explicate (neither to the reader nor to the beholder) the reasons for the “inflamed eye’s” accusation. The accusation will remain tacit; but loud.
Back to the initial description of the Lisbon sisters, clumsy Therese, with her heavy body and “eyes of a cow,” constitutes a counterpart to her sexually appealing sister, Lux.
Therese’s Spanish teacher, Señor Lorca, goes as far as to directly associate the girl’s misfortune with her body weight. “A big girl! I think smaller, maybe happier.12 That is the way of the world and men’s heart,” he postulates (TVS 102). One cannot help but one’s self ask whether it is mere coincidence that Therese is also the Science-loving sister who aspires
12 In “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” Suzan Bordo elaborates on the distinctive pressures that the female body is faced with in patriarchal society. One of these pressures is the demand to be slim. The pressure is so high that it might even lead to disease. Bordo argues that in anorexia nervosa (as, also, in agoraphobia and hysteria, all gender-related pathologies) women, by virtue of their symptoms, unconsciously try to deny the feminine qualities of their bodies and, in this way, assume an illusory sense of male power. Staikou 18 to attend an Ivy League University; a combination doubtlessly better left to boys, from a sexist’s point of view. Mary’s image, on the other hand, is marred by an annoying detail of a different kind: her upper lip fuzz. The concern with depilatory techniques serves as a literally painful reminder of how “the feminine body [is, indeed, constructed] out of a female one”
(Baktry 139). Later on in the novel, Mary is presented as spending endless hours in front of her portable plastic mirror. “[S]he often got one of her sisters to sit before the mirror so that she could dispense [beauty] advice” (TVS 177). It probably comes as no surprise that, as
Kristi McCulchan, Mary’s schoolmate, reveals, Mary secretly aspired to becoming a cheerleader: a most recognizable symbol of “successful” gender performativity that is. “She always wanted to become one. But her mother wouldn’t let her,” Kristi McCulchan concludes
(TVS 185). Apparently, cheerleaders were far too sexually provoking for Mrs. Lisbon’s
Catholic ethics and suburban propriety. Yet probably the most disquieting detail in the excerpt quoted above is found in the description of Bonnie’s physique. Bonnie is depicted as standing out because of “the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.”
The shocking foreshadowing that works its way into the reader’s mind here is that Mary’s fate was pre-scribed on (account of) her bodily difference; the female body as a death trap.
The girls’ bodies become the object of scrutiny on a number of other instances. When the boys get the chance to come closer to the girls for one more time (right before escorting them to the Homecoming prom) they scrutinize their physical appearance again (TVS 118-9).
Trip Fontain is escorting Lux, but the rest of the boys know not whom in particular to escort.
“Fortunately,” as the boys say, “their dresses and hairdos homogenized them,” making the picking process less puzzling for them (TVS 122). In other words, the pains that the girls took in attending their bodies so that these may evince a recognizably feminine outlook resulted in the embarrassing blurring of their individuality. Yet the bluntness and shallowness of the boys’ confession evidently turns against themselves. This is only one of the times when Staikou 19
Eugenides obliquely exposes the burden that performing the female gender role in a man’s world may entail.
On a different instance, the boys appear somewhat more empathetic. As a matter of fact, they are presented as claiming to know “the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball” (TVS 43). But how is it possible for them to know, how is it possible for them to “[feel] the imprisonment of being a girl,” as they naively, once more, purport to do (TVS 43)? The answer is: it is not. In her seminal essay, “Throwing Like a
Girl,” Iris Marion Young has pointedly shown that “the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality” are different from the male ones in decisive ways, because of the norms that patriarchal society consistently inscribes on bodies (141). Hence, it takes more than watching a girl jump rope to actually feel how her body has learned to move through assimilating all these norms.
One such imposing norm is that the female body ought to be young and beautiful. The novel discloses the male gaze’s difficulty with perceiving a body which is neither young nor
“beautiful” in the revealing description of a female neighbor. As the boys/narrators confess,
“the few contradictory glimpses [through the keyhole] we’d gotten form “Old Mrs. Karafilis, with her sagging breasts from another century, her blue legs, her undone hair shockingly glossy as a girl’s, filled us with embarrassment” (TVS 174). Ageism is a form of discrimination afflicting both sexes. Yet one has to admit that “the embarrassment” caused by an aged female body is perceived as more shocking than that which a male body would produce. This discrepancy stems from the existing double standard for physical attractiveness with regard to the two sexes. Staikou 20
The narrators, however, imply that it is not only teenage girls who suffer because of gendered expectations regarding beauty. “Our fathers and brothers, our decrepit uncles, had assured us that looks didn’t matter if you were a boy,” the narrators complain (69). Yet every girl or grown up woman they knew appeared to be madly in love with Trip Fontain. Because he was beautiful. The way the narrators describe Trip daringly eroticizes his body: “With his vacation tan Trip must have looked much as he did in late summer, circulating in his swimming pool, his nipples like two pink cherries embedded in brown sugar” (TVS 71). In the end, Trip’s remarkable sex appeal instigates a spreading cult around his person, a cult with both male and female adherents. What makes him a hero in the boys’ eyes is that he seems to effortlessly enjoy a thrilling sex life whereas they have to give uneven fights for a date. As they characteristically say, “[t]heir sparrows’ chests and knock-knees had taught them perseverance, whereas Trip had never even had to dial a girl’s phone number” (TVS 80).
Interestingly, the only boy in the neighborhood with a fulfilling erotic life is the son of a homosexual who “discretely” shares his own life with his partner. Tellingly enough, the two of them are the only gay couple the boys know of. This is yet another indirect comment on suburban conservatism.
