Extended Essays 2021

RQ: To what extent does Baldwin portray homosexual identity as a cause of destruction in Giovanni’s Room?

Leaving the Garden of Eden: An Overview of Narrative Themes

The overarching theme of Baldwin’s novel is seen to be one of self-acceptance. This is no more exemplified than when David states, “Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.” (pg. 22-23) This garden of Eden is established as a metaphor for heteronormativity. The quote itself arises due to David’s lamentation that Giovanni should have, “stayed down there in that village of his in Italy and planted his olive trees and had a lot of children and beaten his wife.” (pg. 22), to which Jacques responds, “Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” (pg. 22), and so these signifiers of a heteronormative lifestyle, of having a wife and children, are explicitly stated to be representative of a ‘garden of Eden’. The act of remembering or forgetting the garden, then, represents a choice between either self-contempt or self-denial. To remember the garden is to remember heteronormativity, and thus one experiences the, “perpetually recurring death of their innocence,” (pg. 22), as one mourns the loss of their heteronormativity, the loss of their innocence, and thus engages in contempt of the self. To forget the garden, then, is to deny that it ever existed, and thus to deny the pain associated with remembrance, and to hate the innocent as a reminder of what has been lost. Throughout the novel, David oscillates between these two states, of self-contempt and self- denial, and the consequences of this “madness” manifest in destruction. According to the quote, this would contradictorily posit David as a “hero”, by engaging in both the act of remembrance and forgetting. However, this is not the case, as David does not leave his ‘garden of Eden’ until the end of the novel, after he has lost his heteronormativity, represented through the loss of his relationship with Hella. At this point, there is reference to how David’s body is, “trapped in [his] mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.” (pg. 149), and he states, “I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free.” (pg. 149). This mirror represents David’s denial of his own sexual identity, as Giovanni says to David,

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