Identity and Alienation in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

Introduction: Values, Conflict, and Giovanni's Room

Personal values are thought to be a combination of experience and belief — that is, the mixture of what a person has come to believe through what they have learned and what they may have experienced. When an inner belief system and the experiences of the world are in conflict, the person often finds themselves in a state of confusion or ennui. "Deeply held values — core values — anchor every literary character's (and individual's) view of the world and the self. When core values come under attack, a character feels a compelling conflict and seeks to reduce the threat.... Understanding core values is the key to understanding character, which, in turn, leads to understanding conflict, plot, and the underlying design of a narrative" (McKenna and Raabe 203).

James Baldwin, in his novel Giovanni's Room, depicts a young man in conflict. Alienated from his own culture, David is faced with making a choice concerning his sexual identity. He feels he must conform to the social norms of having a wife and family, but is drawn toward sexual union with men — specifically an Italian bartender with whom he has an affair.

Michael Vlahos, a member of the State Department, has stated that "Culture is the source of a people's reality. The way people think and behave at very sophisticated levels is driven by culture. Cultural differences are much more than skin or stereotype deep" (1). Baldwin utilizes the literary device of metaphor to depict David's conflict and to explore the need for secrecy. While metaphors enable individuals to communicate ideas surrounding complex or intimate experiences, their use is not confined to situations where linguistic or grammatical constraints make direct description impossible. Rather, the use of metaphor enables the conceptual process of learning and understanding, extending well beyond such constraints.

Often, there is a gap between metaphor as language and metaphor as reality. Many types of metaphors are used so commonly that they lose their distinction as metaphors and come to function as direct identifiers. Just as metaphors assist in the learning process, they are also helpful in the experience of the world. David's experiences with Giovanni's room are interpreted as metaphors meant to explore the themes of innocence, freedom, and social conformity.

Robert Tomlinson believes that "the key to understanding the text's social and ideological dimensions was the parallel between sex and race" (140). This is not directly confronted in the novel but may exist on an underlying level. Baldwin, in an interview with Richard Goldstein, stated, "if Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.... I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. And homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror of growing up" (178, quoted in Tomlinson 140). This essay addresses the issues of alienation and homosexuality as they pertain to the protagonist, David.

Metaphor, Culture, and the Room as Symbol

Confinement may be physical, social, or emotional — or a combination of all three. The character of David in Giovanni's Room is concerned with the power of social control. What he finds is that control is located within the categorization of an "us" and a "them," defined along axes such as good versus bad, healthy or unhealthy, rational and irrational, heterosexual and homosexual, and Black and white. The shape of subjectivity became defined along associations with the dominant culture, producing an "us" that is predominantly white and a "them" that is understood to be "other" in nature. For David, this duality is defined through sexuality and is confined within the room of his male lover.

Giovanni's room has been completely closed off from the world. The windows are painted over, and the natural world of the courtyard is but a dim shadow. The journey into the known and the unknown that David undertakes is juxtaposed with the confinement he experiences in his day-to-day life. It is not until the two men share space and spatial reality that David is able to truly "see" this. David's experience with Giovanni stirs the memory of his first homosexual encounter, which he describes with fear, characterizing the body of his lover as "brown... The black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood" (14–15).

In the novel, Baldwin symbolizes the journey inward by the retreat into Giovanni's room. Here, David is able to explore aspects of himself not socially condoned. "In order to find out what he is, to determine his being, the alienated subject must ask himself what the other person's words mean, what he expects of him.... He constantly lives in need of 'justification,' for fear that what he feels, says, or does, will be judged unacceptable by some criterion he dimly perceives but whose exact nature escapes him" (Chaitin 166). Such self-absorption, in this instance, leads not simply to recognition of human potential, but to an awareness that life offers choices that can be made for the betterment of the self rather than its destruction.

Alienation, Expatriation, and the Search for Identity

David has made a choice in his reaction to the stresses of his life, but in doing so has also entered into a state of alienation that is both imposed upon him and destructive to himself. Interestingly, Baldwin defines David's choice as "freedom." David states, early in the novel, "Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom" (10). As an expatriate, David's circumstances mirror those of the author while writing the novel. Baldwin, however, considered himself more of an exile than an expatriate — meaning that he was either banished by an "other" or had chosen self-exile due to hostile circumstances (Tomlinson 136).

