Essay On Middlesex

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, follows the upbringing of the title character, Calliope, and her Greek-American family. Beginning with a story about her secretly consanguineous grandparents immigrating to Detroit, the epic novel progresses to the story of her parents, and finally, Calliope herself. While she handles the conflicting dualities expressed within her family and her surrounding environment -- religion vs. science; Old World vs. New World -- Calliope must also cope with the idea of male vs. female when she finds out that she is actually a he and was actually born genetically male. While given the choice to remain as a female without repercussions, Calliope ignores the propensity to remain as the gender she was assigned at birth.

science when the Stephanides family expresses their different opinions towards different situations. Similar to the Old Word vs. the New World, later generations of the Stephanides’ seem to be more accepting of science than religion. While Desdemona follows religion closely and insists on going to church every weekend, her American-born son, Milton, thinks quite the opposite and the distinction is made clear very early on in the novel. However, as these younger generations have grown up in a traditional Greek Orthodox family, it is hard not to have religion, tradition and superstition influence their lives. Milton and his wife, Tessie, are guilty of this when they attempt to intentionally have a girl after hearing superstitions disguised as factual evidence. “To tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris, In the first place, Tessie didn’t believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn’t believe you should try” (9). Before Cal has even been conceived, his parents treat him as a science experiment while ironically also depend on fate and superstition to follow through with their plan. The fine line between science and superstition is often muddled. Cal himself solidifies this notion within the very first chapter of the novel, when he expresses the intermingling of science and myth through his introduction to the