Middlesex, part 3 - Cal/Callie's Immigration Experience
Although Cal/Callie makes a definitive statement about who and what he/she is when he/she runs away in New York, declaring “I am not a girl. I’m a boy” (439), he/she still needs to figure out what it means to be a boy. In effect, the character becomes an immigrant, moving from a familiar and known world to an unfamiliar and mysterious place with different customs and rules.
Cal’s experience as a gender immigrant combines elements of Desdemona’s experience as a first-generation Greek immigrant and Callie’s experience as a third-generation Greek immigrant. Like many first-generation immigrants, the adult Cal overdoes some of the physical aspects of his masculinity, wearing a double-breasted suit, smoking cigars, and building up impressive muscles. Despite these visual cues to his masculinity, he is keenly aware that his female identity is still inside of him: “When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails” (41). Like many first-generation immigrants, Cal doesn’t want others to know of his immigrant status, preferring to be taken for “a native.” Cal’s description of a date calls to mind Desdemona’s refusal to assimilate willingly: “It’s just a first date. It won’t come to anything. No reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. And from love, too” (107).
Even at 41, after living as a man since age 14, Cal is “oozing feminine glue” (72). He still thinks of himself as a daughter to his parents, saying as he thinks about Milton’s appearance, “Even looking back through a daughter’s forgiving eye I have to admit: my father was never good-looking” (174), and declaring “Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter” (520). Cal admits, “I never felt out of place being a girl. I still don’t feel entirely at home among men” (479). These bits of female still living inside Cal are like the bits of Greek woman still living in Desdemona. Just as his grandmother seems to dislike the people of her new country, Cal seems to have a fairly dim view of men, particularly their courtship rituals, asking “did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself?” (371). In telling of Jerome’s attempt to seduce Callie, Cal reports grimly, Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love. (379)
This idea is particularly interesting because Cal can identify with both the woman beneath the “crushing weight” of a man and with the man. In fact, when Callie and Jerome fight and Callie finds herself on top of Jerome, she finds that “it was an exhilarating feeling to be on top of him” (392).
In many ways, Cal’s gender immigration experience reflects Desdemona’s immigration experience. Cal is scared to be on his own: “I was also scared. I had never been out on my own before. I didn’t know how the world operated or how much things cost“ (443). Just as Desdemona did, Cal gets a haircut upon arriving in the new land (441). For both of these characters, hair is significant. Desdemona is judged to be too much of a naïve country girl for Lefty because of her thick heavy braids. Although she doesn’t want to cut her hair and ends up regretting the haircut, she must cut her hair to begin fitting in. Cal’s first haircut is similarly important to his being accepted in his new land. As he had hoped, the haircut has dramatic results: “By the time I came out of Ed’s Barbershop, I was a new creation. The other people passing through the bus station, to the extent they noticed me at all, took me for a student at a nearby boarding school. . . “ (445). The haircut signifies to others that Cal is a boy, but he realizes that he still has Calliope inside of him. When he faces the mirror after the haircut, he sees Calliope, “like a captive spirit, peeking out” (442). Just as Desdemona is trying to escape her identify in Greece as Lefty’s sister and create a new identity in America as his wife, Cal finds that he is “fleeing [him]self” in his immigration (443).
Little by little, Cal adopts the customs and habits of his new country. In addition to getting a haircut, he begins dressing like a boy, realizing the danger in getting the clothing wrong—he will look like “prey” (444). He begins using men’s restrooms, although he finds them “scandalize[ing].” In narrating his period of being a new gender immigrant, Cal says, “Like a convert to a new religion, I overdid it at first. Somewhere near Gary, Indiana, I adopted a swagger. I rarely smiled. My expression throughout Illinois was the Clint Eastwood squint” (449). Cal explicitly compares himself to an immigrant at one point: “I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country” (471). Despite his efforts, Cal finds that he can’t completely exorcise Calliope:
Now and then I fell out of character. Feeling something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I kicked up my heel and looked back over my shoulder to see what it was, rather than crossing my leg in front of me and twisting up my shoe. I picked correct change from my open palm instead of my trouser pocket. (449)
Cal refers to his maleness here as a “character,” and, as Dave Weich points out in an interview with Eugenides, he realizes at one point that all men, natives and immigrants, are acting out characters to some extent. Desdemona, too, is acting out a character in the new country: wife, not sister, to Lefty.
Typically, first-generation immigrants will travel from the old country to the new with all of their belongings in one suitcase; upon arrival in the new country, they will stay for a time with a relative who has immigrated before them (www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/cultr25.thm). This is the model Desdemona followed, and it is the model Cal follows. After packing up a suitcase in the New York hotel room, Callie heads out to become Cal. Just as Desdemona learned how to be American from her cousin Lina, Cal learns how to be a hermaphrodite from Zora. Zora is significant because she helps Cal realize that he can’t live as a man, he must live as a hermaphrodite (487-88). In an interview in Bomb Magazine, Eugenides explains that this is a crucial concept:
Callie is reared as a girl but, due to her virilization at puberty, adopts a male gender identity. Cal "operates in society" as a man. But that doesn't mean that he's really a man. Nor is any man exactly like any other man. Between the alternatives of nurture and nature, I argue for a middle place. That's one of the meanings of the title, obviously. But the Middlesex I'm talking about is not only a third gender category. It also represents a certain flexibility in the notion of gender itself. It's a very American concept really. It's a belief in individuality, in freedom. (Foer)
Before he met Zora, Cal was trying to be a boy. Zora helps him understand that his choice isn’t male or female, but male, female, or what his genitals really show, which is hermaphroditism.
Living as a hermaphrodite rather than as a man doesn’t preclude the need to appear either distinctly female or distinctly male in public. Cal realizes that appearing male brings out different responses in others than appearing female does. He describes what happens when he returns to Detroit and makes eye contact with a black man:
He didn’t lower his sunglasses, but his mouth, his flared nostrils, the tilt of his head communicated defiance and even hate. That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. (518)
If Cal had appeared as a girl, the black man may well have smiled and waved.
To see Cal as a gender immigrant requires us to see the act of immigration as an imaginative act on some level. Moving from one country to another requires the immigrant to imagine herself as someone else. The act of immigration as portrayed by Eugenides is a transformative one. In Middlesex, immigration transforms immigrants in different ways. Lefty and Desdemona are transformed from siblings to husband and wife. Lina is transformed from a village girl into a sophisticated and independent modern woman. Milton, as a member of the second-generation of an immigrant family, is transformed into a sparkling representative of the American Dream. And Cal is transformed, too. He is transformed from someone who thinks people are either male or female into someone who knows there is much more to it.
When Callie realizes her genitals are male, she makes a decision to live as the boy she is physically. By the time Cal writes his story in the form of Middlesex, he knows about his maternal grandfather’s startling transformation from Jimmy Zizmo, Greek rumrunner, to Fard Muhammad, Muslim prophet. When Callie decides to run away and live as a boy, however, Desdemona could not yet have told Cal of Jimmy Zizmo’s transformation into Fard Muhammad. However, because Cal as narrator presents Jimmy Zizmo’s transformation story before he presents his own, readers of the novel comprehend Callie’s transformation with the knowledge that Callie’s maternal grandfather perpetrated wildly successful identify transformation.
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