Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicide

In this essay, female oppression in La Casa de Bernarda Alba will be discussed and analyzed. However, in order to be able to understand the importance of this theme and the impact it has had on the play, one must first understand the role of female oppression in the Spanish society in the 1930s.

In The Virgin Suicides, the narrators, a chorus of men recounting their youths, recall their memories of the Lisbon sisters. The novel centers around the boys, the narrators, and their obsession with the Lisbons girls. The boys want to save the girls from all the events that happen after the death of their youngest sister. When the boys can finally muster up the courage to save them, the girls die tragically, and assumingly leaving the boys unfulfilled with their heroic fantasy. But the boys continue their never ending heroic journey by archiving every instance of the girls’ existence to preserve their memory. The boys’ ultimate fantasy is to be The Lisbon girls’ hero, even after the death of the girls, the boys do not think their heroism has

Since the girls were depressed, this later resulted in their suicide. "Suicide attempts are usually made when a person is seriously depressed and feels that there is no way out of their problems" according to D'Arcy Lyness, PhD. Adolescents commit suicide because they feel as if they can not escape emotional pain. The Lisbon girls were simply depressed. The majority of adolescents who commit suicide suffer from depression. From the film The Virgin Suicides, it is obvious that the Lisbon girls are depressed. The Lisbon girl's depression was the cause of their

In the short story “An Act of Vengeance”, Isabel Allende uses imagery, setting, dialogue, and characterization to demonstrate that the mental trauma that Dulce Rosa Orellano undergoes relates to her legendary beauty in a misogynistic and patriarchal setting that was and still is prevalent in Latin American countries. All of the literary tools used by Isabel Allende are expertly intertwined to create a tragic and suspenseful tale.

The poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka uses vivid images of sights, sounds, and daily activities to symbolize a heartfelt story. In the poem, Amiri, is one of the African American slaves who is frustrated about the discriminatory treatment by whites. So frustrated he wants to commit suicide. The writer used transition words starting with “lately”, “now”, and “then” for each stanza. He was imagining how he acted before his death and how his daughter reacted to his death.

For this primary source paper, I decided to write a comparison on the source Women’s Place in Renaissance Italy: Alessandra, Letters from a Widow and Matriarch of a Great Family and The Virgin Suicides written by Jeffrey Eugenides. Immediately reading the first paragraph of Women’s Place in Renaissance Italy, it strongly resonated with The Virgin Suicides in a way. I thought these two would make an interesting comparison due to the way they both address men, death, complexity of being a female, and family.

“When you died, part of me died too,Now i'm finishing off the rest, so we can be together...I’m coming.” Is a direct quote from Junes suicide note to Delia wishing her a sincere see you soon. A book of a sad suicide turns into a brutal murder but for what? A beautiful lie or did little girls really die? Lynn Weingarten wrote a New York bestseller, suicide notes from beautiful girls, it was a hit in New York but due to all the disregard for the law, lack of respect for authority, and all the talk of sinful lives this won't make the Top Salem Seller.

The most notable aspect of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides would be its first person-plural narrative voice. Literary scholars have often addressed the issue of the narrative voice and the effect that having multiple narrators has on the story. In her article ‘A story we could live with’ Narrative voice, the Reader, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides Debra Shostak addresses how the “we” inadvertently draws attention to the “otherness” of the Lisbon girls. She attempts to dispel the belief that The Virgin Suicides is a misogynistic text by analyzing Eugenides’s complicated use of the word “we”. Shostak’s article gives deep insight into the complexities of the plural narrative and provides a foundation for future analysis of the text. However, what Shostak does not address is how this perception of otherness, by both the narrators and the community in which they reside, ultimately leads to the downfall of the Lisbon sisters. My argument is twofold. Firstly, I will address how the perception by the narrators that the girls are radically different from themselves and their community, combined with the tendency to group the girls as a single monolithic entity serves as one explanation for the girls deaths. Treating the girls as though they are the same person leads to the perceived inevitability of their deaths, which ultimately plays a vital role in their untimely and fatal ends.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, story on events from the past affect the future. Incestuous love between a brother and sister produced a mutated gene that would affect the eventual grand-daughter morphing to a grand-son. Jeffrey Eugenides suggests that society always believes to be missing something in their life; attempting to fill the missing piece producess in mixed outcomes of good and bad.

In Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel the Virgin Suicides, isolation, ignorance, and selfishness are depicted throughout the story. In order to protect their precious daughters from the danger of the outside world, Mr. Lisbon and Mrs. Lisbon have came up with a solution, which is to basically isolate their daughters from the world. Even before the Lisbon sisters’ very first suicide attempt, which was done by Cecilia slitting her wrist in the bathtub, they have been isolating and restricting their girls in every way possible: how they dress, what they put on their face, how they smell like, where they go, what they do, what they say and listen to, and who they spend their time with.

In Jeffrey Eugenides’s book Middlesex, Calliope Stephanide tells the story of not only her transformation, but also the world’s transformation into a completely different entity. Brother and sister become husband and wife, Greeks become Americans, and, most importantly, a young girl becomes a man. Along with being a transformative novel, Middlesex is also considered a modern epic. It is an epic account that retells the history of a recessive chromosome that made its way into the life of the main character. Cal describes this recessive chromosome’s journey as it travels through many imposing events: “Cal needs to tell the story of his past in order to function in the present” (Cohen). This genetic chromosome survives a fire in Smyrna,

The novel, The Virgin Suicides falls under the writing movement regionalism. This can be seen in the entirety of the novel, which is centered around a simple suburb of Detroit. The writing movement of regionalism focuses on a specific geographical setting that effects the behavior, attitudes and actions of those in the novel. This is clearly seen in The Virgin Suicides, which makes the suburban setting of nosey neighbors and a tight knit neighborhood key to understanding the entire plot of the novel and the people’s actions as a result of their environment. In addition, the title of the novel, The Virgin Suicides has important connotations. The word “virgin” itself has connotations of youth and purity of body and spirit. In this way, the girls

In Middlesex Eugenides also uses language to convey the Stephanides’ cultural heritage and its ever shifting role in their lives. Eugenides examine how assimilation effects a family and the differences between tradition and the modern world. Eugenides sprinkle in words that are specific to Greek culture or derived from Greek throughout the novel. Eugenides writes, “ He’d left one morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest . . .” (25). He brings attention to the appearance of this traditional clothing piece by italicizing the word. The connection of the traditional garment emphasizes the Greek culture that Lefty grew up in. The use of real traditional words and pieces of Greek culture create a more realistic narrative

This reenforces the idea that the boys' sight is the main determining factor for much of the information they recount, as at they are unable to differentiate the Lisbons until the party, after having known the girls for much of their lives, and also lusting after them for almost as long as they have, they are isolated from the girls to such a degree that they are unable to see any difference in them until they are in the same room. Most of the community also associates all the girls with one another and rarely sees any distinguishable differences amongst them. In the section when Trip Fontaine and the other neighborhood boys take the Lisbon girls tot he homecoming dance, they boys realize they can't tell the girls apart. "Trip Fontaine, of course, had dibs on Lux, but the other three girls were up for grabs. Fortunately, their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again, the boys weren't even sure which girl was which. Instead of asking, they did the only thing they could think of doing: they presented the corsages" (117). The boys' superficiality is highlighted; the only time in the novel in which the girls are allowed out of the house, they boys are still unable to determine one girl from another. Furthermore, the only way they determine who their dates are by simply lining up in front of them with flowers ready. When the remaining Lisbon girls commit suicide at the end of the novel, Mary is the only daughter to survive, and

With each letter in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos advances a great many games of chess being played simultaneously. In each, the pieces—women of the eighteenth-century Parisian aristocracy—are tossed about mercilessly but with great precision on the part of the author. One is a pawn: a convent girl pulled out of a world of simplicity and offered as an entree to a public impossible to sate; another is a queen: a calculating monument to debauchery with fissures from a struggle with true love. By examining their similarities and differences, Laclos explores women’s constitutions in a world that promises ruin for even the most formidable among them. Presenting the reader glimpses of femininity from a young innocent’s daunting debut to a faithful woman’s conflicted quest for heavenly virtue to another’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance and earthly pleasures, he insinuates the harrowing journey undertaken by every girl as she is forced to make a name for herself as a woman amongst the tumult of a community that machinates at every turn her downfall at the hands of the opposite sex. In his careful presentation of the novel’s female characters, Laclos condemns this unrelenting subjugation of women by making clear that every woman’s fate in such a society is a definitive and resounding checkmate.