Anglais

Commentary : Death and sexuality in Virgin suicides Virgin Suicides, is a novel written in 1993 by Jeffrey Eugenides, an American writer. The story takes place in Michigan, during the 1970's and talks about the Lisbon's girls suicides which fascinate their community. Two groups dominate the novel : the men, who recall their youth and the five suicidal Lisbon sisters. The choice of narrators, a group rather than an individual, using the first person plural is an unusual one. Here men recall a time when they weren't yet fully formed as individuals, when experience was communal, shared and puzzled over together. So the narrator is one or all of a group of adolescent boys who obsessed over the Lisbon girls from a distance in their youth, and now, as middle-aged men, continue to try to piece together the girls' story. The Lisbon are a Catholic family, the father is a math teacher and the mother a homemaker, they have five daughters (between 13 and 17 years old). The story begins with Cecilia, one of the Lisbon's sisters, who tries to commit suicide by opening her veins. After the drama of Cecilia's suicide (she tried to commit sucide a first time and succeed the second time in jumping thought a window), Lux, who had a romance with a young boy called Trip Fontaine, and her sisters are taken to a homecoming dance. As Lux missed the curfew, the girls become recluse and Mrs. Lisbon pulls them out of school. Their lives deteriorate, they communicate with the boys by phone and finally they send a message to the boys to come to the house but the boys find three of them dead. The girls have commited suicide. We will see why we could say that this text is about the death and the sexuality, indeed theses two notions are very close. The