James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

The association of homosexuality with filth begins in childhood for David and most certainly in his relationship with his father. His identity confusion can be seen from early on as he mentions: “I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me” (Baldwin 16). Indeed, David’s father install in him from the very beginning the notion of a white, heterosexual, masculine American male. He wants his son, whom he addresses as “Butch” to “grow up to be a man” (90) and not “a Sunday school teacher” (15). The “teacher” to which his father refers to can be understood as a threat to masculinity because “the teacher” is almost surely a woman and he wishes only a life of “butch” for his son. This notion surfaces

Giovanni is recounting what she’s had to do time and time again and the tone of the poem is one of frustration; frustration with the idea that, as a child, she was given the responsibility to surveil her father, yet without any means of action to curtail the violence that ensues. Giovanni goes so far to even describe herself as “[I am] the silent film (100)” to highlight that, while she may be watching, she is incapable of changing the circumstance because her voice would likely be silenced as “What goes on/In our house/Stays/In our house (Giovanni 100).” Her frustration with her inability to act is also a direct analogy to her frustration with the government’s lack of engagement in her family’s

Writer Thomas J. Farrell stated “ The root, etymological meaning of privacy identifies the household as the essentially private domain: Roman Civil law gave society no authority over it (Farrell).” This privacy is where lust and deception

David must pretend, not just for the remainder of the novel, but for the next forty years, to be ignorant of Frank’s crimes, and much of what is happening because his parents do not realise that he has

Throughout the 1950’s, the United States belonged to the Leave It To Beaver era. Families were structured around a strong, hard working father and a wonderful homemaker mother. Children were brought up with solid ideologies on what society expects from them and were warned about living a different and dangerous life. Only one-year separates Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room from there publishing dates during this decade of unwavering beliefs. These texts were seen as extremely controversial during their time due to their themes of homosexuality. Sexual orientation was an awkward topic during such a “to the book” time period and these texts pushed the limits, making them remarkable and memorable works. Both Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin explore the panic men experience while trying to comprehend what sexual orientation they belong to and highlight the masculine gay man. These texts also examine the woman’s role in the mist of it all.

James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, follows the protagonist, David, as he embarks on a self-journey to establish an identity, personal and sexual, for himself. David is trapped in an American ideal of masculinity and homosexuality that does not define who he truly is, a homosexual male. David tries to pull away from his true desires and constantly struggles to embrace the heteronormative American life instead of being honest and accepting his true self. Throughout the entire novel, David associates darkness, filth and containment with homosexuality, queerness and different spaces that represent sin. Towards the end of the novel, at the end of his self-journey, David, although not literally contained or confined to Giovanni’s room or other dark spaces, does not truly resolve his issues with his true identity and internally will never truly be free.

David spends the first two chapters eavesdropping into the conversations of his mother and father. This way of finding information in itself is very juvenile but is the only way. Because of the eavesdropping, the information David hears is interfered by his childish ways for example “part of me said to leave, get away, run now before it’s too late before you hear something you can’t unhear.” This quote displays David’s naïve thinking. The naivety of David is also shown though his feeling towards his Uncle Frank, he sees Frank as the charming, town doctor and loving uncle. In David’s eyes, Frank can do no wrong, and when he does, he along with his father does not believe the allegations, “why are you telling me this” “are you telling me this because I’m Frank’s brother? Because I’m your husband? Because I’m Maries employer? He paused “or because I’m the

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 movie Rear Window captivates the audience by presenting a thrilling murder mystery, where Jeff Jefferies, the masculine hero, is confined to a wheel chair in his apartment, which leads to the spying on his neighbors. In the movie, Hitchcock beautifully captures the turn of events from Jeff’s wrongful surveillance of his neighbors, to catching the killer. His examination of the idea of surveillance and privacy, plays into the current American debate of the rise of the surveillance debate. Hitchcock’s movie also falls into a traditional pattern where men are the active dominant roles and women are the submissive, background roles. Consequently, I believe that women are not a part of the rise of surveillance state conversation,

At the age of 5 years old, not only did he began to take showers with his father, but when they went to the beach club, his mother bathed him in the shower in the presence of other naked women. By the age of 6 years old, David noticed the power men had over women, “when a male entered the women’s side of the bathhouse, all the women shrieked”. (Gale Biography). At the age of 7 and 8 years old, he experienced a series of head accidents. First, he was hit by a car and suffered head injuries. A few months later he ran into a wall and again suffered head injuries. Then he was hit in the head with a pipe and received a four inch gash in the forehead. Believing his natural mother died while giving birth to him was the source of intense guilt, and anger inside David. His size and appearance did not help matters. He was larger than most kids his age and not particularly attractive, which he was teased by his classmates. His parents were not social people, and David followed in that path, developing a reputation for being a loner. At the age of 14 years old David became very depressed after his adoptive mother Pearl, died from breast cancer. He viewed his mother’s death as a monster plot designed to destroy him. (Gale Biography). He began to fail in school and began an infatuation with petty larceny and pyromania. He sets fires,

The bedroom can be substituted for the female body, and thereby represents "the enigma and threat generated by the concept of female sexuality in patriarchal culture" ("Pandora" 63). Concealing sexuality but also reifying the female body as and in the forbidden space of the bedroom, John invokes spatial and bodily associations of enclosure and mystery.

James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room is titled such for the purpose of accentuating the symbolism of Giovanni’s room. Within the novel Giovanni’s room is portrayed with such characteristics as being Giovanni’s prison, symbolic of Giovanni’s life, holding the relationship between Giovanni and David, being a metaphor of homosexuality for David and being a tomb underwater. These different portrayals of Giovanni’s room are combined within the novel to create an overall negative metaphor of homosexuality as perpetuated by society. These different portrayals of Giovanni’s room are dirty, suffocating and restricting; Baldwin is showing the reader that homosexuality can be understood as all of these things,

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Hella struggles with a way to experience her femininity without defining herself in relation to men. She is David’s fiancée who is away in Spain for most of the novel. After returning to David, Hella experiences a yearning both for home and to become what she feels is a real woman, which she thinks that only David can provide her. Relying on David to give her the feeling of being a woman, Hella writes to David frequently about what she feels their life together would be like. For Hella, the feeling of home is inexplicably tied to being a woman and the vulnerability she feels when she is with David, or with a man.

gay, he constantly struggles to find a way to make himself believe that he is a

This is when Giovanni makes his appearance. He is handsome and Italian and even though David refuses to admit it, he is very attracted to this young, dark man. After a while he ends up in his bedroom where he stays for several weeks. That he is having a homosexual affair is tearing on David, and he despises Giovanni as well as he loves him. In the book, David is saying to him self: ‘The beast which Giovanni awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni anymore'. When he finds joy in Giovanni's room, it quickly becomes clear that it cannot last, and that love does not always conquer all, and that it actually stands no chance against fear and self-delusion. He is fighting a constant battle against something he can't remove or ignore.

A recurring theme in the character of David Bell is his inflated opinion of himself. Chapter Two begins with David stating, “I was an extremely handsome young man” (DeLillo 2.11). David continues to describe his appearance in an almost scientific manner that would appear to be simply a factual statement. When David equates his relationship with his mirror as therapeutic, however, we see how much he stakes his opinion of himself on the way he looks. “I was blue-eyed David Bell. Obviously my life depended on this fact” (DeLillo 2.11).