For those with some exposure to postwar American culture, “suburban gothic” is likely to be a familiar cultural mode. It is prevalent across various forms, both popular and “serious,” its tropes are readily identifiable, and its motivations are intelligible. The decaying tract homes, infestations and insidious duplicating technologies arguably all serve to evoke a horror of suburban surveillance and conformity and anxieties about the violence and perversity of family life hidden behind closed doors. Thus it seems reasonable to generalize that works of fiction and films such as The Stepford Wives, Blue Velvet and The Virgin Suicides make use of the gothic principally to critique a white middle-class dream of home-owning prosperity and security.
Suburban gothic can be seen as according very closely with the outpouring of polemic which dominated discussion about suburban life in the postwar decades. Initially the most influential voices in this chorus of denunciation were the writers of more or less scholarly historical or sociological studies, including David Riesman, Lewis Mumford, and Betty Friedan.Footnote 1 Typically, their work bemoaned the loss of rewarding communal lives left behind in the inner cities, and of a spirit of independence that had previously marked American life. Many of these studies attended to the different effects of suburban life on men and women; initially concern focused on the plight of the alienated, emasculated corporate drone and latterly on the psychologically debilitating effects of the limiting domestic roles conferred on women. These studies were complemented by the literary fiction of predominantly white, middle-class male authors, such as Sloan Wilson, John Updike and John Cheever, whose visions have increasingly come to shape perceptions of the postwar suburbs, thanks in part to subsequent film adaptations. The themes and concerns of suburban gothic have also long found echo in cognate popular modes, including noir and science fiction.Footnote 2
By rearticulating these wholly familiar concerns, however, the gothicity of suburban gothic becomes redundant; quite simply, it is not being utilized to say anything that is not already well known about the suburbs. This is rather the problem with an otherwise energetic and extensive study of the topic, Bernice Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, which concludes that the suburban gothic “deserves to be considered one of the most significant and revealing undercurrents in American popular culture.”Footnote 3 But what Murphy “reveals” is that the suburban gothic has all along been posing precisely the same “despairing questions asked by the authors of The Split-Level Trap back in 1960 – ‘What has been happening to these people? What is missing, what is so terribly wrong in this pretty green community?’ ”Footnote 4 Such questions are usually purely rhetorical. Moreover, the very persistence of these “anxieties” produces nothing more than a comforting confirmation of particular kinds of knowledge. The suburban gothic, in Murphy's account, is, then, an altogether safe mode, its uniformity mirroring, indeed helping to produce, the perceived uniformity of the suburbs it supposedly attacks. There is little scope for the gothic's vaunted tendency to confound, to exploit uncertainty.Footnote 5 To be sure, there is no recognition of how the gothic's indeterminism is so often constitutive, or, as Andrew Lloyd Smith has it, a “narrative necessity, providing the essential possibilities of mystery and suspense.”Footnote 6 In this article I examine how suburban gothic has been deployed in more distinct and productive ways which harness the gothic's potential for formal and epistemological disturbance. Focusing principally on Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, I examine how the uncannily familiar tropes of gothic can disrupt the overly familiar way in which stories about the suburbs tend to be told, and in doing so say something unsettling about the most familiar of American spaces. Precisely what The Virgin Suicides disturbs has to do with the suburbs' location within American history. If suburban gothic has tended to critique the manner in which suburbs supposedly have become disconnected from history – to the point of establishing a comforting truism – Eugenides's novel reconstitutes the postwar suburbs as a historical space, a site of conflict undergoing change. Eugenides's gothic motifs – doublings, infestations, ruination – coalesce around the irruption of repressed ethnic memories into the cultural blankness of the suburbs. But equally, the novel's various gothic narrative effects problematize the telling of these suburban histories; that is, the remembrance of forgetting. The foremost of these is the first-person-plural narrative voice which, operating as a peculiarly indeterminate retrospective chorus, serves to question the reliability and coherence of recent histories of the suburbs.Footnote 7 Eugenides's gothic foregrounds a current tendency to misread and misremember the suburbs, a tendency which produces a simpler, safer version of them that reassures us of our apparent separateness and distance from such troubling places.
