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54 pages 1 hour read

James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1956

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Symbols & Motifs

Giovanni’s Room

Giovanni’s room is a space of multiple meanings in the text not only as a primary setting but also as a symbol. David explicitly reads the room as a symbol for Giovanni’s life and his mental state. Giovanni came to Paris without a strong will to live, and the room visually reflects this inner turmoil:

When one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief (87).

David reads in Giovanni’s carelessness with his things a neglect of his life. By physically entering the room, David becomes a part of Giovanni’s life. Giovanni views David as his life’s savior, as he gains a motivation to live through loving David. David helps to tidy the space while Giovanni is away at work, symbolizing how he positively influences Giovanni’s outlook on life for a time.

When Giovanni loses his job, he begins remodeling the room both to show his love for David and to maintain control over his collapsing life by “push[ing] back the encroaching walls” (114). David believes Giovanni senses his impending departure for Hella, and so David views Giovanni’s renovations as an attempt to keep him in his life for good. Unable to imagine how the room can be a long-term home for the two of them—and not believing men can have a life together regardless—David secretly plots to escape Giovanni’s room with the money from his father. David believes by leaving the physical space behind, he can also leave his affection for Giovanni contained in the space. However, the memory of Giovanni’s room haunts David forever, as he thinks “every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room” (85) and the love he had there.

The room also symbolizes David’s sexual paranoia and feelings of shame for being in a relationship with another man. David first enters the room in darkness, symbolizing the fear David feels for loving Giovanni. The room itself is away from Paris’s city center and the prying eyes of “le milieu” who wait for David to join them; the distance transforms the room into a sanctuary, but one founded on secrecy and worry. Even Giovanni “would stiffen like a hunting dog” (86) when figures pass by their windows, fearing their prying eyes. The smallness of the room requires a physical and emotional intimacy between the men that David cannot leave unacknowledged; the room forces David to see the sexuality he has repressed, which frightens him deeply. The looming archaic portrait of a man and woman reminds David of the heterosexual expectations of society that feeds his internalized anti-gay bias and growing hatred for Giovanni. Giovanni’s room thus becomes a pressure cooker for David’s fears of ostracization, making him believe the only way to maintain his constructed identity is to flee the room.

Home

For many of the characters, home is a physical place that symbolizes comfort and knowability through its unchanging mental image. As Baldwin populates the story with expatriates and immigrants, home also explicitly means the place where the characters came to Paris from. David has conflicting feelings about his home in New York. He thinks fondly of the city’s vibrant energy where everything is “high and new and eclectic” (33), but when his father encourages him to return home, David is reluctant to give up the freedom he has found in France. Similarly, Giovanni speaks positively of his Italian village, but asserts he “[does] not think I have a home there anymore” (116). Giovanni makes David realize that while their home countries are real places they can return to, the “home” they imagine is a symbolic, romanticized space that can never exist. Home can only be home from a distance, where he and David can forget the negative aspects that made them leave in the first place. David shows these feelings in his present-day reflections, as he remembers his time with Giovanni in a positive, beautiful way that could only be achieved through distance in the South of France.

David comes to long for his home in America because he feels increasingly alienated in Paris. Unlike Giovanni who “belonged to this strange city” (62), David finds no solace in the Parisian streets or people because they appear so unfamiliar. Although the stasis of home worries David, he also finds comfort in the familiar people and security in the known life expectations. David associates his American home with heterosexuality and settling down to build a traditional nuclear family, which is a future he desires as protection for his manhood. The promise of returning home, of returning to a heterosexual life, allows David to explore his sexuality in France, knowing he can return to the protection of home whenever he chooses. Conflict arises, however, when David includes Hella into his dreams of home. Though David says he wants to make a home with Hella in America, he still only thinks of home as a distant, symbolic place—a far off dream. In contrast, Hella views their future life together as tangible and material, so David’s delays in the South of France prove to Hella that he was never serious about the reality of their relationship.

American Identity

The motif of American identity pervades Giovanni and David’s relationship, especially concerning how Giovanni understands David through stereotypes about his home country. Giovanni sees America as a young country and Americans as naïvely optimistic because of their country’s relative newness. Giovanni believes Americans have “no sense of doom” (114), which leads them to treat “serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love” (34) frivolously. Giovanni sees Americans as rich, so he views David’s complaints about Giovanni’s room and Paris as David being unaccustomed to poverty. Whenever Giovanni speaks openly and disdainfully about Americans, he also speaks directly about David. He introduces David as “monsieur l’americain” (52) to his friends, turning David into a symbol of Americanness. David begins to fervently defend his home country because at the same time he feels he is defending himself.

Giovanni uses these qualities to interpret David’s feelings and behaviors because David’s aloofness leads him to often not explain himself. Giovanni compares David’s lack of concern for Giovanni’s survival to American tourists gawking at his Italian village’s poverty. Giovanni envisions David “shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time” (138), as he knows he will be able to leave the uncomfortable situation that Giovanni will be stuck in forever. Giovanni sees David’s resistance to him as his deep-seated American virtue of purity and innocence, which doesn’t allow him to dirty himself with “the stink of love” (141). David resents Giovanni’s narrow stereotypes of him because he left home to escape restrictive American values, but he also does not want to fully sever his ties to his home country and risk losing that essential facet of his identity. David’s nationality causes him to feel increasingly alienated in Paris where his values appear out of place.

Age

Baldwin uses depictions of age—particularly the rigid division of young and older men in “le milieu”—to explain David’s fear and paranoia about his sexuality. In Paris’s queer “underworld,” David perceives only two potential outcomes for pursuing relationships with man. The first outcome is associating with the younger men who seek out older gay men for money and quick pleasure, and the second is becoming like the older gay men who, out of loneliness and desperation, exploit the younger men’s need for money. Wherever David goes, he sees this distinction between the “knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys” (26) and the older men who “looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease” (54). David agrees with Giovanni that the young men who do sex work for “money or blood or love” (26) are “lamentable” (147), but he also detests the older men because they appear as a vision of his own future. David comes to view sexual and romantic relationships with men through this lens of non-affection and exploitation, where connections to other men are purely for desire and survival.

David hesitantly relates to the young men because he also extorts money from Jacques, but David’s place within this category is tenuous. As the narrative progresses, characters draw attention to David’s advancing age. Jacques reminds David that “confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore” (41), suggesting a foolishness to David’s continued denial about his sexuality. David himself can’t help but feel “so helpless or so old” (110) in the face of Giovanni’s youth. David is in his late twenties, and the pressure to figure out his future leaves him frightened that he is becoming too old to write off his continual affairs with men as foolish lustful indulgences. As he ages, David realizes his desires are more deeply bound to his identity than he wants to admit, as he finds himself frequently staring after young men, like in Part 2, Chapter 1. Giovanni’s accusations against David during their last night together confirms David’s fears: Giovanni sees him, Jacques, and Guillaume as fellows in age and exploitative practices. David’s obsession with holding himself at a distance from both the young and the old—while still engaging in their circles—pushes him closer to the future he fears because he limits himself to such narrow understandings of gay relationships.

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