Bluest Eye And Giovanni’s Room Essay, Research Paper

There are several novels written by two of the worlds most critically acclaimed literary writers of the 20th century James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. But I would like to focus on just two of their works, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In these novels in some way the authors suggest a theme of how the past is rooted in the present. Now each of these authors shows this in a different way. This is because of the contrast in their story outline and the structures of their novels. Yet they both seem to suggest that if the past is not clear then the present or the future can not be clear as well. One can not run from ones past, it will only dictate ones future.

I would like to start with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. From the very beginning of the novel we see this man standing in the window of his apartment building in France. He begins to reminisce about the things that he had done and the past that had caused his present reality. From this very moment the author begins to suggest to us that something about this man’s past is relevant to the plot or story about to be told. The man, whose name is David, tells us about this person named Giovanni, and how he was about to face the guillotine. David also tells us about how his fianc?e Hella had left him. And how he told her that he loved her. He begins to go back in time to explain to us how he met and asked Hella to marry him, as well as to tell us that he lived with Giovanni. So what was this dilemma that Giovanni was about to face or had already faced. David dose not tell us at this point, instead he starts to tell us about this guy named Joey who was once his best friend, until that night. The night that he began to feel different for him. He says: I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many

times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed

me.But this time when I touched him something happened in him and

in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had

ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I

had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was

beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and

the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to

make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head

down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as

it were, by accident.(Giovanni’s room Pp. 13)

He goes on to explain how Joey and him slept together that night, how it made him feel, how frightened he really was. He also expresses to us the sham that it made he feel about his manhood. This would be one of the most rooted problem of his past that would hunt his future. And it was not like he could tell his father, for David’s father was a man who had images of what manhood should be, especially for his son. David had no one to help him confront this issue. This was an issue he had to deal with all by himself. The hatred the fear and the reluctance all pushed him into a callous way of dealing with love. He suppressed this issue so much in his subconscious mind that it began to illustrate itself in his decision he makes in the present. David goes on to explain to us the relationship he had with his father. And how it too was a determining factor for the person that he became. He never was close with his father, because his father had a stereotypical of men and their emotions. And so even when David gets hurt in an accident (pg. 38) his father doesn’t want him to cry. He wants him to be a man, a manly man. It got to the point that David knew how to manipulate his father into believing he understood his emotions without necessarily knowing anything. David wants to stand up for himself and be a man like his father says, but he also knows he needs assistance even though he doesn’t want to admit it. And so it carries out our protagonist into one of the few if any concrete decision that he makes in his life and this is when he moves to France. In Paris, he meets up with an old semi-sort-of friend Jacques and he meets up with a woman who would later become his fianc?e. It is then that he then meets with a new friend, a man named Giovanni. David and Giovanni connected instantly. And David would soon try to now explore that feeling of love once again. Even though he was engaged to Hella, she had gone to Spain and this gave him a reason to justify his relationship with Giovanni. His relationship flourished and bloomed with Giovanni. Yet he never really recognized it. He still felt that it was somehow wrong for him to love Giovanni. He even says: “The beast which Giovanni awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni anymore.” (Pg. 111) David felt that Giovanni had risen a fear and intimidation in him that was rooted in his past, and this made him hate Giovanni as much as he loved him. David’s past reflects all his decisions throughout his present. David is very indecisive simply because what had happened to him with Joey and he was unable to speak to anybody about it. He affects peoples’ lives without necessarily knowing that he is affecting it. David wants to be a man so much, yet he cannot seem to break the need for assistance from his father. Even though he was appearing to be free. Then one day David gets a letter from both Hella and his father. His father was beginning to get suspicious of what David was doing in Paris. He wanted David to come home. In Hella’s letter, Hella tells him that she loves Spain but she wants to come home to Paris. This is when David once again makes a very rash decision based upon what he thinks to be true versus what he knows to be true. He decides to leave Giovanni even though he knows he does not want to stay with Hella. All the decisions he made that were now beginning to affect and hurt other people was beginning to make him think about death. That is why when he stood by the river he thought of dying. He says, “I had though of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer.” (Pg. 136) David begins to reflect on all his decisions that he had made, but by this time, it was too late. He was never ever certain of reality. For him, his reality was nothing comprised of nothing. By the time Giovanni is sentenced to the guillotine, David begins to feel sorrow. He begins to reflect back on all the things that he had done. And that is when he realizes that he really did love Giovanni. James Baldwin takes us back into the beginning of the novel, when David is in the house after Hella has left and he is peering out through the window of his porch. This whole thing had been reflected from the past. A man’s life had changed in many ways from the beginning of the novel we just did not know it. If David could have just confronted his fears, he might have realized that he was not afraid of anything but fear itself.

