1956 novel by James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room is a 1956 novel by James Baldwin. The book concerns the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men in his life, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar. While he deals with his difficulties with men, he is engaged to an American woman who is travelling in Spain.
Baldwin’s controversial novel has prompted complex discussions on many issues, including representations of homosexuality, bisexuality and struggles with internalized homophobia. The novel also raises questions of social alienation, identity, masculinity, and manhood.
Plot.
David, a young American man whose girlfriend has gone off to Spain to contemplate marriage, is left alone in Paris and begins an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni. The entire story is narrated by David during "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life," when Giovanni will be executed. Baldwin tackles social isolation, gender and sexual identity crisis, as well as conflicts of masculinity within this story of a young bisexual man navigating the public sphere in a society that rejects a core aspect of his sexuality.
Part one.
David, in Southern France, is about to board a train back to Paris. His girlfriend Hella, to whom he had proposed before she went to Spain, has returned to the United States. As for Giovanni, he is about to be guillotined.
David remembers his first experience with a boy, Joey, who lived in Brooklyn. The two bonded and eventually had a sexual encounter during a sleepover. The two boys began kissing and having sex. The next day, David left, and a little later he took to bullying Joey in order to feel like a real man.
David now lives with his father, who is prone to drinking, and his aunt, Ellen. The latter upbraids the father for not being a good example to his son. David's father says that all he wants is for David to become a real man. Later, David begins drinking, too, and drinks and drives once, ending up in an accident. Back home, the two men talk, and David convinces his father to let him skip college and get a job instead. He then decides to move to France to find himself.
After a year in Paris, penniless, he calls Jacques, an older gay male acquaintance, to meet him for supper so he can ask for money. (In a prolepsis, Jacques and David meet again and discuss Giovanni's fall.) The two men go to Guillaume's gay bar. They meet Giovanni, the new bartender, at whom Jacques tries to make a pass until he gets talking with Guillaume. Meanwhile, David and Giovanni become friends. Later, they all go to a restaurant in Les Halles for breakfast. Jacques enjoins David not to be ashamed to feel love; they eat oysters and drink white wine. Giovanni recounts how he met Guillaume in a cinema; how the two men had dinner together because Giovanni wanted a free meal. He also explains that Guillaume is prone to making trouble. Later, the two men go back to Giovanni's room and they have sex.
Flashing forward again to the day of Giovanni's execution, David is in his house in the South of France. The caretaker comes round for the inventory, as he is moving out the next day. She encourages him to get married, have children, and pray.
Part two.
David moves into Giovanni's small room. They broach the subject of Hella, about whom Giovanni is not worried, but who reveals the Italian's misogynistic prejudices about women and the need for men to dominate them. David then briefly describes Giovanni's room, which is always in the dark because there are no curtains and they need their own privacy. He goes on to read a letter from his father, asking him to go back to America, but he does not want to do that. The young man walks into a sailor; David believes the sailor is a gay man, though it is unclear whether this is true or if the sailor is just staring back at David.
A subsequent letter from Hella announces that she is returning in a few days, and David realizes he has to part with Giovanni soon. Setting off to prove to himself that he is not gay, David searches for a woman with whom he can have sex. He meets a slight acquaintance, Sue, in a bar and they go back to her place and have sex; he does not want to see her again and has only slept with her to feel better about himself. When he returns to the room, David finds a hysterical Giovanni, who has been fired from Guillaume's bar and falsely accused of stealing from the till.
Hella eventually comes back and David leaves Giovanni's room with no notice for three days. He sends a letter to his father asking for money for their marriage. The couple then runs into Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop, which makes Hella uncomfortable because she does not like Jacques's mannerisms. After walking Hella back to her hotel room, David goes to Giovanni's room to talk; the Italian man is distressed. David thinks that they cannot have a life together and feels that he would be sacrificing his manhood if he stays with Giovanni. He leaves, but runs into Giovanni several times and is upset by the "fairy" mannerisms that he is developing and his new relationship with Jacques, who is an older and richer man. Sometime later, David finds out that Giovanni is no longer with Jacques and that he might be able to get a job at Guillaume's bar again.
The news of Guillaume's murder suddenly comes out, and Giovanni is castigated in all the newspapers. David imagines that Giovanni went back into the bar to ask for a job, going so far as to sacrifice his dignity and agree to sleep with Guillaume. He imagines that, after Giovanni has compromised himself, Guillaume makes excuses for why he cannot rehire him as a bartender; in reality, they both know that Giovanni is no longer of interest to Guillaume's bar's clientele since so much of his life has been played out in public. Giovanni responds by killing Guillaume in rage. Giovanni attempts to hide, but he is discovered by the police and sentenced to death for murder. Hella and David then move to the South of France, where they discuss gender roles and Hella expresses her desire to live under a man as a woman. David, wracked with guilt over Giovanni's impending execution, leaves her and goes to Nice for a few days, where he spends his time with a sailor. Hella finds him and discovers his bisexuality, which she says she suspected all along. She bitterly decides to go back to America. The book ends with David's mental pictures of Giovanni's execution and his own guilt.
