Cecilia’s Diary (Symbol)
Cecilia, the first Lisbon girl to commit suicide, is revealed to have a diary that is referenced throughout the rest of the novel following her death. Kept under lock and key, the diary signifies the privacy of Cecilia's thoughts and reflections that she writes in the pages; however, when the narrator and his companions look through it, they find only mundane notes and nothing very drastic or disastrous about the girls' lives. She only writes down the basic facts about her life and doodles. The diary goes towards Eugenides's destruction of the distance people put between themselves and disaster, and the diary reflects the normality of the Lisbons' lives as well as develops Cecilia's character, her solitude, and gradual estrangement from her sisters and parents.
Light (Symbol)
Light constantly appears in The Virgin Suicides and symbolizes clarity. First, when the boys enter their Lisbon household for the first time, they descend into the basement where the party is held and, due to the growing brightness, imagine that they are entering the earth's core. In this light, they are able to see the LIsbon girls up close for the first time and are finally able to distinguish differences between them. Descriptions of the sky, cloudy or sunlit, helps to indicate the degree of despair that surrounds the Lisbon household at various parts of the novel. Towards the end, the Lisbon girls are often spotted lighting candles to a shrine they made for their sister, and Lux is seen flashing signals in code with her Chinese lantern across the street. In all three situations, light appears at moments of clarity, when the situation of the Lisbons becomes clearer to other characters and illuminates the tragedy surrounding the family.
This is reinforced when the boys attempt to signal back using a flashlight. Suddenly, Lux's light goes out, and the boys feel "reprimanded." They do not fully understand the girls, as shown when they confront the girls' dead bodies, and so cannot bear light to shine upon their condition. The girls alone can do that, which results in a reproach when those who do not understand attempt to impose their understanding of the situation upon reality.
It is interesting to note that the name "Lux" means "light." Lux is often the one seen carrying messages between her sisters and the boys, and is the only one at the end to speak to the boys before the four remaining sisters commit suicide. This furthers the symbol of light as a representation of clarity, as the reality of the girls is conveyed by the character with the most direct links to the image of light. Additionally, one of these messages reads "In this dark, there will be light." Not only does light become a symbol of understanding, but it also becomes an image of hope that the girls hang onto as they are slowly crushed by the social conditions of their day.
Suicide and Death (Motif)
The Virgin Suicides portrays a community that doesn't know how to properly deal with suicide and death. The Lisbon household is very Christian, much like many other households in the community, but takes it to the extreme in prohibiting the girls to go out, experience teenage romance, wear clothing that could be deemed "revealing," etc. The stringent conditions placed upon the girls by society, combined with a perceived lack of attention from their parents, is part of what drives the girls to suicide. As a result, there appears to be a strong social commentary on the way in which society functions can push people to their limits, sparking tragedies in communities that are prohibited from addressing these topics due to social stigmas and long-held beliefs.
However, The Virgin Suicides also shows how death has a long-ranging impact on others, not only victims. The boys in the novel are now middle-aged adults, yet still linger in the shadow of the Lisbon girls. For instance, in sexual interactions with women, they look for a resemblance of their innocent interactions with the Lisbon girls. In their treehouse, they've kept records and remnants of the Lisbon girls for decades, and in compiling this account they've gone over memories that they've hung onto for years and years. In spite of all the time that has passed since the girls' suicide, the members of their community have failed to move on, highlighting how suicide and death isn't something limited only to the individual.
Hindsight and Foreshadowing (Motif)
The Virgin Suicides is written as an account in hindsight, compiled following various interviews, exhibits, and the narrator's own experiences in regards to the Lisbon girls. As a result, the account is often peppered with the narrator's own insertions of reflection, or with facts that hint at later events: for instance, when people become confused about whether or not Cecilia was carrying a suitcase at the time of her death, the narrator adds that "We can only explain Mrs. Pitzenberger's testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of hte later suicides where luggage played such a central motif" (43). In the novel, facts overlap one another regardless of when they appear chronologically, blending in a sense of doom and fate with the story of the Lisbon girls.
