Literary Criticism (1400-1800): Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (Essay Date Spring 1993)

Literary Criticism (1400-1800): Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) ©2011 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document. Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) SOURCE: Scherr, Arthur. “Voltaire's Candide: A Tale of Women's Equality.” Midwest Quarterly 34, no. 3 (spring 1993): 261-82. [In the following essay, Scherr lauds Candide as a classic and perennially popular work of literature, and examines its exploration of gender relationships, arguing that the play makes a case for the interdependent nature of male-female relationships.] Candide, Voltaire's great philosophical conte, is undoubtedly among the most popular and perennial of literary works; as such it has received an enormous share of frequently esoteric critical attention. Invariably stressing the climactic final chapter, concluding with Candide's decisive pronouncement, “il faut cultiver notre jardin [we must cultivate our garden],” many interpretations center on the issue of theodicy and the extent to which Voltaire and his protagonist recommend active struggle against evil, oppression, and war rather than isolated, selfish withdrawal from an inhumane society. Though these questions are important, Candide may be read on a parallel level as an examination of gender relationships and as Voltaire's paean to the beauty, common sense, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women. An argument for the moral, intellectual, and physical equality of women and men, interdependent composites of strength and frailty confronting an indifferent, often harsh natural environment and a brutal, indeed malevolent social one, is among its themes. In Voltaire's own life women played a far greater role than men. Though he never married, Voltaire readily acknowledged his dependence on his two mistresses, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749) and Mme Denis (1712-1790), who was also his niece, for intellectual, emotion, and erotic sustenance. They were his confidantes; indeed, the scholarly Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet—whom he lived with at her château at Cirey for much of the period from 1734-1749—inspired his enthusiasm for Newtonian physics, the philosophical study of history, metaphysics, biblical criticism, and deism. After the death of Marie Louise Mignot Denis's husband in 1744, Voltaire took his vivacious, affectionate, and somewhat duplicitous niece, whom he nicknamed “Bonne-Maman,” as his mistress, a relationship which continued almost uninterrupted until he died in 1778. Though she supplanted “the divine Emilie” as his sexual intimate, Voltaire remained deeply devoted to Mme du Châtelet as an intellectual partner (and perhaps competitor), a prudent counsellor who often curbed his hot temper and headstrong tactlessness toward his critics. Emilie died tragically at age forty-three, after giving birth to a daughter, fathered by her final lover, the Marquis de Saint Lambert, an officer and poet with whom she had begun an affair after Voltaire's puzzling withdrawal of his affections (which she naively ascribed to impotence). “I have not lost a mistress,” Voltaire lamented to his new paramour Mme Denis. “I have lost half of myself, a mind for whom mine was made, a friend of twenty years” (quoted in Aldridge, 169). Discerning in Emilie a hermaphroditic figure, a mixture of animus and anima, he confessed that she was for him more than a father, a brother, and a son, all male imagoes. Overlooking that her death was the result of a uniquely female function, he mourns her enigmatically as “un ami et un grand homme”—a friend and a great man (Mason, 36, 44), thereby implying his belief in sexual equality and interchangeability and his impatience with unmerited gender stratification. Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) 1 Literary Criticism (1400-1800): Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) Regarding Emilie more as a colleague than a lover, Voltaire's lust for her was unwontedly abashed; with his niece Mme Denis he candidly expressed his passion. Perhaps intimidated by Mme du Châtelet's noble birth (though her family was by no means wealthy), he warned a friend to hide from the “Sublime and delicate Emilie” some pornographic verses he had composed (Mason, 44; Besterman, 67-68). He felt more at ease with his sister's daughter, who shared his bourgeois roots. The personalities of the two women resemble Jude Fawley's wives in Thomas Hardy's immortal novel: the mercenary, voluptuous Arabella Donn and the erudite, slender, ethereal feminist Sue Bridehead. On the other hand, both Emilie and Marie Louise, like Candide's Cunégonde, were buxom and rosy-cheeked, suggesting that they embodied Voltaire's physically robust