If Brontë’s contemporaries would have had no trouble identifying the original of the performer whose very name thrilled Europe, they might have been a little disturbed by Lucy Snowe’s assertion that, at the time of writing, the actress’s great name’s “once restless echoes are all still; she who bore it went years ago to her rest: night and oblivion long since closed above her.” For although Rachel had been reported to be ill, pale, and suffering for years, she was not in fact dead at the time Brontë was writing, and did not die until five years after Villette was published, two years after Charlotte Brontë herself died. When Brontë saw her in London in the summer of 1851, she did seem to be fading; but the text inclines one to suspect that there were also other reasons why the novelist who admired her enough to immortalize her in the very same move killed her off.
The English writer and the French actress were almost exact contemporaries; both of them were small, not beautiful women, and passionately ambitious artists; both survived beloved younger sisters who died of tuberculosis (Rachel visibly promised to die of it herself the summer that Brontë saw her); and there the resemblance ends. But as Chapter 22 of Villette and Brontë’s letters suggest, the withdrawn writer from Yorkshire felt intensely and disturbingly connected to the flamboyant foreign actress who seemed to be her opposite and complement. Shocked by Rachel’s fierceness and self-assertiveness, Charlotte Brontë was also moved to compassion for the frail woman, very nearly her own age, who seemed possessed by terrible passions, “devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcized.” Watching Rachel, she felt the other woman’s emotions, felt herself possessed by an ungodly force she dared not name. “I shall never forget it,” she reported in one of several letters she wrote about Rachel; “she made me shudder to the marrow of my bones: in her some fiend has certainly taken up an incarnate home. She is not a woman—she is a snake—she is the ——.” The chapter called “Vashti” in Villette’s hot center seems to stop the narrative as dead as that sentence stops, bringing Lucy-Brontë to a pitch of eloquence, an ecstatic empyrean, where her own story is forgotten. So narrow is the focus on the actress that Lucy’s more ordinary life fades away; the set piece threatens to dissolve the novel. But ironically, the theatrical episode proves crucial to the plot: Lucy’s companion’s response to Vashti reveals him to be callous and conventional and unworthy of Lucy’s love, and at the theater he meets the woman he will marry. Turning away from stolid English John Graham Bretton, Lucy will begin to admit she loves someone more like Vashti, the violently emotional French teacher, Paul Emanuel. In effect, seeing Vashti changes her life.
Villette tells us nothing about the play or the details of Vashti’s performance, focusing as it does on Lucy’s response to the actress; only by recalling Rachel (and extrapolating from Lucy’s love story) can we guess (as we must) that the play she sees must be Phèdre, the tragedy of a woman’s uncontrollable, unrequited love. Both the performance and the chapter end abruptly, when the actress’s stage agon is interrupted by a cry of “Fire!” but the only real danger proves to be the panic of the crowd. The anticlimactic end raises the question of whether this woman who seemed to set the whole theater aflame with emotion was anything but a figment of the overheated imagination, the enthusiasm of deluded playgoers and the dangerous emotions that Lucy Snowe, striving to live up to her own cool name and exterior, seeks to banish. Villette asks scornfully whether the star who thrilled Europe in the 1840s and 1850s was nothing but a big name, a being of illusory genius and substance.
Many of Brontë’s critics, reading her letters and reading her in Lucy, have raised the related question of whether the violent Vashti’s power was all in the novelist’s head, born of a repressed English spinster’s problematic identification with a sexy French actress. “I neither love, esteem, nor admire this strange being, but (if I could bear the high mental stimulus so long), I would go every night for three months to watch and study its manifestations,” Brontë wrote in her own person, of Rachel. Her pronouns pointedly avoid gender, too prudishly, almost as if she were daring psychoanalytic interpretation. Brontë’s intense ambivalence suggests that Rachel stirred the self that she denied, reflected her secret desires for not only passionate action but public acknowledgment and applause. The French actress seemed shockingly and temptingly and threateningly like her hidden self—a self she half-hoped she might have hallucinated. In Villette, Lucy Snowe gives the reader grounds for dismissing the power of the actress as an illusion, which only seems to start a fire in the theater. But Villette also insists on “Vashti’s” historicity—her having “a name that, in those days, could thrill Europe.” Doing so, it invites us to shift the focus from the mind of Charlotte Brontë to Rachel.
I STARTED OUT reading about Rachel from what I took to be Brontë’s question of how real she was, how distinct from the emotions of those who applauded and talked about her, how knowable. After years of sifting through the verbal and visual traces of her, I am unable and unwilling to answer it. The only conclusion I have come to is that this is the big question that faces all biographers, only more boldly and dramatically when the subject is an actress and a star.
