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Part 2, Chapter 38
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Don Quixote, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth and Lies
Literature, Realism, and Idealism
Madness and Sanity
Intention and Consequence
Self-Invention, Class Identity, and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
After a few days of questioning, the Vicar-General sanctified the marriage. The princess’s mother, Queen Maguncia, was so upset by the marriage that she died of sorrow. The funeral was interrupted by the Queen’s cousin, the giant Malambruno, who came to punish the newlyweds: he turned the princess into a brass monkey and the knight into a metallic crocodile, and he placed a metal column between them. The column states that the lovers will be disenchanted when Don Quixote fights the giant. The giant then punished the duennas by causing them to grow bristly beards. Here the duennas lift up their veils and show the beards to Quixote and the rest, lamenting their fates and fainting away.
“Antonomasia” looks a lot like “Micomicona” – the two names share most letters. And since both stories feature a giant, we can assume the butler modeled this hoax on the earlier hoax perpetrated by Dorotea and the others. “Antonomasia” is also a Greek word that means to rename. The transformation of the couple recalls Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ancient stories that describe lovers turned into animals and plants. Quixote’s life in the second half of the story becomes more and more self-consciously fictionalized: it resembles the first book and many others, like Metamorphoses.
Themes
