Present and Poison: Gift Exchange in Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen

Abstract

Prosper Merimee's Carmen (1845-1846) tells the story a fiery, wayward, seductive, yet unattainable Gypsy cigarrera, or female cigar-maker, who goes about Andalusia as she pleases, using men along the way and breaking her lover's heart. Readings the novella have produced contradictory interpretations: either critics see Carmen as a product the French, Romantic, colonialist imagination that sought to demonstrate national superiority by figuring Spain as exotic, oriental, and feminine; (1) or they see in Carmen's behavior the refusal to obey men's rules, heed national boundaries, uphold strict identity categories, and thus, by extension, Spain's refusal to be culturally dominated. (2) This apparent contradiction between sets critical readings stems from a notable lack attention to the complex economy exchange in Carmen. Indeed, acts exchange abound in the novella, and an understanding the circulation goods and people will reveal why the novella seems simultaneously to harm Spain's image, detracting from the country's autonomy as a self-representing nation, and to free the subject--be it Carmen or Spain--from restrictions and the imposition identity categories. Carmen is a framed story passion, betrayal, and murder, but it also purports to be an ethnographic study interest to archaeologists. Narrated by an unnamed French scholar, who travels through Andalusia in 1830 to research the location Julius Caesar's victory on the battlefield Munda in 45 BCE, the story centers on the tragic love affair between don Jose, the bandit, and Carmen, the Gypsy cigarrera. This narrative makes up the first three chapters, which Merimee quickly wrote in 1845, and they were promptly published in the Revue des Deux Mondes as a complete novella. The author then added Chapter Four in 1846, when Carmen was published in book form. (3) The final chapter presents a discussion Gypsies, or Bohemians, whom Carmen and her clan represent in the novella. The narrator describes their occupations, physical types, general temperament, their ubiquity in Europe, and their linguistic influence in France. Thus, the final version Carmen's story is framed by the French narrator's scholarly study, first proposed as a search for the location the battle Munda and then offered as an expose the Bohemian people. By the time Carmen's first printing, Merimee had already published accounts his travels to Spain in Parisian journals so that the mid-nineteenth-century public would have easily read Carmen as a verite vecue, or a lived reality (Clark 189). Moreover, the Revue des Deux Mondes, a journal of the two worlds, was a cultural travel journal that described fantastical, exotic places in the world to readers Europe's civilized world. (4) At this time, Romantic travelers and writers held a certain fascination for Spain, perceiving it to be a place where passion triumphed over reason. Seeking adventures with the exotic and encounters with the unknown, the Romantics found Spain to be more savage than civilized, more Oriental than European, and--given its 700-year history Moorish rule--more Muslim than Christian. Works such as Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829), Notre Dame de Paris (1831), and Theophile Gautier's Voyage en Espagne (1843) represent Spain not only as a culture raw passion and primitive practices but also as a land lawless, magic-wielding Gypsies. (5) Conflated with the Orient, Spain, and particularly Andalusia, became a repository for Europe's others: Muslims, Moors, Gypsies, and criminals alike. Having traveled extensively through Spain--indeed, having been one the first French Romantics to do so, thereby paving the way for others to follow (6)--Merimee possessed the knowledge first-hand experience, which lent itself to his work fiction. By publishing Carmen in a journal that purported to reveal the actuality primitive cultures and by framing his story with scholarly propositions and observations, Merimee covered his tale adventure and passion with a veneer authority and truth. …