Family Fun
Cal’s fragile sexual identity is understandable considering the surprise he gets when he finds out that despite growing up as a girl, he has male sexual organs as well. However, his confusion is also grounded when keeping in mind his tenuous family sexual background. Growing up, Cal is surrounded by polarized groups of male and female relatives, each of whom convenes in separate groups to discuss his conception. Uncle Pete, a lifelong bachelor, and his beliefs about thermometers and timing are responsible for Cal’s coming into the world, rather than other genetic combinations forming in his mother Tessie’s womb. Of course, the reader cannot discount the incestuous relationship between Cal’s grandmother, Desdemona, and her brother, Lefty. Cal even has issues with his genetically unharmed older brother, whom he terms “Chapter Eleven,” possibly because of his normal sexual makeup.
The theory is proposed that Cal’s sexual status is due to the unnatural coupling of his grandparents, which is unwelcome in the religious, legal, and scientific communities. It might be said that Cal was born a hermaphrodite as divine punishment, or because of the lack of biological diversity in his genetic makeup. Another family pairing which might have led to Cal’s status is his parents’ union, as they were also related, albeit cousins.
Despite the moral injunction of siblings marrying, the narrator presents his grandparents’ struggles in the aftermath of battles between the Turks and the Greeks in such a way as to make the reader feel pity and sympathy for the lonely Lefty and Desdemona. The brother and sister had recently lost their parents, and at twenty and twenty –one years of age respectively, they were forced to fend for themselves economically and later, in terms of survival in general. At first, Lefty was left with two girls his age from their town from whom to choose, neither of whom appealed to him. Later, his fear, isolation, sexual curiosity, and refugee status helped him find comfort in the arms of the familiar, namely his shapely sister. Although morally wrong, the action of a grief- stricken brother secluded on a mountaintop, and later traveling to a foreign country with his attractive and nurturing sister pulls on the heartstrings of the reader.
Perhaps this sympathetic depiction of Cal’s grandparents is an attempt on the narrator’s part to have the reader regard him and his choices with the same benevolent viewpoint. After all, when Calliope was born in 1960, and Cal in 1974, this sexual anomaly was looked at with wonder and disdain. Through his depictions of the circumstances surrounding his birth and his familial factors that led to his existence, Cal portrays himself as a character shaped by his family, society, and destiny.
-Ariella Medows
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Tags: incest, Middlesex, Sexual Identitty
