Rachel as Phèdre, photograph by Nadar (photo credit 1.2)
“It is the fate of actors to leave only picture postcards behind them,” Virginia Woolf once wrote. The postcard shop at the Théâtre-Français invites us to consider the mailable colored reproduction of Gérôme’s Rachel alongside what is sold as its complement, a picture of Delacroix’s 1853 painting of the tragic actor François-Joseph Talma, who had died in 1826. The circumstances in which these two paintings of dead actors were produced were very different: Gérôme’s commission came from Rachel’s sister, who would sell the portrait to the Théâtre-Français, while Delacroix’s was from the state. Talma is portrayed in the role of the tyrant Néron in Racine’s Britannicus. He is seated on a golden throne to which the viewer must look up; lions’ heads adorn its arms. His feet—shod in light golden Grecian sandals, not encumbered, as Rachel’s are, by the heavy-soled archaic cothurni—are ready to lift him; his nervy left hand clenches the armrest, pressing fingers into the lion’s open eye. The actor crowned with laurel is identified with an emperor: not only with the bloodthirsty Roman Nero, who loved to playact and paid people to applaud him, but also with that other tyrant and devotee of the theater, Napoleon I, who had preferred Talma above all actors—and perhaps, most ambiguously, with the man who had just made himself the second emperor, Louis-Napoleon, whose minister commissioned the portrait of Talma (and portraits of other heroes) in the course of making the political point that the new regime was continuous with legitimate governments of the past.
THE CONTRAST WITH the Rachel portrait is dramatic. To begin with, Talma’s figure takes up the whole canvas, while Rachel’s is diminished by its architectural context. The man’s high-colored, open, mobile face, the flash of his large eyes, the strong grip of hand and poise of foot, are theatrical and vital; scarlet drapery swags and swirls to suggest movement; though his subject is a man long dead, Delacroix’s theme is action and acting, life not death, the present not the lost past. A feminist reading of the difference is tempting: the man is portrayed as powerful agent, the woman as victim and vessel; the man’s portrait is full of verve and light and movement, the woman’s over-emphatically enclosed. On the Rachel postcard, the gold frame of the Gérôme portrait, regularly buttoned with rosettes, serves as a border; the Talma runs to the edges. Gérôme’s scarlet tragedy toga encases the female figure, Delacroix’s emphasizes the free mobility of the strong man. Talma is a man in action, Rachel an icon of a woman personifying an abstraction. But it would be wrong to read the portraits as simple opposites. It was commonplace to compare Rachel to Talma; Gérôme knew the Delacroix portrait; and Delacroix painted Talma after having seen (and also dined with) Rachel. Recalling the tragedian in 1853, Delacroix had to be paying oblique homage to the tragedienne who had revived, with Corneille and Racine, the memory not only of Aeschylus but of Talma as well.
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784 (photo credit 1.4)
Painting Talma as Néron, in the age of Louis-Napoleon, Delacroix raised subtle questions about the reigning tyrant. Perhaps one ought not to make too much of the casual cruelty with which Talma-Néron sticks his finger in the eye of the lion carved on his throne; but the choice to depict the actor in that role rather than another, and in the act of rising, has clear reference to the concerns of the painter’s moment. By the early 1850s, Rachel had altered people’s view of classical tragedy. She had revised Talma’s repertoire by emphasizing the importance of women’s roles; she had made the old plays immediate and modern; and by feminizing the genre of tragedy, she had intensified its ironic dimension. When Britannicus was produced at the Théâtre-Français in 1848, for example, it was no longer Néron’s play: all eyes were on the actress who dared, at the age of only twenty-seven, to play the role of Agrippine, the emperor’s mother. The vivid portrait of Talma as Néron conveys the power in the world of an actor’s art—Talma’s, and also Rachel’s—and wryly comments on the theatricality and the limits of power, in Rachel’s manner.
Delacroix never did a full-scale portrait of her; neither did his rival Ingres, although Rachel at one point negotiated with him (she bowed out when he demanded too many sittings). In the works of the painters of her time, her influence can be traced and has been: she is said to have been the model for the dark-haired, pale, and muscular Semitic beauty in Delacroix’s painting La Sibylle au Rameau d’Or (The Cumaean Sibyl). But it is hard to sort out the features of this particular actress from the general vogue for dark-eyed exotics documented by both academic and romantic painters, including Chassériau, Delacroix, and the young Courbet. Rachel’s popularity coincided with an aesthetic-erotic vogue for exotic women. Travel to the East, after Napoleon, had helped to create a taste for Semitic feminine beauty; ringing changes on the type, artists sought models whose appeal ranged from the languidly sensual to the decadent. This orientalist enthusiasm was criticized: one of the patriotic young men of 1848 in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869) laments the taste for dark, thin women—and, at the same time, for “the women of antiquity”—declaring, “when all’s said and done, a tart is a lot more fun than the Venus of Milo. Let’s be Frenchmen, for God’s sake.… We must go from brunettes to blondes.” Later, the Goncourts deplored as anti-erotic the vogue for “thin, gaunt, flat, bony women, slight to hold in your hands, with … infinitely little place on them for amorous exercises: chlorotic women looking spectral and unhealthy—on their faces nothing but their minds.” Rachel, wanting in flesh and beauty, was widely regarded, especially after her death, as the original for this Goncourtian paradigm.
