“As Judith Butler points out cogently in Gender Trouble, gender identity is not fixed, but created in the act of performativity. How does Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, Middlesex, subvert our received ideas of inherent gender identity?” (UNISA, 2010: 12).
Eugenides’ Middlesex could well have been written with this module in mind. Exploring each of race, class and gender, its essence is nevertheless not these three aspects of life themselves but the very intersection between them and what the hybridity and its limitations create and mean for the novel’s characters. It is therefore arguably impossible and certainly undesirable to study one of these aspects in isolation; for by doing so, the central intersection, the ‘middle’ of Middlesex, would be lost. Therefore, gender identity in this essay is examined in the context of the novel’s many levels of hybridism, namely the intersections between gender, sexuality and ethnicity. By venturing into the ‘middle’ of gender and commenting on the controversial theories of the ‘other’, Middlesex leads us to “subvert our received ideas of inherent gender identity (UNISA; 2010: 12). This is also in part due to Eugenides’ cleverly made point that while scientists, theorists and lobbyists rage, the desire for theory, what is scientific and politically correct does not always lesson the pain of being an ‘other’ for people who have been born intersex. This is approached by Shostak who writes that “because real people also inhabit intersexed bodies, suffering the social consequences of their exclusion from normatively categorized identities, more is obviously at stake in thinking about intersexuality than theory itself” (2002: 33).
In the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, Butler states that “…performativity is not a singular act but a repetition and a ritual,” (xvi). Until a teenager, Cal lives life as a girl and even though he sensed that he was a different kind of ‘she’ (“…I wasn’t a girl but something in between” – Eugenides; 2002: 375) had assumed his gender as undisputable until examined. The performativity of gender is attested at the time of narration when Cal’s once-assumed femaleness sneaks through into his male life, a timid alter ego whose existence has been made permanent by years of being; possession by something performed into life: “Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It's a little like being possessed” (Eugenides; 2002: 41).
Zerilli’s critique of Butler’s Gender Trouble as a “paradigm for understanding gender as a performance rather than an essence” (Shostak; 2008: 4) is illustrated by Middlesex. During Cal’s journey across America, he speaks of learning “about my new body” (Eugenides; 2002: 452) and about “bodily metamorphosis” (519). The synecdoche of his language simplifies what he cannot verbalise, even as Cal the adult: it is not his body that undergoes a metamorphosis, but his psychology and conception of the same body he has always inhabited. That is, the essence of his gender, that is, his body, undergoes no change during his trip (which is foreshadowed by Lefty and Desdemona’s journey to America, characterised by relationship transformation as Cal’s is by gender transformation), but his performance does: “I walked across the room, concentrating as I did on walking like a boy” (Eugenides; 2002: 441). His gender transformation is thus purely due to performance – his clothes, voice and haircut as well as his walk.
In her essay “Theory Uncomplicated by Practicality”: Hybridity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Debra Shostak compares the practicality of living as an intersex person with theory for the group’s advancement and representation; and the practicality of Middlesex as the middle, as in between, with the theory of hybridism: it is not in the middle at all, but rather means “to be something else” (Shostak; 2008: 2). She quotes Daniel Mendelsohn’s review, Mighty Hermaphrodite (2002), as saying that the novel “pretends to be about being in the middle, only to end up suggesting that you have to choose either end” (Ibid); that is, male or female, homosexual or heterosexual. However, Eugenides himself claims the term hybrid for his novel, saying “The book, like its hermaphroditic narrator, was meant to be a hybrid. Part third-person epic, part first-person coming of age tale” (Safran Foer; 2002).
Middlesex celebrates hybridity not only in content, but in style; the mixture between first and third person narration means that, as Lee Merton puts it in Why Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Is So Inoffensive (2010), “As a heterodiegetic narrator who later becomes homodiegeic, Cal’s narrative presence…makes him in a sense always homodiegetic or always part of the action” (37). Thus, he says, the reader is assured from the start that Lefty and Desdemona escape the fires of Smyrna to America and that Cal is ultimately male (Ibid). The focus is therefore not so much on the outcome of the two primary plots but on the processes that the characters pass through. While Lefty and Desdemona’s story serves as a logical explanation for Cal’s five-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, it also foreshadows much of Cal’s in between state or ‘middleness’ (which Shostak refers to as introducing “the conceptual problems of sameness and difference”, 2008: 7). The socially taboo theme of incest coincides with that of intersex (also socially taboo and in this case a result of incest) and as Desdemona is “haunted by fears of the consequences of inbreeding” (Lee; 2010: 34), it fulfils those fears.
