Cervantes - Don Quixote Essay

The minds of humans are imperfect. It is for this reason that it is often easy to mistake fantasies and reality. Fantasies can be described as wishful thinking, as imagining something perfect and they may or may not have their roots based on reality. Therefore, reality is what we can deduce from the fives senses and experience. In Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, many different kinds of women are encountered throughout the adventures of Don Quixote. There are poor peasants, rich vassals, prostitutes, and even shepherdess. Women in this novel seem to fall under either women of fantasy or as a women of reality. There is a stark difference between the two groups of women, but sometimes they are so sublime that they may even jump between women of fantasy and those of reality. Dorotea, the rich peasant and wife of the nobleman Don Fernando, and Luscinda, a very wealthy women and wife to Cardenio, would fall explicitly into the category of sublime women which can transcend from reality to fantasy and work their way between either realm. Dulcinea and Aldonza Lorenza fall into categories the very contrasting categories of fantasy and reality, respectively. Therefore, Luscinda, Dorotea, and Dulcinea serve as the fantastical ideals that men desire women to be, but truth of the matter is that most women of the time were what Aldonza Lorenzo was a women of reality.

Despite being written more than 150 years ago, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo has upheld its original popularity and secured a position within classic literature. The Count of Monte Cristo proved to encompass many trends of the French Romantic period, which examined human personality in a personal and imaginative way unlike previous literary styles. Dumas’ novel was influenced by the historical period preceding it; Popular literary trends, foreign literary influences, and the shadow of Napoleon’s fallen empire all impacted The Count of Monte Cristo by shaping unique themes.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is a story that includes many tales of a man obsessed with chivalry, Don Quixote, and his squire, Sancho Panza. These tales contain various important themes, one including male and female relations. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encountered male and female relations of all types – promiscuous, ideal, young, and old – and from all of these types of relations that the two men encountered, the reader learned a lot about male and female relations, which developed this theme into a significant one throughout the book.

How important is an individual that most often than not authors focus on the growth of one over the growth of the many? Is it because the growth of one symbolizes the growth of all? Or is the focus on the individual due to the image it presents which is the growth in us? In any event, this outlook of individualism is widespread in literature and different genres and techniques excavate the development of the individual. Another factor that comes into play in the development of the character is the situation and the effects of the environment. Within William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and Michael Cervantes Saavedra’s satire Don Quixote are two different characters molded and formed or in both cases malformed to incorporate their

Back in those days a woman who loses her virginity was seen as a disgrace to her family and community. Her so called husband had disappeared and there was no real witness to support her story. Here Cervante uses the misfortune of Dorotea to point fingers at those who took advantage of women and got away with it. The irony here is that the victim finds herself running while the oppressor continues his conquest of destroying women lives. Cervante shows here how Don Fernando who represented a threat for women in the society was untouchable and not seen as an abuser. Since Don Fernando was a man a Hidalgo (Member of the Upper class), no one questioned him. Cervante brings up the subject of rape that everyone in the Spanish society pretends to not see. Cervante though Dorotea shows how women’s lives are destroyed due to the assail behavior of men. Don Fernando’s banditry led Dorotea to exclude herself from the society, she finds herself living in the mountains far away from home in order to avoid insults. Cervante openly describes his disagreement towards this bullish behavior towards women. Cervante tries to explain that it’s not normal that woman who had lost their virginity were regarded as sinners, considering that there may be different reasons which led to

A writer, no matter how great, no matter how brilliant his work, does not exhaust the literary wealth of a nation in a given era, but with all your heritage or just one of his work, he can score the highest peaks of the literature. Based on merit and dignity Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra takes the first place in the literature of the Spanish Renaissance, because most profound and extraordinary artistic force reflected the spirit and meaning of his time. In an ingenious unique way, it has revealed the battle between old and new in its era from the standpoint of humanism. In the history of world literature Cervantes is known primarily as the author of the novel "Don Quixote".

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is grounded in past records on a figure by the name Don Quixote. While it is unclear from the text itself to what degree Cervantes had embellished the so-called history, it is certain by his own admittance that the work is “inventive” (Cervantes, 446). From this it is immediately apparent that it is not truthfully a history in an Aristotelian sense. Yet still it maintains that grounding in reality, and to call Cervantes’ Don Quixote a “truthful history” is perfectly sound, for sufficiently relaxed definitions of truthfulness and history. Two opposing approaches to what is permitted in a work called a history can be found from Aristotle, particularly in his Poetics, and from Tagore’s The Ramayana.

