Masculinity in Don Jose **** -- Carmen -- Bizet ---- **** emasculation in Don Jose -------

Speranza

One would think that everything has already been said about Carmen— the character, the novel, the opera, and her infinite resurrections in the

last one hundred years of plenitude—and that we might as well let her rest in

peace.

However, the persistence in the popular imagination of the notion of

Carmen as the ultimate essence of Spanishness is troubling.

A recent poll in the

European Union revealed that, after Don Quixote and Don Juan, Carmen was

the fictional character most identified with Spain.

Even more puzzlingly, twenty

percent of those surveyed believed Spain to be an “oriental nation” (Pulido 10).

Both perceptions have been deeply intertwined in the imaginary construction of

the Gypsy as icon of Spanishness.

This confusion of cultural identities requires

the resuscitation of Carmen in critical discourse, if only to exorcise the demons

 

of exoticism for now.

Several underlying myths deeply imbedded in the European imagination converge

on the construction of Carmen:

-- the orientalization of Spain, or cultural

conflation of Spain with the Orient, in the nineteenth century

--the romantic mythification

of the bohemian as gypsy, or imaginary conflation of Bohéme (the region

where many Gypsies lived) and Bohème (the “gypsy way of life”);

--  the

conflation of Gypsy, Andalusian, and Spanish identities as mutually interchangeable

signifiers.

This conflation of national, ethnic, and racial identities created a

profound cultural remapping that repositioned both Spain and Gypsies in Europe

 

as exotic others.

It also led to the cultural appropriation of the Gypsies’

mystique, their commodification as embodiments of the exotic, and their ambiguous

relocation to the symbolic center as icons of Spanishness.

 

 

The Gypsy is in the European Imagination.

 

Gypsies, of course, were not the only ethnic others in Europe, but they were the ones

closest to home and most easily exoticised.

Jews, Basques, Greeks, Cossacks, Ukrainians, and other

ethnic minorities would fall in the same category, just as women.
 

 

Contemporary critical readings of the Carmen myth, particularly in cultural

studies, follow two contradictory tendencies.

Those informed by feminist theory

see her as an affirmation of free will, independence, and liberation.

Those informed

by post-colonial theory seek to unmask the misogynist and racist undertones

toward the other, which ultimately neutralize those emancipatory impulses.

The ambiguous nature of the Carmen myth, as conceived by Mérimée and developed

in Bizet’s opera, invites both readings.

In fact, the key to its continual renewal

and adaptability might be its fundamental ambivalence about issues crucial in

the construction of our modern consciousness, an ambivalence which reveals

cultural anxieties about gender, race, class, nation, language, and sexuality.

The cultural construction of the Gypsy in the modern European imagination

is intimately linked to the orientalist discourses of Romanticism as a projection

of its ambivalent feelings of fear and desire towards the other.

Carmen epitomizes

this ambiguity in the white European male consciousness, for she embodies

a highly marked racialized other (non-white, non-European, non-male), while

displaying a rebellious, subversive, and free spirit.

The love/hate scenario replayed

in all the versions of the Carmen myth reflects the simultaneous repulsion

and attraction toward the other.

This ambiguity conforms to the romantic

fascination with the marginal, bohemian, exotic, and premodern.

It also reveals

the need to tame it, to control it, and ultimately to neutralize and destroy it.

Because exorcising the exotic other is ultimately a way for European bourgeois

culture to exorcise its own demons, Carmen must die.

An analysis of the

ideological underpinnings of this most enduring of all Spanish Gypsy myths—in

its development from novella to opera and its establishment as an icon of

Spanishness—will reveal this same ambiguous impulse driving the exotic construction

of oriental Spain.

 

 

  

While the Orient had been a subject of interest to European poets and politicians

during the Enlightenment, this interest became particularly widespread

during the romantic movement against the backdrop of the industrial revolution

and the advancement of modern imperialism.

 

Romanticism rejected industrialism and encouraged an interest and admiration

for idealized pre-industrial societies and a desire to return to a pre-modern past.

As fugitives from their own time and space, romantic artists were the ultimate

escape artists.

Their idealization of the Middle Ages, a distinctive romantic trope

for the age of innocence, paralleled their idealization of exotic lands and cultures,

particularly the Orient.

Their anti-industrialism generated a predilection

for natural scenery, unspoiled “primitive” societies, and remote landscapes.

The

new romantic concept of Beauty included the quality of strangeness (uncommon,

monstrous, unexplained, and ungoverned by reason).

This cult of the exotic

explains the romantic fascination with Mediterranean cultures and the Orient,

as reflected in the renewed interest in travel books, archeology and anthropology,

museum collections, and picturesque paintings of the Oriental such as those by

 

Gros, Gericault and Delacroix.

Of course, the embrace of the exotic (the oriental)

had the effect of superimposing European values over these other cultures,

creating a distorted picture that conformed more with the expectations and fears

The Orient was

an adventure based in realistic acts of description.

Fom a later twentieth-century

point of view ‘Oriental’ is a political mythology passing itself off as objective

truth.

The exoticization of the Orient was part of the discourse of orientalism governing

European perspectives toward the East, a discourse of a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the

Orient.

As a system of symbolic representation based on bourgeois ideology,

orientalism looks at the other from a perspective of intellectual, moral—and

frequently legal and political—authority.

Literary and artistic orientalism shared

this perspective with their colonial counterparts—from the oriental dreams of

Napoleon in Egypt to the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the European

colonization of North Africa and the East.

Unfortunately, because Said’s study is

devoted almost exclusively to French and British imperialism in the Middle East,

it ignores other European nations involved in orientalist practices, as well as

other oriental cultures or peoples whose cultural roots lie in the East (particularly

Jews and Gypsies).

Thus, Said’s study paradoxically reinforces the sense of

hegemonic dominance of the British and French colonial systems under question

The building of empire is first an internal

process with internalized others who are more likely to be rival Europeans”

It is for this reason especially relevant to our analysis as it applies both to the

European construction of Spain and marginalized others such as the Gypsies.

In the geopolitical

imaginary of Europeans . . . there is a hegemonic geometry of center

and periphery that conditions all perceptions of self and the other.

The

first decades of the nineteenth century saw French imperial power at work in

Spain with the Napoleonic occupation, the War of Independence (1808-1814),

and the military intervention of 1823 decreed by Chateaubriand in his role as

Minister of Foreign Affairs to restore the Bourbon dynasty.

