Sexuality and American Culture

The first two books of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex tells two love stories: Cal’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty and his parents Milton and Tessie. In both cases, their love ought to be forbidden because both couples are also related. The case of Milton and Tessie, who are second cousins, is not so awful by modern standards; in New York State, a person can marry his or her first cousin. It is Desdemona and Lefty’s love that still slightly bothers me because relations between siblings was and still is frowned upon. If people outside the family had known, they would have been ostracized and seen as inferior by dominant society.

The guilt that Lefty and Desdemona felt when they first started their relationship is due to society’s standards of who one could and could not be with.  The guilt continues to eat at Desdemona after she learns that consanguine relationships lead to children with birth defects, so she distances herself away from Lefty sexually and emotionally. The need for the couple to fabricate their past histories and to pretend that they did not know each other until they enter the Giulia is an attempt to normalize their relationship. If they acted like complete strangers, then their relationship would be OK. This is almost like a form of self-regulation, but their denial of their past relationship as brother and sister cannot hide the fact that they are related to each other, which will affect future generations.

Another form of exclusion from society comes in the form of Cal Stephanides, formerly known as Calliope. Since he is a hermaphrodite, it is difficult to classify what group he should belong to. Not much is known about his life yet, but from what we learn Cal has problems with keeping relationships and constantly moves from place to place after he started living as a male. He also admits that his feelings of shame are one reason why he decided to join the Foreign Service. His shame is understandable; it is brought on by the dominant society who feels that hermaphrodites are foreign, strange, and inferior in some way. If he were to try to explain his situation to other people, the fear is that they will not understand him.

Other forms of exclusion of certain groups are found throughout Middlesex. During the burning of Smyrna, the refugees had to be left behind while citizens of certain nationalities were able to leave for safety. In Detroit during the 1920s, there is a clear division between the white part and the black part of the city. And when black people are finally able to buy houses outside the Black Bottom, white people moved out of Detroit and into the suburbs to keep that separation between blacks and whites. This separation of groups is a result of a feeling of superiority by the dominant group and the need to exert that on the so-called inferior groups.