“Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it… That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really.” (Stoppard 54-55.) This description of life (or death) in a box from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead describes the situation Susie Salmon finds herself in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones- struck dead and stuck in a personal heaven that feels more like a hellish box akin to Rosencrantz’s description, and denied her wish to grow as an individual and come to grips with her state of existence and being; that same idea of the isolating box proves to ensnare, if not so literally, her friends and family as well, and it is only through sexual experiences and discovery of themselves and their existence that Susie and the rest are able to break out of the box and their No Exit-like world to find an entrance into the realms of personal acceptance and understanding.
Susie is murdered at the outset of the story by a Mr. Harvey, who himself had a scarred childhood and harbors Oedipally-driven desires of sexual destruction. Just fourteen at the time she is murdered and pondering feelings about the prospects of high school and the possibility of a sexual prospect in her friend Ray, Susie finds herself in a heaven that is unique and painstakingly so- her heaven is not the Judeo-Christian concept of it, and she frequently “her” heaven, and, for the most part, hers alone. The reactions of the town, her families, her friends, and her murderer all progress with time. All this is seen by Susie, who herself is trying to move on- but she finds that she is unable to, that she wants to live and grow as she had intended, and she “lives” vicariously through the advances in life of those she knows, watching her sister Lindsey graduating and falling in love, rooting for her father as he pursues her killer, all the while remaining stunted in her growth, unfulfilled and unhappy. By the end of the story she finally is able to, through strength of will and the advancement of the mind, achieve her goal of sexual advancement and growth as she is able to share the sensation of her friend Ray kissing a girl named Ruth, and as a result of this advancement and growth, finds herself in a new heaven, open and filled with possibility.
Susie’s life after death is adamantly described as unique and as sterile, and it is because of these factors that Suzie feels isolated and longs for her livelihood, for the ability to grow and change; fourteen years old when she died, she was just about to begin to experience her transition into womanhood, and now finds herself in a place where she can never do so. Susie’s heaven is an existential land in the most basic way- it is where she works to define and shape her existence as she is now and her memory of how she was then, before her death. Yet for all of her musing, Susie’s thoughts amount, in the end, to very little- as, without the experience of sexual advancement she is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle and cannot define herself or come to grips with the nature of her being. Nothing Susie says, does, or even feels matters or carries significance, as it is all post-mortem, and all taking place, essentially, in a box. That, in a nutshell, defines Susie and her heaven, a person stuck in a box, like Didi and Gogo as they haplessly awaiting Godot, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern flipping coins and passing the time through a game of “Questions.” Any attempt Susie may make to further herself whilst here is futile, for her heaven is but a box; only beyond it lie the answers she needs, and the only way to break through the wall and leave her box is through an understanding and acceptance of the self that she lacks, that she seeks- that she needs sexual reference and experience for. Susie wants to live again, and for her, the next step in life would mean sexual intercourse and discourse, falling in love, true love, and to have that ripped from her by the rape of Mr. Harvey and, just as Rosencrantz so desperately shouts to Guildenstern within the castle as the events of Hamlet inevitably happen, has “no control! None at all… They’re taking us for granted!” (Stoppard 56.) That was her life, and thus to find herself in death again without control, without the power to shape own image and pursue her own ideals, or even adequately shape them, she is told by her onlooker, Frannie, “You won’t experience it” (Seybold 19), and let go of those desires is a horrific discovery, one that leaves her struggling to defy that idea and define her existence.
While all this is occurring with Susie, trapped in her box of spiritual and eternal abstinence, those she leaves behind on Earth must find a way to cope with Suzie’s departure, and all do so through sexual means, in one form or another. Susie’s mother is left on fire internally; she had barely been able to be contented as a housewife before, and with the death one of her daughters, a gruesome death at that, she just doesn’t seem to see fidelity as demanded by the ethical and moral groundings of her society as worth it, and neither is her family anymore. She has an affair with a detective covering Susie’s case, and in the course of her sexual contact with him rediscovers the person she was before she was married, a person she never truly stopped being and never truly forgot- she has alluded to her children when they were young that she feels she is Persephone, stuck with Hades and away from the spring and warmth she craves, and refers to Helen of Troy as “a feisty woman who screwed things up” Sebold (150), a stay-at-home woman who was no good to herself or anyone else. Mrs. Salmon’s Troy has burnt, her façade as a content caretaker shattered, and she, alluding to Edna in The Awakening, leaves her family and the haunting memory of Susie’s demise behind to for a fresh start; all this had simmered beneath her surface before Susie’s death, but it is brought to the boiling point during her affair with the detective- her sexual experience brings forth in her an awakening of her own, and flings open the gates for Mrs. Salmon, allows her to move on and advance in her life.
