Strait Is the Gate

Alissa Bucolin loves her cousin Jérôme with an intensity the novel never questions, and builds an entire theology out of deferring him anyway, taking the Gospel verse that gives the book its title, strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, as a literal instruction that earthly happiness and the difficult road to virtue must be opposites. Every deferral, every small renunciation, reads to her as proof she is choosing the harder, truer path rather than simply failing to choose him.

Gide builds the novel's real critique underneath Alissa's sincerity: her asceticism, for all its Protestant piety, is just as total and just as self-focused a commitment as Michel's hedonism in The Immoralist, a totalizing devotion to her own private idea of virtue that costs Jérôme a life, costs her sister Juliette a genuine chance at happiness before Juliette settles for a marriage without passion, and ultimately costs Alissa herself the faith she was trying to prove through sacrifice, since the diary that closes the book shows her growing steadily less certain God is even asking this of her.

Gide sharpens the mismatch by letting the cousins' own letters drift apart over the years they correspond, Jérôme's remaining full of ordinary, hopeful plans while Alissa's grow steadily more abstract and devotional, so the reader watches, letter by letter, exactly the widening gap Jérôme himself is too patient and too in love to register fully until it is far too late to close.

The title's source, Matthew's Gospel, contrasts the narrow gate of life with the wide gate of destruction, and Gide, raised in the same austere Huguenot tradition he gives Alissa, builds the whole novel as a demonstration of what happens when a genuinely devout person takes a metaphor about spiritual discipline and applies it literally to an actual, living relationship, mistaking the deliberate difficulty of the road for proof that any easier one, including marriage to a man she loves without reservation, must be the wrong one.