Why I Am Not a Fan of Jeffrey Eugenides' Novel _Middlesex_

[queerbychoice]

I long ago lost count of how many of you have recommended Jeffrey Eugenides's novels to me: off the top of my head I remember recommendations from frankepi, rekraft and theobscure, but I'm pretty sure there were even more than that. I also remember one person - I think it was theobscure - mentioning that they had some reservations about the book's tendency to promote biological determinism. This warning caught my attention, yet I never imagined that this issue would turn out to be nearly so all-encompassing a problem as it did.

I finished reading Middlesex today. Yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize. Yes, the sentence structures were pretty. Yes, it meets most of the usual standards for being considered an extremely well-written book. But it has also caused me to strongly dislike its author. I feel that this is a very politically right-wing reactionary novel brilliantly disguised as a left-wing revolutionary one.

The novel is about an intersex person named Calliope Stephanides. Calliope (more often known as "Callie" for short) is born with externally female-appearing sexual organs, and is assumed to be a "normal" female baby, and is raised as such for the next 14 years. But Callie's chromosomes are actually XY, and this is discovered at puberty when Callie develops all male secondary sex characteristics. After narrowly escaping a doctor who wants to chop Callie's sexual organs down to "normal female" size, Callie shortens "her" name to Cal and chooses to live as a male for the rest of "his" life.

The scientific name given in the novel for Cal's condition is 5-Alpha Reductase Pseudohermaphroditism, although this condition usually produces visibly intersex sexual organs that are immediately noticed at birth, rather than ones that could easily be mistaken for those of a "normal" female for Cal's first 14 years of life. The author explains away this failure to notice anything unusual with the fact that Cal's grandparents are longtime personal friends of a particular doctor, who immigrated to the U.S. with them before Callie's parents were born, and so Cal's parents are loyal to this longtime family doctor even though by the time Cal is born, he's 74 years old, with badly deteriorating vision, and just to top it all off, in the middle of checking newborn Cal's sex, he gets distracted by the sight of a beautiful nurse who he marries soon thereafter (yes, at age 74 - or 75, by then).

The scenario of nobody noticing anything unusual about "Callie"'s body is somewhat of a long shot, but certainly not impossible to believe, especially with all these convenient excuses provided. It's just that there's very little data on any real life cases to base this fictional work's characterization upon.

Oh, also, the novel goes much further out of its way than necessary to detail a much larger amount of inbreeding than necessary to "explain" Cal's inheritance of a recessive intersex genetic mutation. Not only are Cal's parents first cousins, but Cal's paternal grandparents are brother and sister, and not only that, but in addition to being brother and sister, they're also third cousins - due to even more intermarriage further back in the family tree. Cal even adds that these intermarriages specified in the book are only a tiny simplified fraction of all the total intermarriages in the family. But really, why is all of this necessary? The recessive genetic mutation is specified as involving only a single gene: people who inherit one copy of the muated gene but a "normal" copy from their other parent end up "normal," but people who inherit two mutated copies, one from each parent, end up intersex (at least if they have XY chromosomes: XX bodies are affected if they get two copies, but the degree to which they are affected is far less noticeable). Because the mutation involves only the two copies of a single gene, one from each parent, all that is required for Cal to inherit the recessive genetic mutation is that Cal's two immediate parents both possess a copy of the same mutation. The odds of this happening are much better if Cal's parents are genetically related somehow, and their being first cousins certainly accomplishes that. But for Cal's paternal grandparents to be brother and sister is quite unnecessary - Cal's father could still inherit his single copy of the genetic mutation just as easily if Cal's grandparents weren't related at all. If anything, all this intermarrying of so many generations prior to Cal's parents just makes it less believable that the family somehow isn't full of dozens of other intersex people in addition to Cal. So I feel that Jeffrey Eugenides's gratuitous inclusion of far more incest than is actually relevant to explaining Cal's intersex genes betrays just how "unnatural" and "undesireable" he really considers intersex people to be - he stigmatizes them as though they can only come to exist in families with levels of inbreeding comparable to historical British royal families!

