Symbolism In The Virgin Suicides

In "The Virgin Suicides," Eugenides uses the motif of boundaries to express how the girls are enclosed in this environment that they are living in and want to escape but have people that keep them restrained for example their family, friends, and even strangers.
Mrs. Lisbon is holding the girls captive in their own house because she does not want them to express their sexual identity and tries in every way possible to keep them in the house. where is the background “A few weeks after Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum- security isolation, the sightings of Lux making love on the rook began”(136). The girls feel as if they have to hide their items from their parents, for example, " Peter Sissen found Mary Lisbon's secret cache of cosmetics tied up in a sock under the sink: tube of red lipstick and second skin of blush and base, and the depilatory wax that informed us she had a mustache. . ."(7). This reveals that Mrs. Lisbon is seizing the girls individuality and they have to resort to secretly hide their items, and this goes against a mother's role in a White suburbia in which the daughters can go to them for support and allows them to live their life.
Lisbon wants them to behave like girls and not fantasize about the boys in the school. In the classroom the boys notice that the girls have changed in attitude, " We noticed the change too. The girls seemed less tired, In class they stared out the window less, raised their hands more, spoke up. They momentarily forgot the stigma attached to them and took apart again in school activities" (106). The girls feel as if they have to change and meet the expectations of their father, but also fear in what he might do or say to them if they don’t meet his standards. Although this change was also a positive one because they became more social and their voices were heard even though they had a pair of eyes watching them all the