Sancho Panza and Social Class in Relationships - Research Paper Example

Quixote’s Servant: Sancho Panza and Social Class in Relationships Cervantes’ Don Quixote is one of the most enduring and popular works of literature ever written. Because of its immense popularity throughout the ages it has been viewed in many different ways by many different scholars and literary critics. One useful way that the novel can be examined is by looking at the social class of the various characters and how this affects their relationships to one another. Sancho Panza is the best character to use as an example for this exploration, as he is socially subordinate to Don Quixote and others throughout the novel. He exhibits clear traits of a lower social class, while Don Quixote exhibits clear traits of a higher one. The novel even uses food to draw clear social distinctions between Quixote’s “squire” and other characters. In all cases, then, the character of Sancho Panza shows that social class play a very important role in defining character relationships in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Sancho and Don Quixote are both defined by their own social classes. Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, and he is an unsophisticated country person. Don Quixote, on the other hand, is nobility (Echevarria 8). Both men have the characteristics of their social class. Sancho “exhibits a spontaneous reflex of self-presevation, plaintive insistence on painful indignities, stubborn tendency to state the obvious, eagerness to fill his pockets or his belly, and indifference to military glory or nice points of honor” (Close 92). All of these mark him as lower class. Don Quixote, on the other hand, has many traits that are common to representations of his own social class, the nobility, such as “principled abstemiousness, precious sentimentality, impetuous rashness, overbearing arrogance, trying to keep face in humiliating circumstances, steadfast refusal of inconvenient evidence and, above all, inflexibly treating books as a viable rule of life” (Close 91). Sancho Panza’s relationship with Don Quixote is clearly affected by their social classes, as the “disparity between the two could not be sharper. Don Quijote belongs to the low nobility, the squire is a peasant” (Echevarria 8). Sancho, Don Quixote's squire, is then completely subordinate to the other man. It is only through looking at this relationship between the two men that it is possible to really understand who Sancho even is in terms of his character (Flores 150). If Sancho were not a servant, for instance, he would not serve as Don Quixote’s squire at all, because their social class based relationship would be entirely different. Sancho often fits into preconceived notions of how the lower class should act to the upper classes. Indeed, one of the simple virtues that Sancho is often recalled for is his “loyalty to his master” (Flores 5). What is more, Sancho’s “arrival in the story logically causes the exchanges with don Quixote to slot into the standard patterns of master/servant dialogue in sixteenth-century comedy” (Close 90). In other words, without Sancho, the story would be very different indeed. Although Sancho does serve this structural sort of role in the novel, acting as a more comedic relief to Don Quixote’s very sort of depressing delusions, other scholars prefer to focus on his class to the exclusion of other aspects. He is sometimges even used by scholars to represent the conflicts between the upper and lower classes (Flores 150). Something this type of scholar often points to are the rewards Sancho is supposed to earn for his service, part of the reason he goes with Don Quixote on his adventures at all. One theme which clearly defines the two characters in different ways is Sancho’s salary. What his “eventual reward for his services” will be “runs through the dialogue between him and his master from beginning to end” (Close 114). What is most interesting about this relationship aspect is the promise of being a mayor of an island, which is obviously a ridiculous one. However, it is the only thing Don Quixote doesn't completely forget about when he is on his death bed towards the end of the novel (Close 115). This may be because his promise of the mayorship represents social reality in that “it reflects his real obligations, moral and social, towards a faithful servant whom he originally enticed into his service on an illusory promise of reward” (Close 115). One interesting aspect of the novel is that parts of it “reveal cultural assumptions that consuming certain foods was a sign of social identity and maintained proper social equilibrium” (Nadeau 59). One particular episode is the part of the novel that involves Sancho Panchez going to Barataria to become mayor. Before Sancho eats at a feast, Don Quixote gives him a good bit of advice on how to behave and what kinds of food he should eat. This shows Sancho to be a peasant because he does not know these things already and Don Quixote has to give him instruction on how to eat and how to handle himself as a gentleman at the table (Nadeau 60). This shows an interest in upward mobility which “Spain, like many parts of Europe, was experiencing a lot of” (Nadeau 61) during the time Cervantes wrote his novel masterpiece. Something else that is interesting about Cervantes’ work is that he never really forces his characters to say things that he as an author believed were true if it is not something the character would have believed (Flores 151). This means it is not always possible to assume that something a character says is meant in a negative or positive way unless he directly comments about the character. In general Cervantes “allows his characters to agree or disagree with him and change their opinion as the story unfoldes, constantly increasing the number of manifold points of view manifested in his novel” (Flores 151). What this means for any scholar interested in examining Social Class in the relationships of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or any other character, is that he or she will have to pay a good deal of attention to figure out how something is meant, and whether what the character says or does is meant to be viewed in a good light, a bad light, or somewhere in between. In conclusion, it is clear to see that social class and perceptions of social class play a very large part in how characters relate to one another in Don Quixote. Although it is not always clear what Cervantes intended us to take away from these relationships, it is clear that they exist. Sancho Panza, as has been shown above, is a good example of the various aspects of social classes in the novel. Because he is poor, he has certain characteristics associated with him. Furthermore, these characteristics are enhanced by his servant/master relationship with Don Quixote. Sancho's social class is even experienced by his like of food and how he relates to that. Ultimatly, then, in addition to being a comic novel making fun of knightly romances, Don Quixote is at its heart about how people interact across the divide of social classes. Works Cited Close, Anthony. A Companion to Don Quijote. Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2008. Print. Echevarria, Roberto Gonazlez, ed. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: a Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Ebrary. Web. November 24, 2010. Flores, R.M. Sancho Panza Through Three Hundred Seventy-five Years of Continuations, Imitations, and Criticism, 1605-1980. Newark, DL: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982. Print. Nadeau, Carolyn. “Critiquing the Elite in the Barataria and ‘Ricote’ Food Episodes in Don Quixote II.” Hispanofila 146 (2006): 59-75. Print. Read More