For in the actor’s case the question is complicated by another question: would people other than her contemporaries have thought Rachel was wonderful? As Delacroix reflected in his journal, performers are the only artists whose contemporaries judge them once for all; unlike painters, he wrote, they have no recourse to posterity’s reevaluation. (Films and tapes have changed this, to some degree.) Villette shows that Lucy Snowe’s character and circumstances determine her peculiar perfervid view of Vashti; other people (like her companion, John Graham Bretton) see actors similarly, through the scrims, and within the limits, of their own emotional lives. Like Lucy, who takes seriously “a name that thrilled Europe,” they are influenced for good and ill by other people’s opinions; as Lucy’s are, their perceptions are affected by the dominant assumptions of their culture, even when they reject them. For like Lucy they cannot but hear, and grapple with, received ideas—pervasive feelings about feeling, ideas about the nature of men, women, art, and the self.
According to one encyclopedia, Rachel was “the greatest actress France, or perhaps the world, has ever known.” With her the reign of the actress began, write theater historians, pointing to her successful struggles for control of her time and money. She was personally of unprecedented interest to her fans. “Rachel,” writes Jean Duvignaud, “was probably the first actor to go beyond the frame of mere notoriety and actually put her life onstage, where each of its events was transformed into an image of destiny—an abstraction of destiny made by transposing the memory of adventures played out in theaters.” Not only the heroines she played and the structure of the plays she starred in shaped her self and her life story; the lives and legends of dead performers did, too. In a play written for her, she created the role of the eighteenth-century tragedienne Adrienne Lecouvreur; Alfred de Musset praised her as a second Malibran, after the diva who had died in 1836 and inspired him to write an elegy. Stars are translations, re-presentations, of other stars. Richard Avedon photographed Marilyn Monroe as Jean Harlow; the headline of one French newspaper’s review of a recent biography of Rachel stressed the ragged street singer she had been, dubbing her the “môme Piaf” of tragedy. Marilyn Monroe probably didn’t know how close she came to imitating a nineteenth-century tragic actress when, in her heyday, she placed the humble musical instrument she claimed to have played as a child—an old white piano, not a guitar—in her luxurious living room.
Images of other celebrated women impose themselves on a star, blurring and also aggrandizing her. The individual becomes generic; history melts into metaphor; fictions and their creators become one. The artistic and literary women of her era informed Rachel’s image. For example, George Sand’s Consuelo (1842), a novel about a singer, was dedicated to Pauline Viardot, the novelist’s great friend and the diva Malibran’s sister; obliquely, it als
o invited readers to recall Rachel, who like Sand’s heroine had been an impoverished child singer rescued by a kindly chorus-master, and had risen from destitution to become famous. (The web of associations was strengthened by gossip connecting Rachel and Musset, who had also been Sand’s lover.) Sand’s novel invoked romantic fiction as well as theatrical history—specifically, the eponymous heroine of Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne, or Italy (1807), who writes poetry and recites it to great applause. Like Corinne, Consuelo is the story of a brilliant woman performer; and just as Corinne did, it allows its readers to confuse its fictional performing heroine—I owe the phrase and the insight to Ellen Moers—with the famous woman author behind her, whose performance is the novel. Germaine de Staël, the author who irritated Napoleon, came to be called “Corinne” after the heroine she named for the Roman poet Corinna; scandalous Aurore Dudevant boldly named herself George Sand: both writers were kinds of stars, admired by the reading public as fashioners of their own unique and reminiscent images, as types and antitypes of Woman.
Stars like Rachel, whom other women see as their reflections and their opposites, seem to act out the struggle between individual and stereotype. Comparing her own different gifts of variety and mobility to a tragedienne’s stark severity, Ellen Terry wrote of Sarah Bernhardt, “on the stage she has always seemed to me more a symbol, an ideal, an epitome, than a woman.” She added, “It is this quality which makes her so easy in such lofty parts as Phèdre.” In her biography of Ellen Terry, Nina Auerbach describes the ways the English actress’s career was constrained and informed by Victorian images of pure and loving womanliness, some of which she embodied while she rebelled against others. Rachel shocked and stirred Charlotte Brontë because she daringly transcended conventional womanliness, being foreign and bold as well as brilliant, and emphatically not bourgeois—and representing Tragedy.
But other people, Brontë knew, saw her differently. “He judged her as a woman, not an artist: it was a branding judgment,” Lucy Snowe writes of her companion, John Graham Bretton. He dislikes Vashti, and metaphorically he brands her as a criminal or an animal might be branded. Unmoved by her appeal to the spirit, as Lucy is, he insists on her (female) body: he is disturbed—just as Lucy is exhilarated—by suspicions of sexual sources or analogues of her stage passions. He insists that woman and artist are opposites, that women cannot be artists, that actresses like Vashti cannot be women. The slide is easy, the position commonplace: misogyny casually exacerbates what Jonas Barish has called “antitheatrical prejudice.” Where actors are considered less than artists, because what they show and sell is their bodies and selves, actresses are seen as lesser yet. Critics have argued persuasively that sexist connotations are implicit in the feminine suffix.
