`` The Virgin Suicides `` By Jeffrey Eugenide

Each year suicide is becoming more common in the United States among adolescents, according to the Suicide and Mental Health Association International. The main reason why adolescents commit suicide is because they are depressed. In the article "Nightmare in the Mirror" by Scott Long, he explains that adolescence has changed throughout the years. An assertion he makes is that teens have "Angst and bouts of suicidal despair distinguish this gloomy figure…" (Long 156). Long explains that throughout the years, adolescents have become sadder and depressed. Adolescents, who suffer from depression and are suicidal, don't usually inform others. Those adolescents fall into the third quadrant of the Johari Window.

It is evident that Cecilia’s death is an influential event, especially to those close to her, in the passage from pages 152-153 on Jeffrey Euginides’ The Virgin Suicides. The author shows how Cecilia’s suicide attempts led to more frightening events; the deaths of her sisters. Cecilia’s death did not remain mysterious, but became the explanation for her sisters’ suicides. The people in the Lisbon’s community did not remain curious as to what caused Cecilia’s death because they think that it is better to stop future incidents. The people of the community think that Cecilia and her suicides are the reasons for the death of the remaining Lisbon girls. In order to express the influence of Cecilia and her suicide in relation to her sisters, the author accentuates the idea of the uncanny with the use of unrelated metaphors, such as cooking and disease, and imagery. The uncanny in this passage is expressed as something that is dark, uncomfortable, weird and dangerous.

Middlesex is an outline of the life of Calliope Stephanides who grew to the age of fourteen believing that she was a girl with unnatural thoughts for the same sex. As puberty takes hold of her friends and classmates, both Calliope and her family begin to worry about the growing gap between her and the average teenage girl; this marks the beginning of a new life for Calliope who finds she is really a he. Under the new name, Cal, this individual struggles with identity management as he traces his transformation from female to male and the genetic condition, beginning with his paternal grandparents that caused it. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog less Detroit day in January of

In life, there are many times where an individual may feel alone. Personally, this past week can attest to that notion. Moving into a college dorm, saying goodbye to my loved ones, and taking on a new chapter in my life, have all been accompanied by a new set of emotions that I have never felt before: homesickness, freedom, peer-pressure. However, looking around everyone seems happy, and it feels as if I am trapped in a space that no one else appears to be in. But, internally they may be battling the same struggles that I am. That is what can be drawn from “The Wisdom of Sociology: Sam Richards at TedxLacador,” the idea that behind the facade, our personal struggles are all connected.

The text is very descriptive and loaded with symbols. The author takes the opportunity to relate elements of setting with symbols with meanings beyond the first reading’s impressions. The house that the characters rent for the summer as well as the surrounding scenery are introduced right from the beginning. It is an isolated house, situated "quite three miles from the village"(947); this location suggests an isolated environment. Because of its "colonial mansion"(946) look, and its age and state of degradation, of the house, a supernatural hypothesis is implied: the place is haunted by ghosts. This description also suggests stability, strength, power and control. It symbolizes the patriarchal oriented society of the author’s time. The image of a haunted house is curiously superimposed with light color elements of setting: a "delicious garden"(947), "velvet meadows"(950), "old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees"(948) suggest bright green. The room has "air and sunshine galore"(947), the garden is "large and shady"(947) and has "deep-shaded arbors"(948). The unclean yellow of the wallpaper is

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.

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a novel that deals with the complexities of being a teenager, dealing with related themes such as growing up, loss of innocence, adolescent sexuality, loneliness, unrequited love. These seemingly innocent themes however, develop a darker side, as they lead to the suicides of the main characters- Lux, Bonnie, Celia, Mary and Therese: the 5 Lisbon sisters. The themes of objectification and The Male Gaze also become relevant through the nature of the detached male narrative; The story is told retrospectively through the the viewpoint of an unknown number of anonymous boys, now middle-aged men, who grew up in the same middle class suburban neighbourhood in middle America as the girls. This first person plural narrative, as well as various stylistic devices such as diction, imagery, metaphors and tone all affect the way the Lisbon sisters are represented to the reader.

“That’s why they were only taking a few things at a time; they weren 't really coming for ivory and paintings. They wanted me!” Even when she wasn’t in her room she was always afraid of something. “I always dreaded that my parents would divorce. It was my third biggest fear, right next to the fear that one of them would get abducted by heartmen on the road to Sugar Beach, or my first fear, that I would get sucked into the lagoon by neegee.” Out of all three fears only one seemed to happen. Her parents relationship finally came to an end after a lot of fighting, disagreement, and cheating. “Daddy, I hold your foot, don’t leave us. Daddy, please, I beg you” she cried that day. From then on, except the servants and cook, “it was only women at Sugar Beach.” Even after dealing with something so hard in her life that wasn’t even what affected her the most.

The novel starts with the primer of Dick and Jane that promises the perfect family and home for which Pecola never stops searching in the book: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy” (7). But as these lines are repeated in several paragraphs, it becomes an unpunctuated, frantic stream of language suggesting that behind this comfort myth lies a disrupting and disordered reality. The house is an antidote to being outdoors. “Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor” (18). This home desire is also one to curb the funkiness or the excess of the lives of the characters. But home as paradise is quickly translated into prison: “What they do not know is that this plain brown girl will build her nest stick by stick, make it her own inviolable world, and stand guard over its every plant, weed, and doily, even against him” (69). The haouse is a jail and a respite simultaneously, just like the community the house appears to promise comfort and rest but fails to do so for Pecola in

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,

When one first watches the movie, one may quickly judge that the characters are in direct contrast to the colors they represent. In the movie, Tangie (orange) which means vitality with endurance plays the part of a promiscuous girl whose hatred for her mother drives her to do what she does. On further look at her character, I realize she is a true reflection of the color orange. She endures sexual abuse from her grandfather and faces abortion at a tender age but is still strong enough to overcome it and bring out her true beauty. The text also employ poems and songs to show the intensity of pain and emphasize the strength of each character and women in general.

Furthermore, the boy 's description of the Lisbon girls reveals their perception of women through sex and love. At the end of the novel the boys demonstrate how the divide in gender prohibits them in understanding the Lisbons girls struggle. The boys describe the Lisbons possessions by oversexualizing them, capturing their detachment from the emotion of the girls and focusing on the physical aspects: “Bedrooms filled with

This is significant as it makes the sisters appear less human, once again. This further objectifies and others them from the boys and the rest of the neighborhood, as it sets them apart from their suburban norm. Louise Wandland explains in her essay entitled “We Couldn’t Fathom Them at All”, “the novel presents us with an image of women as others, which is problematic as it denies women subjectivity and a voice to tell their own story” (Wandland 4). The othering of the girls makes the Lisbon sisters seem like

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

The development of every person is the journey from childhood to adulthood through the challenging period of adolescence. This period leads to a great transformation of the human body which also has a great effect on the psychological state of a person. Such transformation of a unique intersex person is discovered by Jeffrey Eugenides in his novel Middlesex that became a bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize. The author fills the novel with numerous autobiographic details, whereas the work traces the story of a biological male who was raised as a girl until the truth is revealed in the period of adolescence. I also have found a variety of moments that resonate with my feelings and experiences of adolescence during puberty that was still far from the hell Calliope faces. The example of the transformation illustrated by Eugenides in Middlesex can be viewed as a change that any person goes through, but that is much more radical in its effect.