From the opening scene of Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin introduces the reader with a man divided. David, the narrator of the novel, is staring at his reflection in a window overlooking the south of France, where he has gone to escape the complicated questions of identity that haunted him in Paris. Baldwin presents the reader with a split image of David as both the internal David who is telling the story, describing what he sees, and the external David, who is being reflected in the glass. Using this image of a split self, Baldwin raises questions about how identity is formed. In the first chapter of the book, he ties these questions of identity to images of David’s home. He raises questions about what home is to the expatriate and how it is formative in shaping one’s self. Baldwin uses complex characters and images of dividedness in order to struggle with notions of home and how it is connected to identity, both as a place that gives definition and as a place that must be left in order to “find” one’s self.
The novel opens in the south of France, with David looking back at the events that have brought him to this moment: “the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life” (3). The events he is about to recollect will reveal to the reader, and maybe to himself, why David is alone on this night, why Hella, his fiance, is on a boat back to America, and why Giovanni, his lover, will be executed by the next day. But before delving into the actions that have led to these consequences, before discussing his life in Paris, David reflects on his life at home in America. Growing up, his family lived in numerous cities across the United States, giving his idea of home an unsettled feeling. In one of the houses he remembers a photograph of his dead mother dominating one of the rooms “in which I never felt at home, and my father washed in the gold light which spilled down on him from the tall lamp” (11). His parents dominate this room in his memory of home. Parents can be seen as both figures of authority and the origins of social expectations. The way David remembers his parents in this room gives them a reverent, almost holy quality, which echoes the importance David assigns to his father as the voice of social mores after David’s first sexual experience with a boy. Baldwin paints home as the place where right and wrong are established, where ideal role models and expectations are set up. Home is where the idea of what one should be is formed. But the fact that the image that raises the issues for David is a room in which he doesn’t feel at home in hints at the problems he has in living up to these ideals.
David cannot live up to his father’s expectations, which are simply that David will be “a man” (15). David says that “he wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself” (17). To be a man like David’s father would mean to be distant, emotionally inaccessible, hard to communicate with, hard working and secure in heterosexuality. David is fighting an internal battle with the part of himself that questions his sexuality, the part he wants to deny because it does not fit the identity that has been set up for him at home. That prevents him from being able to identify with his father, his idealization of manhood. He feels that he cannot admit the desires that he has to himself or to his father, the drunk and womanizer. David does not want to think that him and his father are alike, yet, in this same chapter, the reader is presented with a David who begins to imitate his father�s behavior. He begins staying out late and drinking, as his father does, and he battles his aunt in his father’s place.
David deals with his father’s struggle to be close to him by telling him what he wants to hear about David’s identity. “The vision I gave my father of my life was exactly the vision in which I myself most desperately needed to believe” (20). While denying both his father and himself, David creates a projected version of his self to present to both himself and his father. That identity reflects the ideals of manhood that David has recieved from his father. It is one of an adventurous male spirit, a heterosexual relationship, and a tough drinker. This image David has created is as split as the mirror image that opens the novel because it is an accumulation of what is expected of him at home, what his father wants him to be, and what he feels that he should be, even if it contradicts how he might actually feel. He cannot admit how he feels because he will not allow himself to be someone he is ashamed of, and this notion of what one should be ashamed of that is formulated at home.
It is this created identity that David hopes to leave behind in America. He says he perhaps goes to “find” himself in Europe. David doesn�t want the self that he has denied, but he doesn�t want the self that he has created either. “I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed home” (21). Here again Baldwin presents a split self, the present “I” looking back on the “I” looking for a different self. The self that David has been denying in America is the self that he finds in France. In this sentence, home is the place where David denies his self but it is also the place where it can be denied. Home offers David an alternative identity in which to hide and protect himself against the fear that accompanies desire. In Europe, away from home, there are no definitions for David, no expectations with which to define one’s self, no boundaries with which to hide.
David, as an expatriate, has a complex relationship with home. He leaves home because it does not allow him to be his true self. At the same time, home is what has enabled him to define himself the way he has chosen. This complexity is highlighted when David remembers Giovanni calling him an American when they disagree and “not an American at all” (89) when they do agree. He seems to use the term “American” to mean something obstinate and difficult, passionless and disagreeable. “And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more that that; and I resented being called not and American because it seemed to make me nothing” (89). This sentence captures the dilemma of the relationship between identity and home. David does not want to be defined by his home but without his home to define him, he seems to have no identity at all. Without the identity David created at home, he really has no identity at all because he has denied his self in order to comply with the identity he created for himself at home.
