ABSTRACT
In 1869 Andre Gide was born in Paris into a wealthy Protestant family. Gide's love life was fragmented more than that of any other man in this study because he was cut off in so many ways-from his own sexual desires, from his mother, from his adolescent lovers, from his wife, from the Calvinist church, from French society, and from his God. Gide's Nietzschean spokesman Menalque urges that "every new thing should always find the whole of us wholly available. The major source of Gide's early Christian instruction was a pious Protestant mother. When he was seventeen, his mother sent him to Paris to prepare for his First Communion, but Pastor Couve's boring instruction drove Gide to undertake his own religious education. Parallel in time to his Journals, he dramatized his anti-Christianity in fiction with tragedy, farce, romance, and satire. The contrasting ideas and emotions set the terms of Gide's intense ambivalence about Christianity.