One last instance that challenges gender norms is the boys’ guilty experimentation with girls’ cosmetics. The boys have a peer, Woody Clabault, put on his sister’s pink lipstick because it is the same as Lux’s one. Then, they make him kiss each one of them so that they
“would know what it tasted like” (TVS 151). Naturally, “the next day [the boys] refused that any of this had happened” (TVS 151). The narrators confess this is the first time they have ever spoken of the incident. The feeling of guilt caused by the transgression of gender roles only attests to the duress under which these roles are assumed, performed, repeated, and naturalized—to recall Butler’s theorization of gender performativity—obliquely pointing to the constructedness of masculinity as well. All the aforementioned instances of “gender Staikou 21 trouble,” of contestation of stereotypical embodiment and heterosexual norms occupy a rather small, and therefore marginal space, compared to the entirety of the narrative. However, this is not a measure of their significance, I argue. Nor is it Eugenides’s way of endorsing or promulgating heteronormativity. Quite on the contrary, this marginal status reflects the one that real bodies are confined to in the actual, heteronormative, suburban milieu.13
So far, I hope I have been able to show that Eugenides’s narrative brims with descriptions of human bodies. The preeminence of those of the female body among them is blatant. Throughout the novel, the Lisbon girls’ bodies are, in effect, the alternatingly but often simultaneously, celebrated and lamented objects of the boys/narrators’ desire.
Therefore, I find it hard not to be stricken by the utterance that opens the novel’s closing period, in which the sexed specificity of the Lisbon girls’ bodies is overtly denied: “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them . . .” the narrators unexpectedly claim (TVS 248-9). The narrators, that is, eventually decide that their ideal lovers’ gender was irrelevant. In reality, a statement like this could not have been more misleading.
At this point, I would like to draw on Alex Grosz’s admittedly polemic position, which I will quote in its entirety—in two parts—because of its sheer pertinence: “The question of sexual difference admits of no outside position. The proclamation of a position outside, beyond sexual difference is a luxury that only male arrogance can afford. It is only men who can afford the belief that their perspective is an outside, disinterested, or objective position” (191). While it is true that by accentuating their lament as “a lover’s discourse”
(“but [the] only [thing] that [mattered is that] we had loved them”) the narrators make little claim to disinterestedness or objectivity, the exteriority of their discourse to the question of sexual difference is hard to be denied. To say that “it didn’t matter in the end that they were
13 This is a readily identifiable aspect of Containment Culture at work in the American suburb. Staikou 22 girls” is to suggest that the girls were loved as… genderless girls. The oxymoron only emphasizes the impossibility of this condition as embodied experience. A less attentive reader might argue that, as genderless, it is the girls who are positioned outside the space of sexual difference. But to endorse this view would be to miss the plain fact that the “true outsider” is the one who effectively endows himself with the perspective of an “outsider, since, in lived reality, as Grosz insinuates, no one exists outside the realm of sexual difference.
The reason why I have insisted on this utterance is because it evokes a stance that ostensibly contradicts the one assumed throughout the rest of the book. Up until that point, nothing mattered more than that “they were girls.” What is it that changed so radically, then?
In my view, at the end of the book, confronted with the quandary of the girls’ suicides, the narrators choose to downplay gender, so as not to, or being unable to finally acknowledge that the suicides were actually gendered.14 At the same time, the narrators choose to privilege a vague erotic discourse—one deprived of its true referent, that is—in a final attempt to reassert control of their (love) story. For, in killing themselves, the girls had most radically negated the boys’ desire, finally assuming agency in the most contradictory of ways, given that suicide leads to the subject’s very annihilation. In response, as if mobilizing a coping mechanism right before their story’s closure, the narrators choose to negate the girls’ gender. It is as if they are actually saying: it didn’t matter in the end that you (girls) didn’t love us back as boys—when, in reality it did.
Still, there remains a crucial paradox: the boys needed the girls not to love them back because, in this way, they could continue to be the sole authors of their love story; or, as
Shostack puts it, “The boys [choose to] remain entrenched within the narrative that suits their
14 Of all the theories that were proposed in the effort to explain the girls’ suicides, none seems to take into account the girls’ gender. However, when the hospital doctor that looked after Cecilia’s wounds (in her first suicide attempt she had slit her wrists) tenderly scolded her for being there, Cecilia’s disarming answer was: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl” (TVS 7). Staikou 23 narcissistic desires” (825). After all, they do confess that the girls had made “them happier with dreams than wives” (TVS 169). Apparently, in the narrators’ eyes, girls cannot possibly be both. In deciding to take their own lives the girls also unwittingly made them authors of their story in a literal sense. But who does their actually refer to; to the narrators, or to the girls? Whose story do the narrators tell in the end? I contend that they give their own answer to this quandary when they confess that the only thing that mattered in the end, is “that [they] had loved them,” which should be read as: the only thing that mattered, in the end, is that they
(the boys) had loved them (the girls). The Virgin Suicides is effectively the boys’, or rather, the narrators’ plural narrative of a (love) story, and, more in particular, the kind of story the boys “could [actually] live with,” as Shostack cogently notes using the narrators’ own words
(827).
However, to fall prey to the alluring romantic notion of unrequited love, or to overemphasize the question of authorial control, without interrogating both of these notions’ gendered implications, would mean to miss a whole piece of the puzzle-like narrative’s point.
