Strait Is the Gate (French: La Porte étroite) was published by the Mercure de France in 1909. The title comes from Matthew 7:13 — “Enter ye in at the strait gate” — and the novel examines what happens when someone takes that injunction literally. Jérôme and Alissa are cousins who grow up together and fall deeply in love. Their union seems inevitable — everyone expects it, both families approve, and neither has any practical obstacle. But Alissa, influenced by her reading of the mystics and by a profound, self-consuming religious devotion, gradually withdraws from Jérôme, renouncing earthly love in pursuit of a spiritual perfection that she believes requires the sacrifice of everything she most desires.
Gide constructs the narrative with extraordinary cunning. Jérôme tells the story, and his account presents Alissa’s renunciation as noble, if painful. But after Alissa’s death, her journal is discovered, and its entries reveal a different story: a woman tormented by desire, by jealousy (she has been told that her sister also loves Jérôme), and by a religious fervor that may be genuine devotion or may be a sublimation of feelings she cannot face. The gap between Jérôme’s narrative and Alissa’s journal is the novel’s true subject.
Gide intended Strait Is the Gate as the obverse of The Immoralist: if Michel’s sin is excess of freedom, Alissa’s is excess of virtue. Both are destroyed by their refusal to accept the ordinary compromises of human life. Together, the two books constitute Gide’s analysis of the Protestant temperament — a temperament he knew intimately, being its product and its victim.
Collecting Strait Is the Gate
First edition (Mercure de France, Paris, 1909, in French): Paperback wrappers.
Market values:
- French first edition, fine: $400–$1,000
- English first edition (Knopf, 1924): $80–$200