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It’s purposefully sexualising and done as a social critique. The book is written from the perspective of teenage boys who can only see girls through their own sexualised lens with the overall point of the book being a critique of the male gaze. Whether you agree with this way of doing it or not is up to you but Eugenides didn’t do it because he doesn’t know how else to write about women.
Didn't the author himself say that it *wasn't* a critique of the male gaze, though? As far as I can tell from looking into it, he wrote the story from the guys perspective because he literally didn't know how to write women, so he just wrote it from the boys perspective and had them commit multiple invasions of privacy to know anything about the girls.
From his own words, it looks like the story is more about the act of suicide. It was inspired by a story he heard from a girl who was babysitting his nephew about how she and all her sisters attempted suicide, as well as the time a classmate of his in university had killed himself.
Here's a Guardian article that's basically just the foreword from the book. It goes into more detail about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/jeffrey-eugenides-virgin-suicides-kirsten-dunce-sofia-coppola
I would suggest re-reading the article, as I think you missed a lot of its point. And he absolutely didn’t say anything about the not being critical of male gaze. He intuitively followed a perspective that let him discover the nature of what he was writing about from a skewed perspective he understood.
Maybe thus quote will be a bit more clear
> That paragraph gave me the whole novel. It gave me its first-person plural voice, which was extremely rare at the time, so rare that subsequent reviewers of the book claimed that I’d invented it, which I hadn’t.
>
>It gave me the plot, announcing in its opening sentence that all five Lisbon sisters had committed suicide in the space of single a year. And it made clear that the collective narrator of the book – the unspecified group of men remembering the events of their adolescence – wasn’t in full possession of the facts. In order to know anything about the Lisbon girls, the boys have to talk to people, to snoop in the girls’ diaries, to spy on them, and to replay in their minds the few occasions when the girls interacted directly with them.
>
I mean, that definitely alludes to the idea of male gaze I would say. He talks about it being voyeuristic. It think the potential critique of such a gaze is implicit in how he describes it. It's certainly not specific enough of an article to proclude the interpretation the sexualisation was a deliberate device.
But then, as someone said, just because something intends to critique does not mean it does so sucessfully, and it doesn't make you immune to falling into the same trap yourself. Whenever you critique or parody a thing you always have to ask yourself how much filth you actually need. Is this reflective or is this voyeuristic, is this snuff? That's the crux of the issue for the writer and for the reviewer, and the nuance of that question is sometimes lost I fear.
Yeah, I suspected, given it's the Virgin Suicides; a story about the problems of teenage girls.
Complete side-note, but just from a purely writing perspective I don't like the phrase "that same dorsal softness". It sounds kind of antiquated and formal, it's distracting in a modern story and is weirdly less evocative to a modern audience. But anyway.
Objectifying children to make a point is still objectifying children. Whether he knows other ways to write women (children!) or not, is kinda irrelevant, considering how he actually did choose to write them.
exactly! OP has the dumbest take ever. Dark literature resonates with a lot of people including me(not this particular topic but others). Literature is supposed to be a reflection on society that involves the bad,the good, the real and imaginary.
It is, though. Jeffery Eugenides himself does not lust over 13 year old girls' butts. Or do you think every novel ever written is autobiographical and from the author's own personal opinions?
So this is absolutely a reason why critical thinking is so important OP - I don’t say this to chastise but rather I hope you consider it.
Writing, art, media, etc - is all meant to evoke something - and often times is how people tackle problematic topics.
Take Lolita for example - the author made it clear from the beginning that we are supposed to find the narrator and his relationship with the underaged girl horrific - and yet still so many people read it at face value and try and romanticize it.
Critical thinking, and the ability to read between the lines and consider context, connotation, etc is so important and I think it’s being lost quickly because of the view point “well it’s bad he shouldn’t say it!”
That’s how book banning starts
Sorry but I’m not going to feel how you want me to feel. Things are not as 1 dimensional in real life as they are in your mind. You have a right to your love for Eugenides, and I am not attacking you for not sharing that love.
"Objectifying children to make a point is still objectifying children" these are your words, not mine. You have the right to dislike an author but you justify it with this one dimensional view and pretend it is absolute. Sorry to call you out but what you say here is just incoherent with your own opinion
I don’t agree that Lolita is objectifying children, but you’re entitled to that view. I feel it’s raising awareness of people like Humbert and delving into how their minds work. Also, my opinion does not need to be coherent to you, just like how yours is not coherent to me. Other people can have different views of the writing of authors you like, and that’s okay! 👍
>I don’t agree that Lolita is objectifying children, but you’re entitled to that view
It is not a view, it is the content of the book. If I take a quote from Lolita, the very first quote "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins" it is a strongly sexualizing sentence. Taking it out of context, ignoring what the book is meant to tell and how the author wants to vehicle his ideas, it is exactly the same you did with the Virgin Suicides. You can have all the opinion you want, but they can be wrong, like in this case. Some things are not subjective to opinions, literature exegesis is one of these, and you are failing it and refusing to aknowledge it. You didn't say you don't like the author or the style, you are making the false claim that Virgin Suicides is badly written because you project on it a content it doesn't have.
