Middlesex depicts multiple generations of a Greek immigrant family drawn to the U.S. by the American Dream, yet ultimately shows that this dream—like the idea of America itself—is not what it advertises itself to be. It is true that for the generation of the Stephanides family who travel over, the U.S. represents a profound opportunity for self-reinvention, success, and happiness. However, the way this works out in reality—particularly for subsequent generations—is much more complicated. In particular, the novel highlights the issues of xenophobia, racism, classism, and economic depression to illustrate that life in the U.S. does not live up to the myth promised by the American Dream. In the end, the main character, Cal, reverses the American Dream narrative by migrating out of the U.S. and hoping to eventually end up in Turkey, the part of the world his grandparents originally left.
In many ways, the novel contains the cliched tropes of immigrants who come to the U.S. seeking a better life and who develop a strong sense of patriotism about their new homeland as a result. In particular, it emphasizes that immigrating to America can be a chance for self-reinvention. This is true of Sourmelina, who enthusiastically assimilates into American culture, embracing the comparatively liberal attitudes around gender that exist there. As Cal describes: “Somehow in the course of her life Sourmelina had become an American. Almost nothing of the village remained in her.” Meanwhile, Lefty and Desdemona also seize the chance for self-reinvention, using their distance from their homeland to keep hidden the fact that they are brother and sister and thus avoid scandal when they get married. Immigrants’ enthusiastic embrace of American identity continues in subsequent generations, although it takes a different form—indeed, the novel suggests that intergenerational clashes over American identity are one of the key parts of the immigrant experience. Cal’s father, Milton, is a patriot who embraces particularly conservative American political views and is obsessed with the history of the nation. Cal’s parents’ bedroom is “furnished entirely in Early American reproductions, it offers them connection (at discount prices) with the country’s founding myths.” Yet as a young Callie identifies, Milton’s understanding of American history is actually rather erroneous. While Milton is furious about the 1967 Detroit Race Riot that forces his family to move home, Callie points out that the Boston Tea Party was also a riot. Yet Milton refutes this, angrily asking, “What the hell are they teaching you in that school of yours?” Callie herself, meanwhile, clashes with her mother, Tessie, when Callie expresses distaste for Greek food. She requests “normal food” instead, and when Tessie asks what she means, Callie replies, “American food.” While each generation of the Stephanides family embraces the U.S. to some degree, this takes very different forms and leads them to clash with one another.
The book also highlights important ways in which the American Dream is actually more like a nightmare. It primarily does so through depicting the prominence of anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-black racism, and the economic decline of Detroit. Importantly, it shows how Greek Americans like the Stephanides family suffered from some of these issues while being complicit in perpetrating others. Among the hardships the Stephanides family face in America are xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, and economic struggles. As a young child, Callie feels at home in the U.S. and has every reason to believe that her family fits in there. However, this changes when she starts attending the private Baker & Inglis School for Girls. She observes: “Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden American wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock.” Suddenly, Callie realizes that there are people who believe that recent immigrants—particularly those who are not of Western European descent—will never be “truly” American. Her self-consciousness about her own status is exacerbated by her crush on her best friend, the Obscure Object, whom Callie describes as having colors that “agree with the American landscape, her pumpkin hair, her apple cider skin.” Callie feels that she will never be able to live up to the American ideal that the Obscure Object represents and to which Callie compares herself. Similarly, although the Stephanides family initially achieves a moderate level of financial prosperity in the U.S., this does not last. Like many residents of Detroit, they are hit hard by the economic downturn of the 1970s and particularly the collapse of the automobile industry. Following Milton’s death, the family’s restaurant business goes bankrupt within four years (in part due to mismanagement by Cal’s brother, Chapter Eleven). At the end of the novel, Cal explains that he is glad that his father, Milton, died before he witnessed the devastated fortunes both of Detroit in general and the Stephanides family in particular.
At the same time, the novel also shows that the Stephanides family are not just victims of the negative sides of life in the U.S.—they are also perpetrators. This is particularly true regarding racial tensions between black Americans and white groups in Detroit. Like other Greek American characters in the novel, Milton is a perpetrator of anti-black racism, and also holds prejudiced views about other oppressed groups. These are encapsulated by his catchphrase, “The matter is with you,” which Cal explains in the following way: “It grew into a kind of mantra, the explanation for why the world was going to hell, applicable not only to African Americans but to feminists and homosexuals.” Although the Stephanides family themselves face prejudice and oppression, this does not necessarily lead them toward fair, just, and empathetic behavior. Often, it instead leads them to perpetuate oppression themselves. While the novel does show positive sides to life in the U.S., it also severely undercuts the myth of the American Dream.
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Migration, Ethnicity, and the American Dream ThemeTracker
Migration, Ethnicity, and the American Dream Quotes in Middlesex
Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own midwestern womb.
Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.
Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could re-create themselves. The driving spirit on the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe and Asia Minor were dead behind them. Ahead lay America and new horizons.
My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a sight twinge of filial guilt.
Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island after.”
The truth was that in those days Desdemona was struggling against assimilationist pressures she couldn’t resist. Though she had lived in America as an eternal exile, a visitor for forty years, certain bits of her adopted country had been seeping under the locked doors of her disapproval.
“The matter with us is you.” How many times did I hear that growing up? Delivered by Milton in his so-called black accent, delivered whenever any liberal pundit talked about the “culturally deprived” or the “underclass” or “empowerment zones,” spoken out of the belief that this one statement, having been delivered to him while the blacks themselves burned down a significant portion of our beloved city, proved its own absurdity. As the years went on, Milton used it as a shield against any opinions to the contrary, and finally it grew into a kind of mantra, the explanation for why the world was going to hell, applicable not only to African Americans but to feminists and homosexuals; and then of course he liked to use it on us, whenever we were late for dinner or wore clothes Tessie didn’t approve of.
[…] right about this time Lefty’s English began to deteriorate. He made spelling and grammatical mistakes he’d long mastered and soon he began writing broken English and then no English at all. He made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband’s mind could lead to only one place, back to the days when he wasn’t her husband but her brother, and she lay in bed at night awaiting the moment with trepidation.
Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
In 1974, instead of reclaiming his roots by visiting Bursa, my father renounced them. Forced to choose between his native land and his ancestral one, he didn’t hesitate.
In addition, the subject has been raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles. In general the parents seem assimilationist and very “all-American” in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not be overlooked.
I’d like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle.
Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the döner restaurant downstairs […] Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year 2001. We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret.
I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country.
