Between Place and Identity: Spatial Production and the Poetics of Liminality in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Fiction

Abstract

This article investigates the role of space in the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides, focusing on The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002) through the lens of spatial theory. Drawing on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Doreen Massey, the study explores how Eugenides constructs spatial environments that not only frame but actively shape the identities, desires, and traumas of his characters. In The Virgin Suicides, suburban domestic spaces are shown to function as heterotopias—sites of surveillance, repression, and mythologized femininity—while Middlesex engages with transnational and urban spaces to narrate diasporic and intersex identity as dynamic, embodied, and liminal. The analysis reveals that Eugenides uses space as both a narrative device and a thematic concern to interrogate gender, memory, and power. Rather than passive backdrops, the novelistic spaces become charged arenas of conflict and transformation, reflecting and resisting dominant socio-cultural discourses. This study argues that space in Eugenides’ fiction operates as a critical register for understanding the politics of belonging and the production of subjectivity. By situating Eugenides within the broader field of literary spatiality, this article contributes to contemporary debates in literary geography, gender studies, and American fiction.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, the spatial turn in the humanities has radically reshaped the way literature is conceptualized, interpreted, and situated within broader cultural, political, and geographic frameworks. No longer regarded merely as the passive backdrop to narrative events, space has emerged as an active textual and ideological agent that structures meaning, reflects power relations, and mediates identity. Literary geography, at the intersection of spatial theory, cultural geography, and narratology, has become an increasingly vital lens through which to examine modern and contemporary fiction. Within this growing field, the novels of Jeffrey Eugenides remain surprisingly underexamined, despite their overt spatial complexity and geographic richness.

Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides 1993) and Middlesex (Eugenides 2002) offer compelling meditations on the relationship between place and subjectivity. Both novels render space not as a neutral container but as a socially and symbolically charged construct: the American suburb in The Virgin Suicides becomes a hermetically sealed heterotopia of surveillance, grief, and mythologized memory, while the city of Detroit in Middlesex is portrayed as a palimpsest of racial, economic, and diasporic histories. Furthermore, Eugenides’ engagement with migration, intersexuality, and diasporic identity foregrounds spatial liminality and hybridity—concepts central to contemporary theories of space and place.

This paper argues that Eugenides’ work articulates a dynamic, relational understanding of space, one that aligns with and expands upon key ideas in critical spatial theory. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace, Doreen Massey’s relational geography, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s notions of space, place, and emotional geography, this study interrogates how Eugenides spatializes narrative and narrativizes space. By treating place as both a material and metaphoric site of identity negotiation, the novels challenge essentialist notions of gender, home, and nation.

Through close textual analysis, this article demonstrates how Eugenides’ fiction makes geography legible as an embodied, affective, and political dimension of storytelling. The aim is not simply to “map” Eugenides’ literary landscapes, but to uncover the ways in which space itself becomes a protagonist—one that shapes, distorts, and defines the ethical and ontological stakes of the narratives. In so doing, this study contributes to a growing body of literary geographical scholarship and offers new insights into how narrative space can function as a site of both epistemological inquiry and cultural critique.

2. Materials and Methods

The spatialization of narrative has become a defining concern of contemporary literary studies, informed by a constellation of theoretical perspectives that treat space not as an inert setting but as ideologically charged, socially constructed, and experientially lived. This section outlines the theoretical architecture underpinning the present analysis, drawing on key thinkers in spatial theory and human geography whose work enables a nuanced reading of Jeffrey Eugenides’ complex spatial imaginaries.

2.1. Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space

Henri Lefebvre’s seminal work La production de l’espace (1974), translated as The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991), offers the foundational claim that space is not a neutral container but is actively produced through social relations. Lefebvre’s spatial triad—spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and representational spaces (lived space)—provides a flexible but rigorous model for analyzing how literature encodes spatial ideologies and experiences.

In Eugenides’ novels, this triadic model illuminates how spatial environments (suburbia, urban decay, and diasporic dislocation) are constructed through narrative and experienced by characters in embodied, contested, and symbolic ways. The Virgin Suicides offers a particularly poignant rendering of lived space, where the suburban neighborhood becomes imbued with collective memory, gendered mythology, and emotional trauma.

