Don Quixote: Facing the Power

Witold Jacorzynski

Abstract


This article gives an account of the power relationship in Don Quixote, a famous Miguel de Cervantes novel. While Don Quixote is deluded into thinking that he is really a brave and noble knight errant who will set right all the wrongs of the world, he is faced with his relatives and friends, his niece, the housekeeper, Nicolas the barber, the priest, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, and many others who try to get him back to his hacienda in order to “rescue” him. It is argued that their attitudes can be seen as strategies to defend a social system to which a madness of Don Quixote was a thread. What Don Quixote opposed were the institutions on which the social system in the 17th century Spain was founded: the family, the state, the church, the scientific authority. Although the violent and paternalistic attempts were undertaken to stop Don Quixote’s mission, the real purpose of his “benefactors” was not an annihilation but a symbolic appropriation of Quixote’s courage, spontaneity and firmness.


Keywords


Don Quixote; political power; practices; resistance; social order; symbolic appropiation

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/i.2017.42.2.121
Date of publication: 2018-06-13 09:03:28
Date of submission: 2018-02-25 12:06:03


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