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Giovannis room

Giovannis room James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room: Function of Parents in the Identity Struggle James Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room presents the struggle of accepting homosexuality as one young man's true identity. One way in which Baldwin presents this issue is through the character David and the forces of his father and dead mother. David's father has an idealized vision of his son as rough and masculine which leads David to reject his homosexual identity. He feels his homosexuality inhibits him from becoming the rough and masculine man his father desires. David's father fuels his son's struggle of accepting homosexuality as true identity by expressing his ideal son as independent and rugged; and his looming mother symbolizes David's true homosexual identity and his inability to escape it. David cannot accept homosexuality as his true identity because he feels that it goes against the definition of a "man" as described by his father. David feels this way because he overheard his father tell his aunt Ellen the following: "All I want for David is that he grow up to be a man. And when I say a man, Ellen, I don't mean a Sunday school teacher" (24). Baldwin seems to suggest that his father wants David to have manly experiences like working hard and exploring the nature of women. He doesn't want David to become a stiff and sheltered man like a Sunday school teacher. After hearing his father say that, David feels that he has to hide his homosexuality. His efforts to hide and deny his homosexuality propel him farther into his struggle to accept his true identity. David's struggle mounts when he hides his true identity from his father and tries to deny his homosexuality to himself. Because David refuses to accept the fact that he is gay, he constantly struggles to find a way to make himself believe that he is a "man" as his father expects of him. He feels that his homosexuality holds him back from becoming rugged and manly and decides to "allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened" (30) him. David admits that he rejects his shameful homosexual identity and wants to believe that he possesses manly qualities such as independence: "The vision I gave my father of my life was exactly the vision in which I myself most desperately needed to believe" (30). David manipulates his father into allowing him to go to France by making him think that he could develop into the hard-working and tough man that his father hopes for because he himself wants to believe it. In other words, his father ingrains the notion of what a real man is, and so David refuses to come to terms with the sexual feelings that he has for other men by deceiving himself. Baldwin uses the dominating spirit of David's dead mother to illustrate David's inability to embrace his homosexuality as a part of his true identity. The figure of David's dead mother represents David's true homosexual identity. David feels that she is always present and watching him. As the looming mother, she represents his true flesh and blood, or homosexuality, because he knows that no matter how hard he tries to reject and deny it, his true feelings and attractions to men are still present. Baldwin uses very specific imagery of his mother to illustrate David's attempts to reject his sexuality and how the feelings still linger within him. The images from David's nightmare about his mother clearly suggest that she is representative of his identity struggle. David recalls her image from his nightmare as "blind with worms, her hair as dry as metal…straining to press me against her body; that body so putrescent, so sickening soft, that it opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive" (17). His mother is a symbol of his homosexuality, and as she tries to embrace him and pull him into her, he fights and tries to escape. The fact that David feels that she is pulling him into a "breach" or abyss confirms the idea that she represents his struggle with homosexuality. It is evident because David's first gay lover, Joey, is also described as an abyss: "That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood" (15). The parallel between David's mother and Joey supports the fact that David is trying to keep the manhood that his father expects him to possess. But David's feelings of his mother watching over him, suggests that despite his efforts to escape the abyss, his mother and homosexuality are always going to be a part of him. Although David tries to reject his homosexuality to retain his manhood, Baldwin suggests through the dominating spirit of the mother that David will not be able to escape from his true identity. David's mother, as a symbol of his homosexuality, watches and governs his actions. As David senses, she is the part of him that controls his identity and his relationship with his father: "My mother's photograph…seemed to rule the room. It was as though her photograph proved how her spirit dominated that air and controlled us all" (18). David must come to terms with the fact that he cannot deny his true self. David's parents are significant to his struggle to accept his homosexuality as part of his true identity. His father wants David to grow up to embody rugged manliness, which leads David to believe that he can't do that as long as he's gay. David then rejects and pushes his true identity away from himself, which is illustrated through the images of his dead mother. Finally, feeling the presence of his mother's spirit, David realizes that he cannot escape from his homosexuality. He also realizes that he would have spared himself the struggle with his identity if he knew that he couldn't escape from it: "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 Bibliography:

Word Count: 1039