2.2. Michel Foucault: Heterotopias and Spatial Deviance

Michel Foucault’s brief but influential essay “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault 1984) introduces the concept of heterotopias—real places that exist outside of normative spatial order, functioning as counter-sites of crisis, deviation, or transformation. Heterotopias are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” Heterotopia as defined by Michel Foucault in his 1967 lecture “Des espaces autres” (published posthumously in 1984) refers to real spaces that function as counter-sites—simultaneously physical and symbolic—that exist outside of normative special and social orders while reflecting or contesting them. Unlike utopias, which are idealized non-places, heterotopias are embedded in the material world but disrupt conventional spatial logics by juxtaposing incompatible spaces, layering multiple temporalities, and enacting ritualized forms of exclusion or deviation. They are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1984), and often serve to mirror, invert, or destabilize dominant ideologies through their structural ambivalence and liminality. In literary analysis, heterotopias are often employed to theorize spaces that resist narrative coherence, defy spatial realism, and foreground the affective or ideological contradictions embedded in the lived environment. The Lisbon home in The Virgin Suicides, for instance, operates as a heterotopia of deviation: a domestic enclosure that becomes increasingly disconnected from the external world, transfiguring space into a vessel for both socio-cultural critique and tragic idealization. Foucault’s theory thus enables a reading of Eugenides’ fictional spaces as liminal, ambivalent, and resistant to spatial totalization.

2.3. Edward Soja: Thirdspace and Spatial Trialectics

Building on Lefebvre, Edward Soja articulates a postmodern spatiality through his concept of Thirdspace—a space that transcends the binary of physical (Firstspace) and mental (Secondspace) geographies. Thirdspace refers to the real-and-imagined, lived-and-conceived spaces that challenge conventional mappings of power, identity, and experience.

In Middlesex, Thirdspace becomes particularly salient in understanding Cal’s gender identity, which resists binary classifications and exists within a spatial and epistemological liminality. Soja’s framework supports an analysis of the novel’s interweaving of bodily geography, urban space, and diasporic displacement, thereby extending spatial analysis into the domain of embodied subjectivity.

2.4. Doreen Massey: Relational Space and a Global Sense of Place

Doreen Massey’s reconceptualization of place as relational, open, and constituted through flows (rather than as fixed or essentialized) challenges traditional notions of geographical rootedness. In For Space (Massey 2005), she argues for a global sense of place that recognizes mobility, heterogeneity, and simultaneity.

Eugenides’ spatial imaginaries, particularly in Middlesex, align with Massey’s model: Detroit is presented not as a static location but as a dynamic site of racial struggle, economic transformation, and cultural encounter. Moreover, the novel’s transnational itinerary—from Asia Minor to America—underscores Massey’s insistence that place is produced through interconnection and movement, not isolation.

2.5. Yi-Fu Tuan: Space, Place, and Emotional Geography

Finally, the phenomenological perspective of Yi-Fu Tuan, particularly in Space and Place (Tuan 1977), allows for a reading of space as emotionally charged and shaped by human experience. Tuan’s emphasis on how space becomes “place” through attachment, memory, and affect deepens the analysis of Eugenides’ narrative geographies, particularly the nostalgic framing of suburban spaces in The Virgin Suicides.

Collectively, these theoretical perspectives construct a robust framework for exploring how Eugenides spatializes narrative experience. The convergence of social production (Lefebvre), symbolic resistance (Foucault), epistemological hybridity (Soja), relational dynamism (Massey), and affective emplacement (Tuan) allows this study to trace the nuanced ways in which spatiality is inscribed, interrogated, and subverted in Eugenides’ fiction.

3. Narrative Spacialities in Eugenides’ Fiction

The spatial analysis of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex reveals how space and place operate as fundamental narrative and symbolic structures shaping identity, memory, and emotional experience. The two novels, while differing in tone and scope, both use spatiality to explore themes of containment, transition, and selfhood.

