This session will not focus on the well-known problem of “Gypsy” stereotypes, which has been thoroughly investigated by recent scholars (e.g. Colin Clark, Deborah Epstein-Nord, Sarah Houghton-Walker, Nicholas Saul), but will seek instead to explore more nuanced representations and the ways in which writers obsessed with “Gypsies” have used and depended on the “Gypsy” trope as a stimulant for their own work.

The fascination with “Gypsy” freedom across the centuries raises important questions of heritage, appropriation, and exploitation: if the outsiderhood of the Roma has generated subversive possibilities through the imaginary “Gypsy” figure beloved of “non-Gypsy” writers, how is the resulting cultural debt to be reckoned? How best to acknowledge the ways in which literary works are beholden to a minority that has been historically excluded but whose very exclusion has been appropriated by non-Romani writers for their own ends? The matter is sensitive, because literary emulations of the free-roaming, free-thinking “Gypsy” go hand in hand with the erasure of Roma experience from the historical record and are complicit with the marginalization and persecution of the Roma minority. There is an urgent need, not only to recover Roma voices, but also to understand the utility--indeed, the necessity--of the “Gypsy” figure for non-Romani writers.

Stoyan Tchaprazov will focus on George Borrow’s semi-autobiographical Lavengro (1851) and Romany Rye (1857). Unlike many contemporaries, Borrow does not reduce his “Gypsy” characters to either criminal sociopaths or emblems of freedom, but instead allows them to speak as equals with Lavengro, the Englishman. Following his exchanges with the amateur boxer Jasper Petulengro, Lavengro realizes that the “Gypsy” is not a “humbug,” but a firm believer in his own moral rectitude and intellectual prowess. Petulengro’s articulacy establishes his “Gypsy” perspective as a valid alternative to Englishness. Borrow’s work is now little read but would deserve more attention from scholars of Victorian literature as a counterweight to the typically silent “Gypsy” stereotypes. However, the use to which the “Gypsy” figure is put by the non-Romani Borrow also requires critical scrutiny: at a time of cultural turmoil, Victorian writers looked to exotic minorities for new perspectives, and for the author Borrow, Petulengro is a valuable alter ego, and a source of professional and financial gain.

Kristin Boudreau will trace the figure of the “Gypsy” from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) to her narrative poem, “The Spanish Gypsy” (1868). Although the “Gypsy” appears in Eliot’s novel as the familiar dualistic emblem of freedom and threat, Eliot’s poem interrogates those stereotypes in the figure of Fedalma, the Roma woman who was kidnapped as an infant and raised among Spanish Catholics. While she displays none of the lawlessness found in stereotypes of the Romani, Fedalma has inherited the “gypsy” longing for freedom: “Why, I with all my bliss/Have longed sometimes to fly and be at large.” In Eliot’s vision, Fedalma’s decision to leave her Spanish fiancé for her people stands as a response to the call of duty, not of personal freedom or happiness. Instead of perpetuating the (largely male) fantasy of unbridled “Gypsy” individualism, Eliot’s poem resists false emulation, and affirms the existence of a “Gypsy” community and value system.

Philip Landon will explore the role Matthew Arnold’s seminal poem “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853) plays in establishing the imaginary “Gypsy” figure as a model for subversion and free thought. He will trace the continued afterlife of Arnold’s “Gypsy” figure--who, notoriously, was not a “Gypsy” but an “Oxford scholar poor” who “went to learn the gipsy-lore” and whom Arnold imagines haunting the Oxfordshire countryside for centuries. Immensely popular with subsequent generations, Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” is taken up by twentieth-century British and Irish travel writers and informs and enables their attempts to adopt new perspectives. Travel writers such as Walter Starkie, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Bruce Chatwin not only allude to but strongly depend on the figure of the “Scholar Gypsy” as a vehicle for their truant innovations as they invent and reform the heroic, male travel writing genre.

The session will conclude with a discussion of the problems of voicelessness, misrepresentation, and erasure more generally, aiming to link the comparatively new field of Roma studies to other, more long-established academic conversations regarding the literary representations of minorities (Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak).