He, She, It

Gender barriers hinder the ability for men and women to fully understand each other. The role society impresses upon its inhabitants forms distinct differences between the races. Interconnectivity is nearly impossible because of these socially enforced rules and values. Because of the social intimidation and innate ignorance, men and women are unable to cross the barrier the separates them sexually. Jeffrey Eugenides delves into the world of obsession and adolescence in his voyeuristic novel, The Virgin Suicides. The spellbinding novel follows the story of five mysterious sisters, and the boys whose lives they forever change. The narrative voice is a collective voice, an infatuated group of boys who can only report on what they see or find or remnants from the oral information they gather. The story is built around a failed investigation in which the boys gather mounds of “evidence” only to realize they never understood the Lisbon girls.
Eugenides creates two parallel experiences. It is the men who return to the era of their teenage obsession and girls that changed their lives versus with the tragic lives of the very girls they admired. These men recall a time before they fully understood themselves, let alone the opposite sex. They return to a time when experience was shared and communal. The central belief is that the Lisbon sisters are the feminine ideal in how they are shrouded in mystery and unattainable. Their obsession is tangible through the “evidence” they collected, “[they] tried to arrange the photographs chronologically” (4). Their devotion lasts even into adulthood (a lost romantic ideal they can cling to). The men keep in touch with each other to continue to be the custodians of the girls' lives. Lisbon sisters are the mystery that is the opposite sex personified. Equally, the girls, through wildly different, constantly return to being seen as one entity, “the Lisbon sisters.” On one of the few occasions when they boys have physical interaction with the sisters, “their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again the boys weren’t even sure which girl was which” (122). The sisters also see themselves as a unit, “Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It's often difficult to identify which sister she's talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader's mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads” (42). Eugenides vaguely makes distinctions within the collective sexual units, filtering their lives into a shared understanding and experience.
The Virgin Suicides tell the story of familial, cult-like suicides. The novel encircle this time period, beginning and ending with the last suicide. No one seems more intrigued and haunted by these girls and their deaths than their male counterparts. The men collect “evidence” from the girls (Exhibits 1-98), but despite being inanimate, their connection with the girls is magical, obtaining fetish-like qualities. In their attempt to understand who the Lisbon girls were and why they committed suicide, they never find a truly satisfying answer. Each action they took to understand the girls was a step further into confusion. Like Sirens, this female entity lured the boys in, only to leave them wanting more. The group of young boys is unable to understand the inner workings of the Lisbon sisters, the motive behind their collective suicides. The unrelenting factor keeping them from complete discernment of the Lisbon girls is the gender barrier that separates them. Eugenides re-establishes the sexual obstruction by never giving insight into the minds of the opposite sex. The Lisbon girls represent the epitomized gender enigma, the unsolved mystery of the opposite sex. Contrarily, Eugenides takes a different approach with his second novel, the comedic epic, Middlesex.
Middlesex, reaching across generations, continents, and genders, traces the path of a mutant gene to one Calliope Stephanides. In Cal, our storyteller, that gene finds expression. Eugenides explains, “I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence.” While the boys in The Virgin Suicides have the gender gap that cannot be bridge, Calliope lies on that bridge. In many ways, the book looks at how we are all an I before a he or a she. By creating this I narration, Eugenides leaves the reader close to Cal’s metamorphosis. Because of its epic nature, the I narration needed to have third person qualities to be able to relay the tale that led to the actual ability to do so. Cal, straddling the gender gap, falls easily into the minds and thoughts of both sexes. With uncanny fluidity, Eugenides creates a character that becomes the omnipotent lens to the past. Calliope reveals the way his grandparents fell in love in before they fled from the Turkish invasion of Asia Minor; how “at first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hugs began to change” (39). Cal can explain with unrivalled certainty, the way Desdemona blushed when Lefty, her brother and third cousin, looked at her. Cal delves into the way his parents, second cousins, could not deny the love that flowed within them. Cal acknowledges with clarity how Tessie, his mother, allowed Milton, his father, “to press his clarinet against her skin and fill her body with music” (176). Because of the condition, Cal transcends the gender biases and dwells within the gender gap.