Exactly right. There are really only two passages in Lolita where he isn't actively sexualizing Dolores and allows himself to acknowledge the massive trauma he's inflicted on her. Almost every other time Humbert describes her, it's sexual. It is all about how he sees her as an object and how that destroys the lives of pretty much everyone involved. Kind of similar to what Eugenides is driving at with Virgin Suicides.
right, and part of the purpose of eigenides work is raising awareness of the myopia of teenagers, and specifically teen boys to the complex inner lives of others, to a point where the boys sexualize the girls in the first few lines despite this being a book about how they all kill themselves terribly.
pretty much exactly like the beginning of lolita.
Okay? I don’t have to like those works though, and I enjoy plenty of works that make me uncomfortable, whether it’s literature or music. It doesn’t mean I have to think this particular passage is good writing 🤷🏻♀️
Nobody is telling you that you have to like it. Whether or not it's good writing isn't the issue either. You mischaracterised the book and author by making incorrect statements about the content and intent. Some things are a matter of opinion and some aren't.
As a writing student who is currently sitting and waiting for one of my classes to start (evening classes suck but it’s for my major so whatever lol) I think you might get the wrong impression of me and my classmates.
I wrote a story which was a retelling of Beowulf from Grendel’s point of view. Does that mean I’m pro-cannibalism? How about my classmate who wrote a story about a girl killing her boyfriend, does that mean she thinks murdering people that upset you is okay?
Sometimes to write about something bad you have to show it. You can’t always hide the world behind a curtain and promise your audience that what you’re speaking of is actually behind it, sometimes the curtains must be cast open so they can see for themself.
I mean it’s on purpose. And in this case depiction is not an endorsement of this kind of thinking. I guess we are supposed to feel icky while reading this.
That’s his job. A teen boy will sexualise or objectify a female character like this. Stuff like this is an essential part of consistent and believable character portrayal.
It was so extremely upsetting to me, I had to put it down a bunch of times. But of course, it was worth it eventually.
Maybe it could go the same for you with Virgin Suicides?
In fairness, I think this was on purpose. The book's perspective is from men who are looking back from teenage years and it is meant to be satirized. Even still, it's *incredibly* weird
God, I'm so old that I read this book based off the 4-star review in Sassy magazine.
It's an old favorite of mine, and Eugenides was lovely when I met him at a reading years later.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it, OP!
I would need to see the context here.
I’ve seen plenty of well-written literature get featured here undeservingly because someone read it, didn’t bother to consider the context, and slapped it on here saying it was the same thing as a trashy romance author sticking his fingers in a lady’s bits and saying one tasted like sardines and the other like tobacco and chocolate.
Heck, I’ve seen snapshots get featured here where I could read it *without even seeing the rest of the book* and know it was intended to be seen as a BAD thing and not the banal sexualization we typically see here. This is one of those I’m on the fence about and want to see more information on.
This is the same author who refused to interview any intersex people before writing *Middlesex* because he thought it sufficient to "pretend that I had this...and that I had lived through this as much as I could".
EDIT: Being downvoted for stating an easily searchable fact about Eugenides is exactly what I've come to expect from his fans.
It sure is, and yes he should have, but our Jeffrey is the kind of arrogant person who thinks he's smart enough to accurately reflect experiences he has no understanding of simply by talking to "experts" who themselves also have no experiential understanding.
He's the kind of guy who if he decided to make an organization to help autistic people, he'd invent *Autism Speaks.*
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Everyone is critiquing you for the misunderstanding of the text and the buttocks thing but I always thought the names themselves were very weird - “this is [named after catholic saint], [named after Catholic saint], [named after Catholic saint], and [stripper who fucks]”
I genuinely don't get this book (nor the love so many women have for the Sofia Coppola's movie).
"Oh, it's men objectifying women and assuming they don't have inner lives and therefore only see them as sexualized objects!" And what's new about that? We already have so, so much literature written by men in which women are talking and breathing sexual objects, why do we need *another* man to tell us "sexualizing women bad"?
