The Immoralist (Criticism)

Criticism

Liz Brent

Brent holds a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She works as a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, Brent discusses scents, odors, and smells in Gide's novel.

Michel's experience of personal rebirth in The Immoralist is characterized by an increased awareness of his physical being. His sense of touch, taste, and smell become heightened, and each new sensation represents a celebration of life. The more alive he feels, the more he seeks out sensual experiences. As he explains, "The only way I could pay attention to anything was through my five senses." Throughout The Immoralist, Gide uses sensual descriptions, particularly the sense of smell, as an important indication of Michel's growing self-awareness and lust for life.

Michel first experiences his sense of smell as a celebration of life while traveling in North Africa and Italy on his honeymoon. The first instance in which he mentions the sense of smell is while he and Marceline are in Biskra, Algeria. As Michel recovers from tuberculosis, he finds himself more and more focused on his physical health. When he becomes well enough to take walks in the park near their hotel, Michel experiences a new sense of life welling up within him. During one of these walks, he enters the park "with a sense of rapture."

The air was luminous. The cassias, which flower long before they come into leaf, gave off a sweet scent — or perhaps it emanated from everywhere, the light, unfamiliar smell which seemed to enter into me by all my senses and filled me with a feeling of exaltation.

This first powerful sensual experience of his heightened sense of smell represents for Michel a sign of the new life emerging within him. "Was this finally the morning when I was to be reborn?" he asks.

With Michel greatly recovered from his illness, he and Marceline leave North Africa to travel through Italy. In each new location, Michel experiences new fragrances that further awaken his growing lust for life. He frequently describes his experience of the smells around him as intoxicating and rapturous. In Salerno, he walks among a grove of lemon trees in a state of dreamy intoxication. His experience of the lemons is described in lush detail, exulting in their look, taste, and smell.

The fragrant lemons hang like thick drops of wax; in the shade they look greenish-white; they are within reach, and taste sweet, sharp, refreshing.

In Ravello, Michel becomes bolder and more adventurous in his new celebration of life through physical and sensual experience. He wanders in the woods by himself, enjoying his new physical strength, focusing on the aesthetic qualities of his own body. He finds a remote clearing in the woods where he sunbathes nude, experiencing the forces of life through the physical sensations of his skin. With the heat of the sun's rays, he states, "my whole being surged up into my skin." One day, he dives naked into a clear mountain stream and comes back to shore to bath in the sun. To enhance this rejuvenating physical experience, Michel adds the smell of fresh mint.

"There was some wild mint growing there," he relates. "I picked some, crushed the sweet-smelling leaves between my fingers and rubbed them over my damp but burning body."

While traveling from Ravello to Sorrento, Michel again experiences his sense of smell as a celebration of his excitement about life. As he describes their journey:

"The roughness of the sun-warmed rocks, the rich, limpid air, the smells made me feel so alive.
... 'Oh joy of the body!' I exclaimed to myself."

Upon returning home, Michel and his wife stay for the summer at La Morinière, their estate in northern France. While there, Michel spends most of his time out roaming in the fields and woods, where he experiences a whole new range of smells that further inspire him to pursue his natural desires. He describes with exaltation the smell of the sea air, the odor of wet leaves, and the fragrance emitting from the crops as well as the earth itself. During the apple harvest, he describes the rich fragrances filling the air: "A sickly sweet scent rose from the meadow and mingled with the smell of the ploughed earth."

Interestingly, while Michel and Marceline spend the winter in Paris, Michel makes no mention whatsoever of any smells, odors, or fragrances, whether good or bad. This represents Michel's feeling of sensory deprivation while in the city, where he finds the social atmosphere stifles his quest for natural, physical experiences. When they return to La Morinière the following spring, Michel once again celebrates his strong impressions of the smells of country life. During the hay harvesting season, he observes:

The air was full of pollen, of scents, and it went to my head like strong drink. It was as if I hadn't breathed for a year, or else had been breathing nothing but dust, so smoothly did the honey-sweet fill my lungs.

As he spends more and more time with young peasant men on the estate, Michel begins to associate his sense of smell with his attraction to these vigorous youths. He becomes fascinated with the earthy existence of the peasants, and intrigued by their secret lives. The young man who fills him in on local gossip tells Michel stories that "gave off vapours of the abyss; I inhaled them uneasily, feeling my head spin." Alcide, the young man whom he helps to poach on his land, sleeps in the barn, and Michel even enjoys the odor of Alcide's clothes, which "still bore the warm smell of poultry."

During Michel and Marceline's second trip through Europe and North Africa, Michel continues to associate his sense of smell with his love of life. He hates being in Switzerland, because he finds the people lacking in vitality. However, as they leave Switzerland to enter Italy, he becomes aware of the vigorous sense of life associated with Mediterranean culture. He comments that traveling from Switzerland to Italy, "was like exchanging abstraction for life, and even though it was still winter, I thought I could smell scents everywhere."

As they continue their travels through Italy, Michel continues to delight in the rich scents of the land and people. In Naples, he is drawn by the scent of the orange blossoms to go out prowling the streets at night, for "the slightest breath of wind carried their scent." In Taormina, Michel is so charmed by a Sicilian coach driver, whom he describes as "resplendent, fragrant and delicious as a piece of fruit," that he spontaneously kisses the man. In the ports of Syracuse, Michel finds that he is enchanted even by the unpleasant odors of life on the docks, "The smell of sour wine, muddy backstreets, the stinking market frequented by dockers, tramps and drunken sailors."

While Michel associates a strong sense of smell with the love of life, he likewise associates those who are repulsed by smells with death and morbidity. During their stay in Florence, Marceline becomes increasingly ill while Michel finds himself more and more invigorated. One day, enchanted by their fragrance, he buys a huge bundle of almond blossoms to bring home to his wife. He excitedly arranges the flowers throughout their hotel room. But when Marceline returns and steps in the door, she is nauseated and upset by the odor of the flowers, "a faint, very faint, discreet smell of honey." It is as if even this subtle fragrance of life is overwhelming to the dying woman.

The Immoralist has been widely praised for its elegant and affecting prose. Gide's vivid descriptions of Michel's sensation of smells, odors, and fragrances are brilliantly expressive of his celebration of life through sensual experiences.

Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on The Immoralist, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Douglas Dupler

Dupler is a writer and has taught college English courses. In this essay, Dupler discusses the moral quandaries in a novel that contains a quest for freedom.

The title of André Gide's novel, The Immoralist, refers to a protagonist who consciously experiments with his moral boundaries. In the beginning of the novel, this protagonist, named Michel, is prompted by a serious illness to find a new way of living. His strained efforts to get well lead him to loosen or discard the moral fabric which once enveloped him. By the end of the novel, Michel has so adopted a philosophy of personal freedom, and challenged his belief system, that he seems adrift in a sea of uncertainty and experiences an intense solitude that he calls an "empty liberty." During the story, Michel gains firsthand experience of sickness and health, love and marriage, and life and death. During these deep experiences, the protagonist struggles both for his own truths and to affirm his life amidst his solitude and his increasing amount of freedom.

From the beginning of the story, the conflict between individual and culture is hinted at; the question arises, "In what way might Michel be useful to the state?" As Michel begins telling the story of his life, in retrospect, he shows the point of uncertainty to which he has arrived when he states, "I no longer understand anything." The story Michel begins to tell is his personal quest for freedom, which includes freedom from accepted moral laws, and that quest has left him in a place where he acknowledges, "the difficult thing is knowing how to live with that freedom."

When describing himself at the beginning of the story, before changes have occurred to him, Michel portrays his life as normal to the point of being almost unnoticeable. He has been a man of placid emotions and calm passions. He marries Marceline because his father is dying, and he believes that the marriage will please his father during his last days. Michel states that he did not love his wife at the beginning, and instead of passion he felt "a tenderness, a sort of pity" for her. He is very aware of the intricacies of social convention when he notes that his wife was Catholic and that he is Protestant. Michel is a successful academic, although his work has been published under his father's name. When speaking of himself, he notes how "the early moral lessons of childhood . . . exert an influence," and mentions an "austerity" that he inherited from his "mother's indoctrination" and his "puritanical childhood." Michel points out that he has friends, but that he "loved friendship more than the friends themselves," revealing the mental abstraction that permeates his bookish life. Michel notes his "thrifty habits" and the "detached" quality of his life. In short, Michel describes himself as influenced by the cultural rules in which he is immersed, so much so that he remarks that, "It never occurred to me that I could lead a different life."

Michel's illness produces deep inner questioning in him. The illness takes him to the edge of life and death, where he has to affirm his desire to live. In the throes of sickness, he realizes a "wild, desperate drive towards existence." The illness is representative of how restricted and contracted his life has become, and his efforts to overcome the sickness become efforts also to find a new and more vital way of living. Michel becomes so debilitated that he has to learn to do basic tasks again, and he feels a "thrill of discovering life afresh" as he makes slow steps toward recovery. During his recovery, Michel organizes his life in order to "concentrate solely" on his cure, and he "would identify as good only those things that were salutary," a new change in his moral system. Michel decides that survival is simply a "question of willpower," and he begins living his life in a way that enables him to exert his will over his situation. Michel is exiled from his homeland by illness and by choice. Leaving his culture behind during his convalescence frees him from cultural constraints, and he realizes that he must seize this freedom. In his new situation, he states that his "salvation depended on myself," while the new life he envisions will be "an exaltation of the senses and the flesh," quite different from his previous life.

