Response 3: Text-to-text

Azel Kahan                                                                                                     5/4/15

Middlesex Blog: Text-to-text

A text-to-text comparison worth motioning in the chapter The Obscure Object is when Calliope feels a very peculiar combination of emotions that can be related to a style of literature studied earlier in the academic year. This is when one of the characters in Middlesex, Maxine Grossinger, has an aneurysm on stage at a performance. Normally and event like this one would be extremely traumatic, instilling horror and sadness into everyone in the scene. However, Calliope reacts differently. “While the sun set melodramatically over a death that wasn’t in the script, I felt a wave of pure happiness surge through my body”(339). This reaction almost resembles a story element found in Shakespearean plays, the hamartia. This is the downfall of a hero/heroine, often a result of dealing with death, as seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The character Macbeth possesses hamartia because after committing murder once, it becomes a turning point in his character development that sends him down a spiral of more death and self-destruction. Callie may be similar in the sense that her witnessing the death with the obscure object in her arms brings her pleasure, making her see other events in a controversial manner. This event is also similar to Shakespeare’s Macbeth because this death changes the protagonist slightly, altering her development through the story. Jeffrey Eugenides may or may not have borrowed story elements from the 16^th century poet, but there is no question that the significance of these two passages are paralleled in some manner.