“People would never fall in love if they hadn’t ever heard love talked about,” says Jeffrey Eugenide in the epigraph of ‘The Marriage Plot’- a realist story about marriage and a postmodern, metafictional commentary on the kind of story it tells. This quote really makes us wonder about the influence of popular culture when it comes to love. Nothing can better explain this influence than the ‘Don Quixote Effect’. It is an effect said to be faced by an individual who is immersed in a world of ideas that he/she believes is the truth and those who strive to achieve these ideals. Such an individual is called a ‘Don Quixote’- “an impractical idealist bent on righting incorrigible wrongs” (‘American’).
This effect is even more interesting in the 19th century, the Victorian era which was at the brink of two world wars and the advent of the moving picture. Thus, this essay will examine the Don Quixote Effect in 19th Century Literature.Quixote, before becoming an archetype was a 17th-century Spanish literary character and the protagonist of the novel ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes. The novel explores the eponymic would-be knight deviant whose delusions of grandeur make him the butt of many practical jokes. Today, the ‘Don Quixote Effect’ is used to refer to an effect faced by individuals who idealize romance, be it love or war. This archetype is said to obtain these idealizations through literature and often such idealizations lead to the downfall for them. As the American Journal of Sociology explains, there are three popular answers to how literature impacts society as a whole: literature mirrors or reflects society, literature shapes society or “literature functions socially to maintain and stabilize, if not justify and sanctify, the social order which may be called the social control theory” (Albrecht, 425). In the case of love, literature functions in the social control theory category. It is through romantic literature in the shape of novels, poems, and songs that we have learned and created ideas about what constitutes love, what notions of our emotions we must value and which feeling we should emphasize on.
In western romantic literature in the 19th century, the novel that has most generously and deeply explored the Don Quixote Effect is Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (1856). This could be because of Flaubert’s love for Cervantes as Tessari, an Italian writer says in his popular article on Culture Trip, “Gustave Flaubert never hid his passion for Miguel de Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’, in a letter in 1852, he wrote”I find all my origins in the book I knew by heart before knowing how to read, Don Quixote.” Early in the novel, we learn that Emma Bovary- our protagonist- spent her childhood in a convent diving in romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be a spiritual being, someone who understands her soul perfectly while being a thrilling intellectual and sexual presence. She eventually gets married to the kind and thoughtful but imperfect human Charles. He isn’t a hero from a novel, so she gets quickly bored by the routines of married life. She firmly believes that her life has gone wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.
In a rather clumsy search to bring her reality in line with romanticism, she sets out and gets involved in a series of misguided affairs with louche figures, spends too much money, neglects her child and eventually commits suicide — bankrupt and in disgrace. Flaubert blames literature for the death of Emma Bovary: particularly Romantic novels. She experiences the Don Quixote Effect, literature idealizes her perception of love and when real life doesn’t match up, it leads to her downfall. Tessari summarizes this in his article by comparing her to Quixote
“Emma Bovary, the passionate and sentimentally troubled heroine, constantly looking for an escape from the tedium of her life, should represent a feminine transposition of Don Quixote. Both heroes find refuge in literature and imagination as they strive to transpose the heroics and the overly romantic stories of their readings into their own lives.”
Another interesting take on the Don Quixote Effect, towards the end of the century, is the novel ‘Arms and the Man’ by George Bernard Shaw (1894). Set at the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, ‘Arms and the Man’ questions romantic notions about war and love. Captain Bluntschli, a fleeing soldier, climbs into a Bulgarian lady’s bedroom through a window, sparking a course of events that push the characters towards ideas like realism and pragmatism. The Bulgarian lady Raina and her fiancé Sergius view war and life as a stage on which one makes grand romantic gestures. The play begins with Raina holding up the portrait of Sergius “like a priestess.” This priestess is not worshipping a romantic, or even sexual, love for Sergius. Rather, she is worshipping at the temple of her ideals of love (Shaw 1). By the end of the play, Raina is engaged to the infinitely practical Bluntschli and Sergius to Raina’s servant, the beautiful and grounded Louka. George Bernard Shaw wrote the play primarily as a vehicle to promote realism and disabuse audiences of their romantic notions of heroism, warfare, and marriage. The story shows the transformation of a quixotic girl (Raina) into a realist through the persuasion of the hero, Bluntschli.
