Re: Middle of Middlesex
Re: Middlesex 1/ 2
“… since the 18th century the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that sexuality has it privileged point of deployment in the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from the start.”
– Michel Foucault
The bigger half of part one is dedicated to the history of Calliope’s grandparents—Desdemona and Eleutherios, or “Lefty”—and to the provenance of their incestuous marriage. In a ostentatious house on the mountain is where the brother and his sister grew up—they played a variation of the popular rock, paper, scissors game—which could have nurtured Lefty’s gambling problem—explored the crevices of the mountain, and were involved with the handling of silk. They were, atop their little mountain in Asia Minor, isolated from the licentiousness of city life. Their only conduits to sexuality were each other and a magazine which “At night, when everyone was sleeping, her father used to take out of the bottom drawer of his desk”—whether or not this knowledge was acquired by spying, implying that Desdemona had caught her father masturbating (she would only be conscious of the act itself rather than the actual name, and taboo, of the act due to her ignorance in matters of sexuality), is only valid in assumptions. Lefty and Eleutherios grew up together as brother and sister—also as 3rd cousins. From this magazine, Lingerie Parisienne, Desdemona would learn about the seductive qualities of dress as modeled by the women in the photos—she would teach her disciples Vicky and Lucille the disciplines of courtship.
Lefty had also discovered this spicy piece of literature at an early age. He would rub his private parts on immobile objects in search of “that feeling”—you know, “that feeling.” Eugenides writes, “Those ten sepia-toned photographs were what had started Lefty’s fascination with the city. But he had never entirely forgotten his first loves in Lingerie Parisienne. He could summon them in all his imagination at will.” Aside from this magazine, Lefty had his sister, who became his outlet for emotional equilibrium. They survived their adolescent trials and tribulations, including the death of their mother, with each other’s consolations. Lefty, motivated by his curiosity of yonder, puts on a suit, slicks his hair, and walks into the city to sleep with prostitutes, gamble away his cocoon wages and, in one instance, call out his sister’s name during sex with another woman.
Calliope introduces his/her grandparents to talk about the smuggling of that deformed fifth chromosome to America that would make it difficult for him/ her to select the appropriate restroom—that “one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…”
