46 pages • 1 hour read
Dale WassermanMan of La Mancha
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Conflict Between Idealism and Realism
Content Warning: This play romanticizes mental health conditions and uses terminology that reinforces the stigma around them.
The conflict at the heart of Man of La Mancha arises from Cervantes’s and Don Quixote’s refusal to accept the world as it is and instead to fight for the world as it should be, even when that fight seems hopeless. The play acknowledges that this idealism may be an “impossible dream,” but in the end asserts that a life inspired by idealism is superior to one based on cold realism.
Don Quixote is the embodiment of idealism in the play. His insistence on fighting windmills and elevating simple folk to lords and ladies not only acknowledges how some people see idealism as ridiculous or foolish—he embraces the stereotype and then shows the positive results. Don Quixote insists in “The Impossible Dream” that he intends to serve others without reward, and that the world will be better as a result. In the most significant example of this attitude, Don Quixote’s respectful treatment of Aldonza initially appears incongruous with her social standing, but it ultimately encourages her to embrace a better version of herself. The prisoners’ enthusiastic singing of “The Impossible Dream” at the play’s end asserts that this type of inner transformation can occur in the “real” world as well.
While arguing that a life based on idealism can make the world better, Man of La Mancha does not shy away from the cost. The Duke/Dr. Carrasco insists that reality is cruel and inescapable, and some events support his view. Cervantes’s idealism has landed him in the Inquisition’s prison. Don Quixote’s battles—against windmills, the muleteers, moors, and the Knight of the Mirror—all leave him battered. The Moorish dancers take advantage of his trust to rob him. The muleteers take advantage of Aldonza’s kindness to seize and abuse her. Aldonza then screams at Don Quixote, revealing how letting him crack her tough, cynical shell of realism has opened her to deeper pain.
In the end, Man of La Mancha says the world can be brutal. In the face of that reality, a person has to choose to resign themselves to it or to believe in a hidden goodness and work to bring it to light. In Cervantes’s debate with the Duke on idealism versus realism, he argues that a life resigned to “reality” is not worth living—he calls it “maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be” (61, emphasis added). To choose a life in which evil and suffering rule is to choose despair. In contrast, a life of idealism brings joy and hope. Even if one still suffers, it will be a better life than one driven by cynical realism and selfishness.
The Transformative Power of Imagination
If The Conflict Between Idealism and Realism provides the motive for trying to transform the world, then storytelling provides the means. In Man of La Mancha, Cervantes successfully uses storytelling via a play to present his vision of a more idealistic worldview to the prisoners. In a metareference, his success suggests that the musical Man of La Mancha could also transform its audience through engaging the power of the imagination.
Cervantes begins his play-within-a-play by inviting the prisoners to “enter into [his] imagination and see [Don Quixote]!” (11) while donning the costume of the knight. The play explicitly links acting with the performance of imagination. The prisoners slowly join into the playacting, choosing to imagine a scene together in a willfully shared delusion. By entering the story together, the audience of prisoners starts to transform. The Governor at the beginning jovially presided over robbing Cervantes; at the end, he wishes Cervantes well and returns his manuscript. The prisoners join together after Cervantes has left the stage and sing “The Impossible Dream,” signifying that they have bought into that idealism which he shared with them through his play.
Man of La Mancha links imagination with idealism at other points in the play as well. The Padre suggests that Don Quixote merely “has been carried away by his imagination” (29, emphasis added) in desiring to right wrongs and seek adventure. Don Quixote imagines windmills as giants and inns as castles; Cervantes suggests that reality is subjective and “whatever his mind may make of it” (17). What Don Quixote sees in his mind and what Sancho and others see are both ways of viewing reality: The latter is constrained by facts, the former uplifted by imagination. As Don Quixote indignantly tells Dr. Carrasco, “Facts are the enemy of truth” (40). By imagining, for example, Aldonza as the Lady Dulcinea, he strips away the mere “facts” of her social position and shows the potential that she, in truth, has within her, while suggesting the respect she deserves from others.
In short, imagining a better world lays the foundation for idealism in Man of La Mancha. That idealism spreads and captures the hearts of others through a different kind of imagination: the magic of acting in a play. Just as Cervantes invites his audience of prisoners to imagine a knight living by ideals, so too does Man of La Mancha implicitly invite the theater audience to be transformed by the musical’s imaginative act of storytelling on stage.
Perceptions of Mental Health
Since Don Quixote is the hero of his story, Man of La Mancha tends to romanticize his “madness.” It is a conscious acceptance of delusion that helps make sense of the world in a more idealistic way. While the musical fails to acknowledge the potential discomfort a haphazard use of “madness” can cause, it does acknowledge the unjust stigma often attached to popular uses of the word, while suggesting that those dismissed as “mad” might also have a more worthwhile worldview.
As Don Quixote’s quest falls apart and the Inquisition closes in upon Cervantes, the prisoners and Cervantes consider what it means to be the titular Man of La Mancha. La Mancha, they agree, is an empty wasteland that produces a singular crop:
THE DUKE: Which apparently grows lunatics.
CERVANTES: I would say, rather…men of illusion.
THE DUKE: Much the same. Why are you poets so fascinated by madmen? (60).
Both Don Quixote and Cervantes hail from La Mancha. The challenge that the Duke poses is whether the two men are “mad”—people with mental health conditions that can be ignored because of it. Man of La Mancha does not ultimately reject these claims, but it does undermine them, especially as Cervantes argues that “men of illusion” are not necessarily irrational—they are just idealistic. Rather, it suggests that this kind of dismissive perception of mental health conditions serves primarily as an excuse to discredit people who challenge the social norm.
When the Padre and Dr. Carrasco interact, the skeptical doctor has no doubt that Don Quixote has a mental health disorder and must be cured, but the Padre expresses ambivalence. He suggests the knight has merely been carried away by The Transformative Power of Imagination. In “To Each His Dulcinea,” the Padre admires the beauty of Don Quixote’s vision while still seeing it as a dream. At the knight’s sickbed, the Padre agrees Dr. Carrasco’s actions were necessary but nevertheless regrets them, as depriving Don Quixote of his idealism has deprived him of his will to live.
These conflicts show that Don Quixote’s supposed “madness” is not an objective fact; rather, it is a label used by those around him to dismiss his unusual behavior instead of giving his idealism and point of view a fair hearing. This echoes Cervantes’s conscious choice to refuse to accept reality, with all its suffering, as an unchangeable fact: “Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be” (61, emphasis added). In his view, condemning idealists or nonconformists as “mad” amounts to an abject surrender to the evil of the world instead of seeking ways to improve it. Ultimately Man of La Mancha has little to say about actual mental illness. Instead, it explores how other people apply stigmatizing stereotypes to Don Quixote’s nonconformism as a means of criticizing or oppressing him, with Cervantes arguing that what is truly “maddest of all” is not to recognize the value of dreams and idealism.