Like all actors, she was to some extent typecast by her body; what they called her homeliness may have made it easier for men to take her seriously as an artist. A charcoal sketch of Rachel by Delacroix, very different from his statuesque sibyl, suggests as much: it portrays the actress in performance, a plain woman throwing her whole soul into the imaginative work of acting. Was she in fact ugly? What are we to make of the delicate little miniature that depicts an adorably fine-featured Rachel as the heroine, crowned with flowers, of Le Moineau de Lesbie, a slight pseudoclassical play written to exploit her charm and seductiveness?
In a celebrated early statue by Auguste Barre, Rachel is the pure Roman virgin Camille of Corneille’s Horace. She is dewy and distraught and vivid in the English painter William Etty’s appealing portrait, which (oddly, in spite of Henry James’s clear allusion to Gérôme’s, in the novel) decorates the cover of one paperback edition of The Tragic Muse. Rachel is prim and tight, even gnomish, in pictures by other artists. The glossy oils of the star by Amaury-Duval and Dubufe insist on her severe elegance and glamour; in Lehmann’s 1851 painting she looks benign and graceful but unbeautiful; and in the portrait by Müller which she is supposed to have preferred she could pass for Charlotte Brontë, dowdy and domestic. Hostile caricatures depict her as a sullen, negroid Jewess or a hideous skeleton. On sheet music of La Marseillaise printed in 1848, line drawings show her as a version of the central figure in Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, simplified and commercialized to suit the bourgeois revolution.
The few photographs we have of Rachel are as mutually contradictory as the other visual images, and, in their different ways, as disappointing. In private life, she huddles up and stares at the camera, blurry-faced, intense only around the unreadable eyes; or she poses, worn and faded, three months before her death, in front of a crudely painted scenic backdrop. In another photo, she is elegant but ugly; then again, clear-faced and pensively pretty, much more than the jolie laide men conceded she was when they acknowledged that she wore clothes well. Time, moods, and illnesses changed her looks. The staged shots of Rachel in action show her frozen for muscle-aching minutes so the camera can catch Hermione’s mouth twisted in scorn, Camille’s operatic despair, the slant-mouthed sneer of Athalie asquat.
Photograph said to be of Rachel, photographer and date unknown (photo credit 1.3)
She is elus
ive: her voice, not her body, was the source of her power in the theater. She was very young when she first became famous, and she actually grew during the early years of her celebrity; costumes, roles, camera angles dramatically altered her. The sole constant in portraits of Rachel is that she is always dark, not fair, and always inaccessible, either “on” for the camera or guarded-looking, with something in her eyes (a slight cast?) that suggests she is away. Though nothing about her is coy, she will not meet the interlocutory gaze.
Language seems preferable to this embarrassment of contradictory visual riches—even the bland, flat description on her 1856 passport, comforting in its plainness: “Age, 35 years; Height, 1.6 meters; Hair, brown; Forehead, high; Eyebrows, brown; Eyes, brown; Nose, aquiline; Mouth, average; Chin, round; Face, oval; Complexion, pale.” And still savory is the lovingly, longingly detailed description Samson set down years after her death, taking obvious pains to account for (and correct) the flaws that others had ascribed to her:
Rachel was below average in height; she had a rounded forehead; deep-set eyes that, without being large, were very expressive; a straight nose, with a slight curve. Her mouth, studded with small, well-placed white teeth, was at once mocking and proud. Her neck was perfectly attached to her shoulders; her small head, with its low forehead, sat graciously upon it. She was terribly thin, but dressed so artfully that her thinness almost became a kind of beauty. Her gait and her gestures were easy, all her movements supple, her entire person filled with distinction. She had, to use a current expression, the hands and feet of a duchess. Her contralto voice had little range, but having a most acute ear she used it with the utmost skill, managing the finest and most delicate inflections. When she first began to speak, there was a slight huskiness to her voice that soon disappeared.
He attributed the differences in descriptions of her to both real and imaginary changes wrought by time and subtler agents:
When she first appeared on the French stage she had not yet attained her full height; there was a sort of confusion, if I may be permitted to put it thus, in her small features and closely set eyes, and she was declared to be ugly. Later, she was said to be beautiful. She was in fact neither, not entirely one or the other, but both, depending on the time, the day, the expression on her face.
