The Libertine Carmen, a Female Don Juan

Abstract

For the psychoanalyst Andre Green, there is a link between the creations of a writer and his life. The creators can be totally unconscious or partially conscious of the material arising from the depth of their unconscious. My goal is to show that creations like dreams are a royal path to reveal unconscious. I will try to show it with Merimee‘s short story and then with the Bizet’s opera. Merimee’s Carmen was inspired during a travel in Spain by a news item from the Countess of Montijo and a gypsy met in a cabaret near Valencia. Merimee is a bachelor, a libertine. He falls in love with a beautiful, brown-haired, sensual, married woman, Valentine Delessert. After a passion-love of four years she breaks for another lover. The short story was written five years later, a mourning work. His Carmen is a gypsy who steels and lies, a non-moral prostitute, a narcissistic pervert. The Carmen of Bizet and his librettists is a mythic character created for the Comic opera in Paris, a seductress and a manipulator. Don Jose’s passion will lead him to a love crime. Bizet in his twenties has been a seducer, rejected by Celeste Mogador. Celestine Galli-Marie will sing his Carmen. She seduces him and rejects him just before the first performance of Carmen. Bizet died a few weeks later, a drama on stage and in life. A writer or a composer don’t choose the subject of a novel or an opera by chance. The success of the opera Carmen is related to the capacity of the creators to give life and emotion to their characters. Carmen’s destiny expresses Merimee and Bizet’s death wishes and those of men seduced and abandoned by such a woman.