Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: In his second novel, Middlesex 1 , Jeffrey Eugenides is deep in the Greeks.If Melville in Moby Dick sets up an anthology of whaling, Eugenides builds his collection of Greekness.It may be because the Greeks found a mythical way out of the contradictions and the ambiguities that characterize the fragmented human being in search of unity through Hermaphroditus, the figure of an indivisible duality, quite appropriate to express the diverse reality of American unity.The Pulitzer-prized writer revisits the myth in a novel way combining it with the aporias of ethnicity.Gender trouble in Middlesex could hardly veil the immigrant and ethnic experience in America that spans three generations of a Greek family in the twentieth century.The novel is about reinventing your identity on different levels, be that Greek to American, female to male, says the author who, digging up his Greek origins, makes an original contribution to the Greek-American novel. 2 2 Although reviewers, unable to see the connection, found these two levels incongruous, Eugenides bridges this apparent gap by interweaving the strands of gender and ethnicity in the narrative, as his narrator sets out to construct his identity.The hyphenated being is the epitome of this Bildungsromanand novel of quest, both forms favored by ethnic literature.At the same time, Middlesex is a sort of epic which is a genre "generally associated with ethnogenesis, the emergence of a people, and can therefore seemingly be appropriated transnationally by all peoples," as Werner Sollors says in Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors 238).In this multigenerational saga, the Stephanides invent and construct their Americanness and their Greekness against a backdrop of an American society at grips with assimilation and multiculturalism, and a Greek community responding to these issues. The Reinvention of Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.9036
Author: Aristi Trendel
Institution: Le Mans Université
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2013295560