ALSO BY RACHEL M. BROWNSTEIN
Becoming a Heroine
Rachel thumbing her nose, photograph by Dragon
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright © 1993 by Rachel M. Brownstein
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Columbia University: Excerpt from “A Company of Actors (The Comedie-Francaise)” from Papers on Acting IV by Francisque Sarcey (Columbia, 1926). Reprinted by permission from the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Doubleday: Excerpt from George Sand in Her Own Words, edited by Joseph Barry (Doubleday, 1979); excerpt from The Goncourt Journals, 1851–1870, translated from the journal of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, edited by Lewis Galantiere (Doubleday Doran, 1937). Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Oxford University Press: Excerpt from Heine’s Jewish Comedy by S. S. Prawer (Oxford University Press, 1983); excerpt from “Rachel in Russia,” Annenkov quoted in Senelick (Theatre Research Int’l III, February, 1978). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brownstein, Rachel M.
Tragic muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française / Rachel M.
Brownstein. —1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83182-8
1. Rachel, 1821–1858. 2. Comédie-Française. 3. Theater—France—History—19th century. 4. Theater and society—France, 5. Actors—France—Biography. I. Title
PN2638. R3B7 1993
792′ .028′ 092—dc20
[B] 92-25987
v3.1
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Tragedy
CHAPTER TWO
Stars
CHAPTER THREE
Origins
CHAPTER FOUR
Playing Rachel
YOUNG PRINCESS
FORTUNATE FALL
FATAL WOMAN
STATUE
SYMBOLIC MOVES
STAGE EMPRESS
CHAPTER FIVE
Afterlives
A WOMAN AND AN ARTIST: VASHTI
SEPARATENESS AND CONNECTIONS
TRAGICOMIC MUSE
Notes
Illustrations
Photo insert follows this page.
A Note About the Author
I AM GRATEFUL to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the CUNY Research Foundation for financial support and encouragement, and to the archivists and helpful staffs of libraries here and abroad, especially the Bibliothèque de la Comédie-Française, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsénal, and the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; The Theatre Museum, London; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library; and the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center of the New York Public Library. And I thank Mme Sylvie Chevalley for advice and materials, as well as tea.
This book could not have been written without the sustaining encouragement of Nancy Miller and Alice Kaplan—my friends, colleagues, and insightful readers and advisers. Also invaluable has been the help of Shale Brownstein, Gabriel Brownstein, Carolyn Heilbrun, Elizabeth Houlding, Geoffrey Nunberg, Sandy Petrey, my knowledgeable agent Georges Borchardt, and my editors Elisabeth Sifton and Susan Ralston. I thank Adrienne Munich and Robert Viscusi, editors of the volume of Browning Institute Studies (vol. 13, 1985) in which an early version of my discussion of Arnold and Brontë first appeared; J. D. McClatchy of The Yale Review; and the members of the responsive audiences who listened to me talk about Rachel at the City University and elsewhere. For assistance, insights, inspiration, and input of various kinds, I am grateful to Bonnie Anderson, Louis Asekoff, Christina Boufis, Richard Brickner, Daniel Brownstein, Ezra Brownstein, Mary Ann Caws, Myriam Chapman, Lore and Morris Dickstein, Susannah Driver, Linda Dunne, Diana Fane, Gina Fisch-Freedman, Helene P. Foley, Anne Humpherys, Deborah Interdonato, Gerhard Joseph, Juliet Koss, Barbara Newman, Marie-France Racine, Claire Sprague, Jane P. Tompkins, Count Charles-André Walewski and Countess Walewski, Wendy Wipprecht, Joseph Wittreich, and especially Jane Richmond, who read the final manuscript and made last-minute improvements. She shares with Henry James the credit for suggesting my title.