In The Virgin Suicides, even the simplest images and sentences become signs of later doom. For instance, Mrs. Karafilis sees clouds over the Lisbon house and appears to agree with the Lisbon girls' lack of faith in living, foreshadowing how all four remaining girls will ultimately take their own life at the end. Cecilia's explanation of fish-flies' extremely short life cycle before she commits suicide, and the image of her tracing her initials in the insects' corpses, foreshadows the culmination of her own extremely short life. In this way, Eugendies shows how even the most normal scenes become images of doom that point to the girls' ultimate fates.
Fences (Symbol)
The Lisbons inhabit a stereotypical American middle-class suburb in Detroit, which is maintained neatly by the inhabitants and divided up by clean fences. These fences come to symbolize the multiple barriers between different groups of people. For instance, though the boys long to learn more about the Lisbon girls, they are forever stuck on the other side of their fence and never truly get to know them. Similarly, the girls are kept within the parameters of their fence, representing how they are kept prisoner by their mother's strict policies and the social conditions that drive them to suicide. As a result, while fences become a physical means to divide up property and assign inhabitants to their appropriate living spaces, they also symbolize the distance between community members and the isolation that some face.
Additionally, fences symbolize the instances of emotional boundaries and literal instances of "crossing the line." After Cecilia's death, fewer and fewer people go beyond the Lisbons' fence and into the Lisbon house as they do not know how to treat the subject of suicide and, more specifically, one of the youngest deaths in their community's history. The only person that Mrs. Lisbon agrees to see is her priest, who belongs to an occupation that deals with guiding people through emotions towards a perceived good. Other than the priest, nobody else is able to traverse this emotional barrier that was erected not just by the Lisbons, but also by social stigmas surrounding suicide. On the other hand, when the Lisbons fail to rake their leaves and the leaf litter is blown by the wind onto other people's property, the neighborhood begins to grumble about how the Lisbons are not doing their duty as community members, showing how their behavior has begun to exceed socially-acceptable parameters.
One of the most notable instances of a fence appearing is when Cecilia throws herself out of the window and onto the fence. The way in which she kills herself on the fence highlights multiple things: (1) that she has transgressed social norms in a community that does not know how to grapple with death and suicide, (2) she has just begun menstruating and is literally in the boundary between girlhood and womanhood, and (3) her death becomes a kind of barrier between the Lisbons and the rest of the community, as her family comes to bear the stigma of losing a child to suicide.
The Environment (Motif)
The physical environment often represents the state of its inhabitants in The Virgin Suicides. This is most evident in the case of the Lisbon house, following Cecilia's suicide: it falls into disrepair, such as when a stench begins to radiate from the house, or when it is bare during Christmas and is only decorated with lights after the holiday season is over. This shows how the inhabitants' states and actions impact their physical environment, which holds up a mirror for all to see. Because of this obvious reflection, the community members often keep their environments (their property) in a neat state all the time, but a state that is the same as everyone else's—showing how simplified happiness (which they profess to have) has become, and how everyone has become homogeneous in such a standardized society (and this ultimately contributes to the Lisbon girls' suicides).
However, the environment also has an impact on the characters, instead of it only being a one-way relationship. When the Lisbon girls go to Homecoming, their moods quickly rise when they go to the party, and they are visibly happy for the first time in what seems like a long while. Upon their return, however, their happiness quickly dissipates. Another instance is the planets in Mr. Lisbon's classroom: upon his dismissal, the new teacher takes down his planets mobile, leaving them cracked and broken in a corner of the classroom—much like the Lisbon family's own state. This demonstrates how closely tied the characters are to their direct surroundings, and how it is almost impossible to escape such glaring reflections of oneself in this community.
Generalization (Motif)
Throughout the novel, generalizations constantly appear. It begins with the Lisbon girls when they are continually referenced as identical to one another or even as "a single species." It's only when the boys enter their household for the first time that they see them as distinct from one another, but even later—at school following Cecilia's suicide, or when Trip and his friends take the girls to Homecoming—they once again appear to merge into one entity. This is reinforced with the role of the media in covering the suicides, when they keep mistaking girls for their sisters and come up with details that fit the girls into the mold of tragic heroines, and not the people that they actually were. Through the generalizations made regarding the Lisbons, Eugenides juxtaposes these with the specifics the narrator attempts to aim for and highlights how generalizations contribute to the decline of understanding in society and are, in part, a reason for the tragedy that can befall communities as shown in the case of the Lisbons.
