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Hella’s Troubled Femininity BETTY HE
Hella’s Troubled Performance of Femininity in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Betty He
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THE COMPLEXITY OF HELLA’S CHARACTER IS OFTEN OVERLOOKED IN JAMES BALDWIN’S Giovanni’s Room. We meet her at a crossroads, standing in the Paris train station, having abandoned her solitary travels and hurrying towards married life. She is waiting for the narrator and her fiancé, David, to pick her up:
She was wearing green, her hair was a little shorter ... When she saw me she stood stock still on the platform, her hands clasped in front of her, with her wide-legged, boyish stance, smiling. (Baldwin 119)
This description of Hella sets the stage for her use of performance to construct her gender identity, and it reveals a duality in that performance. With her short hair and “wide-legged, boyish stance,” Baldwin immediately reveals the aspects of her that are not stereotypically feminine. She is more complicated, however, than the simple embodiment of the “emancipated girl” her appearance suggests (Baldwin 123). By standing “stock still” on the platform with “her hands clasped in front of her,” she is intentionally passive, expecting David to perform the role of the husband for her to act like the eager wife. As such, despite her boyish appearance that seems to assertively reject normative femininity, her performance of femininity is multilayered and formed through her interactions with David. Hella expects David to perform normative masculinity and depends on his performance to define hers, supporting an understanding of gender performance as interdependent between people.
Critical analyses of Giovanni’s Room often focus on David’s performance of masculinity as an isolated event, while reducing Hella to a part of the heteronormative order that David struggles against or to a victim of David’s refusal to take responsibility for his gender identity.1 Rare acknowledgments that Hella performs the role of a heterosexual woman—rather than simply is a heterosexual woman—still do not investigate the complexities behind her performance.2 Judith Butler argues that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it [is] … an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (520). Gender is not an essence, but rather somsething that must be
1 See Armengol 682; Johnson-Roullier 946, 948; Thomas 609-610. 2 For critical works that address Hella’s adherence to a heterosexual ideal and performance of normative femininity, see Rohy 221 and Frontain 46-47.
constituted externally through a repetition of acts which either mostly conform to a norm or mostly contest it. Butler further defines these acts as “mundane … bodily gestures, movements, and enactments,” suggesting that beyond larger choices in life, everyday actions are the core that reveals an individual’s gender identity (520). Analyzing Hella’s mundane acts lends insight into how she performs femininity and the nuances within that performance.
Beyond constructing an individual’s gender identity, performative acts can structure an individual’s position in attaining knowledge about themselves and the world. Ernesto Martínez posits that “what [individuals] are willing to do in the social domain” determines what they “can know about themselves and their social contexts” (782, emphasis in original). Therefore, an individual’s self-knowledge is predicated on their everyday acts, because when individuals act against an oppressive norm their actions “depend on people making extreme shifts in their conception of self,” allowing them to see the possibilities provided by adopting another identity, and thus producing self-knowledge (Martínez 783). Martínez emphasizes that the
resulting self-knowledge has “destabilizing and dangerous” implications for the self (783). This conception of risk when constituting a certain identity is also echoed by Butler: “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (522). Thus, when an individual’s performative acts constitute a non-normative gender identity, they are generating new self-knowledge by opening new possibilities yet while sustaining the risks of rupturing their selfhood. By analyzing Hella’s appearance, movements, and speech, this essay will reveal that while Hella shows dissatisfaction with a heteronormative society, her passive adherence to a heterosexual ideal and performance of normative femininity limits the possibility of gaining knowledge about herself and the world to rupture the existing social order. Through her performance, she also demands that David act according to normative masculinity.
Hella’s fear of the risks of non-normative gender performance drives her to marry David and succumb to a heteronormative way of life. In her disdain for the “old hags” in Spain who shamelessly pursue eighteen-year-old boys, she reveals that she fears she will end up like them (Baldwin 93). More importantly, this fear arises from the lack of possibilities she believes are available to her should she not marry. Outside of the heteronormative order that hinges her identity as a woman on successfully marrying a man and starting a family with him, the possibilities of womanhood available to her are lonely and bleak. About the “old hags,” she says, “it would be a pretty place if you could dump all the pensioned widows into the sea,” illustrating her recognition that unmarried women of a certain age become unviable and
disposable (Baldwin 93). Being a woman—an already marginalized identity—Hella faces the risk of invisibility within her society; thus to ensure her intelligibility to others, she performs a conventional femininity coherent under social norms. As a result, she marries David because she sees no other desirable option. To counter the fear of becoming disposable, she gives up exploring the possibilities of remaining independent and acquiesces to the heteronormative institution of marriage.
