Literary And Scholarly Works : Giovanni 's Room By James Baldwin

The American Minority Authors opens the reader eyes of the struggles of acceptance within the society, and how their heritage and their American culture can coexist. Minority writers, Cisneros, Eastman, and McKay, through their stories, give us insight of their cultural heritage and the struggles they have with society embracing diversity. In Sandra Cisneros, story “Geraldo No Last Name”, speaks of a Latino immigrant who does not speaks English living in America. The narrator of the story even put a label on him calling him a ”brazer”(Cisneros,1989, para 4), is a slang word for a migrant worker(Garling, 2007).

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

Vulnerability is a compelling aspect of this text and Vargas consistently uses it throughout the text to appeal to his audience’s sympathy. This is made brazenly obvious when Vargas tells the audience he is gay and then proceeds to write, “Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status.” By telling his audience it is harder to come out to people as an undocumented immigrant than it is to tell people he is gay, it puts everything in perspective. While both gay and immigrants are highly debated topics, the typical American understands how hard it is to come out as gay. It is a challenging and taxing experience to come out as gay because not everyone agrees with that lifestyle. By comparing the two, his audience, legal Americans, are able to begin to understand how formidable coming out as an undocumented immigrant truly is. Vargas strongly appeals to pathos by comparing undocumented immigration to sexuality, evoking empathy from his audience.

Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. "Angelina E. Grimke." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 771-75. Print. Grimke expresses how slavery is not right in any way, shape, form or fashion. She states now God does not approve of this. She also states how it is not in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or anything like that.

As Gloria Anzaldúa moves forward with the cultural dealings of homophobic ideas, we learn more of her fear of being rejected. Some groups may conform to the norms to be accepted in a culture, which we see often in the United States when dealing simply with immigration and assimilation, but there are

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.

Categories are used to place people or objects together based on characteristics; using this system brings comfort because of people’s need for normalcy and consistency. When someone refuses to be categorized they are perceived as an outcast, a rebel, and a renegade. “Broken Ghazal in the Voice of My Brother Jacob” by Aaron Samuels and “Everybody” written by Logic share a very evident connection of being biracial; however, what might not be so blatant is how one should not let categories act as restraints. Each piece seeks to convey individuality and put to an end of stereotyping.

Another Country and Go Tell it on the Mountain are two of James Baldwin's most analyzed novels. Some see both novels as great additions to American literature, while others criticize Baldwin's unique writing style used in both works.

George Chauncey’s Gay New York Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, goes where no other historian had gone before, and that is into the world of homosexuality before World War II. Chauncey’s 1994 critically acclaimed book was a gender history breakthrough that gave light to a homosexual subculture in New York City. The author argues against the idea that homosexual men lived hidden away from the world. Chauncey’s book exposes an abundant culture throughout the United States, especially in New York. In this book Chauncey not only shows how the gay population existed, but “uncovers three widespread myths about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movement which was isolation, invisibility, and internalization.” Chauncey argues against these theories that in the years 1890-1940, America had in fact a large gay culture. Chauncey book is impactful in the uncovering of a lost culture, but also works as an urban pre-World War II history giving an inside view of life in the city through sexuality and class.

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,

Anzaldua describes how she experienced the feeling of being deviant towards society and not belonging to the community she lives in, “The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe’s fear: being different, being other than and therefore lesser, therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human” (Anzaldua, 1987). Acknowledging that someone is different from you in their thoughts, opinions, behavior, and appearance is not as easy as it may seem when these qualities matter to you. But acknowledging that being different is not better or worse—it is simply not the same—is what many people fail to do, often without even realizing how intolerant they are. The author herself, however, shows that she is in every way broadminded about her beliefs, her opinions, and even the language she speaks—the book is written equally in English and Spanish. The author naturally switches from one language to the other, showing not simply that she is bilingual, but that she is a human being above all other qualities, and it is the content, the meaning behind words that matters, not the form or language in which they are written.

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

In James Baldwin's second novel published, we meet a young American called David. He has left his home country to live in Paris. In the first meeting with this man, he stares out a window and thinks about his life. Even this early in the book we get an impression of everything not being in its right place. This is where emptiness lives.

The most widely accepted statistic concerning homosexuals is that one in every ten people are homosexual. Although some research argues that the number is closer to one in every twenty, this statistic still claims that five percent of the human population prefers their own sex to the opposite. While it is still an extremely controversial issue to whether we can “pray the gay away” or people are simply born with a homosexual identity the same way they are born with brown hair, the numbers cannot be ignored, even though historically they have been. In this paper, however, I will not be discussing how or why people are or are not gay, I will be discussing the masculine image forced upon the men of Cuba. The idealized image of the New Man was impossible to meet for all men especially homosexual men which is evident through the unrealistic expectations put forth in Che Guevara’s Man and Socialism and The Cuban Family Code, the social constructs laid out by Pedro Juan in Dirty Havana Trilogy and Fresa y Chocolate.