Michel's illness forces him out of his dualism between mind and body; he claims he does not have the "strength to lead a dual life," and that he would "think about the life of the mind later," when he is better. He abandons intellectual activity and begins a willful and organized program to strengthen his body and overcome his illness. As his body heals, he experiences a transformation. Michel discovers a "newfound awareness" of his senses; he delights in the feeling of sunshine on his body and of taking cold plunges in water. The countryside of North Africa becomes beautiful to him, which he describes with poetic and graceful language. He cuts off his beard and allows his hair to grow longer to reveal his "new self," and his body becomes muscular and tanned. He becomes "no longer the pale, scholarly creature," but a person who is determined to allow a "voluptuous enjoyment" of himself and "of everything that seemed . . . divine." Michel also changes how he views his body, seeing it "no longer with shame" that he perhaps inherited from his culture, "but with joy." By the second part of the novel, Michel's belief system has changed in the way that he views his mind and body; before, the life of the mind had precedence, but his transformative illness forces him to prioritize the health of his physical body.

Michel, throughout the story, strongly attests to the transformation that the illness brings about. He emphasizes the change in himself when he states that, "Everything that was painful to me then is now a delight." When he returns to France, he is "constantly reminded" of the change that has occurred to him, and he states that he "had only just been born." He further abandons his old life when he declares he would prefer to adopt a "provisional mode" of living, and he begins to experience life as "nothing more" than the "passing moment." Michel becomes a more advanced immoralist when he begins to rebel intellectually against his old way of thinking. He claims, "I started to despise the learning," and he made efforts to "shake off these layers" that he had acquired from his culture. He comes to believe that underneath a "secondary" layer of himself, put there by culture, there is an "authentic being" that is primal and vital, and that by getting back to that more essential part of himself he can make his life more "harmonious, sensuous, [and] almost beautiful." His personal philosophy becomes one of both striving for perfection and ridding himself of cultural programming, and he states, "How could I be interested in myself other than as a perfectible being?"

The transformation affects other areas of Michel's belief system. In one instance, Marceline prays for Michel during Mass, to which Michel responds, "There is no need to pray for me." He rejects an appeal to God because he claims he does not want any obligations, while Marceline refuses to believe that he can heal without divine help. In another scene, further delineating the change in Michel's moral system, he observes one of the children, with whom he has made a friendship, steal a pair of scissors from his room. Assuming the boy has no idea that he has been observed, Michel allows the incident to pass without comment or reproach. Instead, this boy, named Moktir, now becomes Michel's "favourite," and this incident becomes "a strange moment of self-revelation." The scissors also have an interesting symbolism; this incident, of tolerating and even admiring the act of stealing, represents a break, or a cutting away, of some of Michel's morals.

Michel also questions his love for his wife. He analyzes his love for her, and he tries to will himself to love her more. Love becomes an act of self-creation for Michel, when he makes a promise to force his love to "grow with my health." He shields his inner reality from his wife, stating, "it was important that she didn't interfere with my new self-awareness." He mentions how he has to lie to Marceline about his feelings for her, and that he began to "enjoy this dissimulation" at the same time their love "deepened," a strange contradiction but one that tests his "new, unknown faculties" of pushing his moral edge. At one point, Michel declares that his "veneration" for his wife grew in "inverse proportion to my self-respect."

Michel also tests his morals when he goes to his family farm and interacts with the farm workers. Michel finds out that one of them is poaching from him, and rather than stop the illegal act, he becomes interested in it, condones and assists it, and eventually even pays one of the perpetrators unknowingly. By transgressing long-held agreements and codes of conduct, Michel gets taken advantage of and the workers become exasperated with him. In the end, the farm becomes uninteresting to Michel, he becomes alienated from the people who had been close to him, and he flees as "everything was unraveling" around him.

