In a radio broadcast at the Festival of Britain South Bank Exhibition in 1951, Dylan Thomas said, ‘Perhaps you will go on a cool, dull day, sane as a biscuit, and find that the exhibition does tell the story… But I’m pleased to doubt it.’ While Dylan Thomas’ scepticism about the ability of objects to ‘tell the story’ suggests that the curated meaning of objects can be limited and potentially biased. Yet, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) and James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room (1956) challenge this idea by using carefully curated objects within confined spaces to expose the internal queer struggles of their characters.

In both novels, the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine objects within intimate spaces reveals the performative nature of gender and the societal constraints imposed on queer identities. Through this symbolic curation, Barnes and Baldwin illustrate that objects do more than ‘tell the story’ — they become powerful symbols of their characters’ internal queer struggles, challenging the boundaries of gender and societal norms.

Critics such as Eldridge Cleaver associated homosexuality as a ‘sickness’ and akin to ‘baby rape’, a pithy exemplar of the hostile reception of queer identities within the period. O’Connor and David of each text respectively see their queerness confined to a single room – the objects within this room becoming curated manifestations of this queerness, unable to exist publicly. 

Narrative Overviews: Setting the Stage for Queer Identity

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is a modernist novel that portrays the lives of several characters in 1920s Paris, with a central focus on the character of O’Connor, an enigmatic Doctor and transvestite, and his tumultuous relationship with the expatriate Nora Flood. The novel examines the intersections of identity, gender, and desire through a fragmented narrative style and rich, symbolic descriptions of the objects and settings. O’Connor’s room, filled with a mix of masculine and feminine objects, becomes a site of queer expression and internal conflict, reflecting broader themes of societal rejection and self-exploration.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin follows David, an American expatriate living in Paris, who grapples with his sexual identity and societal expectations. The novel delves into David’s troubled relationship with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, against the backdrop of his engagement to a woman named Hella. As David struggles with his desires and fears, his internal conflict is mirrored in his interactions with the objects and spaces around him, including the room he shares with Giovanni. The novel explores themes of identity, shame, and the difficulty of reconciling one’s true self with societal norms.

Crossed Lines: The Symbolism of Gender in O’Connor’s Chamber

In Nightwood, Nora discovers the transvestism of O’Connor when entering his room. Yet, his queerness becomes decidedly apparent to the reader before his appearance (where he is described as heavily rouged and his lashes painted) through the oxymoronic items of masculinity and femininity that fall under Nora’s (and subsequently the reader’s) gaze. In the room, nouns within the lexical sphere of medicine (‘a pile of medical books,’ ‘a rust pair of forceps, a broken scalpel’ and ‘half a dozen odd instruments’) are prefaced with qualifiers of abandonment and contempt (‘rusty’ and ‘broke’).

The decaying objects, which represent O’Connor’s external masculine persona, serve as a metaphor for his disdain towards the performative aspects of traditional masculinity, revealing his rejection of this gendered façade. These images of decay metamorphose within one sentence to become objects of lavish and intense femininity: “some twenty perfume bottles, pomades, creams, rouges, powder boxes, and puffs.” The medical and feminine syntactically and figuratively meet in their location on the ‘maple dresser’. It is, however, not only the curation of gender within these objects that is significant. Their awkward jumbling together translates to a clear meaning — a similarly awkward jumbling within the doctor himself.

As the prose progresses, the omniscient narration increasingly emphasises feminine objects, using fragmented lists to highlight their gendered significance. For example, the narration mentions a ‘chiffonier hung with laces, ribands’, and ‘stockings’, all of which are ‘women’s finery’ [emphasis mine]. Despite this emphasis on femininity, the presence of masculinity lingers in the room, which is described as ‘also muscular’.

The conjunction ‘yet’ prior to this addition suggests the prose is aware of this contradiction; the objects in the room come together to form a “cross between a chambre a coucher and a boxer’s training camp.” Barnes’ use of the pun ‘cross’ evokes the concept of cross-dressing. Notably, the cognate term ‘chambre a coucher’ visually stands out in its italicization, accentuating its foreignness as an object within a location termed as ‘muscular’, just as O’Connor’s femininity is a contextually foreign concept.

Judith Butler suggests that “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender: identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” Contrasting Thomas’ previously mentioned claim, these objects do ‘tell a story’. In their incongruity, they reveal the interiority of Queer struggle. 

