James Baldwin, Hemingway, and Mental Exile in the Metropolis - Research Paper

Introduction

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) look at the mental life of expatriate characters wandering through the metropolis. Although the two novels ultimately treat despair and exile differently, the protagonists in the two books - David and Jake Barnes share similar psychological conflicts and experiences of city life in a foreign land. Baldwin looks at city life and exile from a culturally insecure position because of his background. Being black and gay at the time put Baldwin in a less privileged place culturally (Armengol 679). Therefore, he examines exile from more multiple and critical perspectives. He highlights the social forces that attracted Americans to expatriation and openly addresses the self-imposed shame and fear that intensifies the internationalization of these circumstances. Hemingway, a straight white man, magnifies that hopelessness and desperation isolation and psychological exile as part of the modern life. He presents the metropolis life as a necessary crisis occasioned by attempted reinvention that followed the chaos of a world war.

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Both Baldwin and Hemingway look at the city life of modern exiles through gender lenses. David and Jake's mental conflicts come from the pressure to maintain a normal masculine identity. However, these tensions have radically different sources and manifestations. Each of the two protagonists in exile seeks to consolidate his threatened masculinity. For David, it is in response to homosexual panic, and for Jake, it is in response to a phallic wound sustained from the war (Henderson 321). Yet it is in Paris that each repeatedly encounters challenges that remind him of the need to consolidate the inviolable manhood.

Jake is primarily challenged by Robert Cohn, whom Hemingway paradoxically depicts as "unmanly" in spite of having a penis that Jake lacks. Brett, who sees Jake's inability to have sex as a barrier to their relationship, also threatens his gender identity. She makes Jake uncomfortably conscious of his wound, of which he comes to direct acknowledgment. Besides worsening his wound, Brett subverts the conventional ideals of femininity (Hemingway 11). She has a man's name; she is independent and promiscuous and has short hair. These manly characteristics threaten Jake even further because they undermine the stable gender binary that he is working so hard to retain.

David's challenge comes from his relationship with Giovanni. The gay relationship affects and reveals the shameful part of his identity. David needs to give up his hold on the standards of socially acceptable manhood to maintain a relationship with Giovanni. The relationship also makes him recognize the elements of his identity that are not in line with how he perceived himself. David rejects a "housewife" role in his gender dynamic relationship with Giovanni and pursues his ruined heterosexual relationship with Hella to compensate for his masculine inferiority feeling (Baldwin, 217). Unfortunately, David fails to reconcile his strange desire with his ideal self-image of conventional masculinity. Thus, his attempt to reinvent himself makes David run into a psychological disorder that destroys him.

Each novel revolves around the conflict of unsatisfiable desire. They both depict Americans fleeing to Paris, where they keep moving from one locale to another, drinking alcohol with the hope of achieving a new level of satisfaction in life. Jake desires to have a fulfilling relationship with Brett to resolve his inner tension. But his lack of a penis makes this desire inherently impossible to satisfy. Everything around Jake, including Romero, Brett, and Cohn, becomes failure and dissatisfaction with him. He reduces his inability to satisfy his desire to simply the unavoidable outcome of the modern life of his time. Although David also has an unsatisfiable desire, in his case, it for social reasons. His desire for Giovanni contradicts his need to have socially acceptable masculinity. Therefore, when he decides to pursue the masculinity through his relationship with Hella, David is forced to repress his attraction to Giovanni (Baldwin 221). Unlike Hemingway, Baldwin does not portray unsatisfiable desire as an unavoidable occurrence. He assesses the incompatibility of manliness and homosexuality, presenting the hopelessness and resignation as the results of the pressure that societies put on the socially exiled.

All of this is underlain by the tension of the race. Although he does not state it explicitly in the novel, Baldwin implicitly conflates the black race with homosexuality. The first man that David had sex with, Joey, is portrayed to be having a "brown body," which is further associated with images of filth and darkness. In his first appearance, Giovanni is described as "insolent and dark and leonine" (Baldwin 228). Baldwin employs this connection to demonstrate the embarrassment that society causes gay men, black men, and mostly black gay men. The society exiles and destroys them psychologically. In the case of Giovanni, society takes the psychological exile and destruction to the extreme when he is executed for murder. It is a symbol of a violent societal shaming enactment. It is important to note that Giovanni was not executed for his homosexual tendencies, although it indirectly contributed to his involvement with Guillaume, whom he murdered.

