Date of Award
Spring 4-1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Jesse Matz
Second Advisor
Orchid Tierney
Abstract
Bedrooms in the novels Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys are spaces which figure the characters’ desire and consent. Although consent is normatively framed as an articulation of pure and essential desires, it is deeply entangled with gender, race, and property ownership in these novels. The rooms of David’s childhood in Giovanni’s Room engender a terror of the body and flesh, and each room he inhabits thereafter archives and displays his past encounters with domesticity and its perversions. Giovanni’s room is a messy and chaotic space that often hinders the clarity David clings to. While David positions it as a claustrophobic closet, the function of the closet emerges out of a larger cartography of David’s desire, a desire that must always both fear and engulf what is irrational and exterior. The distinctions between the self-knowing mind and the infectious body are produced as a means of preserving David’s subjectivity, and, in turn, Giovanni is fixed by other men in the novel as non-autonomous, though always engaged in a laborious effort to escape this logic and build something new. In Good Morning, Midnight, no sexual encounter can be isolated from the past and from power, giving the novel a temporality of repetition. Rhys’s protagonist, Sasha, faces within each room an inevitability and expectation of what she must always provide, resulting in her conflating her existence in the room to death, for she becomes another repeated furnishing in its grasp. While her assaulter attempts to impose a core sexuality onto both her and her hotel room through his insistence of sex, Sasha ruptures this discourse during her assault by taking hold of the very repetition that threatens to annihilate her, and making the room’s power dynamics the foundation for the discourse of the assault. Ultimately, a new framework for consent is explored in these novels, for they give its language the full gravity of what forms it.
Recommended Citation
Renner, Rebecca, "“Living Blood, that the Linen Drinks Up”: Consent and Desire in the Modernist Bedroom" (2024). Honors Theses. 860.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/honorstheses/860
Rights Statement
All rights reserved. This copy is provided to the Kenyon Community solely for individual academic use. For any other use, please contact the copyright holder for permission.