THE PLAYERS of Greek tragedy wore masks. Roland Barthes remarks that, historically, “the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask.” For Barthes, a photograph is a death’s head, “a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” To find the life in it, he continues, one connects with a punctum, responds to a particular detail; in the idiosyncratic response one locates the otherwise stilled life, the vital moment the photographer caught, stopped, and preserved. Though most photographs of Rachel defy such engagement (the exception, perhaps, is my frontispiece), Barthes’s interactive model—which echoes the relation of the spectator and the actor in the theater—strikes me as the best available for the biographer. Any other approach, I think, involves as much self-projection.
We can only hope to fan a flicker of life from a photograph, however. The vital presence of singers and actors inheres in what Barthes called the “grain” of the voice. One cannot hope to find the “real” Rachel any more than one can revive and reevaluate her art. The weird, authoritative tones that compelled her audiences are lost for good; when one of her admirers attempted to set down her cadences by musical notation, he could mark the rises and falls, but not the timbre, which permanently eludes us. This warns against trying to locate and represent some essence of Rachel, and encourages the different project of reconstructing her by bricolage, out of the words and images that record other people’s perceptions of her.
CHAPTER TWO
Don’t think it’s so easy to bury people of my race and merit.
Letter from RACHEL to her mother
I would not advise an author to take as subject of a tragedy an action as modern as this.… Tragic characters must be viewed with a different eye from the one with which we commonly look upon characters whom we have seen so closely.
JEAN RACINE, Second Preface to Bajazet
She is unique; she is Elizabeth; there’s only one. Perhaps with the exception of Her Majesty the Queen.
Director RICHARD BROOKS of Elizabeth Taylor,
in a television interview
RACHEL IS STILL REMEMBERED in France. There is an Avenue Rachel at Père Lachaise cemetery, where the name on the pediment of her tomb, a miniature Grecian temple, reads, tout court, Rachel. Her portrait hangs in a conspicuous place in the Théâtre-Français, and sitting on a red plush seat in the audience there one can breathe an air that is still, as Henry James found it, “thick with associations.” In 1876, when the distinctive horseshoe-shaped house was even less changed than now, James reflected, “Even if I had never seen Rachel, it was something of a consolation to think that those very footlights had illumined her finest moments and that the echoes of her mighty voice were sleeping in that clingy dome.” (Criticizing a similar phrase of Jules Janin’s, Samson scornfully observed that an echoing theater wouldn’t be much good.) Modern Paris is the home of Rachel’s—and Napoleon’s—descendants. And in one winter week there today you might be able to see four or five of the plays Rachel performed in. Every schoolchild in France still memorizes the great harangues, confessions, arguments—the monologues called tirades—from the tragedies by Corneille and Racine; a little more than a decade before Rachel’s debut, Stendhal had protested that Shakespeare was the greater poet, but Racine continues to be honored and performed in France, where his works are considered the finest essence of a patrimoine uniquely bound up in language. Although the favorite spectacle of French people today may well be Baudrillard’s America, the name of Rachel still rings a bell in Paris, evoking a past when theatricality was naive and high culture glamorous.
The tomb of Rachel at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
Cultivated European Jews may also recall that Rachel was a very great actress, and the subject of many biographies. But most people I know who know her name at all came to it, as I did, through Charlotte Brontë, whose last novel, Villette, describes an actress who cannot but be Rachel. The language insists on the phenomenon of the star: “She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos—hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing—half lava, half glow.… What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.” We are invited to identify this “shadow of a royal Vashti” as Rachel partly because the only proper name she has is but loosely attached to her: the indefinite article even suggests that the odd name Vashti is generic. And Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, is not a reliable narrator; the actress, we think, may be a Vashti only in her mind. Single, Semitic, and biblical, the name resembles Rachel’s. It is also suggestive on its own, especially in a text that makes much of names: we know from Charlotte Brontë’s letters that Lucy Snowe’s name was meant to suggest her coolness (Brontë had considered “Frost”). Vashti is the name of the queen who gets cast off by her husband, in the Book of Esther, because she rebelliously refuses to display her beauty, at his behest, before a group of partying men. The actress in Villette is another kind of rebel, a woman who defies men’s rules and requests by boldly putting herself on display.
From Lucy’s point of view this Vashti is immodestly famous. But the Englishwoman is drawn, paradoxically, by her reputation—as she puts it, “a name that thrilled me—a name that, in those days, could thrill Europe” (Luc
y also happens to have been invited to the theater to see Vashti by a man she is in love with). She is even more thrilled when she sees the actress performing, and she conveys her excitement and awe so vividly—if turgidly—that almost all biographies of Rachel in English have gratefully borrowed from Lucy’s description in the “Vashti” chapter of Villette to suggest what the actress was like on the stage: “Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to conflict with abstractions. Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no result in good; tears water no harvest of wisdom: on sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile as fair.”
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