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The family unit is integral to deciding how to create one’s own personal identity. Not only is it significant with regard to sociocultural background and beliefs, but it also lays the foundation for how one chooses to define oneself. The protagonist, Cal, defines himself as much as a part of his family as he does against it: These differing experiences help him come to terms with his identity as well as his family history. Without Cal, the family’s story of immigration, ancestral decisions, and personal evolution would have no narrator.
No one can escape genetics. The narrator is clear about this from the beginning: “I was born twice: first as a baby girl […] in January of 1960, and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petosky, Michigan, in August of 1974” (3). This dual birth is both a story about a phoenix rising from his own ashes and a tale about delivering oneself from history. His grandparents aren’t “typical” immigrants by most measures; in escaping war and the devastation of their village, they realize that they’re irrevocably bound to each other. Although they’re brother and sister, they marry on their journey to the new world, and later have two children. This decision influences their descendants’ lives, especially Cal’s.
However, this genetic story doesn’t entirely define Cal. His entire family history, from intermarriage to immigration, informs who he becomes. He’s a product of his upbringing in the US, particularly Detroit, during a time of unrest and upheaval. Like his literary forbears (Stephen Dedalus and Saleem Sinai), Cal Stephanides can’t escape history: “A single surgery and some injections would end the nightmare, and give my parents back their daughter, their Calliope, intact” (429). The nightmare of history influences Cal’s evolution. Nevertheless, following the example of his grandparents, he lives out his destiny in an atypical fashion. History doesn’t decide Cal’s fate; it only shapes his determination.
Ultimately, Cal must decide for himself who he is: It isn’t the story of Desdemona and Lefty’s childhood and experience; it isn’t the story of his parents and his upbringing; it isn’t what Dr. Luce says in his evaluation of Cal’s genetics. Cal himself must undertake the journey in order to reach his final destination. Cal’s identity is entirely his own, while still undeniably influenced by his inheritance and family history.
The entire novel is clearly influenced by the narrator’s association with the Greeks: not only his Greek immigrant family but also the ancient Greeks, who shaped Western literature in fundamental ways. The author known as Homer told two of the most seminal stories in that literary history, The Iliad and The Odyssey. While the former tells a tale about war and conquest, the latter relates a journey of homecoming. In Middlesex, Cal unspools both—the war that ultimately determines his own origin story and the travels it takes to deliver him to himself—in order to discover that the epic is truly contemporary, a way of understanding identity and how it comes to be.
Cal is conceived amid war: First, the Greco-Turkish War brings his grandparents to the US. Second, World War II brings his parents together. Finally, the battle to come to terms with his own identity defines his life: “Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other” (3). As he begins his story, he calls upon those Greek Muses to aid him in his journey and help him find his home. As he apologetically admits at the beginning, “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too” (4). It isn’t merely the family genes he has inherited that inform who he comes to be, but also the cultural influences that define his heritage. Cal has Homer in his blood.
The very act of writing informs the narrator’s identity. Not only does he call upon the Greek Muses to help him channel the multigenerational story of his life saga, but he also understands that writing helps define him: “All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell” (20). Already, the narrator acknowledges that the fluidity of gender is central to his story—and that telling the story is urgent, something that he must do. Later, he understands that his need to tell the story is also part of his cultural inheritance, “the dream of writing a book worthy of joining their number,” as he refers to the Great Books series: “[A] one hundred and sixteenth Great Book with another long Greek name on the cover” (302). His authorial self becomes part of a long and celebrated tradition. Indeed, when Cal invokes the Muse, he’s actually calling upon his younger self, Calliope. As Dr. Luce reminds him, “Calliope was one of the Muses, right?” (408). In this way, he validates his identity as a “hermaphrodite.” When Cal plays Tiresias in the school play, he’s embracing the mythical history of her ancestors in a relevant way: Tiresias, the blind prophet, was a woman for seven years.
Cal likewise wants to honor the voyage of his grandparents in escaping war and overcoming obstacles in order to forge a new life. When he’s an adult living in Germany, he thinks about this transition: “Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany […]. We’re all made of up of many parts, other halves. Not just me” (440). He’s expressing the essence of all that makes him who he is, that epic journey upon which everyone embarks—“[n]ot just me”—in order to discover the self. Thus, the epic isn’t just about a long trip across a vast sea. In Callie’s world and in Cal’s, everyone can become their own epic hero.
The house on Middlesex Boulevard represents the apotheosis of all Cal’s experiences: Cal lives in between the new world, as symbolized by the US, and the Old, as symbolized by Greece; immigrant experience is central to Cal’s life. His grandmother’s faith in her silver spoon rests side by side with her son’s faith in the ideologies of modern science. The belief in the village juxtaposes the city factories of Detroit. The realities of Detroit are complicated by history, race, and class. Always in between, Cal exemplifies something central to the American experience: the ability for reinvention. As he states clearly, near the end of the novel, “Here was my home, Middlesex” (519). This refers not only to the actual house but also to his liminal state in the simplistic binaries of gender and sex.
He understands that he was born at a special moment in history: “In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the master of his own destiny” (9-10). This seems improbable given the origins of the Stephanides family. Desdemona and Lefty leave a burning Smyrna behind—a grand city that, tragically, never fully recovers—to pave their unconventional way in the US. When Cal’s grandmother predicts that he’ll be a boy, the old country collides with the new. In fact, he’s born a girl, at least as the doctor interprets it at the time. This initially represents something about the immigrant experience that is about loss: Desdemona’s “American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded one more notch” (17). Eventually, however, that experience proves crucial to Cal’s development and to the value of preserving tradition: Desdemona is right about his chromosomes being typical of a male child, and it’s fitting that the novel ends with his respecting the traditions of the old country: He waits in the doorway, helping his father’s spirit ascend.
Not only was he born in a particular time, but he was born in a particular way: He’s neither one thing nor the other, neither American nor Greek, neither female nor male. He embodies a liminal space that allows him to navigate the complexities of his own existence and of America. His experience of his awakening sexuality and his understanding of his own identity echoes all of this. As he discovers himself, it’s “an education both in what was and what might be” (329). This could easily be applied to the situation in which his grandparents found themselves, unhoused and orphaned, caught in between the forces of history and the possibilities of the future. Cal’s journey toward self-discovery reverberates with his immigrant history. That he’s not one or the other is a liberating experience.
The house itself helps release the family from the confines of its history: Middlesex, with its strange architecture and large windows, frees the family from the memories of the past. They’re able to create their own narrative, with wide-open vistas and hidden cul-de-sacs. Certainly, the family occupies a place of privilege: The Hercules Hot Dogs franchise has allowed them the wealth to move to the suburbs and to improve their circumstances. However, they also symbolize a particular journey. Like Cal’s awareness of his unique place in the world, that he’ll forever be something in between, the place in which the family dwells never accommodates a binary: It’s both a wonderland of American prosperity and a place of reverent difference. Ultimately, Middlesex—the person, the place, the idea, and the book itself—is meant to symbolize the American dream itself, come to fruition, in all its confounding and binary-defying glory.
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