Adam Morton Ms.

Poole Advanced Placement British Literature 10/27/11 Symbolism Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine. Page 95 of 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides As Desdemona and Lefty enter the Ford-ruled town of Detroit, Jeffrey Eugenides compares human individuals to videogames and machines, controlled by invisible joysticks, showing his distaste for the generally accepted unnatural nature of modern man, by directly addressing the rapid movement of humanity toward industrialization and mechanization, and the worrisome loss of autonomy that comes with such advancement. By painting this symbol of men plugged into technology, forced to repeat their movements over and over, Eugenides gives a late warning of the dangers of technology and industrialization. Humans have become a unit of maximized, repetitive production within the labor force. The fact that workers initially rebelled against the technology and difficulty of an industrial work world shows the physical and emotional strain that technology places on the individual. There is no resolution to this conflict: Eugenides simply states that we have all inherited the adaptation to this removal of individuality. He then states that the individual becomes one of many identical robotic producers, lined up along a robotic production facility. Their sole purpose is to create profit. Instead of being individuals, they are uniformed machines, stripped of any personality and dehumanized. Eugenides use of joysticks and remotes implies that assembly-line workers would be controlled by the invisible hands of their employers, forced against their will to continue with repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.