STARS ARE MADE UP of fictions; we acknowledge this when we call them fabulous, legendary. Images as well as actual persons, they seem more and less real than the rest of us, and therefore suggest that personal identity is bound up in illusions, stereotypes, social and literary conventions. Fortunes were made in Hollywood by exploring the phenomenon: the dead or distant actress is and is not a person apart from the face that fills the screen, the unique and familiar image—larger than life—that we call by her name.
Stars are remarkable for doubleness above all; perhaps they represent doubleness. They seem to be both singular and reminiscent, simultaneously false and true. As such they reflect, reveal, and focus a problem that has preoccupied Western culture for at least two hundred years: the shape and depth of individual character, the outlines of the integral, coherent self, the relation between the substance of a self—sometimes called character—and appearances, self-presentations, temporary social roles.
A star is someone whose roles shape her character and get conflated with it, whose personal life appears to be spectacular as we watch it get theatrically played out. The process is peculiarly charged when she is a woman, and representative, in this culture, of the private or inner life. A problematically public woman, the star is accessible to all, but also entirely self-possessed. We don’t know quite what to make of her; we wonder about what she makes, has made, of herself; credulous and cynical by turns, we applaud and enviously debunk her. The contradictions and connections between selves and others are palpably part of a star’s identity—if she may be said to have one.
Stars are signs of anxiety about identity. The glamour that distinguishes them from everything bourgeois belies their origins: they are products of bourgeois individualism, emblems of it. The word “star” was first used in English, of actors, in the 1820s. The earliest stage stars were David Garrick and Mrs. Siddons in England, and Talma and Rachel in France: before them, people came to the theater for the play. A star’s fans (from “fanatics”) come rather to see a person, or perhaps the very idea of one: when la grande Rachel visited her in prison, the condemned murderess Marie Lafarge told her she regretted having missed her in some of her roles, having not seen her “toute entière.” Simply by being herself, a star poses the question of whether and how coherent, integral identity hangs on performances and fictions.
This study of the nineteenth-century tragic actress Rachel is about the paradoxes she presented, the way her image worked as a thrilling, telling oxymoron. In the traces of her that remain, I look for the conditions and contradictions that generate stars, and the specific ones that made this one. My approach has resulted in what might be called a postmodern biography. That is, it is not a sequential narrative of the story of a life; it does not seek to isolate and define some inner essence of Rachel; and it is self-conscious about the position from which I am writing. Locating my subject amid the clashing cultural currents of her time, I see her now as mere spume on the waves and then
as riding them, sometimes brilliantly navigating for her own ends. I pay more attention to how she was seen than I do to her own subjectivity: my interest is the person in performance, the star. But although I call Rachel a cultural construct and read her as if she were a text or a collation of texts, I do not mean to present her as only a shimmer of language. Rachel actually lived and made money and loved and fell ill and died in history, and she was exceptionally faithful to her own past—to her family and to her repertoire. But for reasons that I hope will become clear, I think the best way to know what she was and what she meant is to look at her through other people’s eyes. It is also the only way we have now. Influenced by what I have read and lived through, then, I read her not as the unique and integral self she seemed to be, but as a function of her personal effects.
RACHEL WAS the reigning tragedienne in Europe from the late 1830s to the mid-1850s—mock queen of a culture that had mixed, vexed feelings about royalty. In the France of her time—post-Napoleonic and post-Restoration, post- and pre-revolutionary, and then imperial once more—concern with both personal and national distinctiveness was intense. The nation’s identity was being debated and defined, from the 1830s, as its history was rewritten in numerous volumes by men with different political agendas for its future. The very flood of words suggested that a people could be what it said it was: France, after all, had become a republic, an empire, and so on through a succession of utterances. As Balzac showed in a series of novels he called La Comédie humaine, this was a society in which the most interesting and enterprising individuals might decide to change their names, assume new characters, improvise selves and lives. Napoleon’s example and his idea of the career open to talent inspired the ambitious; Guizot’s exhortation, “Enrichissez-vous!,” directed their energies; and as writers like Stendhal and Balzac considered and reflected on their countrymen’s strivings, they encouraged people to reimagine themselves.
