When Harry Bit Sally

An awesome 'funny or die' video courtesy of Jordan Stone. "Grandpires" and "Grombies" are now in my vocabulary.

Operas of Verdi, Balfe, and Gilbert

I. Il Trovatore by Verdi

In Il Trovatore, Asucena ultimately avenges the death of her mother through the execution of Manrico, but this is complicated in several ways. She raises Manrico as her own, and it appears that they have a loving familial bond (i.e. she is not just raising him as a mechanism for revenge). After all, he comes to her aid when she needs him, and he calls out to her just prior to his execution. However, there is a gap about Manrico’s upbringing, and viewers have limited access to Asucena’s thoughts of Manrico. At one point, she tries to tell him that he is not her son, but retracts it (13). Further, Asucena is overcome by Manrico’s execution. Count di Luna, reneging on his promise to spare Manrico, unknowingly executes his own brother. Count di Luna is the active agent here, so the situation/execution of Manrico seems to implicate the Count more than Asucena. What do you make of it?

a. Do you think the opera highlights the cruelty of the ruling class? What about its representation of “gipsies”?

b. Does this opera become a commentary on how an established power (in this case, nobility) imposes itself upon a smaller group (“gipsies”)?

c. What do you make of the depiction of Asucena? Is she vilified? Consider her act of infanticide.

d. Some argue that Il Travotore teeters on a fine line between tragedy and melodrama. Where would you place it?

II. The Bohemian Girl by Balfe and The Merry Zingara by W.S. Gilbert

Balfe’s and Gilbert’s operas (the latter a parody of the former) take a lighter tone.

a. What do you make of the deus ex machina twist that Thaddeus is nobility and acceptable to be married to Arline? How does this link to Nord’s discussion of the marriage plot (14)?

b. What to you make of the fact that Thaddeus is an adult/soldier when he first meets the six-year-old Arline, and that a love affair ultimately springs from their relationship? More specifically, do you sense a high “ick” factor?

c. What is the purpose of Gilbert’s parody? Does the parody work to act as a correction of The Bohemian Girl? How are “gipsies” depicted in both operas?

III. Closing thought

Il Trovatore is taken from a drama by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, the plot of The Bohemian Girl is borrowed from Cervantes’s “Precioso,” and The Merry Zingara is a parody of The Bohemian Girl. What do you make of this constant making and re-making?

288 pages of "Nature v. Nurture": George Eliot's Identity Question

"The Spanish Gypsy" hinges upon the legend of Gypsy kidnapping/child swapping/foundlings, although in this case Fedalma, Gypsy child, is stolen and raised by whites. Fedalma is set to wed a duke when her long-lost father reappears, as a prisoner of the Spanish court, and calls his daughter back to her "rightful" place as the leader of her people. Drama and heartache ensues.

It would not be unfair to call Eliot's poem heavy-handed, as she nearly beats to death the question of nation, identity, and roots. However, the poem offers several points of departure that relate to our discussions this semester. I've included some general questions that occurred to me while reading--feel free to add your own.

1. Based on the "rules" of this text, would Fedalma have been able to marry Silva and become a duchess if she had never seen or known her father? Would her heritage have lain dormant?

2. What role do Jews and/or Judaism play in the text? (For ex: Sephardo) Can we compare this text to Daniel Deronda?

3. Within the poem, do we have any hope that people of different backgrounds can ever mingle? Does Eliot herself believe that mingling can occur?

4. Zarca's great goal for his people is to establish a homeland for them, a place that will be their nation. What do we make of this longing for stability--and do we read it as Eliot's English gaze imposing English values on Gypsy characters?

I don't have more specific questions, but I do have topics that I think we should consider here or discuss in class: the representations of Christianity within the text, the form of the poem, the angels of Memory and Reason.

"From Shire to Shire, and Place to Place": Gypsy as other Others?

As a starting point of thinking about “Gypsyhood,” I would like to propose several questions related to differences between characteristics assigned to the Gypsies and those attached to the Irish and the Jews.