Suburban Gothic and American History
The presumption that the postwar suburbs are free from history makes the gothic mode seem inappropriate. Murphy notes this awareness in some of the earliest examples of suburban gothic. One of Richard Matheson's victims of suburban haunting complains, “It doesn't make any sense. Why should a place like this be haunted? It's only a couple of years old.”Footnote 8 A common cause of suburban haunting is that these postwar residential developments, whilst themselves new and possessing at most purely decorative references to the past, have been built over lands once populated by other peoples. Typical of this strand of suburban gothic is the 1982 film Poltergeist and its sequels; here the residential subdivision's development over a much older burial ground, possibly Native American, is the cause for later supernatural disturbance. The desire for a share of the American good life quite detached from disturbing histories of displacement and dispossession is shown for what it is: an utterly self-centred materialism. (Such a critique was probably most keenly felt during the Reagan years, a period so often derided in precisely these terms.) Gothic horrors such as Poltergeist thus moralize that suburban America's ignorance of or disregard for the past will always result in that past coming back to haunt it.
There is, however, more to suburban gothic's preoccupation with the presence of the past than a simple reworking of the biggest cliché in the book of American hauntings, the house built over an Indian burial ground. The association of suburban life with a desire to live in a place without a past has increasingly given way to representations of suburban landscapes which have not been allowed to age. In several films produced in the 1980s and 1990s, suburban environments are explicitly cast in the image of 1950s televisual representations. As such, the suburbs are more easily characterized as both artificial (they resemble an idealized media image) and oppressive (they are characterized by conservative “family values” and the presumption of white privilege). Robert Beuka is critical of the insistent “relegation to the past” of these environments, which, he argues, shows how suburbia has become entirely “overdetermined” in millennial America. In films such as The Truman Show and Pleasantville (1998), Beuka complains, the suburb is “depicted less as a lived place than as a signifier of certain co-optive, even totalitarian impulses that lurk beneath the fabric of centrist, middle-class American culture.”Footnote 9 This layering of 1950s and contemporary suburbia takes a more distinctly gothic turn in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). The uncanny quality of its New England town setting derives in large part from the blurring of visual references to 1950s and 1980s American suburbia. Lynch has suggested that this disorientating sense of doubling and of time compression – what Laura Mulvey refers to as its “amorphous temporality” – expresses his fascination with the parallels between the Eisenhower and Reagan eras, in particular their shared championing of a suburban vision of the good life.Footnote 10 Whether they feature haunting or time compression, what these suburban-set films have in common is their insistence that suburban lives are not properly part of American history. Suburbanites embody either a refusal to acknowledge the past or a desire to live wholly within it. These outlooks leave little room for any consideration of specifically suburban histories, troubling or otherwise. Yet might not such histories be an area suburban gothic could conceivably and productively inhabit? Or, to put it another way, might it not be more disturbing to consider suburban pasts as being closely imbricated with American history than detached from it?
The Virgin Suicides shares with Blue Velvet and the other aforementioned films a strong sense of time being out of joint. In part it is the insistently elegiac tone of Eugenides's novel which makes it seem as though it is outside time. The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a group of men who have come together to try to recall and explicate the most dramatic yet unfathomable event of their adolescent lives, the multiple suicides of the five daughters of the Lisbon family, their neighbours in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the elite Detroit suburb in which the men grew up during the 1970s. The very palpable nostalgia that pervades the novel relates the men's failure to come to terms with the deaths; manifestly, they are still in mourning. As Debra Shostak observes, the suicides have “stopped time for the narrators, who seem to live in a timeless zone of contemplation of the Lisbon deaths.”Footnote 11 But it is not only the novel's narrators who appear to dwell in a “timeless zone”; their parents also seek suspension from history. The preference of the novel's first-generation suburban settlers for sheltered, anaesthetized lives is considered by the narrators to be a traumatized response to the experience of war and loss. Yet the narrators also find reasons to believe that such pasts have not been, and cannot be, fully shaken off by a move into the suburbs; indeed, as I will show, it seems that suburbanization refocusses attention onto these pasts.Footnote 12 In addition, The Virgin Suicides effects a number of uncanny symmetries between the traumas of suburban pioneers, the previous experiences of their parents, and the subsequent ones of their offspring. Despite its apparent atemporality, which is in keeping with so much suburban gothic narrative, Eugenides's novel actually insists on resituating suburbia in history. Such historicization is by no means straightforward: The Virgin Suicides articulates not only the ambiguous presence of history in the postwar suburbs, but also their ambivalent presence in the history of postwar America. Both of these moves are enabled through a number of identifiably gothic motifs and textual strategies.