Since these events

coincided with the loss of the Spanish American colonies, Spain became less

threatening as an imperial rival—events that clearly placed France in a position

of superiority and situated Spain as a conquered other, literally and symbolically.

Another important aspect neglected by Said is the particular double bind of

Spanish culture due to its experience of orientalism from both sides.

As a European

Christian culture that has repressed a constitutive element of its historical

identity and sees the oriental as its cultural and political other, and as a mirror of

oriental culture constructed by other Europeans (emphasizing the historical imprints

left by several centuries of close contact with Arabic and Jewish culture

and highlighting the Gypsies as a symbolic representation of Spanish orientalism).

This duality, frequently mediated through the fictional construction of the Gypsy,

explains how Spain, like the Gypsies themselves, is constituted in romantic literature

as an internal other to European modern identity, the same position of internal

alterity that, ironically, the Gypsy has come to hold within modern Spanish

 

 

 

culture.

The symbolic centrality of Gypsies in Spain’s collective imaginary (as opposed

to their actual marginality in society) might be partially explained by their

embodiment of a radical difference in Spanish culture—the crucial but repressed

non-white, non-European, and non-Christian elements that are the legacy of its

Jewish and Moorish past, and that are safely projected onto the figure of the

Gypsy, exoticised as outcast.

We need to resituate within this complex background

of orientalist discourses the ideological ambiguity of the romantic construction

of Gypsies and Spain.

It is well known that Spain was a privileged space for the romantic imagination.

French imperialism was instrumental in the discovery of Spanish art, as

during the occupation French military officers (such as General Hugo, the poet’s

father) systematically seized works of art from Spanish churches, convents, and

private palaces, and shipped these coveted possessions back to France.

The discovery

of Golden Age art and literature (Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbarán,

 

Cervantes, Calderón, the romancero) and of Goya’s depictions of the picturesque

and horrific created a fascination for all things Spanish—culminating with Louis

Philippe’s "Musée Espagnol" (1838)—that rapidly spread through the rest of Europe.

------

The romantic construction of Spain embodied the qualities that writers such as

Borrow, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Byron, Irving, Mérimée, and many others were

looking for: a rich cultural past, a preservation from modernity, a certain quaintness,

 

and a heroic history (from the Medieval hero El Cid to the guerilla resistance

in the War of Independence against Napoleon).

The romantic imagination

exoticised the strange non-Western substrate of Andalusia in particular—its oriental

influence, the legends of its Moorish past, and, most importantly, the continuous

presence of the Gypsies—blending all these images into a composite

 

oriental Spain.

In nineteenth-century European discourses Spain was exotically oriental in

nature. But because it was closer to home and the unfamiliar was spoken in a

familiar language, it was perceived as a more sheltered space onto which the

fears and anxieties caused by modernity could be safely projected. Its physical

proximity, however, was countered by the reinforcement and resemantization of

its geopolitical border -- as in the French maxim with clear imperialist overtones

attributed to Alexandre Dumas Pere: “Africa begins at the Pyrenées” --and by the

efforts to exoticise difference.

Indeed, one could say that for the romantic imagination

“the Orient begins at the Pyrenées.” Thus, the Swiss literary historian

Simonde de Sismondi considered Spanish literature as the perfect mirror in which

to contemplate a feminized oriental other:

 

Spaniards themselves had helped create this confusion of identities as a nationalist act of resistance

against foreign influences. The Spanish aristocracy reacted against the French and Italian

models imported by the Bourbon monarchy during the Enlightenment because of the perceived

threat to national identity.

Thus the Spanish elite started identifying with and imitating the customs

in music, clothing, speech, and entertainment of Madrid’s lower classes, considered more Spanish

and authentic (the “majos” and “majas” portrayed by Goya).

The aristocracy also embraced forms of

popular entertainment that were seen as typically Spanish, flamenco and bullfights, where Andalusians

and Gypsies prevailed as performers.

As a result, Gypsies, Andalusians and Majos became clichés

identified with Spanishness in Spanish music and theater. The diffusion of these images both inside

and outside of the Spanish territory prepared the way for the Romantic discovery of “oriental Spain.”

   

. . . la littérature espagnole est pour nous un phénomène, et un objet d’étude et d’observation.

Tandis que son essence est tireé de la chevalerie, ses ornements et son langage son empruntés des

Asiatiques. Dans la contrée la plus occidentale de notre Europe, elle nous fait entendre le langage

fleuri et l’imagination fantastique de l’Orient . . . Si nous considérons la littérature espagnole, comme

nous révélant en quelque sorte la littérature orientale, comme nous acheminant à concevoir un

esprit et un goût si différens des nôtres, elle en aura à nos yeux bien plus d’intéret; alors nous nous

trouverons heureux de pouvoir respirer, dans une langue apparentée à la nôtre, les parfums de

l’Orient et l’encens de l’Arabie; de voir, dans un miroir fidèle, ces palais de Bagdag, ce luxe des

califes qui rendirent au monde vieilli son imagination engourdie, et de comprendre, par un peuple

d’Europe, cette brillante poésie asiatique qui créa tant des merveilles. (258-59)

The literature of Spain presents to us a singular phenomenon, and an object of study and observation.

Whilst its character is essentially chivalric, we find its ornaments and its language borrowed

from the Asiatics. Thus, Spain, the most western country of Europe, presents us with the flowery

language and vivid imagination of the East . . . If we regard the literature of Spain as revealing to us,

in some degree, the literature of the East, and as familiarizing us with a genius and taste differing so

widely from our own, it will possess in our eyes a new interest. We may thus inhale, in a language

allied to our own, the perfumes of the East, and the incense of Arabia. We may view as in a faithful

mirror, those palaces of Bagdad, and that luxury of the caliphs, which revived the lustre of departed

ages; and we may appreciate, through the medium of a people of Europe, that brilliant Asiatic

poetry, which was the parent of so many beautiful fictions of the imagination. (445)

 

This passage offers an essentialist paradigm of the kind “like us” (European,

occidental, chivalric) “but unlike us” (Asiatic, exotic, excessive and feminized),

bringing to the forefront the issue of cultural mediation.