In the end, Michel meets suffering and illness again as his wife's health deteriorates. He seems to play a disturbing part in her decline, pushing them to repeat the exhausting journey that Michel had made to overcome his own sickness. In his quest to find what "man is still capable of," he becomes driven by an "irresistible demon." His narrative contains contradictions that reinforce his sense of confusion toward the end. He asks, "how many . . . conflicting thoughts can coexist within a man?" and decries his "insufferable logic." Of his wealth, he "grew to hate this luxury and yet enjoy it." Of people, he states that "the worst instincts . . . seemed to me the most sincere." He keeps his distance from other people, claiming that "the very things that separated me . . . were what mattered." His loneliness is palpable when Marceline dies; he states, "I no longer know the dark god I revere." Michel acknowledges his predicament and confusion in the end, when he states that consistency in thinking is "what makes a real man." Instead of seeing the potential of the future, which he once proclaimed, he ends his story by remarking on the "intolerably long, dreary days" that lie ahead of him, as he has freed himself from both constraints and safety nets.

Source: Douglas Dupler, Critical Essay on The Immoralist, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

David Remy

Remy is a freelance writer in Pensacola, Florida. In the following essay, Remy examines Gide's use of natural imagery to mirror his protagonist's psychic state.

André Gide's The Immoralist is a novel of exploration and discovery, albeit within a psychic realm. Michel, an accomplished archaeologist and scholar, embarks upon a journey of self-exploration that is guided by his subconscious as much as it is by any willful decision to abandon the social mores that have imposed themselves upon him. As the novel progresses, Michel's spirit remains rebellious, unbridled, and this spirit gathers in intensity with each layer of his former self that he casts aside. Throughout The Immoralist Gide incorporates natural images that mirror Michel's psychic state, especially the process of psychic renewal that results from stripping away the patina of education, family relationships, and respectability that have provided Michel with a foundation and direction for his life.

For Michel, a man whose mentality is tied to his physical surroundings (a fact attested to by his incessant wandering), environment plays a key role in shaping his attitude toward life, and for this reason much of the imagery Gide uses to represent Michel's psychic state is associated with nature. Early in the novel, after a brief stay in Paris, Michel and Marceline journey to Michel's farm, La Morinière, near Lisieux, which is, according to Michel, "the shadiest, wettest countryside" he knows. The farm, which had formerly been the domain of Michel's father, who is now deceased, offers Michel an opportunity to put his imprimatur upon the family's history.

With the aid of Charles, the caretaker's son, Michel tours the farm, inspecting its pastures and orchards and formulating a plan for the future.

From this orderly abundance, from this happy subservience, from this smiling cultivation, a harmony was being wrought, no longer fortuitous but imposed, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural, in which one could no longer tell what was most admirable, so intimately united into a perfect understanding were the fecund explosion of free nature and man's skillful effort to order it.

This plan is nothing less than grand in design, but Michel, his "old turmoil" having been displaced by a feeling of serenity, must assess the amount of energy he will bring to the task of reshaping the farm. He must plumb the depths of his psyche and determine his ability to combat the forces of nature, much less the sense of family history associated with the farm, if he wishes to demonstrate a "disciplined intelligence" over the land and all it produces.

With a characteristic transition that fosters a strong connection in the novel between actions and the ideas that motivate them, Gide employs imagery that places his protagonist's psychic state in bold relief. For example, when Michel finds Bocage, the caretaker who has known him since he was a child, beside a pond that must be drained and cemented to repair a leak, Gide describes the scene with images that are laden with symbolic meaning. According to Michel, the pond had not been drained in "fifteen years," thus indicating a certain neglect that has resulted from the inexorable progress of time as well as human indifference. The pond is full of "very large" carp and tench (another bottom feeder) that had "never left the deepest parts" of the containment. The fish, like Michel's memories of La Morinière, are firmly established and will not give way easily. "Occasionally a great shudder ran over the surface, and the brown backs of the disturbed fish appeared," says Michel as memories, like the denizens that have surfaced, rise from deep within his subconscious. Moreover, the fish represent Michel's desire to master the "powerful savagery" that exists within nature and within himself, for he wishes to control the land with that "disciplined intelligence."

By wading in and joining the farmhands and their children in an impromptu "fishing party," Michel physically immerses himself in the land he claims as his own. Water, long a symbol for the unconscious because of its translucent qualities and interminable depths, becomes a medium for exploration as Michel and Charles, with mud-splattered faces, wade into deep holes and attempt to catch a large, slippery eel, itself a symbol for Michel's nascent freedom once the eel emerges from the pond's murky depths into the light of day. Gide's choice of imagery and symbolism may lack subtlety, but they nevertheless bind the novel's ideas with actions that the reader can easily interpret.

