Voltaire's Zaïre: Fantasies of Infidelity, Ideologies of Faith

Abstract

In this article, Weber reads Voltaire's 1732 tragedy Zaïre, in which a young Christian slave is killed by her lover, the Muslim sultan of Jerusalem, as a commentary on the epistemological similarities between sexual jealousy and religious fanaticism. From the eighteenth century on, critics and audiences have conventionally seen the play as a masterpiece of tear-jerking sentimentality: pious Zaïre is slain by the sultan who loves her deeply, but who mistakes her secret assignation with a Christian priest for a romantic rendezvous and, in a jealous rage, stabs her to death, only to realize after the fact that his beloved was blameless. An emphasis on the text's bittersweet affective charge misses, however, Voltaire's own insistence on a vocabulary of "infidelity" whose double register of erotics and belief poses serious questions about the stringent, destructive aspects of the ideology of virtue that subtends both domains. Weber revisits Zaïre in order to highlight its timely meditation on the harmful effects of intolerance and suspicion in matters amorous and religious alike.