Being an American does not provide David with the tools he needs to navigate the new cultural arena into which he has allowed himself to enter. Nicholas M. Evans explains that "social proximity in and of itself does not provide the ability to perceive the 'true' meaning of cultural experience. Nor does it ensure that the meanings a writer finds will cohere with audiences' modes of reception.... Rather, specific cultural and historically contingent conditions shape both elements of the reputation-building process" (147). The essence of David's alienation is rooted in his sexual preference.

He finds himself struggling through a welter of painful experiences in order to define himself as "us" or "them." The pain of alienation is present in both his experience as an expatriate and his homosexual experiences. His reasons for becoming an expatriate were associated with discontent — a disassociation from American cultural values that would allow him to experiment in the development of his character. David reflects on this search for identity: "I think that if I 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 at home" (31).

Men of a certain age and experience, such as David, have an underlying need to take control of their lives. Yet each time they attempt to do so, the alienation or disassociation becomes greater. They resort to announcing submission to cultural values, only to end by renouncing many of the things they see as necessary for survival. David wants very much to conform to the values of home, house, wife, and family — his proposal to Hella indicates this as his initial choice. However, the relationship that develops with Giovanni forces him to secret himself away and make difficult choices. He finds that alienation from American culture has not resolved the question of identity.

The questions and issues are only driven inward and become more personal. William van Dusen Wishard, president of World Trends Research, believes that the meaning unconsciously used to sustain the inner life of the individual in earlier times is virtually gone for men living in the modern Western world. Few men can be sustained by any primal source of life's highest value. "This breakup of inner images of wholeness is feeding a certain degree of anxiety and alienation. As a result, we now have a language of dysfunction that has entered the vocabulary only since the beginning of this century. 'Stressed,' 'paranoid,' 'repressed,' 'burned out,' 'mid-life crisis,' 'identity crisis' — they're all terms we think of as individual problems, but in fact they represent a deeper condition of our times" (1999, p. 316).

An individual can choose to control an inner self and not allow these aspects to gain dominance, thus keeping the complete individual hidden from society; however, those components continue to exist. "The outsider, unable to express himself, seeking a universal language as a mask of difference and a means of communication — such are often the experiences of the American living abroad. These are also the experiences of some gay men in heterosexual society, and it was Baldwin's gift to express both at the same time" (Capozzola 12). The myth of the coherent self, grounded in consciousness, allows the individual to see themselves as the author of their own actions. With this view of the will as self-generating, it is possible to understand the self as emerging from the concrete individual's situated practices.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. 1956. New York: Laurel Books, 1988.

Bigsby, C.W.E. "The Divided Mind of James Baldwin." The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Brown, Richard Harvey. "Cultural Representation and Ideological Domination." Social Forces (1993): March, 657–677.

Capozzola, Christopher. "Beauford Delaney and the Art of Exile." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (2003): Sept–Oct, 10–13.

Caudron, Shari. "Open the Corporate Closet to Sexual Orientation Issues." Personnel Journal (1995): August, 42–49.

Chaitin, Gilbert D. "The Birth of the Subject in Camus' 'L'Étranger.'" The Romanic Review (1993): March, 163–181.

Ehrenstein, David. "The Fire Still Burns." The Advocate (2003): March, 61.

Evans, Nicholas M. "Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present." MELUS (1997): March, 147–150.

Guthrie, Robert. "A Letter to James Baldwin." Chicago Review (1996): December, 59–63.

Hanson, F. Allan. "Where Have All the Abnormal People Gone?" The Humanist (2000): March, 29–36.

McKenna, John J., and David M. Raabe. "Using Temperament Theory to Understand Conflict in Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home.'" Studies in Short Fiction (1997): March, 203–213.

Tomlinson, Robert. "Payin' One's Dues: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin." African-American Review (1999): March, 135–156.

Vlahos, Michael. "Culture and Foreign Policy." Foreign Policy (1991): March, 1–16.

Wishard, William van Dusen. "What the Future Holds: Three Themes That Affect America and the World." Vital Speeches (1999): March, 313–317.