The Carmen Who Lives
Imagining women's futures
The third of three articles about Carmen, along with What’s In the Cards and It’s Not About Sex.
I’m back in the U.S., unpacked and settling back into to normal life, whatever that is.
I made so many new friends, ate lots of pho, and drank lots of Vietnamese coffee. It was a fantastic performance with the wonderful singers and orchestra of the Vietnam National Orchestra and Ballet in the gorgeous Ho Guom Theatre. The President of Vietnam came to the show. I hear he’s an opera fan. (!!!)
The finale of Carmen is probably its most complex scene, and I feel like I could conduct it in my sleep at this point. I saw it half a dozen times before the final show, each time a little bit different, each time with the same bloody end. And having watched the final curtain fall so many times, I can’t help but dream up a different ending for the opera - and for Carmen herself.
As things stand, it’s a brutal scene, brilliantly written. Carmen’s ex, Don José, stalks her outside the amphitheater where her current partner, the celebrity toreador Escamillo, is fighting a match. Don José begs her to get back together.
He’s desperate and violent, but she doesn’t flinch. She tells him it’s over. Carmen was born free, and she’ll die free, she sings defiantly.
He presses, and the tension winds tighter and tighter. Don José’s music is just as obsessive as his dialogue. His repetitive material grows increasingly dark the more she insists.
Words turn rapidly into actions - for both of them. She throws the ring he gave her. He stabs her.
Curtain.
The last thing I want to do is anger the Opera Gods by messing around with an iconic finale, but - just as a thought experiment - try this on for size:
Imagine that instead of murdering Carmen, Don José slinks off the stage after her final rejection, even more of a broken man than when he slinked on.
Escamillo sweeps out of the bullring victorious. In a rush of adrenaline and confidence, he asks Carmen to marry him.
She laughs and says no. She repeats the same line she sang to Don José, this time in triumph. Carmen was born free, and she’ll die free.
Curtain.
That’s the end of the newly published RBN Edition of Carmen. But it’s not the end of, well - Carmen. I’m less interested in what happens to our re-imagined protagonist in the final scene than I am in considering what happens to her after the curtain falls.
I like to imagine that The Carmen Who Lives becomes a superstar. When we meet her, she’s already a natural singer and dancer. Crowds scream her name, even when she’s just a cigarette girl.
I see her becoming a nineteenth-century Cardi B or Kesha or Tina Turner or Madonna. Drawing massive crowds to an arena just like her (ex, in this revision) lover Escamillo did. I like to think she makes a whole lot of money.
Now imagine Carmen at the age of eighty, ninety, a hundred even. Imagine her at the end of a long life, in her bed, cared for by - a partner? Her children and grandchildren? Her gypsy troupe? All of the above?
What kind of life does she look back on? Carmen is a complicated personality, so it’s likely not decades of sweetness and light. But it would certainly be a rich life. A life of many relationships, and, yes, a lot of sex. A life of adventure and risk.
But - you might ask - why bother spinning out a fictional future for a fictional character?
Because one of the most insidious ways we diminish women is by failing to fully imagine their futures.
The futures of Carmen’s male counterparts are palpable, even within the opera’s fictional world. Escamillo a fast-rising star. The loss of Don José’s stable, middle-class future is one of the most powerful emotional motors of the plot.
Not so for Carmen. Even though she’s the title character, we don’t get any sense of a real trajectory for her. No clear vision of what her potential is. Race is a slippery historical concept, but it’s fair to say that, in contemporary terms, Carmen could be considered a woman of color - and certainly a woman of the underclass - and in that way, her future is doubly denied. (Not unlike Sonya Massey, whose story you should read.)
It’s a future that’s cut down violently. But even the most sympathetic listener probably doesn’t have a visceral sense of what it would have been.
This is the sneaky phenomenon that led the philosopher Kate Manne to coin the term himpathy. Manne noticed that in cases of sexual assault - from college campuses to Kavanaugh - the same questions came up over and over again. What about that bright young man’s future? What about that accomplished man’s career and family?
Manne was curious about an often-unasked question: what about her future? Why is his future is so tangible that any damage to it feels painful, while her future is hardly imagined at all?
It’s an attitude that perpetuates a spectrum of injustices well beyond sexual assault. Parents are more than twice as likely to Google “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Managers promote men, but not women, based on their “potential.”
Data points like these are often used to explain the invisible biases that marginalize women in a variety of spaces. But they also connect the dots on a much more painful truth. Seeing someone’s infinite possibilities - whether they’re a gifted child, a junior employee, or a survivor of sexual assault - is an essential part of seeing their personhood.
To fully imagine someone’s future is to see them as fully human. And it’s a piece of humanity that is so routinely denied to women, we barely even notice it.
Some of that is no doubt a self-defense mechanism. Even the most engaged listener reacts to Carmen’s death with an alarmed gasp, maybe a horrified shake of the head. But if we fully imagined her future - the life she could have led and the person she could have become - we would probably have a good, hard cry instead.
Multiply those tears by all of the women whose potential has been cut off, in large ways and small, by a world of normalized misogyny, and it’s no wonder we reflexively draw a blank when it comes to imagining women’s futures. If we were to really, truly face the magnitude of their loss, the pain would too much to face.
But face it we must. Not just to mourn lost futures - although that’s a necessary task - but to create better ones. Because when you imagine a woman’s future - when you see it so clearly that just the thought of losing it feels like a gut-punch - then you’ll support it. You’ll protect it. You’ll speak up for it.
So please - start envisioning women’s futures with your wildest, most technicolor imagination. The world will be better for it.
I’m sorry to still have to say that the Eastman School of Music is most certainly not a place where women’s futures are supported. I shared my own story of harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, as well as a reporting process that offers no protection to students who raise concerns. I was flooded with stories of women who had the same experience at Eastman. Some shared those stories publicly.
The school offered no response - aside from one of its deans threatening to sue me. There was a lot of hope that Eastman’s new dean, Kate Sheeran, would bring some change. She has only stonewalled. I’ve reached out to Eastman and U of R leadership multiple times about a plan to move forward in the fall. They have refused to respond. It’s genuinely unclear as to whether I can return to a reasonable, equitable environment to finish my degree - all because I reported a problem faculty member.
You’re welcome to contact Dean Sheeran - ksheeran@esm.rochester.edu - although the school is making it very clear they don’t intend to offer any meaningful response.
This is a fantastic essay. Thank you!