SilkWorms

If Lolita was a novel that expanded our view of a “perverse” practice through the intimate diaries of the pedophilia Humbert Humbert, Middlesex obliterates our traditional understanding of the narrative to sexuality. Instead of merely presenting sexuality as an extension of a person’s identity, as proposed by Humbert’s pedophilia or Hester’s act of Adultery, Middlesex’s narrative is constructed in such a way that sexuality is at the core that perpetuates and generates all other themes and events. Sexuality becomes the origins of actions, the origin of religion, the origin of history, the origin of man, the continuation of life through evolution, all the way to the present day struggles of the humble narrator.

The image of the silk-worm is one that repeats through the book. From the very origins of silk, from Princess Si Ling-chi discovering it and keeping it secret until the smuggling of silkworm and mulberry leaf outside of China, the history of silk creates a profound emphasis on history. Instead of simply stating that her grandmother was one who was adept at cultivating silkworms, the narrator finds it necessary to emphasize even the most minute of details, as if recognizing that everything is connected. Everything is part of a web, and even the history of the silk worm itself: the smuggling out from China; the smuggling into America; using electric bulbs to trick the silk-worms from distinguishing from their old habitat acts as a metaphor and a foreshadowing to Des and Lefty trying to preserve their secret in their homeland; being smuggled onto the boat; reinventing their stories; finding sanctuary in a new home; and struggling to trick themselves (and in Des’s case pray for) a better future. The ongoing continuity suggests a way in which sexuality never changes; it merely is a permutation of the puzzle pieces, just like Lefty gambling through the 999 ways to find the “best” way to win. There is no right answer, just a different one where all the smallest changes will affect the outcome. Sexuality becomes a gamble with a life on the line, every action becoming important, every moment deciding.

A genealogical approach is utilized over and over in this book not only to examine the origins of Silk-worms but genetics and gene pools, the interlacing of families and incest, the infinitesimal affects of war, peace, and stagnation embodied by the oppression of the Turks and the fall of Detroit. The expansion of scope demonstrates that the book is not restricted to only a lifetime (Humbert in Lolita) or several centuries (Scarlet Letter with a Victorian twist) but to the very beginnings of time. The narrator Calliope alludes to her and her brother the “floating…since the world’s beginning on our raft of eggs…inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in my case both) hour of birth” (198) as a reference to the extended continuity of events. As suggested before by the almost obsessive quality of providing context, Eugenides constructs Middlesex so that sexuality itself is firmly laced all the way back to the origins of the world. The religious undertone which accompanies this context—the creation of man—is exemplified in many different parallels which include Jimmy (Fard) “recreating” the older past of the tribe Shabazz to explain black superiority, or Calliope referencing preformation, The religious undertone in sexuality throughout the novel elevates sexuality into a divine act of creation. It then places a supreme responsibility on sexuality itself and all the ways in which it is intricately related to all other aspects in life, as the whole novel for the first two parts are the unraveling of which factors and events that are responsible for the narrator’s current sexual being.

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