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Suburban Gothic and the Ethnic Uncanny in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2012

MARTIN DINES
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Abstract

If uncertainty and anxiety are the troubling but potentially radical qualities of gothic narrative, suburban gothic has typically been understood in terms of a banal unhomeliness which merely confirms reassuring commonplaces about the postwar American suburbs. In such readings, the suburbs are supposed to embody a desire to stand outside history: either they are places in which people seek refuge from their own pasts, or they represent an idealized past removed from the challenges of the present. This article argues that Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides undermines easy assumptions about the suburbs' atemporality. The novel's various gothic motifs suggest the difficulty of abandoning European pasts in order to adopt the white American identities required for a life in the suburbs; repressed ethnic difference haunts the suburban landscape. Yet Eugenides's suburban gothic also complicates the process of remembering such acts of forgetting: the difficulty of explicating suburban pasts, the novel insists, is precisely a measure of their having become historical. The drive to present comforting, codified narratives of the suburbs is shown to be part of a move – which always fails – to disassociate the present from these sites of conflict and trauma.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 959 - 975
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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5 Much more productively, Michasiw discusses the ways the suburbs have been installed as gothic “stations,” which are offered to consumers as “places … to be scared of.” Kim Ian Michasiw, “Some Stations of the Suburban Gothic,” in Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, eds., American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 237–57, 239. These reassuring fears often displace other anxieties. The couching of suburbs as gothic environments by numerous elite critics, Michasiw argues, obscures the increasing difficulty the elite has in differentiating itself from the mass, which occurs in part because “in order to separate [the two] the critic must embrace and take as real the very set of signs that have raised the security fences [of gated communities]”. Ibid., 250.

6 Allan Lloyd Smith, “Introduction,” in Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (eds.), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 7.

7 Strictly speaking, the novel's narrative voice is not choric, but a singular voice speaking anonymously as or for a unified “we.” In order to draw attention to the narration's fabricated plurality, henceforth I will catachrestically refer to the narrative voice as that of “the narrators.”

8 Cited in Murphy, 10. An appreciation of the incongruousness of a gothic response to the American scene has of course much earlier antecedents in the likes of James Fennimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Paulding, who agreed that there seemed little scope for the production of gothic romance in a country with “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery” – not that this prevented them from resorting to the gothic. See Ringe, Donald, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Goddu, Teresa E., Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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12 Similar observations occur elsewhere in Eugenides's fiction. The similarly retrospective narrator of his second novel Middlesex, in which a good deal of the historical action also takes place in Grosse Pointe, suggests that his family's eponymous modernist house makes an incongruous home for three generations of Greek Americans. For instance, remembering his grandmother Desdemona, who like Mrs. Karafalis of The Virgin Suicides arrived in the US as a refugee in the early 1920s, the narrator remarks: “The boxlike room, stripped of all embellishment or parlor fussiness, a room that wished to be timeless or ahistorical, and there, in the middle of it, my deeply historical timeworn grandmother. Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering.” Eugenides, Middlesex, London: Bloomsbury, 2002, 273.

13 Eugenides, Jeffrey, The Virgin Suicides (London: Bloomsbury, 2002; first published 1993), 43Google Scholar. Subsequent page references in the text in parentheses.

14 On white flight in Detroit see Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 2nd rev. edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. In Middlesex, Eugenides depicts two generations of Greek Americans relocating further and further from the centre of Detroit, largely in response to the in-migration of the city's expanding black population.

15 In a productive eco-critical reading of The Virgin Suicides, Christian Long explains that the Dutch elm epidemic, which decimated half the nation's population of Ulmus america, was exacerbated by their being planted closely together in suburban neighbourhoods in order to create idyllic arboreal streetscapes. Long argues that the Lisbon girls may be understood as “nature painfully absenting itself from the suburbs, a ‘pristine’ nature the suburban form simultaneously idealizes and consumes.” Long, Christian, “Running out of Gas: The Energy Crisis in the 1970s Suburban Narratives,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 41, 3 (2011), 342–69, 360CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See, for instance, Hoskin, Bree, “Playground Love: Landscape and Longing in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides,” Literature Film Quarterly, 35, 3 (2007), 214–21Google Scholar; and Shostak.

17 More recent studies of third and later generations have modified this view: the emergence of “symbolic ethnicity” – an identity enacted periodically and by choice – is actually driven by the very same factors that were once held to weaken ethnic identification: social mobility and the relative social isolation experienced in the suburbs. See in particular Waters, Mary C., Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Alba, Richard D., Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale, 1990)Google Scholar.

18 Sugrue, 22.

19 James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ … and Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984.

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21 See, for instance, Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

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23 Though historians and writers of fiction alike disagree over whether or not the sacrifices involved in the rush to acquire a first home actually damaged the future prospects of immigrant families. See, for instance, Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Pietro di Donato's 1939 novel Christ in Concrete, concerning the plight of poor immigrant Italians, is decidedly less optimistic about the opportunities afforded by home ownership.

24 Roediger, 177.

25 See also Sugrue, 211–18.

26 See Higley, Stephen, Power, Privilege and Place: Geography of the American Upper Class (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)Google Scholar.

27 More broadly, descendants of immigrants were encouraged to invest in their whiteness, but not their ethnicity, through various New Deal housing initiatives from the mid-1930s onwards, such as redlining and steering. These practices deterred immigrants from developing their own urban neighbourhoods and encouraged them to move into areas, usually suburban, which were designated as raceless. See Roediger, 230–31.

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