It is the trauma of watching their father murdered by their mother that draws twins “Jackie-O” and Marty Pascal together in an intimate and incestuous way in the film The House of Yes. Similarly, it is the suicide of their youngest sister, Cecilia, which draws the Lisbon girls together in the novel (and film) The Virgin Suicides. This boy-girl twin incest is no doubt shocking to audiences watching the film or the play for the first time, just as shocking as the brutal suicide of a thirteen-year-old girl. It is this shock factor that is the ultimate purpose of the utilization of trauma within The House of Yes and The Virgin Suicides. The entire Pascal family is traumatized by the murder of Mr. Pascal, which happened to take place on the same day as a national trauma—the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The entire Lisbon family is traumatized by the unexpected suicide of the youngest, Cecilia. The ideal family—mother, father, children—and therefore the dominant fiction is destroyed with the murder of Mr. Pascal and the suicide of Cecilia. “Jackie-O,” being mentally unstable in her inability to repress her father’s murder, becomes the center of the family as the Pascals try to restore their familial structure. The center of the Lisbon family structure, Mrs. Lisbon, experiencing an unexpected wound to the structure becomes unstable and the attempt to restore the family structure proves extremely unsuccessful. Though trauma plays a significant role in both The House of Yes and The Virgin Suicides, the stories’ main theme is family dynamics: in The House of Yes the loss of the father, the central familial figure, equated with the loss of John F. Kennedy, fragments the ideal family structure (the dominant fiction) and it is up to the rest of the Pascal family to tie those fragments together; in The Virgin Suicides it is the loss of Cecilia that causes the center, Mrs. Lisbon, to become unstable and breaks the family structure (though with the time the Lisbons spend inside their home it would seem that the structure would mend strongly). The family remains fragmented and is ultimately led to complete destruction.
     The House of Yes begins in the present time, but it is not too outlandish to conjecture that the Pascals were the ideal family—extravagant house, mom, dad, and three lovely children. Similarly in The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbons are seen as an ideal family—nice house in the suburbs, a station wagon, and five beautiful daughters. This stable and ideal familial structure establishes what Kaja Silverman refers to as the “dominant fiction”—fiction that reinforces societal ideals. Silverman argues in her article “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity,”
     “Dominant fiction” is opposed here neither to an ultimately recoverable reality, nor to the condition of “true”

     consciousness. “Fiction” underscores the imaginary rather than the delusory nature of ideology, while “dominant”

     isolates from the whole repertoire of a culture’s images, sounds, and narrative elaborations those through which

     the conventional subject is psychically aligned with the symbolic order…The dominant fiction neutralizes the

     contradictions which organize the social formation by fostering collective identifications and desires, identifications

     and desires which have a range of effects, but which are first and foremost constitutive of sexual difference.

     Social formations also rely for their continued survival upon the dominant fiction; both the symbolic order and the

     mode of production are able to protect themselves from interruption and potential change only so long as that

     ideological system commands collective belief—so long, that is, as it succeeds in defining the psychic reality of the

     prototypical subject. (54-55)
The social formation addressed in The House of Yes and The Virgin Suicides is that of the immediate family. Thus, according to Silverman’s argument, the ideal family formation relies on the dominant fiction, the collective belief in the “ideological system.” The “collective identifications” within the familial social formation are that of mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, wife, and husband. What lies at the center of the family structure, ideally, is the father/husband. The father commands respect, and provides law and order in the household. In The Virgin Suicides, it is the mother, Mrs. Lisbon, who takes on this role. Jacques Derrida asserts, “[t]hus is has always been though that the center…constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure” (878). Therefore, the father (or mother) as the center of the familial structure gives said structure order and meaning. When Mr. Pascal is murdered, the center is destroyed and consequently the family structure collapses. When Cecilia commits suicide, the center is also destroyed, albeit figuratively. Simultaneously, the dominant fiction also collapses and the family structure is left in a fragmented chaos. Thus, the Pascals and the Lisbons must restore order within the structure in order to restore the dominant fiction by maintaining a stable family life.
     The Pascal family trauma in The House of Yes is paralleled with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, being that it occurred on the same day. The established dominant fiction was that of the President being a paternal figure to the country. This national trauma disrupted that dominant fiction. John F. Kennedy was the center of the country’s structure, and with his unexpected and violent death, that structure was immediately thrown into a panic. Through Marty and “Jackie-O’s” ritualistic reenactment of the JFK assassination, they are attempting to reestablish the dominant fiction and stable familial structure by distancing themselves from their own personal family trauma; they reenact a national trauma that everyone can relate to instead of a trauma unique to themselves. In addition to the ritual itself, the repetition of said ritual is also an attempt to restore a stable familial structure because it is a way of dealing with the trauma through mastery. According to Freud, the Pascal twins are “obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of…remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19). Though it appears that Marty has successfully repressed the traumatic event of his father’s murder and Jackie has not, they both repeat this unique ritual and find comfort in it.
     The fragmentation of the Pascal family via Mr. Pascal’s murder causes each member of the family to take on new roles to cope. “Jackie-O,” the only member of the family that is unable to repress her father’s murder, becomes the new center of the family structure. Being that she is mentally unstable, and because she is the new center, the family structure is also unstable. Mrs. Pascal becomes a cold and controlling mother; Anthony drops out of college and appears to be a pathological liar; Marty leaves to try and establish a normal life for himself. Anxiously awaiting Marty’s return, “Jackie-O” is hopeful that everything will return to the way it was, but much to her surprise and displeasure, someone outside the family gets in the way of her hopes—Lesly, Marty’s fiancée. “Jackie-O” wants Marty to be hers again, and being that she is now the center of the family structure, Mrs. Pascal and Anthony assist “Jackie-O” in achieving this goal with the hopes that perhaps it will restore the stability of the family structure.
     Anthony’s role in assisting “Jackie-O”—and thus restoring the familial structure—is that of the innocent and sensitive brother who sympathizes with Lesly in her shock on discovering Marty and “Jackie-O’s” incestuous relationship in action. Anthony persuades Lesly to view him as a source of comfort and empathy—he is just as shocked to find out about Marty and “Jackie-O” as she is. Empathy turns into sex, as Anthony claims to have fallen in love with Lesly. Once the deed is done, Lesly must break gently to Anthony that she cannot love him, and to her surprise he is unusually calm, for he then breaks to her, as he nonchalantly smokes a cigarette, that he just wanted to get laid. Hence, Anthony fulfills his role to destroy Marty and Lesly’s relationship in order to restore the Pascal family structure.
     Mrs. Pascal’s role is not so deceitful and indirect: she tells Lesly plainly that if she does not utilize the train ticket provided for her and leave the Pascal estate, Marty will immediately be informed of Lesly’s infidelity with Anthony. Mrs. Pascal and Anthony have formed a sort of team in ridding their family of Lesly; they have taken on these roles to keep the center of their family structure, “Jackie-O,” stable and therefore to restore stability to the entire structure.
     The restoration of the family structure is accomplished if only for a brief moment. Once Marty is brought back to his senses by Lesly, he remembers his quest for normalcy and his need to escape his family. Unfortunately for Marty, Jackie “insists that the house that they live in [is] the place where the threat of nonconformity is death” (Williford 75). Because Marty resists conforming to his family structure, Jackie insists that he must die. For Jackie, killing Marty is restoring the family structure. For in life, Marty resisted his family and did not want to be a part of it; his absence affected the family structure. However, in Marty’s death, he is kept close to the house and to his family and thus, in Jackie’s eyes, the family structure is stable again. Because Jackie is the unstable center of the family structure, this “re-stabilizing” of the family structure is in actuality far from stable, and the dominant fiction is left in pieces.
     The dominant fiction is also fragmented in The Virgin Suicides. Mrs. Lisbon is the center of the Lisbon family because it is she who keeps law and order in the household. Even Mr. Lisbon treats her as an authoritative figure. For example, when Trip Fontaine speaks to Mr. Lisbon about asking Lux to the Homecoming dance, Mr. Lisbon “told Trip to sit down, and for the next few minutes he explained that he and his wife had certain rules, they had been the same rules for the older girls and he couldn’t very well change them now for the younger ones, even if he wanted to his wife wouldn’t let him” (113). Though Mr. Lisbon appears to be an enforcer of the “rules” in regard to his daughters, he explicitly states that “even if he wanted to his wife wouldn’t let him” because she is the center of the family structure and maintains the authority within the Lisbon household. Ultimately, it was up to Mrs. Lisbon to allow the girls to go to the dance, and they were only allowed to attend if they followed Mrs. Lisbon’s rules. The girls were even forced to wear conservative dresses homemade by Mrs. Lisbon:
     The week before Homecoming, in fact, she had taken the girls to a fabric store. The girls wandered amid the racks