Anyway, on with the genetic determinism. On page 19, Cal goes out of "his" way to state: "If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture, you couldn't come up with anything better than my life." Then, of course, Jeffrey Eugenides helpfully explains to us exactly what the outcome of this experiment would be, in spite of the fact that it's being conducted purely in fiction. Despite not having the slightest reason to suspect that "she" is anything but female, "Callie" proceeds to be completely exclusively attracted to women "his" whole entire life, even from the age of eight, fully six years before actual puberty. (I've heard enough other people talk about having experienced sexual attraction long before puberty that I've come to accept that it does happen to some people, but it did not happen to me or to a lot of other people I know, and so I consider it to be a relatively rare event. In this case, I think the author resorts to staging a relatively rare event specifically because it's just that important to him to assert that "Callie"'s sexual attraction to females had to have been produced solely by having XY chromosomes, because puberty was still too far off for any of its beginnings to have suggested yet in "Callie"'s mind that "she" might not be a "normal" female). The revelation that Cal has XY chromosomes is supposed to suddenly explain why Cal has always been exclusively attracted to women. Cal remarks on page 166: "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level." Despite the fact that hormone balances have been studied continually for a century in search of "explanations" for queerness and have been so thoroughly discredited as an "explanation" by now that not even the craziest of the "gay gene" seeking scientists like Simon Le Vay and Dean Hamer bother to bring up that notion anymore!

The scenes when "Callie" is 14 and gets taken to a medical specialist who discovers "her" XY chromosomes do earn my approval for thoroughly condemning the tendency of doctors to carve people up without informed consent or giving them much of any time to think it over first. The medical specialist, Dr. Luce, asks "Callie" a variety of questions to determine "her" gender identity, many of which are actually questions about sexual prefence, and he does not tell "Callie" anything about chromosomes or what "her" body will develop like in the future or what all these questions are for. As a result, "Callie" lies and tells Dr. Luce everything "she" thinks "she" is supposed to say, in response to what "she" interprets as accusations of lesbianism: "she" omits all mention of having been attracted to girls, kissed girls, fallen madly in love with and had sex with a girl (all this at only 14!), and instead makes up lies about nonexistent crushes on boys, and throws in a mention of having had "sex" with a boy once (in reality this event would have been better described as rape, and "Callie" did not enjoy it one bit). Dr. Luce responds by informing "Callie" and "her" parents that "she" is a female who just needs a little quick surgery to chop "her" sexual organs down to "normal" female size, and then regular estrogen injections forever after. The only reason Cal escapes from this fate at all is the random coincidence that Dr. Luce's receptionist happened to call him out of the room unexpectedly during an appointment and then Cal, left alone in Dr. Luce's office, happened to wander over to Dr. Luce's desk and stumble onto his case description of "Callie," which Dr. Luce had never intended for "Callie" or "her" parents to read. Through this accidental reading, "Callie" discovers that "she" has XY chromosomes and "she" then reconceptualizes "himself" as Cal, and runs away from home to live on the streets, still 14 years old, just to escape the surgery Dr. Luce had planned.