For instance, that most ubiquitous of gothic devices, doubling, proliferates throughout the novel. The narrators repeatedly comment on how the Lisbon daughters appear indistinguishable from one another, and on how they consider themselves to be the girls' doubles.Footnote 13 Largely this is a consequence of the men's refusal or inability to see their female counterparts as individuals; as Shostak argues, it better serves the narrators' own mythic and somewhat self-aggrandizing narrative to view the girls as a group of sacrificial virgins rather than as experientially distinct teenagers. (Just occasionally they manage to catch glimpses of the girls' individual subjectivity; Shostak argues that these moments enable a counterreading of the novel's dominant, misogynist narration.) But there are other doublings of which the narrators seem very much less aware. Ordinary perceptions of maturation are continually scrambled in the men's account, with many figures appearing simultaneously aged and youthful. The novel opens with an image of the youngest Lisbon sister, Cecelia, in the bath, blood from her slit wrists clouding the water, “her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman” (3). Later on the exact reverse of this image is presented, when an old Greek neighbour, Mrs. Karafalis, is similarly spied in the bath: in her nakedness she appears ‘shockingly’ like a girl (174). At the very end of the novel the narrators reveal themselves to be middle-aged and balding (249); this moment is jolting too because the narrative has hitherto been almost entirely focalized through their teenage selves. Then there is Joe the Retard, at once wizened and infantile, who appears as an early foreshadowing of the narrators' entrapment within their own adolescence (28). These doublings, which pass without comment from the narrators, relate not only their own trauma, but the existence of other, competing traumas associated with their home environment: those of their parents – grandparents even – who are still troubled by their own pasts, and who have moved to the suburbs in order to escape them. The novel's continual making strange and confused the inevitability and orderliness of the processes of growing up and ageing is expressive of the contradictions of postwar suburbia: first that there is still so much history in a place which is supposed to have broken free from the clutches of the past; second that this moment of supposed historical evacuation has itself become a historical moment, with all the problems that recollection and narration entail.
Also like Lynch's film, an insectile motif runs through The Virgin Suicides. In Blue Velvet, the placidity of the opening suburban scenes is sharply undercut by repulsive close-ups of seething insects, which seem to be boiling up from under the ground. Such imagery rather serves to confirm the commonplace that the calm exterior conformity of the suburbs is just a facade which hides nests of depravity. In The Virgin Suicides, the insects' significance is more complex: like the instances of doubling discussed above, they invite different interpretations. The narrators, once again, tend towards mythic readings, but the inclusion of other material and commentary seems always to encourage from the reader more historically grounded explanations. The first such account is of the swarm of fish flies which rises annually from the algal bloom of the nearby polluted lake to deposit a layer of corpses on virtually every man-made surface. The girls’ deaths occur in synchrony with this apparently most natural of life cycles, and thus appear inevitable. Indeed, the day before her first suicide attempt, Cecelia is reported to have drawn her initials through a scrim of their remains, suggesting a willing identification with ephemeral nature (4). Later, an infestation of Dutch elm beetles prompts the organized removal of the neighbourhood's entire natural and protective canopy. The surviving Lisbon girls are the only people in the neighbourhood who fight to save their tree; responding to a picture of the girls’ struggle, the narrators declare, “they seem to be worshipping it like a group of Druids” (183–84). The girls’ lives – and deaths – seem to the narrators to be merely part of some great elemental, timeless force; this tendency of the boys obscures both the girls’ individual subjectivity and the historical specificity of their suburban habitat. Yet the insects also relate decidedly human concerns, in particular the physical and social landscape of postindustrial Detroit. The fish flies, for instance, are actually less associated with the lake's water or