Description
- Abstract:
- While scholars have examined at length the critical problems of humor and violence in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, rarely have they considered the workings of shame in this novel. Hidden and silent, this bodily affect carries great communicative force in the novel, especially in part II in key episodes that unfold in the ducal palace where Don Quixote and Sancho spend so many chapters. This dissertation examines the convergence of the physiological and psychological in the bodies—and specific body parts—of three characters central to these chapters: the eponymous hero himself and his beard, the servant Altisidora and her female genitalia, and the Duchess and her legs. All three bodies destabilize performances of sex and gender identity and diverge from prescribed codes of behavior, generating powerful affective responses grounded in shame. Through them, Cervantes’s novel exposes sickness in the broader body politic of early seventeenth-century Spain. Chapter one focuses on Don Quixote’s beard washing by a group of female servants, particularly in the context of imperial martial propaganda. The maidens’ actions trigger a destabilization of gender roles that hinges on exploiting contemporary narratives linking weaponry, male genitalia, and facial hair. Chapter two examines a crisis in notions of both class and gender through the bodies of cats with which Altisidora identifies metonymically as a castrating vagina dentata. Chapter three focuses on the fuentes (or drains) cut into the Duchess’s legs to treat infertility. While she conceals those shameful incisions beneath her skirt, Cervantes deploys them to lay bare consequences of ignorance and lack of productivity in aristocratic and imperial bodies. The bodies exposed or hidden by various means throughout Don Quixote, especially in the ducal palace, embody affective processes, giving voice through the shamed flesh to the political and social anxieties of Cervantes’s Spain.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Granda, Carmen Cecilia,
"Shameful Bodies, Shameful Nation: Embodied Affect in the Ducal Palace in Don Quixote (Part II)"
(2016).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0N29VCB
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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....