ideal of woman, rather than the eighteenth-century French stereotype of female beauty as pale, slim, and fragile. Indeed, Candide's paramour Cunégonde is in large measure a composite of the physical, sensual Mme Denis and the more cerebral, aristocratic, austere Mme du Châtelet. Both Voltaire's personal life and his chef d'oeuvre, Candide, attest his respect for women's experience and his belief in equality and reciprocity between the sexes. Both genders endure parallel ordeals, conflicts, and challenges and meet them with a common fortitude. At several junctures Cunégonde, Paquette, and the Old Woman more aptly reflect Voltaire's buoyant, “bisexual” temperament than the men, who invariably, like Candide and Pangloss, engage in passionate defense of absurd philosophical dogmas; argue illogically, often in an unwittingly droll and ironic manner, like the young Baron expounding his aristocratic prerogatives; or cynically evaluate people and events, like Pococuranté and Martin. At least until the final chapter, when Candide invokes the need to “cultivate our garden,” the novel's women display greater common sense, resilience, assertiveness, and sincerity. As this essay seeks to point out, the conte's two protagonists, Candide and Cunégonde, each exhibits a wide range of both “male” and “female,” aggressive and passive, personality traits. Similarly, the confusion, inversion, and consequent equalization of gender roles are among Candide's most prevalent motifs. Voltaire delineates a controversial theme of the “Radical Enlightenment”—sexual equality and equivalence, the uniformity of human nature, what David Hume (93) called its “constant and universal principles.” He employed his brilliant ironic wit to convey the view that men and women are each congruent compounds of reason and emotion. In his development of Candide's character, Voltaire depicts a young man who, at least at the outset, bespeaks a pronounced femininity and a readiness to interchange sexual identities. Although Voltaire may have intended Candide to represent Everyman, in the first chapter his personality is far from virile in the traditional sense of that word. On the contrary, we are told that he is naive, sincere, and open, with “the gentlest of characters and the simplest of intellects” (Candide, 3), traits which until recently were deemed “feminine.” Thus Candide's identity is somewhat androgynous, even tending toward “female” passivity and amenability at the conte's beginning. On the other hand, Mlle Cunégonde, Candide's lover, is presented in far more affirmative terms. She is “seventeen years old, rosy-cheeked, fresh, buxom, appetizing” (5). Especially in light of Voltaire's invariably restrained, symbolic, objectified style, this description is almost prurient compared with that of the other characters; it prepares the reader to perceive the woman as the more active, aggressive figure, and initially to identify with her as such. Indeed, passive, shy Candide finds himself entranced by Cunégonde's beauty, acclaiming her as convincing proof of the veracity of his tutor Dr. Pangloss's dictum that his was the “best of all possible worlds”: “Candide listened attentively, and believed innocently, for he thought Mademoiselle Cunégonde extremely beautiful, although he never found courage to tell her so” (7). Out of admiration and identification with the lovely young woman, Candide even muses about exchanging his tenuous male persona for her animated female identity, which in the context of activity takes on aspects traditionally associated with maleness: “He concluded that next to having been born Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, the second degree of happiness was to be Mademoiselle Cunégonde; the third, to see her every day; and the fourth, to listen to Master Pangloss, the greatest philosopher of the province, and Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) 2 Literary Criticism (1400-1800): Candide, Voltaire - Arthur Scherr (essay date spring 1993) consequently of the whole world” (7). When Cunégonde observes Pangloss engaged in sexual intercourse with her mother's chambermaid Paquette, “a very pretty and very docile brunette,” quite similar, in fact, to the “gentle” Candide, she determines to initiate an identical “lesson in experimental physics” with the young man. By attributing aggressive sexual intent to the female, Voltaire is perhaps indulging in that favorite male fantasy of the nymphomaniac or “phallic” woman. As Voltaire describes the pivotal event in his delightfully understated style, it is Cunégonde who seduces Candide: she “dropped her handkerchief; Candide picked it up; she innocently took his hand; the young man innocently kissed the young lady's hand with a highly special vivacity, sensitivity, and grace; their lips met,

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