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Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
Motifs
Explanation and Analysis—Night and Day:
Throughout “Giovanni’s Room,” night bleeds into morning, and the edges of a day blend with each other. David’s careful attention to night and day supplies close parallels to the gender binaries that he negotiates throughout the story. The novel itself begins with just this observation: “I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life,” David writes.
The porous divisions between night and day offer a reminder of queerness—its appearances and recurrences frequently accompany David’s moments of sexual fulfillment. His evening with Joey is a lifetime that is short, “bounded by night” and “ended in the morning.” Likewise, his first acquaintance with Giovanni stretches the limits of moonlight. He, Jacques, Guillaume, and Giovanni stay all night in the bar and eat an oyster breakfast, passing through Les Halles in time to catch the thick of shoppers on their morning grocery errands.
As his affair with Giovanni progresses, the distinctions cease to matter. The boundaries grow fuzzy and challenge the suggestion of a sharp division, sexual, planetary, or otherwise. “I remembered the first afternoon I woke up there, with Giovanni fast asleep beside me, heavy as a fallen rock. The sun filtered through the room so faintly that I was worried about the time,” David recalls. David’s relationship allows him to navigate beyond rigid categories, embracing an existence that is instead somewhere in between.
Related Themes:
Motifs
Explanation and Analysis—Sight:
In a novel whose protagonist staggers beneath the weight of exposure and vulnerability, eyes often present another source of perception and self-consciousness. David is uncannily aware of gazes directed upon him, and much of his narration reflects this. The story closely follows moments of eye contact in ways that intensify its underlying sense of uneasiness. Jacques looks on greedily at the boys in the bar. David’s caretaker searches his face and surveys his emptied house, very nearly uncovering his homosexuality. On the street, David and the sailor engage in an entirely silent exchange of humiliation and shame: “we came abreast and, as though he had seen some all-revealing panic in my eyes, he gave me a look contemptuously lewd and knowing.” Eye contact escalates the conflict with its constant undercurrent of angst.
Between David and Giovanni, glances transmit powerful yet unspoken understanding. What is left unsaid is often more important that what is not, and such fears and desires get shared through their eyes. Giovanni looks at David with a “terrible intensity” that “made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.” Eyesight expresses arousal, anger, and an underhanded, mutual acknowledgement of their queer identities. David might escape the cramped, tattered room, but his face—which is “more transparent than a shop window”—can’t tear itself away from Giovanni’s eyes. He denies to Giovanni any sexual attraction, yet his glance says otherwise. A protagonist bent on concealment and denial gives away everything with his eyes.
Related Themes:
Part 2: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Love, Like Water:
Mentions of water appear throughout the course of Giovanni’s Room. Though Giovanni memorably likens the sea to time, water also provides vocabulary for the complex, shifting landscape of love at the other points in the work. David frames his first night meeting Giovanni in distinctively maritime terms. He compares the commotion at Guillaume’s bar to the “roaring of the sea, heard at night.” Upon meeting Giovanni, he even likens the new bartender to a “promontory” above the sea of customers. David “flows” towards Giovanni as a “river rushes when the ice breaks up.”
Water shifts from describing a lover to the experience of love itself. Giovanni appeals to aquatic language yet again as he criticizes the fickleness of women:
Women are like water. They are temping like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.
Through his emphasis on inconstancy, Giovanni turns water into a metaphor for the difficulties of successful love. He transfers the variable, fluid quality of water onto romantic and sexual desire.
Later references to water take on an extra, suffocating sense as the relationship festers. Love, in its dangerous forms, drowns. It is oppressive, tragic, and stifling. For David, Giovanni’s extreme possessiveness creates the impression that he was “dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.” After their break-up, Guillaume surrounds a forlorn Giovanni “like the sea itself.” The water even briefly associates with death itself. David contemplates suicide while walking along the Seine at night and Giovanni proposes to “drag the river” when David disappears, worrying that he drowned himself in it. Baldwin plays on the shifting qualities of water to survey life, love, and death.
Related Themes:
Part 2: Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Windows and Mirrors:
Giovanni’s Room is bookended by a reflection in a windowpane and another in a mirror. In between, the novel’s account of both windows and mirrors underscores the role of perception in defining the queer experience. Windows and mirrors replicate the process of both seeing and being seen.
