How Does Voltaire Portray Women

Fear of cuckoldry is widely known theme in medieval and Renaissance English literature. Fear of cuckoldry was also a widespread fear in English society during those eras. Men often treated their wives as possessions. Once men and women married, divorce was almost impossible, especially since it was almost impossible to prove that one had been cuckolded. If one were cuckolded and one’s wife had another man’s child, one might spend decades taking care of that child and passing on one’s money and belongings to that child without ever knowing that one had been deceived. Unmarried women are seen as their fathers ' property and the play 's two marriages are marked by jealousy and cruelty. Most

    Candide on the surface is a witty story. However when inspected deeper it is a philippic writing against people of an uneducated status. Candide is an archetype of these idiocracies, for he lacks reason and has optimism that is truly irking, believing that this is the best of all possible worlds. Thus Voltaire uses a witty, bantering tale on the surface, but in depth a cruel bombast against the ignoramuses of his times.

After marriage, the husband was considered lord and master of the family. But not all the women were meek and submissive. By the 1700's, the woman’s status had rapidly improved in colonial America. A wife and child made as much as a man did. Although women did not have equality with men, their status greatly improved from their status in Europe. A woman’s station in life was determined by the position of their husbands or fathers. The women of the poorest families, compiled to work in the fields, stood at the bottom of the social ladder. One of the surest signs of the accomplishments a family had made, was the exemption of their women from the fields. Before 1740, girls were trained in household crafts and the practical arts of family management. But afterwards they began to study subjects that required reading and studying such subjects as grammer and arithmetic. The women of the upper classes occupied themselves mainly with planning the work of the home and with supervising the domestic servants. Along with these tasks the women also baked, nursed, and sewed. But there were many social restrictions placed on the women of that time. One such restriction was that a wife, in absence of her husband, was not allowed to lodge men even if they were close relatives. For

Voltaire attacks the corruption within the church and its officials as well.  The Grand Inquisitor, a significant clergyman, makes Cunegonde his mistress at a Mass service.  Even more ironic is that he shares her with a Jew.  It was a Franciscan priest that robbed Lady Cunegonde of her money and jewels.  The old woman identifies herself as the bastard daughter of a pope, and the papacy is also identified as keeping soldiers for private use.  When Candide is ill in France, a clergyman is one of the many that harasses him in attempt on his wealth.  Ironically, the disease that Pangloss catches from Paquette, originated from a Franciscan priest.  Voltaire portrays the church as violent and corrupt and the clergy as parsimonious fortune hunters.

Women were confronted by many social obligation in the late nineteenth century. Women were living lives that reflected their social rank. They were expected to be economically dependent and legally inferior. No

When first introduced to the narrator, readers quickly pick up on how observant she is to the world around her. However as the novel draws to a close, many quick events take place with little to no explanation or commentary from the

In Voltaire’s Candide, the women are constantly being victims of rape, abuse, and violence. They suffer no matter how rich or how poor they were. From Cunegonde to Paquette, and The Old Woman, none of these characters possess such importance as the male characters do. Voltaire ridicules gender roles and the lack of power these women had in the Enlightenment period, which was supposed to be a time of “intellectual freedom and equality for men and women” (Johnson)

In the sixteenth century the role of women in society was very limited. Women were generally stereotyped as housewives and mothers. They were to be married, living their life providing for her husband and children. The patriarchal values of the Elizabethan times regarded women as the weaker sex.’ Men were considered the dominant gender and were treated with the utmost respect by females. Women were mainly restricted within the confines of their homes and were not allowed to go school or to university, but they could be educated at home by private tutors. Men were said to be the ones to provide for their families financially. Women were often seen as not intelligent. Property could not be titled in the name of a female within the family. Legally everything the female had belonged to her husband. Poor and middle class wives were kept very busy but rich women were not idle either. In a big house they had to organize and supervise the servants.

