Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What is the significance to the manner of suicides in Virgin Suicides Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 5 months ago. Active 5 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 37k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The girls are listed in the order that they chose to kill themselves in the novel: Cecilia - She is not listed in this question, but she is still one of the sisters and the first to die. Her death sets in motion the fate of her sisters.
She chose to jump out of the window and impale herself onto a fencepost. This death was very bloody and dramatic. The remaining sisters did not want to repeat the drama of Cecilia's death. Therese - She chose sleeping pills and gin. This method of suicide is presumably pain free and peaceful since you just go to sleep. Therese suffered from low self-esteem. This method would let her die quietly without drawing attention to herself. Bonnie - She chose to hang herself. The clothing that she is wearing speaks more of symbolism than the suicide itself.
Cecilia jumps out the window during the party and kills herself. The remaining sisters attempt to return to normal life, and go to the homecoming dance on a group date with the narrators. Lux is crowned homecoming queen and has sex with Trip on the football field.
She comes home later than curfew. The girls are grounded and even forbidden from going to school. Lux is taken to the hospital for a burst appendix and asks for a pregnancy test and gynecological exam. The sisters start sending messages to the neighborhood boys and talk with them once on the phone. Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.
The girls take back their own narrative from their admirers by following the script of damsels in distress—leaving pictures of the Virgin Mary in their mailboxes, playing records over the phone, calling the boys over to run away and ride off into the sunset—only to kill themselves with the boys in the house.
Not only do Bonnie and Therese wait until the boys are in the house distracted by the tantalizing possibility of romantic contact with Lux to commit suicide—Lux waits until they have left in horror, so they will have to live with the fact that they might have been able to save her.
The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind…. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. When I read this passage at fifteen years old, I was furious.
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