hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something….
In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. In a telling passage, one of the boys visits the Lisbon home and then gleefully reports the news that Lux Lisbon-the most individuated of the sisters-is currently menstruating:
They obsessively watch the girls without permission, describe the girls’ appearances in objectifying terms (“bursting with their fructifying flesh” is one early example), and often can’t even tell them apart. The boys seemingly decry the various types of gendered mistreatment the Lisbon girls suffer, from their parents’ borderline abusive levels of restriction to one sister’s statutory rape, and yet, they actively participate in the sisters’ oppression. If this narrative device immediately seems like a breeding ground for the male gaze, that’s very much the point. They try to make sense of the girls’ deaths by recounting everything they knew about the girls’ lives. The book is narrated by a Greek chorus of neighborhood boys, who were in love with the Lisbon girls and are still haunted by their deaths decades later. The Virgin Suicides follows the suicides of the Lisbon girls-five beautiful white blonde girls whose mysterious malaise captivates their suburban Michigan neighborhood. So livid, in fact, that it was the only time in my life that I was tempted to write an author just to complain and ask annoying, entirely futile questions that essentially amount to “Why? Why did you do this to me?” Lyrical, unrelentingly dark, and keenly attuned to the perils of being a teenage girl, The Virgin Suicides seemed to be one of a rare breed: a novel written by a man, from a male perspective (a collective male perspective, no less), that demonstrates the male gaze in order to actively critique it. When I first read Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides at fifteen years old, I knew almost at once that it would be one of my favorite books.
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