Begayal - Alienation of Affections in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Stewart O'Nan's Everyday People
Matthias Groß
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: sehr gut, University of Leipzig (Institut für Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This paper on adultery in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Stewart O’Nan’s Everyday People and their adulterous characters David and Harold was commenced by a seminar on the representation of adultery in the novel. Even though the discussions in class touched upon various aspects of the crime of infidelity, such as different historical and literary periods or cultural aspects and developments, however, to my understanding it lacked an important facet. Out of convention, probably, adultery was only discussed in the constellation of heterosexual extramarital affairs, that is, either a husband was unfaithful to his wife with another woman, or a wife with another man. Apparently, the awareness of the two novels that I will discuss in this paper and their specific rendering of the issue of adultery contributed to or even nourished my feelings of missing the essential aspect of same-sex adultery. In my research for this paper I realized that my opinion was justified, for homosexual affairs outside of heterosexual marriages have also concerned jurisdiction, legislation, and public opinion on a larger scale and still do. In this paper, however, I will only discuss these aspects marginally, for the focus lies upon the examination of adultery in literature.
