Abstract
This essay reads gender through performance and performance through gender. Manolova argues that James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) critiques a specific kind of liberal white American performative masculinity that perpetuates a heteronormative, racist, and imperialist social order. The novel aims to conceptualize a more ethical and socially responsible gendered subjectivity through a theatrical critique of performativity and the genre of the tragic. Manolova distinguishes between accepted theories of performative masculinity and formations of masculinity and manhood that emerge from the novel, arguing that the dialectical tension between these formations allows for the envisioning of an ethical worldview that transcends existing genres, genders, and the value systems they express.
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Notes
- 1.
For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Matt Brim, Soyica Colbert, Maggie Galvan, Kevin Floyd, Ian Foster, Peter Hitchcock, Robert Reid-Pharr, Sarah Schulman, Alan Vardy, and Jerry Watts, a friend and mentor taken from us much too soon, whom none of us will ever thank enough.
- 2.
Here and elsewhere in the chapter I use ‘performance’ and ‘perform’ as umbrella terms that encompass more specific performance-related designations, such as the performative (as derived from performativity), the theatrical, and the tragic.
- 3.
Rolland Murray (2007) argues that Baldwin’s critiques of patriarchy and masculinity are more comprehensive in his fiction than in his essays and more rigorous in his writing as a whole prior to 1964, a year Murray identifies as the start of Baldwin’s increasingly uncritical acceptance of masculinist Black Power ideology. I am not suggesting that the essays necessarily clarify what Baldwin is attempting to accomplish in his fiction; the two genres are clearly doing different kinds of work. However, these essays do articulate theoretical and political positions that inform his fictional work.
- 4.
Baldwin does not offer an analogous statement to characterize mature womanhood. Although the essay argues that conformity to rigid gender roles is responsible for “the debasement of the relationship between the sexes” (595), its main concern is with male subjectivity and immature masculinity as a barrier to men’s involvement in meaningful relationships with people of any gender.
- 5.
Baldwin initially drafted Giovanni’s Room and Another Country as a single novel. Set mostly in New York and partially in France, Another Country also deals with the relationship between expatriation, queer sexuality, and white male liberal guilt.
- 6.
“A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled…Without this passion we may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and separate us from ourselves; and without this passion when we have discovered the connection between that Boy-Scout who smiles from the subway poster and that underworld to be found all over America, vengeful time will be upon us” (Baldwin, 600).
- 7.
It is important to note that David does not need to be supported by Giovanni’s meager wages, but chooses to be. He could write to his father and ask for money—and eventually does, when he decides to leave Giovanni—or even seek employment.
- 8.
When Giovanni expresses indignation about Hella’s traveling extensively alone, without the companionship of her male partner, David explains that Hella is “intelligent” and “complex” and that he has no desire to restrict her mobility. He also points out that women “don’t seem to like [the] idea”, proposed by Giovanni “their inside life…is not like the life of a man” (Baldwin 1956, 80). At the same time, David knowingly uses a woman named Sue by having sex with her in an attempt to prove to himself that he is a properly heterosexual man and despises her desire for him. He uses Hella in a similar way, and over a much longer period of time, through his engagement to her and his continuation of his relationship with her despite having fallen in love with Giovanni.
- 9.
Raymond Williams distinguishes structures of feeling from terms such as “world-view” or “ideology” because a structure of feeling is “a social experience which is still in process…concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (1977, 132). Similarly, I see white liberal guilt as a dynamic process rather than a fixed ideology, an ever-evolving formation with both progressive and reactionary potentialities. In Giovanni’s Room, it is the latter that are realized, even while the former are presented as possibilities.
- 10.
This is not to suggest that white femininity does not perpetuate racism or does not operate in racist ways; rather, the critique is of Baldwin’s isolation of femininity as a singular racist force without considering, in this instance, how it may operate in tandem with masculinity.
- 11.
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (2012) poignantly defines lynching as “a kind of racialized gang rape” (21) in her discussion of Pauline Hopkins and William Faulkner novels.
- 12.
Giovanni tells David that he first met Guillaume in a movie theater lobby where Guillaume makes a scene after losing his expensive scarf, suggesting that Giovanni may have stolen it. “[N]ot even Garbo ever gave such a performance,” Giovanni insists (Baldwin 1956, 109).
- 13.
Although Guillaume descends from aristocracy (cf. 150), there is no evident distinction between a bourgeois class and a ruling class in the world of Giovanni’s Room. Guillaume, whose occupation positions him as bourgeois, is the most wealthy and powerful character in the novel and wields control over the livelihood of Giovanni and other working-class men.
- 14.
The statement “it did not seem real” could also signal a moment of self-awareness, a momentary observation that the crisis in front of David is one that he imagines, which ultimately allows David to calm down.
- 15.
The double entendre in Baldwin’s choice of the word “preservative”, the French word for condom, is especially evocative in this context.
- 16.
While narrating a conversation with his French landlady after Hella has discovered his homosexuality and left him, David reflects: “My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already” (68). At this moment in the narrative, on the eve of Giovanni’s execution, David thus considers how in the eyes of the social order he is no less of a criminal than Giovanni.
- 17.
For this and other versions of the Tiresias myth, see Luc Brisson’s (2002) “The Myth of Tiresias”.
- 18.
“Liberalism, in its heroic phase, begins to pass into its twentieth-century breakdown: the self-enclosed, guilty and isolated world; the time of man his own victim” (Williams 1966, 100). The conditions that prolong the tragedy of David’s trajectory are largely self-chosen. While he is struggling with his internalization of structural homophobia, he is also depicted as someone who lacks the courage and resolve to pursue the socially taboo but personally fulfilling path of queer love. Giovanni’s trajectory, on the other hand, is directly circumscribed by the material conditions of his life in Paris, over which he has little control. His story, unlike David’s, is not a bourgeois liberal tragedy, but an unmistakably working-class tragedy.
- 19.
Matt Brim (2014) performs a stunning reading of the murder weapon, described by David as “theatrical”, as indicative of transphobic rage and transphobic violence in his book James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination.
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Manolova, V. (2017). The Tragic “Complexity of Manhood”: Masculinity Formations and Performances in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. In: Horlacher, S., Floyd, K. (eds) Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_8
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