Sismondi’s hegemonic

male subject position invites the French reader to breathe, see, and experience

the oriental from a safe distance through the language and the mirror of Spanish

culture, repeatedly referred to in the feminine form and characterized by

feminine traits (perfumes, ornaments, flowery language). This form of mediation

enacted through the self-authorizing power of academic discourse—in this

case the discourse of literary historiography—redefines Spanish culture as sensual

and exuberant with the exotic oriental accent of the other, while constructing

an us/them dichotomy that reinforces cultural hegemony. Sismondi’s obsessive

insistence on demonstrating throughout his three-volume work that Spanish literature

fails adequately to conform to the paradigms of French and Italian literatures

(mainly due to its oriental influence) confirms both a fascination with the

exotic and, ultimately, a need to dismiss it as inferior other. Of course, this is in

no way an exceptional occurrence. A very similar design shaped that popular

 

nineteenth-century French exotic concoction known as the espagnolade, a favorite

genre among Parisian readers and theater goers alike, which had as its goal

the exploitative and derisive celebration of Spanish exoticism and which was also

at the root of the construction of Carmen.


Indeed, a constitutive

element of the orientalization of Spanishness throughout the romantic period

and beyond is precisely the reflexive mechanism of citation and endless repetition

 

of inherited images. Thus, in 1826 Alfred Vigny writes in Cinq-Mars: “Un

Espagnol est un homme de l’Orient, c’est un Turc catholique”

‘A Spaniard is a

man from the East; he is a Catholic Turk’ (289; 225).

Two years later Victor Hugo

 

states in his preface to Les Orientales:

“l’Espagne c’est encore l’Orient; l’Espagne

est à demi africaine, l’Afrique est á demi asiatique” ‘Spain is still the Orient. Spain

 

is half African, Africa is half Asiatic’ (11).And Stendhal reiterates the same idea

 

 

the following year, conflating race, language and ethnicity: “Sang, moeurs, langage,

manière de vivre et de combattre, en Espagne tout est africain. Si l’Espagnol était

mahométan il serait un Africain complet”

‘Blood, manners, language, way of

living and fighting, everything in Spain is African. If the Spaniard were a Muslim

he would be a complete African’ (152).

Chateaubriand goes even further in 1838,

reaffirming that Spaniards are “Arabe chrétiens” ‘Arab Christians’.

In fact,

one of the trademarks of orientalist discourses is the interconnectedness of texts

supporting each other, the network of overt citations (and often camouflaged

plagiarism) as a strategy to verify the object of study and legitimize the locus of

authority residing in the orientalist.

Some writers, like the travel writer Pecchio,

are quite explicit about acknowledging their sources, while reinforcing the idea

of southern Spain as a feminized internal other for the pleasurable consumption

of northern European traveler.

Byron n’a rien exagéré lorsque qu’il a dit que

l’Andalousie était un harem.

Byron did not exaggerate at all when he said that

Andalusia was a Harem’ (138-39). Orientalist discourses of Spanishness can thus

be seen as true “mosaics of citations,” to echo Julia Kristeva’s dictum. The same

mechanism of reflexive citation is at work in the nineteenth-century European

artistic depictions of Spanish Gypsies (see Brown).

Knowledge was largely acquired

from other books and rarely by first-hand experience.

Two parallel trends intimately related to the orientalist outlook in search of

exotic others took place at this time: the vogue of traveling to Spain to follow the

oriental trail, and the transformation of Gypsies into bohemians.

The basic purpose of romantic travel writing was to “fantasize

the satisfaction of drives denied at home, thus evading the conflicts between

guilt and duty, inner desires and social responsibilities. The craving for oriental

fantasies resulted in an avalanche of travel literature—again profusely reproducing

inherited images—that aimed to fulfill the desires repressed in bourgeois

societies: promising adventure, exploring forbidden territories, and offering

vicarious escapades outside of bourgeois conventionality. The parallel idealization

of Gypsies as travelers roaming free in a perpetual state of flux was particularly

appealing to the romantic artist at odds with bourgeois society.

The key element in the nineteenth-century construction of

the Bohème in French culture was the imaginary identification of bohemians

with Gypsies (known as “bohémiens” in French, from the region of Bohemia) by

those déclassé artists and intellectuals dissatisfied with bourgeois culture and

urban industrialism. Indeed, the myths of the bohemian Gypsy and of exotic

 

oriental Spain were fused as early as Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1830).

The Cervantine echo of Preciosa is ever present in the exotic Esmeralda, a “Spanish

Gypsy” who in fact ultimately turns out to be neither Spanish nor a Gypsy—

providing yet another case of mistaken ethnic identity.

The immense popularity

of this work awakened a long-lived fascination with the idealized Spanish Gypsy

that would be sustained and developed by bohemian artists like Jollivet, Steuben,

Díaz de la Peña, and Adolphe Leleux in the following years.

By fantasizing and

symbolically transposing their desires onto an exotic outside, bohemian artists

found in the Spanish Gypsy the instrument needed to safely reconcile their differences

with bourgeois ideology, while in fact never leaving home.

 

 

 

Particularly influential in the dissemination of these myths were George Borrow’s

 

accounts of his travels in Spain with the Gypsies: The Zincali; The Gypsies in Spain

(1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843). Borrow combined familiar images of the

Spanish Gypsies with accounts of first-hand experiences in a new example of the

“family tree of ideas” and “inherited thinking” at work in the social construction

of Gypsy identities.

Mixing picturesque adventures with ethnographic

observations, Borrow’s work reiterates well-known negative perceptions

of the Gypsies (as primitive, uneducated, sensual, degenerate, living on the fringes

of society, and devoted to thieving and fortune telling), while simultaneously

revealing other traits dear to the romantic fantasist.

Gypsies as rebel outcasts

and outsiders, travelers, musicians and dancers, whose free-spirited women possess

both the power of seduction and the occult.

As Spain and Gypsies became

inseparable in the romantic imagination—for cultural and ethnic differences

tended to be subsumed in the category of exotic otherness—many of these same

images were easily attached to Spanish culture as a whole (primitive, backward,

superstitious, ignorant, quaint, a land of passion, music and dance).

Thus, for

 

instance, Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1843) offers a ready-made composite of a

romantic Spain “de cachucha, de castagnettes, de majos, de manolas, de moines,

de contrabandiers et de combat de toureaux” ‘of cachucha, of castanets, of majos,

of manolas, of nuns, of smugglers and bullfights.

In the image repertoire

constructed by the orientalist codification of Spain the fan and the shawl (“mantón

de Manila”), products of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, became

privileged signs of exotic oriental Spanishness.


Moreover, this codification of a

system of signs of Spanishness as ready-made exotic images for North European

consumption coincided with the commodification of Spanishness in everyday

culture, fashion, travel, painting, dance, theater, and writing—a vogue for all

things “Spanish” that has been well documented by Léon-François Hoffmann

(51-65).

As these examples make clear, the processes of codification, cultural

appropriation, and commodification of oriental Spanishness are phenomena that

went hand in hand.

