It is the seventies and the Lisbon family boasts five daughters, ages 13 through 17, who are budding with sexuality while their strict Catholic parents do everything they can to keep the girls cloistered at home, pure, and, well, intact. In The Virgin Suicides, we know what’s at stake from the outset, the title doing so much of the work of preparing us for the story to come.
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993) The attention is placed on the person in the virgin body rather than he or she who means to conquer that body, and sexuality becomes the beginning rather than the end of the story. Such novels tackle the more complex question of what it means to surrender to a desire for the very first time. In fact, much of what is written about virgins is fueled by secretive, sweaty desire the best modern novels on the subject - like the ten I’ve selected below - tell a story that, as in The Virgins, transcends the easiest or least of what we know about virginity. Virginity is treated with far more grace and subtlety in Pamela Erens’s latest novel, The Virgins (Tin House Books), a beautifully written story about two outcasts who form an all-consuming bond at an exclusive boarding school, as told, in secretive, sweaty detail, by a rather odious classmate.
Or, put another way, you know virginity is a big deal when a vampire breaks a bed frame as he breaks his new wife’s hymen. Even vampires get in on the act with the Twilight trilogy, placing Bella’s virginity at the sacrosanct center of the narrative. We disseminated the idea throughout our cultures, religions, legal systems, bodies of art, and works of scientific knowledge.” Nowhere does this human notion flourish more than in literature.įrom the New Testament of the Bible to Jane Austen’s chaste women and the sultry sexuality of Nabokov’s Lolita, we have seen writers grapple with the subject of virginity as it pertains to being unbroken, unclaimed, and unexplored.
In Virgin: The Untouched History, Hanne Blank notes, “Virginity is as distinctively human a notion as philanthropy. Virginity is a prize, something to cherish, protect, and/or conquer. The virgin holds a mythical place in our culture.
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