During Middlesex a triangle of gender, ethnicity and sexuality is constructed. The connection between gender and ethnicity is illustrated largely in the similarities between the stories of Lefty and Desdemona’s immigration into the United States and Cal renouncing his performed femaleness to become a male; also in Cal’s apprehensive courtship of Julie, an Asian-American woman. One of the strengths of the novel is the push-pull tension that Eugenides creates between belonging, assimilation and the middle of the continuum; estrangement, when one belongs to neither balance. Tangibly illustrated by the difficulties of Greek-American immigration, Cal’s grandparents’ story serves as an analogy for Cal’s experience along the gender continuum. Daniel Mendelsohn describes this push-pull as “The tension between who Callie is raised to be and who Cal ends up being, between his early life as a girl and his subsequent life as a man, are obviously intended to serve as occasions for musing upon all kinds of bimorphisms and dualities” (2002).
Required to buy a house, brush his teeth and use soap by Ford, arguably the most iconic American corporation of the time, (who thus assumes that foreigners do not subscribe to American levels of hygiene), Lefty has little choice but to become as much as possible assimilated into American culture, even having to take English classes at the “Ford English School Melting Pot” (Eugenides; 2010: 104). Desdemona however, plagued by the guilt of their incest, clings onto her Greek culture in the new she finds herself, saying to Lefty “I don't want to look like an Amerikanidha” (82). Little wonder then that Lefty and Desdemona fail to find a common or shared ‘middle’ for their marriage; the marriage that was instigated at such great cost and which was designed strengthen both familial and cultural ties. Although Cal is in the singular, one person who needs to find an “inhabitable middle” (Shostak; 2002: 8) for himself, he too is conflicted. This is largely due to his involuntary defiance of social norms, first as a female, his attraction to the same gender and secondly, as a male, his reluctance to engage in sexual activities due to his physical differences.
The junction between gender and ethnicity is also highlighted in Cal and Julie’s romance. She is as wary of him as he is of opening up to her. Saying "My gay-dar went off completely" (Eugenides; 2002: 184), Julie explains that she has often been approached by gay men who are attracted to her because “Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy's in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bodies are more like boys" (Ibid). Calling Eugenides’ portrayal of Julie “vaguely racist”, Lee goes on to say that “Julie's experience suggests that Asian femininity is specifically racialized as a femininity similarly deprived of reality in American culture at large” (2010: 39) which the novel’s intersection between gender and ethnicity, and how gender is perceived and ascribed differently in different cultures. This further evidences it as performance rather than essence (for if it was an essence it would be universally consistent and recognisable).
Cal and Julie’s gender discussion leads naturally to the hybridity between gender and sexuality in the novel. The assurance that Cal gives to Julie of her body not being boyish does not seem to alleviate her wariness. When she switches the light off she says that it is “Because I’m a shy, modest Oriental lady” (Eugenides; 2002: 514), the darkness shielding both the intersex and the Asian body and “implying that some excess of shame persists” (Lee; 2010: 43). However, through sex Julie and Cal achieve the completeness and acceptance of each other that Desdemona and Lefty expected but never found. Describing each other as their respective “last stops”, this can be seen as either a resigned settling, a consolation; or each other as the right ‘fit’ for happiness together.
In response to Cal’s assertion that he became male because “Desire made [him] cross over to the other side, desire and the facticity of [his] body. . . .” (Eugenides; 2002: 479), Mendelsohn wonders why he could not have been a gay female (2002). The heteronormative tones for which the novel has been criticised are borne out by Cal’s guilt for his attraction to the Obscure Object: “since it wasn't me who did this but Rex Reese I didn't have to feel guilty, didn't have to ask myself if I was having unnatural desires" (my italics: 375). That is why, according to Shostak, she does not consider
“retain[ing] her "uncorrected" anatomy and continu[ing] to live as a girl, a failure of imagination largely connected to her experience of erotic desire for another girl...she is also at the mercy of the system of compulsory heterosexuality that would marginalize and punish her desire, constructed as "lesbian." (my italics, 2002:12).
However, in reply to Mendelsohn and in the firmly hetero-socialised Cal’s defence, with all sexuality aside, he does not feel fully comfortable as a girl growing up, explaining the signs of manliness, “I began to exude some kind of masculinity; in the way I tossed up and caught my eraser...” (Eugenides; 2002: 304). It can also be stated in response to the same comment that Cal’s decision to become male was in part because if he had chosen to remain living as a female he would have had little choice about the ‘corrective’ surgery aimed to align his body with his gendered childhood. He would have thus sacrificed “the capacity for sexual pleasure that...may be compromised by such surgery” (Shostak; 2002: 12). Cal almost instinctively shies away from surgery that is designed to ‘correct’ him, thereby protecting what he calls his “crocus” and rebelliously defying the definition of hermaphrodite (a “monster”) that he finds in the library.