In The Virgin Suicides, the suburban domestic space is revealed as a site of psychological entrapment and emotional desolation. The Lisbon family home exemplifies a heterotopic space that isolates its inhabitants through the imposition of rigid social and familial controls. This spatial confinement, as theorized through Lefebvre’s triad and supported by Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of emotional geography, transforms the home into an anti-place—a site where place attachment fails and emotional suffocation prevails. The emotional landscape of the novel is thus inseparable from its spatial logic: the suburb’s geometric rigidity mirrors the girls’ constricted existences, culminating in their tragic deaths. This finding confirms that spatial form in The Virgin Suicides functions as both metaphor and mechanism for the characters’ psychological states.

Conversely, Middlesex presents space as fluid, liminal, and generative. The spatial journey across continents, cities, and neighborhoods parallels Cal’s evolving gender identity and cultural hybridity. The results demonstrate that spatial mobility fosters emotional growth and self-discovery, consistent with Tuan’s argument that emotional attachment to place is constructed through narrative and embodied experience. The novel’s transnational settings emerge as dynamic sites where space and identity are mutually constitutive. Moreover, the interplay of fixed and transient spaces reflects Cal’s negotiation of boundaries, illustrating how spatial plurality enables complex subjectivities to emerge.

Together, these findings suggest that Eugenides’s fiction uses spatial frameworks not merely as backdrops but as active agents in character development and thematic exploration. The contrasting spatial logics—confinement in The Virgin Suicides and expansiveness in Middlesex—underscore the nuanced ways space shapes emotional and psychological experience in contemporary literature.

4. Case Study I: The Virgin Suicides and the Suburban Heterotopia

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides is a novel deeply anchored in spatial tension: the suburban neighborhood, the claustrophobic family home, the porous yet inaccessible boundaries between genders, and the spatialized collective memory of adolescent trauma. The novel’s exploration of spatiality is not merely topographic but metaphorical, emotional, and epistemological. By applying spatial theory to The Virgin Suicides, we uncover a complex poetics of enclosure, deviance, and nostalgia, wherein space itself becomes a central actor in the unfolding tragedy.

The novel presents suburban space as a claustrophobic and symbolically overdetermined setting where gendered subjectivities are shaped, policed, and ultimately destroyed. The Lisbon family home and its surrounding neighborhood function as a Foucauldian heterotopia—a “space of otherness” that reflects and inverts cultural expectations (Foucault 1984). But beyond its structural role, the house becomes a deeply felt place, a site of emotional saturation. As Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (Tuan 1977, p. 3). The Lisbon sisters experience neither. Their home, instead of being a site of rootedness and safety, becomes a prison of surveillance and repression.

The girls are confined physically and symbolically, their desires sublimated into the boys’ nostalgic, fetishizing gaze. The boys’ narrative is one of failed intimacy and distant mourning. They reconstruct the Lisbon home through scraps and memories, attempting to fix meaning to a space that resists understanding. As Tuan observes, emotional intensity is what converts undifferentiated space into meaningful place (p. 136). For the Lisbon sisters, however, their lived environment remains emotionally stifling and psychologically barren—a space where emotion cannot flourish but only implode.

Henri Lefebvre’s triadic model—spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces—reveals how suburbia operates ideologically and materially to contain female subjectivity. Spatial practice (the routines of suburban domesticity), reinforced by religious authority and parental control, imposes a false sense of stability. Tuan argues that the built environment often reflects “an effort to impose order and meaning” (p. 179), but this order in The Virgin Suicides is one of death rather than life. The Lisbon house becomes an anti-place, its ordered appearance masking disorder and despair.

Moreover, the spatial arrangement of the suburb—repetitive, over-planned, and rigid—aligns with what Tuan calls “geometrical space,” which lacks emotional resonance and instead promotes detachment and dehumanization (p. 17). The girls’ suicides expose this hollowness, transforming the neighborhood from a perceived utopia to a ghostly, haunted map. In this way, Eugenides shows how suburban space not only reflects social values but produces psychological conditions that render certain lives untenable.

