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Therese Lisbon
Mr. Lisbon is Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese’s father. He’s a math teacher at the local high school and is a meek, reserved man. He and Mrs. Lisbon have strict rules about what their daughters are allowed to do, but Mr. Lisbon seems less adamant about upholding them. When the neighborhood boys interview Mr. Lisbon years after his daughters die by suicide, he and Mrs. Lisbon have gotten divorced. He implies to the boys that he only went along with his household’s strict rules because he didn’t want to undermine his wife. This might be true, since he’s the one who convinces Mrs. Lisbon to let Trip Fontaine take Lux to the homecoming dance (along with several other boys, who pair off with the other Lisbon sisters). But when a drunken Lux comes home late that night, both Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are enraged, and they institute even harsher rules, hardly allowing the sisters to leave the house. On the whole, Mr. Lisbon is emotionally distant, as evidenced by the fact that he avoids talking about his emotions in the aftermath of Cecilia’s suicide—whenever his neighbors visit him, he sits them in front of the television and distracts them with a baseball game so he doesn’t have to talk about the tragedy. He’s similarly avoidant in his private life, as he lets the house slip into disrepair and moves through life as if in a haze. He also resigns from his job as a teacher, though it’s clear that the school forces him out because parents don’t think he’s qualified to teach their children if he can’t even “run his own family.”
Mr. Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides
The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Mr. Lisbon or refer to Mr. Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard.
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Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of popcorn.
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Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
Chapter 4
Quotes
They maintained that a person who couldn’t run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon’s behavior hadn’t helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.
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Get the entire The Virgin Suicides LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mr. Lisbon Quotes in The Virgin Suicides
The The Virgin Suicides quotes below are all either spoken by Mr. Lisbon or refer to Mr. Lisbon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Peter Sissen acted as our leader, and even looked slightly bored, saying again and again, “Wait’ll you see this.” The door opened. Above us, the face of Mrs. Lisbon took form in the dimness. She told us to come in, we bumped against each other getting through the doorway, and as soon as we set foot on the hooked rug in the foyer we saw that Peter Sissen’s descriptions of the house had been all wrong. Instead of a heady atmosphere of feminine chaos, we found the house to be a tidy, dry-looking place that smelled faintly of popcorn.
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Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
Chapter 4
Quotes
They maintained that a person who couldn’t run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon’s behavior hadn’t helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.
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