Middlesex 6

"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. It was all a bluff, but so it was it on most men. We were all walking around squinting at each other. My swagger wasn't all that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly. For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible. Now and then I fell out of character. Feeling something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, rather than crossing my leg in front of me and twisting up my shoe. I picked correct change from my open palm instead of inside my trouser pocket. Such slips made me panic, but needlessly. No one noticed. I was aided by that: as a rule people don't notice much."
Page 449, Chapter 3, Book 4

This passage makes great use of simile and metaphor to help the reader to gain a foothold in a decidedly unconventional situation. The narrator is making the transition from female to male, and encountering resistance. This situation is sufficiently awkward enough to alienate the reader if the author doesn't handle it correctly. As such, the narrators predicament is related to a new convert to a religion, his/her idea of a male expression being related to Clint Eastwood's famous scowl. The author's tone is one of detachment and ambivalence, created by use of short sentences and small alliterations. The final sentence of the passage also demonstrates one of the authors main themes, that no one notices what is right in front of them.

Middlesex 5 ( i don't understand why these wont post)

"The cedar swamp was an ancient place. No logging had ever been done here. The ground wasn't suitable for houses. The trees had been alive for hundreds of years and when they fell over, they fell over for good. here in the cedar swamp verticality wasn't an essential property of trees. Many cedars were standing straight up but many were leaning over. Still others had fallen against nearby trees, or crashed to the ground, popping up root systems. There was a graveyard feeling: everywhere the gray skeletons of trees. The moonlight filtering in lit up silver puddles and sprays of cobweb. It glanced off the objects red hair as she moved and darted ahead of me."
Page 369, Chapter 9, Book 3

This excerpt is a description of the setting of the chapter. The tone of the author is almost Gothic, reminiscent of Dracula in its description of broken-up moonlight and shadows. The author even outright states that "There was a graveyard feeling", and describes skeletons of trees and cobwebs, leading almost forcefully to a mood of suspense. The swamp is described as ancient, leading back to the narrators Grecian theme of fate preordained far in the past. The crookedness of the trees symbolize the lack of surety inherent in the future, foreshadowing the use of drugs and Callie's lack of surety in what she is. Finally, the one aspect of color in this scene, the Objects hair, is thrown into sharp relief in the moonlight, pinpointing the narrators fixation on her, as well as her incapability of attaining her as she is described as moving and darting, uncatchable.

Middlesex 4

"Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean task of keeping all those Modernist surfaces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs-- a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed-- Lefty now cleaned the huge picture windows, the fogged glass of the greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were exploring it. Or, should I say, them."
Page 260, Chapter 3, Book 3

In this passage, the narrator describes her/his grandfather's quest to clean the huge windows of their new house, aptly named Middlesex. The short sentences and the diction of the paragraph has a tone of nostalgia, while the mood is one of sadness, because the narrator has previously hinted that Lefty is soon to die. The narrator also makes an intertextual comparison between Lefty's task of cleaning the windows and the story of Sisyphus, who was condemned after he died to always be pushing a rock up a hill and never be able to reach the summit. This parallels the thankless task of trying to keep a house of huge windows clean, especially a house with small children. The narrator also uses the symbolism of a certain tense of ancient Greek verbs, portraying a never-ending task and also juxtaposing itself against Lefty's lack of weariness in this task.

Middlesex 3

"YOU HAVE HEARD OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION? THIS WAS UNNATURAL SELECTION. BY HIS SCIENTIFIC GRAFTING YACUB PRODUCED THE FIRST YELLOW AND RED PEOPLE. BUT HE DIDN'T STOP THERE. HE WENT ON MATING THE LIGHT-SKINNED OFFSPRING OF THOSE PEOPLE. OVER MANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGED THE BLACK MAN, ONE GENERATION AT A TIME, MAKING HIM PALER AND WEAKER, DILUTING HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY, TURNING HIM INTO THE PATHS OF EVIL. AND THEN, MY BROTHERS, ONE DAY YACUB WAS DONE. ONE DAY YACUB WAS FINISHED WITH HIS WORK. AND WHAT HAD HIS WICKEDNESS CREATED? AS I HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE: LIKE CAN ONLY COME FROM LIKE. YACUB HAD CREATED THE WHITE MAN! BORN OF LIES. BORN OF HOMICIDE. A RACE OF BLUE-EYED DEVILS."
Page 155

