The Rape of Roxane and the End of the World in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes

Catastrophe is oddly comforting--Hollywood thrives on the genres that the concept produces. The sped-up time of lurching toward a cataclysmic event allows for many grand cliches around life and death. --Srinivas Aravamudan, "The Catachronism of Climate Change" (1) The main character of the Lettres persanes (1721) worries incessantly over the fidelity of the five wives he has left behind in his Ispahan seraglio. Not that Usbek loves these women; as he explains early on in the novel to Nessir, his most intimate correspondent, one may avoid such emotional attachments through sexual oversatiety: "Dans le nombreux serail ou j'ai vecu, j'ai prevenu l'amour et l'ai detruit par lui-meme" (138, letter 6). (2) What Usbek fears is not infidelity per se but rather public humiliation: "N'aimerois-je pas mille fois mieux une obscure impunite, qu'une correction eclatante?" (138). It follows that his marked preference for his youngest wife, Roxane, is based not on her relative youth or beauty but rather on his belief in her exceptional "virtue," defined as a principled resistance to having sex, even with her husband. (3) The first line of the novel's closing missive, Roxane's vitriol-laced letter 161, reveals of course that she is quite open to having sex--just not with Usbek, whom she finds repulsive and whose paranoia (and eunuchs) she has been manipulating: "Oui, je t'ai trompe: j'ai seduit tes eunuques, je me suis jouee de ta jalousie, et j'ai su, de ton affreux serail, faire un lieu de delices et de plaisirs" (372). Roxane's opening "oui" reminds us that Usbek is already aware, when he reads letter 161, that a strange man has been found in the bed of this most "virtuous" of wives. But while his lead eunuch, Solim, declares that this transgression on Roxane's part has left him shocked and disgusted with her, he comes close to expressing admiration for Roxane's virile paramour, who, having been discovered in flagrante delicto, manages to fight his way out of his lover's chambers, injuring a number of eunuchs in the process. At last, overcome and dying, this unidentified hero makes a final request: to return to his beloved's rooms, "pour mourir, disoit-il, aux yeux de Roxane" (371). The request is, unsurprisingly, denied, but the adulterous couple have their revenge: Roxane takes Usbek's eunuchs with her to the grave, poisoning them alongside herself. As we read the last line of the novel, the poison takes full effect in her body: "La plume me tombe des mains; je sens affoiblir jusqu'a ma haine; je me meurs" (373). This decidedly eclatant revenge--a seraglio scandal to beat all others--has long been explored as a metaphor for political resistance. (4) Recent scholarship also insists on the gender politics of Roxane's final letter; indeed, to do otherwise is to read this work's greater political message anachronistically, as Sylvana Tomaselli has demonstrated. (5) But this reading transcends, to the point of eclipsing, the subplot of the harem, losing sight of the significant fact that this young woman's suicide is first and foremost an act of broken-hearted despair in the face of her lover's murder. As Roxane pathetically writes: "Je vais mourir... Car que ferais-je ici, puisque le seul homme qui me retenait a la vie n'est plus?" (372). In refocusing attention on the literal level of the seraglio subplot, I begin in part one of this piece by taking a close look at the hints dropped about Roxane's affair prior to letter 161. I argue that these details, while easily overlooked, serve to prepare the reader for the stunning revelations on which the novel closes. In performing this close reading, I am following Philip Stewart's recent reconsideration of Usbek, based on the idea that errors of interpretation become solidified when a work has been studied as closely and over such a long period of time as has the Lettres persanes ("Toujours Usbek"). Stewart's Usbek is, however, infinitely suspicious and alert--even to Roxane's machinations--while the Usbek I present has a fatal blind spot. …