Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Joyce Carolyn Oates’s Expensive Peo

Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Joyce Carolyn Oates’s Expensive People Suburban life is commonly portrayed as a narrative of the upper-middle class. Clean, sterile and reserved, suburbia is a tangible representation of the universally misconstrued â€Å"American dream.† However, culture fails to recognize the dark underbelly of this uplifting dream: a world of masked depression, ingrained superiority and stark ignorance. Jeffery Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Joyce Carolyn Oates’s Expensive People both narrate the darker side of the American dream. This hidden societal decomposition is portrayed in a light filled with brilliant reality; a reality that true American life fails to acknowledge. Both The Virgin Suicides and Expensive People were written about a time wrought with cultural tension. Although none of this is directly mentioned it seems highly unrealistic that any part of these happenings failed to seep into suburban communities and infect them with some sense of a crumbling reality. Outside influences, whether they were consciously recognized or not, drifted silently into suburban America and cast a suffocating spell on these structured communities. National crisis and society as a whole became the catalyst for suburban decomposition, simply because all those living in such communities chose to ignore reality and feign an untouched existence. In The Virgin Suicides the five Lisbon girls are placed in â€Å"a comfortable suburban home† (Eugenides 5). However, this placid existence is disrupted by the suicide attempt of the youngest daughter Cecilia. The naivetà © of the community is shown extremely early in this novel , citing the newspaper’s failed obligation to report the drama: â€Å"Our local newspap... ...al institutions. Suburban life has always been seen as untouchable, a form of utopic existence. Both Eugenides as well as Oates did an excellent job in distilling this myth and portraying the American dream-esque neighborhood as more of an American fiction. The Lisbon suicides, dictated by monotonous routine and dreary life style, became a representation of the disease that was infecting the country: conformity. Richard’s murder of his mother became the crack in the community’s pristine outer shell of existence; his refusal to become submissive to suburbia came when he sent the last bullet into his mother. Both novels capture negative suburban influence and, in reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s theory of the â€Å"death of the American dream,† in direct correlation with both novels, suburban life has become â€Å"a monster reincarnation of Horatio Algers American dream.†