Distance, in the boys/narrators’ case, is not simply a corollary of misfortune in matters of love. Rather, it is again a matter of perspective, of a gender-specific epistemological and relational stance. Grosz’s contribution carries on insightfully, as she adds:
The enigma that Woman has posed for men is an enigma only because the male
subject has constituted itself as the subject par excellence. The way (he fantasizes) that
Woman differs from him makes her containable within his imagination (reduced to his
size) but also produces her as a mystery for him to master and decipher within safe or
unthreatening borders (the fantasy of the inscrutable that men attribute to women and
the West to its others as well.) (191) Staikou 24
The instances in which the infatuated boys from Gosse Pointe are caught reproducing the stance quoted above are ample. What I have to acknowledge though, is that they appear to do so mostly unknowingly—naturally15 would be a suitable alternative adverb—as unknowingly, yet movingly, they try to break (away from) it. This oscillation, namely, this inconsistency, constitutes the narrative’s singular consistent mode. At any rate, the narrators are the first to admit their failures, as when they remorsefully contemplate their past as follows: “At home, each boy had pictured the Lisbon girls amid the stock scenery of our impoverished imaginations . . .” (TVS 123). At other points, as we have seen, they seem more prone to indulge in delusions of absolute authorial control. Not surprisingly, one of these moments is the way they choose to bring their narrative to a close. But the girls’ (absent) bodies as signs, once more, manifest their resistance. For, in the novel’s closing line, the narrators are helplessly forced to admit that they “will never find the pieces to put them back together”
(TVS 249 emphasis is mine). Exiting this world, the girls took the secret of their short-lived embodied existence with them. The narrators’ (love) story can never be complete. In this vein, the narrators can never be the masters of their “master narrative.”
15 “Naturally” because they have internalized—as natural—the patriarchal discourses that produce women as a radically different. Staikou 25
CHAPTER TWO
Eugenides’s Suburban Gothic and the Female Body
“Not every castle is Gothic, and not every Gothic has a castle” (Williams 15). True,
Eugenides’s Gothic involves no castle, but obsessively circles around an ostensibly ordinary middle-class home. According to Murphy, the Suburban Gothic is concerned “first and foremost, with playing upon the lingering suspicion that even the most ordinary-looking neighborhood, or home, or family has something to hide, and that no matter how calm and settled a place looks, it is only ever a moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident” (qtd in Madden 7). Eugenides uses a number of external gothic markers to draw the outline of the suburban milieu. Some of these markers include the neighborhood’s diseased
Elm trees, the ubiquity of dead fish flies, the polluted lake, the escalating neglect of the
Lisbon house, and, last but not least, the six month long cemetery workers strike that resulted in thousands of corpses piling up in “the deep freeze of mortuary” (TVS 36). The real crisis, however, the decisive “sinister incident” comes from within; from the interior of the house that has become the prison of the Lisbon girls.
That the captives are female is no coincidence. The incarcerated young woman is a classic topos of gothic literature. Yet, the Gothicist’s compulsion to narrate the plights of female captives is not simply a matter of adhesion to generic standards. It reflects enduring cultural ideas and practices with regard to the female body. However, as Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price insightfully observe, “[t]o forefront the notion of the body as sexed is not just another consideration to be taken into account, but a factor that changes everything” (9). As I have already shown, Eugenides spotlights the body as sexed throughout his novel, and this is what I shall also continue to do for the rest of my present discussion. In doing so, I will show how the female body “changes everything” within its specifically Gothic and suburban Staikou 26 context; put differently, I will argue that it is essential to the Suburban Gothic that Eugenides proposes.
The female body is essential for two distinct but interrelated reasons: firstly, because it allows the author to “add gothicity” to his text by alluding to, advancing, or recontexualizing familiar motifs relating to the gothic heroine. Indeed, from among a number of gothic markers that are employed by Eugenides, the ones connected with femininity are the most resounding.
In particular, Eugenides depicts his heroines in persistently physical ways that decidedly gothicize his narrative, as when he insists on their bodies’ frailty, sense of doom, and eventually, violent death. Secondly, the female body is pivotal in that the “added value” of bodily gothicity/gothic embodiment functions as a key interpretative frame for the context whose “gothic value” it augments. This context is dual. It is generic, i.e. the Suburban Gothic, and socio-cultural, i.e. the (gothic) American suburb; both contexts are employed at one and the same time.
By this, I wish to argue that by forming part of this specific sub-genre, which programmatically thematizes suburban life, The Virgin Suicides contributes to a wider debate that runs through literary, academic, journalistic and everyday discourses. That the female body has a central place in this particular debate is by no means inconsequential to Eugenides, who demonstrably shares this interest, if, not from a committed feminist’s standpoint.
Paradoxically, (or is it not paradoxically, after all?) this makes the novel all the more intriguing. Eugenides’s engagement with the ongoing debate concerning the specificity of the suburban female body is far from predictable or uncomplicated: at times, the depiction of the female body becomes even shocking, while the male gaze is asphyxiatingly imposing from beginning to end. Nevertheless, as I will try to demonstrate, the novel, as a whole, is keen on questioning the cultural norms that perpetuate the oppression of female bodies. While it is true that the book reproduces a number of gender stereotypes, at the same time, as I will Staikou 27 argue, it often works to challenge them. Yet, it does so without ever assuming a loud, didactic tone; other, subtler strategies are called in. To agree with Shostack once again, the fact that stereotypical representations of female embodiment are not always (successfully) undermined does not make The Virgin Suicides a misogynist work; rather, it attests to its complexity, which is also the complexity of our gendered world.
Death in the Suburbs
A typical instance of the kind described above, comes as early as the novel’s first page, setting the key to which the entire book is subsequently tuned. There, we read of
Cecilia’s first suicide attempt:
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrist like a Stoic while
taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes
of someone possessed and her small body giving of the odor of a mature woman, the
paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquility that they stood mesmerized. But
then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself . . .
(TVS 3-4)
This small excerpt, saturated with both gothic and bodily signs, introduces us to the youngest gothic heroine of the novel. To begin with, the description of a suicide attempt, one of a teenager, to boot, is morbid enough on its own, morbidity standing for a most unmistakable gothic marker. What gothicizes the description even further is the reference to an archaic—in this particular case, ancient—past. The allusion is, possibly, to the most renowned Stoic and suicide, Seneca the Younger.16 Moving further down, we read of Cecilia’s “yellow eyes of someone possessed.” What is particularly interesting about the admittedly luring diction, is the employment of the word “possessed,” which metaphorically means someone who has
16 Philosopher and dramatist of the first century A.D. Staikou 28 been intruded by an evil spirit or force. This will not be the sole allusion to demonic powers— a textbook gothic reminder—throughout the book. Quite on the contrary, there is a recurrent connection of the Lisbon girls—but mostly of Cecilia17—with mysticism, spiritualism or sorcery; in one word, with the supernatural. This is an authorial strategy to which I shall return later on. For now, I will continue by observing another interesting word choice: according to the passage, the paramedics stood “mesmerized” in front of Cecilia’s eerie tranquility. This morsel of narrative has the effect of a photographic standstill. It artfully elicits the air of time turned still, only to be set back in motion by the “reality”18 of a scream.
Suspension of temporality is, too, a common gothic motif.
What is impossible to miss in this excerpt, though, is that the conflation of all the gothic motifs listed above, takes place around a centripetal, organizing force: the “small body” of a girl. Interestingly, this body is said to emit the scent of a mature woman. Given the bloodiness of the scene, what else could this reference be but an allusion to menstruation, the physical event that marks the passage to sexual maturity? However, I am tempted to speculate that the “misogynist camp,” namely, those who accuse the novel of misogyny, might argue that the insinuation at play here is that mature women smell… of death. At any rate, it is true that smell in the novel is consistently associated with putrescence and decay.19 What the overall effect of Cecilia’s description points to, though, is a radical unfathomability. Cecilia’s body is a blur sign. Half-dead and half-alive, half-girl and half-woman, half natural and half
17 Cecilia is described as: fixing a neighbor, Mrs. Scheer, with her “spiritualist’s gaze” (TVS 4); being ostracized by some of her fellow suburbanites as “a freak of nature” (TVS 112); possessing paraphernalia that allude to spiritualism or witchcraft (a zodiac mobile, a collection of potent amethysts, and a pack of Tarot cards) (TVS 40- 1). After her suicide, she reappears in the narrative as a “ghost,” which mockingly proves to be her sister Bonnie, “wrapped in a bed sheet” (TVS 61). 18 In his seminal essay “The Fantasic,” Tzvetan Todorov argues that the defining characteristic of fantastic literature is the creation of a feeling of radical uncertainty as to whether what is narrated does happen in the reality of the narrative, or it is a mere illusion. In the examined excerpt, Eugenides artfully alludes to this effect. 19 Probably the most characteristic instance comes from the narrators’ description of the smell that the Lisbon house started, at some point, to emit: “We tried to locate its source looking for dead squirrels in the yard or a bag of fertilizer, but the smell contained too much syrup to be death itself . . . The smell was partly bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film, but also the singed smell of drilled teeth” (TVS 165). Staikou 29 unnatural, Cecilia resists interpretation, or, rather is denied one, by the male gaze that tries to frame her. To be more precise, a certain kind of interpretation is, in effect, put forward. But it is one that conveniently mystifies Cecilia’s body. In other words, this is one of the moments when narration refrains from breaking away from the dominant mode of narrative mystification of women.
Cecilia’s first attempt at taking her life was unsuccessful. She had to wait for a period of about two weeks, that is, until the infamous party was organized at her place, to give death a second shot. That party was part of a tentative family policy that entailed a slightly looser surveillance of the girls. This new approach was reluctantly implemented upon Dr.
Hornicker’s suggestion. Dr. Hornicker was the psychiatrist who diagnosed Cecilia’s first suicide attempt as “a cry for help” (TVS 21). Cecilia herself had called it “a mistake” (TVS
21). More precisely, the psychiatrist had diagnosed that,
Cecilia would benefit by having a social outlet, outside the codification of school,
where she can interact with males her own age. At thirteen, Cecilia should be allowed
to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them.
The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individuation.
(TVS 3)
This passage epitomizes the notion of gender performativity within the restrictive space of a heteronormative social environment. “Shared customs” are not random. They are powerful cultural signs inscribed upon the social body through repetition in time. In this particular case, the implied shared customs are the culturally validated codes of femininity and female sexuality. The extent to which these are crucial becomes transparent in Butler’s subsequent observation: “Gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end.” Therefore, Butler continues, “[T]he term ‘strategy’ better suggests the situation of duress under which gender Staikou 30 performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (“Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution,” 952). The fact that, in her second reference to survival, Butler omits the adjective “cultural” is by no means accidental: people’s physical existence is at stake in the perilous game called gender. As I will move on to demonstrate, Dr. Hornicker’s “gender prescription” is depicted in the narrative as a disastrous failure of a survival strategy.
