Don Quixote and Othello: Failed Research Proposal

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Desdemona and Othello's love is a love of impossible dreams, killed by impossible dreams.

Othello is a play where individuals are incapable of communicating as 'real' people -- everyone, one could say, is an artist, but a bad one. Cassio becomes drunk and sings, losing his true morality and true self, and losing himself in Iago's plot. Rather than confronting her husband, Desdemona sings her "Willow Song," of a dead maid to explain her sorrow and confusion over the fact she has lost her husband's love, apparently for no reason. These characters tilt at windmills of their imagination -- whether windmills of adultery like Othello, or windmills of perceived injustice like Iago.

No fiction leads to any positive ends throughout Shakespeare's tragedy. Othello first sees Desdemona as a kind of Dulcinea, an utterly pure and chaste being. Although she is no peasant girl like Quixote's Aldonza, she cannot live up to her husband's projected ideals. So she becomes a kind of whore in Othello's eyes, a prostitute worthy of death, because she is no longer 'perfect.' Their marriage is false, an imitation of a marriage, which seems more perfectly initially and then is shown to be based upon sand and fictions. Much as it is said in Don Quixote, ironically "All that you have to do is to make proper use of imitation in what you write, and the more perfect the imitation the better will your work be." Fictions and imitations, or stereotypes, are more potent than realities. It is very easy to be put under the spell of another person's fiction, if they seem to believe that fiction with enough fervor -- even the practical Sancho Panza finds himself going along with Don Quixote, against his better judgment, even when the Don's actions result in more harm than good for the people whom he is trying to save.

Not everyone is taken in by fictions in these tales in Don Quixote, there is also a plot by the old knight's niece to relieve the old knight of his illusions, just as Emilia strives to convince Othello of her mistress' chastity -- and is just as completely rebuffed as Quixote's niece, only Emilia dies for her efforts.

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Once these false artists, Othello and Don Quixote, storytellers to themselves, believe in illusions, nothing can dissuade them. And worse, many believe their illusions and take them for reality.

Of course the question arises -- why do great artists like Cervantes and Shakespeare create works of art that question rather than validate the purpose of artistic creation? Cervantes and Shakespeare do not look dismissively upon art, only art that is a lie and has no reference to reality. Cervantes uses Don Quixote to laugh at chivalric romances, and Shakespeare uses Othello to show how an overly idealized and romanticized view of women can lead to murder. Inspiration must come from reality, a result of a series of interactions with real people in the real world, and not just exist in an individual's mind. The Don's heart is broken when he learns that the world cannot be bended to the narrative he has created in his mind from books, and Othello is crushed by realizing how easily he is duped. Storytelling must enhance reality, not provide an escape, and to merely love an ideal, rather than wisely or well is dangerous. The purpose of art is to teach another person to see the world more clearly, not to see lies and illusions, whether those lies and illusions are good or bad.

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