So don't get me wrong: I'm certainly very glad that Jeffrey Eugenides thoroughly condemned Dr. Luce and other doctors like him. What I object to is that the alternative that Jeffrey Eugenides advocates in this novel is not a radical new world in which hermaphrodites will be free to explore multiple gender ideas and choose their gender presentation freely without being pressured to conform to anyone's preconceived notion about what gender they "ought" to be. Rather, he's merely substituting an absolutely thoroughly mainstream modern definition of gender as being determined by the chromosomes for a 1970s model of gender as being determined by the patient's personal "choice" when under massive pressure from unethical doctors who give hardly any information about what the "choices" actually consist of. This is the exact same absolutely thoroughly mainstream shift in our society's definition of gender that has been taking place in the Texas court system where transsexuals used to be only allowed to marry people of the opposite gender to their current gender but are now only allowed to marry people of the opposite gender to their birth chromosome gender. (And who the hell XXY and XXX chromosome people are allowed to marry in Texas, the Texas court system has not yet gotten around to commenting upon.) This shift in the definition of gender is completely not left-wing revolutionary. Hell, it's right-wing reactionary! A left-wing revolutionary shift in the defintion of gender would base the definition more on personal choice, and would simply eliminate the tendency for doctors to withhold relevant information and unethically pressure people about what to choose, and would eliminate the concept that parents can be allowed to make such choices for their children. But instead of turning the cruelly unfree so-called "choices" that doctors like Dr. Luce pressure people for into real choices with informed consent and no pressure, the "gender is determined by chromosomes" theory that Jeffrey Eugenides and the Texas court system are advocating just gives people even less choice (well, you can't really get any less than what was usually zero choice to begin with, but even less of even an acknowledgment that it should be their choice) about what their gender should be.

I think there's a tendency for people to imagine that any book that even acknowledges the existence of intersex people is somehow automatically left-wing revolutionary, but that is not true at all. To mention any topic does not automatically specify in which direction you're trying to influence your readers' opinions about that topic. In the case of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex, I feel that his primary goal in writing the novel was to assert that gender and especially, more than any other aspect of gender, sexual preferences, are inborn. Lacking sufficient data for a real "experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture," he decided to invent a fictional experiment that he'd be free to write in such a way as to say what he wanted it to say. To do this, he found it convenient to invent an intersex person, but I do not feel that what he says about intersex people is particularly any less hurtful than what doctors like Dr. Luce say. The novel encourages any parents of intersex children who read it to interpret their children's chromosomes as the final say on what their children's gender identity should be and will be. Sure, there are occasional mentions that Cal's adult gender identity isn't completely unaffected by having been raised for 14 years as a girl, but certainly Cal's sexual preference for women is very clearly specified as having been biologically determined by chromosomes, and since most heterosexual parents still prefer to have heterosexual children, that belief alone would tend to bias them quite decidedly toward forcing their child into the gender of their child's chromosomes.

Comments

[paperthinwalls.livejournal.com]

those first two sentences of yours do not mutually inclusive--believe me, i've met some people--but in your case i'll assume both are true.

i think you are looking at this whole topic through an issue-driven lens. yes, fiction sometimes ['extremely frequently'? i'm not sure about that as a construction or a statement] promotes ideas about the world that extend beyond the story itself. but to what end? are we to believe that they are more important than the story itself? 'ideas about the world' assumes that we are dealing with the same world in which we live and breathe as we read the book--which can never be assumed with a work of fiction. 'extend[ing] beyond the story itself' also assumes that when this extension happens, it is into the 'real' world of the reader, rather than the larger world of the characters. this may sound nitpicky, but i assure you: it's not. imagine taking a creative writing seminar and hearing that for three hours.

there are a lot of assumptions being made here. the point is simply this: is a novel required to conform to some code of conduct because it takes on topics on which others [in more appropriate forums than the novel] have taken a stance? in other words, is the novelist then required to stay away from all controversial topics if he or she is not prepared to tackle them in what the theorists of that area would deem a 'responsible' and 'completely informed' way? might the novelist simply write a work which is complicated, beautiful, occasionally ugly, specific to his or her characters, and utterly human? or must it have a capital-A Agenda to be legitimate?

oh, i have a degree as well. not that it helps much in the world of livejournal.

[paperthinwalls.livejournal.com]

'those first two sentences of yours do not mutually inclusive'--that should be 'are not.'

way to make myself sound intelligent. ;)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

i think you are looking at this whole topic through an issue-driven lens.

And that's somehow wrong? Surely LiveJournal entries about books are permitted to focus on a certain particular aspect of the book in question.

"'ideas about the world' assumes that we are dealing with the same world in which we live and breathe as we read the book--which can never be assumed with a work of fiction."