As the narrators insinuate, before the party, Cecilia, “the misfit”, had made all possible efforts to fit in. She had “colored her lips with red crayon,” but sadly, in the boys’ eyes, this
“gave her face a deranged harlot look” (27). She had even tried to hide the scars on her wrists by wearing a collection of bracelets. Eugenides’s genius in producing haunting details has the bracelets held to Cecilia’s skin with scotch tape: a poignant way to highlight the inventive artificiality but also, the disturbing grotesquery that might be implicated in the rituals of conformity to perceived gender expectations. Cecilia did try to embody these expectations; hesitantly and clumsily as her overall comportment reveals: “She acted as though no one were there,” the narrators reminisce (TVS 27). In the end, it was as if she was forcing her body to perform the role of the girl that Dr. Hornicker had laid out for her: the role of the girl that is interested in interacting “with males her own age.”
After Cecilia’s death, some suburbanites attempted to attribute her salto mortale to her alleged, frustrated love for a peer named Dominik Palazzolo, himself an aspiring but frustrated lover who jumped off a roof out of erotic despair. According to the narrators though, there was only one entry in Cecilia’s diary concerning him, and this read: “Palazollo jumped off the roof today over that rich bitch, Porter. How stupid can you be?” (TVS 32-3).
What can be elicited from all this information is that Cecilia’s sexual interests remained undisclosed, possibly even to herself. Life shows that the pressure to enact scenarios of sexual behavior that are not one’s own can become an unbearable burden. Instinctively, Cecilia Staikou 31 revolted against the scenario prepared for her; her body betrayed her unease; her attire, too. A genuine and unrepentant Goth at heart, Cecilia had refused to wear anything else than the vintage “wedding dress with the shorn hem” that she always wore (TVS 26). She sat speechless in her stool for a while, then excused herself, untucked her bracelets, and climbed the stairs to the second floor from where she threw herself out of a window. Cecilia’s troubled
(gender) performance finally ends with a thud, the one her body lets out as it lands on the house’s fence. Eugenides is definitely on her side. The insurmountable difficulty that arises from the text, the same difficulty however, that adds to its brilliance, is that he is so all the way to the end, her end.
The final gothic brushstroke that the narrative adds to the portrayal of Cecilia is the chillingly detailed description of her violent death. Finding his daughter impaled upon the fence, Mr. Lisbon tries to free her body from the murderous spike that keeps her suspended in the air “like a gymnast” (TVS 31). The narrators watch him as he,
[W]as trying to lift her off the spike that had punctured the left breast, traveled
through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and
come out her back, ripping the dress and finding the air again . . . Mr. Lisbon kept
trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and
that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a
fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in
hurling herself out of the world. (TVS 31)
Was Cecilia too gothic for this world after all, or is there truth in Helen Meyer’s suggestion that “the world is a Gothic place for the second sex”? (117). I believe that both of these views are valid. In claiming that Cecilia was too gothic, I mean to overtly posit something that I have already insinuated: Cecilia, the “weird sister,” stands for the queer subject, the one Staikou 32 unable to fit into given gender scripts and sexualities. As Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik posit,
“the Gothic text’s preoccupation with boundaries and their permeability has always extended to the demarcations of gender identity;” and those of sexuality, I would add. (56). Eugenides’s novel also does this and Cecilia’s character is its tour de force in doing so.20
Certainly, the way Eugenides questions fixed gender identities is a most oblique one.
True, he does not radicalize his suburban heroes; however, one must be forced to think of anything more radical than suicide itself. At any rate, the moments that directly challenge cultural norms concerning gender and sexuality are admittedly few. Their contrapuntal resonance though—contrapuntal to all permeating suburban heteronormativity—manages to stay with the reader in an insidiously drastic way. We must never lose sight of the built and cultural environment within which these heroes and heroines move or are being confined; namely, the American suburbs. After all, the suburbs were built to house the stem cell of heteronormativity: the nuclear family. All other modalities of relating with people within the suburban framework were doomed to be marginal, especially in the era during which the story of the Lisbon girls unfurls. Fittingly, this particular aspect of suburban doom finds a poignant expression in Eugenides’s suburban gothic.
On the other hand, to return to the surgical details of the excerpt under discussion, the description of Cecilia’s agonizing body is truly liminal. It is liminal, firstly, in that it takes gothic horror to its extremes. The anatomical accuracy of the description is almost sadistic, and the simile that compares Cecilia to a fish on a hook, truly unnerving. Also, the idea that
Cecilia’s nervous system functions autonomously, after her death, evokes the familiar gothic
20 Let us also remember the anxiously suppressed “drag experiment” of the boys, described in chapter one. Staikou 33 motif of the (female) automaton.21 The excerpt is also liminal in that it raises legitimate questions as to how far, how deep the invasion of female privacy by the male gaze might go.
The scrutinization of Cecilia’s body as it balances on the pole that impaled her is not the only time in the novel that a dead female body is seen under a harsh light. Cecilia’s body is described again inside her coffin as well as Bonnie’s breathless body as she hangs from a beam. The “objective” reader could not possibly miss the “necrophilic” motif here. These moments admittedly stand out as some of the most provocative ones in Eugenides’s book.
