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Flashbacks
Part 1: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Father and Son:
In a twist on the familiar Oedipal trope, Giovanni’s Room approaches its father-son dynamics with gender anxieties in mind. The foil between David and his father makes for a strained relationship that lurks beneath much of the novel. Rather than vying for the affections of David’s mother, father and son come into conflict over an unspoken awareness of queerness. The source of their tension isn’t so much sexual competition as the difference of their desires altogether. David shrinks from his father’s attempts at masculine rapport:
We were not like father and son, my father sometimes proudly said, we were like buddies. I think my father sometimes actually believed this. I never did. I did not want to be his buddy; I wanted to be his son. What passed between us as masculine candor exhausted and appalled me.
David and his father are a case study of opposites. The novel continuously contrasts between David’s attraction towards men and those of his father, a chronic womanizer. Whereas David makes love to Joey, his father spends evenings at a time with his mistress. A victim of the other sexual extreme, David’s father oppresses him with the expectations of traditional heterosexual attraction. David fears his father’s judgment to the extent that he must escape across the Atlantic and invent lies in his letters. In a faintly ironic pun on the archaic, sexual sense of “knowing,” David recalls: “I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.”
In spite of their differences, the novel presents both as characters strangled by their own sexual appetites. Both struggle to command their desires, to the point where their behavior unexpectedly converges. David’s father struts like a “cock” before his female guests from an irrepressible attraction to women. Preoccupied with suppressing his own homosexuality, David similarly overplays his masculinity throughout the novel. He sends aggressively sexual provocations to Sue and tries to “drive out fire with fire” while making love to Hella. In this pairing, David’s father is the source of his paranoia that also holds up an unlikely mirror to his own actions.
Related Themes:
Part 2: Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Giovanni vs. Hella:
Giovanni’s Room has a fraught love triangle and pair of character foils at its heart. David’s two lovers—Giovanni and Hella—compete for his affections, invest themselves in their love, and ultimately get betrayed by his infidelities. They also subscribe to vastly different beliefs about gender and hold contrasting attitudes towards their love lives. Giovanni is a self-proclaimed gay man; Hella commits herself to heterosexual union. Together they stand at two different poles of sexuality and torment David with his indecision.
Giovanni is unabashedly, innocently gay. He lacks David’s “English” sexual reservations but also refuses to groom young boys in the way that Jacques does. Giovanni recognizes his desires and acts upon them: he abandons his Italian village to find a more fulfilling relationship in the city. The novel shows how he accepts the joy from his queer identity and encourages others to discover themselves in the process. David recalls how his love affair with Giovanni “had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me.” Giovanni’s commitment to the relationship is liberating and fulfilling for David in a way that his love for Hella is not.
Hella embodies the other extreme. Giovanni’s fluid, freeing sense of identity finds its inverse in Hella’s submission to traditional gender expectations. Following her acceptance of David’s marriage proposal, she teases him about her new wifely role:
I’ve got you to take care of and feed and torment and trick and love—I’ve got you to put up with. From now own, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m not one.
Marriage is an affirmation of gender identity that she willingly accepts. Hella admits occasional reservations about her role as a woman: she admits she is “not really the emancipated girl I try to be at all." Womanhood for Hella is oppressive, at times unjust—she realizes in Spain that she can’t be free “until I was attached—no, committed—to someone.” But Hella nonetheless turns to the traditional heterosexual script for validation. Being a wife is inseparable from “having babies” and being an “obedient servant,” both of which she accepts and eagerly awaits. Hella recognizes the limitations of her gender, but doesn’t want to “forget what it’s like to be a woman.” If Giovanni abandons the myths of heterosexual love and his traditional gender roles, Hella takes refuge in them.
Though Giovanni and Hella represent alternate gender possibilities, they both come to terms with their own identity. In their respective acceptance of gender, they contrast with David himself. They make space for the possibility of love where David engages in torturous self-denial and devastating infidelity. Giovanni and Hella possess a measure of self-understanding that David all too tragically lacks.
Related Themes:
