Written in 1909, The Narrow Gate tells the story of Alisha, the hero, who resolutely rejects worldly happiness and human happiness in order to maintain his perfect and pure virtue. She loves her cousin Jerome, but in order to keep her pure mind, their love has to stop at spiritual communication. In the narrow door leading to happiness, the fragrance of Arisha disappeared and life came to an end.
Gide tells a love story kidnapped by morality and reason with the narrow door as a clue. Through this story, he tells readers that Platonic love with only spirit and no lust is not the only way to get happiness.
0 1 "platonic love of spirit rather than lust"
Alisha and Jerome are childhood friends, and adults know that they have no speculation. I hope they will enter the marriage hall when they grow up. Alisha is mature and kind, and Jerome works hard. They communicate with each other and tell each other their feelings in letters.
Alisha is a philanthropist because she forgot to love herself. After her mother eloped with a strange man, she took care of her father, brother and sister alone. After her father died, she divided the property among the poor. She has a pure heart and simply believes that people who abandon the world of mortals will get happiness.
Alisha's pursuit of pure and perfect love actually stems from her excessive desire for happiness. Her mother's infidelity made her doubt about marriage. In her childhood impression, a beautiful and sexy mother is a symbol of desire and body. Alisha is the most like her mother, but she doesn't want to betray her father like a runaway mother. That kind of marriage is immoral and unhappy.
Jerome's feelings for Alisha are rational and moral to some extent. When he grew up and really felt the pain of sensuality, he didn't possess Alisha selfishly, but respected and cared for her. Love also inspired his sense of responsibility.
As they grow up and mature, they will fall into emotional difficulties every time they meet. Jerome can't stand Alisha's lofty, while Alisha values morality and perfect love more than Jerome.
Alisha confessed her love for Jerome in her diary: "All my virtues are just to please him, but I don't think my virtues can last around him." .
Alisha abandoned Jerome in pursuit of the ideal state of love. When Jerome proposed to her, she loved Jerome, but she didn't allow her pure feelings to become mediocre and boring. The love between Jerome and Alisha runs counter to each other in Chasing Me.
Allen de Botton said in Love Notes: "Sex is the product of the body. It doesn't need to think, just wants to revel, be straightforward, get rid of the shackles of reason and completely satisfy the body's desires. In contrast, the mind cannot yield to the torrent of lust. 」
In Alisha's view, it is impossible for her to give up her faith, morality and reason to gain physical desires. Just like Plato's love, Plato mentioned in the dialogue "Drinking": "The noblest love is spiritual love, which is the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty by both parties. Reject physical desires and pursue spiritual purity. 」
Platonic love is absolutely pure and should not be associated with dirty carnal desires. Once a physical relationship occurs, it is no longer pure love, but pure love is a noble moral and rational treatment.
It is unrealistic to fall in love only in the spiritual world.
Pure spiritual love exists, but it is only a stage in love. Life is long, so we should face the real life.
Alisha and her lover Jerome read together, shared their views in letters and expressed their feelings in words. When he was young, Jerome could accept such a distance, but as he grew older, he wanted to marry Alisha, just like Juliet, Alisha's sister, and live an ordinary husband-and-wife life, get married and have children, and start his own family.
Alisha despised her sister Juliet's civilian love. She thinks such a marriage will bind her soul. What she wants is pure and ideal love, not family or trivial life.
In her eyes, my sister is unhappy, because her husband is in business, and my sister is also doing business with her husband, not studying. My sister keeps giving birth to children, and life is ordinary and simple, and life has become unremarkable.
In Alisha's eyes, the life my sister chose is a broad road to happiness, not a narrow door to happiness. The narrow door to happiness should be to have perfect love.
The feelings of Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu in A Dream of Red Mansions are just like Alisha's feelings for Jerome. They read, write lyrics and write poems together. In the eyes of delicate Lin Daiyu, her feelings for Jia Baoyu are pure and supreme, and she dreams and longs for perfect love. While Xue Baochai is sophisticated, realistic and rational. In her view of love, she listens to her parents' orders and the matchmaker's words. Marriage is the only way out for women. Marriage brought her protection. She doesn't care about love, but more about how to manage marriage in reality.
Alisha pursues Platonic love, stands beside his lover, pays silently, waits quietly, and does not expect to enter or pray for possession. Even though I knew it would never work out, I persisted.
It is this unrequited greatness that doomed its tragic ending. In the end, it can only be a parallel line waiting in the distance, leaving only the beautiful fragments in the memories as eternity.
The artistic process of the novel: narrated in the form of the first person, with a strong sense of reality.
In Narrow Door, Gide tells the story in the first person, which makes readers truly feel the emotional changes of the couple. In addition, in order to let readers know the heroine's psychological state, Gide also presented Alisha's spiritual world in the form of letters.
Let's look at the sentences in the novel:
In this article, we can truly feel Jerome's pure and affectionate love for Alisha, as well as her inner longing and unattainable helplessness. She knows that her lover Alisha wants an idealistic perfect love, and she is trying to satisfy it and hope to get rid of this dilemma.
Jerome is also influenced by morality. For a time, he became a saint who suppressed his normal feelings. When it was time to see Alisha, he deliberately ignored it. When it comes to approaching her, he thinks that "the best action worthy of her is to leave her at once", and Jerome is constantly compromising for Alisha.
The "unattainable ideal state" shows Jerome's desperate heart for love, and the spiritual love pursued by Alisha makes him feel illusory, contradictory, tangled and painful.
In the first half of the article, we didn't understand the girl Alisha's strange behavior towards love until we read Alisha's diary.
The confession in this letter shows Alisha's inner contradiction. On the one hand, she pursues supreme spiritual love, on the other hand, she also understands that virtue and belief hinder her love and make her afraid to face love and happiness!
Alisha, because of her mother's sin, stimulated and hurt her heart and loved her lover. Because of her moral beliefs, she can't marry her lover. Suffering from mental torture, her life finally ended.
What do we think of Platonic love?
In most love tragedies in the history of literature, unreasonable social class barriers and human factors make lovers unable to combine, and finally end in pain and double suicide, such as Romeo and Juliet and butterfly lovers. There are also a few works that destroy the combination of two people because of the inner estrangement and emotional contradiction between the two sides.
And this story of Gide, a unique and simple love story, can reach such a depth. It is the abstract concept between them that leads to tragedy, Alisha's death and Jerome's lifelong regret.
They believe that the pursuit of perfect ideals and love beyond morality will lead to the narrow door of happiness.
There is a question in Zhihu, "Do you believe in Platonic love in modern society?"
Most netizens said that love is a kind of desire. Love a person, out of physiological instinct to kiss and touch, which is also the performance of love.
I don't believe in platonic love, but supporting spiritual love over physical pursuit will last longer.
The love between men and women begins with the spirit, but it is not limited to the spirit.
In the passion of love, we need to keep the light of reason, but there is no pure reason.
Reason needs its own life to give passion and strength, while cold reason needs passion to supplement it. That is love.
In real life, it is a long process for adults to realize love. It is not enough for two strangers to form their own family and live together with spiritual support. This also requires the tolerance and understanding of two people. It is not easy to get to know each other, so just cherish it.
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