4.1. The Suburban Home as Heterotopia

The Lisbon house operates as what Michel Foucault terms a heterotopia of deviation—a space of simultaneous intimacy and estrangement, positioned both within and outside the suburban social order. Initially presented as an ordinary middle-class home, the Lisbon residence becomes a spatial anomaly once its daughters begin to withdraw from society. As the narrator observes, “The house had become a prison. We saw it in the way the roof sagged, as though bearing the weight of all those people inside” (The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides (1993, p. 90)).

This heterotopic quality intensifies after Cecilia’s suicide, when the family’s grief solidifies into spatial restriction: “The windows remained shut. The curtains closed. The air inside the house grew dank and yellowed, heavy with vinegar and old newspapers” (p. 96). Eugenides uses the domestic space to enact both literal and symbolic confinement, echoing Foucault’s analysis of heterotopias as “places that are outside of all places, even though they may be actually locatable” (Foucault 1984).

Lefebvre’s triad is also evident here: the conceived space of the family home (as mapped by social norms), the perceived space (as experienced by the boys watching from across the street), and the lived space (as embodied by the increasingly desocialized Lisbon girls) produce a dissonance that underscores the spatial alienation at the heart of the novel.

4.2. Neighborhood as Lived Space and Emotional Archive

The suburban neighborhood in The Virgin Suicides is not a neutral backdrop but a lived space, suffused with longing, guilt, and failed understanding. The narrators—adult men reflecting on the events of their adolescence—construct a collective spatial memory that blends fact, imagination, and emotional projection. “We became obsessed with them, with the way they seemed to occupy space as if it were theirs alone” (p. 38). Here, Eugenides captures the boys’ spatial fascination with the Lisbon girls as aesthetic, almost metaphysical presences in their environment.

After Lux’s failed escape and her forced return home, the narrators describe the street as an altered, almost haunted landscape: “The neighborhood seemed to hold its breath. The lawns went brown. The mail piled up in boxes. Dogs howled at fences as though sensing a disruption in the ordinary geometry of things” (p. 115). This description exemplifies Soja’s Thirdspace, where physical geography (dying lawns and abandoned mail) converges with psychological and affective disturbance.

The boys’ surveillance—from treetops, across lawns, or through binoculars—further reinforces spatial asymmetry and gendered power. Yet the novel complicates voyeurism by linking it to a failed epistemology: the boys never truly “know” the girls or their reasons for suicide. This epistemological opacity is mirrored in spatial terms: “We knew the house only from its exterior—the blinds drawn, the walls white and featureless as paper” (p. 72).

4.3. Temporal Geography and the Cartography of Grief

Eugenides also uses spatial structures to shape the novel’s temporality. The retrospective, nonlinear narrative constitutes a form of temporal cartography, where space is used to anchor, distort, and repeat moments of trauma. The narrators’ obsessive return to specific scenes—the basement, the front porch, and the bedroom window—suggests a form of psychic mapping that defies linear chronology.

Foucault’s heterotopias are inherently temporal as well as spatial: “They always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault 1984). The Lisbon home, briefly opened to outsiders during the chaperoned party, then closed off again, follows precisely this pattern. The narrators recall: “For a single night, we breached the border. We crossed into their territory. We danced in their kitchen. And then we were expelled” (p. 142).

Grief in The Virgin Suicides thus becomes a spatial condition—entangled with memory, architecture, and landscape. The novel’s concluding lines emphasize this unresolved spatial tension: “And still we knew nothing. The emptiness of the house grew in our minds. It became a map with no key, a territory we could no longer name” (p. 215). The house, once literal, becomes metaphorical: a cartographic symbol of the narrators’ incomplete knowledge and emotional entrapment.

5. Case Study II: Middlesex and the Liminality of Transnational Space

In Middlesex (Eugenides 2002), Jeffrey Eugenides crafts a sprawling narrative that traverses continents, generations, and gender categories, constructing a multilayered geography of displacement, transformation, and becoming. The novel’s spatial complexity is both geopolitical and intimate: it moves from early 20th century Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, through the racial unrest of the 1960s, and into the suburban landscapes of postwar America. Central to the novel is the protagonist Cal/Calliope Stephanides, whose intersex identity serves as both a biological and metaphorical Thirdspace—what Edward Soja calls “a space that is both real and imagined, a space of both/and rather than either/or” (Thirdspace, Soja (1996, p. 11)).