During David’s affair with Giovanni, windows are reminders of vulnerability; they threaten the two lovers with the possibility of exposure. The account of Giovanni’s room links the windows directly to sight: in menacing fashion, the windows stare out like “two great eyes of ice and fire” while the courtyard “malevolently” presses in for a peek. In fact, the very presence of the windows places the two lovers in immediate danger:
We, or rather Giovanni, kept the windows closed most of the time. He had never bought any curtains; neither did we buy any while I was in the room. To insure privacy, Giovanni had obscured the window panes with a heavy, white cleaning polish. We sometimes heard children playing outside our window, sometimes strange shapes loomed against it.
Windows introduce the paranoia of surveillance. David and Giovanni risk being seen—and therefore judged—by the outside world, and the safety of their relationship depends on concealment. Giovanni “stiffens like a hunting dog” when the children pass through the courtyard, and he coats the windows with “white cleaning polish.” Faced with the possibility of exposure, they must dissimulate.
But windows are not simply apertures to the outside world. By presenting windows as sources of self-reflection, Baldwin adds another dimension to the motif. David stands before a dark windowpane in the house as he begins sharing the story of his “flight,” implicitly linking the window to the act of remembrance. “The germ of the dilemma” is somewhere “locked in that reflection I am watching,” he writes, as though staring more deeply into his own reflection will also untangle the difficulties of his story. Beyond exposing David, the house’s windowpanes offer him an entrance into understanding himself.
This journey of self-understanding proves to be a perilous one. “Giovanni’s Room” is about self-consciousness mutated into shame—the difficulties and fear of confronting oneself. For most of the story, David’s self-reflection amounts to self-repression: he is aware of his queerness yet afraid to accept it. “Walls, windows, mirrors, water, the night outside—they are everywhere,” he notes, haunted by the prospect of seeing himself. He cheats and lies his way out of his commitments until forced, at last, to face his reflections—literal and figurative—in the mirror. As daybreak nears, David becomes “terribly aware” of the “large mirror” in the room and sees Giovanni’s face like an “unexpected lantern.” Even more, he must finally come to grips with the desires of his own body:
The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of mystery.
As he stares at his own reflections, David longs to “crack that mirror and be free”—the mirror becoming less physical than metaphorical at this point. He recognizes that he is trapped in his own self-loathing and that he must overcome it. The “key” to David’s salvation—which lies in his “flesh”—can only be attained by embracing his body and thereby accepting himself.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Stone and Brick Walls:
Walls symbolically express inhibition and constraint. The mention of “stone walls” appears first during David's conversation with Sue in Part 2, Chapter 2, where they trade in uncomfortably snappy banter about sex:
‘Stone walls,’ she said, ‘are impenetrable.’
The waiter arrived. ‘Doesn’t it,’ I dared, ‘depend on the weapon?’
In eliciting a sexually provocative sense of penetration, stone walls are innuendoes and representations of David’s mental inhibitions. They form part of an aggressive masculine performance in which David wildly overshoots his aim, hoping to “find a girl, any girl at all.” His nearly coerced affair with Sue is an attempt, he explains, at driving out the “real fear” buried within him. In a deeper sense, his penetration of stone walls is also an attempt to destroy his gender misgivings. David tries to forswear his homosexuality in an act that will cement his status a proper American man.
Back at Giovanni’s place, the walls of the room hem the couple into its cluttered confines. In Part 2, Chapter 3, Giovanni undertakes a “hard” and “insane” renovation project that involves removing parts of the wall to make space for a recessed bookcase. Most of all, David suspects that he does it simply to “prove his love”:
He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down.
Giovanni’s literal renovation may well be a metaphorical one, too. In remaking the room, Giovanni also seems to create a more capacious understanding of love. He pounds away at the brick and—in some sense—resists the social stigmas that threaten their relationship. Giovanni pushes against the “encroaching,” claustrophobic trope of the closet and makes room for someone he loves. Where David penetrates stone walls, Giovanni tears them down and attempts to reimagine them, piece by piece.