fish than with the pollution-induced mat of algae, which gets even worse the year after following an industrial spill. The elm trees are said to be the only topographical feature that distinguishes their suburb from the city of Detroit (34, 44), which in the logic of postwar white flight is inextricably associated with the violence and poverty of its black population. The disquiet about infestation certainly echoes the anxiety, anger and disgust expressed by white suburbanites threatened by black encroachment.Footnote 14 On the other hand, the insects seem also to relate the longer journeys of certain arriviste suburbanites: one of the Lisbon girls insists that “if boats didn't bring the fungus from Europe in the first place … none of this would have ever happened” (181).Footnote 15 In addition to the fish flies and the beetles, the neighbourhood resonates with the thrum of crickets. Despite all attempts to eliminate them with chemicals, the crickets perpetually sing “from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did” (58). Once again, the narrators consider the insects part of an eternal natural order: the crickets evoke for the narrators an ancient sentience, which their parents are said to be more in tune with. Yet this mythic construal marks a realization that their parents have histories which pre-date the environment which, as adolescents, is all they have ever known. Thus all of the insects seem to herald – or perhaps mock – the suburb's failure to divorce itself physically and socially from the city which produced it, and from which most of its older inhabitants have come.
White Suburbs and the Ethnic Uncanny
To be sure, these infestations, which help depict the suburb as plagued, diseased and dying, contradict its inhabitants' apparent belief that they live in an immortal and pristine world. Indeed, up until Cecelia's death, the first of the suicides, the narrators claim that no one has died in their suburb (35). Perhaps this incredible feat is attributable to the strong sense that nobody is really truly alive; the residents are, in a very modern sense, undead. Different explanations are offered for this living death. Some seem to have to do, once again, with traumatized responses: to the experience of war (35), and also to the black city – “occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring” (36). This unpreparedness for dealing with death prompts blackly comic scenes when the city's gravediggers go on strike. Mortuaries fill up and corpses have to be shipped out of state in refrigerated containers (36). Mr. Lisbon also struggles to find a suitable cemetery in which to bury Cecelia. Alternatives remind him of threatening ethnic difference: one is near the Palestinian section and resounds to the call of the muezzin. And where that ethnic difference has been erased, other equally unpleasant associations are invoked. Another cemetery is by the remains of what was Poletown. That neighbourhood has been razed by GM to build a new factory which never got off the ground; the massive expanse of waste ground abutting the cemetery reminds Mr. Lisbon of Hiroshima. Cecelia is finally laid to rest in the flattest, blandest and most distant cemetery in town, which is located between two freeways. Even the headstones are laid flat; the only things that punctuate the horizon are cheap plastic American flags. But even this wholly deracinated environment – the next best thing to crossroads, perhaps – is no place to put the past in its place. Again this is articulated by gothic imagery: excessive watering by family members acting as caretakers has caused flooding, and “a trail of deep footprints from grave to grave made it appear the dead were walking at night” (36–38).
These anxieties about “ethnicity” are noticeably wholly absent from Sophia Coppola's 1999 film adaptation of Eugenides's novel. Scholars, whether responding to the film or the novel, have also bypassed this aspect, tending to focus instead on the portrayal of sexual oppression in the suburbs.Footnote 16 This topic is surely worthy of scrutiny, but what is intriguing and distinct about Eugenides's suburban gothic is the way it foregrounds the fragility of newly established suburban identities, based on a shared whiteness, which are always threatened by the return of repressed “ethnic” memories. This fragility derives from home ownership being confirmation both of the European national identities of new immigrants and of their having become fully assimilated middle-class Americans. In other words, the home becomes a site of the collision of two equally powerful but potentially incompatible identities.
