Study Guide to The Immoralist and Other Works by Andre Gide

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Andre Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Titles in this study guide include The Immoralist, The Notebooks of Andre Walter, Urien's Travels, Strait Is The Gate, The Counterfeiters, The Pastoral Symphony, Isabelle, Robert and Genevieve, The Vatican Swindle, Fruits of the Earth, Prometheus Misbound, Corydon, and excerpts from his personal journals.As a noteworthy French writer of the twentieth-century, Gide's literature displays his diversity in writing as it extends from fiction to first person narratives. Moreover, Gide's personal narratives were considered his most successful writings. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Gide's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

ANDRÉ GIDE

INTRODUCTION

BEGINNINGS

André Gide, born in Paris in 1869 - he died in 1951 - is one of the most important figures in the literary history of France in the twentieth century. His significance derives not only from his work or his achievements as a stylist but also from his symbolic position as a man of letters over a long life-span. He was the friend or respected antagonist of most of the important French writers during the six decades of his productive and controversial career.

Gide’s father died when the boy was eleven years old. Paul Gide was known as an extremely intelligent man, a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Paris. The father’s family had a long Protestant tradition in mainly Catholic France, a fact of great philosophical and psychological importance for André Gide, whose mother had also been brought up as a Protestant - although her family had counted among its members a few Roman Catholics. The atmosphere in the home was acutely puritan and moralistic, and left on the novelist an imprint whose profound markings - for all of his ideational struggles - he never erased. Martin Turnell, a most perceptive Gide critic and biographer, has discussed Gide’s own assessment of his maternal and paternal inheritances. In his Journals Gide has discussed these inheritances in terms of opposites which make for dramatic juxtapositions, but which may also demonstrate the love of symmetry so typical of the French literary mind. Paul Gide’s family had lived in Uzès, a town in southern France not far from the Mediterranean; Juliette Gide came from Normandy. But although Albert Guerard, another important critic and biographer of Gide, quotes an opinion citing the intellectuality of Uzès and the sensuousness of Normandy, he agrees with Turnell that no simple oppositions can be constructed between the two regions - whose attributes a visitor might in fact confuse with each other. The observation points up Gide’s turning toward classicism and symmetry, the great concern for clarity of expression which has made his style the object of much study and admiration. As we shall see, however, another major aspect of the novelist’s character, rebellious and iconoclastic, contended with the first; the conflict gave rise to the kinds of conflicts which would produce the works under discussion in this Study Guide.

André, whose childhood was sickly, was brought up in an atmosphere markedly defined by the presence of women in the household and in important positions. The father’s early death served to emphasize the repressive presence of austerity. Besides Gide’s mother, there was Anna Shackleton, originally Juliette Gide’s governess, the daughter of a Scotch engineer settled in France, a spinster. Two important teachers were women; there was an aunt, Claire, intensely middle-class, a woman of probity. Mme. Gide had decided early to protect her son from the contamination of unhealthy influences. She saw to it that he had piano lessons, but - Guerard remarks - made sure that he did not play Chopin, a composer she regarded as a bad influence. There was money in the family; indeed Gide never had to worry about that; but she made her son account closely for his allowance even after the inception of his writing career.

Another woman, however, played a highly important part in Gide’s life, early and late: Madeleine Rondeaux. Although Gide did experience a rather lonely, isolated childhood, and although his friendships were limited largely to members of the family, he did have friends. Madeleine was Gide’s cousin. One night, when Gide was a boy of thirteen - he was visiting his uncle Émile, Madeleine’s father - he came upon his already beloved Madeleine kneeling by her bed, weeping bitter tears: the young girl had just discovered her mother’s adulterous activities, which would eventually split up the family. Gide wrote much later about this incident, which he described as the discovery of a mystic orientation of his life. He was deeply moved by her misery and decided that he would devote his entire life to an attempt to cure her of her unhappiness. From that time on the two children shared all holidays, read the same books, became intensely concerned with similar matters. In addition little Madeleine was immensely religious, and through her Gide read the Bible very carefully, prayed in the middle of the night, slept on bare boards - as the novelist is quoted by Turnell - and would wash himself with cold water in winter as an act of merited penance. By the time of the emotional crisis involving his cousin, Gide had already experienced difficulties arising from his sexual behavior. When he was eight years old, the boy had been dismissed from school for an entire term because he had been observed masturbating in class. Indeed, the family doctor dealt with the difficult situation by threatening a surgical operation - as a cure. In the light of contemporary psychoanalytical awareness, one can only surmise what great damage might not have been inflicted by this episode, particularly for a boy who would lose his father three years later and who grew up in a manless household, in a repressive environment. When Gide was twelve years old, he was taken to Montpellier, at whose university his uncle, Charles Gide, was a professor of political economy. His Protestantism earned him numbers of jibes and taunts; he developed a nervous sickness, which shadowed his life for many years afterward. He eventually went to the Sorbonne - the University of Paris - but he never got a degree.

THE CAREER BEGINS

By the end of 1890, Gide had completed his book, The Notebooks of André Walter, for which few critics have claimed any literary merit. It was published in 1891. The book deals with the tension, which characterized the relationship between Gide and his surroundings. Gide wrote later, in 1926, that the book was really about the struggle to overcome masturbation, to which he had regressed in his twentieth year, at a time when he rejected the possibilities of ordinary sexual activities. The book sold extremely few copies - it had been published anonymously and privately. He had fond hopes for the volume, but the least of which included the wish that his cousin Madeleine would look upon him with greater favor after its publication and marry him. She did not, at this time, a refusal probably due to a series of domestic difficulties and her father’s death at about this point in her life.