At the high point of the romantic era, when these orientalist clichés had already

been assimilated, the ultimate romantic myth of Spanish gypsyness was born.

 

We mean Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen.

Originally published as a three-chapter novella in

1845, the year the word “exotisme” appears for the first time in the French

Académie—“orientalisme” had appeared in 1840 (Moura 193-94)—Mérimée’s

narrative provides further proof that these concepts were already well codified

in French culture.

Through his travels and research in Spain, Mérimée had firsthand

familiarity with Spanish culture, but he was even better acquainted with the

Parisian Bohemian subculture, where the romanticized mythical idea of Gypsies

as free, rebellious, and unbound by society’s rules was fused with the identity that

bohemians had constructed for themselves as outsiders to bourgeois culture.

The idea of the free-loving Gypsy woman—with very little resemblance to actual

 

reality—was mostly an artistic projection of the grisette type, the lower class muse

and lover of bohémiens.

Mérimée’s ambivalent approach to his subject matter

was the consequence of his double life as, on the one hand, a respectable member

of bourgeois society—attested by his many official appointments and honors,

his association with the elite circles, and his close friendship with the Empress

 

 

   

Eugènie—and, on the other, a life-long fraternizer with bohemian life (including

 

his own liaisons with grisettes).

Not surprisingly, then, the novella encapsulates

Mérimée’s ambivalence toward the figure of the other represented by the

Gypsy and a mixture of attraction and fear toward “la vie bohémienne” or “gypsy

life.”

But ultimately the novella illustrates the disavowal of those bohemian ideals

by Mérimée, an imperialist at heart who was appointed senator by Napoleon III

during the Second Empire.

    

Mérimée’s story of Carmen (basically confined to the third chapter of the novel)

is framed by the self-legitimizing discourse of a male narrator, an archeology

scholar traveling throughout southern Spain (a semi-autobiographical veiled

reference to Mérimée’s own official position as traveling cataloguer of national

monuments).

In the first two chapters the narrator speaks from the position of

authority conferred upon him by his gender, class, intellectual background, and

national status.

In the fourth and last chapter, a later addendum on cultural

anthropology and language usage of the Spanish Gypsies explicitly indebted to

the works of George Borrow, he again legitimizes his position of intellectual superiority

 

through his orientalist scholarly discourse.

The explanatory footnotes

inserted throughout the story (such as the Gypsy proverbs from Romaní translated

into French) and the interpolated stories (such as the legend of King don

 

Pedro, who is compared to the Caliph Haroûn-al-Raschid from Thousand and

One Nights), both exhibit a romantic taste for the exotic and the orientalization

of Spanish culture, and offer yet another strategy of authentication that reinforces

the narrator’s authority and the story’s verisimilitude.

The unnamed narrator

in control of Carmen’s story epitomizes the new orientalist discourses (such

as archeology, anthropology, and cultural linguistics) that grant the speaker a

position of intellectual and moral authority over the natives.

The narrator’s scholarly

fascination with past splendours even leads him to look for the lost Roman

ruins of Munda, where Caesar fought his last battle—a search that implicitly associates

his outlook with European civilization and imperialism.

Nevertheless,

following the well-trodden path towards the barbaric primitivism of the exotic,

he finds instead the foreign orientalist story of Spanish Gypsies, bandits, smugglers,

and toreadors—the compulsory components of every nineteenth-century

travel book on Spain.

In fact, the plot of the novel constantly moves around,

traveling from place to place like tourists and travel books.

Cordova, Granada,

Seville, Ronda, and the Sierra mountains were all obligatory stops in every

traveler’s companion guide to the Iberian Peninsula.
 

 This duality was constitutive of the engendering of the Bohème itself, as male bohemians were

usually of petit bourgeois origin, but their female companions were generally grisettes, or working

class girls.

 

The direct influence of Borrow on Mérimée is acknowledged in the last chapter of Carmen.

Borrow and Mérimée also shared an interest in Pushkin’s writings on the Russian Gypsies.


One of

 

these works, Zigáni, was translated by both Borrow and Mérimée, and was yet another source for the

exotic construction of Gypsies and perhaps the inspiration for Carmen (see Northup).

 

 

From the start of the novel, set in the exotically colorful Andalusia of 1830, the

first-person narrator frames the story with a familiar setting into which he then

introduces elements of the unfamiliar, the bizarre, and “oriental,” thus constructing

a domesticated exotic other.

This framing reveals an underlying anxiety about

defining ethnic identities and marking boundaries.

Identities are confused into

a bipolar order that constructs the great divide of male European self/female

Oriental other.

Cultural differences across the divide are highlighted as irreconcilable

(civilized/barbarian, white/dark, MASCULINITY male/female, us/them), while correspondences

within each side of the divide are stressed and presented as interchangeable

(Gypsy, Arab, Jew, Middle Eastern, Andalusian, and Spanish versus English, French,

and European).

Tellingly, the narrator’s first observation about Spanish culture

is that the ritual exchange of cigars among men establishes relations of hospitality,

“comme en Orient le partage du pain et du sel” ‘as does the sharing of

bread and salt in the East’(6,4), but he later decides that those “devoirs de

l’hospitalitée” ‘obligations of hospitality’ are indeed just “préjugé de sauvage”

‘primitive notions’ (7; 17) by which he does not need to abide.

His encounter

with Carmen is marked by a reciprocal case of mistaken ethnic identity.

At first

he takes Carmen to be an Andalusian, then he cannot tell whether she is Moorish

or Jewish, until finally she reveals to him her true identity as a Gypsy.

For the

narrator these different ethnicities (Andalusian, Jewish, Moorish, or Gypsy) are

obviously confused and almost interchangeable versions of the “Oriental.”

Conversely,

Carmen takes the French narrator for an Englishman, a mistake that

provides the narrator with yet another opportunity to develop the orientalist

West/East, white/non-white dichotomy.

En Espagne,

tout voyageur qui ne porte pas avec lui des échantillons de calicot ou de soieries

 

passe pour un Anglais, Inglesito. Il en est de même en Orient.

n Spain, any

traveller not carrying samples of calico or silk is taken for a Englishman (Inglesito).

The same is true in the Levant’ (272-73; 13).

For Spaniards and Orientals alike,

northern European travelers, whether French or English, are all categorized

 

within the same paradigm.

The clear geographical and ethnic divide of the narrative framing is replayed

internally in the love story between the northern brigadier from ELIZONDO (the river valley), Navarra don

 

José Lizarrabengoa, an “old Christian” Basque hidalgo, of Elizondo, Navarra,and Carmen, the southern

Gypsy girl whose oriental origins are in question.

