‘Oddly Shaped Emptinesses’: Capital, the Eerie, and the Place(less)ness of Detroit in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides

ABSTRACT

Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi’s critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers’ attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order – the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge.

KEYWORDS:

• Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Virgin Suicides (1993)
• Detroit
• space and place
• the eerie
• neoliberalism
• Nancy Fraser
• borders
• Mark Fisher

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to audiences at the 2018 Western Humanities Alliance conference in Calgary, Alberta and the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College, where this paper gradually took shape. I am particularly thankful to Ato Quayson for initial encouragement and to my seminar group at the Futures Institute for thoughtful feedback. I would also like to recognize financial assistance provided by a faculty Extended Funding Grant from Red Deer College, without which my participation in these events--and this work--would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Indeed, the inability to tell locations apart may be part of the point – think of the running Simpsons gag that we have no idea in which state the city of Springfield is situated.

2. Politically and geographically, Grosse Pointe actually consists of five adjacent municipalities on the eastern edge of Detroit with a combined population of (at present) about 46,000 – Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Point, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores (formerly Grosse Pointe Township), and Grosse Pointe Woods; the designation ‘Grosse Pointe,’ however, is generally used to refer to the five municipalities collectively.

3. Fraser concedes, for instance, that President Donald Trump has pursued a policy of hyper-reactionary neoliberalism while in office (198). She argues, however, that whatever his betrayals, Trump ran as a populist rather than a neoliberal, and support for him emerges from the same anti-neoliberal impulse as has support for Bernie Sanders or (in the UK) Jeremy Corbyn. Fraser writes that ‘the fact that workers who vote for right-wing populists get betrayed by those whom they elect does not refute the idea that they are looking for social protection … . But, in voting for Trump, an important segment of working- and middle-class Americas wanted … the abrogation of “free-trade” agreements, and large-scale public infrastructure projects to create well-paid manufacturing and construction jobs’ (198).

4. There is a moment where the narrators observe their fathers working to dismantle a fence and reach for a particularly jarring analogue: ‘We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before,’ the we recounts, ‘they struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flags on Iwo Jima’ (53).

5. The reference to gold chains may also be racially coded; regardless, these scenes speak to another of the novel’s feints – the illusion the narrators persist in of Grosse Pointe as a middle-class suburb rather than a retreat for the extraordinarily wealthy; Grosse Pointe indeed includes Michigan’s wealthiest zip code, and passing references in the novel to yacht clubs, mansions, millionaires, and coming-out parties become revealing of attempts to flatten place.

6. For a related argument, addressing blackness as commodity in American culture, see Lott’s (2017) Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.

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Brian Jansen

Brian Jansen is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maine. He earned his PhD from the University of Calgary, where his SSHRC-funded dissertation explored issues of ethics and agency in popular American series fiction. His work on American literatures and cultures has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in the Canadian Review of American Studies, the Journal of Popular Culture, ESC: English Studies in Canada, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and the European Journal of American Studies.