Into the Room and Out of the Closet: (Homo)Sexuality and Commodification in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

Abstract

David, the narrator protagonist of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, is teetering on the brink of yielding to his homosexuality when, as an American tourist in the Paris of the fifties, he meets the tragic Italian immigrant, Giovanni. The circle of acquaintances that the raconteur frequents spins to propel him to one location that would challenge his self-representation: Giovanni's room - the metonym of his newly appropriated sexual identity. Once David enters Giovanni's dilapidated room, he virtually enters a realm of no return, a social inferno, yet also a heaven and haven of unrepressed sexuality. When the protagonist leaves his lover's lair, he escapes the closet he has inhabited, consciously or not, for most of his life and accepts the truth of his sexuality. Furthermore, "the closet" objectified, Giovanni's room stands not only for the recognition of David's homosexual identity, but also for the social and political oppression that comes with it, being that the closet, as theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evinces, "is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century" (71).