Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex: Summary

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex dives into the history and development of a person born in the United States as neither a girl nor a boy. The story is told from the perspective of this person who, at certain times in their life, goes by the name of Cal Stephanides and at others, goes by the name of Caliope Stephanides. The novel involves an underlying tendency of the family of the main character to seek out the stereotypical American Dream; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As the family struggles to find this dream, Cal struggles to find himself. Cal goes through a timeline of his life, not in chronological order, but in circular motion, explaining the reasons for his deformation, the history behind it, and all of his family who were

Lefty and Desdemona, grandparents to Cal, follow the typical immigrant story by fleeing their own country during a historical Turkish massacre and arriving to a historical Ellis Island. They then migrate to Detroit, Michigan, where Lefty begins working at the historical Ford Motor Company, and Eugenides explores the wonders of the historical assembly line. Desdemona is a witness to the historical founding of the Nation of Islam. Finally, Cal’s brother becomes a hippie and his father becomes a Greek Nixon after watching the historical Watergate hearings. Lene Renneflott from the University of Oslo points out in her essay Power and Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex that Cal relates himself and his internal immigration with the immigration and journey towards Americanism of his grandparents when he says “My grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much money in my pocket and under the alias of my new gender. A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come,” (Eugenides