Abstract
Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 short story “The Third and Final Continent” and Geoffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex draw complex portraits of immigrant American masculinities that change with age. In these fictions, characters work to construct masculine identities in a diaspora as they confront their own aging and mortality. This essay uses the short story to explore the relationship between emerging gender identity and shifting geographies and then turns to see how this relationship is complicated in Eugenides’ longer work. Lahiri’s narrator tells a linear story of aging immigrant masculinity using his first American landlady as a fixed point in the geography of his becoming a citizen, a husband, and a father. This mapped out path of aging is complicated in Middlesex: the narrator, Cal, in the process of building a masculine identity after a childhood as a girl, weaves a story that includes those of his immigrant grandfather Lefty and his father Milton.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Armengol, Josep M. “Aging as Emasculation? Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.” Critique, vol. 59, no. 3, 2018, pp. 355–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1386157.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge, 1996.
Christou, Anastasia. “Ageing Masculinities and the Nation: Disrupting Boundaries of Sexualities, Mobilities and Identities.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 23, no. 6, 2016, pp. 801–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2015.1058760.
Elkins, Richard and Dave King. “Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities.” In The Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, edited by Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R. W. Connell. Sage, 2005, pp. 379–394.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Graham, Sarah. “‘See Synonyms at Monster’: En-Freaking Transgender in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex.” Ariel, vol. 40, no. 4, October 2009, pp. 1–18.
Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005.
Khan, Aisha. “Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race.” Small Axe, vol. 19, no. 3, 2015, pp. 29–49. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/602409.
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2006.
Kostova, Bilyana Vanyova. “Remembering Ethnicity in Middlesex.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 70, no. 4, August 2015, pp. 306–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12071.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Lee, Merton. “Why Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Is So Inoffensive.” Critique, vol. 51, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610903249856.
McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Manchester UP, 2010.
Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1992, pp. 9–21.
Talley, Heather Laine and Monica J. Casper. “Intersex and Aging: A (Cautionary) Research Agenda.” In Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Aging: Challenges in Research, Practice, and Policy, 1st ed., edited by Tarynn M. Witten and A. Evan Eyler, Johns Hopkins UP, 2012, pp. 270–289.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the kind assistance of José María Armengol in pointing me to resources for this essay, and for the editorial advice of my colleague Cristine Varholy. Work on this project was also supported by a Faculty Summer Research Grant from Hampden-Sydney College.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hardy, S. (2021). Geographies of Aging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. In: Armengol, J.M. (eds) Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71595-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71596-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)