André Gide : Narcissus and his sister-soul

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between André Gide's female characters and his moral, religious and aesthetic development. In Gide's fictional works, the feminine roles echo certain aspects of his own character: mystical fervor, love of virtue, and adherence to duty. The female characters also seem to represent the life of the soul. Nearly all of Gide's heroines die or become victims of a distorted or limited perception of reality. The heroine's sacrifice may awaken the male protagonist to his autodestructive path: selfdeception, unbridled freedom, or excessive introspection.

The central feminine figure in Gide's life and works is Madeleine Rondeaux, his wife and cousin. She directly inspired most of his female characters. For this reason, the relationship between André and Madeleine is carefully examined in this study. In his adolescence, Gide's religious awareness emerged simultaneously with his spiritual love for an idealized Madeleine. He associated this pious woman with God. She was his image of virtue and the object in the external world which enabled him to believe in a second or invisible reality separate from the physical reality of everyday life. Through Madeleine he gained an awareness of the existence of the opposing worlds of sin and virtue. The conflict between these two worlds constituted the central drama of his invisible reality.

Gide's idealized image of Madeleine echoed his own religious feelings, but the real Madeleine lived by strict moral values which he could not accept. Furthermore, as the sacred intermediary between God and himself, Madeleine could not be carnally known. His relationship with her evoked ambiguous feelings of desire and resentment. He needed her physical presence to believe in God and in the invisible reality, but at the same time her bourgeois virtues annoyed him. Madeleine's silent judgment of his moral values constituted both a check and an irritation to aspects of his personality. Though his love for her greatly contributed to the division of his nature, the conflict was essential to his development.

As Gide began to rebell in late adolescence against moral restraints and to explore his complex contradictory nature, he felt the need to confess, justify, and clarify his actions and his attitudes. . He substituted moral restraint for aesthetic discipline which allowed him to explore the opposites in his nature through his fictional creations. He found his equilibrium in movement from one extreme of his nature to the other. His idealized image of Madeleine was the one constant in his life to which he always returned.

Gide's fictional world became the ideal reality in which he depicted his perception of the brute facts presented by external reality. However, as this study suggests, he needed Madeleine's presence to produce the conflict which he resolved through artistic creation. Her existence also enabled him to believe in a second reality, an invisible world outside of time and beyond the external world. Through his relationship with her, he felt that he drew nearer to the center of existence. Without her, he felt disoriented in the external world and the contours of his secret reality evaporated. For Gide, life without conflict led to creative sterility.