Mérimée's 'Carmen' and Gypsies

Bizet's Carmen is based on Prosper Mérimée's novella of 1845. Mérimée visited Spain multiple times before writing Carmen and he devoted considerable time and effort into researching the costumbrismo (folklore) of Andalusia - Gypsies, bandits, bullfighters, cigarette girls, witches, highwaymen, and so on, that became the background stereotypes of his story, and he tells that story as if it really happened to him.

Mérimée chose to go down almost the opposite path from Cervantes, whose influential and wonderful La Gitanilla (1613) breaks down cross-cultural stereotypes and actually has a happy ending. Mérimée was relatively late to use "Gypsy" (Romani) characters in fiction, so he went with the stereotypes. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in 1831, presents the young Gypsy girl Esmeralda in a heroic light. Mérimée also was aware of his friend Pushkin's poem The Gypsies, written in 1824 and published three years later. That poem is a narrative about a young Russian hero, Aleko, who falls in love with a Gypsy girl named Zemfira, who ultimately betrays him, and rage and jealousy overwhelm him. It ends badly... It is believed that Mérimée read the poem in 1840 and had translated it into French by 1852.

Mérimée painted the watercolor above for the 1845 publication of his Carmen. Unfortunately, he also decided that Carmen must end up stabbed to death by her lover Don José, because this is what Gypsies were supposed to be like in the Romantic Age, and that is the ending we know today. He then attempts to justify this with some lame cultural analysis of the Romani and it is every bit as bad as his plot for Carmen, but I suppose it works in an opera.

Over the centuries, the most popular image of Gypsy women may have been as fortune tellers, musicians, dancers and prostitutes - in Caravaggio, Corot and Courbet for example. Perhaps the most interesting painter of romantic Gypsy (and Jewish) life in the 19th century was the Polish artist, Antoni Kozakiewicz, whose painting Kartomantka (1884) is shown up top.

I also like the artwork by German artist Alastair (real name Hans-Henning von Voigt) for a 1920 edition of Mérimée's Carmen, like this example:

Also see Mérimée and George Sand here... and the image at the bottom of this page.