The message archangel: Why Virgin Suicides still resonating?
Why Virgin Suicides still resonating?
If you're have been around enough on internet or you're a pop-culture enthusiast; the novel Virgin Suicides will not be unknown for you.
The Jeffrey Eugenide’s novel is astute, sensitive, romantic and also a real portrait of teenage suicide. The first publication was in April 1st, 1993. The modern classic, narrates the story of the five Lisbon sisters, living the suburban life in Michigan during the 1970's. Their life was surrounded by the fundamentalist religious beliefs of their mother, that increasingly keeps the girls in isolation. The results, as the title of the book suggests is the suicide of the five girls. The story is all narrated by a couple of boys – also neighbors of the girls – who remain fascinated with the tragedy throughout the decades, maintaining the attempt to figure out what lead them to end their life at a young age.
In 1999, the novel is immortalized in a ethereal film directed by Sofia Coppola, soundtracked by Air.
A "not-so-fun" fact is that in 2000, Paramount gave a limited release to the movie, due the fear of encourage "teen suicide".
It's interesting how the popularity of this novel never decreased. Back in 2013/2014 tumblr, the quotes and the aesthetic was getting the teen-alt girls in their core, since many elements, fashion or moody, were in sync with Lana del Rey's music as much with Air music, which is really close to the "coquette" subculture we got nowadays. More recently, in 2021, Marc Jacobs released a collection dedicated to Virgin Suicides under Heavn. On tiktok, videos tagging Lux Lisbon have over 800 million views. And not staying under the ethereal aesthetic taken from the movie, the book still selling great: the title sold over £ 345,000 in 2022, also, still gaining more traction and attention due booktok niche on Tik Tok.
Here, we're taken to the main reasons to why this novel still resonates to young girls over the last thirty years: the pains of girlhood factor. One of the opening quotes that meet generations of girls and thrills minds is when Cecilia, after be dismissed by a doctor saying that she's is not old enough to have serious mental issues, prompt says: “Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.”
Personally, I first watch this movie when I was 12 years old. I was struggling with body dysmorphia, that led me into a depression that I've been fighting viscerally for years. Also, I grew up in a christian-evangelical family. My parents are preachers and when you're the oldest daughter, the community tend to lock you in a world that ain't built for you to feel good, instead, is built to explore you to the core. Many, many times I found myself alone in my parents house, just like the Lisbon girls, full of the desire of just be and just live but rules that we never signed were put on our realities, causing us pain and much other damages.
However, it's different when you read the novel or watch the film at age 12, and when you re-watch at 18 or in your 20's.
Girlhood is complex. And Jeffrey Eugenides recognized it. In his writing, he could acknowledge how complex, dark, and sorrowful a young woman’s inner mental life could be. It didn’t glorify it, it didn’t brush it off — it just captured it, it respected it, and gave it the room to exist how it really is.
Many adults see the pains of girlhood as an "failed attempt in seek for attention". So, many people make fun of it, put nonsensical rules, tend to shame and ridicule girls. The identification with the narrative only shows that we all should see more girlhood as a topic, with it’s ugliness and beauty. Virgin Suicides speaks with women in a language that understand without hiding from the horror of suicide, capturing the mundanes of depression without core-romanticize the mental issue or glorify it.
In other words, we could say that the novel got the "right" vision of teen suicide. Also, both movie and book are getting a revival since the sadness among teen girls are increasing. A study published by the CDC in February reported record levels of sadness in teen girls, with 30 per cent saying they have seriously considered dying by suicide, a 60 per cent rise since 2013. In the UK, reports show that self-harm admissions to hospital among teenage girls more than tripled between 2010 and 2020. (2023, DAZED)
The Osvaldo Cruz Foundation – FIOCRUZ – in Brazil did a research the survey "Self-Provoked Violence in Childhood and Adolescence" identified 15,702 notifications of attendance to suicidal behavior among teenagers in health services, predominantly the age group 15-19 years (76.4%), female (71.6%), and race/color of white skin (58.3%), in the period from 2011 to 2014. The study reveals that residence was the most frequent location of these occurrences (88.5% of 10-14 year olds; 89.9% of 15-19 year olds), and the most commonly used means was poisoning/intoxication (76.6% and 78%, respectively at ages 10-14 and 15-19). As for hospitalizations resulting from attempts in teenagers, there were 12,060 records between 2007-2016, with a predominance of females (58.1%) and a higher occurrence in the Southeast Region (2.7 and 7.0 notifications/100,000 inhabitants, in the 10-14 and 15-19 age groups, respectively). (2021, FIOCRUZ)
There are myriad reasons for this uptick – such as social media’s influence and the COVID-19 pandemic – factors that wouldn’t have impacted teenage girls in the 90s, when the book was first released.
The book endurance is still important to acknowledge that these issues aren't new and tend to increase. “The continued popularity of The Virgin Suicides really speaks to social anxieties that circulated around girlhood, from concerns about girls and mental health, body image, bullying, sexualisation, or more broadly, fears about girls ‘growing up too soon’,” she says. “That was the context that surrounded the 1990s release of The Virgin Suicides, and these are a set of debates and comments we still see today.” (Dr. R. Kennedy for Dazed UK)
In addition, the book brings the western vision expected over girls: they suppose to be good, pure, innocent daughters and friends but sexually knowing and sexually desirable for boys and young men. Contradictions that surrounded girlhood by decades, even centuries. Now, more intense due the hypervisibity over girls on social media platforms.
While girlhood has changed in myriad significant ways since 1993, it’s clear the story speaks to the immutable quality of teenage pain and the anxieties of growing we have almost always projected onto young girls. The period between 13 and 16, 17 can be really painful for young girls, in both physical and mental ways and that’s the reason why the book and the film remained popular, because we all can see ourselves in many aspects of our own experiences in each Lisbon sister through the book.
It’s cheering to think that this novel it still strikes a chord among young women and girls from diferent generations, after 30 years on from it's release, keeping it as subject matter.