In sharp contrast to don

José, Carmen is exoticised as a dark Gypsy woman, highlighting the strangeness

and wildness of her oriental substrate and of her picturesque acquaintances

(Gypsies, bullfighters, smugglers, bandits), who bring additional “local colour” to

the story.

The double framing mirror structure of the story creates an additional

sense of ambiguity and confusion.

The internal story of the Gypsy and the Basque

dragoon, which constitutes the third chapter and main part of the novella, is nar-

 

(Interestingly, even the name of Carmen has been a source of great confusion. The etymology of

the name does NOT derive from the Latin word carmen for “song” or “charm,” or carmin for “red,” as

most readers and critics believe and Mérimée probably intended, given the strong symbolic associations

 

of both.

In actuality the name Carmen comes from the Arabic word karm, “vineyard,” from

which derives the modern Spanish word carmen—with the final –n added because of confusion

with the Latin word—still used in Granada to refer to a moorish-style villa with an inside garden.

 

 

 

 

rated also in the first person, but this time by don José.

This mirror structure

blurs the male narrators’ identities to the extent that the narrator (in

charge of chapters one, two and four) and don José appear almost interchangeable.

 

Don José clearly acts as a mediator for the master narrator—he is his mirror

reflection—as they both represent male authority figures displaced in an

exotic territory.

For the narrator he is another fellow traveler, “a voyageur comme

moi, moins archéologue seulement” ‘a traveller like myself, though one less interested

 

in archaeology’ (7; 3).

Don José is a northern hidalgo (literally, “son of

something”) who feels displaced in Andalusia, a white European with fair hair

and blue eyes, traditionalist, educated and civilized, representative of social order

and propriety—as is the narrator.

Don José clearly symbolizes bourgeois honour,

duty, and possessiveness.

Yet he also embodies the fatal attraction (dear to the

romantic imagination) to the life of freedom outside of bourgeois conventionality

offered by Carmen.

Through this narrative confusion, the

can safely project his desires and anxieties onto the figure of don José without

the fear and danger of personal involvement with the other.


Both the prudish

dragoon and the prudent narrator are captives of Carmen’s charm.

Significantly,

in each case their first meeting with Carmen takes place in a setting that arouses

a male fantasy of an erotic utopia.

From their respective male subject positions,

Andalusia is constructed as an ideal earthly paradise offering unlimited numbers

of local women to fulfill male desires.

The narrator is visually stimulated

watching the women of Cordova bathing nude in the river at night:

 

. . . toutes ces femmes se déshabillent et entrent dans l’eau.

Alors ce sont des cris, des rires, un

tapage infernal . . . les hommes contemplent les baigneuses, écarquillent les yeux, et ne voint pas

grand’chose. Cependant, ces formes blanches et incertaines qui se dessinent sur le sombre azur du

fleuve, font travailler les esprits poétiques . . . (19-20)

Women remove their clothes and leap into the water.

A pandemonium of shouts and laughter

ensues.

The men gaze at the bathers in a vain attempt to see what is going on.

Yet those white and

indistinct forms visible against the dark azure of the river set poetic minds at work . . . (12)

 

The French narrator’s voyeurism is mirrored in the visual pleasure of don José,

who guards the secluded women working half-dressed in Seville’s tobacco factory

and shares with the narrator the illicit experience of entering a forbidden

room.

Figurez vous, monsieur, qu’entré dans la salle je trouve d’abord trois cent

femmes en chemise, ou peut s’en faut, toutes criants, hurlant, gesticulant, faisant

un vacarme à ne pas entendre Dieu tonner.

Just imagine, señor: the first thing I

found when I went into the room was three hundred women in their undergarments

and precious little else, all shouting, screaming, gesticulating, kicking up

the most unholy row.

Both scenes suggest the fantasies of the oriental

harem or the brothel, with women sexually available for a token compensation,

 

whether a mantilla or a cigarette.

Here, Mérimée appears to agree with Byron

The mirror structure is befitting in a work where the dynamics of self/other become central

problems of representation.

The double frame narration implies a series of mirror reflections between

don José and the narrator, the narrator and the author, as well as the distorting

mirror relationship between history and fiction, text body and footnote, reality and legend, model

and copy—a reflection of Mérimée’s own ambivalent doubling as historian and novelist.

The mirroring

device also suggests the endless repetition of borrowed images of orientalism (the hall of

mirrors of inherited romantic clichés), as well as the compulsive repetitions of the main characters

(to love, lie, steal, and kill), governed by internal dynamics as much as by codes of representation.

 

 

 

and Pecchio: Andalusia, and Spain by extension, appears as a paradise of sexual

freedom and opportunity for the foreign male traveler, a fantasy of both a colonial

and sexual conquest.

Yet another, perhaps more perverse, form of identity confusion is at play in the

story.

The subject position of don José is an ambiguous one, and his ethnic mark

as Basque functions as a shifting signifier.

While he is a narrative stand-in for the

French narrator, sharing the same gender, race, religion, and class position, as a

 

white male Christian hidalgo, he is also tainted as an ethnic other.

Both Basques

and Gypsies are historically loaded cultural formations in Mérimée’s story.

The

notion of “Old Christian,” a racialized construction of Spanish identity that excluded

its internal others, originated with the spirit of the Catholic Counter-

Reformation which tried to abolish all forms of religious, political, and cultural

nonconformity.

Race became a privileged marker of national identity, and

“limpieza de sangre” (“purity of blood”) the litmus test of authentic Spanish blood,

particularly for those with Jewish or Moorish ancestry.

The contaminated body

of the other was literally expelled or exorcised.

Race and class were clearly intertwined,

as Basques claimed “limpieza de sangre” and “hidalgo” status by birth.

An

 

old Christian Basque hidalgo like don José and an oriental, mixed blood Gypsy

like Carmen represent two diametric worlds.

The unlikely union of the Gypsy

and the Basque in Mérimée’s story fulfills the orientalist’s idea of the Spaniard as

“Arab-Christian” or “Catholic Turk” and the mythical construction of Spanish

identity as essentially split: half-European and half-Oriental, like us but unlike

us, partly civilized yet exotic and dangerous.

This confusion of identities is reinforced

by the fictional characters’ own impersonations of each other.

Carmen

tries to pass herself off as Basque to don José, replaying

the old myth of the child

stolen by the Gypsies and speaking to don José in Basque.

