The Conflict Between Soul And Body In Andre Gide’s Works

Andre Gide was a famous French litterateur in 20th century and awarded for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947.The artistic charm of Gide lay in his significant writings,in which human problems have been presented with keen psychological insight.His works fully demonstrated his concerns for the human conditions and his profound thinking on the major issues of humanity.At the same time,the master status of Gide can also get the reflection from the development of artistic expression as well as his polish on language style.Gide took experiments on writing techniques of modern novels and had great influence on the Nouveau Roman.In France,the research about Gide has been very mature which involves all aspects,including the study about the author and about his works.In China,the research about Gide has lasted for nearly a century.Many researchers have mentioned the conflict between body and soul in Gide’s works,but haven’t carry out a detailed study.In fact,the entanglement of soul and body haunted him in his entire life.In order to bridge this painful separation and find inner harmony,Gide began to write in his young period.The conflict between soul and body run through Gide’s writing experience.The discussion of the conflict in this thesis is based on the analysis of Gide’s representative works,especially Les Cahiers d’Andre Walter,La Tentative amoureuse,Les Nourritures terrestres,L’ Immoraliste,La Porte etroite,La Symphonie Pastorale,Corydon,Si le Grain ne meurt.Apart from the introduction and the conclusion,this three-chapter thesis focuses on Gide’s creative process based on specific text analysis,and aims at the explanation of Gide’s works on spiritual level.The first chapter is devoted to the source of the conflict between soul and body,and aims to figure out why this conflict became the contradiction of his whole life and also his writing subject.On one hand,Gide lived in a turbulent and unreasoning era.Accompanied by a series of regime changes and economic changes,the society was in turbulences and conflicts.The development of irrational philosophy,constituted a confrontation with Christian asceticism and provided a powerful force for anti-Christian ideology.On the other hand,Gide’s gloomy childhood was the key to the conflict between soul and body.His parents came from two different families in which the conflict of two religions,two areas and two characters put him into the abyss of contradiction.The severe puritanical education turned his natural desire into devil and trap Gide in the clash between soul and body deeply.The second chapter is about how the conflict between soul and body is displayed in Gide’s works.Gide’s attitude about soul and body underwent two different periods.At the first period,he was influenced by family and religious education,therefore he extolled the purity of spiritual love and thought physical pleasure was meaningless.Les Cahiers d’ Andre Walter and Les Tentatives amoureuses are regarded as Gide’s study about these two aspects.Later,he discoverd the fun of indulgence in the travel to North Africa and began to defend body enjoyment.Consequently,his writing came to the second period.He eulogized sensual pleasure in Les Nourritures terrestres and represented the sharp clash between soul and body in his moral trilogy.In order to defend physical pleasure,he also defended homosexual love publicly in Si les Grains ne meurt,Corydon,and Les Faux-monnayeurs,struggling for the rectification for body love.The third chapter aims to describe how Gide dealt with the conflict between soul and body.Facing the two waxing and waning powers,he tried to employ the easiest way to solve this problem,meaning to remove one of the two opposite factors.On one hand,it meant to remove soul and turn the character into a person without morality and spirit.On the other hand,it meant to dispel body and make person die in order to solve the problem.As this solution is too idealized,in the book La Symphonie pastorale,he found a medium way in which soul and body made a compromise in order to reach a state of equilibrium,but this attempt also failed with the tragic death of the heroine.Besides,in Si le Grain ne meurt,Gide proposed other two means to deal with his conflict:one is to turn to artistic creation to release inner pain,the other is to pay attention to society and groups instead of parochial individual world,targeting for personal liberation.Although Gide tried lots of methods to reach reconciliation between soul and body,he couldn’t solve this problem thoroughly and reach harmony between soul and body.The conflict between soul and body,is also the conflict between individual desires and collective moralities.However,it is his endless entanglement and contradiction that showed the reality of humanity and made Gide as a writer who had the courage to dissect himself and always tell the truth.