Punter speaks of the obsessively intrusive depiction of the dead female body in a number of literary texts of the Western Canon—many among them, Gothic—as a gesture that simultaneously “consigns the female body into a space of terminal privacy” and “exposes it to the full public gaze of the reader as anatomist’s pupil” (Gothic Pathologies, 103 emphasis mine). The description of Cecilia’s lethally wounded body blatantly employs the vocabulary of an anatomist. On the other hand, in the bathtub description of her first suicide attempt, the girl’s inert body is masterfully aestheticized.22
Eugenides’s novel forms part of a greater gothic tradition in which “the triple linking of death, the female and the aesthetic seems to take its place naturally” (Punter, Gothic
Pathologies, 101). What is alarming about this canonical literary triad—which is, actually, expansively cultural rather than exclusively literary—is, exactly, the extent to which it has acquired a status of legitimacy, of naturalness. Nevertheless, it is my contention that
Eugenides stands critically opposite this tradition. For instance, after aestheticizing Cecilia’s
(still living) body in the bathtub, he goes on to show that there is nothing sublime, and certainly nothing beautiful about (a teenage girl’s) death; only separated vertebrae and a
21Tellingly, according to the narrators, newspapers accounts of the Lisbon tragedy “treated the girls as automatons, creatures so barely alive that their deaths came as little change” (TVS 176, emphasis is mine). 22 Even if there is not an intended allusion to Ophelia in this particular description, I could not escape the thought of her body, afloat in the immortal stream that William Shakespeare wrote and John Everett Millait painted for her. Staikou 34 punctured breast. One could, nevertheless, argue that the act of writing the girl’s death is, by definition, an act of aestheticizing it. Although I would by no means disagree, I would still feel compelled to call attention to the significance of the ways in which aestheticization is carried out by each artist, and in each case.
Let us, for instance, examine the manner in which Eugenides’s narrative aestheticizes—there is no doubt that it does—Bonnie’s dead body in a breathtaking instance near the end of the book. The boys/narrators step inside the Lisbon house for the first time after Cecilia’s party. They are there on a mission. They are there to help the girls escape. At least, this is what the girls had made them think, and what would have been an appropriate ending (crowned with marriage) for a Gothic novel of the classic kind. In The Virgin Suicides, however, Eugenides offers no marriage plot.
Instead, the boys/narrators eventually discover that their cherished neighbors had called them to their house because they wanted them to witness their deaths. The dead bodies are dispersed in various rooms of the house but the boys ignore the appalling fact. They follow a sound and walk down the stairs that lead to the basement. There, they realize that the room has not been cleaned after Cecilia’s party. The place had been left to rot, but according to the narrators, “The room’s changes—bugs adhering to the walls, one bobbing dead mouse—only heightened what hadn’t changed. If we half closed our eyes and held our noses, we could trick ourselves into thinking that the party was still going on” (TVS 214). After establishing an eerie feeling of anticipation, caused by the encounter with the uncannily unchanged23 and identifiably gothic space, the narrative goes on to describe what it was that had irrevocably changed in the scenery:
23 In his seminal essay entitled “The Uncanny,” Freud posits that the feeling of uncanniness is produced by the confrontation not with something novel or foreign but with something familiar and rooted in the mind that has been estranged by the process of repression. Staikou 35
It was then we saw, over Buzz Romano’s head, the only thing that had changed in the
room since we left it a year before. Hanging down amid the half deflated balloons
were two brown-and-white husks of Bonnie’s saddle shoes. She had tied the rope to
the same beam as the decorations. None of us moved. Above him, in a pink dress,
Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a piñata. It took a minute to sink in. We gazed
up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame
that has never gone away took over. (TVS 15)
Eugenides’s aestheticization of the dead female body in this excerpt is striking and unconventional. The awkward, yet dramatically effective simile that takes the reader aback here is that of Bonnie’s body as a “piñata.” The grotesqueness of the specific word choice in this particular context—a death scene—is almost unbearable. The wider context, as I will not weary myself repeating, is the Suburban Gothic/Gothic suburb.
The alliance of the Gothic and the grotesque is a well attested one. But what is it in particular that Eugenides is after, in mobilizing the grotesque’s affective potential? As
Geoffrey Galt Harpham posits,
[G]rotesque is another word for non-thing, especially the strong forms of the
ambivalent and the anomalous. The mind does not tolerate such affronts to its
classificatory systems as grotesque forms present; within an instant of being exposed
to such forms it starts to operate in certain ways, and it is these operations that tell us
that we are in the presence of the grotesque. (4)
If we come to think of it, following Harpham’s train of thought, the dead human body epitomizes the grotesque: the dead body is the non-thing par-excellence because it is a body that is a thing, an inanimate body. In the case of Eugenides’s description, the inherently—as I have just argued—ambivalent and anomalous dead body becomes even more so, in that it is Staikou 36 scandalously out of place. A dead body in a mortuary is a painful sight, but it is something to be expected. Also, a dead body on the ground is an image much easier to grasp; one exposed on the vertical axis sets a tough phenomenological and perceptive challenge. The mental and psychic bafflement that Bonnie’s dead body engenders—the difficulty in classification of which Harpham speaks—is compounded by the fact that it hangs from a rope, in the house’s basement.24
Bonnie’s “festive pink dress” is the paraprosdokian that completes the inappropriateness of the scene. “Within an instant of being exposed to such forms,” Harpham says, the mind “starts to operate in certain ways, and it is these operations that tell us that we are in the presence of the grotesque.” The boys/narrators describe a similar state: “None of us moved . . . It took a minute to sink in,” they confess. The reader, too, finds her/himself in a similar state, as s/he vicariously experiences the boys’ horror. But mostly, as s/he realizes how difficult it is for her/him to fully grasp the grotesque form that the narrative has set before her/his eyes. It is the operations of her/his mind before this aporia that alert her/him to the realization that s/he is standing in the territory of the grotesque; most significantly though, it is the vaguely identifiable affect which overwhelms her/his body that does this. This affect is, indeed, hard to name. Still, the narrators manage to locate its source: it is “the shame that has never gone away.” It is the shame in front of a girl’s dead body. In the previous lines, I have intentionally used the “split” pronoun s/he, despite the evident stylistic cacophony, in order to emphasize that the feeling of shame is also split—that is, gendered. The narrators poignantly emphasize this split as they utter the following harsh realization: “We had never known her [Bonnie]. They had brought us here to find that out” (TVS 215, emphasis is mine).
