Showing posts with label carmen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carmen. Show all posts

7 Jul 2017

Hot Gypsy Girls 3: On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher

I'm a free spirit, men love me / I'll drink, I'll dance but do not forsake me
For my magic will end in flames and / Your heart will burn out my name


I: L'amour est un oisseau rebelle

The character of Carmen, a young Spanish gitana, is the perfect embodiment of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. Bizet's opera, composed in four acts and first performed in 1875, is the tragic story of how a respectable army officer, Don José, is drawn in to her dangerous world in all its oriental otherness and infectious immorality.

His mad obsession with Carmen and vain belief that he might possess her love, costs him everything; his honour, his dignity, and his masculine pride. Although it is she - not he - who ends up in a pool of blood on the floor, having been murdered by his hand: Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée! he cries, having stabbed her in a jealous rage.  

But whilst it's Carmen who is ultimately the victim of a terrible crime, it's Don José with whom the audience are expected to sympathise; seeing him as the victim of her duplicity and guile. And that, of course, is exactly how racism, misogyny and class discrimination works. It's also how a work of art that openly exploits a Hot Gypsy Girl's appeal in order to titilate its audience and appear outrageously unconventional, implicitly reaffirms the bourgeois order at the same time.

As Adriana Helbig rightly notes:

"Don José's transformation and Carmen's murder embodied a strong message to the 19th-century middle-class audience: ­ Carmen's deviant, immoral actions would not be tolerated and any contact with her would lead to pain and eventual social, spiritual, and moral ruin."

This being the case - Carmen being an essentially moral and reactionary tale - one is surprised that Nietzsche loved it so - but loved it he did! Indeed, he claimed to have seen it twenty times (coincidentally the same number of performances that Brahms also claimed to have attended) and that each occasion left him feeling happier and more alive than the last.

Perhaps we might briefly explore why that was the case - why, if you like, even a famous German philosopher should fall under the spell of a Gypsy Girl in all of her Andalusian hotness ...


II: L'amour est enfant de bohème

A real man, says Zarathustra, wants two things above all others: Gefahr und Spiel. For this reason, he desires a woman like Carmen; for within the pornographic imagination the Hot Gypsy Girl is one of the most dangerous playthings on earth. And so, perhaps, at some level, in boasting of his love for Carmen and her animal vitality, Nietzsche is affirming his own masculinity following his failed relationship with Lou Salomé.

But there are, of course, other reasons why Nietzsche was drawn to this opera and proclaimed Bizet a genius - not least to piss off the Wagnerians, although it should be noted that Wagner himself greatly admired Carmen, having attended the very successful first production in Vienna, six years before Nietzsche first saw it in Genoa, in 1881.       

For Nietzsche, Carmen identifies the tragi-comic essence of love, which Oscar Wilde famously summarizes: Each man kills the thing he loves. But, more than this, it accomplishes a much-needed Mediterraneanization of music, by which Nietzsche means it makes music gay and free-spirited once more; giving wings to thought and - as he also hints - putting lead in pencil.

In other words, Bizet makes horny; giving one that feeling of power that is, in Nietzschean ethics, the source of happiness and, ultimately, goodness. For Nietzsche, Carmen makes one a better man and a better philosopher - and this is why he is happy to throw himself at the feet of a Hot Gypsy Girl in Seville ...


Notes

Bizet's Carmen (1875) was based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, written and first published in 1845. Amongst other sources, Mérimée drew upon George Borrow's book The Zincali (1841) for material on the Romani living in Spain; a work largely responsible for the Spanish components of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. 

Adriana Helbig, 'Gypsies, Morality, Sexuality', The New York City Opera Project: Carmen (2003). Click here to read. 

Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1967). 

For an interesting essay on Carmen as Nietzsche's muse, by Traian Penciuc, click here. Pencuic rightly argues that Nietzsche's affinity for Bizet's opera is anything but whimsical.  

To read part one of this post - On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women - click here

To read part two of this post - Esmeralda: Trope Codifier and Fraud - click here.


5 Jul 2017

Hot Gypsy Girls 1: On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women

I feel her, I see her, the sun caught in her raven hair 
is blazing in me out of all control!


It would not be unreasonable to argue that the pornographic imagination is founded upon, circulates, and sustains a wide range of racial and sexual stereotypes, including that of the Hot Gypsy Girl ...

With her dusky complexion, fiery dark eyes and loose black hair, wearing a low-waisted long skirt split to the thigh that she hitches up flamenco style to dance barefoot in public pieced with a low-cut, midriff-baring blouse that invites more than just navel-gazing, she is not only exotic in her sultry good looks and colourful appearance, but animal-like in her wild and overt sexuality.

Many men desire her, but most would be too scared to approach her. For like the true temptress, she spells trouble and threatens danger as well as offering the promise of unbridled passion; the Hot Gypsy Girl knows how to use a knife - and I don't mean in table-mannered conjunction with a fork.

This porno-romantic construction of free-spirited and strong-willed femininity that is found in much of the art, music, and literature of the 19th century, stands in direct opposition to the Victorian ideal of buttoned-up womanhood that held sway across Europe at the time; white-skinned, fair-haired, mild-mannered, kind-hearted, chaste and - above all - submissive to the male authority of their husbands and fathers.

Puritanical commentators who dislike stereotypes, will point out that there's very little empirical evidence to support this fantasy of the Hot Gypsy Girl. But, even if not based in actual fact, she's a real figure nonetheless with her own alluring truth and there are numerous examples to be found within modern popular culture.

Two names, however, immediately present themselves: Esmeralda and Carmen ... 


Notes

The image used above is of the Gypsy assassin Mejai, from the Franco-Belgian comic book series Le Scorpion, written by Stephen Desberg and illustrated by Enrico Marini. It's taken from the main page of the Hot Gypsy Woman entry on TV Tropes: click here

Those interested in reading further on this subject should see Ian Hancock, 'The "Gypsy" Stereotype and the Sexualization of Romani women', in Gypsies in Literature and Culture, ed. V. Glajar and D. Radulescu, (Palgrove-Macmillan, 2007), pp. 181-91. This essay can also be found on the RADOC site: click here.

To read part two of this post - Esmeralda: Trope Codifier and Fraud - click here

To read part three of this post - On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher - click here.