Annotated Bibliography for Gide's The Immoralist

The Politics of Sexuality in Gide’s L’Immoraliste: An Annotated List of Works Cited

Abstract

The majority of current critical discourse of Gide’s L’Immoraliste is not discussion of the reprehensibility of the narrator Michel’s actions, but rather what are the political implications, sexual and moral, behind the author and the text. As the narrator Michel’s actions are purely selfishly motivated, tied in with sexual taboo, and ultimately cause the death of his wife, ambiguity regarding what is really at stake in the novel abounds. The story is often read as a (homo)sexual awakening, a travel narrative chronicling the illness, self-discovery and reinvention of Michel, a Frenchman in the colonial Near East. Gide refrains from overt discussion of sexuality and hides his own beliefs behind the veil of a first person narrator confessing his history to a group of mute interlocutors (Cohen 68 and MacKenzie). While some scholars, such as Michael Lucey, choose to focus more on Gide’s biography, reading the understated homosexuality in the text as a response to the homosexual taboo in early twentieth century French society, others such as Joseph A. Boone and Edward Said focus much more largely on what the work says about Western imperialist ideology and the “othering” of the Arab colonial subject. Despite the amount of weight scholars give to the political and social implications of colonialism, it is present in some form in all scholarly work regarding sexuality and L’Immoraliste. L’Immoraliste speaks of power dynamics encompassing heterosexual and homosexual subjects, of a sexuality that brings Michel further into himself, disconnecting him from and blinding him to the Arab Other that he objectifies (Lucey 186); Moreover, L’Immoraliste ties together the economic, social and political implications of colonialism for colonizer and colonized, painting an image of colonialism as a sort of sexual imperialism.

Annotated List of Works Cited

Boone, Joseph A. “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.” PMLA 110.1 (1995): 89-107. Web.

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Boone’s essay “sheds light on the sexual politics that complicate Western male travelers’ encounters with a homoeroticized Near East” (101). Critical of Said’s heterosexual interpretive framework, Boone attempts to push the boundaries of Western ideas of homosexuality by illustrating the ways in which Western writers have imposed their sexual and gender norms on Near Eastern subjects. The intersection of the Western homosexual’s view of the colonial Near East as “a gay sanctuary with certain historical and economic factors of Western colonialism allowed a level of exploitation potentially as objectionable as the experience of marginalization that sent these travelers abroad in the first place” (101). In L’Immoraliste, Boone’s ideas are illustrated by the dependency of Michel’s awakening on “the orientalist move of equating the Near East almost exclusively with the body and surfeit… there is no room for art or intellect” (101). For Michel, the Arab boys are objects, rather than subjects, onto which Michel projects his inner psychology.

This essay provides a historical textual map of Western conceptualizations of Near Eastern gender and sexual identities, while situating the sexuality enacted in L’Immoraliste in a larger framework of Western social and cultural values.

Cohen, Keith. “Confessing and Withholding Secrets: Masculine Anxieties in Gide and Proust.” L’Esprit Créateur 43.3 (2003): 68-78. Web.

Cohen reads the literary form of first person narration as a foundation for confessional power in terms of Foucault’s idea of “screen discourse, a mode of which sexuality [is] talked about as an avoidance mechanism making it possible not to confront ‘the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex’” (68). In his essay, he reads Gide’s “masculinities” as disguised in Michel’s sexual confession to his interlocutors. Cohen includes a psychoanalytical reading as he sees Michel’s burgeoning sexuality as a “narcissistic rediscovery” (70), a self-infatuation inter-mixed with homosexual and heterosexual love.

Michel’s masculinity is balanced in his gallant, protective love of Marceline and in his erotic love of Arab youth and aspects of their bodies that he once possessed himself (70). After the death of Marceline, however, filth, masculine youth and low social station are signifiers of his same-sex attraction. In his confession, Michel (and Gide) constructs space that renders his actions “value-neutral” (72) because he both pins his homosexual desire on “the curious gaze of the colonial tourist” (72) and he never betrays Marceline. Supporting Cohen’s reading is the underlying idea of the colonies as lawless space where (sexual) acts deemed morally reprehensible in France can be safely enacted.