Beyond surrendering to heteronormativity, Hella also conforms to normative femininity by performing a series of stylized acts when she prepares to leave David to return to America:
She went to the closet and got her coat; dug in her handbag and found her compact and, looking into the tiny mirror, carefully dried her eyes and began to apply her lipstick. “There’s a difference between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those little blue books. Little girls want little boys. But little boys—!” She snapped her compact shut. “I’ll never again, as long as I live, know what they want … “ She ran her fingers through her hair, brushing it back from her forehead, and, now, with the lipstick, and in the heavy, black coat, she looked again cold, brilliant, and bitterly helpless, a terrifying woman. (Baldwin 165)
Hella is methodical in her actions, performing them in an order that emphasizes their dramatic effect. She first announces her determination to leave by getting her coat. Then, she “looks into” the tiny mirror of her compact in a brief moment of self-reflection that conveys a sense of wisdom. She wipes away her tears to highlight her sorrow, and afterward applies lipstick to appear like she is disguising her pain with strength and bravery. These stylized acts are typically feminine and construct an image of her as the scorned but dignified woman. She then snaps her compact shut at just the right moment to create suspense for what she is about to say. The pause in her sentence left by this motion emphasizes her calling David a “little boy”—not a man—a choice which expresses her contempt and serves to wound him by attacking his masculinity. Then she pulls her hair out of her face and stands in red lipstick and a black coat, just like a femme fatale in a Hollywood film. These carefully executed actions replicate a normative, rather than subversive, mode of femininity represented in popular culture.
Despite Hella’s adherence to normative gender identity and sexuality, she meagerly tries to resist complete surrender through ironizing women’s inequality to men in marriage. Although she fully devotes herself to David, she does so in an ironic way, showing that she is not yet fully resigned:
From now on, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m not one. … I won’t stop being intelligent. I’ll read and argue and think and all that—and I’ll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts—and you’ll be pleased because I’m sure the resulting confusion will cause you to see that I’ve only got a finite woman’s mind, after all. (126)
Through irony, she holds on to her desire for freedom and criticism of women’s limited agency
in society. Her satirical declaration that “you’ll be pleased ... to see that I’ve only got a finite woman’s mind, after all” reveals she is hyper-aware of men’s dismissiveness toward women’s intelligence, and has experienced it herself. Since she thinks marriage is her only option to retain any last drop of womanhood, she holds on to this lucidity of women’s inferiority to men in marriage, rehearsing this recognition in her speeches to David to reassure herself she has not fully surrendered to a totally conventional version of womanhood. She leaves space for the part of herself that sought independence when she initially refused David’s marriage proposal to travel alone in Spain. Through her speeches, she ostensibly deceives herself by believing she is entering marriage while also aware of the gender roles that society necessitates her to ascribe to—and that in this awareness, she retains a sliver of agency despite her surrender.
Hella’s use of irony is an insufficient effort to resist gender and sexual normativity, as it relies on generalizing about differences between women and men—reifying gender binaries. When she begs David to “please let me be a woman, I don’t care what you do to me. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll wear my hair long, I’ll give up cigarettes, I’ll throw away the books,” she talks about discarding these non-normative traits with a sense of irony and awareness that these aspects of her do not truly define her as a woman (Baldwin 161). Her phrasing, “let me be a woman,” also satirizes the normativity for women to be passive in marriage. Yet, in her double-edged voice feigning submission while expressing discontent, she nonetheless resorts to a gender-binary logic that declares her womanhood is dependent on David’s conforming to a conventional ideal of masculinity. In Hella’s attempt to find a way to express women’s subjugation and find liberation through this discourse, she describes sexual difference in a way Butler cautions feminists against: “a reification which unwittingly preserves a binary restriction on gender identity and an implicitly heterosexual framework for the description of gender, gender identity, and sexuality” (530). Hella’s acts come closest to constituting the identity of a liberated woman when she uses irony in her speech, yet this device is not enough to rebel against an oppressive normativity. For Hella to identify as a woman unconventionally, her actions must disrupt the heteronormative social order, a possibility she discards by marrying David.
