Escaping War and Searching for a Land:

Middlesex (2002) and Immigration

by Zekayi Kılıç

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides revolves around the immigration experience of the Greek Stephanides family who immigrates to the USA in the early 20th century. The experiences of the family are juxtaposed with the struggles of its third-generation member, the main protagonist Cal’s story of being intersex in the 1970s. The novel’s narration that tries to touch on each generation of the family, and especially the main immigrants Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides helps to portray the ethnic and social dilemmas that exist in immigrants’ lives. For the Stephanides family, immigration is a hope to escape to a country where they can enjoy basic human rights.

            Change of place caused by wars is compared to the protagonist’s way of escaping the intimacy problems caused by being intersex. ‘They fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself.’ (443) Similar to his grandparents, Cal changes countries to create a new life and feel emotionally secure. Moreover, Cal traces his intersex genotype back to her grandparents’ incestuous marriage which took place on the ship that sailed from Smyrna. The author intentionally blends the tale of an intersex person with the tale of the immigrant ancestors to show that the choices of the ancestors can cause a genotype change and appear in further generations. This allows the novel to cover many decades, the birth and growth of multiple characters, and events such as the Burning of Smyrna, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Korean War.

In Middlesex, the creation of a new identity in new places is a very important theme. When the immigrant siblings/partners first move to the USA, to fit into society they had to change drastically. It is the hard part of the immigration process for the Stephanides family, especially for the grandmother Desdemona. The fact that immigration can only carry her body, but not the life in Turkey, Desdemona feels alienated in the new country. In the end, she needs to transform into a Greek American. Something similar happens to Cal too. Every time he escapes to a new country, he escapes as a man. However, he must live with the memories and the traumas of the girl he was. Each place change means both the beginning and the ending of the suffering. The new place symbolizes hope and safety, and he can transform into the man he wants to be accepted as. However, in his romantic relationships, he keeps having difficulties being accepted as an intersex person. His genitalia and the traumas of sex change become a lifelong hindrance to his happiness, and he deeply relates his ‘misfortune’ to his grandparents’ transformative immigration journey.

In conclusion, through the portrayal of the escape from the war to finding a new home, Middlesex gives us the cruel moments of war and the hopeful moments in the new country. The novel allows us to explore the immigration’s effect on immigrants’ lives and makes us see what values can be upheld to create a country without human rights violations against immigrants.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.