Secrets Theme Analysis

Middlesex is full of secrets. The novel suggests that secrets are a pervasive part of life and connect people to one another even when they don’t realize it (because of the very fact that they keep their secrets hidden). Indeed, certain truths about the novel—such as Cal’s intersex identity—is unbeknownst even to Cal himself for much of his youth. Yet while secrets might be everywhere, the novel also shows that they do not tend to stay secret. Even if it takes many years or even multiple generations, secrets always come out—often with explosive results.

According to the novel, two of the main reasons why people keep secrets are ignorance and shame, factors that often end up working together. Indeed, ignorance and shame can make people keep secrets against their will, hiding truths about themselves that they would rather have out in the open. Yet as the novel shows, over the course of time both ignorance and shame tend to lessen in intensity, and for some characters—including Cal—this means that they can begin to live their truth later in life, even if they weren’t able to when they were younger. Cal’s status as intersex remains a secret for much of the novel due to the dual factors of ignorance and shame. Cal inherits the gene that makes him intersex due to his grandparents’ incestuous relationship; however, neither Cal nor his parents initially know the nature of Lefty and Desdemona’s relationship because of the shame surrounding incest. In other words, they are ignorant because of shame. When Callie is born, the doctor who examines her, Dr. Philobosian, is also ignorant about her condition; not realizing that she is intersex, he assigns her a female identity. However, after Cal finds out the truth about himself, he doesn’t reveal this truth to many people. He explains that he avoids hanging out with girls because he is worried that they will see the truth about him: “I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country.” This quotation links Cal’s concealment of his trans and intersex identities to the secrets kept by first generation immigrants like his grandparents.

While some of the characters are able to keep secrets for many years, the novel heavily emphasizes that all secrets come out eventually. In some cases, this is simply by accident (such as when Callie’s injury from the tractor leads doctors to discover she is intersex), while at other times it is more deliberate. Importantly, the novel also shows that the revelation of secrets isn’t always linear. Sometimes a character exposes a secret only to take it back again. The revelation of Callie’s intersex condition after she is injured by a tractor is perhaps the best example of a secret being revealed completely accidentally. In other cases, there is more ambiguity over whether the revelation was accidental or intentional. For example, regarding Sourmelina’s secret that she is a lesbian, Cal explains, “My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified.” Lefty and Desdemona felt that the secret of their incestuous relationship was safe with Sourmelina because of her own secret. Yet as the novel illustrates, no secret is safe forever. Once Sourmelina dies, it becomes clear that her lesbianism was more of an open secret, or at least something that most people knew was true on some level even if they didn’t admit this to each other (or to themselves). The fact that Sourmelina dies in 1979 is also significant. By this point, changing attitudes toward homosexuality mean that the people around her are perhaps better equipped to understand her experience than they were when she was a young woman. The shame and ignorance that initially led her to keep her secret have begun to fade away. 

Cal’s reflection about Sourmelina’s secret further underlines the idea that secrets almost have an internal energy of their own and will force themselves to be known at a certain point. This is also shown by the gene that causes Cal to be intersex. The gene is recessive, which means that many generations of Cal’s family carried it, including his parents Milton and Tessie, even though they are not intersex (nor is Cal’s brother, Chapter Eleven). The secret of the gene remains hidden within the bodies of the Stephanides family for 250 years. However, like the truth about Sourmelina, it eventually makes itself known, thereby serving as a reminder that nothing can be kept secret forever.