I would like to clarify something I ranted about in the previous entry. Laurent Pelly claimed that during Massenet's time, there was a fascination with dangerous women in literature. Pelly Updated Manon to that time period--the 1880's--with this idea in mind. However, he claimed that Manon had parallels with Violetta in La Traviata, and Carmen, whom he claims have this in common: That they were "great heroines who break the rules of their bourgeois society and are sacrificed to a hostile male world". There is one major problem with this assertion.
What we are talking about are three completely different women here. Manon is not a dangerous woman per say. Rather, she is a foolish and impulsive teenage girl who wants to have it all (who doesn't?). The only reason why she is labeled a loose woman is simply because of her fecklessness. When she and des Grieux live together again, she is trying to have both the love of des Grieux and the luxurious life. It is Manon's greed that drives her to become manipulative. She truly does love des Grieux, but her desire for the high life causes problems and is eventually what lands both her and des Grieux in serious trouble. So it isn't Manon being a dangerous woman in a male-dominated culture that causes her downfall. Instead, it is her being feckless, impulsive, and avaricious that leads to her and her lover's ruin.
Violetta is a courtesan, which is a high-priced prostitute. She too is truly in love with Alfredo, even though she is told to break it off. M. Germont does use a rather ham-handed method when telling Violetta to leave. At the same time, do remember that M. Germont is not concerned over nothing. When someone dates a person with a bad reputation, it affects the reputation of his family in a negative way. And despite her best efforts and her love for Alfredo, Violetta cannot get around her past (the fact that she is dying of tuberculosis only makes the matter worse). So, Violetta is not a victim of a male-dominated culture so much as a victim of her own bad reputation. That and TB.
Now, Carmen is a dangerous woman, but the fact here is that she knows she's bad news and makes no apologies for it. Unlike Manon and Violetta, Carmen is a poor gypsy girl and never stays in one place for long . She is a smuggler, a criminal. And when it comes to love, she prefers a brief relationship that only lasts six months. So she is never truly in love with Don Jose so much as infatuated with him for the nonce. And she has never seduced men like Don Jose before; men who have never been outside their hometowns and only know honest women like Micaela. It doesn't occur to Carmen in 65 million years that someone would actually want to marry her and spend the rest of his life with her. When she leaves Don Jose after a brief dalliance, she can't understand why he would demand that she come back to him. And when Don Jose finally kills her, he does it out of jealousy (which is not unheard of). So Carmen is a victim of jealousy rather than a male-dominated culture.
So what he have here are a foolish woman who truly is in love but her greed gets the better of her, a woman who is also truly in love but is a victim of her own bad reputation despite her best efforts, and a woman who is real dangerous woman who knows it and is a victim of a jealous ex-boyfriend. Neither of these women are victims of male-cultures per say. Manon is ruined by her own folly. Violetta is dying of TB and cannot escape her reputation as courtesan. And Carmen has never encountered a man like Don Jose in her life and falls victim to jealousy that is totally alien to her. Do any of these scream "sexist culture"? No. Two of these women are truly in love; unfortunately, one is a fool and the other has a bad rep. The other is a vamp and knows it; she just happens to seduce the wrong man.
Oh, and in regards to a bourgeois society., Violetta and Manon's world, France, is indeed bourgeois, but the women's sins are nothing new. Being a prostitute has always hurt a woman's reputation. And being foolish has also always been a big problem for someone. Carmen's world, Spain, is not bourgeois at all. Spain had been stuck in the Middle Ages for centuries and did not get a middle class until more than a hundred years ago. To say that Carmen "violates the rules of a bourgeois society" tells me the M. Pelly was not paying attention in history class when he was in school.
Manon is a fool, Violetta is a woman with a bad reputation, and Carmen is a vamp. Neither of them have anything really in common, so don't bother trying to assert that they do. They don't.
Enough said, so there.
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