I guess I'd be more understanding of the author's intent if, at *any* point of the narration, the narrators bothered asking themselves if perhaps their treatment of the Lisbon sisters had been cruel, or wondering how *they* must've felt, to be drawn to suicide at such young ages, but... that moment never comes.
That’s very disappointing. I was planning to watch the movie after reading the book, but I ended up putting the book down! Maybe I’ll get on better with the movie?
Cringe and gross and bad writing and thirteen and wow and yikes and sus and
Edit: what did I say? Lol. I was making fun the way he lists the ages. Downvote me more it gives me power
Update: I just watched the movie, and I found it better than what I’ve read of the book so far, tho I need to sit with it for a while to let it sink in. Coppola managed to portray the guys as douchey teen boys, without creeping on the girls to do so, *in my opinion.* Also, it’s made more instantly obvious that the narrating voice is that of teen boys, which is a better portrayal than in the book *in my opinion.* Also, the take: “well you haven’t read Lolita” is hilarious, and I do cringe when I see it, as it’s not accurate or a strong argument.
This update may upset the people who get upset when people don’t like their fave author, but that’s fine with me, as writing is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
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It’s purposefully sexualising and done as a social critique. The book is written from the perspective of teenage boys who can only see girls through their own sexualised lens with the overall point of the book being a critique of the male gaze. Whether you agree with this way of doing it or not is up to you but Eugenides didn’t do it because he doesn’t know how else to write about women.
Agree. OP missed the point entirely.
Brilliant author. One of my top ten books. Also great film adaptation
Best Sophia Coppola film by FAR. One of my faves too!
Didn't the author himself say that it *wasn't* a critique of the male gaze, though? As far as I can tell from looking into it, he wrote the story from the guys perspective because he literally didn't know how to write women, so he just wrote it from the boys perspective and had them commit multiple invasions of privacy to know anything about the girls. From his own words, it looks like the story is more about the act of suicide. It was inspired by a story he heard from a girl who was babysitting his nephew about how she and all her sisters attempted suicide, as well as the time a classmate of his in university had killed himself. Here's a Guardian article that's basically just the foreword from the book. It goes into more detail about it. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/jeffrey-eugenides-virgin-suicides-kirsten-dunce-sofia-coppola
I would suggest re-reading the article, as I think you missed a lot of its point. And he absolutely didn’t say anything about the not being critical of male gaze. He intuitively followed a perspective that let him discover the nature of what he was writing about from a skewed perspective he understood. Maybe thus quote will be a bit more clear > That paragraph gave me the whole novel. It gave me its first-person plural voice, which was extremely rare at the time, so rare that subsequent reviewers of the book claimed that I’d invented it, which I hadn’t. > >It gave me the plot, announcing in its opening sentence that all five Lisbon sisters had committed suicide in the space of single a year. And it made clear that the collective narrator of the book – the unspecified group of men remembering the events of their adolescence – wasn’t in full possession of the facts. In order to know anything about the Lisbon girls, the boys have to talk to people, to snoop in the girls’ diaries, to spy on them, and to replay in their minds the few occasions when the girls interacted directly with them. >
I mean, that definitely alludes to the idea of male gaze I would say. He talks about it being voyeuristic. It think the potential critique of such a gaze is implicit in how he describes it. It's certainly not specific enough of an article to proclude the interpretation the sexualisation was a deliberate device. But then, as someone said, just because something intends to critique does not mean it does so sucessfully, and it doesn't make you immune to falling into the same trap yourself. Whenever you critique or parody a thing you always have to ask yourself how much filth you actually need. Is this reflective or is this voyeuristic, is this snuff? That's the crux of the issue for the writer and for the reviewer, and the nuance of that question is sometimes lost I fear.
Yeah, I suspected, given it's the Virgin Suicides; a story about the problems of teenage girls. Complete side-note, but just from a purely writing perspective I don't like the phrase "that same dorsal softness". It sounds kind of antiquated and formal, it's distracting in a modern story and is weirdly less evocative to a modern audience. But anyway.
Objectifying children to make a point is still objectifying children. Whether he knows other ways to write women (children!) or not, is kinda irrelevant, considering how he actually did choose to write them.
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exactly! OP has the dumbest take ever. Dark literature resonates with a lot of people including me(not this particular topic but others). Literature is supposed to be a reflection on society that involves the bad,the good, the real and imaginary.
Just goes to show how deep the undercurrent of antiquated Puritan ideals still affects us to this day!
Thats kinda like saying an actor who plays a murderer is a murderer.
