I’ve been staring at my computer screen for about an hour thinking about what to say about Middlesex. The book is a consummate force of Greek-American culture, carried by the development of the American City and glossed over by the story of Calliope Stephanides. But as it says volumes about Detroit, or the miseducation of […]
Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through […]
It is a testament to the crude fascination of scientia sexualis that with such a novel case of gender identity, everyone was busy trying to collect and examine the physical details of Christine Jorgensen’s life. This is epitomized in Document 3’s text from a Time’s article:“The New York Post put the facts on the […]
Cal’s story traces the lines of her life through the well-trodden path of a young girl’s development, suddenly shifting towards the well-worn path of adolescent boys, but stops and hovers in the middle. He did not have to struggle to break gender boundaries. In a very real sense, it came naturally. Cal’s story is harder […]
In last week’s class, Lee proposed a great question that we didn’t talk too much about, so I’ve decided to use it as the launch point for this week’s readings (particularly that of the last two books of Middlesex). The question was something along these lines: Is it important for an author to have an […]
Of everything we’ve read this semester, I have to admit that Middlesex has been the least gripping for me. Maybe it’s the pace, Cal’s voice, switching from “Angles in America,” predominantly dialogue, to lengthy prose, or maybe it’s something in me–my disintegrated family, my hurting heart–that makes it the wrong book to read at the […]
Genes tell the mythology of the contemporary age. Cal Eugenides traces his personal mythology through an unlikely series of events that conspire to create the perfect circumstances to produce Cal exactly as he/she is. This tale is spun like most other myths, with fibers of truth and patterns of exaggeration, but it reflects a very […]
While reading Middlesex, a certain quote, the origin of which I cannot place, kept popping into my head: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” Our sense of deserving in life is shaped the by the shame we cannot overcome. The characters in Eugenides’ novel each negotiate the embodiment of this feeling, preoccupied by […]
Throughout Books One and Two of Jeffery Eugenides’ Middlesex, we the reader are placed in the unusual position of casting our hopes with the success of a character, Cal, whose sexual identity—and, correspondently his path through the world—is quite unlike that of the overwhelming majority of his readers. This trick is nothing new (I am not an […]
Middlesex hinges on questions about sexual identity, but the narrator’s cultural background informs this as well as most aspects of the novel. The juxtaposition between Greek and American culture comes with a juxtaposition of sexual histories and sexual views. The events leading up to Cal’s conception are essentially like the two “colliding” (a word […]