Don José, in turn,

trades his military uniform for a gypsy costume and becomes an aculturated Gypsy,

to the extent that he is mistaken for one by the Gypsies in Gibraltar.

This transformation

is reflected in his name change from don José Lizarrabengoa to José

Navarro.

For all their ethnic differences, Basques and Gypsies have a lot in common

 

in Carmen.

The Basque is another form of the incomprehensible other,

whose secret language needs to be translated by the narrator (like the Gypsies’

 

own Calé ), and whose cultural roots (like those of the Gypsies) need to be decoded

and footnoted. Both are attractive and exotic to the romantic imagination:

they have a mythical past, and legendary origins.

They are at odds with society

and largely misunderstood; and yet they are also identifiably close to the French

Basques and bohémiens found at “home.”

Both are travelers who live outside of

their mythical paradise: don José in exile from his homeland in the northern

Basque provinces, Carmen forever roaming, like all Gypsies, since the “exodus”

from their original homeland (Egypt according to myth; India, according to historical

discourse).


Characterized as typical extremes of Spanish split identity,

Basque and Gypsy eventually reconcile their cultural differences with their union

in the Sierra Mountains of Andalusia, a symbolic space in the violent formation

of national identity.

The Sierra Mountains have throughout Spanish history represented

a locus of struggle and resistance against domination and assimilation,

 

most recently for Spanish guerillas fighting French invaders, and earlier for mi

 

norities escaping religious and political persecution (especially non-Old Christian  

Moriscos, Conversos and Gypsies). It is fitting that the orientalist composite

image of modern Spanish identity would blend and con-fuse these different

ethnicities as stand-in synecdoches of Spanishness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spontaneous, full of life, and unbound by the conventional mores and laws of

society, Carmen embodies the heroic defiance of free spirit, desire, and natural

instinct over the social rules governing modernity.

She is the idealized image of

the bohemian.

But for those same reasons she also represents a symbolic threat.

Her natural freedom warrants her autonomy, as she will not be tied to any man,

and this constitutes a permanent threat to the confused identities of don José,

the narrator, and ultimately Mérimée.

In this double bind lies the

ambiguous undecidability of the story, for while Carmen incarnates the principles

of freedom espoused by bohemians, her independence threatens the male-dominated

social and narrative order.

From the beginning, fears of inadequacy and emasculation are stirred in don

José by the sexually charged gestures, lurid language, and provocative clothing

worn by Carmen, whose job at the tobacco factory is, quite symbolically, rolling

cigars by hand and chopping off their heads.

An upright and uptight don José,

recognizing the temptation of the exotic forbidden fruit, remarks:

“Dans mon

pays, une femme en ce costume aurait obligé le monde à se signer”

In my part of

the world everyone would have crossed themselves at the sight of a woman dressed

like that’ (33; 21).

Reinforcing the biblical imagery, it is at the “rue du Serpent”

where Carmen again uses her charm to seduce don José.

The implicit comparison

of the tempting, subversive Gypsy with the biblical serpent is part of a process

of degradation signaled by the repeated use of animal imagery (comparing her

to a cat, a wolf, and a chameleon), which represents the free-spirited Gypsy as

primitive, instinctual, wild, and dangerous.

Furthermore, Carmen is systematically

demonized and characterized by the Frenchman as a fortune teller, a witch,

and “une servante du diable” ‘a servant of the devil’ (22; 14).

Again, the same

mirroring effect reoccurs as she is repeatedly described by don José as a witch

and a devilish creature, although he nevertheless completely succumbs to the

Gypsy girl’s charm.

The ambiguity of the story owes a great deal to both the narrator’s and don

José’s mixture of attraction and aversion toward Carmen.

Clearly, don José fulfills

the romantic fantasy of identifying with the other, living a “gypsy life” on the

fringes of society.

By joining Carmen in the mountains, he becomes a Gypsy fellow

traveler, but also a bandit, a smuggler, and eventually a prisoner, identities at

odds with the social norms and moral code of his upbringing.

As an object of

fascination and repulsion to the two men who represent the center of authority

in their respective narratives, Carmen spells a threatening other, a dark figure

that resists assimilation and endangers masculine power.

Her story thus requires

a final exorcism of the exotic so that social and patriarchal order may be restored.

Don José, a proud man of honour and reason, has lost both to Carmen’s magic

 

 

 

spell. His symbolic bewitchment is suggested repeatedly throughout the novel

and parallels the micro-story of the medieval King don Pedro I introduced as a

 

mise en abyme.

The analogy between the romantic don José and the romanticized

don Pedro is introduced at his first rendezvous with Carmen at the rue du

Candilejo, where (the narrator reminds us in another lengthy footnote) don

Pedro had killed a man in a quarrel, and also where don José will kill Carmen’s

suitor in a sword fight, inaugurating his long career as an outlaw with the Gypsies.

Before the final climax of the story, while Carmen performs the ritual of her

“magic,” she sings “quelqu’une de ces chansons magiques où elles invoquent

Marie Padilla” ‘one of those magic songs invoking María Padilla’ (75; 51).

This

new reference (amplified in yet another extended historical footnote) to the

traditional legend of the bewitched King Pedro I, who had presumably fallen

under the magic spell of his mistress María Padilla, popularly known as “la grande

reine des Bohémiens” ‘the Great Queen of the Gypsies” (75; 51), thus casts a

 

menacing shadow over don José: Carmen’s song is a bad omen that spells trouble.

The pressure to stop Carmen’s devilish magic and menacing charm and, ultimately,

to make her conform is clearly felt from the beginning of the narration:

“Toujours la même! Ça finira” ‘The same old story. This has got to stop’ (26; 16),

shouts a furious don José when he discovers Carmen has returned to the “occult

practice” of fortune-telling and the not-so-occult practice of flirting with other

men.

Because he is unable to tame Carmen’s independent spirit, the only way for

don José to put an end to these practices is to put an end to her life.

In order to

break free of her spell, don José resorts to a symbolic exorcism that will destroy

her “demonic” powers and eliminate his own sense of powerlessness: “La fureur

me possédait. Je tirai mon couteau. J’aurais voulu qu’elle eût peur et me demandât

grâce, mais cette femme était un démon”

Fury gripped me. I drew my knife. I

would have liked her to show fear and beg for mercy, but that woman was a

demon.

Carmen must die, for she is unwilling to submit to a master/

slave relationship. Thus, Don José’s final embrace of Carmen, like the orientalist

embrace of the exotic other, is the kiss of death.

