The images of the Gypsy in Deborah Nord's essay emerges as a kind of ghostly figure---outside of history but acting *in* history; alien other yet a familiar part of the British landscape. What did you make of the paradoxes of "gypsiness" in Nord's reading? How did you respond to Nord's discussion of race as at once biological and cultural at the end of the essay? Does the term "race" lose or gain meaning when racial figures are so difficult to define?
Feel free to comment on this or any other aspect of the essay.
--Dan
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I agree with Nord when, she claims that “the word ‘race’ could express a desire to designate ostensibly separate and identifiable “non-English” groups” (20). Earlier in the article it was claimed that the Gypsies are defined as a race simply because its historians want to prove that the people have pure blood origins. I believe that is an absurd way of thinking. First of all, it was not the Gypsies that separated themselves from other in the towns that they travelled to initially. It was the town people that saw them as different because they had a different language, style of dressing, and customs. Thus it was the people like the British that force upon the Gypsies a separate identity from them. Further more, why should it matter now, years later, if decedents of this group of people want to find their origins in order to dispel myths or just claim pure blood? Every human being wants to belong and know where they derive from. I do not think it is racist for Gypsies to be associated with other races or ethnics groups, such as the Indian culture or Romania culture. However, I do believe society is forcing so many identities on the Gypsies, when it is not their place to do so. The Gypsies should be the ones to decide on who they are and what they should be called. They should be able to identify themselves. I also find it interesting that in the British novels many of the characters find an escape in the very people they define themselves against. The people that refuse to conform to the English culture and standards of life are now seen as exotic, a break from the reality of their lives.
I thought it was very interesting how Nord describes the gypsies as Others who are part of the British nation. At least the Irish were considered Others, but only because of where they lived: outside of England. The gypsies were outsiders in their own country partly because their country of origin was unknown. So even know they were in England, right where they could be seen, they were stereotyped as savages.
It almost kind of reminded me of how slaves were treated before and during the civil war. They were in America, but their Origins were of elsewhere, so they were Others. They were stereotyped as primitive and savages and treated very badly because of the stereotypes that people from America had given to them. They were right there! Among the Americans! But they were still Others and outsiders. It might be a stretch for a comparison, but that's what it made me think of.
In the discussion of race, I did not think that "Gypsy" was a race before I began reading the article. Nord says that gypsy became a race because the English wanted them to become know as people separate from the "race" of being a white British person. Even after reading the article, I still couldn't understand how the British could claim that "gypsy" could be a race, even if their country of origin isn't clearly defined.
Before I read this essay, I was not expecting it to be so different from what we were reading with the Irish. It is an interesting dynamic that the Gypsies are "the other within". The part I found to be different (and it stood out to me) was the Origin section. The writer makes it seem as though they have no history or origin, but in writing this section, it seems to me like this is their history. And it is interesting. Then there was a part in that section saying that some writers believe, "that they occupy a primal spot in the history of civilizations and contain in their culture clues to essential humanity...the Gypsy could remind modern men and women of a time before the corruptions of modernity corroded their souls" (9). I guess I just really was not expecting to hear these positive things when I began the essay. Well, to me they are positive. I know that this was not what the entire thing was about, but it really stuck out to me. I was prepared for simians (or something just as bad) and near the beginning of the essay, I got the description I mentioned. I guess it just surprised me.
Personally I was most interested in both the parallels and differences between the Gypsies and the Jews. I recognized a connection even before Nord mentioned it when she wrote "these Gypsies are British, if not in citizenship, then certainly in permanent domicile and, most likely, country of origin" (3). It really connected with me, probably because I'm in Holocaust Lit and I keep hearing over and over again how the Germans didn't think that you could be Jewish and German. For them even if you were born in Germany and your parents and their parent's before that were too, if you were of the Jewish faith then you should be denied German citizenship. Until now I had never known that the two had such a strong connection, or that "Jews and Gypsies haunted each other throughout the nineteenth century as persecuted and stateless peoples", but now that I know I think that it's really cool. The difference of origin caught my attention too. Their lack of identification as identification is crazy, but toward the end when Nord started talking about how they've begun to try to identify their origins struck me as even more odd. Why would they engage in the "potentially distorting process of personal identification" (17)? Would identifying themselves strip them of the Gypsy-ness? I feel like it would. Part of their history is the mystery that surrounds them. At the same time though a lot of their mystery isn't theirs, it's what other people have labeled them as...so I don't know.
The paradox of foreign and familiar seems to sum up the notion of the other we have been discussing in this course. In order for there to be an other, some characteristics of that “foreign” being must be identified and thus become “familiar.” (5) To expound on this paradox as found in other sections of Nord’s work, the foreignness of the Gypsies may be seen as the idea that they do not have an origin, or that they were kidnapped. (7-12) Although this is not associated with English-ness, how many Englishmen actually knew their heritage all the way back to the beginning of time? Did the feeling of not fitting in prevail among the society to make the image of Gypsies familiar? Nord goes further to explain their foreignness as “heterodox femininity” in which the woman imagines herself “escaping from the exigencies of conventional femininity” (14). Again, while this is non-English, how many women of the time had these thoughts? Did enough hope to escape the patriarchy that the idea of a Gypsy attitude was a bit familiar?
Another paradox I found Nord discussed was that of the contrast between urban and rural. I think it’s interesting that the Jews and Gypsies are associated with the pastoral landscape of England by the Englishman’s imagination, but that they are most prevalent to those Englishmen living in a cosmopolitan area. (6)
Regarding Nord, I think it’s the coolest (in an interesting thing I didn’t know before reading this kind of way) myth about Rom-Schmul stealing a stake intended for the crucifix. (6) An additional comment is her pausing to define “race” (“non-English in appearance and habit” on page 20). It seems necessary that the readings we have done take a moment to identify which race of people they refer to. This was found very frequently in Dracula criticism.
Nord's explanation of the origins of mystery with the "Gypsies" in the early nineteenth century struck me as quite different from the presentations of the Irish that we had previously studied this semester. What I found interesting was the fact that the Gypsies were respresentative of an other who is both foreign yet holds a distinct place in English culture. I was unaware that the gypsies were considered as "a domestic or internal other" (3). The pervasivness of the gypsy as a trope of literature is easily understood because of the ambivalence and mysteriousness of their origins in both language and identity. I found it increasingly interesting that there could be foreign gypsies as well. Origins in England were a point of safety and security in the culture and the fact that the gypsies' origin was one of inherent ambivalence I think this made the literary trope more tempting and important to explore as fantasy and imagination.
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