Playwriting as a Woman: Prosper Mérimée and The Theatre of Clara Gazul

Known throughout the world as the author of Carmen, Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) also wrote the first French romantic dramas and has belatedly been recognized—at least in continental Europe and Russia, where his plays have from time to time been performed—as one of the truly innovative dramatists of the nineteenth century. The same cannot be said for England and America. Mérimée the playwright simply does not exist in the Anglo-American theatrical world. His name appears nowhere in any of the American or British handbooks, dictionaries, or encyclopedias of world drama—with the exception of the Thames and Hudson Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Theatre, edited by Martin Esslin, which, in fact, is a translation from the German of Friedrichs Theater-lexicon von A-Z. Why this conspiracy of silence? How does it happen that Mérimée the playwright is recognized in one part of the world and totally ignored in another? What are the sources of this parochialism?

The neglect of Mérimée as a dramatist in the English-speaking world is in large part a consequence of his radical politics, atheism, and anti-clericalism, his unconventional dramaturgy, and his practice of artistic deception—all of which held back his acceptance in the fundamentally conservative nineteenth-century theatrical establishment. Out of step with the political, moral, and aesthetic norms of his own age, Mérimée's theatre was dismissed as an unstageable and scandalous mystification in France for nearly a century, only to be rediscovered as eminently theatrical by early twentieth-century French directors and actors and by avant-garde companies in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Ignorance of this phase of theatre history—and the critical reassessments that follow from it as to the nature of theatricality—has meant that Mérimée's dramas have never entered the narrow sights of the Anglo-American editors who determine the contents of reference works.

The fact that Mérimée was a hoaxer, a manipulator of masks, has further complicated the issue, leading the literal-minded to believe that he could not be a "serious" playwright if he practiced artistic deception, when in fact shape-shifting was central to Mérimée's artistic identity and method. Even the author's nationality and gender as a playwright were rendered ambiguous and made part of a mystification that deliberately reveals more than it conceals.

At a time when female writers often adopted male personae in order to gain credibility, Prosper Mérimée assumed the identity of a fictitious Spanish actress-author, Clara Gazul, so as to trick his readers, mislead the censor, and achieve imaginative freedom. In 1825 when he was just twenty-three Mérimée published a collection of six plays that he called The Theatre of Clara Gazul, pretending to be the fictive author's fictive translator, Joseph L'Estrange, and providing a biographical sketch of the playwright's life.

According to this invented biography, included as the preface to the plays, Clara Gazul was the niece of a Spanish guerilla commando hanged by the French during their occupation of Spain (1808–1812). When she was only fourteen, the beautiful girl with a swarthy complexion first met Joseph L'Estrange and began to tell him her story. She claimed to have been born under an orange tree by the side of the road in the kingdom of Grenada. Her mother was a fortune-teller and her great-grandfather the Moor Gazul, famous in ballads and legends. Clara was given as a ward to the avaricious Father Medrano, an inquisitor who locked her up in a convent in an attempt to defraud her of her inheritance. In revolt against the hypocritical religious education forced upon her, Clara fled the convent and went on the stage in Cadiz, soon becoming a celebrated actress and playwright. By birth, race, sex, profession, and temperament an outsider, the rebellious young woman was forced to take flight to England at the time of the restoration of the monarchy when all her works were put...