Previous
Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Key Examples in Middlesex
Book 1: The Silver Spoon
Explanation and Analysis—Military Genes:
Throughout Middlesex, Cal/lie often refers to genes in military terms, as soldiers who either obey or refuse to fall in line. This emerges as one of the novel's important motifs. Note the following example below, from Chapter 1:
Arrayed in their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my life.
Explanation and Analysis—Greenroom:
In the following example of metaphor from Chapter 1, Callie describes the influence of fate and free will over their birth:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. […] An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace […].
Related Themes:
Book 1: Matchmaking
Explanation and Analysis—Military Genes:
Throughout Middlesex, Cal/lie often refers to genes in military terms, as soldiers who either obey or refuse to fall in line. This emerges as one of the novel's important motifs. Note the following example below, from Chapter 1:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Arrayed in their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my life.
Explanation and Analysis—Circularity:
In the following passage from Chapter 2, Cal/lie utilizes metaphor to explain their approach to storytelling:
Unlock with LitCharts A+All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Theater Performance:
In Chapter 2, appropriately titled "Matchmaking," Desdemona works hard to make the two marriageable village girls attractive to her brother, Lefty. Cal/lie uses the language of theater and staging in the following excerpt—a metaphor, encompassing her relationship with the two prospective brides:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Victoria Pappas stood half in and half out of the light, the shading across her body exactly that of the photograph on page 8 of Lingerie Parisienne. Desdemona (costume lady, stage manager, and director all in one) had pinned up Victoria’s hair, letting ringlets fall over her forehead and warning her to keep her biggish nose in shadow.
Related Themes:
Book 1: The Silk Road
Explanation and Analysis—Smuggling Operation:
In an important example of indirect metaphor from Chapter 4, Cal/lie connects two prominent symbols: the silkworm box and the recessive gene.
Unlock with LitCharts A+In a.d. 550, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China [...]. Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those first stolen eggs filled my grandmother’s silkworm box on the Giulia. I’m the descendant of a smuggling operation, too. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome.
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
Explanation and Analysis—Cannons:
Chapter 5 chronicles Lefty and Desdemona's initial arrival in Detroit, so different from the European cities they grew up frequenting. Cal/lie uses distinctive figurative language, including metaphor, to describe their grandparents' first impression of Detroit:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Lefty stared out at the motor cars parked like giant beetles at the curbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the atmosphere. There were red brick stacks and tall silver ones, stacks in regimental rows or all alone puffing meditatively away, a forest of smokestacks that dimmed the sunlight and then, all of a sudden, blocked it out completely.
Explanation and Analysis—Human Machines:
In the following example of hyperbole from Chapter 5, Cal/lie blithely refers to 1913 as the year "people stopped being human":
Unlock with LitCharts A+Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Frieze:
In the following passage from Chapter 5, Cal/lie imagines Lefty's English language classroom at the Ford Auto Plant, purposed to educate immigrant workers (in a rather propagandistic manner). Cal/lie uses indirect metaphor to describe Lefty's classroom:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He sat in a desk with his workbook open in front of him. The desk felt as though it were vibrating across the floor at the Line’s 1.2 miles per hour. He looked up at the English alphabet in a frieze on the classroom walls.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Familiar Ingredients:
In the following example of indirect metaphor from Chapter 5, Cal/lie compares recipe ingredients to shared linguistic elements, carrying over cooking imagery from a previous passage:
Unlock with LitCharts A+My grandfather, accustomed to the multifarious conjugations of ancient Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master. Once he had swallowed a good portion of the English vocabulary, he began to taste the familiar ingredients, the Greek seasoning in the roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
Related Themes:
