History Literature / TheVirginSuicides

* VirginPower: The possible reason why the girls are so fascinating. Well, except that one...

* TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth: [[spoiler:The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their DyingTown and choose the ultimate escape from it]].

* SuicideByPills: [[spoiler: Mary overdoses on sleeping pills later on in the story after her first attempt to kill herself [[BungledSuicide failed]].]]

* ShamelessFanserviceGirl: Lux Lisbon.

* RightThroughHisPants : And, apparently, Lux's tights, on the football field.

* PrefersGoingBarefoot: Lux is almost perpetually barefoot. She later abuses this fact to play FootsieUnderTheTable, and to [[spoiler:try to tantalize Trip, whose eyes remain glued to her foot]].
* PregnancyScare: [[spoiler: Lux has one following her string of rooftop one-night stands. She isn't pregnant, but the actual outcome isn't any better, as the scare exposes her dalliances to her mother and causes her to clamp down even harder]].

* OddNameOut: Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Cecilia, and ''Lux''. Of course she gets greater focus than her sisters, and becomes a main character in the FilmOfTheBook.

* MeaningfulName: Both Cecilia and Lux's. Cecilia is the first one to go, Lux is the last one. Keeping in mind that Cecilia means "the blind one" and Lux means "light"... one reading could be, "the blind one" is the first one to go; "light", the last one.

* MakingLoveInAllTheWrongPlaces: [[spoiler: Lux Lisbon]] has a succession of encounters on the roof of her house.

* TheHeroDies: [[spoiler:By the end of the film, all of the Lisbon sisters have killed themselves.]]

* HairOfGoldHeartOfGold: All five of the Lisbon girls

* GoodBadGirl: Lux loves cigarettes and sex, but is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. Another one of her passions? Knitting.

* GirlNextDoor: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.

* TheGenericGuy: Mary is easily the least developed Lisbon and is defined mostly by her relation to the others. In the film, her SpearCounterpart is David.

* DownerEnding: The girls do commit suicide, and their parents don't seem to understand they were partly responsible. All the surviving boys can do is examine the tragedy with hindsight.

* ChildhoodMemoryDemolitionTeam: The trees in the neighborhood are being cut down because of a spreading disease. The Lisbon girls try to prevent the tree in their front yard from being cut down because of how much it meant to Cecilia. Possibly subverted that Mr. Lisbon never recalls Cecilia exactly being interested in the tree and some speculate that the girls had a publicity motive for protecting it.

* CheatedDeathDiedAnyway: Book-only. In the book, [[spoiler: Mary's initial attempt [[BungledSuicide fails]] and she lingers for a month after the rest of her sisters before finally overdosing on sleeping pills]]. The movie makes no mention of this plot point and goes straight to [[spoiler: the Lisbon parents leaving the neighborhood]], leaving us to assume that [[spoiler: Mary died with the others]].

* BungledSuicide:
** [[spoiler: Mary's first suicide also fails. She lives for a while before she successfully dies by sleeping pills]].

* AwLookTheyReallyDoLoveEachOther: When the girls run out to protect their tree from being cut down, the boys note that this was one of the few times they seen Mr. Lisbon hold Mrs. Lisbon in affection. Likewise, Mrs. Lisbon tells the yard workers that her girls have a right to stand there.

* AllGirlsWantBadBoys: Trip Fontaine, designated pot-smoking MrFanservice.
* BrokenBird: Lux.

* AdaptationDistillation: Despite setting Lux as the main character, Sofia Coppola's 1999 version is very loyal to the novel.

* FiveFiveFive: The number on the card held by Cecilia during her attempted BathSuicide is "555-MARY."

* AbusiveParents:
** Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
** Mrs. Lisbon does turn genuinely abusive after Lux and Trip have sex in the football field, hitting Lux, pulling the girls out of school, and forcing them to burn their non-Christian music. [[spoiler: She proceeds to go [[VillainousBreakdown completely ballistic]] after Lux's PregnancyScare, turning her house into a virtual prison]].

* VirginInAWhiteDress: Cecilia constantly wears a wedding gown despite all attempts to make her take it off, eventually [[spoiler:dying in it]].

* ShoddyShindig: The Lisbon family throws a chaperoned party for Cecilia in the hopes of cheering her up after her suicide attempt. They don't really have much experience with throwing parties, and thus it's a dreary affair and Cecilia ends up leaving and hurling herself out of her bedroom window.
* SlutShaming: There are vague but definitely existent hints that Cecilia's suicide was motivated at least in part by going through puberty and feeling ashamed of becoming a sexual being. It's not clear if anyone was shaming her directly, but given her strongly religious household it was likely she was, at the very least, shamed by her environment.

* StartsWithASuicide: Opens with Cecilia's first suicide attempt. Her second, successful one is what really sets the story in motion.

* HereditarySuicide: A couple of months after Cecilia's suicide, all four of the other Lisbon girls, her sisters, die by suicide (in the film, Mary dies in the mass suicide, whereas in the book, she actually survives that attempt only to overdose on pills and die later.)

* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Cecilia. She does it herself.

* CreepyChild: Subverted with Cecilia. She's not creepy, just misunderstood.

* DrivenToSuicide: The motives of the girls are never truly disclosed. Only with Cecilia do we get anything close to insight.
-->'''Doctor''': What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.\\
'''Cecilia''': Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.

* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}: Cecilia is a spacey introvert who empathizes more with animals and nature than people.