Cal is only able to return home as a man after travelling across America and working at the Sixty-Niners peep show. Despite the job being exploitative, he meets other people who are different and have been classed as ‘others’ and gains acceptance from both them and the club’s patrons who pay to see him perform.
In Cal’s choosing to live as a male, Eugenides demonstrates how limited the scope of his choice actually is, something that Cal does not realise. As quoted above, Cal speaks of how “desire...made him cross over to the other side” (my italics, Eugenides; 2002: 479), a revealing quote from which several things should be addressed. Firstly, the use of the word “made”, which instantly removes all choice. Secondly, his having to cross over to the “other side” which indicates a binary of gender. Therefore, in a sense there really is no ‘middle sex” at all, merely two end points one is ‘allowed’ by society to occupy. Shostak states that Cal “continues to protest that one can choose and that one’s choice can counter genes or upbringing...such a choice does not support a position of betweeness. Each figure Eugenides chooses falls short of the newly thinkable because each inevitably tumbles back into the binary” (2002: 16). Cal therefore shied away from his “unnatural” desire for women meaning that his ‘choice’ was ultimately dictated according to the only binary which thus felt “natural” – the heterosexual one. Without fully realising it, Cal admits the general lack of choice, saying “But in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born” (Eugenides; 2002: 19).
However, the circumstances in which Cal is placed compulsorily forces him to reject social norms in one way or another. He can either live as a homosexual female, change his gender and live as a heterosexual male or choose to define himself by neither of the two but to live as an intersex person. Thus even his normative ‘choice’ to change his sex brings with it shame and is in itself a rebellion (as is evidenced in his running away from home), the narrowly defined norms of his life mean that he assumes that he will not be accepted by his own family or community. Furthermore, his decision not to have ‘corrective’ surgery and therefore to retain his “crocus” for which there is no official name, is significant as forgoing being ‘corrected’ means that he may be defined as a “monster”. This shows brave rebellion against certain norms and an element of choice.
Another way in which social convention is parodied throughout Middlesex is in the use of names or labels – what Lee calls “terminological distinction” (2010: 33). Perhaps because of his Greek heritage or perhaps because of the more allegorical connotation, Cal uses the term ‘hermaphrodite’ to describe himself. The only time he uses the more politically correct term ‘intersex’ is when he discusses politics, saying of himself “I happen not to be a political person” (Eugenides; 2002: 106), which is somewhat ironic because he works in international diplomacy. Cal’s own name too, changes with his gender from the feminine Callie to the masculine Cal; their root, Calliope, staying constant much like the essence of their namesake. In the transitions between first and third person narration, this difference in name serves to regularly remind the reader that Cal is ultimately male and that the story is told from his perspective.
The reader’s perceptions of gender identity are challenged and ultimately toppled by Cal’s account of his life as a hermaphrodite. Exploration of the middle serves largely to emphasise the margins, demonstrating society’s shamefully narrow borders of what is considered normal. As Cal says, “Normality wasn’t normal...If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone” (Eugenides; 2002: 446). However, as Eugenides shows, the freedom not to choose a binary is a “project not easily realized within the lives of those who must occupy the space of difference” (Shostak; 2002: 4). Much of the power of Middlesex lies hybridist nature - its amalgams and crossroads, the lack of conclusions and the many unanswerable questions it poses about the meeting of gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
Sources Consulted
Butler, Judith P. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
During, Simon E. (ed.). 2007. The Cultural Studies Reader. 3rd edition. Routledge: New York.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. 2002. Middlesex. Bloomsbury: London.
Lee, M. 2010. Why Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Is So Inoffensive. Critique (Atlanta, Ga). 51 (1): 32-46.
Mendelsohn, D. 2002. Mighty Hermaphrodite. Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/nov/07/mighty-hermaphrodite/. Accessed: 01/07/2010.
Safran Foer, J. 2002. Jeffrey Eugenides. Available at: http://bombsite.com/issues/81/articles/2519. Accessed: 01/07/2010.
Shostak, D. 2008. “Theory Uncompromised by Practicality”: Hybridity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. Contemporary Literature. Volume 49, Number 3.
UNISA. 2010. ENN4804 – Tutorial Letter 101 for 2010. Pretoria
