The display and function of suburban images in Jeffrey Eugenides' 'The Virgin Suicides'

Zusatztext

It seems that America"s economic and technological progress has not succeeded in bringing about the "good society", the notion of the happy, single-family house neighborhood. A higher standard of living has somehow failed to result in a better quality of life.
So far suburban living is an exclusively American model of planned, mass-produced housing, which appeared after World War II and has increased drastically ever since. Suburbanites, the inhabitants of Suburbia, have been the object of cynical mockery for people from cities, who criticize the predictability and conformity of this form of housing and therefore living.
Most recently the film American Beauty (1999) has created the image of suburban life as a deceiving paradise, where the mental health and happiness of the inhabitants are sacrificed for the outward tidiness and a pretentious normalcy of the environment. In my paper I will focus on this relation and how it is presented in Eugenides first novel. The central event in his debut is the suicide of five sisters in an affluent midwestern suburb, which remains an inexplicable mystery to the narrator and the community. In his novel Eugenides points at the fact that prosperity and outward order do not ensure mental health or happiness. The girls end their lives untimely even though they live in a place that is supposedly providing for a perfect life. Instead the first rather seems to attract the latter. It is also noticeable how the community reacts and what effects the suicides, as an unfathomable tragedy, have on the usually ordered and safe environment. Furthermore I will particularly analyse social rituals that are supposed to maintain and stabilize the norm and order of the community. Then I will take a closer look at the correspondence of the physical environment and the inward state of the suburbanites. In doing so I attempt to find reasons in how far suburbia fails to represent the American dream, and how this downfall is displayed in the novel. The introductory quote can be seen as a critical question towards the belief that the suburbs are regarded as the safe havens of exclusive security for privileged white middle-class members of the American society.

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