"Le nouveau-gentilhomme" de Mme d'Aulnoyfactores trans-culturales en la calibración de la salud mental de don Quijote

Abstract

The pan-European interpretation of Don Quixote’s personality began, and continued to be throughout the 17th century, focused on his comical madness, but with the passing of the centuries that view has shifted to various alternatives that reflect the concerns of the cultures that consider him theirs. 20th-century existentialists, heirs to the Romantic exaltation of individualist rebels, saw him as sane, a moral model to be imitated in a corrupt society, in spite of the fact that Cervantes, and with him historicist criticism, stressed that his brain had dried up. In the 21st century postmodernism, caught up in rapid worldwide changes, consider him an actor who cleverly transforms his personality to fit the circumstances. Madame d’Aulnoy, an aristocrat at the court of Louis XIV, knew Don Quixote well and lived for a time in Spain, but still she began to write a frame story for a collection of her fairytales with typically upper-class scorn for a bourgeois with chivalric dreams whose ambition is to be accepted among the ‘well born,’ and so she decides to have her main character win out. Writing an end to the novel from an authentically Cervantine perspective of seeing both sides of the coin, she lets herself be carried away, even though she fights against it, by the dreamer who imagines a less demanding world.