"Middlesex" by Jeffery Eugenides Essay

Parents cling to their children wanting them to stay young forever, wanting endless memories and nothing to change, yet they must be able to part from these feelings to allow the child to grow. In the story “A Private Talk with Holly”, the author, Henry Felsen, uses symbolism to convey the central idea that if you love someone you have to let them go. When Holly, the main character of the story, talks to her Dad about changing her plans, he is faced with a difficult decision, but in the end he allows Holly to chase her dreams for her own good.

The memoir of Jeannette Walls had several characters, important people in her life. But, there was one specific character, her dad, that she had a close relationship with. Jeannette Walls grew up in poverty and always moved around. Her family was close, but Jeannette was closest to her father over anyone else. She loved and admired her father and defended him too. Her memoir, “The Glass Castle” is very popular. She is a grown-up now and cares about her parents. She offers to help them out of poverty, but they resist. Jeannette certainly cares for both parents, but her father has a special place in her heart. Jeannette has a special relationship with her father because she admired his heroicness, she got to pick Venus as her star, and he helped her and distracted her from being scared and in pain.

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

Juliet’s father forces Juliet to marry Paris, and if she does not he threatens to leave her to ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’. This arranged marriage with one she does not love compels Juliet to find an urgent resolution, and this resolution contributes to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. The families’ feud contributes to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, as they know that their relationship must remain unknown. The feud leads to delusion and deceit, and their eventual death. Ultimately, the feud between the families makes their deception necessary and inevitable; but this deception leads to their untimely deaths.

In the three stories “Eveline”, “A Rose for Emily”, and “Desiree’s Baby” three single women go about love in three different ways. Their struggles for love are similar; the decisions they made you will not believe. One thing you can say about all the women is their poor love lives. With their fathers in their way, the women find it hard to find love. Love is a four letter word that everyone wants, but some never get to experience the happiness. While Eveline, Miss Emily, and Desiree have controlling fathers, they want love; one walked away from her happiness, one kills for it, and another kills herself.

Beginning with the complexities of Ida’s family–including her nuclear family with the addition of her aunt Clara–and her social life and later relationships, the eldest-most narrator recalled her perspective of the significant events of the early-to-mid chapter of her lifetime and the outcomes of her relationships within. Almost directly after being introduced to Ida’s point of view, it is revealed that her aunt and best friend, Clara had, through the duration of her sister’s–Ida’s mother–illness, been impregnated with the child of her brother-in-law–Ida’s father. The impending child was to be Rayona’s mother, Christine. Subsequent to the news of

In this novel Taylor is a dynamic character, we see her transform from a young girl who didn’t want to get married or have kids to an independent single mother. In the beginning we get to know her as a self-owned, determined and a stubborn girl who is focused, ambitious and thinks outside the box; because she knows firsthand what is like to see her mother struggle as a single parent. She learned to value every day because pregnancy was like a disease. An example of her considerate outlook is “believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a poppy seed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize” (3). This small but

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.

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,

or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense

The bond between a mother and child is often spoken of as being unlike any other. Yet there are always exceptions to the rule where this connection isn 't as impenetrable as one might assume. This book is an example of this bond gradually becoming weaker over time. It shows how it affects the child, Bone, and leaves her vulnerable to the abuse of her step-father. Bone’s mother, Anney, had fallen in love with a man who abused her which at first, she’s unaware but eventually comes to realize but still chooses to stay with him. Throughout the book there are instances of Anney’s negligence in recognizing her daughter’s abuse and being of aid to her but wasn 't. In having to deal with her

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is essentially the “coming of age” story of Catherine Morland, a sympathetic yet naïve young girl who spends some time away from home at the impressionable age of seventeen. As Catherine matures in the town of Bath and at Northanger Abbey, she learns to forgo immature childhood fantasies in favor of the solid realities of adult life, thus separating falsehood from truth. This theme is expressed in a couple of ways, most obviously when Catherine’s infatuation with Gothic novels causes her to nearly ruin her relationship with Henry Tilney: her imagination finally goes too far, and she wrongly suspects General Tilney of murdering his late wife. The theme is less apparent

always aware of Tessʼs “purity,” as the subtitle of the story “A Pure Woman” tells. It is clarified that

he 18th century novel, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, is a fascinating book about a young woman’s struggle with family and love. Pride and Prejudice was originally published in 1813, but, the most common version of the story, and the one used for this research, is from the version published in 1892, still by only Jane Austen, though many other authors have contributed to this book over time. Austen often references the class system at the time, often noting one of the multiple heroine’s struggle to marry outside of the class that they were born into, in other words, attempting to marry ‘up’ in the world. Austen also notes such struggles as women being unable to own property or being forced to marry somewhat ‘unsavory’ characters in order to ensure not only their health, but the health of their family. Pride and Prejudice highlighted the stigma of marrying outside one’s birth assigned class system through influence on character relationships from outside sources, such as the character of Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s influence on the relationship of the characters Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, or the influence of Miss Bingley on the relationship of Mr. Charles Bingley and Jane Bennet. (Austen, Pride and prejudice, 1892)

Psychological school of thought denotes the first impression as an event in which two or more people first have an encounter. During such a circumstantial encounter, the persons meeting form mental images of each other depending on what they are able to observe with maximum accuracy (Lim, Kai, Izak Benbasat, and Lawrence 33). Such an observation is pervasive to include certain characteristics comprising physical appearance, age difference, race, gender, culture, posture, language, and accent. The characteristics as observed have a great influence on how the individuals will perceive each other as well as the type of treatment they receive (Lowe, Mary and Crawford 41). This paper, therefore, employs Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice as a lens text to understand whether first impressions can be deceiving in determining a person’s character as they are based on boxed assumptions and prejudices fed by society.