The traveler encounters Don José, who befriends him and relays the tale of his tempestuous relationship with Carmen, a Roma woman, whom the narrator later meets. Mérimée’s story is told through the voice of a French narrator who travels to Spain in 1830 on an archeological mission. Although the tale did not originally involve Roma, Mérimée capitalized on the growing market for stories involving Roma by making the heroine of his tale a woman from this ethnic group, a culture understood as exotic and, thus, exciting to white European readers. Mérimée found inspiration for Carmen in a story he had heard about a young woman murdered by a jealous man. 1844), both works familiar to Mérimée when he wrote Carmen. In this context, Mérimée’s Carmen mimicked contemporary scientific studies of Roma, including George Borrow’s “The Zincali: An Account of the G*psies of Spain” (1841) and Friderich Pott’s “Die Zigeuner in Europa und Aisen” (vol 1. The journal primarily published non-fiction, including Mérimée’s own series of “Letters from Spain,” an account of his travels. This characterization originated in Bizet’s source material for the opera, Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845), originally published as a serial in the culture journal Revue des Deux Mondes, ( Review of Two Worlds). Productions of Bizet’s opera have historically portrayed Carmen as an exoticized stereotype of Romani women. Historical Understanding of the Romani People A painting of the character Carmen, a Romani woman, use to promote the opera in 1846. A depiction of Carmen and other Romani women dancing in a press engraving from the Opéra-Comique, Paris, 1875.Īs Jeremy Johnson, dramaturg for Houston Grand Opera explains, “Carmen has always been called a ‘g*psy,’ an exonym for the Romani people that has long been used as a pejorative slur, often to justify oppressive public policy.” The exonym, a name not used by the people group it is used to identify, is a European word stemming from the misrecognition of Roma people as originating from Egypt and is now widely understood as a demeaning term.
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