"The Garden of Eden" in Giovanni's Room

““You two together,” Jacques suggested, “you weren't happy together?”

“No,” I said. I stood up. “It might have been better,” I said, “if he’d stayed down there in the village of his in Italy and planted his olive trees and had a lot of children and beaten his wife. He used to love to sing,” I remembered suddenly, “maybe he could have stayed down there and sung his life away and died in bed.”

Then Jacques said something that surprised me…. Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden…”

Everyone, after all, goes down that same dark road- and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright- and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden…. Perhaps everybody had a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.” (Baldwin 25)

James Baldwin uses powerful symbolism in this passage from Giovanni’s Room, and it definitely gets his point across. It is easy to think about what could have been for Giovanni if he had never left Italy, if he and David had never met, about how unexceptional and untragic his life would have been. But Jacques’ point, about how “nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” rings very true- temptation is inevitable, and once Giovanni saw a route to something more, something bigger, he was helpless to bite the apple, and thus  “see the flaming sword,” blocking the possibility of return forever after he left. This does happen to people, within the novel and in real life, and it happened to David. He left his garden of Eden when he slept with Joey, and could never go back no matter how much he may have wanted to. It is evident within the novel that this has affected him ever since, keeping him closeted and predominantly unhappy.

Beyond Skin Deep: Skin Color In Nella Larsen's Passing

“Brian, she was thinking, was extremely good-looking. Not, of course, pretty or effeminate; the slight irregularity of his nose saved him from the prettiness, and the rather marked heaviness of his chin saved him from the effeminacy. But he was, in a pleasant masculine way, rather handsome. And yet, wouldn't he, perhaps, have been merely ordinarily good-looking but for the richness, the beauty of his skin, which was of an exquisitely fine texture and deep copper color”-(Larsen 54)

Though throughout this section of Nella Larsen’s Passing we see that Irene and Brian’s marriage is not without its problems, here Irene admits to herself her husband’s beauty. On the surface, this is a quote about beauty and its relation to skin color, a topic which comes back later in the section, during which Irene discusses the same topic with Mr. Wentworth. In a way, according to Irene, skin color adds something exotic to a person, politically incorrect as that sounds today. It makes a person more interesting, and in the 1920s, during which this book is set, people were fascinated by the new and unfamiliar. Still, this passage is more than skin deep- it shows a richer, deeper cultural connection within the African-American community and the Redfields’ lives.

This passage does carry with it a racial undertone. Brian’s blackness is what makes him beautiful and not just “good-looking.” The way in which Larsen describes this quality lends it something much deeper- it is a “richness,” which for me correlates with the richness of the African-American culture to which Brian and Irene belong. They have a connection with their community that Clare Kendry lacks and yearns for. She is disconnected from her own culture and trapped within that of the white world, which could be viewed in light of this passage as just “good,” but lacking in the roots and vibrancy of  the cultural world of her birth. It is blackness which brings with it this richness, and it is this that Clare is seeking to find a link to.

Racial Disconnect and Homoeroticism in Passing, by Nella Larsen

“For I am lonely, so lonely…cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life….. You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of…It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases…. And it’s your fault, `Rene dear. At least partly. For I wouldn't now, perhaps, have this terrible, this wild desire if I hadn't seen you that time in Chicago….” (Larsen 11)

This quote from Nella Larsen’s Passing sets up a lot about her novel and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Taken from a letter written to the protagonist, Irene Redfield, from her high school friend Claire Kendry, it seems to describe (on the surface) Clare’s feeling of disconnect with her African-American roots, which she has hide to hide by “passing” as a white woman in her marriage to a deeply racist, but very rich, white man. Her “pale life” does not compare with “the bright picture of the other,” that other being her race and its culture. When she married her husband, she thought she “was glad to be free of” that “other,” but has since come to realize that this is not the case, particularly after reuniting with Irene, who does not attempt to “pass” and maintains a connection with her roots. This, however, is a rather superficial analysis of this passage. I believe that there is a deeper homoerotic interpretation that can be gleaned from it.

            Clare’s passion in this letter is undeniable, as she clearly indicates her painful loneliness, with lines like “I am lonely, so lonely” and “It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases.” Though on the surface these remarks have to do with their race, I believe that she may be attempting to convey her passion for Irene, as these are phrases often associated with love and desire. This desire is more overtly mentioned later in the passage when Clare writes “I wouldn't now, perhaps, have this terrible, wild desire if I hadn't seen you that time in Chicago.” She explicitly blames Irene for her desire, and though Irene could be held partially responsible for Clare’s racial crisis, Clare could also be referring to a deeper desire, one considered both “terrible” and “wild,” as lesbianism was during this time. Though it is not overt, I believe that this interpretation could be drawn from an analysis of this passage.

