Montaigne’s "On the Power of Imagination" and Diderot’s "The Indiscreet Jewels"

Montaigne’s essay On the Power of Imagination explores the idea of imagination and its power over reality. He notes that “all this can be attributed to the close stitching of mind to body, each communicating its fortunes to the other.” This relates to Diderot’s story The Indiscreet Jewels, in which a sultan has a ring that he can point at women to make their “jewels” talk. When this happens it can be considered a manifestation of the mind communicating to the body as the talking jewel recites the plain truth from the mind without the mouth’s filter. Montaigne also says “It is quite a different matter that the imagination should sometimes act not merely upon its own body but on someone else’s.” In Diderot’s story, the sultan’s imagination, which imagines women’s jewels spilling their secrets. This seed of thought that has arisen within his imagination is what enacts his wish through the use of the ring.

Aside from this, Montaigne also maintains the opinion “that those ridiculous attacks of magic impotence by which our society believes itself to be so beset that we talk of nothing else can readily be thought of as resulting from the impress of fear or apprehension.” This statement leads into an explanations and examples of how men’s imaginations and thoughts of impotency can suddenly translate to real impotency in the body and that this fear of impotency actually makes men more likely to get it. This is somewhat similar to what happens in Diderot’s story in that after hearing the first woman’s jewel talk and reveal her secrets, all the other women feared that it would happen to them as well and that they too would suffer the terrible consequences of such an occurrence. Diderot describes this fear in the sultan’s mistress when he says “At these terrible words, the favorite paled, trembled, pulled herself together, and beseeched the sultan…not to test on her.” He also goes on to describe that “All the ladies had an air of constraint and spoke only in monosyllables. They were wary, expecting that at any moment a jewel might join in the conversation.” Also Montaigne’s idea that what one constantly imagines will occur is shown in the story when the sultan walks in to hear one of the women trying to hide her fear of such by saying that she feared nothing it could say, and he then points the ring at her and makes her jewel speak.

In addition to this, the essay implies that mind is what creates reality and this applies to creation of gender identity and gender roles as what we imagine, because people shape their identity to norms society creates. These norms are essentially what one imagines a “normal” man or woman to be. This imagined role translates over to the body and thus incites certain behavior that contributes to the determination of the gender identity.