The Virgin Suicides

by

Jeffrey Eugenides

Elm Trees and the Lisbon House Symbol Analysis

Elm Trees and the Lisbon House Symbol Icon

The Virgin Suicides tracks the deterioration of a suburban neighborhood’s elm trees as a way of symbolically illustrating an overall sense of decline. The elm trees in the boys’ neighborhood are large and impressive, but they become infected by beetles that slowly kill them. The only way to stop the spread of this beetle, the Parks Department insists, is by cutting down the infected trees—which, in turn, essentially means razing all of the trees in the neighborhood. This has a significant impact on the overall aesthetics of the neighborhood, and the residents develop a nostalgia for the time period in which there were still healthy trees lining the streets—a time period that also happens to coincide with when the Lisbon sisters were still alive. To that end, the boys associate the pre-infection elm trees with the glory days of their neighborhood, back when the Lisbon sisters were still alive and there was nothing all that serious to worry about. But as the trees slowly die and are cut down, this idyllic period comes to an end, ultimately symbolizing a broader shift taking place across the nation, as the idea of the perfect American Dream falters in the face of an economic recession, increasingly urgent calls for equality, and the general decline of American exceptionalism. In this way, the slow death of the elm trees symbolizes not just the deterioration of the Lisbon family but also the crumbling of an entire way of thinking, as the neighborhood boys slowly realize that the perfect world their parents raised them in won’t actually protect them from the harsh realities of everyday life.

Elm Trees and the Lisbon House Quotes in The Virgin Suicides

The The Virgin Suicides quotes below all refer to the symbol of Elm Trees and the Lisbon House. 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:
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement form which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 1
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.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Peter Sissen (speaker), Mr. Lisbon, Mrs. Lisbon, Dr. Hornicker
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees. Now, in autumn, only a few leaves make swan dives from the tops of remaining elms, and most leaves drop four feet from saplings held up by stakes, runt replacements the city has planted to console us with the vision of what our street will look like in a hundred years. No one is sure what kind of trees these new trees are. The man from the Parks Department said only that they had been selected for their “hardiness against the Dutch elm beetle.”

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mr. Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:

We still had winter in those days, vast snowdrifts, days of canceled school. At home on snowy mornings, listening to school closings on the radio […], we still knew the vivifying feeling of staying warm inside a shelter like pioneers. Nowadays, because of shifting winds from the factories and the rising temperature of the earth, snow never comes in an onslaught anymore but by a slow accretion in the night, momentary suds. The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 196-197
Explanation and Analysis:

In single file, like paratroopers, we dropped from the tree. It was an easy jump, and only on impact did we realize how close the ground was: no more than ten feet down. Jumping from the grass, we could nearly touch the tree-house floor. Our new height astounded us, and later many said this contributed to our resolve, because for the first time ever we felt like men.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry.

[…]

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 238-239
Explanation and Analysis:
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Elm Trees and the Lisbon House Symbol Timeline in The Virgin Suicides

The timeline below shows where the symbol Elm Trees and the Lisbon House appears in The Virgin Suicides. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...men from the local Parks Department work nearby on one of the neighborhood’s dying elm trees, spraying insecticide on the infected limbs. A picture of this elm tree is visible in... (full context)
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...house, making it easier for him to escape the police at a moment’s notice. The tree in the Baldino family’s front yard was cut down and replaced with a cement stump... (full context)
Chapter 4
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...alongside the Lisbon sisters. Later, in the spring, the local Parks Department goes around identifying trees that will have to be cut down to prevent the spread of the Dutch elm... (full context)
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...Mr. nor Mrs. Lisbon is willing to tell the girls to step away from the tree. Mr. Lisbon tells the workers that he’s a proponent of an alternative “therapy” for the... (full context)
Chapter 5
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...drastically changes its appearance. The Parks Department also returns and finally cuts down Cecilia’s elm tree, along with all of the other elm trees in the neighborhood. Without the trees, the... (full context)
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...the neighborhood—and, for that matter, the country—worth living in. There are no more beautiful elm trees, the booming automobile industry is waning, and even snowstorms fail to live up to their... (full context)
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
...97 “artifacts” they collected to commemorate the sisters. The items are gathered in the old treehouse, which still stands in one of the only surviving trees in the neighborhood. But even... (full context)