L’ibridazione non ha avuto luogo: sul monostilismo di Middlesex

Despite its popular success and the award of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Jeffrey
Eugenides’ Middlesex has been the subject of numerous negative reviews by academic crit-
ics. In their considerations, however, they have too often behaved as if the concepts of form
and content were separable from each other, neglecting to note that the merit of Middlesex
should consist in showing the inadequacy of this opposition and in highlighting the relation-
ship of mutual interdependence between the issues addressed and the stylistic procedures
implemented. However, in Middlesex the textual strategy does not seem to correspond to the
intentions declared by its author: the novel leaves its reader with an impression of incom-
pleteness, of failure to achieve the promised complexity and indeed of simplification of a
reality that is far more complex than what it manages to describe. Deepening the concept of
style and starting from the debate on hybridization born in the philosophical field between the
18th and 19th centuries, the article aims to explain this judgment, showing how in Middlesex
the hybridization of literary genres and sexual genders has not really had place and how the
novel does not prove capable of affirming the legitimacy of a hybrid sexual and textual iden-
tity.