Sometimes called one of the four muses of the romantic stage, Rachel, they say, stood for Tragedy as Marie Taglioni stood for Dance, Maria Malibran for Opera, and Marie Dorval for Drama. But she is not quite assimilable into the company of stage Marys: she had a different relation to her different art. While dance, opera, and drama flourished as if naturally in a society enamored of spectacle, poetic High Tragedy was popular only through the agency of Rachel—only because she had revived it, and only when she performed it. Theater historians remember her for single-handedly bringing back to life an old-fashioned genre soon after her contemporaries had pointedly rejected it. In the first decade of the Bourgeois Monarchy, she stirred memories of past glory—of the ancien régime and the Napoleonic empire, of ancient Greece and Rome, of some ideal literary time beyond time. She moved audiences to reflect on how France had survived, and how it had changed. Astonishingly and ironically, by performing courtly dramas that had been dismissed as elitist, artificial, and irrelevant to modern life, she became a popular star. She made an enormous amount of money: as Mae West would save Paramount, as Deanna Durbin would save Universal, as Marilyn Monroe would save Hollywood, Rachel saved the Comédie-Française.
Contradictoriness was her strength. While connoisseurs commended her art as perfectly traditional, she was also romantically original. Therefore advocates of both classicism and romanticism loved and hated her: and response to her was nearly always intense.
She became famous before sound and moving images could be recorded, and her ephemeral art is gone. From what people wrote, we can guess she was one of those unexpectedly breathtaking performers who, like the unlikely-looking actor in Isaac Babel’s story “DiGrasso,” convinces audiences that “there is more justice in outbursts of noble passion than in all the joyless rules that run the world.” But at the same time she seemed to stand for the rules of art. By making heterogeneous crowds thrill to Racine’s high-minded, formally exigent lines of verse, she helped call into question the line between control and passion, elite and popular culture, and art and nature, high and low, in general.
Like the other women performers of her time—the opera divas and ballet dancers and romantic actresses—Rachel was understood to stand for Nature and Instinct and Passion and Beauty. But she also represented their opposites, standing also for the lapidary word. Her face and her skinny body were unprepossessing. Her voice was rough and deep—it had bronze tones, they said later, comparing it to Sarah Bernhardt’s golden ones. Critics spoke with respect of her “male talent.” But the image of the priestess of high grim art hardly accorded with the sensational rumors about her private life. This Tragic Muse was no dignified, married, English Mrs. Siddons, but a woman who lived like a Parisian courtesan, a pleasure-loving, jewel-collecting demimondaine. And her parents were Jewish peddlers from Alsace; people said they barely spoke French. The darling of queens and statesmen had risen from nowhere, as legend requires, to become a star. And by keeping her family close to her, she seemed perversely and arrogantly to insist on the fact that she had come to center stage from the nation’s murkiest margins. You could see her as a heroine of the new age of opportunity for all, or argue from a distance, as Matthew Arnold did, that the contradictory forces of modern life were gloriously resolved in her image. Or you could say, more accurately, I think, that she challengingly embodied opposites, made the force of social, psychological, and aesthetic conflicts felt—and therefore became a star.
RACHEL ELUDED stereotypes and evoked them. She inflected and combined images that were already compelling to the popular mind: the priestess of art, the stage queen risen from the gutter, the virgin and the virago. As a woman, an actress, and a Jew, who commanded respect and made large sums of money, she focused and braided together a set of anxieties about sex and power, about national and sexual as well as personal identity. Questions of who she really was, and who or what she stood for, were central to her figure’s fascination. She stood for passion and restraint, therefore for romanticism and classicism; for foreignness and also for France, the monarchy, republic, and empire; for Woman’s duplicity and the greed peculiar to Jews. The clash of symbolic meanings was noisy and resonant, the echoes warning against easy interpretation. From the beginning people were saying she was not really sincere, inspired or gifted—not, as we say now, for real. Hostile critics condemned her as a puppet of her father or the Comédie-Française, or ascribed her success to claques and powerful journalists. Meanwhile she herself flamboyantly mocked the roles of Actress and Tragedy Queen, seemed to flaunt the fact that she was a fiction and a fabrication, someone making herself up.