According to the article “Rights for woman”, in the 1800 women were treated as subsequent class citizens, and they did not have many rights at all. They were not able to vote and were not encouraged to get an education, or even get a job that they enjoyed (Rights for Women, Par. 1). Women were expected to clean, cook, and find a husband. According to Juliet Levy, Marriage is an agreement that over all comes with substantial financial upbringing. (Levy, 427) As previously stated woman were worth less than men during that time, so the men were basically able to treat them however they wanted. Men were able to send their wives to insane asylums if they did not follow the rules or live up to the expectations of women of that time. According to an article on woman

Another scene of Candide claiming tyranny being manifested is when “they put me in prison instead. My innocence would not have saved me, If I not been moderately pretty. The judge released me on condition that he succeeded the doctor, But I was soon supplanted by a rival and dismissed without a penny in my pocket. That’s how I have been forced to continue in this detestable way of life.” (115) As Pangloss young, old mistress, Paquette was taken under a surgeon’s wing and cured her disease after it was acquired initially by Pangloss, but as time progressed, the surgeon’s wife was abusive and then poisoned by her own husband, so he then left them both and Paquette was then soon sent to prison and acquired by a judge that took advantage of her. Under certain conditions of her “freedom” was the simple fact that she was his mistress but he soon dismissed her while leaving with her money.

These women understand that in the 1800s they had very little power; only through men may they exert any influence. The female characters in Candide are of little importance to the action of the story. The narrator embraces a male perspective and does not endow any of the women with any interesting or redeeming qualities. The Old Woman, being ugly and world-weary does not even earn a name. Paquette is merely described as “a pretty and obedient brunette.” (5) She is pronounced obedient not because of her duties as a chambermaid, rather because she is quite willing to submit to the men in the baron’s castle. Cunegonde, Paquette, and the Old Woman are not intricate characters.

When the readers meet the young, subordinated wife of a physician, who remains nameless throughout the entire story, perhaps hinting at the commonness of such situations where all those women are the same: faceless and nameless, this woman’s dilemma becomes obvious. She has been stripped off the only function a woman in those times had, the domestic one, due to the fact that she suffers from a mysterious illness which requires the infamous bed cure. Gradually, she is treated more and more as a child, unable and even forbidden to express herself in a creative way, namely to write, being persuaded that it cannot do any good to someone in her condition. This is why the protagonist (who is simultaneously the narrator), takes it upon herself to write a journal about her experiences and the mysterious woman that haunts her from the

An expecting couple awaits to discover the gender of their baby. The nurse announces that it’s a girl. The couple is extremely excited, but do they truly grasp the weight of what this implies? Gender is not simply a physical trait, as it affects nearly every aspect of a person’s life. Stereotypes repress the potential in all men and women. The same stereotypes are found throughout literature such as Medea by Euripides, Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, “Sonnets” by Shakespeare, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frederick Waterman’s “The Best Man Wins”. A common thread between these pieces is that power can be gained by those who are suppressed by defying gender stereotypes and social hierarchies.

He sees firsthand the results of violence and rape, page 6 “There several young virgins, whose bodies have been ripped open, after they had satisfied the natural necessities of the Bulgarian heroes, breathed their last….The ground about them was covered with the brains, arms, and legs of dead men”. Moreover, two of the female characters, Cunegonde and the Old Woman are also subjected to rape and servitude as a result of warfare. Most of the violence in the novel Candide is as a consequence of continuous warfare and struggle for power. On page 95, the Old Woman remarks “ I would like to know which is worst, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-de-fe, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a gallery..”. All of these atrocities highlight the consequences of warfare in the 17th century, and exhibits Voltaire’s view of the world as absolutely chaotic in terms of the violence experienced by many of the characters in the novel, with so much suffering inflicted on all them that it becomes almost comical due to the frequency of their

The integration of Chaucer’s dual persona is important in showing her immediate appearance and how her character develops in her Prologue and Tale.