If The Virgin Suicides illustrates spatial repression and emotional implosion, Middlesex stages space as movement, transformation, and emotional complexity. Yi-Fu Tuan’s insight that “experience in place is more lasting and significant than a momentary encounter in space” (Tuan 1977, p. 197) helps us understand how Eugenides uses the changing geographies of the Stephanides family to construct both cultural and personal identity across generations.

From the Greek village of Bithynios to Prohibition-era Detroit and finally to modern San Francisco, Middlesex unfolds across liminal spaces where borders—geographical, biological, and gendered—are constantly crossed. These transitions echo Tuan’s notion that emotional attachment arises not only from permanence but from the narrative of movement through space (p. 6). For Cal, whose life traverses multiple forms of identity, space is not just a backdrop but a participant in his becoming.

The family’s early years in Detroit’s ethnic enclaves mark the creation of place through communal ties and sensory familiarity—smells, language, and rituals. Tuan emphasizes that place is made meaningful through repeated bodily encounters and shared memory (p. 18). As the family moves into more assimilated and sanitized suburban settings, that emotional geography is eroded. The transition parallels Cal’s own crisis of identity, culminating in a spatial and existential rupture.

Cal’s journey to San Francisco enacts what Tuan calls the “discovery of the self through movement in space” (p. 53). San Francisco, with its associations of queer identity and freedom, becomes a heterotopic zone where Cal’s redefinition takes place. His stay in a hotel and his walks through the city illustrate Tuan’s point that transient spaces, though temporary, can acquire intense emotional meaning when associated with personal transformation (p. 181).

Ultimately, Middlesex is a novel of cartographic queerness, charting an identity that resists spatial and categorical fixity. As Tuan reminds us, “the ability to make a place for oneself is a primary indicator of psychological health” (p. 154). Cal’s final return to Berlin and then to Detroit is less about arriving at a destination than affirming a capacious, flexible map of the self—an emotional geography that has learned to dwell in in-betweenness.

5.1. Diasporic Cartographies and Relational Place

Doreen Massey’s theorization of space as relational, open, and constituted through interaction offers a vital lens for interpreting Middlesex’s diasporic geographies. As the Stephanides family migrates from Smyrna to Detroit, their identity is not simply transplanted from one rooted place to another but continuously negotiated through cultural hybridity, historical rupture, and spatial reconfiguration. Cal notes: “Emigration had been a stripping away of the past. What remained was the house, the streets of Detroit, the factories, the language of business” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 89)).

Massey’s insight that “places are processes” (For Space, Massey (2005, p. 151)) is echoed in Eugenides’ treatment of Detroit, a city whose transformation mirrors the family’s own. As Cal narrates: “Detroit was a city of transplants. Nobody really belonged, and so the city could never decide what it was” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 102)). The city is not a stable backdrop but a node of intersecting social, racial, and economic vectors, offering a paradigmatic example of Massey’s “global sense of place.”

5.2. Urban Space, Industrial Collapse, and Racial Geography

The spatial production of Middlesex is particularly potent in its depiction of Detroit as a palimpsest—a city continually overwritten by industrial capitalism, racial division, and socio-economic collapse. Lefebvre’s concept of spatial production helps elucidate how Eugenides maps these forces onto the cityscape. “We lived in a neighborhood that was slowly turning black. First came the kids, then the music, then the white flight” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 170)). Here, space is shaped not only by physical structures but by the lived experience of racialized social relations.

Eugenides aligns the 1967 Detroit riots with a moment of spatial rupture, exposing the fragility of urban order and the volatility of spatial borders. “The city was burning, and we could see the red horizon from our windows. We were told not to go outside. The streets no longer belonged to us” (p. 209). This moment exemplifies what Lefebvre describes as the “contradictions of abstract space”—space designed for control and efficiency, yet subject to social upheaval (The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1991, p. 318)).

5.3. The Body as Thirdspace

More radically, Middlesex transforms the body itself into a spatial metaphor. Cal’s intersex condition—born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and raised as a girl before transitioning to a male identity—operates within Soja’s notion of Thirdspace: a lived space that refuses binary categorization. “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl… and then again, as a teenage boy” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 3)). Cal’s body is not simply a biological fact but a spatialized site of inscription, interpretation, and resistance.