Related Themes:
Part 2: Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Stone and Brick Walls:
Walls symbolically express inhibition and constraint. The mention of “stone walls” appears first during David's conversation with Sue in Part 2, Chapter 2, where they trade in uncomfortably snappy banter about sex:
‘Stone walls,’ she said, ‘are impenetrable.’
The waiter arrived. ‘Doesn’t it,’ I dared, ‘depend on the weapon?’
In eliciting a sexually provocative sense of penetration, stone walls are innuendoes and representations of David’s mental inhibitions. They form part of an aggressive masculine performance in which David wildly overshoots his aim, hoping to “find a girl, any girl at all.” His nearly coerced affair with Sue is an attempt, he explains, at driving out the “real fear” buried within him. In a deeper sense, his penetration of stone walls is also an attempt to destroy his gender misgivings. David tries to forswear his homosexuality in an act that will cement his status a proper American man.
Back at Giovanni’s place, the walls of the room hem the couple into its cluttered confines. In Part 2, Chapter 3, Giovanni undertakes a “hard” and “insane” renovation project that involves removing parts of the wall to make space for a recessed bookcase. Most of all, David suspects that he does it simply to “prove his love”:
He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down.
Giovanni’s literal renovation may well be a metaphorical one, too. In remaking the room, Giovanni also seems to create a more capacious understanding of love. He pounds away at the brick and—in some sense—resists the social stigmas that threaten their relationship. Giovanni pushes against the “encroaching,” claustrophobic trope of the closet and makes room for someone he loves. Where David penetrates stone walls, Giovanni tears them down and attempts to reimagine them, piece by piece.
Related Themes:
Part 2: Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Windows and Mirrors:
Giovanni’s Room is bookended by a reflection in a windowpane and another in a mirror. In between, the novel’s account of both windows and mirrors underscores the role of perception in defining the queer experience. Windows and mirrors replicate the process of both seeing and being seen.
During David’s affair with Giovanni, windows are reminders of vulnerability; they threaten the two lovers with the possibility of exposure. The account of Giovanni’s room links the windows directly to sight: in menacing fashion, the windows stare out like “two great eyes of ice and fire” while the courtyard “malevolently” presses in for a peek. In fact, the very presence of the windows places the two lovers in immediate danger:
We, or rather Giovanni, kept the windows closed most of the time. He had never bought any curtains; neither did we buy any while I was in the room. To insure privacy, Giovanni had obscured the window panes with a heavy, white cleaning polish. We sometimes heard children playing outside our window, sometimes strange shapes loomed against it.
Windows introduce the paranoia of surveillance. David and Giovanni risk being seen—and therefore judged—by the outside world, and the safety of their relationship depends on concealment. Giovanni “stiffens like a hunting dog” when the children pass through the courtyard, and he coats the windows with “white cleaning polish.” Faced with the possibility of exposure, they must dissimulate.
But windows are not simply apertures to the outside world. By presenting windows as sources of self-reflection, Baldwin adds another dimension to the motif. David stands before a dark windowpane in the house as he begins sharing the story of his “flight,” implicitly linking the window to the act of remembrance. “The germ of the dilemma” is somewhere “locked in that reflection I am watching,” he writes, as though staring more deeply into his own reflection will also untangle the difficulties of his story. Beyond exposing David, the house’s windowpanes offer him an entrance into understanding himself.
This journey of self-understanding proves to be a perilous one. “Giovanni’s Room” is about self-consciousness mutated into shame—the difficulties and fear of confronting oneself. For most of the story, David’s self-reflection amounts to self-repression: he is aware of his queerness yet afraid to accept it. “Walls, windows, mirrors, water, the night outside—they are everywhere,” he notes, haunted by the prospect of seeing himself. He cheats and lies his way out of his commitments until forced, at last, to face his reflections—literal and figurative—in the mirror. As daybreak nears, David becomes “terribly aware” of the “large mirror” in the room and sees Giovanni’s face like an “unexpected lantern.” Even more, he must finally come to grips with the desires of his own body:
The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of mystery.
As he stares at his own reflections, David longs to “crack that mirror and be free”—the mirror becoming less physical than metaphorical at this point. He recognizes that he is trapped in his own self-loathing and that he must overcome it. The “key” to David’s salvation—which lies in his “flesh”—can only be attained by embracing his body and thereby accepting himself.
Related Themes:
