The old women’s narration of her life story is a very “woe is me” story, and is a very traditional oral history. She used very vivid imagery to describe her terrible life as well as exaggerations to enhance the meaning of her story. It reminded me of a fishing story. One person tells a story—Cunegonde about her misfortune—and another person—the old women—tells an even bigger story. The second person’s story is even more extravagant in an attempt to either out do the other or in the case of the old women to prove a point. The old woman saw the bad side of life. She had experienced so much trouble that it would be normal that she viewed the world in this way. Cunegonde did nothing but complain about her life, and the old woman needed a way to prove that there were people in the world who were just as misfortunate of even more so than Cunegonde. The use of the overt exaggeration by Voltaire is done with the purpose of showing the misery of the human condition. The novel is filled with characters who are suffering, but keep saying that “it is the best of all possible worlds” so everything is fine. The old woman however was not like that. She was very realistic in her approach; she knew what had happened, but she did not see it happening because she was made for that purpose. I felt that the old woman saw her misfortune as something to overcome. That everything could only be a step up from how her life had been before. Throughout the course of the novel she is the only character who does not lament of her poor situation.
What I found so striking about her story is that it is one of reminiscence and sentimentality. The woman gives her story an air of melancholy. She was brutally tortured, yet she still looks back on her life with some sort of respect. This was her life no matter what happened. This correlates well with the modern memoir genre. A genre dominated by stories of woe or trauma, yet retold by people who respect the life they had as a way to teach them how to enjoy the life they are living.