As he runs away from the needs of his harem, Usbek demonstrates an alienation typical of his age. The eighteenth century might not have invented loneliness, but it certainly refined it. Wondering why English pornographers of the late seventeenth century were compelled to make sexuality mechanical, disgusting, and shocking, Roger Thompson considers the social and intellectual changes that were to form the period. Taking into account the growth of commercialism, the shift from communal to self interest, the rise of the nuclear family dependent upon mutuality and privacy, he suggests the strains of private, and therefore diminished, lives existing between states of connection and dislocation. While

Loneliness could also become public spectacle. For at the moment that the body politic was being measured and found monstrous, the body personal was becoming, by virtue of its urban, commercial connections, an entity best studied in the street.