The Immoralist by Andre Gide: Links between Sexuality and Mortality

Sexuality is strongly linked to life, health, and vitality. The opposite of these would be death, illness, and mortality. Several passages in Gide’s novel The Immoralist have touched on this dichotomy in the context of sexuality. This is because sexuality is directly linked to continuing life and life cannot exist without death. In his book  The Undertaking, funeral director Thomas Lynch said, “Walking upright between the past and future, a tightrope walk across our times, became, for me, a way of living: trying to maintain a balance between the competing gravities of birth and death, hope and regret, sex and mortality, love and grief, all those opposites or nearly opposites that become, after a while, the rocks and hard places, synonymous forces between which we navigate, like salmon balanced in the current, damned sometimes if we do or don't.” 

Sex and mortality can be directly linked as opposites akin to birth and death because sex is the process for the procreation of life whereas mortality is being fallible to death. Lynch says they are “synonymous forces between which we navigate” our lives and he is correct. It is the core of our existence and Gide explores these two ends on the continuum called life. He proves, too, that sexuality often leads to self-discovery and fuels the desire to live and enjoy the world in which we are surrounded.

In The Immoralist, the main character Michel is faced with the death of his mom at age fifteen and the death of his father nine years later. The loss of each parent had significant alterations in the course of Michel’s life. At the loss of his mother he states “I did not yet suspect what great power that early childish morality has over us, nor what traits it leaves in our mind. That sort of austerity, a taste for which my mother had left to me while inculcating its principles, I transferred in its entirety to my studies.” After the death of his mother, his father molded him not with moral beliefs, but through education. As a result, he became an academic and didn’t explore his sense of self or sexuality while going through adolescence. He said, “And so I reached the age of twenty-five practically without ever having looked at anything but ruins or books, and totally ignorant of life; I applied unusual fervor to my work” (10).

Michel gets married around the age of twenty-five to ease the mind of his dying father. He is not in love with this woman, but has never loved any other woman either. Michel lives a life that seems to be numb to all pleasurable sensations and feelings, as though he is trapped in a dismal world. He has ignored sex, life, and death only to feel nothing but pity. He admits he doesn’t even know himself. He is on autopilot, not truly living and thinking for himself.

After getting married and having his father die, Michel realizes that his own health is very delicate. He is reminded that life is fragile and that the “excessively tranquil life [he] led was weakening [him]” (11). Soon after this, Michel’s senses seemed to be coming alive. He looked at his wife carefully and started to notice her grace and beauty, “Up to then I had lived for myself or at least in my own fashion; I had married without imagining that my wife would be anything more than a comrade, without thinking very clearly that, after our union, my life could be changed. I had just come to understand, finally, that the monologue was now over” (12). With this new change in thought, a whole host of new thoughts was unleashed inside Michel.

From this point on, it seems that Michel enters a sort of ‘rebirth’. He sees life differently and notices everything delicately. “As I came into contact with new sensations, parts of me were stirred, dormant faculties that had not yet been put to use, and so had kept all their mysterious youthfulness. I was more surprised, amazed, than amused, and what I especially liked was Marceline’s joy” (13). It seems that for the first time in a long time, Michel is starting to feel pleasure, one of the joys of life.

Michel falls ill. With his health threatened, he seems to really be shaken to the core and cries over his conflicting emotions. When he felt ambivalent about life, he also felt ambivalent about death. Once he began to enjoy life, he began to fear death. His health seems to change drastically with several bad days followed by several good days and so on. “Finally, one day,” Michel recounts, “Just like a lost sailor sighting land, I felt a gleam of life awakening; I had the strength to smile at Marceline.” As Michel’s feelings become heightened, he directly correlates his newfound sense of life to the fact that “death had brushed [him] with its wing.” (p 16) Soon after Michel starts to truly feel alive, his first instincts of sexuality, pleasure derived from others, seemed to kick in. He becomes enamored with young, healthy boys.

After seeing a young boy, Bashir, bleed smooth, red blood, Michel contrasts it with his clotted, blackish blood. Michel becomes upset over his poor health because he actually wants to live and is afraid to die. Up until now, Michel felt mostly pity toward others and numb to the world. He says, “And suddenly I was seized by a desire, a wish, something more rabid, more imperious than anything I had felt until then: to live! I wanted to live…I concentrated entirely, desperately, desolately, on that effort to go on existing” (19).

From this moment on, all things that were previously important to Michel, mainly scholarly work, no longer were important. He didn’t want to spend his days recovering back to health being buried in books; he spent his days recovering in the outdoors. Children visited with him often, especially if he was outside. He found an actual sense of joy by being surrounded by others, adventuring through the oasis, and not being around Marceline.

The moments when Michel truly feels like he is alive are soon followed by sexual thoughts or acts. In Africa, he lusts over the bodies of young boys right after he is saved from death. He doesn’t show this sort of passion for his wife until later in the novel when her life is endangered. Michel sees Marceline’s carriage driver recklessly driving through the countryside. Once the horse collapses, he gets into a brawl with the driver and ties him up. He was so proud of himself and his strength. He faced his mortality and reflected “it had immediately seemed to me that I could give up my life for her… and give it all happily.” After the brawl, they kissed and at night they had sex for the first time. This sexual encounter causes Marceline to become pregnant. She also becomes sick, just as Michel had earlier. With only a month left in her pregnancy, the life growing inside of her dies.

Sex and mortality are “synonymous forces between which we navigate.”

Toward the end of the novel Marceline is gravely ill. Michel’s response is that he loves her and wants her to get better but only because he doesn’t want to be alone. He brings her a room full of spring flowers. Spring is the season of rebirth in the northern hemisphere, where buds form on trees and grass turns green again. Marceline immediately rejects the flowers due to their ‘fragrance’ when really she rejects the notion that she will never live to see future springs. Michel gets rid of the flowers but notes to himself “Oh, if she could no longer abide even that little touch of springtime!...” He knows her death is near.

After Marceline dies, Michel keeps traveling. He meets a prostitute and spends the night with her a few times. She has a younger brother, Ali, that Michel enjoys spending time with as well. Ali discovered Michel had slept with his sister and was so mad he didn’t come back for days. Michel didn’t sleep with Ali’s sister after that for fear of losing him. The novel ends with Michel reflecting on her, “She laughs and jokes about my preferring the boy to her. She claims that he’s the main thing keeping me here. Maybe she’s not altogether wrong…” In Michel’s world and ours, sex leads to life, life leads to death, and death leads to sex. The circle always continues and teaches a lesson each step of the way.