Eugenides mentions how Ovid’s Metamorphosis address Tiresias, the mythical hermaphrodite and the character Calliope plays in her high school play. He was drawn the incredible utility of Tiresias, this person that knew more than a normal person. That is what makes a good novelists, the capability to know people better than the average people, to be an understander of both sexes. It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination, since you should be able to go into the heads of men and women if you want to write books. What better vehicle for that than a hermaphrodite narrator? It's sort of like the dream novelist himself, or herself, or itself. However, in opposition to the portrayal of hermaphrodites in literature, like Tiresias, Eugenides write about a real hermaphrodite. Cal is one of the most unique narrators in modern literature because of every person can relate to this character. At heart, Middlesex is modern myth about adolescence. People hear that Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite, and sometimes that repels them from reading it. But I see it as a family story. Eugenides uses a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for sexual confusion and the uncertainty of identity that accompanies adolescence. Eugenides uses Cal's double-visioned life experience as an opportunity to display a generous, good-humored empathy toward all of his novel's characters, male and female. Cal serves readers not only as a lens on the hermaphroditic, but also as a prism of the humane. One reviewer refers to the book as “a cleverly post-modernized successor to the likes of Howard Fast's THE IMMIGRANTS series, engrossing multi-generational bestsellers that were popular in the Nixon era, when Cal Stephanides and Jeffrey Eugenides were growing up.” Since genetics play a prominent role, the book is a novelistic genome; containing some of the oldest traits of writing and storytelling. It begins with epic events, old fashioned, almost Homeric ideas and, as it progresses, it becomes a more deeply psychological, more modern novel. Eugenides manages to tuck this strange personal tale into the generocity of the traditional epic, much as Cal's pseudo-penis is hidden away in his labial folds.
Both novels tell of the internal world of the familial unit, differing tragically from the norm. These families are statements about the American suburb in what seems like easier times. In The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides makes it difficult to place the entire blame on the parents. The pressure to conform plays a major role. Every detail is a criticism against the world in which the Lisbon sisters and Calliope lived. In the Grosse Pointe, Detroit of the Lisbons, each home mimics its neighbors. Every autumn, the families rake and burn their leaves in a primitive yet respected and expected ritual, all in an attempt to keep their lawns clear on discolored blemishes. When, like the trees of this area, the sanctity of the town becomes diseased, the city moves to extricate the infection. Mr. Lisbon is asked to relieve his duties as teacher at the high school. But like their infected counterparts, the Lisbon girls are relentless in restraining against the suburban conformity. In Middlesex, Cal's life story is grounded in the context of the sprawling Stephanides family history, a Greek-American immigrant saga that brings Cal's paternal grandparents to urban Detroit in the wake of the burning of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922 and leads all the way to the present day Germany. Four decades of Stephanides roams the pages: from entrepreneurs to charlatans, housewives to hippies, homosexuals to religious leaders, all linked by matrimony and genetics and love. Even the most eccentric subplots of Middlesex, whether it is a Muslim temple scam, a tension-fraught car chase, or the invention of hot dogs that flex like biceps, are imbued with tender, familial warmth. Bypassing in-your-face gender politics, Eugenides focuses on undeniable in-your-bloodline realities, the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” Even though genetics sets the stage, American history is the backdrop. Key moments in the Stephanides family are marked by significant moment on American history. When Grandfather Lefty arrives in Detroit he is briefly employed at the Ford Motor Company, where Eugenides deftly etches the dehumanizing aspect of assembly line work. The Detroit race riots of 1967, white flight to the suburbs, the social divisiveness of the Nixon era, and the so-called sexual revolution all feed into the Stephanides story. There are moments as well when Eugenides captures the pulse of an era in his dialogue, such as Chapter 11's explanation of his refusal to use deodorant during his hippie phase: “I'm a human…This is what humans smell like.”Eugenides wrote two novels that comically comment on two societal taboos: teenage suicide and hermaphrodites. The first looks into the world of shattered female idealism seen through aging eyes of once-young men. Obsession and voyeurism mix with anti-conformist undertones to construct the gender study that is The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides takes it a step further with his second novel. Appealing to every type of person, Cal is the perfect narrator, making his hermaphrodite book, the perfect crossover novel.