Soja argues that “Thirdspace is where everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined” (Thirdspace, Soja (1996, p. 57)). Cal’s journey—from the female-coded spaces of school and home to the liminal, anonymous spaces of San Francisco’s queer underworld—tracks a cartography of gender that is fluid, unstable, and subversive. “I felt free in San Francisco, in that place between identities, between names” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 402)). The liminality of this “in-between” space reflects the essence of Thirdspace, where binary logics collapse and new epistemologies emerge.

5.4. Genealogy, Myth, and Transhistorical Space

The novel’s intergenerational structure further emphasizes its spatial poetics. Eugenides constructs a genealogical geography, wherein familial identity is transmitted across landscapes and eras. The ancestral village of Bithynios, with its “stone houses and olive trees” (p. 28), is not simply a physical locale but a mythic origin point, a representational space that anchors the family’s spatial imaginary.

Tuan’s affective theory of place—“what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Space and Place, Tuan (1977, p. 6))—applies here. Bithynios is repeatedly recalled, long after the family has left it, becoming part of the mental geography through which Cal understands his identity: “I saw the hills of Bithynios in my sleep. I felt the dust of it on my skin. It was my past and not mine” (Middlesex, Eugenides (2002, p. 274)).

This layering of personal, familial, and historical spaces aligns with what Bertrand Westphal calls geocriticism: a method that examines the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and intertextuality of literary space (Geocriticism Westphal (2011)). Middlesex is not one story in one place, but many stories across many spaces—folded into each other, mutually constitutive, and always in motion.

6. Discussion

This study demonstrates that Jeffrey Eugenides’ fiction constructs spaces that are not merely narrative settings but complex socio-symbolic terrains, infused with power dynamics, affective intensities, and epistemological ambiguities. Drawing from a robust spatial theoretical framework, the analyses of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex reveal how Eugenides employs space as a primary vector for negotiating themes of gender, identity, grief, and transformation.

The Virgin Suicides, when read through Foucault’s heterotopias and Lefebvre’s spatial triad, emerges as a narrative of claustrophobic enclosure, where suburban domesticity becomes a site of surveillance and symbolic violence. The Lisbon home functions as a spatial allegory for gendered repression and failed epistemology. Its transformation into a heterotopic zone—withdrawn, mythologized, and inaccessible—suggests a broader critique of the gendered spaces of suburban America. The neighborhood, likewise, functions as an emotional palimpsest where memory, desire, and ignorance intersect. Spatial experience here is deeply entangled with the narrators’ male gaze, whose inability to access the interiority of the Lisbon girls mirrors a broader failure to “read” or inhabit feminine space meaningfully.

Middlesex, by contrast, opens outward to diasporic and urban spatialities, layering multiple geographies and identities across time and space. Through Soja’s Thirdspace and Massey’s relational spatiality, the novel reveals how identity is mapped across geopolitical displacements and embodied nonbinaries. Detroit, as a city of racial flux and industrial decay, becomes a spatial metaphor for Cal’s own liminality. Moreover, the novel’s intersex protagonist embodies a kind of corporeal Thirdspace—a lived contradiction that resists categorization and inhabits hybridity as both survival and critique. Here, space is simultaneously embodied and imagined, historical and speculative.

Across both novels, Eugenides interrogates the ways in which space configures—and is configured by—power, desire, and trauma. Space is not simply descriptive but performative: it actively produces and is produced by subjectivity. This dynamic aligns with Doreen Massey’s call for a “global sense of place,” where location is always relational, always in process, and always intersecting with systems of inequality and resistance. Likewise, Tuan’s emphasis on place as emotionally invested underscores the affective dimensions of spatiality that permeate Eugenides’ prose.

By positioning space as a central narrative and thematic concern, Eugenides not only reflects existing spatial ideologies but also exposes their limitations and fractures. His work invites readers to consider how space, far from being neutral, is ethically and politically charged—shaping who belongs, who is excluded, and how identities are formed, disrupted, or erased.

