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Revisiting 'Madeleine' and "The Outing": James Baldwin's revision of Gide's sexual politics
MELUS, Spring, 1997 by Jerome de Romanet
In 1954, James Baldwin wrote a short essay, initially entitled "Gide as Husband and Homosexual," that was published in the New Leader and later reprinted as "The Male Prison" in Nobody Knows My Name (1961). At the time of the 1954 essay, Baldwin had just written the critically-acclaimed Go Tell It on the Mountain; and two years after his essay on Gide, he would publish Giovanni's Room, the first novel in American literature to deal successfully with the issue of homosexuality (if one discounts Gore Vidal's failed attempt in the 1948 The City and the Pillar.) In this essay, I will analyze the place occupied by the discussion of sexual identity in Baldwin's early essays and fiction, primarily in "The Male Prison" and an early story, "The Outing," as well as in a recently rediscovered essay, "Preservation of Innocence" (initially published in Zero, Tangiers, 1949).
Baldwin left New York for France in the Fall of 1948 and admitted later on that he had literally run off to Europe to save his life. In those years of post-World War II exhilaration in Europe, the black writer felt--as he put it in the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name--that whereas "in America, the colour of my skin had stood between myself and me, in Europe, that barrier was down" (11). It is remarkable however, that until very recently at least--including at the official 1987 Baldwin memorial at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine--very little attention has been paid to the equally crucial sexual nature of the American author's self-imposed exile. As a writer, Baldwin saw himself as the literary heir--and sometimes artistic parricide--of other famous American expatriates, most notably Henry James and Richard Wright. In parallel, the Harlem-born Baldwin located himself within another tradition, albeit a more discrete, camouflaged one: the tradition of male authors of homosexual or bisexual persuasion, who have contributed to American literature and have often been expatriates at one point or another in their artistic careers--Walt Whitman, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and, closer to our time, Gore Vidal, Edmund White and Melvin Dixon. It is also noteworthy that within this homo /bisexual tradition, there has been, from early on, an important African American presence.(1) The premise of this essay is that Baldwin's French exile was as much concerned with issues of critical and racial affirmation and identity as with the more private aspects of his emerging sense of sexual emancipation, as a black man and a gay male.
Remarkably, Baldwin's rhetorical articulation of an idiosyncratic discourse on sexuality began at the time that he read Andre Gide and wrote his essay. The text by Gide that Baldwin focused on, Madeleine, Et Nunc Manet in Te, is often overlooked in the Gidean canon. At first glance, it appears to be Gide's posthumous homage to his wife Madeleine. Just as Baldwin never adopted a publicly homosexual persona or the stance of a gay activist during his lifetime--reserving this for the last interviews and his indirectly autobiographical fiction--Gide chose not to discuss his matrimonial affairs until after his wife's death in 1938, at a time when "the most enlightened commentators [on his work] did not even know her real given name" (Madeleine vi). It must be noted that Madeleine Gide maintained a deliberately self-effacing role throughout her married life; there is only one known picture of her, and she left no writings that might provide her own account of the years that she spent with the famous writer. What we know about her is therefore through Gide's necessarily skewed perspective; in the very few instances that he mentions her at all in his Journal, her husband refers to her by the Biblical name "Emmanuele." Furthermore, the purely platonic nature of Gide's union with Madeleine contributed to her total obfuscation. In the confessional, guilt-ridden tone that characterizes Madeleine, the French writer admits that he is "amazed at the aberration which led [him] to think that the more ethereal [his] love was, the more worthy it was of her--for [he] was so naive as never to wonder whether or not she would be satisfied with an utterly disincarnate love" (16).
Baldwin focused on this aspect of Gide's matrimonial affairs, and used it to bolster his overall critique of Gide's text: noting that Madeleine is above all, evidence of "what it cost [Gide] in terms of unceasing agony, to live with this problem [sic] at all," Baldwin goes on to say that Madeleine Gide was not so much a victim of Gide's sexual nature as "the victim of his overwhelming guilt...which connected with her own guilt and shame" ("The Male Prison" 129). The American author sums up the couple's tormented relationship when he adds that "she was his Heaven who would forgive him for his Hell and help him to endure it" (130). From the start of his critical reading of Gide's text, Baldwin puts the finger on the crucial link he sees between Gide's discovery of his sexual preference and the stern religious tradition that had molded him. Indeed, Gide's guilt in Madeleine is clearly connected with the stern French Protestant, huguenot, heritage of his family, particularly embodied by his mother. The tension between the religious and the sexual is also conspicuous in the tropes of dichotomization that occur in this specific text, and in the Gidean oeuvre as a whole. As critics have noted, both in his discussion of his own life, and in the ensuing attempts to establish a literate discussion and clarification of homosexuality, Gide had to navigate the volatile straits that bridge nature and culture, honesty and hypocrisy, corruption and moral integrity, anomaly and conformity, sexual hedonism and religious rigor. As early as the Platonic dialogues in Corydon, Gide set out to become a "homosexual moralist," or at least to establish the ethics of homosexuality.(2)