Bound by Walls: Navigating Gender and Identity in Giovanni’s Space

The objects in Giovanni’s Room are similarly categorised by a subversion of heteronormative frameworks. We see David “invent in [himself] a kind of pleasure in playing the housewife after Giovanni had gone to work,” a role he performs through his interaction with objects through the lens of a 1950s housewife whose duty it is to clean.  The objects here transcend being mere ‘bottles’ and ‘boxes’ to become props in David’s gender performance. In the short, symmetrical line from the perspective of David’s subjectivity, we learn his interaction with these objects is performative — he “is not a housewife; men never can be housewives.”

Yet David associates with objects through this gendered guise as a means to forge an equilibrium between masculinity and femininity within the queer relationship. With his female fiancé Hella, he clings to her. The prospect of a homosexual relationship with Giovanni has him more frightened than he had ever been in his life. He fears slipping or accepting his queer sexuality, yet he is intimidated or bored by objects associated with the feminine, such as ‘breasts’ or ‘women’s underwear’. They begin to seem ‘unclean’ and ‘uninteresting’. Baldwin curates objects to unmask David’s queerness in his aversion to the feminine, yet his inability to exist in a queer relationship without performing femininity unmasks the internal homophobia of the era.

In Nightwood, O’Connor implies that it is traditional, heterosexism that brings Nora to a stalemate: “There is not truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known.” The masculine ‘garments’ Nora adorns and the material objects that coincide with David’s ‘playing’ of the housewife In Giovanni’s Room function to a similar narrative effect in the prose.

Simone de Beauvoir suggests that in the post-war era (World War 1 in Nightwood and World War 2 in Giovanni’s Room), ‘romanticised and enforced traditional gender roles’ mean that, contextually, these gender binaries were particularly entrenched in social paradigms. This is an attempt to dress ‘unknowable’ queerness in the ‘known’ materiality of heteronormativity, an attempt that is ultimately futile. 

For O’Connor, the curation of objects within the room functions as sanction for this expression outside of rhetoric and syntax, for while David, the objects within the room become oppressive; “the silent walls of the room with its distant, archaic lovers trapped in an interminable rose garden, and the staring windows, staring like two great eyes of ice and fire.”

The walls and windows are anthropomorphised to become voyeurs with their staring and the oxymoronic nouns ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ are suggestive of an incompatibility, an arctic inferno that is simultaneously Giovanni’s internal ‘room’ and external ‘garden’, The room becomes paradoxical and mirrors Baldwin’s comment on the paradox of homosexuality as ‘a transgression of both culture and nature’; “He is unnatural,” Baldwin suggests of the homosexual, “because he has turned from his life-giving function to a union that is sterile.”

Baldwin’s prose is conducive to his terming of the homosexual within post-war America. Just as the homosexual cannot perform his procreating function, Baldwin curates the room to fail in providing sanctuary to the homosexual through its voyeurism and shelter in its invasion by the metaphorical elements.

Curated Contradictions: The Tension of Queer Identity in Barnes and Baldwin’s Narratives

By oscillating between the boundaries of masculinity and femininity, the Doctor embodies a new identity — Barnes curates the objects in his room to expose two alternating sides of his identity. Although in progressive spaces in 2024, transvestism is able to exist as its own entity, with gender adhering much more to Butler’s claims about expression, while Barnes’ prose presents post-war ideals of gender rigidity in this cultivation, exiled to the confinements of the room. However, it is important to note that, despite these modern advances, trans rights are still widely contested in the UK and globally. This ongoing contestation of trans rights underscores a persistent struggle that echoes in these literary depictions of queer identities.

In Baldwin’s final line, David fragments a blue envelope with the date of Giovanni’s execution. In destroying this object, David attempts to perform his last act of defiance, to “save his sex from the knife of transgression.” Yet, as the “wind blows some of [the fragments] back [on him],” the curated object of queerness lingers behind him, following. This final act of destroying the letter is David’s desperate attempt to erase the traces of his transgressive love, but the wind’s return of the fragments symbolises the inescapable nature of his queerness.

This poignant moment encapsulates the broader themes explored in both Nightwood and Giovanni’s Room; despite society’s rigid boundaries, queerness persists, defying the neat categorisations that heteronormative frameworks attempt to impose. Barnes and Baldwin demonstrate that objects, when thoughtfully curated, do more than tell a story — they expose the complexities of identity that cannot be confined to any single narrative or space.

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