The other novel that I would like to go into, is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are similar types of writers. Because they both like to give you the present before they explain the past. Toni starts the novel off telling you that Pecola Breedlove is about to have her father’s baby. And using Claudia to narrate in an adult reflective child’s voice. This allows you as a reader to reflect on your childhood as well. And to see how it can be connected to adult life. You as a reader are not trying to decipher what incidents occurred, but how they occurred. And every character that Toni Morrison brings out in this novel expresses some form of past connection as to the reasons why they are the way that they are, and the reasons why they treat Pecola the way they treat her. Let’s start off with the novel’s narrator, Claudia and her older sister Frieda. The suggestion that Toni Morrison makes is that Frieda and Claudia come from a loving home. This allows them to be clear minded and treat Pecola as a friend rather than the subject of mockery the way most of the society treated her. It also allowed them to view society critically and not allow it to place stereotypes upon them, especially in the case of Claudia who was not going to allow herself to be brainwashed through societal conceptions of ugliness and beauty. She looks at a white doll given to her that is supposed to be beautiful and cute, an image not unlike that of Shirley Temple. She rejects this concept and she hates the doll. Not because she is bitter or that she thinks the doll is prettier than she is, but that she didn’t think of it as pretty at all. And so she destroys the doll as society, given the chance, might destroy her. Then of course, are the children that haunt and taunt Pecola, Maureen Peal and the other boys who taunted her because they were unsure about their own past. And Junior whose mother, Geraldine, had lived her life a certain way took her lessons from society and refused to give her own son the chance to make decisions on his own. She enforced her past feelings about certain black people versus niggers (so she calls them) upon her son. She did not know how to feel love and so she did not know how to give it, even to her son. This in turn became Junior’s reality. He wanted to play with the other black boys; he wanted attention from his mother. And because he could not get it, it turned him into the person his mother never wanted him to become — a juvenile. That is why he taunts and ridicules Pecola. But Toni just doesn’t leave these characters to be the only ones; she goes on to explain the nature of Mrs. Pauline Breedlove’s past. A past which affects the way she reacts to her children and to her husband. Pauline loved the outdoors and she loved to arrange and to clean without interruption. She had fantasies of what the ideal man would be like — what her man should be like. They were fantasies about love. That is why when she met Cholly Breedlove, she felt that love had finally come to her. She decided to move up North to Lorain, Ohio where her and Cholly could begin a family. To make a long story short, she began to see her dreams of love shatter. Her ideal household escaped from her and she began to realize that she and her family were “ugly”. She even says that when Pecola was born, her “eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knew she was ugly.” (Pg. 276) She began to hold this bitterness until she found an avenue. An avenue that allowed her to express her hidden desires now. And that avenue was when she began working for the white family. She needed to find beauty in something, and so she found beauty in her cleanliness and that is what this white family offered to her. They gave her power, praise and luxury. She loved hearing them say that they would never let her go she was able to keep order and she had found her own beauty. (Pg. 128) That is why she began to ignore her own family. Her past characteristics had enforced themselves in the present, not allowing her to understand or even see the pain of her children or that of her husband. So when Pecola drops the pie juice on the floor in that house her mother gets so upset. How dare Pecola invade on her beauty! Cholly Breedlove is another clear example of a character whose past creates his present. He is abandoned by his mother, rejected by his Father, and he grows up with his aunt and he despises the experience. He initially finds love and sanctity in the arms of Pauline Breedlove but that was only for a splinter of a moment, because the incidents in his past create this monster in the future. One incident in particular that disturbs Cholly Breedlove, is the incident where the white men shamed him when he first tries to make love. They flash a flashlight in his face and snicker at him. This builds up a lot of anger and hatred for anyone who loves Cholly Breedlove. He hates Mrs. Breedlove, and that is why he treats her bad. And he hates Pecola for loving him. He states:

The hauntedness would irritate him — the love would move him to

furry. How dare she love him? Hadn’t she any sense at all? What

was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could

his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What if his knowledge

of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy

arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own

respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love? His hatred

of her slimed in his stomach and threatened to become vomit. (Pg. 161)And so he rapes her. Not necessarily to hurt her, but to return whatever love she had given unto him. He had never known what it should have been like. His past was laced with rejections and so he never knew how to give anything else but rejection. And so even if he thought he loved her, he was rejecting her. Which brings me to Pecola. Pecola doesn’t have much of a past because no one allows her to have any. Everyone is always giving her their past, enforcing restrictions upon her and placing her into categories. Because of this she lives vicariously through these much wanted blue eyes. She is given this offspring of hate and rejection and forced to live in a present more vile than any past of any one particular character.

Toni Morrison and James Baldwin make suggestions that the past is rooted into the present in both the novels with depth and clarity. In order to move forward you have to complete the past if not you could wind up in the future of the past for you.

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