As Representative of the Main Character As a Result of Forbidden Love

45 story about a woman who touched a toad while making love. Her baby came out with pop eyes and covered with warts” Eugenides 116. In addition, the presumption also explained as below “During the conjugal act, whatever the mother happened to look at or think about would affect the child. There’s a story in Damascene about a woman who had a picture of John the Baptist over her bed. Wearing the traditional hair shirt. In the throes of passion, the poor woman happened to glance up at this portrait. Nine months later, her baby was born —furry as a bear” The doctor laughed, enjoying himself, sipping more wine. Eugenides 115-116 Based on the presumption, what the wife thinks, touches, or looks while doing the intercourse will affect the baby. Desdemona may forget what she is thinking about while she is making love that night. However, it is clearly stated that she imagines the Minotaur. In the intercourse Desdemona imagines the Minotaur “Against her will, the play had aroused her, too. The Minotaur’s savage, muscular thighs. The suggestive sprawl of his victims” Eugenides 108. Facing the fact that she may have a monstrous baby, she prays it will never happen. Her prayer is granted. Her children are healthy. However, the effect of her sin of doing incest does not affect her children but to her grandchildren who is the main character of the story, Calliope. The effect or the deformity that Calliope has is gene mutation which is came from her grandmother. The effect from the gene mutation itself makes her become an intersex person.

b. As Representative of the Main Character

As we know, Minotaur is a monster. Calliope also feels that she is a monster. 46 Calliope finds a similarity of her figure in Minotaur’s figure as a monster. Calliope herself is half man and woman. Based on Greek mythology, most of the monsters are something that attach to something else in one body. For example: Minotaur, which is a half man and a half bull; and Centaur which is half man and half horse. At this point, it is reasonable that Calliope considers herself as a „monster’. The story begins when Calliope looks up the definition of herself in a dictionary. The definition in the dictionary drags her to a fact that she is a hermaphrodite. Hermaphrodite itself is synonymous to a monster. Following where the trail led, I finally reached hermaphrodite —1.One having the sex organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both male and female.2.Anything comprised of a combination of diverse or contradictory elements. See synonyms at monster. Eugenides 430 Finding herself can be defined as a monster, Calliope was shocked. How she reacts towards the definition of herself is as follow. Callie herself was holding on to this chain now. She was tugging on it, winding it around her hand so that her fingers went white, as she stared down at that word. Monster . Still there. It had not moved. And she wasn’t reading this word on the wall of her old bathroom stall. There was graffiti in Webster’s but the synonym wasn’t part of it. The synonym was official, authoritative; it was the verdict that the culture gave on a person like her. Monster . That was what she was.431

c. As a Result of Forbidden Love

Another similarity between Minotaur and Calliope is that they are the result of forbidden love. Minotaur is the result of the passion of a woman who falls in love with a bull. Calliope herself is the result of forbidden love between her father and 47 mother who are first cousin. In addition, it cannot be ignored the contribution of Calliope’s grandfather and grandmother who have done an incest as they are actually siblings.

5. Zeus