Monkey Business

When it comes to cherish love and marriage, the most difficult decision of your life comes to be. You decide who you will love and surrender your love towards that person forever. Love is an inflexible aspect of Candide, evoked mainly through Lady Cunegonde herself. She feels love toward Candide, and Candide towards her, but ends submitting her love to Don Fernando. This clearly shows how, according to Voltaire’s satire, women tend to follow the wrong decisions in love and marriage. They tend to marry the one who's richer, the one who has more quartering’s, the one who's stronger. But never the one who loves them more. In case of Cunegonde, Candide.

Through the use of monkeys, Voltaire clearly mocks this aspect of women's tendency of love. Practically saying, she will even marry monkeys before marrying him who loves her. Candide himself encounters the case: "Why should you find it so strange that in some parts of the world monkeys obtain ladies' favours? they are partly human, just I am partly Spanish" (70). The monkeys are completely absurd in the scene. But that's why, they play the role of boosting the Voltarie's target essence. Through them the satire becomes evident. The worst of all is that it is true: monkeys are partly human. Then, why not marry a monkey? If we marry people who are partly Colombian, partly American, why not marrying someone who is partly human?