more Middlesex paper, part 2
Desdemona’s immigration experience begins with her decision to travel with Lefty to New York aboard the Giulia. Of course, she doesn’t decide to simply travel with Lefty—she decides to travel with Lefty as his wife. Their courtship begins on the Giulia (63), where the two siblings create new identities for themselves. Emphasizing the power of the narrative the two weave together, Cal, the novel’s narrator, reports, “they began to believe it. They fabricated memories, improvised fate” (68). Lefty is “aware that whatever happened now would become the truth” (67). Desdemona begins to see herself as a new person when she puts on a corset that becomes an important part of her lovemaking experience with Lefty (70). Upon arriving in New York, Desdemona suffers through a haircut that leaves her declaring that she will never cut her hair again. When Lefty tells her the haircut makes her look more American, she declares, “’I don’t want to look like an Amerikanidha’” (82). According to www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/cultr25.htm, this is one typical first-generation immigrant’s reaction to assimilationist pressures. Never quite adjusting to America, always yearning for the idyllic life that probably never existed in Bithynios, she “suffer[s] ‘the homesickness that has no cure’” (98). Almost immediately immersed in English language classes and an American factory job, Lefty has a different experience: “The new country and its language have helped to push the past a little further behind. The sleeping form next to him is less and less his sister every night and more and more his wife” (99). Dressing in American clothes, Lefty “feels thoroughly American as he pulls on his blue wool trousers and jacket” (104). Later, as proprietor of the Zebra Room, Lefty lives the American Dream, but surrounds himself with other immigrants who come to his speakeasy for the food, music, and hashish of the old country (131). The Zebra Room and its owner are distinctly American, however, as shown in a confrontation between Lefty and an angry patron:
“Why don’t you go back to your own country?” one of them shouted.
“This is my country,” Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol. (169)
He may be serving the culture of the old country, but his attitude is all new country.
Desdemona does what she can to maintain her connection with the old country. Even when she finds herself working for Turks, a nationality she despises because of the burning of Smyrna, she finds a strange comfort in the familiarity: “Having grown up in a country ruled by others, she found it familiar. The fezzes, the prayer rugs, the crescent moons: it was a little like going home” (149). Years later, when she and Lefty move into the attic of Milton and Tessie’s house, “she enjoyed the attic because the vertigo of living up there reminded her of Mount Olympus. . . . and when she left the window open, the wind blew through as it used to do in Bithynios” (209). Desdemona does her best to hold onto her Greek identify and culture, despite the fact that she lives out her life in the United States. In 1959, after living in Detroit for 37 years, Desdemona is still predicting the sex of babies in the Old World fashion (4). She and her family, including Calliope’s parents, attend a church where the service is performed in both English and Greek (12), and they are celebrating Greek Easter (15).
Despite her efforts, Desdemona is Americanized to some extent. Americanization occurs partially through television, which she begins watching more of after Lefty’s first stroke leaves him unable to speak. Desdemona “took on television right away. It was the first and only thing about America she approved of” (223). Through the television and the people around her—Milton, Tessie, Cal, Chapter Eleven, all Americans now—she becomes slightly Americanized: 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. (222) In addition to Americanizing forces such as the TV, the time and distance between herself and Bithynios cause her connection to the old country to fade. When her sex prediction for Callie appears to be wrong, “the old country, in which she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded one more notch” (17). Desdemona’s long, slow, drawn out, and incomplete assimilation process is quite typical, according to Gregory Rodriguez, who wrote about assimilation of immigrants in a Washington Post opinion column. According to Rodriguez, assimilation “sometimes tak[es] several generations.” He goes on to say that “assimilation has been mischaracterized as a process of subtraction.” It is fruitful to look at Desdemona’s halting assimilation process, cobbling together American TV, reading the sex of a fetus with a spoon, and abhorrence for drinks with names like “Tom Collins,” as one of addition rather than subtraction. She never willingly gives up anything Greek or takes up anything American.
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