Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Wow! What a book! Jeffrey Eugenides, in telling the story of Calliope/Cal Stephanides, has written a Greek epic, much on the order of Homer’s The Iliad. Calliope in Greek Mythology was the muse of epic poetry. Webster defines an “epic” as a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero. Only with the help of the muse could the author pull off this manipulation of point of view from first person, with Calliope, the heroine, and later, Cal, the hero, as narrator, to third person omniscient: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And it is “at the age of forty-one,” Cal says, “I feel another birth coming on” (3):
“Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own Midwestern womb” (3-4).
In Greek mythology, it was believed that it was the muse Calliope, who, as one of the nine beautiful daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory), enables the epic poet to relate things legendary or historical that only the muse could know. And it is for this reason, Calliope/Cal is able to reach all the way back to her/his immigrant grandparents as possibly the origin of, or rather an explanation for, their “hermaphroditism.” (Today, the politically correct term is “intersex.”) … thus, Calliope’s/Cal’s knowledge of her/his Greek immigrant grandparents. And it was the muse, also, who enabled her/him to narrate as a fetus and before that, as an egg lying in wait to be fertilized.
If credence is to be given to superstition, her/his condition as a hermaphrodite begins with her/his grandparents Desdemona and Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides. In the war with the Turks in the early Twentieth Century, their homeland is destroyed, and their parents are killed. Desdemona and Eleutherios (“Lefty”) migrate to America and settle in Detroit. But … on the voyage over, they, brother and sister, unnaturally in love with each other, marry; and for quite some time, keep their secret. Years later, their son marries his cousin…. Their first child, a son, is born. Then, Calliope, their second child is born, and it is not until years later that an aberration in her anatomy is detected. It is at this time that surgery is recommended to remove the male parts of her anatomy, but she refuses. Thus, she begins a journey of self discovery in which she ends up as Cal.
Hermaphroditism—the correct term is intersex— is a subject until recently, almost never talked about; and until Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel was chosen by Oprah as her book club selection this summer, very few knew anything about this subject. And true to its epic genre, Calliope and Cal are true heroes in their acceptance of their differences and their triumphs over the obstacles they face in their unique situation. Until “Oprah,” I had never accorded any truth to the myth: Hermaphroditus: in Greek Mythology, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who became united in body with the nymph Salmacis. So not only was it an eye opener to learn there are intersex people living quite normal, happy lives, but it was also an enjoyable, suspenseful read. I will admit to some difficulty at the beginning in accepting the omniscient first person narrator, but when I realized Eugenides was writing in the Homeric epic style, using the ubiquitous, omniscient muse, my problem was solved.
Reviewed by Lee L. Peoples
ISBN-13:978-0-312-42773-3
ISBN-10:0-312-42773-5
Reviewed by Lee L. Peoples