By contrast, Mr. Salmon is the stark opposite of his wife; where she seeks to mourn Suzie’s death and deal with it all by fleeing it and starting anew, Mr. Salmon will not let himself, or anyone else, forget it, and becomes a man possessed and consumed by his desire for revenge and justice, to see his daughter’s murderer caught, thus soothing her soul- as well as his. No other thought, feeling, inclination resides in him so strongly (or perhaps at all) and his search becomes his past, present, and future, smashing with a tormented mind and extreme prejudice the model ships he and his daughter used to build, forgetting and utterly casting aside the marriage that has now fallen to pieces, and focusing night and day on nothing more or less then absolute resolution. In a novel so steeped in literary references, Mr. Salmon comes across as an Ahab, unswerving in his pursuit of his goal no matter the cost (his smashed ships and his sinking family affairs strengthening this connection to the Captain) or a Lear figure, watching as the family he has loved so dearly and brought up so well disintegrates, as his daughter is murdered, his wife leaves, he is left fixated and near madness. Thus, Mr. Salmon serves as a foil to his wife’s attempt to move on, shutting himself off emotionally and sexually from the world, and thus not being able to move past the or even come to grips with and define his own personal state existence at all.
It is through the relationship between Lindsey and her boyfriend Samuel however, that the characters, especially Suzie, begin to heal and develop and grow again. Lindsey’s relationship with Samuel is a long-lasting one, stretching from the time of their being friends in high school to when Samuel proposes they wed after they graduate from college together. Here is a symbolic rebirth of true love and spirituality for the characters; the horror of Susie’s rape and the trauma of the destroyed marriage and household of the Salmons is put behind them now, as the world about them begins to heal- Susie’s death has not ended the world, has not destroyed love, and now here before them all is the proof of this. Lindsey and Samuel pass the rites of passage that Susie herself longed for and was denied in life- they grow to be a proper couple, they kiss, the grow steady, they complement each other as a couple should, and finally they marry and consecrate their love and vows. All of this is seen by Susie in her heaven, and all to her joy and relief, as she is no longer, the focus of the town, as she was after her murder, stating “It was no longer a Susie-fest on Earth” (Sebold 236) and the world has gone on without her, and now too have her friends and family; while Susie must still seek to define herself and her existence past and present, here is real proof to her that at the very least others are finally beginning to assert and discover their existence in relation to others. However, she is still faced with the task of understanding that existence, a task she simply cannot do without her rite of passage, the next step in her growth as an individual and as a person of mind and spirit- without the spirit of sex, Susie is doomed forever to that small box that carries the label of heaven, no matter how hellish it may be for her.
This finally changes with the incidents between Ray and Ruth. Ray represents everything Susie might’ve enjoyed and everything Lindsey now has with Samuel- a friend and crush in her lifetime, and the source of her one true kiss, the first step towards achieving her goal of enlightenment. He calls himself “the Moor,” an intentional connection to Othello, and true to this allusion, Ray is very much a “tolerated” stranger in town, due to his dark skin and Indian heritage, and for a short while is suspected of being Susie’s killer; all this racks him, as he did consider Susie to be a good friend, and did think much of that kiss, wishing it could lead to more and realizing it now never will. Ray is, in essence, Susie’s other half still walking the Earth as he, too, is caught up in the existential feel of the story, wondering now what he is, what life and love really are if they can die so quickly. Into this situation enters Ruth, who already cannot quite come to grips with herself, as she is a lesbian in a time when that is far from being understood or socially accepted. Ruth, touched by Susie as she drifted from her body and out of the world towards her heaven, also shares a connection with Ray, and the two, attempting to release their pent-up emotions resolve to kiss each other. Susie is able to experience the kiss they share, and achieves her goal- she has finally gotten her wish, her sexual advancement, the glory and sheer delight of being able to finally define and fully realize that part of her being. Here is the penultimate example of Sebold’s using sexual advancement as not simply a metaphor for progression in life, but in fact as synonymous example of it. The existential barriers, from the youths’ search for definition in their existence to Susie’s stagnant heaven, are broken down now; the lid is pulled off of Rosencrantz’s box, and the growth that Susie had so long pined for is now here to be experienced, a progression that could never have been possible without her discovery of that aspect of herself and her being, and as such she is now finally fulfilled and complete.
It is through that completion that Susie and those that survive her in The Lovely Bones are, in fact, fortunate. In spite of the rape, the murder, the separations and years of consternation and angst, they are able to, through their sexual progressions and growths, make sense of their existential circumstances and surroundings, and, ultimately of themselves, their sexual encounters serve as a gateway to closure and allows them to find a peace within their existence that Didi and Gogo, for all their bickering, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for all their coin flips and games of “Questions,” will never know.
What did you guys want to be when you grew up.
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