My Fair Lady: Cervantes' Dulcinea and Voltaire's Cunegonde

French writer Anatole France once commented that both Cervantes' Don Quixote and Voltaire's Candide were "manuals of indulgence and compassion, bibles of benevolence" (Duran 142). These themes are not the only parallels between Cervantes' picaresque novel and Voltaire's witty satire. Despite Cervantes' tale being notably long while Voltaire's is markedly short, both trace the misadventures of a naïve and idealistic protagonist across a panorama of the early modern world - in the process, satirizing the Church, the nobility, and other social institutions of their respective eras. Another, perhaps less obvious, commonality between Don Quixote and Candide is the role of women as the motivating force behind the plots: Candide's tribulations begin when he is expelled from the Baron's estate for wooing the Baron's daughter Cunegonde, while Don Quixote sets out on his adventures in hopes of winning over his fair lady Dulcinea. But as important as Dulcinea and Cunegonde are to the storylines of Don Quixote and Candide, they are conspicuously absent from the action. We only receive coy glimpses of Cunegonde, and the real Dulcinea never appears at all. They are fluid shadows, half reality, half imagination, and as such, they reflect the mentalities of the men who dote on them from afar, and to an extent, create them. Dulcinea's claim to grace and nobility is as tenuous as Don Quixote's grasp on reality; Cunegonde's transformation into ugliness corresponds to Candide's realization that the world is not the best of all possible ones, but one that is frequently cruel and chaotic.

Throughout both works, Dulcinea and Cunegonde are described in excessively florid and romanticized terms that suggest these women are not what the protagonists perceive them to be. Don Quixote calls his lady the "peerless Dulcinea" (Cervantes 46), and bestows upon her the trite title, "fairest of the fair" (45). Waxing poetic, he says,

"Her hair really is golden, and her forehead the Elysian Fields, and her eyebrows rainbows, and her eyes suns, and her cheeks roses, and her lips coral, and her teeth pearls, and her neck alabaster, and her breast marble, and her hands ivory, and her complexion snow." (100)

This slew of clichéd descriptions, far from substantiating Dulcinea, only makes her more unreal, since no actual woman could even faintly resemble this celestial conglomeration of metaphors. In fact, a woman who actually had "rainbow" eyebrows, "suns" for eyes, or "coral" teeth would be bizarre, if not outright frightening. Like his image of Dulcinea, Don Quixote's view of the world is a romanticized one, which taken to the extreme level, becomes utterly absurd. Candide, not to be outdone, calls his lady love Cunegonde "the pearl of young ladies, the masterpiece of nature" (Voltaire 22). While Cunegonde is a pretty lady (though not necessarily a masterpiece of nature) at the beginning of the story, she quickly becomes ugly through her misfortunes. Ironically, Candide continues to believe she is beautiful until the last chapter, where he is awakened both to her present ugliness, and to the reality of the world. The fanciful language that Don Quixote and Candide use to describe their ladies suggests that they are out of touch with reality, although in different ways. While Candide sees the world through rose-colored glasses, Don Quixote creates an entire world of his own.

In Don Quixote, the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, despite her noble-sounding title, is merely a colorful fabrication. In actuality, she is a "good-looking peasant girl" (Cervantes 29) named Aldonza Lorenzo, who lives in a neighboring village and is hardly aware of Don Quixote's existence, let alone his love. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Don Quixote convinces himself she is a fair lady whose beauty has inspired him to his noble adventures. "A knight errant without a lady-love is a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul" (29), he thinks to himself, in justifying his devotion to Dulcinea. However, for most of the book, he seems content to wander the world in her name without ever meeting her in person. Just as he is more enamored with the idea of having a lady-love than the actual peasant girl he calls "Dulcinea," he likewise is more captivated by the idea of knight errantry than any actual adventures. This is clear through many instances when Don Quixote bends his own chivalric ideals in favor of an easier route. For instance, at the end of Chapter X of the First Part, when he becomes hungry, he quickly amends his statement that knights must fast. As the chivalric tales did not mention knights eating, Don Quixote had proclaimed earlier that the knights "used to live on next to nothing" (81). But when he is faced with the prospect of eating only nuts and raisins while Sancho Panza dined on more substantial fare, he equivocates, "I am not saying, Sancho, that it is obligatory for knights errant not to eat anything other than those nuts to which you refer; but that they must have been their usual sustenance" (82). He then proceeds to eat heartily from Sancho's provisions. In both love and adventures, Don Quixote lives in a world where idealism and reality occasionally intersect, but mainly proceed unhindered by one other.

Candide's delusion about his lady is slightly different than that of Don Quixote. Unlike Dulcinea, Cunegonde is actually a young and beautiful woman at the beginning of Candide. Mirroring Candide's naïve optimism, their love plays out in unrealistic romantic clichés: a blush, a dropped handkerchief, a surreptitious kiss behind a screen. However, this romance in the shelter of the Baron's estate is too far removed from reality to last, and Candide's veil of ignorance cannot last either. The baron soon discovers the tryst and expels Candide from this garden of bliss. Dulcinea, too, finds herself in a cruel world where she is first raped by Bulgar soldiers, then sold hand to hand as a slave, in the process losing all her beauty and becoming "dark-skinning, eyes bloodshot, flat-bosomed, cheeks wrinkles, arms red and rough" (Voltaire 97). Up until their meeting in Chapter 29, Candide - who had not seen Cunegonde's transformation - believes she is still the innocent, beautiful girl she was at the beginning of the story. Ironically, Cunegonde does not know she is now ugly either, as "no one had told her so" (97). She reminds Candide of his matrimonial intentions, and Candide, who is finally awakened to the brutality of the world, agrees to marry her, although she becomes "uglier every day...shrewish and intolerable" (98). As she loses her bloom, so Candide loses his naiveté, gradually rejecting his teacher Pangloss' maxim that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide's flaw here is not in fabricating an alternative world the way Don Quixote did, but rather in believing over-optimistically in what is too good to be true.

Neither Dulcinea nor Cunegonde figure majorly in the plots of Don Quixote and Candide, but while Cunegonde makes several appearances throughout Candide, Dulcinea never appears. It is significant that Don Quixote never encounters Dulcinea over the course of his adventures. He is unable to confront the reality of Dulcinea's identity - and of his own life - which is commonplace, unromantic, and all-around mediocre. He rejects this reality and escapes into fantasy. The one time Don Quixote actually sojourns to visit his lady in El Toboso, Sancho Panza tells him a random peasant woman is Dulcinea. Yet even when confronted with physical proof of his beautiful lady's nonexistence, Don Quixote still believes Dulcinea has simply been bewitched by enchanters. After encountering the "moon-faced and flat-nosed" (Cervantes 548) peasant girl, Don Quixote laments,

I was indeed born to be a mirror of misfortune, the eternal target for the arrows of adversity. And you should also note, Sancho, that those traitors were not content just to transform my Dulcinea, but to transform her into a figure as wretched and ugly as that peasant wench. (550)

Like his idea of Dulcinea, Don Quixote's life is a fabrication that he clings to because he cannot face the commonness and ennui of the real world.

Although there are many parallels between Don Quixote's and Candide's misadventures, their views on the world are interestingly opposed. After the encounter with the false Dulcinea, Don Quixote exclaims, "I say it again, and I shall say it a thousand times: I am the most unfortunate of men" (Cervantes 551). This is the antithesis of Candide's equally extreme belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds" (Voltaire 22). It makes Candide's situation even more pathetic, seeing that Don Quixote, who created most of his own problems, believes he is utterly misfortunate, while Candide, who is thrust into one horrendous situation after another through no fault of his own, tries to reconcile his situation with a fortunate world. Don Quixote at least realizes his situation is pitiable, but Candide still tries to find the silver lining in a completely dark cloud for most of the book. Indeed, it is only when Candide sees his fair Cunegonde transformed into an ugly, weathered hag in Chapter 29 that he is convinced that Doctor Pangloss was wrong and that the world is often cruel and random. And it is only when Don Quixote gives up his quest to do good on behalf of the lady Dulcinea that he realizes that his trials were not because he is any more unfortunate or special than any other man, but that his ill-luck was the result of his own deluded contrivances.

Besides providing love interest factor and pure alliterative value, Don Quixote's Dulcinea and Candide's Cunegonde offer a lens through which one can observe the minds of these heroes from La Mancha and Thunder-ten-tronckh. Even though Dulcinea and Cunegonde are not major characters in the plot, they are an important part to Don Quixote's and Candide's motives and perceptions, as they morph into the projections of the protagonists' ideals, hopes and desires.

Works Cited

Cervantes. Don Quixote. Trans. John Rutherford. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Duran, Manuel and Fay R. Rogg. Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Voltaire. Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories. Trans. Daniel M. Frame. New York: Signet Classics, 2001.