2 In this sense, the role of the pre-Cide Hamete deflationist character of Cervantes 's authorship of/in Don Quixote I-II as hinted at in the late stages of this prologue and subsequently throughout the book, is to be understood as part of his strategy to insists on the importance of linguistic self-awareness through the deployment of the self-reflective narrative technique, e.g. by warning us that the poems of praise featuring in his book are counterfeit, but including them nevertheless.

On the other hand, Don Quixote is ridiculed for trying to be chivalrous in after the rest of the world has moved on to the Renaissance. They are similar because both characters lose their way or are forced off the path they need to be on. Lastly, these “heroes” are similar because both dedicate their quests to women. For Juan, he is trying to stop his letter to protect Mariana, his love. Don Quixote dedicates his efforts to a peasant. Throughout the course of both texts, the male figures lose sight of the women they dedicated their lives to, showing how little they actually cared for these women and how they simply wanted the associated glory. Clearly, the time between “The Censors” and Don Quixote didn’t affect Valenzuela or Cervantes view of “heroes”. Although he was heroic, his peers disagreed.

    In “The Female Quixote,” the whimsical nature of fiction is not just a barrier to social acceptance, but an absurdity. Following popular notions of the time, fiction is presented as a diversion and an indulgence that cannot be reconciled with reality and threatens the reader’s perception of actual experience. The theme is common, as is evident through the basis of this novel, Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” and other works such as “Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen. The story is a series of examples of what not to do, acting as both a cautionary tale and conduct guide. But there is a fundamental instability in the work resulting from the opposition of the moral and the means in which it is

The indisputable literary value of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (usually abbreviated to Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes places his work at the top of the global canon of literature. Internationally recognised as Cervantes’s masterpiece, the work was published in the early seventeenth century during the European Renaissance period, hallmarking the Spanish Golden Age of literature as “the first modern novel” in the history of writing. One may naturally wonder then, what exactly are the radical components of Don Quixote that gives it the element of “modernity” which raises its values up above all the precedent literary works of earlier centuries?

Author and journalist, Barbara Reynolds, in a scholarly review by Arthur Terry, stated that the book Don Quixote, “…offers a great detail, especially the interesting introduction, the excellent notes, and the helpful cast of characters. Students and other serious readers of the classics will be grateful.” (Terry 107) Reynolds expresses her opinion that Don Quixote is a well written and highly recommended novel. Within the book, there are a series of short stories, poems, and essays. Though this is a good novel, there is some debate as to whether or not the first six chapters of the book are an exemplary novel, yet this should not be a dispute seeing as the six chapters contain the qualities and characteristics of an exemplary novel.

In Maria de Zayas’ La tracion en la amistad. This comparative study shows the connection between the two characters, Don Juan and Fenisa. In the essay, Larson discussed gender reversals in the La traición, where Fenisa is the echo of Don Juan Tenorio in Burlador which they were represented as trickster and having many lovers. This shows the subversion of gender representation because this shows how the females are also manipulative. Zayas, the dramatist, shows the inclination of women to lust. Unlike in the stereotypes of women that they are expected to be submissive and the idea of repressing desires, Fenisa was shown as a female character manipulating men for her desires. It challenged the idea of taming the wild nature of women. The character of Fenisa resembles Don Juan that shows lust and selfishness. This intertext challenged the gender binaries and/or gender oppositions that contemporary writers tend to lean into. Larson explored the relationships between men and women in the novel, noting how the two dramas dealt with social issues. She commented how ‘Zayas' play is simultaneously an inversion, a subversion, and a comic copy of the Burlador, especially with regard to the relationships between men and women, power and authority, seduction and deception, subject and object’

The Don Quixote we know today, has changed a numerous amount of times. Not because of someone wanting to alter it, but the simple fact of Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. It’s simple, fusion of horizons is when one translates text from one language to another. The texts do not directly translate, so the translator will explain the text in a similar form. Because texts do not directly align, and translate, a new meaning can be formed. Thus is Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. Because of Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, Cervantes’ meanings could be completely different than what was intended. Many readers now believe Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the form of a satire.

The purpose of the book also pertains with the thought of Quixotism and the invention of characters. Clearly, it was to undermine the influence of the “vain and empty book of chivalry” in order to provide some merry and prudent material for reader’s entertainment. Although it is immaterial he did make a complete end to the further publications of chivalric romances. Cervantes himself wrote in the latter section of part 1, for chivalry,” offers wide and spacious window through which the pen may run without any hindrance.” Perhaps Don Quixote owes his genesis to these notions of his author. But as Cervantes launches his idealistic and possessed hero on a career open to public contempt, the possibilities of a many-leveled, kaleidoscopic theme may have become apparent very early if the characters were not incorporated in a beguiling way. The way he integrated his character not only helped him produce an idealistic effect on his work but also kept track of his idea of “Quixotism” in the quixotic environment created by Don Quixote all throughout the novel