FREE ESSAY ON BLUEST EYE AND GIOVANNI'S ROOM

BLUEST EYE AND GIOVANNI'S ROOM

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 fiancee 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 fiancee. 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.