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Description
As parables of human nature, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex act as a duet of adaptationist behaviour in which Detroit--arguably one of the hubs of the American Dream--operates as the fulcrum and the events of August 1974--the apex of the Watergate crisis--function as the lever.
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Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top--or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things. [...] Life is one crisis after another.--President Richard M. Nixon
In The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides establishes a spatiotemporal continuum in which humankind shares a range of biological and historical experiences. Eugenides's characters shift in and out of this continuum via processes of adaptation, or, in some instances, maladaptation. The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex can be usefully understood as a single textual entity in which his characters share a common biology and a similar history. While both narratives converge within a distinct spatiotemporal moment--Detroit, Michigan, in August 1974--their fates inevitably become diffused by their capacity for adapting to change. By its very definition, a continuum refers to a constantly evolving force, and in Eugenides's case, that force is twentieth-century American life--a world founded by waves of immigration, manifold attempts at sociocultural unification, and the irrevocable sweep of modernity. In itself, post-industrial Americana entails a nationalistic rage for idealism, a frenetic desire for cultural perfection and dominion that produces such phenomena as Prohibition, isolationism, and McCarthyism. This nationalistic zeal for homogenization transmogrifies, in the 1960s and 1970s, into racial disharmony, the political convolutions of the Vietnam conflict, and the sexual revolution. With the disintegration of the nuclear family and widespread cultural malaise in the offing, perfection is simply no longer possible. This reality is made resoundingly clear on the evening of August 8th, 1974, when President Nixon announces his resignation at the climax of the Watergate crisis. In The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, this very moment symbolizes the collapse of American idealism.
Both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex straddle a spatiotemporal continuum that affords Eugenides a means for commenting upon the idealism inherent in the American Dream. In The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides illustrates the experiences of the doomed Lisbon family, an American success story established through their privileged suburban livelihood, steady income, and a mortgage that promises to grant them literal ownership of a piece of the nation and its destiny. Middlesex depicts the trials and tribulations of the Stephanides family, who immigrated to the United States in August 1922 as refugees from the massacre of Smyrna's Greek population by Turkish forces, only to arrive in a euphoric America on the verge of economic collapse. They dream of an American perfectionism in which good values and hard work will pave the road to success. Yet the Stephanides family arrives in a country that is trying to maintain this very same ideology of perfection through Prohibition, quasi-xenophobic immigration restrictions, and, much later, a powerful sense of nationalism that blossomed after America's experiences in the Second World War, culminating in the political witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. As the increasingly convoluted situations of the two families begin to coincide in the American race for financial and cultural dominion, the most significant moment of revelation in Eugenides's spatiotemporal continuum occurs in the early 1970s--and most particularly during the Watergate scandal. For Eugenides, this is the signal moment in twentieth-century American history, the apex of social change: after more than a decade of racial turmoil, rapidly shifting sexual values, and the cultural cynicism wrought by the Vietnam War, the nation finds itself beset by a political crisis that questions the legitimacy of the American government, the last bastion of its citizenry's faith and idealism.
Adaptationist criticism assists us in understanding Eugenides's spatiotemporal continuum by virtue of its attention to the manner in which human beings respond to change, as well as how they attempt to survive and presumably flourish under their new conditions. Adaptationist criticism recognizes the ceaseless conflict between biological and environmental influences upon the nature of human development and individuation. Carroll asserts that adaptationist criticism is "fundamentally opposed to poststructuralist theories" and suggests a wholly distinctive way of reading texts, one valuing the notion that "humans in all ages and cultures display a common, basic set of motives, feelings, and ways of thinking. [Adaptationist literary scholars] believe further that literature commonly depicts human nature, that it is produced by human nature, and that it satisfies the needs of human nature" ("Adaptationist"). Adaptationist criticism is unique in its ability to bridge the sciences and the humanities, fashioning a critical methodology that envelops biology and textuality. As an analytical tool, adaptationist criticism swerves away from the poststructuralist belief that literary characters are simply autonomous textual creations and favours a reassessment of literary personages as reflections of genuine human beings, who--consistently confronted with conflict and choice--must make decisions that impact their capacity for survival. Additionally, these human characters quite often contend with genetic predispositions that disable their ability to make certain choices. Human nature is most frequently responsible for the positions in which many humans (and literary characters) find themselves; driven by their natural instincts, human characters decide to subsist or expire, although their environments may or may not facilitate their desired outcomes. "Literary representations are not disconnected from the material world," David P. Barash and Nanelle Barash write. "Even the loftiest products of human imagination are, first, emanations of that breathing, eating, sleeping, defecating, reproducing, evolving critter known as Homo sapiens."
In Evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll ascertains three levels of interaction between literary criticism and evolutionary psychology, including human nature, cultural order, and individual identity. He argues that human nature involves a wide range of cultural productions, and these "cultural forms are themselves the product of a complex interaction among various innate dispositions and between innate dispositions and variable environmental conditions" (150, 152). Given that much of Darwin's philosophy recognizes that, in order for civilization to advance, human beings must adapt, we can usefully understand the spatiotemporal continuum in terms of the inextricable relationship that exists between human beings and the ceaseless forces of evolution. With Carroll's levels of interaction, human nature functions as the determining factor in a given character's capacity for adapting or maladapting--for living well and flourishing or, conversely, slipping into the oblivion of status quo. Carroll defines human nature in terms of two essential propositions: first, that "innate human dispositions exercise a powerful shaping force on all forms of cultural order," and second, that "all such forces operate in a tight web of systemic interdependency such that the modification of any one element has a distinct effect on all the other elements within the system" (153). As parables of human nature, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex act as a duet... |
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