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Interrogating suburbia in The Virgin Suicides.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides provides a compelling commentary on American values, the American dream, and postmodern suburban life. The text makes clear that the suburban community is a place of failed dreams, illusions, and isolation. The novel and the discussion it evokes provide important teachable moments in American literature courses and ways for students to think about their own communities.

Introduction

Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides is a text that works well for both high school and college-level English courses. Eugenides's clear, conversational writing style, his emphasis on the themes of love, sex, and death, and his sharp portrayals of adolescent characters have made his text a favorite among many college-level students. Interestingly, little secondary scholarship exists on Eugenides's novel, though it has been well received critically. As such, instructors who seek to include it in their curricula face the problem of finding relevant and engaging approaches to teaching the text. Yet as one begins to explore the complex issues of American values, success, and suburban life in the novel, it is clear The Virgin Suicides presents an important text that interrogates and problematizes the American Dream. When one investigates the text, it becomes clear that Eugenides's novel is a document chronicling the isolation and illusion that exists in the postmodern American suburban community.

I taught The Virgin Suicides at a small, four-year, private liberal arts college in eastern North Carolina. The novel was one of several texts the class read in a sophomore-level course titled Studies in a Genre. I chose to focus this course more specifically on short stories and novels centered on the theme of "The American Experience." We read a variety of short stories and other novels, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land. The course was set up as an exploration and examination of such issues as diversity in America, the American Dream, and race, class, and gender. My hope was that students would begin to question these notions as a way to consider whether these important symbols of American identity truly exist in the way in which most Americans perceive them, and through class discussions and the students' writing, it is clear that many students began to see how complicated the notion of the American Dream really is. The Virgin Suicides is an important text in terms of its portrayal of the darker side of the American dream and in its setting of the "ideal" American suburb.

Teaching this novel also makes clear how prevalent the theme of...

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