Imagining Domesticity in Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote

Abstract

This article discusses the role of the home in both Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote and his Novelas ejemplares. The first half of the article addresses the relationship between the idea of wandering and the idea of home, showing that multiple characters understand Don Quijote's vagrancy as the key manifestation of his madness. Moreover, the knight's homelessness connects him to another wandering character: the Morisco Ricote. A historical and textual understanding of home and homelessness thus opens an interpretive space, one that registers Don Quijote's and Ricote's inability to wander as emblematic of the frustrated promise that modernity presented to Spain. Moving on to the Novelas ejemplares, we delineate in El celoso extremeño the identification of the private sphere with patriarchal values of honour, wealth, sexual control and legitimate offspring, and how these are undermined by the representatives of the public sphere. The same is shown to hold in four other stories as well.