ABSTRACT
The following analysis turns to a device favored by Chaucer, Marguerite de Navarre, and others. Ordinarily, the frame and the story establish parallels that support and illuminate major themes and images. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers were particularly skillful in setting their stories in frames emphasizing a background that reverberates to illuminate one or more constituent elements. In Carmen, for example, Mèrimèe offers an engaging narration of eroticism, violence, and crime, then encloses it in a frame exposing the narrator as a coward tempted but terrified by Bohemia (Bizet took the story and character for his opera and ignored the frame).
