Sexuality and American Culture

In Middlesex, Eugenides illuminates many of Foucault's ideas regarding bio-politics through some very comical scenes that critique high modernist ideals. In the first chapter of the novel, there is quite a bit of conflict between authorities delimiting notions of sexuality. Desdemona dangles a spoon in front of Tessie's belly in order to predict whether the baby will be a boy or a girl, a Greek tradition. After telling her son Milton that the baby will be a boy, Milton says that she is wrong. She asks, “And how you know so much?” to which he replies, “It's science, Ma” (Eugenides 6). We find out that prior to Tessie's pregnancy, Milton, “had been seeing visions of an irresistibly sweet, dark-eyed girl,” and that he, “decided to see what he could do to turn his vision into reality” (6-7). Milton turns to Uncle Pete, a pseudo-intellectual and supposed expert on reproduction, who advises, “to have a girl baby, a couple should 'have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.' That way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped” (8). Tessie, however, upholds popular beliefs regarding sex and reproduction, “It was her belief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which it had been created” (8). She is repelled by Milton's scientific approach to having a child, “To tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris. In the first place, Tessie didn't believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn't believe you should try” (9).

This last quote highlights one of Eugenides' main critiques of high modernist beliefs in progress and perfectibility as well as the role of science as the instrument of their implementation: they are inherently hubristic. Cal notes the context of high modernism:

I can only explain the scientific mania that overtook my father during that spring of '59 as a symptom of the belief in progress that was infecting everyone back then. Remember, Sputnik had been launched only two years earlier. Polio, which had kept my parents quarantined indoors during the summers of their childhood, had been conquered by the Salk vaccine. . . . In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the master of his own destiny, so it only followed that my father would try to be the master of his. (9-10)

This “scientific mania” is epitomized when Milton presents to his wife a black jewelry box, inside of which lies a thermometer that is accurate to a tenth of a degree—a clear replacement of the traditional with the scientific. When Tessie gives in to the scientific formulation by using the thermometer, and Cal is born, there is an initial triumph of science over tradition and popular belief, “Desdemona became grim. Her American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded one more notch. My arrival marked the end of her baby-guessing . . . Though the silkworm box reappeared now and then, the spoon was no longer among its treasures” (17-18). This “defeat,” highlights what Foucault says about the regulation of sexual reproduction and the role that scientific discourse plays as an institutionalized regulatory authority. The irony is that both the scientific and traditional will be proven wrong, the result of their hubris being mutation, the birth of a hermaphrodite.

It will be interesting to see how different sexual authorities negotiate with mutation in books 3 and 4. Also, it seems as though Eugenides is setting up a correlation between the history and social patterns of the 20^th century in America, and the peculiarities of Cal's family. There is migration and cultural assimilation, the replacement of traditional ideals with scientific ideals—in short, the proliferation of modernism. Then we have Cal's mutation, his first birth takes place in 1960, placing him in the midst of American cultural revolution, and his second birth takes place in 1974, in the midst of an economic depression, which marked an end to the type of optimism and belief in progress characterizing the post-war period. Seeing that Cal is 41 as a narrator, the novel is starting to look like a kind of grand tour of the 20^th century in America.