Voltaire’s Candide and the film Dangerous Beauty share a strikingly common aspect despite their very different genres: the women in both were portrayed as objects, subject to the value that men endow them. The women in Candide are portrayed as victims of their sexuality. Cunegonde, the old woman, and Paquette have all been subject to rape, prostitution and slavery. This is because they were women and had no means to defend themselves.
They were treated as merely objects. In the case of Cunegonde, she was even shared by the Grand Inquisitor and the Jewish Don Issachar, with four days to the Inquisitor and three to the merchant.Cunegonde was like a piece of machinery that has no feelings or value other than what is accorded to her by the men around her. In the same way, the old woman and Paquette experienced similar incidents. The old woman woke up with a French eunuch attempting to rape her, who then sells her off to slavery. Paquette too finds herself being passed on from one man to the next, from a surgeon, to a judge, to a brothel.
It would have been different if the women used their sexuality to get themselves out of problematic situations, but in the novel they were not really given a choice.They had no will, and were generally regarded as objects to be enjoyed and then discarded. In the same way, the women in the film, Dangerous Beauty, were regarded as little more than possessions. They have no free will to speak of – they cannot choose who to marry, they cannot pursue education and certain freedoms unless they would like to become courtesans, or prostitutes.
They have to use their bodies for leverage, to be able to exercise some power over men. Then, even as they wield power as celebrated and sought-after courtesans as in the case of the heroine, Veronica, they would give away everything they have for that one man.
