Speaking of the threshold of revelation…
Speaking of the threshold of revelation…
Part 2 of Angels in America provided the perfect set up for the second half of Middlesex, with Cal/Calliope providing the perfect portrait of the “threshold of revelation.” Simply speaking, if I didn’t fully grasp it at the end of Angels in America, I certainly do now.
Belonging to neither gender, or both, Cal/Calliope is able to understand both. As Cal states in Book 3, “Already latent inside of me, like the future 120 mph serve of a tennis prodigy, was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both” (269). He then reiterates what he intuited as a young girl – Mr. Stephanides submerging his grief, Mrs. Stephanides “seized with desperate love,” Sourmelina’s nostaliga, and Father Mike’s pride. Cal stands on the line between male and female and can sense and draw from both. It makes Cal empathetic; as he passes prostitutes he thinks “not what I might do with them, but what it must be like for them” (307). It makes a young Calliope attractive to her female classmates – “it wasn’t uncommon for certain innocent, excitable girls to respond to my presence in ways they weren’t aware of” (304) – she exuding something inexplicably masculine while remaining safe as a girl, familiar yet somewhat unfamiliar. On the threshold between child and adult, Calliope presents an oddly appropriate solution, for these girls, for Olivia who “remained in key ways emotionally adolescent” and for whom Cal “was her starter kit” (319), and for the Obscure Object, who rejects the sort of normal, American fantasy of dating a handsome and kind of dangerous guy like Rex for silent, nighttime trysts with her best friend.
The understanding of both sexes, and, concurrently, what was considered normal seemed to help Calliope fool Dr. Luce. Like Christine Jorgenson, she knew what was expected of her from both a male and female perspective. Jorgenson had fashion and a love story for her female audience and long, sexy legs and blond hair for the male audience. She’d have passed flawlessly if not for pesky reporters. Likewise, Callie knew exactly what Dr. Luce was looking for. Even the tale she spins exists on the threshold; “Half the time I wrote like a bad George Eliot, the other half like a bad Salinger” (418); half woman, half man.
[My exploration of this isn’t quite finished – it might end up in an extension of this post or my final paper.]
Tags: threshold