"Assumed," perhaps not. "Argued for," certainly. The author chooses to construct the facts of the novel in a particular way to have a particular effect upon readers' minds, and it is both valid and an entirely common form of literary analysis to examine what the way a particular author constructed a particular novel suggests the author's motivations to be. Imagine an English class in which an instructor insisted that there was no reasonable way to guess at or no legitimate purpose to discussing the political motivations of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Feinberg, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Richard Wright . . . Could you honestly maintain the slightest respect for an English professor who asserted that there was no reasonable way to surmise Harriet Beecher Stowe's opinion of slavery based on the text of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Alice Walker's opinion of female genital cutting based on the text of Possessing the Secret of Joy?

"the point is simply this: is a novel required to conform to some code of conduct because it takes on topics on which others [in more appropriate forums than the novel] have taken a stance? in other words, is the novelist then required to stay away from all controversial topics if he or she is not prepared to tackle them in what the theorists of that area would deem a 'responsible'
and 'completely informed' way?"

Of course not. Disagreement with a novelist's ideas does not in any way imply belief that the novel should not have been permitted to be written or published. A novelist is required, however, to put up with being criticized for his or her promotion of certain ideas, the same as any human being who voices an opinion in any medium is required to put up with being criticized for it by his or her audience.

"might the novelist simply write a work which is complicated, beautiful, occasionally ugly, specific to his or her characters, and utterly human? or must it have a capital-A Agenda to be legitimate?"

A novelist is free to write any novel a novelist feels like writing, and "legitimate" is a subjective judgment that different readers are free to hold different opinions of. I personally would not object in the least if I perceived a novel to have no political agenda at all; however, it is my opinion that Middlesex quite clearly does have a capital-A agenda, and that its capital-A agenda is one I strongly disagree with. This does not in any way mean that I advocate censoring it, but it does mean that I feel perfectly free to write LiveJournal entries criticizing it.

[paperthinwalls.livejournal.com]

[ miss wolf pursed her lips. 'there was quite a distinguished english department at the university there many years ago, but i don't suppose it's managed to fend off the theorists better than anywhere else.'

--ann packer, from the dive off clausen's pier]

you are permitted to discuss anything you feel like discussing. no one, least of all me, is calling that 'wrong' or asking you to censor yourself. that is the beauty of livejournal.

i suppose i'm just confused as to why you have chosen to take such an offensive [i.e. the opposite of 'defensive'] stance regarding this book. for a piece of art of any medium to stir up emotion is a powerful and at times necessary thing, but when the viewer or reader seems to go looking for a fight because of the piece's association with issues about which they feel strongly........well, i guess my knee just doesn't jerk as hard as yours.

"Assumed," perhaps not. "Argued for," certainly. The author chooses to construct the facts of the novel in a particular way to have a particular effect upon readers' minds, and it is both valid and an entirely common form of literary analysis to examine what the way a particular author constructed a particular novel suggests the author's motivations to be.

i think you've missed my point here. the author constructs the facts of the novel in a particular way, yes, and in doing so creates an entirely different world in which the characters of the novel are to function. it is not your world. it is not mine. it is the author's, and by holding fiction to the same standards as nonfiction, i think you are making a mistake. grant the author the right to a little imagination, the authority [see how nicely that works?] to create a world which might not subscribe to/acknowledge/agree with your own political/personal motivations. perhaps they are there. but it is the author's decision. nothing exists in a novel that is not placed there by the novelist, even those things that go unsaid. fiction is a lie.