Later in the novel, once Michel has returned to La Morinière after a series of journeys abroad with Marceline, who now lies gravely ill, Gide employs nature's stark contrasts to underscore Michel's growing frustration and impatience at the responsibilities he must uphold. Once again, Michel, lord of the manor, inspects his property in an effort to distract himself from what he calls his "disheveled life," only to find that the farm now exhibits laxity instead of the organization he had witnessed there before. Burdened by the constant demands that have been placed upon him, Michel seeks the ordered harmony a farm embodies as an ideal, a harmony arrested from the surrounding wilderness, as well as the organic hierarchy that exists within nature itself.

Instead of finding woodlands that have had their timber cut according to a long-standing agreement, one that leaves no doubt as to how the wood should be cut, divided, and sold, Michel discovers that Heurtevant, the contractor, has allowed trees felled in winter to occupy the lot well after spring, the traditional time for harvesting, so that the forest's new growth must overcome these obstructions if the forest is to revive and replenish itself.

Similarly, Michel feels trapped by the responsibilities he must bear, especially those that result from other people's negligence. Though Michel breaks with the past, he cannot assert his independence completely because obstacles remain in his path. The new Michel cannot emerge because the old Michel, the one who was encumbered by family obligations, stands in the way.

Gide's use of these natural images attains greater symbolic importance when one considers that Michel, in search of "the old Adam" within him — an entity who cannot be suppressed by family, education, nor by Michel himself — has decided to abandon the past. In removing the "encrustations" that have, in his view, prevented him from becoming an "authentic being," Michel compares himself to a palimpsest, a piece of writing that, upon close examination, reveals previous drafts or texts underneath. Each layer builds upon the other to form a composite text, a complete entity. Michel understands that, in order for him to uncover his true self, the one that lies beneath the "text" his life has composed thus far, he must remove each outer layer of his being until he reaches the core. "In order to read it," he muses, extending this metaphor, "would I not have to erase, first, the more recent ones?"

When considered in light of Michel's self-image, Gide's use of imagery from nature mirrors the idea of a palimpsest, for layers of soil, water, and timber are removed to reveal a landscape that represents a new beginning; layers are uncovered so that others may push through. The pond is drained so that it may be repaired and replenished; like the formal education that Michel rejects, the dark, murky waters of the pond are drained away to reveal what is at the core: a primal, pristine state represented by the large fish that swim along the bottom. Similarly, the felled trees in the woods around La Morinière represent a thinning, or removing, of old growth so that new growth may emerge. Combining ideas with actions that resonate throughout the novel, Gide presents the reader with images that create visually Michel's process of psychic renovation.

More than one hundred years after its initial publication, The Immoralist remains a novel of startling ideas and confessions. Gide's use of strong visual imagery, particularly that found in nature, serves as a metaphor for Michel's transformation from aesthete to debauched and broken hedonist. Thus, by mirroring his protagonist's psychic state with images from the natural world around him, Gide marks Michel's existential journey indelibly for the reader with each page turned and each layer of being uncovered.

Source: David Remy, Critical Essay on The Immoralist, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

What Do I Read Next?

• Gide's short novel La Porte étroite (1909, Strait is the Gate) is written in the mode of the récit, which Gide identified as a narrative form conducive to expressing some of his central literary themes. The first part of Strait is the Gate is narrated by Jerome, who recounts his love for his cousin Alissa, her refusal to marry him, and her early death. The second part of this story consists of Alissa's diary, which Jerome discovers after her death, and which explains their complex relationship from her perspective.
• Si le grain ne mert (1926, If It Die . . .), considered one of the great works of confessional literature, is Gide's autobiographical account of his life from birth to marriage.
• Gide's novel Les faux-monnayeurs (1926, The Counterfeiters) is one of his best-known works. It concerns a group of boys prone to getting in trouble, and depicts the responses of their teachers and parents to their misbehavior.
• La Chute (1956, The Fall), by French existentialist author Albert Camus, is regarded as a récit in the manner of Gide's The Immoralist. The Fall is a first-person narrative in which Jean Baptiste Clamence, a former lawyer, confesses his feelings of personal guilt to various sailors at a bar in Holland.
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) is a long poem by Gide's friend Oscar Wilde, written while Wilde was imprisoned on charges of homosexuality. Wilde criticizes the inhumane conditions of the British prison system.
• In the biography André Gide: A Life in the Present (1999), Alan Sheridan argues that Gide's works addresses many themes and social issues, still relevant today, including responsibility, freedom, morality, sensuality, spirituality, and homosexuality.
• André Gide, (1993, updated ed.), by Thomas Cordle, provides a critical introduction to Gide's life and work. Cordle examines the influence of the literary movements of symbolism, romanticism, and socialist realism on Gide's writings.