Giovanni's Room

Crucial to David’s understanding of his identity is his perceived adherence to the ideals of traditional masculinity. Rather than challenge the rigidity of dominant expectations that lead men—especially non-heterosexual men—to feel inadequate, David continually tries to conform himself to these ideals, hurting himself and others in the process. David’s understanding of masculinity is deeply tied to heterosexuality and displays of sexual prowess with women. David learns these ideals from his father at a young age, as in Part 1, Chapter 1 when he watches his father file through a string of girlfriends. Whenever David feels he will “lose [his] manhood”(9)—like after sleeping with Joey and after having a relationship with Giovanni—he resorts to “wandering through the forests of desperate women” (21). The diversions temporarily make him feel secure, but as his desires for men grow harder to ignore, David fears the failure of manhood more profoundly.

David’s fear of effeminacy intensifies in France where he is confronted by those who break traditional gender roles, including gay men who reject heterosexual relationship structures and drag queens who revel in visible performances of femininity. These men, who “always called each other ‘she’” (27) confuse David, as his restrictive understanding of gender performance doesn’t allow him to comprehend their pleasure in this self-presentation. In his relationship with Giovanni, David sees himself as Giovanni’s “little girl” (142)—even though Giovanni denies thinking this way—because he is dependent on the other man for money and a home. David only understands his and Giovanni’s relationship through dominant heterosexual structures of power, so his more domestic role in the room incites a “terrible confusion” (88) about his manhood. Although Giovanni values similar traits of masculinity—power and bravado—he does not agree with David that they can’t have a life together as men. Giovanni is happy to build a future and a home with David outside of heterosexual society. David’s fear that he can’t be a man without being in a visible heterosexual relationship holds him back from committing to Giovanni and spoils their relationship.

Hella voices her own irritation with traditional feminine gender roles, which to her also exist as bound to heterosexuality and the nuclear family. She wants children and a loving relationship with a man, but she also resents needing to be committed to “some gross, unshaven stranger” (125) before she will be seen as her own person. Hella precariously juggles her desires for liberation and the safety of a traditional family; unlike David, she questions strict gender expectations. David, however, depends on gender constructs remaining unquestioned because his conformity to traditional roles grants him security. David’s secrecy and anxieties about his failed identity directly affect Hella’s womanhood because she also depends on their relationship to feel like a proper woman. Hella asks David, “If women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then?” (165) Neither Hella nor David can imagine feeling like a man or a woman outside the rigid boundaries of heterosexual tradition, and their adherence to these constructs—in disregard of their true desires—leads to their relationship’s dissolution.

The inconsistencies, hesitations, and evasions in David’s narration reveal a habit of self-deception and expose David’s false, imaginary reality that conflicts with the real world he traverses. David’s most thorough denial concerns his sexuality: Rather than perceiving his attractions to men as essential to his identity, David considers his mostly drunken flings with men as lapses in his heterosexuality, brought about by carnal lust and not real attraction to male-specific attributes. David recalls such affairs using vague phrases—like, “I had been accused of causing a minor sensation by flirting with a soldier” (27)—which show how deeply he represses the memory of these events. The repetition of such offhand flirtations over the course of the narrative indicates to the reader that their occurrences are more than accidental. Because many of the encounters happen while David is drunk, he either pretends to forget the details or asserts, “I could not possibly have done such a thing” (27). However, these lies start to ring hollow. They compound on one another and build to a compulsive habit of David downplaying his sexuality, which both delays and amplifies the outcome of his eventual self-reckoning.

This writing off his attractions to men as drunken accidents taint his relationship with Giovanni. David only realizes in retrospect that he truly loved Giovanni; in the moment, he convinces himself that “we had always both known, Giovanni and myself, that our idyll could not last forever” (94) and that he was only with Giovanni out of his “own desperation” (88). Here David deceives not only himself, but he places false beliefs in Giovanni’s mouth; the reader discovers later that Giovanni does want to stay with David forever. The other characters come to tire of David’s performances—which he believes are convincing—and his inability to acknowledge the harm his lying does to himself and others. Jacques, Giovanni, Sue, and Hella all call David out for the cruelty that he fools himself into believing is necessary to sustain his fantasy. The succession of accusations about his falseness forces David to recognize that his imagined reality exists for him only and is incongruent with the real world; his inclusion of others into his illusory world does real harm that he can’t repress in his mind. David’s lies profoundly hurt the ones he loves the most, ruining his relationships with them and their future relationships with others.