The close connection between desire for the other and its eradication is encapsulated

in the novel’s misogynist Greek epigraph, which Mérimée borrowed

 

from the classical poet Palladas: “

         Every woman is as bitter as

gall, but she has two good moments: one in bed, the other at her death.
 

 

The quotation’s playful use of the Greek words talamos and thanatos—equating

George Borrow, in The Zincali, had already noted the anachronism of the popular Gypsy legend

of María Padilla, since medieval king Don Pedro lived long before the arrival of Gypsies to the

Iberian Peninsula.

Mérimée was well aware of the factitiousness of the legend since not only had he

read Borrow’s account of the legend but he had also started writing his own History of Don Pedro I.

Even though his narrator credits the story to the popular tradition and acknowledges that there

exists a different version of the legend, he still retains it in his story to create the illusion of historical

depth and to foreshadow the story of Carmen and don José.

This is perhaps another sign of the

never resolved conflict between history and fiction that seems to have plagued Mérimée’s career—

thus the recurrent invasion of historical footnotes even in the narration of don José.

The same

 

conflict reappears in the fourth part of the Carmen story added in 1847, where Mérimée basically

recycles second-hand historical and anthropological materials on the Gypsies from authors like

Borrow that seem to contradict their characterization in the novel)
 

   

orgasm and the moment of death—acquires very different proportions at the end

of the novella, as Carmen becomes the tragic object of male SEXUAL DESIRE.


Curiously,

this time the scholar-narrator does not explain the foreign citation in a footnote,

since this cryptic message was probably intended only for readers (male, white

European, and educated—like the narrator and author) who had the means to

decode it.

The narrator thus veils his tacit complicity with the patriarchal order

and his espousal of the misogynist values at the core of European civilization,

here symbolically represented by classical Greek poetry.

The fundamental ambiguity

of the love/hate, attraction/repulsion toward the other ultimately reveals

the barbaric and primitive side hidden behind the cultured and civilized mask.

Death is predicated as a projection of the anxiety caused by male sexual desire for the

other.

Through Carmen’s sacrificial death, don José aims to exorcise his own

demons and, indirectly, the narrator’s.

The narrative accumulation of reasons for Carmen’s death is thus based on a

single premise: Carmen embodies a quality of excess that makes her a threat to

the patriarchal political order, an excess impossible to neutralize except through

her sacrificial death.

Her body is a constant reminder of her resistance to domination.

Carmen’s continued blurring of the territorial demarcations imposed by

cultural and political norms is made manifest on multiple grounds: gender (she

resists male domination); sexuality (her desires are free and uninhibited, and

create fears of emasculation); race (as a Gypsy, she illicits fears of miscegenation);

religion (she practices occult magic and is repeatedly seen as a devil and a

threat to Christian faith); and politics (Carmen not only continually resists both

civil and military authority; she also obliterates geo-political borders, defying

territorial borders and mocking both Spanish and British law in the process as

she takes advantage of the status of Gibraltar as a British colony on peninsular

soil).

Ultimately, Carmen’s smuggling is also an economic threat that subverts

governmental regulations and the monopoly of the oligarchy (a threat already

suggested by the commotion she causes in the state-run cigarette factory).

Clearly Carmen defies and threatens the social order and finally has to pay

with her life.

Don José will be the private executioner, but her symbolic death

for breaking cultural codes and political norms also displaces blame for don

José’s criminal action onto the Gypsy community, their way of life, and the principles

of freedom they bestowed upon Carmen.

Don José’s last words are a blanket

 

accusation of the Gypsy race as a whole:

Pauvre enfant! Ce sont les Calé qui

sont coupables pour l’avoir élevée ainsi” ‘Poor child! The Calé are to blame, for

bringing her up as they did.

On that note, social and narrative order

are both finally restored. The exotic body of the Gypsy is demonized and safely

exorcised. The narrator can go back to the pleasures of his scholarly activities, as

Carmen, don José, and presumably the readers can now all rest in peace.

 

 

  

As we know only too well, however, this was just the first act of a never-ending

 

story.

Mérimée’s Carmen contributed to the renewed fascination with Spanish

Gypsies, mixing dancers, smugglers, bullfighters, and gitanas as interchangeable

 

 

signifiers of oriental Spain. The bohemian imagination of later artists such as

Dehodencq, Giraud, Doré, Corot, Manet, Courbet, Achille Zo, Regnault, Esbens,

and Renoir filled the walls of bourgeois Parisian salons with their exotic genre

paintings, proving that the appetite for exotic Spanish Gypsies was far from dead.

Indeed, Carmen was first resurrected by Giorgio Bizet and his librettists Meilhac

and Halevy in 1875, initiating a long series of deaths and resuscitations that would

continue uninterrupted to our day.

Bizet, who had earlier turned to oriental

 

inspiration for his operas Les pêcheurs de perles and Djamileh, composed Carmen

following another old European tradition of setting operas in Spain, more than

 

20 in Seville alone

Rosini’s Il Barbieri di Seviglia

Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Verdi’s Il

Trovatore,

Beethoven’s Fidelio,

Wagner’s Parsifal, among them.

It seems as if every

major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European composer fell captive

to Seville’s exotic magic.

 

Although the narrative framing disappears in Bizet’s Carmen, and with it the

overbearing French narrator (only the third chapter of the novella is retained),

the historical framing remains.

The setting is moved back to 1820, however, a

period of political confusion, social unrest, and popular uprisings during the

short interval between two major French military incursions into Spanish territory:

the Napoleonic War and the French intervention of 1823.

The othering mechanism

of Mérimée’s narrative framing, which stressed French dominance, is transposed

in the opera through the deployment of French cultural codes operating

—superimposed—over themes codified as Spanish.

Mérimée’s story had to be

adapted to conform to the Opéra-Comique conventions and the expectations of

an audience accustomed to bourgeois melodrama.

The story-line is more complicated

than in Mérimée’s novel: characters are added, and Manichaean stereotypes

are exaggerated.

Thus, in keeping with bourgeois operatic conventions, a

pale, virginal, and angelic Micaela (also a Basque) appeared on stage to balance

devilish Carmen’s racial and sexual excess.

In spite of these changes, the opera

proved to be too shocking for the family theater.

The violent conflation of gender,

race, and class in the portrayal of Gypsies, cigarette girls, transgressive sexuality,

smoking women, outlaws, and the killing of a woman on stage clearly defied

the limits of propriety and acceptability in opera.

Carmen was a public enemy, a

constant menace to bourgeois morality and order, and inevitably had to die in

the end—something formerly unseen at the Opéra-Comique.

