How Jeffrey Eugenides Transforms American Suburbia into a Dreamscape

The Virgin Suicides is a novel about the short lives of all five girls in the Lisbon family. Imprisoned in their own home by - overprotective - Mrs. Lisbon, the girls live in their own wonderland, dreaming of the world outside and the possibilities that couldn't reach them soon enough. The narrators of this book are the neighborhood boys who grew up obsessing over the five girl's lives.

Eugenides succeeds in creating the Lisbon's mythological landscape through excessive characterization and descriptions. Lux, Mary, Bonnie, Cecila, and Therese are all exceptions to nearly every social norm in contemporary culture. An air of mystery surrounds the five girls, which steadily increases as the book continues and the death count rises.

After the first suicide, the group of neighborhood boys find Cecilia's diary, displaying Cecilia's unique thought-process: describing her sisters and the entire family as a single entity. After reading the diary the boys display their curious discoveries in a haunting excerpt:

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."