Please accept our sincere-ish apologies for our absence. We moved, Kansas started her new internship, and some other things also probably happened. We’ve been very busy. But we both have posts going up this week, and we also filmed a video with our friend Alex last night in which he asks us questions about books. We’ll link to that as soon as it’s up. Now, to business.
Let’s talk about the subject that’s been on everyone’s mind: the decimation of America’s libraries by budget cuts, misguided efforts to keep up with rapidly advancing technology, and this guy sitting across from me who has been smacking his gum the whole time. Ugh. But seriously, let’s talk about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs.
I was, at some point in the last few years, introduced to the idea of the panopticon, which is a structure in which people are constantly watched. Or, rather, the idea is that if people are constantly aware that they could be under watch, they will behave as though they definitely are. Prisons are often constructed around this concept, which helps lighten the load of the security staff by creating the impression that a watching eye is omnipresent, regardless of whether it actually is. I was introduced to this idea by Frankie Landau-Banks, whose tale, should I ever write a post on “The Best Books to Give a Teenage Girl to Turn Her into a Feminist,” will be #1 on the list.
Miley Cyrus was raised in the panopticon. We all are, to some degree, but being the daughter of a celebrity and starring in such a money-making franchise since before puberty puts Miley in a special class she shares only with royalty (hello, Prince Baby George!) and fellow child stars. I cannot imagine the toll this takes on a child’s psyche, and so I won’t pretend to understand it (please read this if you want to hear the perspective of someone who does). I will say that it’s an incredibly unhealthy way to grow up, and that the need for privacy and independence is not an indication that something shameful must be happening when doors are closed, as so many seem to assume by burdening our young starlets with the responsibility to lead our children well. In fact, I find it so much more frightening to see celebrities who want every detail of their lives broadcast on TMZ.
I’ve spent the last couple of days rereading The Virgin Suicides, because, hey, have we mentioned we love Jeffrey Eugenides? Yes. We have.
What makes TVS so interesting right off the bat is that it’s told in first person plural. A group of neighborhood boys tell the story, collectively, of five sisters they knew growing up, all of whom committed suicide. Immediately, Eugenides creates the story with a narrator who is literally the male gaze personified, describing the sort of intense observation the boys direct toward the Lisbon sisters. It’s interesting for about a thousand reasons, not least of which is that the story is about two groups of young people, both of which are a hive more than individual people. In this reading, I took the time to see if Eugenides makes any effort to distinguish any of the boys telling the story from the others, and I think it’s safe to say he does not. In fact, he gives them equal page-time, as far as I can tell, and it’s never clear which of the myriad of young men mentioned are the ones telling the story as adults. I topped out my list at 56 names. Such a crowd couldn’t possibly all be developed characters, which is, of course, not their purpose. They are the panopticon to these girls.
In return, the sisters themselves are likewise interchangeable to the boys, which is shown at several points throughout the book. One young man asks Lux, the second-youngest, to a school dance, and her father agrees to let her go on the condition that he bring along other boys to accompany Lux’s sisters. They fight among themselves over who will get to go, never once thinking of who will go with which sister, because it makes no difference in the boys’ minds. They are the Lisbon girls, differentiation be damned.
The boys place their expectations, assumptions and dreams onto the sisters, who are no more real to them than television characters, except in their geographical nearness. After the events of the dance, the girls are restricted to their house by their mother, and the boys never get another chance to know them more thoroughly. They are banned from school, church, and all social activity-- for their own protection, in the eyes of their mother, after the first suicide.
One article I read posited the idea that, since the basic outline of the story is all that’s known for sure (five sisters killed themselves using methods x, y and z during these men’s adolescence, for reasons largely unknown), and the rest is mostly conjecture, the girls themselves are presented as virgins sacrificed to the narrative of the men telling the story. These were incredibly formative events in their lives, signifying the surreality of youth and the innocence they all felt themselves losing. But as long as they tell this story as their own, they continually reject more qualified opinions in favor of the narrative they prefer: that these five young women needed saving, that they killed themselves to put their watchers in the same kind of prison they were escaping, and that they died preserving their perfection. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the men telling this story firmly believe that the girls and their actions belong to them and them alone. The Lisbon sisters are exclusively objects, with no agency of their own, only allowed to be what the boys want them to be.
Which brings me back to Miley.
The danger of imposing our own narrative on real people is that they are only ever given the chance to fail us. The Lisbon girls killed themselves, and it cemented the idealized version of them the young men insisted on having. We’re left without ever really knowing what they were thinking or feeling, because no one was interested in finding that out. And when we look at Miley Cyrus, or Mary-Kate Olsen, or Amanda Bynes, and we’re only interested in reinforcing our beliefs that “she’s a slut,” or “she’s crazy,” or whatever, we take away any chance of knowing what their story actually is-- what message they might be trying to communicate, or what new thing they might be trying to do, or that they might actually need help that doesn’t come in the form of tweets. We sacrifice them as real people in order to preserve the narrative we hold so dearly.
"But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind...They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us... It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling..."
-Lemon
