ABSTRACT
Operatic narrative reflects society’s pervasive sexual competitiveness. Sexual encounters in opera are rarely peaceful affairs. Even more than in other public discourses, operatic sex means struggle, though it remains heavily cloaked in the language of romantic love. The rarified romanticism of French and Italian opera cloaks opera’s sex battles in a guise of idealistic love. Opera’s litany of violence against women is, of course, precisely the issue explored by Catherine Clement in Opera, or the Undoing of Women. The statistics on rape, childhood sexual abuse, battered wives, and sexual harassment are so horrifying that they seem unreal, just another shocking Hollywood drama. And these statistics merely represent the most obviously abusive kinds of sexual power play. In Carmen’s operatic sex war, there is really no contest. Carmen wins hands down, and if she gets murdered in the process, she is only one of a long line of heroines, operatic and otherwise, whose sexual triumph leads to their demise.
