The second Eugenides novel ‘Middlesex’ is extremely abundant with various thematic material and literary descriptions of the relevant social, cultural, and other problems. As Daniel Mendelsohn states, ‘from Ovid to Gore Vidal, hermaphroditism and bisexuality have provided writers with irresistible occasions to comment on both nature and culture” (Mendelsohn). Jeffrey Eugenides is not exclusion and his novel represents refined evidence of the new role that this thematic has gained in modern society.
The cultural, societal, moral, and gender layers of Eugenides’ novel
Culture as a vast domain of human activities within society that produces various patterns, modes of conduct, mindsets, and stereotypes are everywhere starting from family relations to national customs and traditions. It can be described as a symbolical reflection of societal relations (In Levis-Strauss sense). Cultural, gender, and societal problems are in-depth addressed by the author. Some of the most important are individual liberty of lifestyles versus paternalism of power and tradition which made Greek families leave for the United States in search of conditions for realizing ‘this passion inside them’ deeply opposed to dominant societal and moral patterns prevailing in the early 20 century Greece.
Another problem tackles through the utilization of expressive means is the issue of gender in general and its social construction in particular. Calliope hermaphroditism is nothing before it is mentally and socially internalized through self-recognition. Calliope is raised as a girl who doesn’t know that she is intersexed and even her family doesn’t know about it for many years.
She can be described as a ‘normal’, ‘average’ girl before she finds herself in a socially and culturally determined situation that makes her deeply transform her identity. Thus, it may be said that the novel tackles important issues of social vs. biological construction of gender and social conditions for the formation of sexual subjectivity and its further implications.
Another important issue addressed by Eugenides is relations within non-traditional (incest family) and their social implications. This is particularly relevant to current debates on the juridical justification of changing marital status and legislation concerning family regulation in general.
Moral and perceptional issues are the first that arise in this debate and the author seems to pay a lot of attention to the controversial character of non-traditional families. Other issues going in line with the abovementioned problems include family secrecy ( only at the end of the book does Desdemona confess to Calliope/Cal that Lefty in fact was her brother and she again promises to keep this in secret until the time Desdemona dies thus maintaining the circle of secrecy), parental reliance, sometimes mistaken, on various experts, parental autonomy and in the general prevailing perception of sex, bisexual and gender relations.
The central theme Eugenides addresses which forms the fabric of his novel is the experience of an intersexed person originating from Greek emigrants to the United States who has a sexually nontraditional family with her grandparents being sisters and brothers. Calliope’s experience is described as predominantly sexual though embedded in a wide format of family, social, and gender issues.
The main facets of her experience may be described as the race for genuine identity which goes through secrecy, ignorance of her origins, and bisexual experience when at fourteen Calliope fell in love with her female friend (‘The Obscure object’) and her sexual experience with both sexes. At last, the dialectical development of Calliope’s experience is finalized in social revealing and internalizing of her sexual identity (being intersexed) which causes a traumatic effect on her consciousness, and at last, finalizes this identity internalization. When Calliope recognizes and understands her sexual ‘abnormality’ – it is no longer regarded by her as abnormal but she subconsciously recognizes this ‘truth’ as her ‘own’ life for which she struggles, struggles for keeping it since she considers it to be the integral part of herself – her ‘Self’. All this personal experience is superposed with family tragedies and personal uncertainty which make her choose ‘nontraditional’ lifestyles that constitute the tragedy of an ‘intersexed’ person finding himself in predominantly ‘traditional’ society (notwithstanding its liberal and multicultural trends).
Contemporary or historical?
There is no denying the fact that the interrelation of these themes should be regarded as mainly contemporary due to several reasons. First of all, only in our age of liberalization of sexual and family relations did the problem of bisexuality and hermaphroditism get its social implications.
If the early ages of the patriarchic and religious order the marriages between sisters and brothers, incest in general, homosexual marriages, bisexuality, and other sexual phenomena were regarded as obscene and were strictly prohibited, now in the modern age of identity celebration gender and sexual freedom are compromised and are involved in societal relations as autonomous actors. Of course, it raises moral and societal issues on a higher level of difficulty since now the problem is about the cardinal reformulation of predominant views on sex, morality, and gender. This is an issue of great controversy and it is modern of not postmodern.
