My research discusses the characteristics of ironic acts found in the works of Prosper Mérimée, author of the world-renowned masterpiece Carmen. The fundamental question that fuels my project stems from a visible discrepancy between the significant interest that the French share for irony and for Mérimée, and the fact that Mérimée’s unique conception and demonstration of ironic acts has been for the most part dismissed by both literary critics and researchers of irony.
More specifically, my project studies the question of victimization, that is, the representation of entities that fall victim to ironists’ ploys. I compare victims of irony in short stories written by Mérimée with similar entities found in the works of other prominent nineteenth-century writers such as Maupassant, Flaubert and Baudelaire. I show that Mérimée, in an unconventional mood for the period, treats his victims respectfully, as if he sought to preserve their dignity.
My research on Mérimée’s conception and uses of irony offers theoreticians of irony an opportunity to reexamine their accepted notion that successful irony systematically entails an aggressive, if not violent act. Additionally, I seek to demonstrate that Mérimée’s unique demonstration of irony in the 1820s must be perceived as the first manifestation of “modern irony”, contrary to scholars’ traditional location of this phenomenon in Baudelaire’s publication of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857.