“Giovanni’s Room” James Baldwin

Recently I have read three books about homosexuals, “Rubyfruit Jungle,” “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and “Giovanni’s Room.” For this posting I would like to look at the similarity and differences in these three novels. This post definitely has spoilers for all three books.

The obvious issues to begin with are gender and age. Both “Rubyfruit” and “Oranges” are about women, and “Giovanni” is about a man. The age of the main characters Molly and Jeanette are about the same in those two books, both start talking about their lives as children and proceed through adolescence, teens and young adult. It is not quite clear what age Jeanette is at the end of the book–at least I couldn’t find time markers in the very passages of “Ruth” to indicate the time that had passed, but it is easy to assume that she is 20 by this time. On the other hand, in “Giovanni,” David is older (30?) and we only see about a year of his life. He talks about an affair he had with a boy when he was younger, but we don’t get the same biographical details of his introduction to sex in general, the specifics of how he was treated on a daily basis by his father, etc., that we get from “Rubyfruit” and “Oranges.”

In all three books, the characters were told how one is expected to behave, including their gender roles, by their parents and friends. In “Rubyfruit,” Molly hears everyone telling her how women are supposed to behave, they have sex in certain ways, they do not participate in politics and they don’t study film, and she refuses to accept those roles. Her mother wants her to be pretty and social, the “Betty Crocker” wife, but Molly does not find satisfaction in those roles. In a way, I think her mother wants Molly to have a life that she wasn’t able to have. In “Oranges,” Jeanette is also expected to enter a specific role, that of a female missionary abroad. She is prepared for this role not only by her mother but also her pastor and fellow church members. She is taught to minister and the expectation is that she won’t marry, saving herself for the church. Somewhere along the line, besides establishing that she is interested in women instead of men, which is not accepted by the church and her mother, she decides that she doesn’t want to be a missionary. So, similarly to Molly, Jeanette is not following the established roles that are expected of her. David in “Giovanni” is in a similar predicament. His father expects him to be manly, and it is assumed that would mean demonstrating his manliness through his sexual prowess. David’s situation is a different from the two women in that he finds himself in a community of homosexuals in Paris, and they generally pressure him into homosexual relationship. Molly and Jeanette have trysts with individual women, but their relationships are hidden and they don’t have the pressure that David has from both the heterosexual and homosexual communities.

These three characters have different feelings about homosexuality. Molly has lesbian relationships from an early age and is sure after a point that homosexual relationships are preferable to her even as she continues to dabble in heterosexual relationships. She seems to easily accept her sexuality even in the face of opposition. Jeanette says that she didn’t consciously choose to have homosexual relationships, that it happened by accident. However, she never demonstrates in the book any attempt to try heterosexual relationships on for size. On the other hand, she doesn’t seek out homosexual relationships in the part of her life we learn about, and they just seem to happen to her. David does not so easily accept his homosexuality as easily as the women, and he hates himself for it. I don’t quite understand the dynamics of this hate, because he seems to have the same familial pressure to be heterosexual as the women. However, he hates his father for his blatant sexual misconduct, so his self-hatred may stem from the fact that he sees no way out, he doesn’t want to be like his father, yet he doesn’t want to be homosexual either.

The sexuality of all three characters has some impact on others. Molly’s homosexual relationship with her roommate in college resulted in both being expelled from school. Jeanette’s friend Mrs. Jewsberry had to relocate to avoid the social stigma of being homosexual, and Melanie learned to deny her relationship with Jeanette to be accepted back into the mainstream. The most extreme situation is in “Giovanni” where Giovanni is being executed for his behavior after the end of his relationship with David. The impact on the women’s lives revolved around being homosexual and living in a predominately heterosexual world where homosexuality is considered aberrant and, for some people, abhorrent. The problems Giovanni faced were more psychological in nature, and could have happened regardless of the gender of the people involved.

All three characters ended up leaving home. In the case of Molly and Jeanette, they left home but later rekindled their relationship with their mothers. Molly actually left home to go to college first, and when she was kicked out of college her mother did not want her to return home, so she went to New York. In New York, she learned a lot more about herself and what she wanted in life, and it was unfortunate that she learned that to be what she wanted would require a struggle, probably all her life. She returned home several years later and found that, even though her mother did not accept her sexuality–she forbid her to have sex in the house–he mother was interested in having some relationship with Molly now that she was older and saw her relationship with her daughter in a new light. Jeanette fell in and out of favor with her mother several times, and even after the last incident, her mother was willing to take her back as long as she went through another exorcism and continued the path of being a missionary. Like Molly, she was told there were things she could not do because she was a woman, which for Molly included being a film major and for Jeanette it was giving sermons. When Jeanette refused to be “fixed” and denied the ministry, her mother wanted her to leave. Unlike Molly, she did not find a kindred community in another city, and eventually returned to her mother. In the same way as Molly’s mother, Jeanette’s mother recognized a need to continue a relationship with Jeanette but did so in a state of denial. The religious relationships that Jeanette’s mother had were now gone, and by having a distant relationship with her new colleagues the issue of a homosexual daughter were not as important, especially since most of her new colleagues did not know about the affairs of her daughter.

David’s relationship with his father is not like either of Molly’s and Jeanette’s. We are led to believe that David’s father would never forgive his sexual proclivities and that to return home to his father would mean accepting his father’s views on sexuality and the relationship of the genders. On the other hand as an expatriate in Paris, David continued his relationship with his father, who for a long time had supported his lifestyle there financially. They communicated by letters, and in those letters, David did not disclose his homosexual relationship, and misdirected his father with sometimes spurious information about his heterosexual relationship. Thus, the relationship that Molly and Jeanette have with their mothers are more honest than the relationship of David and his father, but Molly and Jeanette are willing to camouflage some aspects of their sexuality in order to maintain relationships with their parents, while David is unwilling to either admit his homosexuality or to accept his father’s version of heterosexuality, and so his relationship with his father is full of subterfuge.

Written on 20 February 2009