Ms. Corlies
Period
The Virgin Suicides
Notes and Quotes – Revised into Headings
Suicide
1. -– “On the morning the last Lisbon girl took her turn at suicide” (3) – not simply doubling, but completing one another – suicide and depression
2. “Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath” (3). Suicide and depression
5. “‘Obviously, Doctor,’ she said, ‘you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.” (13) – depression
7. “We didn’t understand why Cecelia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice” (32). – Suicide and depression
14. “Cecilia was weird, but we’re not…We just want to live. If anyone would let us” (132). –depression
24. “the Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted upon even it’s most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school” (231). Suicide and depression
Psychology
4... -people do not understand why – “you’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets” (7) – psychology
18. “Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand” (157). Psychology
23. “We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out” (215). - Psychology
25. “The Lisbon girls made suicide familiar” (244) – psychology
26. give explanations that may/may not be accurate – “but even as we make these conclusions, we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue” (247) - psychology
Family
3. Cecilia’s first suicide attempt has her clutching, “the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest” (4). – Influence of religion
6. “He had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests. Also, the odor of all those cooped girls had begun to annoy him” (23). – Family relationships
8. -“…protect us from the contamination of tragedy” (38). Family relationships
11. “They had always suspected Cecelia to meet a bad end” (112). – Family relationships
15. Imprisonment – “the old bitch had locked them up again” (139) – house as prison
16. “I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then” (139). – Family relationships
19. “but that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried inside a house itself becoming one big coffin” (163) – house as prison
21. Girls still possess it after their death, “…the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands” (227). – house as prison
How people see the girls
9. “Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnacle” (79) – female perception
10. Lux, “the most naked person with clothes on he [Trip} had ever seen” (79).-female perception
12. Night of the dance, “Fortunately, their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again, the boys weren’t even sure which girl was which” (122) – female perception
13. The girls are actually watching back – “…they had been looking out at us as intensely as we had been looking in” (124). Female perception
17. they becomes “stuck,” even in love, “And we’d have to admit too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights” (147) – female perception
20. “And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone – for us – to save them” (199). – Female perception
21. Girls still possess it after their death, “…the exhalations of the Lisbon girls that still lived in bedding and drapes, in peeling wallpaper, in patches of carpet preserved brand-new beneath dressers and nightstands” (227). – house as prison
22. Unchanged by time – “Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up” (214). – Family relationships