Conflicts, protagonist and his struggle with
It can be easily claimed that the fabric of the Eugenides novel is not homogenous and is filled with various conflicting breaks, the struggle for self-determination, and tragic events. These can be regarded as dominant characteristics of every good novel but in the case of Eugenides, The Pulitzer Prize Winner it is especially true. The novel’s main protagonist’s struggles may be described as being both social and personal and their positions also both social and personal. The history of an immigrant family of Greek origin is something that forms the history of Callie if we address the issue of genesis. This story is filled with family secrets of the family, incests, violence while living in Greece during the war with Turkey.
These conditions transcend from one generation to other drawing the frames of reality perception, personal and societal dispositions, and struggles. With the elegantly postmodernist social commentary, Eugenides introduces this Greek family’s arrival to the United States in search of a better future. When Desdemona and Lefty arrived at Ellis Island, Desdemona said: (“At least it’s a woman,” Desdemona says, watching the Statue of Liberty. “Maybe here people won’t be killing each other every single day”.
The inclusion in American society was though not so easy for this family for they were constantly met with various hardships. Milts loses his business during the Detroit race riots in 1967 which invokes his ethnic origins though he further achieved success in the restaurant business. The invocation of racial and ethnic problems the family met is constantly repeated by Eugenides in his description of first-generation immigrant life in the United States. The central personal and societal conflict and struggle concerns the main characters of the novel Calliope. When she reveals that is bisexual she finds herself at the crossroads of identity and there the conflict begins. When reading Iliad she thinks is that man hormones ‘manifesting themselves silently inside me’. In a similar way when Calliope feel in love with her female friend and her boyfriends help her organize a date with her in a wood cabin she thinks she does it because she is a boy.
This constant substitution of identity becomes absolutely traumatic when after the car accident the doctor in the hospital discovers that Calliope was intersexed and then she is taken to another clinic. This meeting with the ‘Real’ makes her run away and adopt the male identity and the name Cal, traveling the country and in the end, settle in San Francisco to participate in a burlesque show. The revelation leads to the tragedy of Calliope’s father Milton who is given telephone calls from the strange man who says that now the location of Calliope. After finding that the man who called was Milton’s wife’s former fiancé he chases him and dies in the car accident, leaving Cal without the father. The circle of tragedies thus unravels through the novel notwithstanding the partial struggles that the main characters wage and thus the triumph over diversity is not achieved, and this novel may be described as a traumatic experience.
Eugenides life experience relevant to the writing
Eugenides while constructing his characters as he notes draws on the wide range of materials on hermaphrodites and tried t construct real character in his living conditions instead of reproducing pitiful and biological explication. He much draws on the work of Foucault on sexuality in this relation. Thus, he tried to insert the hermaphroditism in the wider context of family and society. As he notes, making the book turn into a family saga was something that allowed me to talk about a range of things and a range of characters, and a range of historical periods. I was eager to do that, as opposed to constructing the book as merely the story of a hermaphrodite (3 am Magazine interview, 2003). Besides structural determination that influenced Eugenides writing these books his personal background much contributed to its plot and images that were used. First of all, Eugenides is himself Greek whose relatives emigrated to the United States and thus creating the characters of Greek immigrants he drew much on their experience and problems they came across after moving to the United States. Eugenides’s choice of hermaphrodite as the main protagonist of his novel can be partly explained by his writing techniques and experiments and has little to do with his personal experience. For instance, he says: ‘It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination since you should be able to go into the heads of men and women if you want to write books’.
References
Mendelsohn, Daniel. Mighty Hermaphrodite Volume 49, Number 17. 2002.
3am Magazine interview. The novel as a mental picture of its. 2003. Web.
Powells.com interview (taken by Dave Weich). Jeffrey Eugenides Has It Both Ways. 2002. Web.