The Baroque Rhetoric of Vision and the Wunderkammer: A Neobaroque Allegory of Reading in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides

Is it possible for a dead woman to retain her subjectivity within a story narrated by a man who mourns her? Or is she doomed to become nourishment for a literary display of male ego? As argued by Juliana Schiesari in The Gendering of Melancholia, the canon of melancholy is populated by men of letters whose elevation depends on devaluing female experience of loss. This paper applies the neobaroque framework to the analysis of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and reads the novel as an allegorical investigation of the relation between male melancholy and femininity. The article argues that the novel, while remaining rooted in the canon of Western melancholy, reveals the contradiction within the melancholy discourse. On the one hand, the narrator seems devoted to uncovering the reason behind the Lisbon girls' suicides; on the other, his investigation is conditioned upon the impossibility of closure. In his obsessive accumulation of signs that promise to solve the mystery, the narrator allows for the only relevant testimony to remain unexamined, hidden in plain sight within the narrator's narrative excess. Cecilia's unedited confession provides a glimpse of the female self which must remain an enigma that propels the narrator's overproduction of meaning.