My hypothesis that suburbanization encouraged competing, contradictory identifications runs counter to classical theories of assimilation, which presume that suburbanization inevitably leads to, and equates with, incorporation. The remoteness of (typically) second-generation immigrants from urban-located ethnic communities and their similarity to other suburbanites in terms of age and class are supposed to all but neutralize significant ethnic attachments.Footnote 17 In his study of race relations in postwar Detroit, Thomas Sugrue insists that this shift happened relatively early: “Beginning in the 1920s – and certainly by the 1940s – class and race became more important than ethnicity as a guide to the city's residential geography. Residents of Detroit's white neighbourhoods abandoned their ethnic affiliations and found a new identity in whiteness.”Footnote 18 Meanwhile, some African American writers have provocatively argued that the assumption of whiteness occurred almost the instant European immigrants set foot in America. James Baldwin famously argued that there were no white people in Norway; immigrants from European countries only achieved whiteness through acts of racial prejudice and violence and the assumption of material privileges predicated on such racism.Footnote 19 Malcolm X is reported to have said that this typically happens with lightning speed, the first word of English any immigrant learns upon arrival in the States being “nigger.”Footnote 20
Recent historiography of immigration and assimilation – responding to the “white ethnic revival” of late twentieth-century America of which Eugenides is undeniably a part – indicates that the picture is more complicated than these accounts would suggest.Footnote 21 David Roediger has argued in Working toward Whiteness that the adoption by European immigrants of a white identity often did not happen upon disembarkation, and was frequently piecemeal: new immigrant notions of racial identity were sometimes informed by their own understandings of whiteness and nonwhiteness from living in Europe; often, their whiteness was questioned by immigration officials and employers, which sometimes led to a closer identification, and sometimes political alliances, with blacks. For my purposes, though, the dynamics of “racial” identification and home ownership are the most significant. Echoing Oliver Zunz's study of immigrants in Detroit, Roediger argues that in the early and mid-twentieth century the desire felt by new immigrants for home ownership was readily understood as a powerful “racial longing”:
The passion for home owning intersected with broadly defined questions of “racial” identity. It spoke to group values reflecting how immigrants thought about both sides of the Atlantic. When President Herbert Hoover characterized the desire for a home as a “racial longing,” he implied that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was his point of reference. However, when the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuva editorialized on home ownership as a way to “honor” one's nationality, it referred to another set of complex, powerful, transnational “racial longings.”Footnote 22
Of course, there were many other, more prosaic motivations, mainly to do with security and independence, which help explain why rates of home ownership amongst immigrants often exceeded those of wealthier and better-established native-born white Americans.Footnote 23 If home ownership confirmed particular national, or “racial,” attachments, it is tempting to argue that such powerful identifications had to be diluted and even abandoned in order that immigrants could assimilate to a white identity required by restrictive covenants being established across swathes of urban and suburban America from the 1920s onwards. However, in these self-segregating communities, many new immigrant home owners could indeed have it both ways. Roediger suggests that “restrictive covenants held out the seductive possibility that neighborhoods could be imagined both as white and as the property of a European ‘racial’ group.”Footnote 24 To a great extent this perception was enabled by the support of local ‘ethnic’ institutions – Catholic churches, and even synagogues – for “neighborhood improvement associations,” whose function was to ward off incursions from non-whites.Footnote 25
But in many instances, immigrants and their descendents were indeed encouraged to disinvest in their ethnic communities and identities. Even after racially restrictive covenants were deemed unconstitutional following the Supreme Court's Shelley v. Kraemer decision (1948), residential discrimination persisted in more informal, covert ways. In certain cases, some European immigrants and their descendents were actively discouraged from settling in white neighbourhoods. One of the most notorious instances was the scheme implemented by the residents, realtors and bankers of Grosse Pointe, the “Grosse Pointe Point System,” which came to national prominence in 1960. As one its practitioners openly admitted in court that year, the system was intended to make it more difficult for those of southern or eastern European descent to acquire a mortgage to purchase property in the neighbourhood. Whereas no restrictions were placed on would-be residents of northwest European descent, those with Italian, Greek or Polish heritage wishing to move into the area had to achieve certain point scores to win admission. (Jews were required to achieve the highest scores; blacks and Asians were barred altogether.) Applicants were judged on a number of factors, including their “degree of swarthiness,” their employment, the manner in which they dressed and even the upkeep of their former home – private detectives were employed to determine the latter.Footnote 26 Thus in the specific case of Grosse Pointe, for certain immigrants who were determined to suburbanize, assimilation – even if posed – paid dividends.Footnote 27