Lucey, Michael. Gide’s Bent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Lucey’s work focuses on the period from the 1920’s to the 1930’s, during which time Gide became more outwardly expressive of his homosexuality, traveled extensively in Africa and subsequently developed anti-colonialist political leanings. His overarching argument in the book is that personal (sexual) expression cannot be separated from political and social thought. In chapter five, Lucey compares the scene in L’Immoraliste in which Michel watches Moktir steal Marceline’s scissors to a similar scene in Les Faux-Monnayeurs to illustrate “the ways in which apparently transgressive desires for escape are structured into the social and economic fabric of French life, ways such ‘transgressive’ desires might fail to be so” (146-147).

In chapter six, Lucey discusses Paul de Man’s idea that sexuality “’can be experienced as a bridge toward another, as a way to reenter the social world from which one has [morally retreated],’”concluding that Gide’s portrayal of Michel’s sexuality is a bridge inward, rather than outward, and concludes that “sexual revolt is not inherently liberating… one runs the risk of re-aestheticizing oneself in an equally unacceptable way” (186). Lucey’s book ties the idea of Gide’s inward sexual expression to the political implications of such expression, particularly on the colonial subjects of Western sexual expression.

MacKenzie, Louis A., Jr. “The Language of Excitation in Gide’s L’Immoraliste.” Romance Quarterly 37.3 (1990). Web.

MacKenzie reads L’Immoraliste as a novel about “dis-covering” and revealing. Gide, he argues, “[artfully dodges] the question of the erotic” that is central to the book. Gide’s inexplicit talk of sexual excitation is “consonant with [Michel’s] psychography,” his lack of sexual experience synonymous to a lack of language to describe his actions and feelings. Thus, Michel uses metaphor and imagery to uncover and define his emerging sexuality and masculinity. Michel recognizes “youthfulness [as a] swing term that legitimize[s] his association with the unfettered vitality and eroticism of the youthful objects of his desire.” Michel is a kind of adolescent, “only partially aware [of the] profound physical, psychic and social changes” he is going through and “sufficiently inhibited by convention.”

Echoing Cohen’s argument about confession, MacKenzie concludes that “the demure quality of confession inject[s] Michel’s resignation with legitimacy” which forces the interlocutor to suspend judgment of Michel’s sexual practices and their social corollaries. MacKenzie’s discussion of convention, covering, and revelation strengthens critical ideas about Gide’s demure handling of homosexual content in regards to the taboo of homosexuality in nineteenth and early twentieth century French society. MacKenzie’s idea of “dis-covering” also parallels ideas about Algeria as a place for revealing hidden identities and desires of the foreign tourist.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1994. Print.

Said’s book is a follow-up to his previous book Orientalism. In Culture and Imperialism, Said defines culture by “all those practices that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that exist in aesthetic forms,” like the novel, “one of whose principal aims is pleasure” (xii). Culture, he posits, “includes a refining and elevating element” and eventually becomes associated with a national identity, which in turn marks a xenophobically loaded difference between “us” and “them” (xiii). Culture as a marker of identity translates, in terms of imperialism, to the imperialist’s dependence on the subjugated party for self-definition.

Said’s post-colonialist frame is relevant to a discussion of sexuality in L’Immoraliste as he reads a “homosexual complicity” among Ménalque (a colonial officer), Michel, and Motir as “unmistak[ably] a hierarchal relationship.” Michel gains self-knowledge from Moktir, which Ménalque helps to define. Moktir’s thoughts and feelings are irrelevant, however, and Gide hints that they are “racially mischievous” (192). Michel’s imperialist gain is afforded by a sexual relationship. Said, like other critics, also touches on the first person narrative structure in rendering any reading of L’Immoraliste, including one with a of frame sexuality and/or power, ambiguous.