Hella’s reliance on gender binaries in her conversations with David not only reifies a heteronormative social order, but also further inscribes David within these norms. At the end of her relationship with David, when she catches him kissing a sailor, she reproaches him for placing the burden of discovering his homosexual desires on her: “I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn’t you heard?” (Baldwin 164). Her use of irony to mock women’s passive nature in their relationships with men reveals her awareness that this conventional conception of women’s roles in marriage is oppressive. She is correct to point out that David has the responsibility to tell her the truth. Even so, her insistence on using stereotypical constructions of gender roles to condemn David’s behavior reveals her refusal to depart from this normative logic of gender. A possible course of action for her would be to articulate her pain resulting from both David’s dishonesty and the inequality between men and women in marriage, therefore contesting normative femininity. Instead, she resorts to biting irony to ease her burden to articulate her identity which is at odds
with conventional womanhood. By shirking the responsibility to articulate her identity and placing the heavy burden of immorality on David, she inscribes them both deeper within the heteronormative social order they both yearn to escape. This passivity also lies in her refusal to recognize that David himself is victim to the heteronormative social order that she scorns. By implying that David should have told her the truth because he is a man—rather than because he should be responsible for his actions—she enforces the standards of conventional masculinity upon David, even though his homosexual desires place him in a vulnerable position relative to heteronormativity. She reifies gender binaries that, no matter how insincerely, still force her and David into their respective normative gender roles.
To fundamentally rupture the heteronormative social order, Hella would need to figuratively commit a suicidal act to generate a new social order in its place that will allow for her non-normative femininity; instead, she commits the sacrificial act of marriage. As Martínez argues about Another Country, Baldwin poses “the ethical imperative faced by all the characters to risk their sense of self (to figuratively commit suicide) in order to better understand their lives” (783). This imperative is similarly present in Giovanni’s Room. Hella reaffirms this when she claims that women “[cannot] let go of what they have” to commit to a man, and that being unable to let go of whatever they were attached to before a man “would have killed them”— or at least it would have killed her (Baldwin 126). A woman not giving up what she has for a man is the act of adopting an identity that risks not conforming to the heteronormative ideal of marriage. Hella equates the risk of that experience to death, echoing Martínez’s analysis of Baldwin’s characters that “to risk their sense of self” is to “figuratively commit suicide.” Hella’s refusal to do so by marrying David is then a failure to “better understand [her life]”—not taking that risk prevents her from adopting the vantage point of another identity. Thus, her lack of action to disrupt the heteronormative social order directly prevents her from gaining a different set of knowledge within the social order. Hella’s experience in an oppressive society that devalues unmarried women drives her to fear and prevents her from performing an “unscripted action”—meaning that, in Butler’s terms, she will repeatedly materialize “historically delimited possibilities” of womanhood (Martínez 783; Butler 522). Thus, even in her more rebellious speech, she conforms to a convention of passive femininity in her mundane acts and perpetuates gender binaries.
Normative femininity and heterosexual ideals restrict Hella’s possibilities for gender performance and push her toward conformity. Hella’s coerced performance of femininity results in her coercion of David to perform normative masculinity. Hella and David’s reliance
on each other in constructing their gender identities and sexualities reveals that gender performance is deeply interdependent and not strictly autonomous. Beyond being shaped by historically delimited norms, gender performance takes form through mundane interactions between people, suggesting that individuals are responsible for each other when constituting their gender identities. The interdependent nature of gender performances implicates each of us in work to rupture the trappings of normative structures. //
Works Cited
Armengol, Josep M. “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Signs, vol. 37, no. 3, 2012, pp. 671–693. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/10.1086/662699. Accessed 20 May 2021. Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/3207893. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021. Frontain, Raymond-Jean. “James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’ and the Biblical Myth of David.” CEA Critic, vol. 57, no. 2, 1995, pp. 41–58. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44378258. Accessed 18 May 2021. Johnson-Roullier, Cyraina E. “(An)Other Modernism: James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, and the Rhetoric of Flight.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45 no. 4, 1999, p. 932-956. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.1999.0076. Martínez, Ernesto Javier. “Dying to Know: Identity and Self-Knowledge in Baldwin’s ‘Another Country.’” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 782–797. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/25614323. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021. Rohy, Valerie. “Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovanni’s Room.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg, Duke University Press, 1996, pp. 218233. Thomas, Harry. “‘Immaculate Manhood’: The City and the Pillar, Giovanni’s Room, and the Straight–Acting Gay Man.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2013, pp. 596–618. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24246956. Accessed 20 May 2021.