Middlesex can be read as a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel)—but rather than depicting the process of growing up as a gradual progression toward one’s final, true self, it instead portrays growing up as a series of rebirths and reinventions. This is mainly shown through the main character, Cal, who is assigned a female gender identity at birth but transitions to a male gender identity after discovering that he is intersex. While this is the central rebirth that occurs in the novel, it is far from the only one—indeed, the novel suggests that human life itself is defined by a continual series of rebirths and reinventions. At the same time, the novel also explores the concept of continuity, not only in the sense of an individual’s continuous identity, but continuity over multiple generations of the same family, community, or culture. As a result, the book ultimately shows that life is defined by both rebirth and continuity, and that rebirth itself might actually facilitate a certain kind of continuity.
Due to being intersex and undergoing gender transition, the novel’s protagonist, Cal, frames his journey through life not as a linear process, but rather as involving (at least) two distinct rebirths. Through this narrative, the book explores the idea that sex and gender are so fundamental to who a person is that learning one is intersex and transitioning from one gender to another involves a total reinvention of someone’s identity, such that they can actually be considered a different person. Moreover, Cal exacerbates this process of reinvention by actions such as changing his name, running away from home, and (eventually) emigrating from the U.S. to Germany, intensifying the notion that he has been reborn into a whole other person. The idea that Cal’s life has been a series of rebirths is introduced in the very first paragraph of the novel: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl […] in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Shortly after, Cal elaborates on what he means and how his identity has changed during these births: “My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my name simply as Cal […] But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.” By mentioning these different forms of identification, Cal shows how the official recognition of a person’s identity can make it seem as if someone who undergoes a gender transition is indeed two different people. Moreover, this quotation links gender transition to migration (from the U.S. to Germany) as two forms of rebirth, a very important idea in the novel.
Yet while Cal himself describes his life as being a series of rebirths, the novel also shows the continuity between the version of Cal who identified as a girl and grew up in Detroit, and the version who identifies as a man and runs away from home, eventually landing in Berlin. The novel calls into question the extent to which a person can reinvent themselves when so much is shaped by their cultural and biological heritage. One way in which the novel explores the limits of rebirth is, again, through Cal’s narrative voice. Although once Cal transitions to male gender identity he refers to his past self in the third person, he still refers to his current self in the first person, just as he did when originally narrating his life as a child who had been assigned female identity. This creates a sense of continuity that persists through Cal’s rebirths. He might be different versions of the same person—but he is ultimately still the same person. This point is also demonstrated through Cal’s name, which is Calliope when he is born and Cal after he transitions. Cal’s decision to change to a different version of his previous name highlights continuity amidst change. Another way in which the novel explores this sense of continuity is through its depiction of Cal’s family. Because the novel is an epic family saga depicting multiple generations of the Stephanides clan, the reader witnesses how the birth of each child is also a rebirth of the family as a whole. Indeed, the birth of a child can significantly change a family’s dynamic, as when the birth of Cal’s father Milton causes a shift in the relationship between Cal’s grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona. While previously their relationship was very egalitarian for the time, Lefty feels bitter and jealous of the baby, which makes him more conservative: “As Lefty began to feel left out, he retaliated with tradition.” Nonetheless, there is also strong sense in which the birth of each child reinforces the existing traits of the family, replicating these traits on and on into the future.
While Cal’s discovery that he is intersex and his subsequent gender transition is certainly the most central and important rebirth in the book, it is not the only one. Indeed, just as Cal’s own moves to San Francisco and Berlin are part of his process of reinventing himself as he grows up, other characters also treat moving and migration as grounds for reinvention. This includes Cal’s grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona, who are “reborn” as an engaged couple (rather than brother and sister, which they actually are) during their migration from Bithynios to the U.S. The novel also shows reinvention and rebirth working in more mundane, small-scale ways, such as in the description of Lefty and Desdemona’s sex life, which is repetitive yet always thrilling thanks to a particular corset Desdemona wears. Cal comments that “The corset made Desdemona new again,” showing how rebirth is a pervasive, continuous part of human existence. Yet while in one sense the corset produces a kind of reinvention of Desdemona, this reinvention is itself a repeated ritual that is part of Lefty’s faithful, predictable love for his wife. In this life, rebirth is shown to facilitate continuity, rather than negating it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Rebirth vs. Continuity ThemeTracker
Rebirth vs. Continuity Quotes in Middlesex
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
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.”
This once-divided city reminds me of myself My struggle for unification, for Einheit. Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin.
Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.
If Sourmelina had always been a European kind of American, a sort of Marlene Dietrich, then Tessie was the fully Americanized daughter Dietrich might have had. Her mainstream, even countrified, looks extended to the slight gap between her teeth and her turned-up nose. Traits often skip a generation. I look much more typically Greek than my mother does.
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.
[…] 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.
I suspect that Chapter Eleven’s transformation was caused in no small part by that day on his bed when his life was decided by lottery. Am I projecting? Saddling my brother with my own obsessions with chance and fate? Maybe. But as we planned a trip—a trip that had been promised when Milton was saved from another war—it appeared that Chapter Eleven, taking chemical trips of his own, was trying to escape what he had dimly perceived while wrapped in an afghan: the possibility that not only his draft number was decided by lottery, but that everything was.
Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.
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.