     of patterns, each containing the tissue paper outline of a dream dress, but in the end it made no difference which

     pattern they chose. Mrs. Lisbon added an inch to the bust lines and two inches to the waists and hems, and the

     dresses came out as four identical shapeless sacks. (118)
The girls are completely powerless against Mrs. Lisbon, even when it comes to their own clothing.
     Another example of Mrs. Lisbon’s centrality via her authority is when Trip comes over to the Lisbon house to see Lux and “Trip didn’t get to sit next to Lux, nor speak to her, nor even look at her…At ten o’clock, taking a cue from his wife, Mr. Lisbon slapped Trip on the back and said, ‘Well, son, we usually hit the hay about now.’ Trip shook his hand, then Mrs. Lisbon’s colder one, and Lux stepped forward to escort him out” (85). Mrs. Lisbon asserted her authority by sitting between Lux and Trip, and it was her cue that influenced Mr. Lisbon to imply that it was time for Trip to leave. Also, it was Mrs. Lisbon’s decision to pull the girls out of school after Lux failed to be home by curfew after the Homecoming dance. Evidentially, Mrs. Lisbon is the center of the Lisbon family structure and sees to its strength and maintenance.
     Prior to Cecilia’s suicide attempt and then suicide, the Lisbon family appeared rather stable. There were five beautiful daughters admired by many, and they all went to church on Sundays. This stability in the Lisbon family structure was due in great part to the stable center of Mrs. Lisbon. Cecilia’s suicide attempt definitely shook up the stable Mrs. Lisbon, but a near loss is far easier to cope with than an actual loss. Thus, Cecilia’s successful suicide attempt caused quite a chink in the family structure. As the center, Mrs. Lisbon desperately tries to reassemble and tighten the family structure, but due to her new instability, she ironically produces the opposite results. After Cecilia’s suicide, Mrs. Lisbon became even stricter than she was previously because she cannot bear losing another daughter. Because the Lisbon girls spend nearly all of their time either in school or at home, they are not given an outlet to express their grief. They are under constant parental observation with their dad as a teacher at their school and their overbearing mother at home. Thus, instead of feeling free and able to express their grief in whatever way they choose, they must constantly be conscious of their parents’ presence and adjust their words and actions accordingly. In this way, grief and stress accumulated within each of the Lisbon girls; although explicitly it may have seemed as though the family structure was tightened by a tragedy, implicitly the girls were aching to be rescued, or so it seemed to the neighborhood-boy narrators. In attempting to find an explanation for the simultaneous suicides,
     [T]he narrators do consider consenting to…modern understandings: “For a while we tried to accept the general

     explanations, which qualified the Lisbon girls’ pain as merely historic, springing from the same source as other

     teenage suicides, every death part of a trend” (238). Yet they find that these ready-made interpretations merely

     heighten the stark resistance of the event to diagnostic comprehension… (Kelly 324)
Doctors and various neighborhood adults explain in their own way why the Lisbon girls committed suicide, but these explanations are merely arbitrary. The Lisbon girls were trapped in a rigid family structure without any kind of escape, which Mrs. Lisbon viewed as the only way to bring stability back to the Lisbon family after Cecilia’s death. However, this rigidness fails to bring stability and in fact produces the opposite, primarily in Lux. The narrators observe,
     Then, about the time the first cold spell hit, people began to see Lux copulating on the roof with faceless boys and

     men…

     A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow.

     Then another darker body could be discerned, sometimes in a fast-food uniform, sometimes wearing an

     assortment of gold chains, once in the drab gray suit of an accountant…We never knew how Lux met them. From

     what we could tell, she didn’t leave the house. She didn’t even leave at night, sneaking out to do it in a vacant lot or

     down by the lake, but preferred to do make love on the premises of her own confinement. (145-46)
Lux feels so imprisoned, so repressed, unable to express herself to her parents or anyone really—save the school counselor who turned out to be a phoney—that she resorts to acting out by having sex with complete strangers on the roof of her own house. This rooftop copulation certainly does not represent stable behavior. Thus, Lux represents another chink in the Lisbon family structure, which fragments the dominant fiction. In the ideal family, daughters do not practice risqué behavior such as Lux’s; hence, the dominant fiction is further damaged.
     Another aspect of the dominant fiction fragmented within The Virgin Suicides in regard to idealistic familial structure is that of the parents. Ideally, parents are supposed to be strong and keep a family together, even in times of tragedy. However, after Cecilia’s suicide, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon grow more and more unstable with the passing of time, exemplified by their odd and antisocial behavior. When calling the Lisbon residence, the narrators recall,
     The phone tolled eleven times before Mr. Lisbon answered. “What’s it going to be today?” he said right away in a

     tired voice. His speech was slurred…”I’m waiting. Today I’ll listen to all your crap.”…“Look, give us a break, will you?”

     Mr. Lisbon muttered. There was a pause. Assorted breathing, mechanically reformulated, met in electronic space.

     Then Mr. Lisbon spoke in a voice unlike his own, a high screech. . . Mrs. Lisbon had grabbed the receiver. “Why

     won’t you leave us alone!” she shouted, and slammed down the phone. (193-94)
Mr. Lisbon’s apathetic nature evidently makes it appear that he has given up on life. Choosing to stop living, being “dead” even in life, is not representative of stability. Neither is extreme overreacting accompanied by screaming. Clearly, the Lisbon parents have “fallen off” the dominant fiction “wagon” of being strong and keeping their family together.
     Finally, the grandest, most obvious event in the novel that contributes to the destruction of the Lisbon family structure and thus the dominant fiction of familial ideals is the simultaneous suicide of Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese. The Lisbon family was thrown into a downward spiral as a result of Cecilia’s suicide and the Lisbon girls had finally hit rock bottom. Instead of planning a literal escape like the narrators had thought they were planning, the Lisbon girls planned a group suicide. This morbid plan devised by the Lisbon girls completely obliterates the dominant fiction. Families are supposed to pull together to cope with tragedy; instead, the girls gave up on trying to live, much like their parents, even though they all had so much of life ahead of them. Unfortunately for Mary Lisbon, she survived the group effort, if only for a month beyond the original event. The Lisbon family, initially consisting of two active parents and five beautiful daughters, was reduced to two unstable parents and one barely-alive daughter. Mary “slept late, spoke little, and took six showers a day” (233). In one instance, Mrs. Lisbon picked a flower in her neighbor’s yard and “held it to her nose, seemed dissatisfied with its fragrance, tucked it into her pocket like a used Kleenex, and walked to the street, squinting at the neighborhood without her glasses” (233). Mr. Lisbon, “every afternoon, parked the station wagon in the shade, opening the hood to pore over the engine” (233). The remaining members of the Lisbon family can hardly be qualified as a family any longer. Hence, the dominant fiction regarding family ideals has been destroyed and all hope lost.
     Both The House of Yes and The Virgin Suicides present families that are drastically affected by a traumatic event. Mr. Pascal as the center of the Pascal family was eliminated, and thus the Pascal family structure became unstable. With Jackie as the new, mentally unstable center of the Pascal family, the chances of returning to a stable family structure were slim. Mrs. Lisbon as the center of the Lisbon family became unstable after the suicide of Cecilia and thus the family structure also became unstable. Obviously, the death of a family member, especially one as brutal as Cecilia’s, would have a traumatic effect on the other family members regardless of the family’s center; however, Mrs. Lisbon’s overwhelmingly strict way of dealing with this tragedy did more harm than good in repairing the Lisbon family structure. Both families struggled in their attempt to return to a stable family structure, and by doing so further damaged the structure. The idealistic family provided by the dominant fiction ceased to exist in both stories, and neither story offered a restoration of the dominant fiction. Thus, at the conclusion of both stories, the family structure has collapsed and the dominant fiction is left in pieces.

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Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences.” The Critical Tradition: Classical Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 878-89. Print.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. New York: Warner, 1993. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. Print.

Kelly, Adam. “Moments of Decision in Contemporary American Fiction: Roth, Auster, Eugenides.” Critique 51.4 (2010): 313-32. Web. Academic Search Premier. 14 Dec. 2010.

Silverman, Kaja. “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity.” Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. 52-124. Print.

The House of Yes. Dir. Mark Waters. Perf. Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze, Jr. Miramax, 1997. DVD.
Williford, Daniel. Rev. of The House of Yes, by Mark Waters. Film & History May 2004: 74-5. Academic Search Premier. Web. 8 Dec. 2010.