Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's Emma

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2008 by White, Laura Mooneyham

I was stolen by the gypsies.

My parents stole me right back. Then

the gypsies stole me again.

This went on for a long time.

Charles Simic, "I Was Stolen by the Gypsies"

As this epigraph from Simic suggests, stories about gypsies have a very long and murky history. The history of the actual Romany people is almost as obscure. It seems that they entered France in the early fifteenth century and Great Britain gradually in the sixteenth century following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Thereafter, in both French and British literature, the gypsies, as they became known, became transfigured by the literary imagination into a collective trope (conjoining freedom and escape from the everyday, licentiousness, thievery, exoticness, foreignness, and the ability to read the future) and a narrative device (the child stolen by gypsies or the adult who runs away with them, as in Arnold's "The ScholarGypsy" [1853] orBorrow's The Romany Rye of the same year). Gypsies by the nineteenth century were firmly established archetypes of the romantic imagination and the Gothic tale as much as they were actual people roaming the byways of the English and French countryside. As David Mayall notes,

the Gypsies have [. . .] held especial appeal for the bohemian imagination of artists, poets, dramatists and fiction writers [...]. In fine art and "high-brow" literature, in the less "respectable" penny dreadfuls and railway literature, and in both light and serious operas, the Gypsies regularly appear in the familiar guise of exotic, dark-skinned, nomadic and romantically alluring rural nomads. (139)

As we know, Jane Eyre has a famous gypsy interlude when Rochester assumes the guise of a gypsy fortuneteller to interrogate Jane, and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie as a little girl runs away briefly to join the gypsies.1

Throughout the nineteenth century, novelists and poets drew on gypsies to represent a complex of meanings. Balzac, for instance, makes brief mention of them as figures of escape, exotica, and fortune-telling in eleven of his novels, Louisa May Alcott in eight novels deploys the gypsies as a trope for outdoor pleasure and sexual licentiousness, and Edward Bulwer Lytton in countless volumes invokes the gypsies as the dark ancestors of possibly dangerous characters. To characterize someone as a gypsy in the nineteenth-century novel is to bring in a host of negative connotations ranging from criminality to miscegenation. Estella's terrifying convict mother has gypsy blood in Great Expectations, Headicliff's mysterious darkness and dangerousness stem from possible gypsy blood in Wuthering Heights, and Will Ladislaw's bohemian recklessness is explained by the inhabitants of Middlemarch as a product of gypsy parentage.

Real gypsies were shunned during this period for allied reasons. As Celia Espuglas has set out, diese reasons were underlaid by racism; eighteenth-and nineteendi-century European accounts stressed the absolute racial apartness of gypsies as well as dieir status as a "degenerate" breed of humankind.2 Gypsies were also disliked because they refused to fit into the prevailing economic system, relying instead on "fortune-telling, hawking secondhand goods, and clearing discarded waste" to make money (Espuglas 148) . Grellmann's 1783 account of the gypsies, for instance, focused on the gypsies as indolent; Leo Lucassen notes that even when they worked as, for instance, musicians or hawkers, such activities were often a form of indirect intimidation and thievery (75).3 Moreover, their standards of hygiene and cleanliness were far less stringent than diose held by the typical British citizen-gypsies often left bodily waste in open trenches near their encampments and were renowned for dieir dirtiness and aversion to baths. Gypsies also had a reputation, probably merited to some degree, for unrestrained licentiousness and prostitution; certainly the figure of the female gypsy as an enticing alien (her descent from Cleopatra was legendary4) marked depictions such as that by George Crabbe: in his "The Lovers' Journey," Crabbe described a gypsy woman whose "light laugh and roguish leer express 'd / The vice implanted in her youthful breast" (158-59). When one adds to this the popular idea that gypsies stole children (Espuglas 148), it is not too difficult to see why "respectable" citizens feared and avoided them. While rare, there are accounts of gypsies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actually stealing children on occasion, sometimes to keep them, sometimes for the purpose of ransom. For instance, one three-year-old child snatched in 1727 was Adam Smith, who later authored Wealth of Nations; he was snatched back, however, by a search party a few hours later (Ross 18).

Before and during the nineteenth century, fictional literature made wide use of these child snatchings, employing the narrative device of the child stolen by gypsies to a degree grossly out of proportion to historical reality. The tale of little Adam Smith became a springboard for a raft of nursery tales, all carrying a heavy weight of admonition, as Deborah Epstein Nord has pointed out: "If the great Smith, a man so important to the building of British civilization, found himself in danger of absorption into an alien tribe, so, too, might any careless child" (Gypsies 24). But child kidnapping and the later restoration of the lost child as an adult also appeared in nineteenth-century texts meant for an adult audience, such as Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), Ellen Pickering's Nan Darrell, or the gypsy mother (1831), Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Mérimée's Carmen (1845), and Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866), among many, many others.5 This plot device was appealing partly because of its sensationalism, but also because the child stolen by gypsies reformulates an ancient device of romance where a child is sold to or stolen by a group of outsiders. This motif we recognize at least as far back as in the selling of Joseph by his brothers to the Ishmaelites in Genesis and later in the fifth or sixth century A.D. Roman tale that gave Shakespeare the plot for Pericles, in which pirates steal the hero's daughter. In each tale, diere is a later reunion with the family after much hardship.