When Sergius wins the battle, Raina refers to her books immediately in a lengthy monologue about doubts, “that perhaps we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin”, to conclude that such ideals were true in reality, “It proves that all our ideas were real after all” (Shaw 5).One of the characters, Sergius is alluded to Don Quixote himself, “charging like Don Quixote at the windmills” says Bluntschli. This allusion is best captured by Michael J. Mendelson in ‘The Shaw Review’, “Just as Quixote’s ideas are shattered by reality, Sergius cuts a fine figure, but his skill as a soldier is nothing but sound and fury. Bluntschli reveals that his success was the result of dumb luck rather than acumen” (Shaw 15). Bluntschli ends up his ‘roast’ as one might call it today with these words “And there was Don Quixote flourishing like a drum major, thinking he’d done the cleverest thing ever known, whereas he ought to be court-martialled for it. Of all the fools ever let loose on a field of battle, that man must be the very maddest. He and his regiment simply committed suicide — only the pistol missed fire, that’s all”, this sentence adheres to the concept that idealization leads to downfall like many other books that deal with realism (Shaw 16). Such references apart from pointing out the Don Quixote Effect help us see how it took shape in the 19th century.
Don Quixote Effect does only take shape in cases of love, it is used to understand war, hysteria, and rationality, to name a few other fields. Jorge Gassenburg, a renowned scientist calls a Don Quixote someone void of rationality, to quote him “The scientist looks for the common among the varied. He separates the essential from the superfluous. And this is what Sancho Panza does continuously. He seeks sensible answers to Don Quixote’s nonsense” (Kenneth 3). Flaubert explores the notion of rationality through Emma’s suicide. Arms and the Man uses it to examine war, where Bluntschli reduces a cavalry charge to the act of “slinging peas against a window pane” to allude to Don Quixote who battles against windmills, creating comic relief and dethroning romanticism associated with war.
The Quixotic archetype is a common occurrence in today’s world but what makes 19th century different was that these ideals were mainly translated through written literature. The book had a significant influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’ (1844), Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (1884), and Edmond Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ (1897), let alone in the 19th century. As for the novels referred to in this paper, Madame Bovary explores a character who is led to her death on the pursuit of ideas, while Arms and the Man explores a character who redeems from this world of idealism. The characters both these novels portray are certainly close to the ones we see in everyday life, as both authors pushed for realistic writing, so it really makes us wonder how many Raina’s and Emma’s are there today, let alone 19th century. Do our love stories need revising? Alain De Botton, a writer at Financial Times says, “Our love stories push us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical, and as a society, we must push the focus on the latter.” Will there have been no Emma or Raina, if there weren’t such novels, or is wishing for the disappearance of the quixotic archetype as idealistic as Don Quixote?
Works Cited
Albrecht, Milton C. “The Relationship of Literature and Society.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 59, no. 5, 1954, pp. 425–436. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2772244.
De, Cervantes Saavedra Miguel, and T. Smollett. Don Quixote. Dover Publications, Inc., 2018.
“Don Quixote.” American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. 2011. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 26 Mar. 2019 https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Don+Quixote.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Marriage Plot. Thorndike Press, 2011.
Flaubert, Gustave, and Eleanor Aveling. Madame Bovary. Thorpe, 2014.
Kenneth. “The Don Quixote Effect.” Exploring Your Mind, Exploring Your Mind, 2 Aug. 2018, exploringyourmind.com/the-don-quixote-effect/.
Shaw, Bernard. Arms and the Man. New York: Penguin Group, 2006.
Tessari, Alessandro. “The Long-Lasting Influence Of ‘Don Quixote’ From Shakespeare To Broadway.” Culture Trip, 21 Apr. 2016, theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/cervantes-don-quixote-an-endless-voyage-from-la-mancha-to-broadway/.
