Station 30 in the Don Quixote Exhibit
Don Quixote Exhibit - Station 30
The quality and quantity of the translations of Don Quixote in
eighteenth-century England had an undeniable impact on the increasing
sophistication of prose fiction. Cervantes'
work was no longer viewed as
simple farce or comedy, but as a model of serious satire to be imitated.
If the purpose of satire is to correct and reform , the figure of Don
Quixote was particularly appropriate: He sought to correct the delusions
of a social order based on a nostalgic conception of the past, and at the
same time his obsession to right every social wrong turned him into a
victim of his own reformist enterprise. He was a kind of Everyman,
according to Motteaux, and not merely some foreign lunatic: "Every
man has
something of Don Quixote in his Humour, some
darling Dulcinea of his
Thoughts, that sets him very often upon mad Adventures. What Quixotes
does not every Age produce in Politics and Religion, who fancying
themselves to be in the right of something, which all the world tells 'em
is wrong...?"
Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and
of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. London, 1742.
From the collection of the George Peabody Library
Collection number: 823 F459A 1742
Motteaux's remarks could easily describe the figure of
Parson Adams in Henry Fielding's The History of the Adventures of Joseph
Andrews And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of The
Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. Parson
Adams, like Don Quixote, is intent in
reforming the world, but he seeks to
do so not because of his misreading of chivalric romances, but because of
his obsession with Apostolic charity.
