The Confused Males of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters,...

The Confused Males of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Voltaire’s Candide, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses â€Å"Now my father was then holding one of his second beds of justice, and was musing within himself about the hardships of matrimony, as my mother broke silence.— —My brother Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman.† —Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.† (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy) The eighteenth century, what a magnificent time—a contemporary critic is likely to exclaim, and indeed it was. The century of Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant, Swift, Sterne,†¦show more content†¦And yet, while enjoying immensely the ironic, sometimes sarcastic, tone of these books, I could not help noticing a quite intriguing detail, which â€Å"sparked† my curiosity now and then. To put it in a delicate way, the main male characters in the books either are not capable of dealing with the opposite sex at all (as in the pitiful case of Captain Gulliver) or they have certain difficulties in doing so (and we will see many examples of this kind). The notion of male sexual failure emerges in all these books, suggesting to the attentive reader that probably not all the discoveries of the eighteenth century were that glamorous.1 Let us, however, look into the texts. Uzbek, a Persian traveler in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, leaves his beautiful wives in the seraglio in Ispahan under the watchful eyes of the eunuchs and heads for Paris (eternal dreams of any married man) â€Å"to pursue the laborious search for wisdom† (41). The reader might ponder how â€Å"laborious† this â€Å"search† could be in Paris, but nothing of that kind ever happens; certainly Uzbek is not having a good time there: I am living in a barbarous region, in the presence of everything that I find oppressive, and absent from everything I care about. I am prey to sombre melancholy and fall into dreadful despair; I seem not to exist any more, and I become aware of myself again only when lurking jealousy flares up in my heart and there breeds alarm, suspicion, hatred and regret. . . . Sometimes I