A Father's Role in the Damaged Masculinity of "Giovanni's Room" Anonymous College

Throughout Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin makes a series of references to David’s sense of fabricated manhood or masculinity impressed upon him by his father. In the first chapters, David alludes to the hollow jocularity between father and son. This hyperbolized masculinity from his father leads to the formation of David’s fervid belief in archetypal manhood, inducing his unconscious, lifelong pursuit of an ideal masculinity. This pursuit ultimately becomes one of the driving forces behind his actions for the remainder of the novel.

Though nameless, David's father is the sole archetypal “man” in the entire novel, and therefore is the only model whom the young David has to form his own perceptions of what it truly means to be a “man.” In David's childhood, David's father was distant, and the times David interacted with him, any paternal instincts were veiled under a mask of fraternal companionship, not fatherhood: “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 did not. I did not want to be his buddy; I wanted to be his son” (16). As a result, David was forced to interpret and form his own understandings of masculinity, and with no true...