On Mikkola and Pickett

I have several major issues with Homosexuality by Brent Pickett. While Pickett’s article, along with Mari Mikkola’s Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender, is very thorough analysis of its topic, it contains some content that I take issue with, especially when he writes about queer theory as a counter to essentialism, saying:

 “queer does not marginalize those whose sexuality is outside the gay or lesbian norm, such as sado-masochists. Since specific conceptualizations of sexuality are avoided, and hence not put at the center of any definition of queer, it allows more freedom for self-identification for, say, black lesbians to identify as much or more with their race (or any other trait, such as involvement in  an S&M subculture) than with lesbianism” -(Pickett 19). 

While the interpretation here is sound on a basic level, there is a fundamental problem with it: while it mentions those who fall “outside the gay and lesbian norm,” it fails to specify those between the gay and straight norm, furthering the idea of the two as opposites rather than different sides of a spectrum. In doing this, Pickett is taking part in bisexual erasure. To be fair, he does acknowledge the problems of an exclusive, essentialist gay liberation movement, and the importance of self-identification by race, ethnicity, and/or fetish culture- he just fails to acknowledge any self-identification beyond this. This is a trend that can be seen in much discussion of sexuality today that I don’t approve of. I believe that sexuality is a spectrum, a continuum, and ignoring that is highly problematic.

Mari Mikkola’s article was decidedly less off-putting than Pickett’s for me as a reader. I truly admire the way in which she analyzes and synthesizes a wide variety of viewpoints that differ radically at times. One of my favorite quotes from the article is about “white solipsism,” which she describes as

“assum[ing] that all women share some ‘golden nugget of womanness’…and that the features consecutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender”- (Mikkola 13). 

Here Mikkola argues by way of Elizabeth Spelman that feminism is a very wide-ranging movement that goes beyond one color or one class, as opposed to the viewpoint put forth by Betty Freidan and others that feminism was one uniform block unaffected by race, ethnicity, class, creed or culture, and that this viewpoint had major flaws.

Overall, both of these articles were very informative, even though they did have their issues. I look forward to discussing them further in class and hearing other points of view students had about them.

Writing is...

Writing is a lot of things. In its broadest sense, it is the communication of ideas through words transmitted in text. But it is also so much more than that. One of my favorite quotes from Allen Ginsberg, which comes from his poem Improvisation in Beijing, says “I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.” For some, writing is essential as a means to convey ideas and express themselves- almost as much so as breathing. As someone who writes creatively, I can agree with this- writing is another way for me to “breathe freely,” to make sense of my feelings and express them.

Writing is how we preserve our past and how we shape our future. It is also how we make sense of our present. Writing is one of the most important elements of our culture, helping us to communicate pretty much every idea from faith to finance to one another for centuries.

This post is a definition, but also an introduction. With that said, hi! I’m Katie and I hail from a small town in New Jersey. I love seafood (one reason I wanted to go to school in New England), and  I watch a lot of TV, listen to The Magnetic Fields and love to read poetry- particularly Ginsberg and Lorca. I also love to write poetry and prose, and am currently attempting to write an epic of love, loss and lies set against the post-apocalyptic wasteland of America after a very different ending to the Cold War. It grapples with such questions as religion, sexuality and politics, and the plot is sort of sprawling and needs to be tamed into a cohesive narrative.

As far as academics go, I am definitely a humanities person. My favorite subject in high school was history, and I’m also passionate about film and politics, as well as creative writing and social justice issues. A big part of why I wanted to take this course is because I feel like high school literature courses don’t discuss gender or sexuality nearly enough. Nearly every opportunity to do so is ignored or downplayed. In my junior English class we discussed the racial aspect of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and what effect race had on Janie, the novel’s heroine, but not the effect of gender, which is just as pronounced, if not more so. These are topics that I, as feminist and advocate for the LGBTQ community, believe are incredibly important and should not be ignored, and I look forward to discussing them in this class. I also look forward to perhaps gaining a deeper understanding of myself in terms of these themes, as they are often not discussed. I want to know what being a woman and a sexual human being means for me.