Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides Essay Questions

What do you see when you think about the Holocaust? What are things you associate with it? Personally I think about the absolute evil of the Nazis and the horrible things that the Jews had to endure. I think about how gut wrenchingly terrible of a life style every one of those people had to live through and what it would be like to have been in their place. What I don’t think about and had never even considered before reading the book Ordinary Men is what it was like to be a member of one of the police battalions that had to do all these gut wrenchingly terrible crimes toward innocent human beings. I saw them as trained cold-blooded killers, robots under Hitler’s command, and nothing else. While reading this book I began to realize that these people were living human beings too, that at first felt disgusted by what they were instructed to do too and that’s what I think the author, Christopher Browning, was trying to do. He is saying that these men were just regular people that were trained to kill and that if we’re not aware of this phenomena that it could happen again.

Middlesex is an outline of the life of Calliope Stephanides who grew to the age of fourteen believing that she was a girl with unnatural thoughts for the same sex. As puberty takes hold of her friends and classmates, both Calliope and her family begin to worry about the growing gap between her and the average teenage girl; this marks the beginning of a new life for Calliope who finds she is really a he. Under the new name, Cal, this individual struggles with identity management as he traces his transformation from female to male and the genetic condition, beginning with his paternal grandparents that caused it. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog less Detroit day in January of

Gender, by definition, is the state of being male or female typically used with reference to social and cultural differences. Sex, by definition, is either male or female into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. However, society fails to separate the two. Judith Butler describes in “Phylosophe” that a young man who was murdered because he was dramatically feminine than he was “supposed” to be masculine. In the “Prelude: The Barbershop,” Ashanti Young details of his hardship of being denied from subcultural groups that he wants to identify with. Audre Lorde expresses her tyranny as a black, lesbian woman fighting through criticism and judgement and silence in “The Transformation

In the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, a group of English boys in their adolescence are stranded on an island. They crash-land while being evacuated because of an atomic war, so the boys must learn to cooperate with each other in order to survive. The boys are civil at first, but the bonds of civilization unfold as the rapacity for power and immediate desires become more important than civility and rescue. The conflict between Ralph, the protagonist, and Jack, the antagonist, represents the conflict between the impulse to civilization and the impulse to savagery, respectively. In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses Ralph and Jack’s struggle for power to show that greed and lust for power can corrupt the best

For this primary source paper, I decided to write a comparison on the source Women’s Place in Renaissance Italy: Alessandra, Letters from a Widow and Matriarch of a Great Family and The Virgin Suicides written by Jeffrey Eugenides. Immediately reading the first paragraph of Women’s Place in Renaissance Italy, it strongly resonated with The Virgin Suicides in a way. I thought these two would make an interesting comparison due to the way they both address men, death, complexity of being a female, and family.

Middlesex by Jeffry Eugenides is a book about Calliope “Cal” Stephanides. In the beginning of the book, Cal, as he likes to be referred to as, tells us about his condition. Cal has a 5-Alpha-Reductase pseudohermaphrodite which is, simply put, a condition that affects the sexual development of males before the birth of the child and also during puberty. In Middlesex, incestuous marriages were secretly accepted among the villagers which resulted in Cal being conceived by cousins. Before Cal’s birth, the tradition of his family was gender prediction by his grandmother, Desdemona Stephanides. It seemed to be a traditional thing for the family from the Greek roots. When it was time to predict Tessie’s, Cal’s mother, baby, Desdemona declared that the child would be a boy. Milton, Cal’s father, disagreed because there was no way the baby could be a boy scientifically. This could also be based on the fact that Tessie and Milton wanted a baby girl. Until the age of sixteen, Cal was raised as a girl even though he had a male brain biologically.

Gender transition: The process in which individuals begin to live and identify with the sex

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, story on events from the past affect the future. Incestuous love between a brother and sister produced a mutated gene that would affect the eventual grand-daughter morphing to a grand-son. Jeffrey Eugenides suggests that society always believes to be missing something in their life; attempting to fill the missing piece producess in mixed outcomes of good and bad.

Montag’s helmet has the number 451 on it because his job is to burn books and the number 451 represents the degree

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, inner struggles are paralleled with each setting. Taking place in the twentieth century each setting plays a significant role in explaining a theme in the novel. Fleeing Greece in a time of war and entering Detroit Michigan as immigrants parallel later events to the next generation of kin fleeing Grosse Pointe Michigan to San Francisco. These settings compliment a major theme of the novel, society has always believed to be missing something in their life and attempted to fill the missing piece.

What would she do if at the age of fourteen she found out she is the opposite sex, a hermaphrodite? In the book Middlesex by “ Jeffrey Eugenides”, Jeffrey has a character name Cal Stephanides narrate a story about his life. Cal starts off the book with the present time of his Greek family predict the sex of him. As the book progress Cal goes back in time telling his family history. Cal was originally raised as a female named Calliope but at the age of fourteen, a tragic accident happen having him to discover that he was genetically a male. Throughout the book, Middlesex had a few minor characters who made a major impact on the story line. Jimmy Zismo is a minor character who had different personality traits, was the reason for Cal to be born and made a major impact in this story.

In Jeffrey Eugenides’s book Middlesex, Calliope Stephanide tells the story of not only her transformation, but also the world’s transformation into a completely different entity. Brother and sister become husband and wife, Greeks become Americans, and, most importantly, a young girl becomes a man. Along with being a transformative novel, Middlesex is also considered a modern epic. It is an epic account that retells the history of a recessive chromosome that made its way into the life of the main character. Cal describes this recessive chromosome’s journey as it travels through many imposing events: “Cal needs to tell the story of his past in order to function in the present” (Cohen). This genetic chromosome survives a fire in Smyrna,

Describing how Cal became intersex grounds the novel in realism and makes the fiction seem like nonfiction. There are many instances where this occurs like in the first page when Cal tells the readers that, “Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5 Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,’ published in the Journal of Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity” (Eugenides 1). Eugenides implements science to make Cal seem like an actual hermaphrodite. This can make readers who are unaware that Middlesex is fiction believe that Cal is more lifelike and this adds more human characteristics. This is a method to bring needed attention to the lives and discrimination that hermaphrodites faced and still face. Eugenides use of heredity also adds more realism to the novel by describing how Cal became intersex. This adds more color to the ancestors of Cal and grounds him in realism down to his genes. This kind of microscale realism adds to the effect that this is nonfiction. Eugenides goes even further by describing Cal’s genitals. This may seem to be inappropriate, but it

The 2002 novel Middlesex, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a novel that should be read by much of the population. It chronicles three generations worth of Greek-Americans and touches upon many important issues that are still noticeable in 2017. The novel is a coming of age story for the main character and the narrator Calliope Stephanides who was born a girl but because of a mutated gene in the family DNA found out she was born a hermaphrodite, someone born with a combination of human sex organs. Middlesex is one of the most vital pieces of American literature to come out of the 2000’s because it forces us to look outside of our comfort zone and expand our minds to the struggles that are faced by those that are sometimes ignored.

In Middlesex Eugenides also uses language to convey the Stephanides’ cultural heritage and its ever shifting role in their lives. Eugenides examine how assimilation effects a family and the differences between tradition and the modern world. Eugenides sprinkle in words that are specific to Greek culture or derived from Greek throughout the novel. Eugenides writes, “ He’d left one morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest . . .” (25). He brings attention to the appearance of this traditional clothing piece by italicizing the word. The connection of the traditional garment emphasizes the Greek culture that Lefty grew up in. The use of real traditional words and pieces of Greek culture create a more realistic narrative