Major themes.
Social alienation.
One theme of "Giovanni's Room" is social alienation. Susan Stryker notes that prior to writing "Giovanni's Room", James Baldwin had recently emigrated to Europe and "felt that the effects of racism in the United States would never allow him to be seen simply as a writer, and he feared that being tagged as gay would mean he couldn't be a writer at all." In "Giovanni's Room", David is faced with the same type of decision; on the surface he faces a choice between his American fiancée (and value set) and his European boyfriend, but ultimately, like Baldwin, he must grapple with "being alienated by the culture that produced him."
Baldwin also develops this theme through other characters who appear in his novel, such as Giovanni. Both by David and by his background as an Italian immigrant, Giovanni is found to be isolated throughout the book. Giovanni is pinned as 'alien' by David, in which he becomes a figure of mystery, though the reader does learn a lot about Giovanni in relation to David, there is not much revealed about Giovanni himself, apart from small revelations about his social status and class, which work to separate him from the other characters in the novel, such as Jacques, Guillaume and David. Thus, Giovanni faces issues of social alienation by both the information given to the reader and the information that is withheld from the reader – which may have been how Baldwin felt with his social presence in America.
Identity.
In keeping with the theme of social alienation, this novel also explores the topics of origin and identity. As Valerie Rohy of the University of Vermont argues, "Questions of origin and identity are central to James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room", a text which not only participates in the tradition of the American expatriate novel exemplified by Stein and, especially, by Henry James but which does so in relation to the African-American idiom of passing and the genre of the passing novel. As such, "Giovanni's Room" poses questions of nationalism, nostalgia, and the constitution of racial and sexual subjects in terms that are especially resonant for contemporary identity politics.
Sexuality and race.
Scholars at the time of the publication of the book had the mindset that whiteness was transvalued as heterosexuality and blackness as homosexuality. Giovanni’s room presents 'race' in different ways. All characters are portrayed through David’s experiences and prejudices; he is the representation of whiteness; he is tall and blond-haired; he grows up in a toxic environment regarding masculinity; and he struggles throughout the novel between his internalised homophobia and his sexuality. On the contrary, Joey and Giovanni, the two men David had relations with, are both described as dark by David. Giovanni, in particular, is coded as black in David’s perception. First, it is said that Giovanni’s enthusiasm is of a “blacker brand” than his, stating a clear difference between the two men. Furthermore, Italians immigrating to the United States were for a long time considered not to be white; they had special cases in the form of immigration as 'North Italian' or 'Sicilian' rather than whites. It was not until the mid-1950s, when the book was published, that Italian Americans were beginning to be considered whites. It is suggested that Italians acquire white status and privileges in the United States, so Italians living in Italy are still viewed as coloured or non-whites. In the novel, David clearly has this mindset, and it shows in his perception of Giovanni. David felt superior to Giovanni also because of his social class, which is also a sign of his 'blackness'. White people in the United States, especially from upper-class families like David, often view non-whites as inferior. Indeed, Giovanni came from a poor village in southern Italy and had in Paris a precarious job as a bartender with a small wage with which he could only provide for himself, and his class made him darker for someone like David with all his prejudices.
Baldwin, in "Giovanni’s Room", deconstructed the discourse about sexuality and race and highlighted that the idea that whiteness opposed blackness and heterosexuality opposed homosexuality is false and that they are related and dependent.
The novel was viewed as a 'raceless' novel, thus being studied mainly in sexual manners rather than racial studies, but it clearly challenges the notion of a novel about white people having no race.
Masculinity.
David grapples with insecurities pertaining to his masculinity throughout the novel. He spends much of his time comparing himself to every man he meets, ensuring that his performative masculinity allows him to "pass" while negotiating the public sphere. For David, masculinity is intertwined with sexual identity, and thus he believes that his same-sex desires act against his masculinity. One of David’s prominent male figures is his alcoholic father, with whom he holds a complex and sensitive relationship. After a drunk driving incident, David is met by his father in the hospital, where his father repeatedly reassures David that he "is going to be all right", to which David replies "Daddy" and begins to cry. This moment of expected vulnerability from David and his father cements the pain behind their relationship, which can be seen to cause David to put up a front of masculinity, which—to him—does not coincide with his sexual attractions.
Manhood.
The phrase 'manhood' repeats throughout the book, in much the same ways that masculinity manifests itself. The difference between the two themes, in this case, is