Acceso usuarios
Enrique Fernández
The episode in which Maritornes and the innkeeper's daughter attract Don Quixote to a hole in the wall where they hang him from his hand is a parody of the dismemberment of the female body in the Petrarchan tradition. The parody is achieved through a comical feminization of Don Quixote's body through a role reversal and through a cruel actualization of the dissective elements implied in the rhetoric of poetic bodily dismemberment. Don Quixote hanging from his hand is similar to corpses hanging by their hands for dissection, an image common in the anatomical books and in the anatomical theaters so popular in this period. The humor and horror of this scene reflect the anxiety ¿the combination of curiosity and fear¿ that dissected bodies arouse in a period when the anatomical science was dismembering the human body, the cornerstone around which human individuality was being constructed.