While the opera retained Mérimée’s confusing ambiguity regarding the other,

entangling bohemianism, Gypsies, and oriental Spain with the idea of love as a

gypsy child, it was also too diluted and denaturalized for the purists, who considered

it essentially a French opera imbued with pseudo-Spanish gypsy-like patterns

by a French composer who had never set foot in Spain.

One of its early

reviewers recognized the orientalist construction of modern Spain emerging from

“ses origines judaïques, arabs, égyptiennes” ‘her Judaic, Arab, Egyptian origins’

  

Indeed, Bizet’s Carmen represents a prime example of

the continued European fascination with oriental Spain.

Bizet clearly contributed

to the orientalist fashion of appropriating Spanish motifs among turn-ofthe-

 

century European composers, from Strauss’s Don Quixote, Lalo’s Symphonie

espagnole, Debussy’s Iberia, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, and Liszt’s Rhapsodie

 

 

espagnole to Ravel’s Bolero.

All of these scores resorted to an ample range of musical

motifs vaguely codified as Spanish and recognizable by French audiences

accustomed to dance halls, cafes and brothels.

By mixing exotic popular rhythms

 

and dances such as the Spanish seguidilla and the Cuban habanera (appropriated

from the popular song “El arreglito” by Basque-Cuban composer Iradier), both

associated with nineteenth-century Parisian night life, with disparate gypsy folk

motifs (Spanish as well as Eastern European), and then embuing these exotic

elements with a brilliant, exuberant orchestration accentuated by oriental arabesques

and the use of chromaticism, conventionally codified as the oriental

dissonant other Bizet created a composite musical language that

defined oriental Spain as mysterious, exotic, and sensual, but also dangerous

and fatalistic.

Thus, Bizet accomplished musically what romantic writers and artists

had done through literary discourse, travel writing, and painting: the confusion

of different, even opposing, identities in a conglomerate recycled image of

 

oriental Spain embodied in the Gypsy.10

Yet in spite of all the elements conventionally coded as Spanish on its surface,

 

Bizet’s Carmen seems really to be speaking about contemporary French anxieties

that are displaced in the opera to the relative safety of the exotic.

It is easy to see

Carmen’s tragic desire for freedom as a Spanish reflection of the revolutionary

desires that ended in the massacres of the revolution of 1848 or the failed uprising

 

of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Indeed, the overarching militarism of the

opera recalls the militarist atmosphere of the post-Commune political situation

in France.

The military institution functions in the opera as the referent of patriarchal

order, hierarchy, and established morality, qualities which are musically

celebrated in the military marches of the garrison at the beginning of the opera

as well as in the pseudo-military march of the toreador at the end.

The final scene of Carmen’s death outside the bullring is also musically linked

with Escamillo’s killing of the bull inside, as both are ritualistically sacrificed.

The

toreador’s victorious march overlaps don José’s killing of Carmen with the clamours

of “Victoire!” and “Bravo” framing the crime scene and so clearly suggesting

the completion of a collective exorcism.

The climatic sacrificial death of female

protagonists who had “crossed the line” and represented a threat to patriarchal

order was of course a recurring element of closure in nineteenth-century European

fiction, and we interpret the frequent need to resort

to this strategy in nineteenth-century opera as a symbolic masculine revenge on

the world of femininity as well as an exorcism of the morally alien and illicit by a

 

(Spanish fin-de-siècle artists and composers were not immune to this orientalist trend. It was in

the fine arts where the nationalist sentiment found its most clear expression through internalized

orientalism. The modern Spanish school that helped create a national musical idiom of international

renown was born in large part as its result. Pedrell, Falla, Granados, and Albéniz all resorted

to the use of Gypsies and Andalusians as tropes of Spanishness in their works, and, not coincidentally,

they all studied or became successful as composers in Paris. The Moorish revival in architecture

and the decorative arts and the overbearing presence of Gypsies and other related Spanish-coded

motifs such as flamenco performers and bullfights in painting (Picasso to Nonell) and sculpture

(Benlliure) seems a reflection of internalized exoticism. Again, it is not a coincidence that all these

artists lived for long periods of time in Paris, befriending French artists who already had a fascination

with oriental Spain)

 

 

 

bourgeoisie which is at once both fascinated and horrified” (579).

Clearly, Carmen

could be inscribed within this operatic tradition of patriarchal exorcism against

nonconformity, but this symbolic act of exorcism, conflating in Carmen different

gender, class, ethnic, and racial identities (female, working class, Gypsy, Oriental,

and Spanish), represents also the triumph of the bourgeois white male

northern European subject over the defeated exotic other.

Once again, the multiple

threats posed by the other, always desirable but always dangerous, need

finally to be ritualistically exorcised and expelled from the social body.

 

With Bizet’s Carmen the orientalization of Spain reached a new zenith.

Although

not a success initially, it soon became one of the most popular operas ever composed,

 

canonizing the cliché espagnolade on a global scale and with a previously

unknown level of respectability and international recognition.

In effect, Bizet’s

Carmen reinscribed the orientalist vision of Spain as a spectacle for travelers’

consumption, symbolized in the figure of the performing Gypsy.

The multi-layered

operatic spectacle—music, dance, costumes, mise en scène—definitely established

in the popular imagination the overdetermined iconization of the

Spanish Gypsy—inseparable from the exoticised romantic construction of Spain

—as the seductive, colourful, exotic female body endlessly performing for male

pleasure, an obscure, and ultimately disposable, object of desire and disdain.

The persistent and widespread notion of Spain as an oriental nation and the

Gypsy as one of its most recognizable commodities is the legacy of the romantic

image of Spain as a land of passion, exotic travel, and erotic pleasure, but also

essentially different, eccentric, primitive, and inferior.

A hundred years ago American

writer H.C. Chaterfield-Taylord wrote another travel book on Spain entitled

 

The Land of the Castanet. Written in the preliminary stages of the Spanish-American

War, the book suggests Spain had already been reduced to little more than

castanets in the American imagination.

The popular success in our day of exploitative

pseudo-flamenco acts such as the Gypsy Kings or Michael Flatley’s

 

Riverdance, as well as the staging of Carmen at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games,

which aimed to project an image of modern Spain to the world, have only reinforced

this idea.

Spain remains, more than a hundred years after Bizet composed

his opera, quintessentially the land of castanets.

The apparent difficulties

of dismantling this inherited image are proof that the pervasive discourse of

exoticism is still in need of its own exorcism.

 

 

  

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