Abstract
This chapter’s focus lies on James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). While the novel has received much critical attention, age and aging have been mentioned only in passing by scholars. Hess illustrates that themes of age and temporality crucially shape the narrative. She examines the novel’s central binary oppositions that function on the basis of age relations: the dichotomy of young, “pure,” heteronormative America versus old, permissive, decadent Europe, and the dichotomy of youthful, heterosexual masculinity versus aging, gay effeminacy. In the context of the Cold War era’s fixation on young hetero-masculinity, the figure of the aging gay man embodies the protagonist’s greatest fear: irrevocable failure—that is, exclusion from a meaningful life course—and exemplifies the discursive power of the heteronormative timeline to erase queer futurity.
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Notes
- 1.
The period beginning in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1950s, when persons suspected of being homosexual were fired from government jobs because they were deemed security risks, also became known as the Lavender Scare (Eaklor 2008, 87).
- 2.
Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female followed in 1953.
- 3.
Freud had defined it as a “perversion,” a condition that, in contrast to neurosis, was regarded as hardly (or not at all) reversible; therefore, the psychoanalytic model “did not originally endorse therapeutic intervention” (Knauer 2011, 24).
- 4.
In the first edition of the DSM , published in 1952, homosexuality was listed as a “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance.” The full definition reads:
This diagnosis is reserved for deviant sexuality which is not symptomatic of more extensive syndromes, such as schizophrenic and obsessional reactions. The term includes most of the cases formerly classed as “psychopathic personality with pathologic sexuality.” The diagnosis will specify the type of the pathologic behavior, such as homosexuality, transvestism, pedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism (including rape, sexual assault, mutilation). (American Psychiatric Association 1952, 38–39)
This definition was not revised until the sixth printing of the DSM II (in 1973), in which homosexuality was replaced by Sexual Orientation Disturbance, which was, however, still referenced parenthetically as homosexuality (American Psychiatric Association 1973).
- 5.
Over the decades, a number of expatriate LGBTQ authors, such as Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Fritz Peters, and Gertrude Stein, went to Europe to live and work there.
- 6.
Ginsberg’s poem had been printed in England by Villiers but was then seized by San Francisco customs officers (Morgan and Peters 2006, 107). It was reprinted in San Francisco by City Lights Books but still put on trial for obscenity in 1957.
- 7.
For recent insightful analyses of race in Giovanni’s Room, see Aliyyah I. Abur-Rahman’s “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room” (2007) and Josep M. Armengol’s “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room” (2012).
- 8.
Hella, David’s fiancée, actually mirrors David’s desire for the security of normative gender roles. Whereas in the beginning of the novel she is presented as quite independent, wearing short hair and blue jeans (Washington 1995, 75–76), when she returns from her trip to Spain, she envisions marriage as a kind of salvation because, as she says, “I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m not one” (Baldwin [1956] 2001, 136). Heterosexual marriage thus represents a “security blanket” for both men and women by safeguarding their sense of belonging in society.
- 9.
The same point is present in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood (also set in Paris), in which a character remarks that Americans are “a clean race of too eagerly washing people,” whereas the French recognize dirt as the necessity of any life that’s not to be sterile (91).
- 10.
One of the most famous examples of such a twisted case of xenophobia is found in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when the character Marlow observes,
It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. ([1899] 1999, 63–64)
- 11.
See Sally Chivers’s chapter “Baby Jane Grew Up: The Horror of Aging in Mid-Twentieth-Century Hollywood” in The Silvering Screen (2011).
- 12.
Jacques’s repetition of the word “dirty” connects this passage to Giovanni’s accusation that David is obsessed with cleanliness and to the previously discussed dichotomy of purity and filth as a dichotomy of nationalities.
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Hess, L.M. (2019). The Menace of Gay Aging: James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_3
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