In France, when David is confronted with the dark murkiness of his desire, he feels homesick. He seems to long for the place where he can deny his homosexual desire even though he left home to find himself and settle his internal conflict. This longing for home first occurs right before David goes to Giovanni’s room, where he is both aware and in denial that his desire will be realized. He has been talking to Giovanni when he suddenly realizes that he wants to return home in that moment to America “to those thing, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else… I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored” (62). David longs for home, not because he knew himself there, but because he knew others and the material objects of that place gave him boundaries. Home is the place where he is not wandering. At home he can be anchored to what is expected of him, to things and people that give him an identity, even if it means denying part of himself. To return home in this instant would be to exchange his desire for safety, for a sense of self that has been defined for him. But he cannot leave at that moment and thus he falls into the “black opening of a cavern” (9) of his desire, a desire that includes the very shameful part of himself that he denied at home.
Even in David’s acceptance of his homosexuality through his continuing relationship with Giovanni, he is still ashamed by that part of himself and attempts to keep it hidden. While coming out of the American Express Office, which is filled with Americans that David no longer can distinguish from each other, he sees a sailor who, he says, “made me think of home – perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (92). David believes that a sailor who is looking at him can see through his created identity, see something in him that is homosexual, that David has denied. David is not sure how he saw it. “I would never dare to see it. It would be like looking at the naked sun…. I knew that what the sailor had seen in my unguarded eyes was envy and desire” (92). David thinks of home as an inescapable condition, as if the sailor has reminded him of how shameful the identity that he is living in Europe, that of a man in a loving relationship with another man, is for him at home. The sailor, whose gaze is like the gaze of home, sees envy and desire in David’s eyes. The envy is for the manhood that the sailor represents that David can not live up to, the desire is the homosexual desire for the sailor’s attractive body. David refuses to see those in his own eyes because to acknowledge their existence would be blinding for him. It would completely breakdwon the division of self that he has been living with for so long. But again Baldwin presents us with a split David who refuses see his own envy and desire and yet acknowledges that he knows athat the sailor sees sees them, and that they exist. David describes his eyes as “unguarded,” which seems unusual for David, who thinks that his desire is buried deep within him. This scene is sandwiched between David’s reading of two letters: one from his father at home and one from Hella, his girlfriend, two anchors that David has used throughout the novel to come up with a projected identity of what he should be. The self that he presents to both his father and Hella is different from the self that he has been living in Giovanni’s room.
The scene with the sailor is echoed again toward the end of the novel, with Giovanni already in jail and David struggling with accepting his life with Hella. He goes out to a bar and meets another sailor, whom he spends several nights with. “…We stood drinking together in a crowded bar. We faced the mirror… In the mirror, suddenly, I saw Hella’s face” (162). At this point, David’s hidden self is completely exposed, again in front of the eyes of a sailor. Baldwin also again frames the scene in that of a mirror. When David goes to look at his reflection, he sees Hella instead, as if the projected image of himself is no longer there. Hella is the person who has allowed him to play the role of the “man.” She has allowed his projected identity to fit his sense of who he should be. As long as he could hold on to Hella, he could maintain his image as a heterosexual man like his father, and continue denying the homosexual part of himself. But by walking into the bar and acknowledging the part of David that he has kept hidden, Hella makes it impossible for him to return to that image of himself that he has been attempting to conform to.
Home is complicated for expatriates; it is where they come from, where they in some sense belong and also where the place left in order to free themselves from the way home has defined them. David is trapped in the identity that he created for himself at home, as he feels, at the end of the novel, that his body “is trapped in my mirror… I long to crack the mirror and be free” (168). He has been forcing his identity to conform to the values that he learned at home by denying a part of himself that he considers shameful. Now, at the end of the novel, he looks in the mirror and recognizes how his identity has been trapped in this projected image, the image of himself that he has presented to his father, Hella, and the world. He now is ready to break with the identity that he began creating for himself before he ever left home. That identity was shaped by home and by the expectations and boundaries that home had given him. That identity was safe in the sense that he didn’t have to think about it and he didn’t have to worry about what other people thought of it, but it was dangerous because it hid a part of himself. The reader leaves a David who longs to unite the split image of self that Baldwin presented at the beginning of the novel, ready to acknowledge the desire that he has feared.
Reference:
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