Crucially, there is no in Giovanni's Room that is actually described as African American or African. Baldwin only hints at darkness as a correlation of oddity to illiterate the internalized connections between shame, filth, and otherness in his society. He avoids asserting the validity of the parallels. Making gay characters literally black would lead to the dangerous assumption that gay and black identity are dilemmas that can be addressed at the same level. This authorial choice is occasioned complex circumstances. Partly, it appears like self-preservation. Considering the difficulty of writing about homosexuality in 1956 when the novel was written, one about black homosexuality would not have any chance in society. According to Armengol (673), Baldwin removed the subject of race to appeal to the African Americans' homophobia as well as the racist sexualization of blacks by whites. Baldwin only associates some of the characters with darkness in a metaphoric way to keep whiteness as an element of social norm intact. Besides, he faced the risk of openly conflating homosexual experience with the black experience. Homosexuality and blackness differently contribute to one's social marginalization, self-image, and identity.

Racial otherness is more explicit in The Sun Also Rises, although it is also portrayed in a more complicated way. Two characters - Romero and Cohn, who are presumably white, are depicted as racial others. Romero is a Spaniard while Cohn is Jewish; they presented as the embodiment of masculinity, which Jake feels denied (Hemingway 54). He is more anxious about his inadequacy because of their racial differences. Jake feels that he does not have much hope of attaining an ideal masculine identity because it is equated with racial otherness. Race, thus, compounds his resignation to the fact that dissatisfaction is inevitable. However, the subject of racial otherness is fictitious and is expressed from a white man's perspective. Since Hemingway writes from a privileged position, he is able to assign otherness to antagonists, and so does Jake. Notably, Jake's exile is voluntary, and that enables him to use reasons like the race to justify the doom of humanity to dissatisfaction.

There is a second geographical displacement that gives this pattern an added dimension. While Jake criticizes Cohn's romantic ideas of travel as unmanly, he succumbs to the illusion of using migrant to escape. Jake goes to Spain hoping to return to an older, more conventional time - a spacial as well as temporal exile. Spain signifies contained violence and order. It is a place where bullfight represents gender normativity and dominates popular culture. However, Jake's idea of Spain turns out to be a disastrous failure. Spain's way of maintaining its traditional sense of masculinity and order places it outside the space of modernity in a way. It thus devalues the methods that Jake acquired from Paris to hide from himself (Davidson 108). It is impossible to uphold his illusion of security and satisfaction, which seems possible in Paris because of the imminent threat of bullfighters and affection. He is an outsider in Spain, and thus, he cannot use its environment or culture to redefine his identity. By contrast, the constant flow of alcohol and taxis in France helped him to forget about his inadequacy fast. It is also easy to go to the next bar, drink, and escape from Cohn.

Paris is important in Giovanni's Room because it is the place where David is free to act out the shameful aspects of his identity. He desires to exile himself from the agony of his homosexuality and perceived unmanliness, and this is only possible in a setting of promiscuity and constant mobility. David thinks that staying in Paris, away from Helle, and his father enables him to reconcile his strange desire with his need to attain normative manhood. However, the reconciliation did not take place because Baldwin depicts David being confronted with the very issues he attempted to flee. The author demonstrates from the onset of the novel that escaping his desire by fleeing to Paris would only mean rediscovering it in a new setting.

Baldwin eventually proves that David's own self is an exile, and the protagonist's psychological tension is compounded by his inability to appreciate the strangeness and complexity of his own identity. He cannot return to some safe haven of home because, in his mind, the home has is just an illusion like the thought of a desire getting lost over the ocean (Baldwin 317). David's home would actually reconcile his normative manhood and queer desire perfectly. Jake's home also seemed to be such a perfect reconciliation between his love for Brett and the inadequate masculinity. This reconciliation is impossible in The Sun Also Rises as Jake's desire for a love relationship ends up in painful despair and resignation. Giovanni's Room, however, the acceptance of this impossibility could bring out the truth because acknowledging the gaps between one's self-image and identity enables the authentic connection. The expatriate runs into resignation and hopelessness because he cannot state his identity fully and honestly.

Paris is important for both Baldwin and Hemingway because it a setting where they were both able to get out of American society, custom, and history and communicate their thoughts without prefabricated identity. Withdrawing from the original setting enables the authors to engage in psychological warfare, which ultimately depicts the tension between different dimensions of the individual rather than the war between an individual and his society (Henderson 325). However, the exile and psychological warfare are both purposeful in the case of David and Jake. Their regular drinking habits enable them to fake acceptance of their identities as well as satisfied desire. However, at the core of each novel is imminent failure showing the impossibility of accepting otherness.

The analysis of masculinity in The Sun Also Rises focuses on its authenticity or inauthenticity, leaving no room in between. Hemingway suggests that authentic masculinity involves resigned response to disappointment and dissatisfaction with modern circumstances. Hemingway, thus, speaks to the fears that come with the modern condition (Davidson 91). Jake's masculinity withstands the perceived threat from Cohn's "pansy" romantic manly disposition and Romero's hypermasculinity. Jake is unable to e...