audiences value her fearlessness and independence. But if Carmen's great, and very sympathetic, independence of spirit is given too much importance this leads to a misreading of the opera's story. Today's audiences may, of course, deliberately misread it since they are no longer in sympathy with the original story. But in Bizet's opera Carmen is certainly not a depiction of "a possible ideal of womanhood for Europeans, but on the contrary [is] a figment of escapist fantasy, a character doomed because her nature is alien to Europeans" (Parakilas 43-44).
By the nineteenth century Europeans had conquered over half the world in their quest to "colonize and missionize, plunder and organize" the exotic, often less-than-human "Other" they found in these lands (Conlon 8). In the second half of the century those cultures that had been sufficiently subdued began to exert a fascination on the imagination of Europeans--including artists. Painters, writers, and composers were drawn by the notion of escaping to these exotic worlds (often using soldiers as th
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