Could you honestly maintain the slightest respect for an English professor who asserted that there was no reasonable way to surmise Harriet Beecher Stowe's opinion of slavery based on the text of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Alice Walker's opinion of female genital cutting based on the text of Possessing the Secret of Joy?

quite honestly, i could only maintain respect for an english professor who asserted that there was no reasonable way to surmise either of those things. that is the only honest, objective place to begin a discussion about literature. not trying to get into the minds and motivations of the authors--trying to get into the world of the book, and its particular set of rules, issues, and quirks. i certainly wouldn't have time for an instructor who professed to know the motivation of mr. eugenides regarding middlesex, either. let me ask you something, does your fictional english professor have personal knowledge of harriet beecher stowe or alice walker? perhaps they have had coffee together, and beecher stowe confessed, 'you know, what i was thinking when i wrote uncle tom's cabin was.......'? because otherwise, your only possible action is to discuss the actions and opinions of the characters. how do they relate to the issues you've discussed? you see, of course, the difference. let the novelists off the hook and leave them free to lie, lie, lie their hearts out for hundreds of pages. that is what a novelist does.

good lord, this must be why they keep the theorists and the aesthetes separated.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I choose to take the "offensive" stance because I am focusing on the particular aspect of the book that is of greatest interest to me. I do not dispute the fact that Jeffrey Eugenides writes very artistically structured sentences and paragraphs. There are, however, plenty of other people who've spent plenty of time saying that already. My particular area of greatest interest is opposing genetic determinist ideas about sexual preferences and gender, as my website is devoted to. Therefore, when I write about a novel, I write about it as me, as the owner of QueerByChoice.com, as a person who is known to be greatly interested in opposing genetic determinist ideas about sexual preferences and gender, and as a person whose audience for anything I write, including book reviews, is likely to consist largely of people who share this interest. It makes sense for me to focus my writings about books from this angle because I know it well and my audience is interested in it. I chose to write about that particular book because it was conducive to being written about from that angle.

It is not surprising to me at all that your knee doesn't jerk as hard as mine on this subject, because it's me and not you who's spent the last twelve years in the perplexing situation of being told by a majority of the society I live in that I can't possibly have had any control over the choice I made one day twelve years ago to become queer, even while the same exact people still acknowledge that I did have control over the choices I made about what car to buy or what apartment to rent or what political party to register with, despite the fact that all such choices feel qualitatively identical to me and in each case I have the same types of memories about a time when I did not have this car, this apartment, left-wing politics or queer sexual attractions, and in each case I have the same types of memories of contemplating reasons for and against various options before setlling upon one of them. Obviously my knee jerks harder on this subject than just about anyone's, because there aren't many other people who've written whole websites devoted to the subject. That is because the response we're talking about is not actually an emotionless inborn reflex like a knee jerk at all, but rather an emotional socially conditioned response of anger that has built up from having been attacked by genetic determinists too many times in the past. I suspect that you have certain topics that make you particularly angry too, due to similarly extensive unpleasant experiences with people who argue for certain points of view - but if you don't, then count yourself lucky for having had an easy life.

"let me ask you something, does your fictional english professor have personal knowledge of harriet beecher stowe or alice walker?"

Let me ask you something: do you seriously believe that you could stand at a podium in front of, say, the Million Man March on Washington, a million African American men demonstrating for their equal rights, and state to the crowd, "I honestly have absolutely no idea whether or not Harriet Beecher Stowe approved or disapproved of slavery, and I can only maintain respect for anyone else who also states that they can have absolutely no idea whether she approved or disapproved of it, and I certainly wouldn't have time for anyone who claimed they could reasonably surmise anything about her opinion of slavery," and not go down in history for provoking one of the most severe outbursts of mass fury the United States has ever witnessed?

Because I don't have time for anyone who's that stupid. If you want to talk about places to begin a discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin, sure, we can begin with a blank slate, but any serious effort to teach all aspects of the craft of authorship necessarily includes teaching how authors promote their ideas an politics in novels, and that means the class must at some point acknowledge the fact that the images of slavery presented in Uncle Tom's Cabin certainly are placed there for the purpose of trying to persuade the reader to oppose slavery in real life.

[paperthinwalls.livejournal.com]

you know, i had a reply ready for this right up until the moment that you called me stupid. i was listening. and you went all playground on me. all nyah nyah nyah.

i'll save my breath for someone who can debate like a big, fat grownup. good night.