![]() ![]() Like Miss Emily, the teen-age Lisbon girls are forbidden to date or fraternize with boys by a possessive parent, in their case a rigidly Roman Catholic mother. The reader becomes even more interested in why this "we" persists in its fascination with the five Lisbon sisters of suburban Grosse Pointe, Mich., than in why each of the girls "took her turn at suicide." And, as in Faulkner's tale, that narrator serves both as a device for emphasizing the girls' isolation and finally as the novel's true protagonist. Eugenides is not only writing about tragically repressed young girls but also using a collective narrator to tell their story. ![]() ![]() It seems fitting to mention "A Rose for Emily" by way of introducing Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, "The Virgin Suicides," because Mr. Typically, he never mentioned the story's most complex feature: a collective narrator pieces together the ghoulish story of proud, love-famished Miss Emily, isolated in her crumbling antebellum mansion, who eventually murders her Yankee lover and sleeps for a generation beside his moldering corpse. WHEN a bewildered student asked him to explain his famous short story "A Rose for Emily," William Faulkner declared that he was simply writing about a "young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations to find love" who was "repressed" by her selfish father, with tragic results. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES By Jeffrey Eugenides. ![]()
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