In The Virgin Suicides, however, despite the machinations of housing associations and authorities, ethnic identities have emphatically not been abandoned. In this most upper-middle-class of suburban neighbourhoods, Europeanness abounds, and not only in its cosmopolitan assortment of surnames: many households are referred to as German, Italian, Polish and Greek. Hyphenated identities are avoided; in other words, these residents are not “ethnic” Americans. Quite possibly this insistence on Europeanness is a consequence of the narrators' historical situation. Several of them are declared to be the grandchildren of immigrants; perhaps they are motivated by the politics of white ethnic revival so ascendant in the latter part of the twentieth century, and are attempting to recover and reassert what their parents were all too keen to abandon in the white dreamscape of postwar suburbia. Notably, though, markers of Europeanness are not evenly distributed throughout the novel. Rather, as the suburb becomes increasingly identified with European nationalities, its essential Americanness becomes more and more insecure. An initial differentiation between Europeanness and Americanness is made towards the beginning of the novel: the “immigrant kid” Dominic Palazzolo, who is on a short stay with relatives, confirms how the narrators “expected a European to look”: “frail, diseased and temperamental” (19–20) – the very image of an Ellis Island immigrant. Their emphatic identification of Dominic with Europeanness, of course, confirms their own Americanness, whatever their own ancestry. After he leaves, though, it seems no longer so easy to make such distinctions. Indeed, Dominic's departure is considered to be a possible reason for Cecelia's first suicide attempt – it seems she is besotted with him – which sets in motion the rest of the novel's incidents. Cecelia kills herself using a method which mirrors the failed attempt of the lovelorn Dominic: throwing herself out of the upstairs window of her home. Dominic falls into “calculated shrubbery” (20); Cecelia is impaled on a fence spike. The subsequent organized removal of the “murdering fence” by the Lisbons' neighbours, and in particular their indifference to the carnage so caused to their properties, leads the narrators to sense “how ancient they were,” and to realize “that the version of the world they had rendered for us was not the world they really believed in” (55). Quite on cue, this insight is followed by the nonchalant emergence of Europeans behaving as if they had never left the Old World: “the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their alpine hats, Mr. Hessen's with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash” (56). Thus, once the figure of the itinerant immigrant is dispelled, Europeanness comes increasingly to seem settled in the suburb.
The bald presence of these almost comically unassimilated Germans perhaps bespeaks the micro-management of racial and ethnic accession in Grosse Pointe. Once again, there were no restrictions placed on prospective house buyers of northwest European ancestry, even those whose preferences – whether for drinks, dress or dogs – deviated from the American. It was quite a different matter for those of south and east European descent, and accordingly, in the novel, the households of Italians, Poles and Greeks are rendered quite differently, with each acquiring decidedly gothic characteristics. First there are the Baldinos. The suspicion that they are mafiosi transforms them, in the locality's imagination, into modern gothic villains, and underneath their garden with its laurel trees imported from Italy is rumoured to be an underground hideaway and a network of tunnels that connects even with the Lisbons' home (10–14). Then there are the Stamorowskis. As the Lisbon's house is overcome by “creeping desolation” as the family's withdrawal from, and abandonment by, the community becomes complete, the narrators comment, “We always thought the bats had come with the Stamorowskis from Poland; they made sense swooping over that sombre house with its velvet curtains and Old World decay, but not over the practical double chimneys of the Lisbon house” (89). Finally, there is Old Mrs. Karafalis, who is kept in the basement of her otherwise assimilated Greek family's home – a subterranean chamber she has made over to look like Asia Minor, in which “she is waiting to die.” As the narrators declare, she is “shaped and saddened by a history we knew nothing about” – her experience is of fear and the brutality of war (in her case the expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey in 1923). Indeed, when she was a girl she hid for weeks in a cave to save her own life. This is why it seems she becomes interested in the plight of the Lisbon girls and is able to “enter into telepathy with them”: “On the day she heard about the girls' new incarceration, she jerked her head up, nodded, didn't smile. But had already known, it seemed” (171–74).
