1. Dulcinea and “Princess Micomicona”

Cervantes carefully planned the architecture of Part One of Don Quijote. The narrative of its hero’s wanderings may appear random in sequence and endlessly deployable, but in fact it is shaped by an elaborate design. The book tips off the reader to the presence of this design in chapter 26, the midpoint of its fifty-two chapters. Here Don Quijote decides not to imitate the madness of Orlando in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and to think only the best of the chaste Dulcinea: “she is today as her mother brought her into the world, and I should do her a grave injury were I to imagine otherwise and go crazy after the manner of Orlando the Furious” [“que se está hoy como la madre que la parió; y haríale agravio manifiesto, si imaginando otra cosa della, me volviese loco de aquel género de locura de Roldán el furioso”]).  Mad though he is, Don Quijote resolves not to go mad in the manner of Orlando. The central placement of this episode owes its model to the Orlando furioso, for Ariosto’s Orlando goes mad out of jealousy and disillusionment at the end of canto 23, exactly at the midpoint of that forty-six canto poem. Paying homage to his Italian predecessor, Cervantes marks the center of his own book.

Indeed, it is at this midpoint that Part One of the novel effects a central transition both in the story of its mad knight and in the interpolated tales that surround and reflect upon that story. At the end of chapter 25, Don Quijote has sent Sancho with a message for Dulcinea or, more properly, for Aldonza Lorenzo, the real woman who may stand behind her. Sancho never arrives at El Toboso, but instead meets the curate and the barber, who, already at the end of chapter 26, are plotting to disguise themselves as a “doncella andante” and her squire, the plot that will be fully realized in chapter 29 when Dorotea takes on the role of “Princess Micomicona.” Sent off for Dulcinea, Sancho returns to Don Quijote with the “princess.” In this narrative chiasmus at the center of Part One, the idealized Dulcinea never appears in the flesh, except in Sancho’s account in chapter 31 of his imaginary meeting with Aldonza. In her stead, Don Quijote’s other fantasy damsel—the royal lady who, according to the scenario he has outlined to Sancho back in chapter 21, promises the knight material rewards, social position, and marriage—comes to life in “Princess Micomicona.” (The further Cervantine irony is, of course, that Aldonza Lorenzo is a real woman, while “Princess Micomicona” is a piece of stage-acting by Dorotea.)

This substitution of “Princess Micomicona” for Dulcinea at the midpoint of Part One epitomizes the larger substitution in the course of its narrative of modern stories of marriages-for-money for outmoded stories of honor and erotic jealousy. Part One of Don Quijote is structured by two groups of narrative materials (episodes, interpolated stories) that are related to and mirror one another through the technique of “entrelacement” that Cervantes inherited from the very chivalric romances he sought to discredit. Each of these groups corresponds to an erotic fantasy of Don Quijote: on the one hand, his apparently selfless adoration of the idealized Dulcinea and, on the other, his almost equally powerful dream of rising to wealth and power by marrying the daughter of an emperor, the dream that seems to come true when “Princess Micomicona” appears upon the scene. The two fantasies suspend Don Quijote, both the character and the book, between two historical formations and mentalities: an older, feudal ethos of male rivalry and pride and a more modern concern for wealth and worldly advancement. The stories grouped around the Dulcinea fantasy (Grisóstomo and Marcela, Cardenio and Luscinda, Anselmo and Camila in the “Curioso impertinente”) are slowly succeeded and displaced in the narrative by the stories grouped around the “Micomicona” fantasy (Dorotea and Don Fernando, Doña Clara and Don Luis, Leandra and Vicente de la Roca, Zoraida and Captain Viedma in the “Captive’s Tale”). In this progression the first part of Don Quijote announces the arrival of a modern world governed by nascent capitalism. It also announces the arrival of the novel itself, the genre that will depict this modern world of social mobility and that will find a principle of realism in the money that makes such mobility possible.

The two great interpolated stories of Part One, the “Curioso impertinente” and the “Captive’s Tale,” relate dialectically to the Dulcinea and “Princess Micomicona” groups to which they are respectively connected. Despite the curate’s objection to its lack of verisimilitude (ch. 35, 423; 371), the “Curioso impertinente” injects psychological realism into the stories related to Don Quijote’s love for Dulcinea. It pits the adulteress Camila against the idealized Dulcinea, the chaste Marcela, and the self-sacrificing Luscinda; it contrasts the self-knowledge reached by Anselmo, who recognizes that he was the “one who fashioned my own dishonor” [“el fabricador de mi deshonra”] (ch. 35), against the deluded, egotistical lovers Cardenio and Grisóstomo, who are more than ready to put the blame on the women they claim to love. On the other hand, the “Captive’s Tale” ultimately rejects the plot, outlined by Don Quijote in chapter 21, to abduct a princess—“roballa y llevalla”—a plot it had initially seemed to follow when Captain Viedma carried off Zoraida with the fabulous wealth of her father’s house. The eventual throwing of these riches into the sea and the return of the impoverished captive to Spain render his “Historia” more heroic and religious in nature, more part of the national history of Spain’s crusade against Islam, in which Cervantes, like Captain Viedma, took part at Lepanto and also in Algerian captivity. Those jettisoned riches separate the “Captive’s Tale” from the mercenary motives not only of Don Quijote’s fantasy and its embodiment in “Princess Micomicona” but also of the other stories of upwardly mobile, advantageous marriages (those of Dorotea, Doña Clara, and the captive’s own brother, the judge), as well as from the story of Leandra, the debased, inverted version of the “Captive’s Tale,” where Vicente de la Roca is interested only in Leandra’s riches when he abducts and then abandons her.

Thus the “Curioso impertinente” counters with realism the idealizing, mystificatory tendency of the old-fashioned love stories of the “Dulcinea” narrative complex; the “Captive’s Tale” counters with idealism the realistic, disenchanted tendency of the modern marriage-and-money stories of the “Princess Micomicona” grouping. In this sense, the “Curioso impertinente” and the “Captive’s Tale” share something with the behavior of Don Quijote himself, who, when he declines to go mad like Orlando, refuses the self-dramatizing jealousy of Cardenio and Grisóstomo, and, when he rejects Sancho’s urging him to marry “Princess Micomicona” on the spot and to keep Dulcinea as a mistress on the side, refuses to turn chivalry into a mercenary, modern career. On the one hand, the unmasking of the infidelity and egotism of romantic love; on the other, the affirmation that spirituality and selfless heroism can survive in a world driven by money and material interest. These will be enduring projects of the genre of the novel that succeeded Don Quijote.