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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Insanity and social class in Don Quixote

About half-way through Book One of Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote" the story takes a strange turn, as DQ meets a man who's gone mad for love and retreated to the wilderness of the Sierra Morenas (?) to live as a hermit; the man, Cardenia (?) begins telling DQ and Sancho Panza his story - how he fell in love with a beautiful girl from his village, they pledged to get married, but his father sent him away to live as a page and companion to some rich lord's son in a nearby town - a great opportunity supposedly -but the spoiled rich son catches a glimpse of the village beauty, sends Cardenia away on a pretext, and gets the beauty to marry him - her father sees opportunity and she is caught - Cardenia goes insane and runs off to the mountains. A few things are interesting about this tale: in the antic and strange narrative style of Cervantes, Cardenia wanrs DQ not to interrupt the tale, and when DQ does, to defend some point of chivalry, Cardenia beats him bloody (the millionth time this has happened in 200 pages - DQ has the constitution of a veteran prizefighter). C finishes his tale later to two other interlocutors. His tale is the prime example so far of feudalism gone crazy - it's not just DQ who's driven nuts by all te knightly tales, but even people in "contemporary" Spain, i.e., 1605, are victims of the insanity of the rules and structure of society - the importance of wealth and title and the impossibility of any shift in class other than through the beneficence of the nobility or through the stunning beauty that leads to a cross-class marriage - a "cinderella" story - and as everyone feels sorry for Cardenia nobody stops for a moment to question the system that drove him to misery and insanity. It's not a wonder that he's insane; it's a wonder than anyone's sane. A further note: according to a footnote, Shakespeare wrote a "lost play" on this theme - hard to imagine it, and I suspect it's well that it's lost, if it ever even existed. I also suspect that Cardenia will be united with his beloved before DQ ends - Cervantes is careful never to show her actually kill her husband or herself - my guess is she's off in a nunnery somewhere, just as crazy as C., a perfect couple.



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