   ① What are the Effects of Soft-Orientalism?

Nord points out that “fascination with Gypsies in Britain was a form of orientalism” (3 italics added). When compared with the Irish or the Jews, the “racial” marker—in terms of their physical feature, including their color of skin—attached to the Gypsies seems to be more distinct, creating a certain distance from the Western population and rendering them closer to the Oriental figure. Like the Oriental or the colonized subject, Gypsies operated as a site of projection of the repressed desire and fear of the West. Also, perhaps, John Hoyland’s strong desire to associate Gypsies with Indians dissociating them from Egyptians reflects the Western desire to see Gypsies as the Oriental existence (though also in modern ethnographic discourse, the Romany’s Indian origin seems to be established as a scientific fact). Yet, at the same time, they were, unlike the “real” Oriental subjects, a domestic or an internal other, inhabiting within the Occident. How does this physical proximity function for the quasi-oriental imagination? Should we see the Gypsies as "other" Others or straightforward Others? How does their intermediate status—not quite Oriental, not quite Occidental—operate within postcolonial discourse? 

② Difference between Gypsies and Jews: Time, Space, and Modernity?

As Nord argues, though the Gypsies shared “transnational (or at least non-national) and stubbornly distinct minority identities” with the Jew (5), these two groups differed greatly especially in terms of their relation to modernity. The Jewish desire (even if it might have been a little over-emphasized partly because of a construct/projection of British desire for quarantine the Jews) for modern nation state observed in Zionism marked a stark contrast with nonchalance about a specific land of the Gypsies, who apparently were satisfied with their nomadic life. Also, while the Jews were closely associated with urban or cosmopolitan cultures, situated within the center of the capitalism, the Gypsies functioned as embodiment of antiquity, especially British past, “allied with an aesthetic of the picturesque and with protest against modern encroachments” (Nord 6). In other words, it seems that whereas the Jew functioned in Victorian mind as an ominous incarnation of “hypermodernity,” the Gypsies played a role of antithesis/antidote of modernity. What do we make of this distinction in terms of their relation to modernity?

③ Gender Representation of the Gypsies: Dream of Androgyny?

Also remarkable is gender representation of the Gypsies. In contrast to the gender representations of the Irish and the Jews, in which female Irish/Jews are rendered desirable (whether ethereal or hyper-sensual) while male Irish/Jews are rendered repugnant, there seems no such gender distinction of aesthetic value in Gypsy representation. As Nord points out, the Gypsy was often represented in Victorian fiction as androgynous, a hybrid figure of male and female. Nord only argues about the imagery of masculinized female Gypsy, which provided Victorian female writers with fantasy of heterodox femininity reveling against patriarchy. Yet, Hoyland pointed out that male Gypsies, when they are young, “they are generally handsome,” which I found atypical for describing the male figure of racial minorities. As I have had an impression that the difference in aesthetic values associated with two genders in both Irish and Jewish cases might be related to the politics of interracial marriage, I am wondering how to interpret this androgynous representation of the Gypsies. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, though it is not a “Victorian” novel but a modernist exploration of androgynity, concerns with Gypsy representation, too, by the way.

④ How Do We Make of Dracula’s Minions?

Although we don’t have many literary examples of Gypsy representations yet, the presence of the Gypsies in Dracula’s last scene is memorable. Narrated from Mina’s point of view, the final moment of the novel documents the fight between Crew of Light and Gypsies as minions of Dracula (though, whether they are really Gypsies or not is unclear: “Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men’s clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind” (Dracula 322). ) What does this scene of the battle with Gypsies, which strangely substitutes for anti-climactic moment of Count’s death possibly mean? By the way, I couldn’t help smiling at Mina, who, though she must be busy watching her husband’s gallantry, is distracted by the gypsy male’s fascinating appearance: “The leader of the gypsies, a splendid looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed” (323).

That’s all for now, but please feel free to add more questions!