Jeffrey Eugenindes's Middlesex - Essay Example

Finding the Middle Ground between Family and Personal Identity In his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenindes paints an elaborate and epic portrait of America in the twentieth century. Beginning at its immigrant roots to the present, the story takes readers from a Turkish village in the 1920s to the race riots of the late 1960s as it follows a Greek American family across generations. At the center of the story is the voice of the newest member of the family. A member whose gender identity, complicated by a genetically inherited hermaphroditism, incorporates an interesting twist into the family's history. Relying heavily on the relationship between past and present, this historical novel uses strong historical imagination to attempt to try and piece together cause and effect, and the possibilities and problems as the narrator attempts to understand and represent both the family's past and future. This novel showcases Eugenides mastery of imagination as he weaves together the different aspects of this family's history presenting them in an eye opening coming of age tale perfectly fitting for today's modern age. The story does a great job of melding self-conscious artifice and real-world history. Perhaps what is most surprising about Eugenides novel is how he effortlessly establishes the credibility in his narrator in the opening statement, " I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey Michigan, in August of 1974" (Eugenides 3). Here the narrator introduces himself and his sordid history, explaining his grandparent's incestuous marriage and how they vowed to keep it a secret. The center of the story surrounds Cal and his struggles with his sexuality. He says, "I've got a male brain. But I was raised as a girl" (Eugenides). While Cal struggles with this dilemma his entire life, Eugenides fights to prove through these struggles that Cal is really no different than any other American teenager. The novel covers all of Cal's childhood and adolescent obstacles in the hope of normalizing Cal's very un-normal condition. What makes these descriptions interesting is that Cal does not provide any emotion, leaving it up to the reader to judge how Cal must have felt as a result. For instance, when Cal tells of his close encounter in the San Francisco park and how he is nearly raped, the descriptions are virtually devoid of any emotion. Cal says the men in the park tell him "Crawl back into the hole you came out of freak" (Eugenides), but the reader is left on their own to decide how Cal must have felt. The closest description to anything emotional is when Cal says, "I had seventy-five cents to my name. I wished more anything that I could call home" (Eugenides). It seems that Eugenides chose to make Cal's descriptions devoid of any true emotion because he hoped the reader would feel for Cal and understand the emotions he must have been feeling through their own. These emotionless descriptions can be seen again in Cal's pursuit of love where his limited manhood most manifests itself, because Cal is afraid of revealing his body. He says very matter of factly without expressing how this makes him feel, "And so, without permanence, I have fallen into the routine of my incomplete seductions," (Eugenides). It is evident that the overall goal of this story is paint a picture of American life and the decisions of one particular family in history. Eugenides takes the reader through the minds of each family member, allowing them a peek inside the windows into their souls. He begins with the grandmother, Desdemona, and her escape from her Greek island home and how she first fell in love with her brother lefty. Through the eyes of Desdemona the reader can begin to understand the reasoning behind her incestuous relationship with her brother Lefty. He makes it easy for the reader to understand why the family members decide to do the things that they do, and why they have made specific decisions because the reader is allowed to see the reasoning behind it. For instance, Eugenides shows the significance and emotional meaningfulness of the silkworm box and how it brought the grandmother memories of her homeland and her first memories of love and growing up. This box stays with Desdemona her entire life, even after all the silkworms have died. Cal describes the box at the end of the novel as, "The box was now so stuffed with mementos it wouldn't shut. Inside were snapshots, old letters, precious buttons, worry beads" (Eugenides). Cal goes on to say that even though he cannot see to the bottom of the box, he is sure that clippings of Lefty's hair and Desdemona's wedding dress are in the box as well. What this silkworm box probably does not contain are references to the many different jobs that family has had in attempts to stay afloat and to make a place for themselves in American society. If the box could speak it would tell of how eve Desdemona herself was once forced to go to work in an attempts to make money for her family. How she was willing to sacrifice her precious silk worms in order to survive. It also wouldn't tell of Lefty's desperate resorts for money and how he used to traffic alcohol during prohibitions and how he "begins to traffic secretly in the bodies of women, collaborating on nude photos for a steady side income (Eugenides). These things have been left out of the box due to Desdemona's Greek pride and the way she turns her head away and tries to ignore anything that would disgrace her family. This fear of disgrace is also seen in her son Milton, Cal's father. Cal says that his father Milton would continually tell him, "The matter with us is you" (Eugenides). Cal says that this phrase was used whenever his father didn't approve of his opinions, when he would be late to dinner, or when he wore clothes that his mother didn't approve of. If the novels fails in any way, it can be marked in the way imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character's gender crisis. The happy ending, and overall comfortability that Cal feels with his sexuality at the end of the novel is very will indicative of the mindset and the way in which history was felt in 2002 at the time that this novel was released. How history shows has been the overall public discourse and feeling felt towards the subject of sexual identity reawaken a sense of contingency and challenge the already constructed narratives and historical events affecting the overall ending of this story. Since this novel is greatly considered to be a work of historical literature, the way in which the story ends should be understood in the context of the history that lead up to it. It would be unlikely that Cal's family would have accepted him and that he would have ended up living such a successful life had he been living in generations past. While Cal's story ends happily, it may not have been so if the novel had ended in a time where acceptance of sexuality was so publicly emphasized. One of the greatest tools Eugenides uses through out the novels is his jumping between past and present. In doing this he truly creates a sense of timelessness, encompassing the entire history and events surrounding Cal's struggles. The story begins in the present with Cal describing himself and then quickly switches back to two generations before him and focuses on the story of his grandparents. This constant transition back and forth between past and present is what gives the novel its overall historical feel and helps develop the story by giving inner details of the family and why things happened in the way that they did. While the most obvious factor for Eugenide's use of this technique is to convey how Cal's hermaphrodite gene is passed down through the generations, it also paints an overarching familial history along with the changing cultures and social opinions of the time. By catching every significant aspect of Cal's family history the reader is able to see just how prideful their culture forced them to be and how they would never succumb to any form of weakness. This pride stayed with the family from its very beginnings and the secret between Lefty and Desdemona. It continued as the grandparents fought hard to make a place for their family in America, often sacrificing their Greek morals and n Lefty's case smuggling alcohol and selling pictures of nude women. The pride can also be seen in Cal's father as he fought to keep his restaurant up and running and fought to defend it again the tanks and the rioting that broke out in Detroit. Evan Cal possesses this overwhelming sense of pride as he embarks out on his own. He faces numerous challenges that would make any other person call out to their family for help, but Cal's pride will not allow him to do so. In the end, Middlesex addresses not only Cal's story and his struggles with his sexuality, it reveals the inner workings of the American family and how pride drives them and forces them to survive. Overall Eugenides does a great job of capturing the many aspects that make up an American life. While it may end in an unlikely way, with Cal actually happy and completely at ease with his sexuality, the overall experience gained from reading this novel is one of appreciation and enlightenment. Eugenides successfully weaves together the story of a family through the generations bringing them full circle through the narration of their newest generation. Reader's eyes will be open to a new perspective of the American family and American life, and how with a fight, everyone can survive. Works Cited Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Picador Publishing. New York. 2002. Read More