In engaging with spatial theory, this article contributes to both Eugenides scholarship and the broader field of literary geography. It suggests that future work might explore how Eugenides’ lesser-known stories—or other spatially attuned contemporary novelists—similarly construct geographies of resistance, longing, and becoming. Ultimately, this spatial reading positions Eugenides’ fiction as part of a larger cartographic turn in literature, where storytelling itself becomes a means of mapping contested terrains of identity, memory, and meaning.

7. Conclusions

This study has undertaken a spatially driven reading of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, situating both novels within the evolving field of literary geography and drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that bridges human geography, spatial theory, and gender studies. By foregrounding space not as an inert setting but as a dynamic, ideologically saturated construct, we have demonstrated how Eugenides’ fiction spatializes memory, identity, trauma, and transformation.

At the core of both novels lies a profound concern with spatial instability and epistemological ambiguity. Whether through the suburban enclosure of the Lisbon home or the liminal gendered cartography of Cal’s journey, Eugenides resists totalizing representations of space and instead offers spaces that are ambivalent, contradictory, and affectively charged. Lefebvre’s triadic model proved essential in distinguishing between the multiple modalities of space—the conceived, the perceived, and the lived—thereby enabling a granular reading of how characters inhabit, resist, and reinterpret their environments.

In The Virgin Suicides, the suburban neighborhood becomes a melancholic heterotopia, a spatial archive of collective failure, nostalgia, and failed witnessing. The Lisbon house, as both architectural form and symbolic space, becomes increasingly opaque—metaphorically absorbing the suicides, silences, and surveillances that structure the narrative. Here, Foucault’s heterotopias and Tuan’s emotional geographies converge: space becomes a repository of trauma that cannot be rationalized through empirical knowledge or male fantasy. In contrast, Middlesex offers a more expansive and transnational spatial canvas, interweaving diasporic mobility, urban geography, and corporeal Thirdspace. Cal’s narrative destabilizes fixed categories of gender, place, and origin, functioning as a textual enactment of Soja’s Thirdspace and Massey’s relational spatiality. Detroit emerges not only as a socio-economic milieu but as a synecdoche of American modernity and its discontents, while the transgenerational journey from Bithynios to suburban Grosse Pointe renders personal identity inseparable from geopolitical spatialities.

What binds both texts is their insistence that space is never neutral. Rather, Eugenides constructs what Bertrand Westphal calls spatial palimpsests—layers of meaning inscribed upon places that resist singular interpretation. In The Virgin Suicides, space becomes elegiac and necropolitical, a site of unresolvable loss. In Middlesex, it is redemptive and metamorphic, though still haunted by the structural violence of history and biology. Thus, Eugenides’ spatial imaginary oscillates between entrapment and escape, between the claustrophobia of closed systems and the generative potential of liminality.

This paper also highlights how spatial theory offers powerful critical tools for analyzing gendered and embodied space. While The Virgin Suicides illustrates the enclosure of female adolescence within domestic and suburban boundaries, Middlesex performs an expansive traversal of gender through and across space. The former critiques the disciplining of female bodies through spatial confinement; the latter celebrates the destabilization of binaries through a geography of difference. The two novels, read together, map a trajectory from spatial foreclosure to spatial fluidity, from static ontology to dynamic becoming.

Looking forward, this study invites further inquiry into the intersections of spatial theory, queer theory, and narrative form. Eugenides’ corpus—rich with border-crossings, threshold experiences, and interstitial identities—could be productively compared to other contemporary authors who engage with transnational, diasporic, or nonbinary geographies. Moreover, future research might explore how Eugenides’ spatial poetics operate within the digital or ecological turn in contemporary fiction, attending to how his narratives encode not only urban and bodily spaces but environmental and planetary ones.

Ultimately, Eugenides’ fiction affirms the central premise of critical spatial theory: that space is produced, lived, contested, and narrated. His novels offer spatial formations that are at once socially legible and radically unstable, making them fertile ground for interdisciplinary literary geography. By engaging these spaces with theoretical nuance and textual sensitivity, we uncover a literary cartography that speaks not only to individual identity but to the broader, shifting terrains of modern and postmodern existence.