24 The Lisbon basement is depicted as the (unsuccessfully) embalmed venue of Cecilia’s party. In its real-world suburban context though, the basement represents the typical recreation area for the children of the family. In The Virgin Suicides, it becomes a grotesquely ornamented coffin for one of the Lisbon offspring. Staikou 37
To my mind, this utterance most succinctly encapsulates the failure of the male gaze exercised upon the girls up until that moment.
A Gothic Sex Drive
So far in the present chapter, I believe I have provided enough proof to account for the narrative’s death drive. For someone who has not read the book, my discussion might have been far more morbid than a reader can handle. Yet, in his novel, Eugenides manages to balance this effect in a number of ways. The systematic injection of wisely administered dosages of humor is one of them, the ubiquity of adolescent desire, yet another one. One instance of cataclysmic outbreak of such desire is particularly gothic, and not surprisingly, focused—again—on the female body, Lux’s body. The time has come to retrace the novel’s sex drive.
In a novel entitled The Virgin Suicides, the narrative ironically introduces one more provocative twist to the character of the Gothic maiden by endowing Lux’s character with a promiscuity that would have probably not survived censorship back in, say, the eighteenth century. The overwhelmingness of Lux’s sexual energy as she ambushes Trip Fontain inside his car deserves to be quoted at length:
He [Trip] laid his head back on the headrest and opened his mouth to ease the
constriction in his chest, when suddenly the air inside the car churned. He felt himself
grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a
hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she
came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn’t have known who it was if it hadn’t
been for the taste of her watermelon gum, which after the first few torrid kisses he
found himself chewing . . . He felt her clammy shins, and then with terror he put his
finger in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist . . . Two beasts Staikou 38
lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get
out of its dump cage. Valiantly he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but
the sense of his insufficiency grew, and after a few minutes, with only the words
“Gotta get back before bed check,” Lux left him more dead than alive. (TVS 85-6)
Eugenides adds an extra touch of gothicity to his Suburban Gothic by toying with one of the most recognizable gothic motifs. The diction in the excerpt is more than telling: after
“sucking the marrow” out of Trip’s bones with “a hundred mouths,” Lux leaves him “more dead than alive.” Later on, the mouths are described as “suck[ing] out his juice in the dark”
(86). In few words, what we have here is Lux as a vampire. Needless to say that insatiable sexual appetite25 is one of the vampire’s defining characteristics. The supernatural tone is further corroborated by Trip’s description of the encounter “as a religious experience, a visitation or vision” (TVS 86). At the same time, it is cunningly undermined by the avowal that the sexual assault was actually perpetrated by a gum chewing teenager, anxious to get home before bed check. Also, the fervor of this sexual embrace is exaggerated to such an extent that it ends up verging on the comic. This—humor triggered by naïveté and exaggeration—is the narrative’s way to challenge patriarchal stereotypes of female sexuality inscribed in the literary and wider tradition.
As I have already mentioned, there are more than a few instances of humor inside
Eugenides’s text. In this particular instance, it is admittedly hard not smile as you read about the “two beasts” fighting over Trip’s defenseless body. However, humor’s decompressing effect cannot erase the deep impact brought about by Lux’s association with “a starved animal” and a vampire. Even as it challenges suburban sexual mores, in the end, the entire scene reproduces the stereotype of an uncontainable female sexuality with potentially
25 The leitmotif of unbridled female sexuality is the undercurrent of the folk theme of the vagina dentata, which was effortlessly brought to my mind as I read about “the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed” below Lux’s waist. Staikou 39 destructive powers.26 However, it is tragically proved that the only destructive powers Lux possesses are used against herself. The defenseless Trip on the other hand, does not seem to get cold feet at all as he abandons Lux after finally having sex with her for the first and last time. His explanation is disarming for all its shallowness: “It’s weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then” (TVS 139). It is obvious that Eugenides’s narrative does not dignify Trip’s sexual comportment, although he had been idolized by the boys as a sex symbol, as we have seen. After all, the adult Trip is interviewed in a de- toxification center. His achievements of a Casanova must not have added up to much in the end. Nevertheless, the narrative does not dignify Lux’s sexual behavior either. Instead of celebrating it as liberated and liberating, it eventually turns it against her.27 To do so, it once more employs a gothic tone, as I am now about to show.
Lux and Trip consummated their passion after the Homecoming prom. Lux eventually got home alone failing to meet her mother’s rigid curfew. It was at that moment that Mrs.
