The Spatial Rhetorics of the American Home as a Site of Imprisoned Teenage Femininity in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Set in an unnamed Michigan suburb in the 1970s, Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides, based on Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel of the same name, tells the story of the Lisbon family, particularly the demises of the five Lisbon daughters. Narrated through the retrospective lens of a collective ‘we,’ as constituted by the neighborhood boys, the viewer is introduced into this world, attempting to unravel the events that ultimately led to the suicides of Cecilia, Mary, Bonnie, Theresa, and Lux. The visions of a home in disarray and a ome in decline are most prominent in constituting the family home as a site of imprisoned teenage femininity under the oppressive rule of the Lisbon parents. The mother appears as the enforcer and the father as a passive accomplice. In the name of keeping the children safe, the parents seek to combat potential deviance by not granting their daughters any mobility outside of parental control. The film shows the detrimental outcome of containing teenage feminine fulfillment as, in the end, all five daughters end their lives. From a theoretical backdrop of predominantly Jessica Enoch’s proposition of the concept of spatial rhetorics, this article aims to uncover how the space of the family home is constituted as a site of oppression. I explore the multimodal ways in which spaces gain meaning by discussing who gets to occupy which space in the home, who is allowed in it, and who gets to control it.