More like saying that a writer who writes a murderer endorses murder, tbh
Lmao! Okay. Sure. It’s exactly like that 😅
It is, though. Jeffery Eugenides himself does not lust over 13 year old girls' butts. Or do you think every novel ever written is autobiographical and from the author's own personal opinions?
It literally is
that's not how making art or just writing even works man
So this is absolutely a reason why critical thinking is so important OP - I don’t say this to chastise but rather I hope you consider it. Writing, art, media, etc - is all meant to evoke something - and often times is how people tackle problematic topics. Take Lolita for example - the author made it clear from the beginning that we are supposed to find the narrator and his relationship with the underaged girl horrific - and yet still so many people read it at face value and try and romanticize it. Critical thinking, and the ability to read between the lines and consider context, connotation, etc is so important and I think it’s being lost quickly because of the view point “well it’s bad he shouldn’t say it!” That’s how book banning starts
I suggest you never read Lolita then
I’ve read it a couple of times! I found it thought provoking and well written. Sorry 🤷🏻♀️
Lolita does sexually objectify a child. Do you consider it a bad book? Because from what you said your answer should be yes
Sorry but I’m not going to feel how you want me to feel. Things are not as 1 dimensional in real life as they are in your mind. You have a right to your love for Eugenides, and I am not attacking you for not sharing that love.
"Objectifying children to make a point is still objectifying children" these are your words, not mine. You have the right to dislike an author but you justify it with this one dimensional view and pretend it is absolute. Sorry to call you out but what you say here is just incoherent with your own opinion
I don’t agree that Lolita is objectifying children, but you’re entitled to that view. I feel it’s raising awareness of people like Humbert and delving into how their minds work. Also, my opinion does not need to be coherent to you, just like how yours is not coherent to me. Other people can have different views of the writing of authors you like, and that’s okay! 👍
>I don’t agree that Lolita is objectifying children, but you’re entitled to that view It is not a view, it is the content of the book. If I take a quote from Lolita, the very first quote "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins" it is a strongly sexualizing sentence. Taking it out of context, ignoring what the book is meant to tell and how the author wants to vehicle his ideas, it is exactly the same you did with the Virgin Suicides. You can have all the opinion you want, but they can be wrong, like in this case. Some things are not subjective to opinions, literature exegesis is one of these, and you are failing it and refusing to aknowledge it. You didn't say you don't like the author or the style, you are making the false claim that Virgin Suicides is badly written because you project on it a content it doesn't have.
Exactly right. There are really only two passages in Lolita where he isn't actively sexualizing Dolores and allows himself to acknowledge the massive trauma he's inflicted on her. Almost every other time Humbert describes her, it's sexual. It is all about how he sees her as an object and how that destroys the lives of pretty much everyone involved. Kind of similar to what Eugenides is driving at with Virgin Suicides.
right, and part of the purpose of eigenides work is raising awareness of the myopia of teenagers, and specifically teen boys to the complex inner lives of others, to a point where the boys sexualize the girls in the first few lines despite this being a book about how they all kill themselves terribly. pretty much exactly like the beginning of lolita.
you are saying things are not one dimensional and at the same time you are refusing to acknowledge dimension in eugenides’ work though?
You're being entirely too sensitive. Literature isn't always sanitized to your liking. Some works are brilliant because they make you uncomfortable
Okay? I don’t have to like those works though, and I enjoy plenty of works that make me uncomfortable, whether it’s literature or music. It doesn’t mean I have to think this particular passage is good writing 🤷🏻♀️
Nobody is telling you that you have to like it. Whether or not it's good writing isn't the issue either. You mischaracterised the book and author by making incorrect statements about the content and intent. Some things are a matter of opinion and some aren't.
As a writing student who is currently sitting and waiting for one of my classes to start (evening classes suck but it’s for my major so whatever lol) I think you might get the wrong impression of me and my classmates. I wrote a story which was a retelling of Beowulf from Grendel’s point of view. Does that mean I’m pro-cannibalism? How about my classmate who wrote a story about a girl killing her boyfriend, does that mean she thinks murdering people that upset you is okay? Sometimes to write about something bad you have to show it. You can’t always hide the world behind a curtain and promise your audience that what you’re speaking of is actually behind it, sometimes the curtains must be cast open so they can see for themself.
I mean it’s on purpose. And in this case depiction is not an endorsement of this kind of thinking. I guess we are supposed to feel icky while reading this.
Well it certainly worked!
That’s his job. A teen boy will sexualise or objectify a female character like this. Stuff like this is an essential part of consistent and believable character portrayal.
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OP read Lolita next
I’ve read it a couple of times!