Lisbon decided to “shut the house down in maximum security isolation” (TVS 141). As the narrators reveal, only a few weeks following this fatal decision, the “sightings of Lux making love on the roof began” (TVS 141). Apparently, Lux had begun to have sex with strangers, whom no one ever knew how she met, on the roof of her house. The word “sightings” resonates with gothic overtones, familiarly used as it is to describe encounters with otherworldly creatures and forces. These sightings were mediated by binoculars—a voyeurist’s emblem—and substantiated by Lux’s sex partners’ “reports” (TVS 147). The
26 Horner and Zlosnik speak of the vampire as “a Gothic body that has proved particularly fertile as a repository of fears concerning the instability of gender” (62). Fears of this sort are magnified in the constitutionally heteronormative suburban milieu. 27 According to Suzanne Becker, the prototype of the Gothic sexual woman is Bertha Mason from Jayne Eyre. Bertha, Becker contends, epitomizes “affirmative femininity turned into the monstrous” (72). This sort of transformation afflicts Lux’s (representation of) sexuality, as well. I will show this in the final part of this section. Staikou 40 narrators invoke sixteen such reports that all share a revealing approach to Lux’s wearied body. After the anatomist’s perspective, the male gaze assumes that of the clinician:
All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who
went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her
collarbones collected water. A few boys mentioned the acidic taste of her saliva—the
taste of digestive fluids with nothing to do—but none of these signs of
malnourishment or illness or grief (the small cold sores at the corners of her mouth,
the patch of hair missing above her left ear) detracted from Lux’s overwhelming
impression of being a carnal angel. (TVS 148)
What the closing line of the excerpt reveals is that, despite the sharp clinician’s eye—manifest in the elaborate details of Lux’s physical condition—the diagnosis is awfully biased: Lux has to remain the “carnal angel” that fuels men’s fantasies and sexual needs. Not even the alarming bodily signs of sheer precariousness stop them from reducing her to mere sexual object. The attempt at sublimating her as an “angel” is nothing but a self-reassuring compensation strategy that hardly conceals these men’s fixation on the “unbeatable Madonna-
Whore” combination.28 Yet at this point, I would like to quote Debra Shostak’s insightful remark regarding the novel’s ideological stance: “[T]o read the novel,” she posits, “requires an important distinction: to argue that the narrators’ story is misogynist may be viable . . . but that is not to argue that the novel is so” (828). In her grain of thought, Bakhtinian heterogossia makes this distinction possible (n. 17, 831). This is my own conviction, as well.
As far as the examined excerpt is concerned, my view is that it exposes rather than endorses the men’s myopic self-centeredness.
28 The quotation comes from the “No More Miss America” manifesto, an emblematic feminist brochure of protest against the Miss America Pageant of the year 1968 (reproduced in McCann and Kim, eds.). Interestingly, when Lux got home after the prom—in which she was elected Prom Queen to Trip’s Prom King— she “was still wearing the miss America tiara” (137). Staikou 41
As if the men’s’ description were not already enough, the collage of reports concludes with a section in which feminine gothicity reaches its apogee, and male empathy hits bottom:
“They spoke of being pinned to the chimney as if by two great beating wings, and of the slight blond fuzz above her upper lip that felt like plumage. Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be” (TVS 148). Lux is here depicted as a mythical animal. Depictions of this kind have never been innocent. Rather, they pertain to a strand of discourses that has mythologized women in systematically recurrent ways. “These myths can be categorized in the two following areas: the female body as dirty (particularly regarding genitalia and menstruation) and the female body as monstrous, supernatural and overpowering.” Both approaches legitimize the idea of women as something other (usually, lesser) than human
(Emily Martin-Hondros 17).
To do some justice to Lux’s sexual partners, though, we have to acknowledge the fact that the excerpt is not a verbatim synthesis of their own accounts. Rather, it is an extravagantly narrativised version of them, on behalf of the narrators, who are definitely much better versed in Gothic conventions than in feminism. Yet through their stylized, pompous account, Eugenides points to their fundamental inability to empathize with the girls as real persons. Nevertheless, the plain fact of the reproduction of the (literary) stereotype of
“the mythical woman” remains. But the greatest quandary that the novel poses to the feminist critic is that, for all its (sporadic) exposure of (the) men’s self-centeredness and sexism,
Lux—as all the Lisbon girls—remains bound to self-destructiveness.
Staikou 42
CONCLUSION
In her essay on “gothic femininities,” Alison Milbank notes that “Gothic heroines always cause the down fall of the patriarchal figures or institutions that seek to entrap them”
(155). Only, in the case of Eugenides’s novel, it takes the heroines’ lives to achieve this.
Ironically, the patriarchal figure in the novel—the embodiment of the Law, symbolically identified with the Father—is here the mother.29 The patriarchal institution that watches its collapse is no other than the family itself that sees its offspring dead and its very reason of being irrevocably annulled. In the penultimate page of the novel, the narrators attempt to reduce the heroines’ decision “to simple selfishness.” Their final verdict seems to be that
“The girls took into their hands decisions better left to God” (248). In reality, this is a euphemistic way to declare their sheer inability to address “the only serious philosophical problem . . . suicide” (Camus 3). This is why the allegation according to which the girls were merely selfish has to once more turn against the narrators themselves; because in order to render themselves capable of fathoming the girls’ decision to annihilate their bodies, the narrators work out an explicatory schema that violates the girls’ personal histories.
As I hope I have demonstrated so far, this is an epistemological stance that permeates the entire narrative. The narrators wish to know and empathize with the girls, but their
“epistemophilic project” is often compromised by the already-made explanations that they often put forward; these explanations more than seldom prove to be decidedly gender-biased.
In showing this, the novel points to the hegemonic patriarchal discourses that mediate the relationships between men and women. Another way it achieves this is by undermining, if, in a not straightforward way, a number of gender-related stereotypes that apply to both the
29 The employment of a woman in the traditional gothic role of the villain, other than offering an interesting thematic twist, piercingly points to the unknowing internalization of the patriarchal value system by its very victims, and the lethal outcomes this brings along with it.
Staikou 43 fictional characters of the book and to real bodies. However, it must be noted that the stereotyping of the female body is not always avoided. In all, though, the Suburban Gothic proves to be—in Eugenides’s hands—a rather malleable medium, one which effectively offers its repertoire of (feminine) gothic motifs to the problematization of suburban life, and especially to that of women. For, the novel’s propelling force, both in terms of narrative development and exploration of ideas within its specific generic framework, is none other than the female body.
Staikou 44
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