Why are these particular households fashioned as gothic? The answer seems to lie with the Lisbons, who are in fact about the only family whose ethnic heritage is undisclosed. Aspects of their Europeanness survive as the faintest adumbrations: their surname is an obscure reminder of such a past, as is their mother's Catholicism, whose outlook seems otherwise entirely Puritan – even her own priest remarks that her preference for austere modern choral music “is what you might expect to find in a Protestant household” (136). Indeed, the interior of the Lisbons' home is devoid of any references to their Old World heritage; instead it is replete with “stark colonial furniture,” and even a painting of Pilgrims plucking a turkey (25). These conscious symbols of an originating American people are reminiscent of what Alison Landsberg describes as the “prosthetic memories” installed by the protagonists of various early twentieth-century immigrant narratives who sought to imagine themselves as Americans, through which they were able to disassociate themselves from their European pasts.Footnote 28 Likely, the Lisbons' ancestors left European shores some time before the arrival of the “new” immigrants – indeed, during the homecoming ball, the Lisbon girls are likened to “pioneer women,” their unflattering dresses having “the stoic, presumptuous qualities of European fashions enduring the wilderness” (118). Whatever the Lisbons' precise origins, their forgetting has a singular purpose. The Lisbons' prosthetic genealogy, which extends back to the Pilgrims, serves to obliterate some other lived, non-American history. The overtly gothic motifs – the tunnels, the bats, the telepathy – serve, then, to reconnect forcibly the ethnically unmarked home of the Lisbons with locations marked by the Old World. These motifs, along with the gothic collapse of the Lisbon home, suggest that the abandonment of European ties in exchange for a deracinated suburban home cannot but produce trauma. In this suburban gothic narrative, there is an irreducible element of the home which is not American. It is the uncanniness of these perceptions – the simultaneous appropriateness and inappropriateness of Old World associations in New World domestic space – that helps to unhouse the suburban home.
Arguably, Old Mrs. Karafalis's understanding of New World suffering, enabled by her Old World experience, relates a further uncanny aspect of the novel. Its central gothic conceit – young women trapped in a ruined building – is of course a dominant trope of classic European gothic fiction. At the same time, The Virgin Suicides borrows from earlier American gothic tales – notably Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” (1919), with which it shares a first-person-plural narrator. “A Rose” is told by the male townsfolk of a provincial Mississippi town who have over several decades become fascinated by an ageing spinster, Emily Grierson. Grierson has sequestered herself in her own townhouse, which, like the Lisbon's upmarket suburban home, has fallen from its high estate into dilapidation. But whereas her domestic quarters are finally penetrated by the male narrators and her murderous secret and sexual perversity is revealed, there is, of course, no such disclosure in The Virgin Suicides, despite the boys' physical access into the Lisbon home. References to the baleful aspect of the Lisbon house and marshy vapours emanating from its environs also evoke Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Actually, Eugenides's gothic has more in common with Poe's: both texts suggest that their narrators are far from reliable, and both refrain from explaining the full mystery of their incarcerated women. Moreover, this most canonical of American gothic stories features a setting which seems more Old World than New. These stories, then, indicate how a residual Europeanness will colour any attempt to articulate a purely American gothic.