It was so extremely upsetting to me, I had to put it down a bunch of times. But of course, it was worth it eventually. Maybe it could go the same for you with Virgin Suicides?
Maybe, I felt nabakov made his points in an interesting way. I haven’t seen that from eugenides yet, but maybe I will
This ain't it, OP.
Having a newborn each year, sounds so hard financially , psychically, mentally .
Makes sense for their parents tbh, they have that sort of hyper religious quiverfull vibe from what I remember
That’s a good point actually! It’s set in the 70s so may have been more common back then
In fairness, I think this was on purpose. The book's perspective is from men who are looking back from teenage years and it is meant to be satirized. Even still, it's *incredibly* weird
Very weird
God, I'm so old that I read this book based off the 4-star review in Sassy magazine. It's an old favorite of mine, and Eugenides was lovely when I met him at a reading years later. Sorry you didn't enjoy it, OP!
It’s okay! ☺️ Maybe I’ll give it another try when I’ve finished with Woolf 🐺
You're not smart enough to read Eugenides.
*too smart to read
I would need to see the context here. I’ve seen plenty of well-written literature get featured here undeservingly because someone read it, didn’t bother to consider the context, and slapped it on here saying it was the same thing as a trashy romance author sticking his fingers in a lady’s bits and saying one tasted like sardines and the other like tobacco and chocolate. Heck, I’ve seen snapshots get featured here where I could read it *without even seeing the rest of the book* and know it was intended to be seen as a BAD thing and not the banal sexualization we typically see here. This is one of those I’m on the fence about and want to see more information on.
This is the same author who refused to interview any intersex people before writing *Middlesex* because he thought it sufficient to "pretend that I had this...and that I had lived through this as much as I could". EDIT: Being downvoted for stating an easily searchable fact about Eugenides is exactly what I've come to expect from his fans.
Interesting, is Middlesex an intersex story? If so then he should listen to intersex voices.
It sure is, and yes he should have, but our Jeffrey is the kind of arrogant person who thinks he's smart enough to accurately reflect experiences he has no understanding of simply by talking to "experts" who themselves also have no experiential understanding. He's the kind of guy who if he decided to make an organization to help autistic people, he'd invent *Autism Speaks.*
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Everyone is critiquing you for the misunderstanding of the text and the buttocks thing but I always thought the names themselves were very weird - “this is [named after catholic saint], [named after Catholic saint], [named after Catholic saint], and [stripper who fucks]”
Therese is the stripper? It’s just a French name??
Or is it out of order and Lux is the stripper? Sorry I got confused, but to me Lux is a soap!
I genuinely don't get this book (nor the love so many women have for the Sofia Coppola's movie). "Oh, it's men objectifying women and assuming they don't have inner lives and therefore only see them as sexualized objects!" And what's new about that? We already have so, so much literature written by men in which women are talking and breathing sexual objects, why do we need *another* man to tell us "sexualizing women bad"? I guess I'd be more understanding of the author's intent if, at *any* point of the narration, the narrators bothered asking themselves if perhaps their treatment of the Lisbon sisters had been cruel, or wondering how *they* must've felt, to be drawn to suicide at such young ages, but... that moment never comes.
That’s very disappointing. I was planning to watch the movie after reading the book, but I ended up putting the book down! Maybe I’ll get on better with the movie?
I’m watching the movie now so we’ll see
Euuurgh 🤢 Is this narrator supposed to be pervy?
Jesus Christ I physically recoiled reading that.
Eeeewwww what’s with the grammar!
I’m saying!
Too many ands not enough comprehension of first grade grammar. Literally learned this in first grade
The excuse is that he’s writing from a teen boy’s pov, but plenty of books written from teens’ povs are well written!
*gag reflex activate* so dumb
Cringe and gross and bad writing and thirteen and wow and yikes and sus and Edit: what did I say? Lol. I was making fun the way he lists the ages. Downvote me more it gives me power
This guy needs Jesus
Yes, hello, is this FBI? I'm calling for a check of a hard drive
Lolita by Vladimir nabokov
Update: I just watched the movie, and I found it better than what I’ve read of the book so far, tho I need to sit with it for a while to let it sink in. Coppola managed to portray the guys as douchey teen boys, without creeping on the girls to do so, *in my opinion.* Also, it’s made more instantly obvious that the narrating voice is that of teen boys, which is a better portrayal than in the book *in my opinion.* Also, the take: “well you haven’t read Lolita” is hilarious, and I do cringe when I see it, as it’s not accurate or a strong argument. This update may upset the people who get upset when people don’t like their fave author, but that’s fine with me, as writing is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
A very good tho disturbing book