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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
Book 1: The Silver Spoon
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:
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 […].
Cal/lie describes pre-birth/pre-conception as the "greenroom to the world." In theater, performers wait offstage in a "green room," ready to perform when called onstage.
In essence, Cal/lie has labeled themself a performer—in life, yes, but principally a performer of gender. As an intersex person, Cal/lie (once called out of the greenroom) must perform multiple roles at once, depending on how people perceive them. Cal describes the anxiety he has about having sex; worrying that, because women perceive him as a man, because he lives as a man, and because he is a man, he will be summarily judged for not "performing" up to standard.
It is fate, or some combination of fate and chance, that made Cal/lie intersex. It is free will, on Cal/lie's part, to choose which version of gender they wish to perform at any given stage in their life.
Related Themes:
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.
The motif reemerges in Chapter 2, in the following passage:
And this can be extrapolated backward in time, so that when I speak, Desdemona speaks, too. She’s writing these words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders, or of the one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…
Cal/lie's choice of figurative language in both passages is telling. They have a combative relationship with their own genetic code, often feeling at odds with themselves as an intersex person in a society that only recognizes binary sex categories. When Cal/lie imagines a gene as a rogue soldier, it is clear that they imagine their own recessive gene—the one that has caused them so much strife and discord. Cal/lie clearly imagines themselves as an erstwhile sergeant barking orders to a body that won't listen. Only once Cal/lie accepts themself do they drop this combativeness.
Book 1: Matchmaking
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:
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.
Desdemona takes her place as "stage manager" for her brother's potential suitors, putting in significant effort to make them more appealing to Lefty. She takes on such responsibility as a way of deflecting her own desires, performing the role of a dutiful sister to disguise the fact that she desires Lefty for herself. This secrecy arises from shame, deeply imbued on a societal level. Incest is a social taboo with biological weight—too much incest causes recessive traits to become fixed in the population. Not all recessive traits are detrimental, but they can be. Take various royal European families as example: when inbred for centuries, recessive diseases like hemophilia abound.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Circularity:
In the following passage from Chapter 2, Cal/lie utilizes metaphor to explain their approach to storytelling:
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.
Cal/lie calls themself the "final clause" in a "periodic" or repeating sentence. The sentence itself has changed, and will continue to change, as the cycle of life/mutation/transformation continues. This is another example of circularity, rebirth, and continuity as prominent themes in Middlesex.
It is also worth noting that Cal/lie feels their personal story has an "innate feminine circularity," referring to the menstrual and lunar cycles. While Cal/lie's relationship with gender is complicated, this excerpt demonstrates that they still feel some connection to the femininity of their childhood—of Calliope. What's more, Cal/lie still feels connected to biological traits commonly associated with women: periods, menstruation, month-long hormonal cycles. Cal/lie's femininity is not vestigial; it is still very much a part of them, even when they live life as a man.
Related Themes:
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.
The motif reemerges in Chapter 2, in the following passage:
And this can be extrapolated backward in time, so that when I speak, Desdemona speaks, too. She’s writing these words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders, or of the one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…
Cal/lie's choice of figurative language in both passages is telling. They have a combative relationship with their own genetic code, often feeling at odds with themselves as an intersex person in a society that only recognizes binary sex categories. When Cal/lie imagines a gene as a rogue soldier, it is clear that they imagine their own recessive gene—the one that has caused them so much strife and discord. Cal/lie clearly imagines themselves as an erstwhile sergeant barking orders to a body that won't listen. Only once Cal/lie accepts themself do they drop this combativeness.
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.
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.
Cal/lie compares their grandparents' immigration proceedings to smuggling (from a genetic perspective). Given the eugenic leanings of the U.S. government during this time period in history, entering the U.S. with an unknown genetic mutation would have been equivalent to biological espionage. Eugenicists were deeply concerned with the so-called purity of populations. In their eyes, maintaining a genetically healthy population required eliminating or excluding all those considered unfit, from so-called social degenerates to people with chronic medical conditions or mental health symptoms. If people could not be kept out or eliminated, healthy populations were isolated from those deemed unfit. By bringing their recessive gene into the United States, Lefty and Desdemona have done nothing wrong—but in the eyes of the American scientific elite, Lefty and Desdemona are poisoning the gene pool.
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
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:
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.
In this passage, Cal/lie neatly packages several of the novel's thematic strains into one succinct, indirect metaphor. They compare the Greek language to recipe ingredients, and English to the finished product. This comparison is apt, given the fact that English is somewhat of a chimeric language, pulling from Greek, Latin, French, German, and its Anglo-Saxon proto-languages.
While English is not a uniquely American language, it is strongly associated with the United States and, by extension, its reputation as a nation of immigrants. Following along with the melting pot imagery of Chapter 5, English can be interpreted as the pot, into which a other languages dissolve. The relationship between English and Greek is also one of ancestry. Mapping lines of descent, English inherits certain distinguishing characteristics from Greek—the "ingredients" that comprise the younger language.
Related Themes:
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":
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.
People did not literally "stop being human" after the advent of assembly line manufacturing. Rather, they learned to become machine-compatible in the industrial age. Cal/lie's statement, not to be taken as literal, may reflect on the relationship between labor and industry in early 20th-century America. Industrialization, particularly that which Henry Ford pioneered, sought to make laborers into machine cogs: less than human, therefore easily replaceable, therefore easier to conveniently lay-off and re-hire on a whim.
The narrator also compares this new human "machinery" to an evolutionary adaptation, something required of humanity to survive the industrial era.
Related Themes:
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:
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.
In this excerpt, Cal/lie utilizes metaphor to compare Detroit's industrial smokestacks to cannons. The smokestacks appear intimidating, even threatening to Lefty and Desdemona. To illustrate this, Cal equates the smokestacks to "regimental rows", employing military imagery to draw on other recent threatening events that occurred to their grandparents. Coming from a country torn in half by years of feuding and military occupation, Lefty and Desdemona are bound to see the images of war in everything.
On another level, Cal/lie's metaphor aptly connects war and industrial development. Modern warfare requires countless industrial inputs: factories producing bombs, tanks, uniforms, rations, guns. Here one sees the early inklings of the notorious modern military-industrial complex.
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:
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.
In this excerpt, the narrator compares the English alphabet posters on Lefty's classroom wall to a frieze, a type of Ancient Greek wall engraving that used repetitive patterning. Certain friezes depicted important historical or mythological scenes. This comparison emphasizes the superseding importance of English-language knowledge, likening it to classical architecture.
The alphabet posters are also a rebirth, or reincarnation, of their Greek counterparts in that they represent something translated from one country to another. As people immigrate from Greece to America, certain traditional Greek customs receive their own American twist. Perhaps an ingredient, no longer readily accessible, gets replaced in a recipe. New communities of Greek immigrants form, cultivating their own community traditions inspired by their homeland. And friezes, once used to decorate ancient temples, now decorate the walls of English-language classrooms.
Related Themes:
