Character Analysis
The Maiden Fair
At thirteen, Cecilia's the youngest Lisbon girl, and the first to go. She tries suicide twice—first by slitting her wrists and next, successfully, by jumping from her bedroom window. Her suicide sets the novel's chain of events in motion.
She's an odd, withdrawn girl with no real friends and strange interests. She wears a tattered, dirty vintage wedding dress chopped off at the knees. Lucy Brock, who went into Cecilia's bedroom after she jumped, told the boys that Cecilia kept incense, tarot cards and crystals in her room, along with a mobile of the Zodiac. She dyed all her underwear black, which was no surprise to the boys, who liked to look up Cecilia's dress as she was standing up on her bike.
The day before her first suicide attempt, one of the neighbors sees her standing outside her house looking at a car covered with the bugs that infest their neighborhood every June:
"You better get a broom, honey, "Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia fixed her with her spiritualist's gaze. "They're dead," she said. "They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don't even get to eat." And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L. (1.1.3)
That would have been serious foreshadowing if we didn't already know she tried to kill herself. It's almost like she's already a ghost—pale, skinny, floating around in her shabby dress staring into space.
Weird
The boys at one point understand her suicide as a result of her being a "misfit" (5.40). They knew her as the "weird sister" (2.14). Even her sisters acknowledge she was strange. Therese told the boys,
Cecilia was weird, but we're not. (3.189)
The narrators begin to learn more about Cecilia after her death, from her diary and from the descriptions of a girl who had spent time with her. She had "no real friends" (2.14). Cecilia started the diary about a year and a half before she died. The narrators pore over the diary for clues about why Cecilia killed herself, but they can't seem to find any. Most of the diary is descriptions of the sisters' daily lives—their crushes, their anger at Mrs. Lisbon, their favorite foods and colors, their need to feel grownup.
But later in the diary, the entries become more distant and impersonal:
As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera's pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie. (2.14)
Sounds like someone gradually detaching from life.
In the days before her death, no one really sees it coming. Not that her parents and sisters aren't always worried about her, but she's just so strange and withdrawn that it's hard to tell if anything's changed. At the psychiatrist's suggestion, the parents throw a party for her and invite her school friends. Cecilia seems happy about the party, according to Mr. Lisbon. Of course, Mr. Lisbon has been admittedly clueless about his daughters, and you have to wonder about the wisdom of throwing a party for an emotionally unstable girl just weeks after a suicide attempt. She had to wear bracelets taped to her wrists to hide the scars from the suicide attempt. That in itself seems to scream "not ready." Anyway, Cecilia spends much of the day in her room listening to weird music and staring at the Zodiac mobile. But hey, that was Cecilia.
She also spent a lot of time that day in the tub, which naturally freaked out her parents, who kept a close eye on her. But even Lux didn't suspect what would happen. She was pretty quiet and spacy at the party, but again—that was Cecilia. She asked to be excused from the party; the boys said this was the first time they heard her speak:
[…] we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything, she sounded old and tired. She kept pulling on the bracelets, until Mrs. Lisbon said, "If that's what you want Cecilia. But we've gone to all this trouble to have a party for you." (1.48)
Wow. We're sure that helped a lot.
Cecilia stares at her mother and pulls the bracelets off her wrists. Her mother gives her permission to go. She walks up the stairs to her bedroom, opens the window and jumps.
It isn't pretty. She's impaled on a spike of the iron fence in her yard. The boys hear a thud, and they're forever haunted by the sight of Mr. Lisbon desperately trying to lift the twitching body of his daughter off the fence, with her wedding dress fluttering in the breeze.
Why Die?
Figuring out why Cecilia kills herself becomes an obsession of the neighbors: "We didn't understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we understood even less when she did it twice" (2.1). There were lots of theories after her first attempt:
Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted to get out of that house," Mrs. Scheer added. (1.28)
The psychiatrist, Dr. Hornicker, in a classic psychological move, saw the attempt as a result of Cecilia's repressed sexual urges. The boys find out later that she'd just gotten her period before her death:
After talking with Cecilia, Dr. Hornicker made the diagnosis that her suicide was an act of aggression inspired by the repression of adolescent libidinal urges. […] "Despite the severity of her wounds," he wrote, "I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help." (1.35)
Others saw a different reason:
"It was like anything else in this sad society, " [Mr. Buell] told us. "They didn't have a relationship with God." (1.29)
(There was a religious angle in the first suicide attempt, as Cecilia was mysteriously holding that photo of the Virgin Mary while lying bleeding in the bathtub.)
Others in the neighborhoods think she slit her wrists to impress Dominic Palazzolo, a boy she had an obsessive crush on. Dominic had once jumped off his roof out of love for a girl who wasn't Cecilia, so people thought that Cecilia's jump was a kind of copycat move. But in her diary, which the boys got their hands on later, Cecilia had written that she thought Dominic's jump was pretty stupid. Unrequited love didn't seem to be the reason she killed herself, at least from what the boys could find in the diary.
Cecilia herself gives us a hint after her first attempt, though she doesn't get specific.
Dr. Aronson stitched up her wounds.[….] Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl." (1.7-1.8)
So adolescence was proving to be unbearable for Cecilia. It's not easy or anyone, but most girls survive it. What was it about Cecilia? Hormones? Neurotransmitters? Clueless parents? Fear of growing up? Confusion about sex and religion? The boys spend a lifetime wondering about it.
Timeline