Middlesex Analysis

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is told from the point of view by a man named Cal. He tells his story of going from Callie, a female, to Cal, a male. In one story, he explains the locker room at his old school. After Cal’s field hockey game, the girls all head to the locker room to shower and change. While walking through the locker room, he describes how the locker room is set up with the different type of girls called the Charm Bracelets, the Kilt Pins, and the Ethnic Girls. With each section he describes their history, and what role each one plays in the school.

From how Cal described the different groups in his school locker room, it shows how your cultural background and ethnicity determines how/where you fit in on the social spectrum.

Cal really draws attention to the fact that their families probably comes from the founding fathers. They have all of the power in the school. Next Cal describes the Kilt Pins, “The most populous phylum in our locker room ... they were fat and skinny, pale and freckled, ... devices that held our tartans together” (298). These are girls who Cal descbries that holds the gap between the top and the bottom. They make up most of the locker room even though they are not the most popular. Cal describes them as just basic girls with not major ethnic background. Eugenides probably labeled these girls as “Kilt Pins” because pins are items that hold the kilt skirts together. In this instance these girls held together the Charm Bracelets and the “Ethnic” girls. Cal ends her explanation of the locker room with her group of girls, the Ethinic girls, “Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance” (298). These are girls whose families are immigrants, like Cal. They are at the end of the social spectrum because they eat different foods, and look different than those of the Charm bracelets, and Kilt