Gothic Discourse in Jeffrey Eugenides’s 'The Virgin Suicides' – Challenging Suburban Uniformity and (Re)Imagining “The Other”

Abstract

This paper argues that Jeffrey Eugenides, in his début novel, The Virgin Suicides, first questions and then challenges ‘the homeliness’ of the American suburbia by adopting an unsettling gothic discourse and by creating gothic subjects (the Lisbons). Gothic discourse includes the gothic tropes of confinement, persecution, alienation and contagion. My approach to the American Gothic tends to side with Siân Silyn Roberts who convincingly argues that this literary phenomenon questions the place of the individual in what he calls “a diasporic setting” (7). In eighteenth century Great Britain, Gothic fiction differentiates a literate middle class from “the other”, meaning other nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. The individual becomes a container of “cultivated sensibility” (Roberts 3). In America, this model was seriously challenged due to “a climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change” (Roberts 5). The cosmopolitan city, a place of invasion, of close proximity to the other, has become the perfect setting for gothic subjects, characterised by Roberts as mutable and adaptable. However, suburbia, with its apparent idyllic life, tries to uniformize the heterogeneous tendencies of the cosmopolitan city.