“Our long national nightmare is over”: Moral Repair and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

Abstract

For the storytellers under review in this volume, negotiating the void often involves an attempt to effect a solution for the devastating changes that postmodernity has wrought, while continuing to evolve under conditions of fragmentation, alienation, and uncertainty. As human beings, we inevitably struggle amongst the historical and sociocultural factors that mark our existence, with hope—that peculiarly human sense of optimism—illuminating our way. Yet how can we enjoy hope’s comforting manna and appreciate our own selfhood, and the selfhood of others, while living under the disquieting shadow of our fractured historical pasts? How can we establish moral repair—indeed, how can we reclaim our collective particularity—when confronted with both the ethical failures of the institutions in which we place our trust and the vexing, bewildering nature of our contemporary present, with its moral ambiguity and its ethical fissures?

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.

President Gerald R. Ford’s remarks on taking the oath of office as President of the United States on August 9, 1974

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top—or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things. … Life is one crisis after another.

President Richard M. Nixon, marking the tenth anniversary of his resignation