Cunegonde as a Secondary Character

Cunegonde is one of Candide’s many companions throughout his adventure. She is the daughter of the baroness and is of very royal blood. Like many of Voltaire’s novel’s characters, Cunegonde in my opinion does not at first or even second glance have much depth. She begins like Candide – young, carefree, and lusty, secure in her youth, beauty, and wealth. Like Candide, she is exposed to the teachings of the bumbling Dr. Pangloss and becomes convinced of his worldview, that this is the best of all worlds- in other words, radical optimism. Candide shares these views at the beginning of the novel and throughout his miseries; in my opinion, he has not changed much by the end (thus, the quest he undertook seems ironic and pointless). Though he does assert more rationally, “We must cultivate our garden,” make our own luck in other words, Voltaire gives no other indication that his views on optimism have changed, other than some sparse and cautious questions he asks. During the worst times, he retains his sunny hope for the future. In having such a static character, Voltaire ridicules this philosophy.

So what does he mean to say to me with Cunegonde as a character? Taking up where we left off, Cunegonde endures seeing her lover booted from the castle. She witnesses her father and brother butchered and her mother torn apart. She his raped and tortured repeatedly, made to work as a slave, witnesses countless brutal events, and is brutalized herself beyond imagination.

So when we meet up with her again after all this, has her life perspective been altered as we would expect a normal person’s to? Voltaire does not go particularly in depth into this- is he saying that she doesn’t really count because she’s a woman? I don’t think so. I don’t really understand the story, to be honest, because I have trouble relating to novels with little internal voice and emotion. I did notice that Voltaire depicts short scenes in which Cunegonde briefly questions the things that have happened to her, the justness of her situation. To me, this indicates that Voltaire intends to characterize her as a person of low intelligence and of little consequence except in her relationship to the novel’s title character.

She appears to serve, for the most part, as a Holy Grail figure, an object of Candide’s seemingly never-ending quest. Cunegonde has all the qualities of a quest’s reward- she is beautiful, virtuous (at least in the beginning), and in love with the hero. He goes to all the corners of the world to find her. So what does it mean when they are finally reunited for the last time and she has become terribly ugly- fat and sunburned according to Candide? Does it mean that she never was that beautiful, that Candide simply built her up in his mind as a figure of unlimited beauty? And that after his trials, his prize has become meaningless? To me, this is yet another way that Candide’s quest can be seen as ironic.

But what if Cunegonde really did lose her beauty? Does she deserve it? How does it really affect her besides decreasing the likelihood of her being raped? Sure, Candide doesn’t really like her anymore but he is still determined to marry her. And that- is it really out of honor or is he simply unable to let go of the holy grail that he has put so much effort into finding, despite the fact that he doesn’t really want her anymore? Though Cunegonde herself doesn’t have much depth, her relationship to Candide makes her a significant figure in the novel.