Extended Essays 2021

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

Conclusion

By the end of the novel, David must decide how he is going to leave the garden of Eden, how he is going to reconcile his sexuality; whether he is to choose to remember, to forget, or to do both. In this final scene, David receives a blue envelope containing the date of Giovanni’s execution. David states, “The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.” (pg. 149-150). At first, David attempts to forget Giovanni, by tearing up the letter, by “watching the wind carry [the pieces] away.” And yet, there is still this “dreadful weight of hope” on his shoulders, and in the end, we see that “the wind blows some of them back on [him]”, thus the memory of Giovanni, of what he represents to David, cannot truly be forgotten. Perhaps, after having seen the consequences of self-contempt and self-denial, David has chosen to both remember and forget, to be a hero. Throughout Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin warns the reader of the consequences of self-contempt and self-denial. He achieves this through his portrayal of queer characters, and how they choose to reconcile their homosexual identities. Self-contempt is depicted through imageries of dirtiness and death, and destroys both David’s love for Giovanni, as well as Giovanni himself. Self-denial is portrayed through motifs of flight and reflections, and causes destruction through the alienation of David from himself and from his relationships. Through the fact that Baldwin presents a choice to his characters in how to leave the garden of Eden, it could be said that he does not necessarily portray homosexual identities themselves as causes of destruction, but rather that destruction is the result of the character’s choices in response to their identities. However, there is still present within the text this element of fatalism, that once the choice has been made, the character’s fate has already been decided; one need only to look at the apparent inevitability of Giovanni’s death to see that, for him, this tragedy had already been written. In Giovanni’s Room , Baldwin engages in the tropes of queer tragedy, not to depict the impossibility of queer love altogether, but to demonstrate that queer relationships are only able to survive when one’s homosexual identity is accepted. Even if it is too late for Giovanni, Baldwin leaves us with the hope that, for David at least, self-acceptance, and thus release from this pattern of destruction, is possible.

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