Andre Gide
At the turn of the century, many European writers expressed awareness of cultural and personal decadence, and social and moral decline was a central theme of much literature. Born in 1869 in Paris, André Gide was one of the most important French writers of the twentieth century. André Gide enlisted in the military in 1892. But after a week, he was discharged, as military authorities suspected that Gide had tuberculosis. This diagnosis convinced Gide that he would die early; however, he recuperated in the Algerian city of Biskra. It was also that year, in North Africa, where he had his first homosexual experience. Throughout 1893 and 1894, André Gide toured North Africa where he explored his sexual interest in young men. In 1895, Gide renewed his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde when the older (and disgraced) author called Gide to search for finer boys.Two years later, he returned to North Africa, where he met with the well-known homosexual Irish writer Oscar Wilde. In important conversations with Wilde, Gide was encouraged to admit his homosexual tendencies, most importantly to himself. Gide's trips to North Africa became the basis of The Immoralist, in which Michel, the protagonist, travels twice to Algeria. First published in 1902, The Immoralist features Michel’s search for his latent sexual self amidst the long-standing social and moral conventions of Europe at the time and the consequences of deviating from these. The novel tells the story of Michel's journey from a married heterosexual to a widowed homosexual. Throughout the novel Gide uses ambiguous homoerotic references, leaving it up to the reader to decide if Michel's search is a quest for a deeper understanding of his identity or if it is a facade to entertain his obvious but understated homosexual inclinations. The truth lies in a combination of the two, and is Gide expressing his own internal struggle through his protagonist.
Clearly mirroring his own life, Gide first introduces the reader to Michel on his honeymoon in Africa in a self-professed “loveless marriage” to Marceline. He subsequently battles Tuberculosis and emerges victorious with a will to live. His life motivation has changed, and it is at this point where we see Michel's latent homosexuality in his obsession with the local Arab boys. Michel insists his fascination with the young boys is merely a fascination with their health and youthfulness, “When he laughed he showed his brilliant white teeth, then licked the wound with delight: his tongue pink as a cat's. How healthy he was! That was what beguiled me about him: health. The health of that little body was beautiful." The sexual tone is definitely there, but remaining consistent with the rest of the novel, is an indistinct and vague reference, Michel's self-deceit. At first, Michel is torn between his love and devotion to Marceline and his desire to be free. Like Michel, Gide struggled in his marriage with feelings of genuine love for his wife, Madeleine, which conflicted with his homosexual inclinations and need for individual freedom. Michel, returning to Algeria, continues to explore his new self, while at the same time beginning the steady annihilation of his character as well as his marriage, letting "the layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there." Michel denounces his heterosexual principles, but does not clearly display himself as a homosexual until the last line of the novel. Instead, Gide expresses the struggle of discovering one’s homosexuality. Like Gide, Michel chose to follow his passion, ruining his marriage and abandoning his old life from before his travels to Africa. In the preface to The Immoralist, Gide declares he wrote the novel, "neither as an indictment nor an apology." He is telling the truth. The novel is an expression of his-own self.
It was with The Immoralist that the real Gide seems to have been revealed. In his autobiography If It Die…, Gide wrote of his childhood, "I experienced an unspeakable distaste for everything we did in class, for the class itself, for the whole system of lectures and examinations, even for the play hours: nor could I endure the sitting still, the lack of interest, the stagnation. One would like to believe that in the age of innocence the soul is all sweetness, light, and purity, but can remember nothing in mine that is not all ugly, dark, and deceitful." As one could imagine, Gide struggled as a child with his homosexual tendencies in a world where the discourses on sexuality saw such a lifestyle as “perverse”. However, he also speaks of how in his childhood he offered no resistance to his desires and cravings (homosexual tendencies). He was fully prepared to give in to them, provided they made no real demands on him and were intense and exciting - like a game. He goes into quite some detail, explaining that there were two possibilities: either the game could be a solitary one or it could be played with partners, inevitably other children. In If It Die... Gide describes an episode of this kind with the concierge's son, while hidden under the family table. The Immoralist was a novel, a departure from the critical writings normally expected of him. But the need for escape, for self-examination combined with concealment (confession without giving too much away), gave Gide the needed courage. The Immoralist is, in fact, essentially a travesty of the author’s own history. What is important, however, is that Gide employed the narrative form in this book in defiance of the sexual climate of the times. Gide sees his characters as embodiments of certain problems, but it is the problems themselves that most interested him.