This passage is part of the tirade of Minister Fard of the Nation of Islam. Capitalizing on the disenfranchisement of the black people living in the ghettos of Detroit, he weaves a tale of the genetic superiority of the black man, reminiscent of the uber-mensch declarations of Adolf Hitler years later, parallelism only in reverse. Fard takes the legitimate religion of Islam and twisting it so he can make quick money. The rhetoric he uses has a tone of contempt and causes the reader to feel threatened if he is white or uncomfortable if he is otherwise.

Middlesex 2 (post did not go through a week ago)

"Smyrna endures today in a few Rebitka songs and a stanza from The Wasteland:

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant
Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.


Everything you need to know about Smyrna is contained in that. The merchant is rich, and so was Smyrna. His proposal was seductive, and so was Smyrna, the most cosmopolitan city in the Near East. Among its reputed founders were, first, the Amazons (which goes nicely with my theme), and second, Tantalus himself. Homer was born therem and Aristotle Onassis. In Smyrna, East and West... blended as tastefully as did the rose petals and hones in the local pastries."
Page 50

This passage describes the ancient city of Smyrna, where the protagonists are situated at this point in the novel. It is described as a place where opposites come together and mesh into a beautiful combination, as a conduit connecting the East to the West. The language the author uses is wistful, his tone being one of loss, because in the sentence previous to this passage, and at certain times during this passage, he foreshadows that the city is soon to be destroyed. In his reference to The Waste Land, the narrator makes an intertextual comparison between this setting of the novel and another work, which incidentally has the authors' name in the first line. The author also uses parallelism to describe the city and compare it to the poem, giving the reader a feel for the city. The narrator also mentions the Amazons in the city's history, musing that they go well with her theme of gender, the Amazons being powerful female warriors.

Middlesex 1

"My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent drivers license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I'm a former field hocky goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox Liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then another... A red-headed girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing who I was. (Her brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into myth; I've left my body in order to occupy others--and all this happened before I turned sixteen."
Book 1, Chapter 1, Page 3

In this, one of the first paragraphs of the book, we learn a great deal about the protagonist. In the first place, we learn that, while she was originally named femininely, later in life her name was shortened to the masculine "Cal". This implies that which the title, "Middlesex", has also implied, that the novel will deal with the subject of gender. Her surname, Stephanides, and her mention of the Greek Orthodox Church lead one to believe that she is of Hellenistic origin, further enhanced by her use of Tiresias, a figure in The Odyssey as well as Greek Mythology. Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years, according to the myth, and the narrators comparison of herself/himself to him also further implies that the narrator's gender might be called into question. The narrator lists things that have occorred in her life, but not their context, nor how they affected her, which adds a mood of suspense and anticipation to the opening pages of this book.

Dracula 7

"There was in the room the same thin white mist that I had before noticed... I felt the same vague terror which had come to me before and the same sense of some presence. I turned to wake Jonathan, but found that he slept so soundly that it seemed as if it was he who had taken the sleeping draught, and not I. I tried, but I could not wake him. This caused me a great fear, and I looked around terrified. Then indeed, my heart sank within me: beside the bed, as if he had stepped out of the mist—or rather as if the mist had turned into his figure, for it had entirely disappeared—stood a tall, thin man, all in black. I knew him at once from the description of the others. The waxen face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between; and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset on the windows of St. Mary's Church at Whitby. I knew, too, the red scar on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him. For an instant my heart stood still, and I would have screamed out, only that I was paralysed."
Chapter XXI, Page 305

This passage depicts when and how Dracula first appears to Mina when she is awake. It contains several examples of symbolism, most prevalent being the physical appearance of the Count. The clothing he wears is black, symbolizing his intentions as well as his relation to the darkness and by extension. The scar on his forehead seems to symbolize that, however, he can be damaged. The way he appears from the mist is reminiscent of the sexual connotations of his feeding by the way he enters the room as the mist, sneakily, seductively. Also, the fear that Mina feels and the darkness of his appearance is a Gothic trait.