Conclusion: The Remembrance of Forgetting
The Virgin Suicides does not, though, find a single dysfunctional family to be guilty of cultural amnesia. One of the final scenes recounted is of a debutante party. Crassly, this celebration of a Grosse Pointe girl's “coming out” into womanhood is held immediately after the three-quarters successful combined suicide attempt of the remaining Lisbon daughters. But then, most attend precisely to put the Lisbons out of their minds and to restore their faith in a specifically American narrative of success: “Raising champagne glasses, people said our industry was coming back, our nation, our way of life” (236). This recollection, then, stands as an act of remembrance by a group of individuals of an event held by a community in order to forget about a family who refused to remember. This layering of memory and denial, a feature throughout the novel, also implicates the male narrators. Their recollections offer no cathartic release, they dispel no ghosts; moreover, they demonstrate that the narrators' response to trauma is simply to create their own collective prosthetic memory. Retrospectively, the narrators fashion their faltering attempts to engage with the girls into a “communal conversation” (66); their rereading of Cecelia's diary enables them to “hold collective memories of times we hadn't experienced” (42). Their choric narrative echoes Cecelia's diary in that it “depicts … an unformed ego” (42) – to the point where “the first person singular ceases almost entirely” (44) – a consequence, it seems, of her (and similarly their) endless watching of others. Relentlessly, the novel shows this form of public memory to be flawed, partial. In their quest for objectivity and inclusivity, the narrators resort to documents and the remembrances of others. Perhaps predictably, what results is an account full of holes and contradictions. Cecelia's diary, for instance, does not confirm the supposition, based on her behaviour, that she was in love with Dominic Palazzolo (32); in establishing a motivation for her suicide it is utterly inconclusive. The narrators attempt to arrange chronologically a series of photographs to better account for the tragedy; their narrative, however, continually requires them to jump between their numbered exhibits. In any case, some photos are missing, and others undermine shared memories – one in particular seems to suggest that the “creeping desolation” of the Lisbon house was all in their minds (89). Many of the neighbours' accounts are contradictory or coloured by self-regard. One testimony of Cecelia the moment before her death is drolly dismissed as the “hallucination of a bifocals wearer” (47). The two people deemed the most reliable of witnesses fail utterly to provide: the girls' counsellor is the one of the few individuals who could not be tracked down (she may anyway have been working under false credentials) and Trip Fontaine, prom king to Lux Lisbon's queen, is considered reliable precisely because he never tells. (In any case, he always moved in a haze of marihuana.) Yet even the most doubtful of accounts from the boys themselves are folded into the narrative: Paul Baldino's tall tale of travelling the neighbourhood's tunnels and coming up into the Lisbon's home to glimpse Cecelia lying in bathwater clouded with her own blood provides the striking “remembered” image at the novel's opening.
In addition, the narrators' account features a number of historical incongruities. For instance, far from triggering a cyclical superabundance, the fish flies of the northern lakes were in actual fact decimated by pollution. The reference to Poletown is anachronistic; its demolition was not to take place until 1981. Thus, once again, the narrators' account is partial not only in ways they readily acknowledge, but also in ways to which they are less prepared to admit. These disavowals parallel the manner in which they refrain from referring to Detroit or Grosse Pointe by name for the entirety of the narrative. This avoidance serves to render their memories mythic, timeless. At the same time, these anomalies and omissions undercut their narrative, demonstrating it to be limited and self-serving. The novel's “choric” narration, then, shows why we should not trust the collective stories we tell of the suburban past. Further, it implies that there is no reliable or coherent subject to narrate suburban memories, and no discrete, stable site from which to tell them.
Only by paying attention to the gothic's formal devices, its textuality, is it possible to gain a perspective on what Cathy Davidson has described as the mode's “challenge to history, its rewriting and unwriting of history.”Footnote 29 The suburbs have for so long been understood as places people go to in order to forget, or to avoid conflict. Instructively, The Virgin Suicides shows how such forgetting is far from inevitable, but equally, how the remembering of that forgetting is inevitably conflicted. Eugenides's suburban gothic insists that the place we presume to know so well can never be fully known; this is a consequence not of its being outside history, but of its becoming history.