CHAPTER ONE
Tragedy is an imitation of an action.
ARISTOTLE, Poetics
The arts differ according to the nature of their medium; well, the actor’s medium is—himself.
His own face, his body, his life is the material of his art; the thing he works and moulds to draw out from it his creation.
COQUELIN, The Art of the Actor
I (to bored man at cocktail party, who has asked me what I’m working on): A book about an actress. Her name is Rachel. Like mine, only French. She was a nineteenth-century actress—a tragédienne.
He (with sudden interest): Oh, really? What did she die of?
IN SPITE OF a cold wet fog like a pall over Paris, crowds began to gather in the Place Royale as early as eight in the morning. Henri IV, building up his monarchy around 1600, had designed the square as the elegant center of a new quartier in the marshy area known as the Marais; by the middle of the nineteenth century, in an enlarged city, it was tucked away behind busy avenues, an island in a poor and populous Jewish section. The matching rose-brick Renaissance buildings with their graceful arcades enclosed a quiet orderly space that was reminiscent of the ancien régime, and as separate from the modern world as a stage set. Renamed Place de l’Indivisibilité during the Revolution, and again later, more euphoniously, after the distant mountainous département of the Vosges, the square remained the Place Royale for most Parisians. The old regal name seemed most appropriate to the occasio
n on Monday, 11 January 1858, as people gathered to mourn the early death of the woman who for most of her brief life had been France’s reine de théâtre, Rachel of the Comédie-Française. A grand state funeral would be the elaborate last act of her reign and her tragedy, the ultimate appropriation of the woman by the nation.
She had made her debut at the state theater almost twenty years earlier, at the age of only seventeen. So thorough was her youthful triumph that soon she was assured a coveted place as a sociétaire, or full member, of the elite company. (She became a sociétaire at twenty-one.) Through three different regimes—from the last decade of the July Monarchy, through the Second Republic, and into the early years of the Second Empire—she dominated the stage on the rue de Richelieu, recognized as a queen there even by republicans. The tragic royal roles she played adhered to her, informed the way she held her head and bore her body, the way other people regarded her. Dignity like hers, vested in the body, seems to be innate: Rachel exuded that rare utter confidence in her own choices and instincts, her own intrinsic worth, which commands admiration and respect. “You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master,” says Kent, disguised, to the humbled, still regal King Lear; pressed to define it, he says, “Authority.” Rachel’s contemporary Théophile Gautier, a poet and critic who disliked French high tragedy, wrote of her that she had “that supreme gift which makes great tragediennes, authority.” To the Victorian novelist Charlotte Brontë she seemed a “stage empress.” In the history of the European theater, Rachel is remembered as the first international dramatic star.
Her great success was an extraordinary personal achievement, as well as a sign of what was on her audience’s mind. While on the one hand it was astonishing that an obscure young actress should be hailed as the queen of tragedy in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, the phenomenon expressed the preoccupations of that time and place: the cult of heroic personality, the concern with national identity, the value placed on performance and self-creation, the grandiosity and theatricality of the world that Balzac’s novels describe. Born in 1821, the year Napoleon died, Rachel was the product of an age that was nostalgic for heroes and suspicious of them. These mixed feelings surely helped to produce its glut of performing heroes and heroines, or stars: the divas Pasta and Malibran, the dancers Taglioni and Elssler, the romantic actors Frédérick Lemaître and Marie Dorval, Jenny Lind the Swedish Nightingale, Pauline Viardot, the mime Deburau. Mocking power in the extra-theatrical world as they dominated their audiences, these accomplished people captured the popular imagination by illustrating a pervasive idea, that one could make oneself up into something significant, that the self could take on a meaning beyond itself.
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