The failure of The Notebooks of André Walter, however, was not complete. Through his friend Pierre Louÿs the writer, Gide met Stéphane Mallarmé, the leading symbolist poet of the period, a man who elicited profound veneration from a number of writers among whom were to be found some of the future immortals of French letters. Mallarmé had a habit of holding soirées at his home every Tuesday, which Gide started to attend. Mallarmé read the young man’s book and complimented him on it. It was at such meetings that Gide met Paul Valéry, who was to become one of the most important French poets of the twentieth century. In 1893 Gide, with his friend Paul Albert Laurens - who was studying painting - went to North Africa. It was the first time the young man had quit the oppressive Protestant environment, which had so shaped his life, and he had a deep conviction of the importance of the trip. Feeling himself to be the divided plaything of obscure and powerful drives, he hoped that some organic oneness would be discovered in Africa. Jean Delay, in his biography The Early Years of André Gide, writes that the young man - who says in his autobiography that he was without his Bible for the first time - sent a letter to his mother asking her to send the Bible to a town in southern France. He refused to leave for Africa before it arrived. (This disclosure is cited by Turnell.) Gide had his first, sudden homosexual experience with an Arab child, after which he went to Biskra, where Laurens and he hired a prostitute, whom they shared. However, Gide started to spit blood; and Laurens, concerned about possible tuberculosis, got in touch with Mme. Gide, who came to Africa and discovered the situation. Although Gide told his mother that he and his companion were sharing the prostitute, Gide discloses in his Journals fifty years later that the situation was not a pleasant one, or a successful one. A doctor diagnosed Gide’s pulmonary troubles as nervous and not tubercular, to Gide’s immense relief. In 1895, Gide went to North Africa for the second time. Although he had originally wanted to go by himself, he got cold feet and wrote to his mother asking both her and Madeleine to come with him. He was refused. Possibly a fear of the repetition of what had occurred the previous time weighed him down, and the refusal freed him to attempt more experimentation. In January, he discovered that Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas were staying at the same hotel in North Africa. Although Gide had met Wilde briefly in Paris, he had not known about Wilde’s homosexuality at that time. At first, he wanted to leave the hotel immediately, erased his name from the register and went off to the station. On the way, he repented of his cowardice and returned. Apparently, the meetings later with Wilde and Douglas were among the most significant of Gide’s entire life. From that time on, the novelist no longer looked upon his secret desires with loathing and fear. Gide started to develop into the assertive nonconformist who would alter the face of French letters.

EXALTATION AND CONSOLIDATION

Gide began a new book in North Africa, Fruits of the Earth, published in 1897. It celebrated the realities of joy, freedom and the flight from the repressions imposed by all the social forces, which impose restraints upon the growing self. The covering of habit patterns, duties and obligations, which conceal and suppress the real self must be broken through if life is to be made to yield the authentic satisfactions of which it is capable. Gide’s mother died in 1895, and seventeen days after her death he became engaged to his cousin, whom he married in October 1895. Gide says in his Journals that upon his mother’s death he experienced a mixture of love, distress and liberty. Critics have filled many pages in an attempt to explain to themselves and to their readers the reasons for Gide’s marriage. The novelist himself discusses the question in his Journals, but his speculations do not lead to any fast conclusions. Guerard writes that Madeleine represented for Gide the powers of piety, which are manifested in both The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate, and Gide himself has stated that all his books prior to 1926 were written under her influence. Turnell states that the marriage was not consummated during the honeymoon and quotes from an unpublished diary Gide wrote in 1896, in which the novelist mentions the number of times he confused Madeleine with his mother - a confusion which psychologists commonly point to as intimately allied with impotence. When Gide and Madeleine returned to France in 1806 he was elected mayor of the little town of La Roque-Baignard; he was then the youngest mayor in France.

Although Fruits of the Earth sold only five hundred copies in the ten-year period which followed its publication, it had an extraordinary appeal for the youth of France after the miserable debacles of the First World War.

GIDE THE NOVELIST

Although Gide experimented in various forms, he is by general consent at his best in narrative. Early attempts at some fictional achievements, like The Notebooks of André Walter and Urien’s Travels (published in 1891 and 1893 respectively) were less fictional narratives involved with plot and character portrayal than examinations of reflexive moods and attitudes. In fact, a representative listing of Gide’s works will feature these two volumes in a category entitled “Poetry in Verse and Prose” rather than a category of “Prose Fiction,” for instance. Gide himself only called one of his fictions a novel, The Counterfeiters, published in 1926. He divided his narrative fictions into three general categories: novel, “récit,” and “sotie.” The second noun refers to such books as The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate, as well as the The Pastoral Symphony (published in 1919) and the trilogy Isabelle, Robert and Geneviève. Gide has stated that all his narratives are ironic, involved with the essential discrepancies between individuals’ senses of the world and what that world is like in a larger context. The “récit,” always features a narrator, involved in the telling of bygone occurrences in his life - occurrences which have brought him to what is usually a moral impasse in the present. The two dimensions referred to above slowly impinge upon the reader’s awareness. We first become absorbed in what the narrator is saying, and as we read - or upon a second reading - we discover the ironical dissimilarities between the narrator’s “truth” and the encompassing realit...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to André Gide
• 2) Textual Analysis
• 3) Character Analyses
• 4) Textual Analysis
• 5) Conclusion
• 6) The Counterfeiters
• 7) Fruits of The Earth
• 8) The Vatican Swindle (Lafcadio’s Adventures)
• 9) Critical Commentary
• 10) Essay Questions and Answers
• 11) Bibliography