Published in 2002, Middlesex
is a timely novel more than a decade later because of the subject of
gender identity. It is the first-person story of an intersex person,
Calliope/Cal, who lives as a girl until age 14 , when hormonal tests
reveal s/he has a rare genetic disorder and possesses the male
chromosome Y. Thereafter Calliope chooses to become Cal, living a
solitary life as a male and avoiding intimacy because of his ambiguous
genitalia.
In Middlesex Jeffrey
Eugenides has also written an immigrant story. Calliope/Cal’s
grandparents are Greeks who escaped the Turkish massacre of the Greeks
of Smyrna in the 1920s. Unknown to all but one person in Detroit, their
new home, is that they are brother and sister (which is responsible for
the chromosomal abnormality’s emerging in their grandchild). Other than the incest
angle, it is a fairly typical but still engrossing immigrant saga of
three
generations, with the family progressing from the old country to
resettlement in racially tense Detroit, assimilation of the US-born,
and finally a move to the suburbs.
In this age of increasing tolerance of homosexual and transgender
persons, it is good to be aware of other forms of
sexual difference as well. Unfortunately,
Eugenides’s book doesn’t help us understand intersexuality well—we
don’t get much keen insight on that subject from the adolescent
Calliope or the adult Cal. Although Cal talks about his ability “to see
not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both,” his
choice to be male presupposes a person must be one or the other.
By the end of the book, however, we see Cal as a human being, with
human traits just like the rest of us—and maybe that was supposed to be
the message.
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