While the attitudes toward actresses in nineteenth-century England differed in important ways from attitudes in France, in both countries they were deeply and fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand actresses were condemned for pretending to be who they weren’t—and weakening what characters they had by pretense. They were also rated for merely playing themselves. In the misogynist imagination, actresses are false—artful, artificial, duplicitous, like women in general—and on the other hand excitingly, transgressively true to the passions and the imagination. In a culture that confusedly conceived of female sexuality as an excess of either nature or artifice, they were taken to stand for Woman. In a world where ladies did not work for money, they were taken to be like prostitutes. Dignified by tragedy, Mrs. Siddons and Rachel were exceptions that proved the rule that sex is at the heart of the questions an actress raises about morality, aesthetics, character, and truth. Proved, but did not break it. An actress, however lofty, is a public woman (in France a femme publique is a prostitute) who provokes in those who admire her more or less prurient curiosity about the parts she keeps hidden, which are easily imagined to be deeper and more interesting than what she shows (hence the interest in her offstage life). In a review of a biography of Rachel subtitled Her Stage Life and Her Real Life, Virginia Woolf insisted—in defense of art more than privacy—that the titular distinction was false: “It is when we feel most that we live most,” she wrote; “and we cannot believe that Rachel, married to a real man, having real children, and adding up real butcher’s bills, would have lived more truly than Rachel imagining the passions of women who never existed.” Does an actor live most fully while pretending to be someone else, on the stage? How important, then, or real, is the offstage life? An actress may be a dramatic test case of human knowableness, the biographical subject par excellence.
SHAKESPEARE HAS IT that the actor holds, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; players are “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” Hamlet tells Polonius. The modern star reflects the society that constructs her. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the age of mechanical reproduction began and technology made possible the dissemination of cheap newspapers, engravings of portraits, plaster casts of statues, caricatures, and photographs, stars were born of collaborative efforts. As the media burgeoned, images begot fresh images. “Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of,” Yeats wrote in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The more present they were, actors seemed the less real—nothing more than emblems.
On the other hand, lovers of the theater continued to feel, as we still do, that the actors with whom they shared moments of strong emotion were their fellows and intimates. Men lament the loss of their own youth, mourning dead actresses, Jules Janin wrote self-pityingly. When Marie Dorval died, Gautier wrote that “it seemed to us we had lost an intimate friend; a part of our soul and our youth goes to the grave with her; when one has long followed the transformations of an actress’s life in the theater, when one has wept, loved, and suffered along with the woman impersonating the fantasies of poets, it is hard not to believe that the magnetic connection created between her luminous figure on the stage, and you in the gloom of the audience, is not reciprocally felt.” The mechanism that psychologists call projection-identification falls short of describing the connection between men and women in the audience and those different others who are bright with meanings.
On the day Rachel died in Le Cannet, Delacroix, in the journal largely devoted to his own artistic development, copied out Gautier’s review of her Phèdre: “Like all true artists, Rachel grows greater in spirit, ardor, and violence as her career continues. Instead of cooling off, she burns more brightly: experience serves to make her freer, more expansive, more impetuous. What she used to do with nuances, she now conveys by a masterful and dazzling tone.” The painter, clearly, was seeing Rachel in his own image, as Charlotte Brontë had done.
It is appropriate that people’s reflections of and on Rachel should be all we have of her. Submitting to her audience’s gaze while her voice took their minds over, she destabilized the opposition of self and other—and male and female, subject and object, creator and creation, High and Low. (“La Jeune Rachel et la vieille Comédie-Française” is the title of an early pamphlet about her.) A star is rather like Stendhal’s image of the beloved, an ordinary branch transformed by the adhering crystals generated by the lover’s imagination. Rachel, who reflects and exemplifies the crosscurrents and contradictions of her culture, was their epiphenomenon and product: she would not have been without them. The star appropriated myths her moment provided—of the actress, of the artist; the men and women who painted and wrote about her helped Rachel to make herself up—as the biographer must, pretending perforce that she was and still is to some extent an integral individual, knowable and real.
BIOGRAPHY, advocacy at the very least, turns easily into role-playing; the biographer who comes to resemble her subject is as familiar as the walker who looks like her dog. For much of the time I worked on this book, I insisted to anyone who raised the inevitable eyebrow that I myself was not playing Rachel—was not pretending to be French or an actress, glamorous or tragic. When I first began to think and talk about “m
y” actress—to appropriate her?—no one would let me get over my nominal likeness to her. Just naming my subject hung the question in the air: was I meaning coyly to draw attention to myself? The matter of our name straightaway and economically raised that very good question attendant on any biographical project: Who does she think she is? (An actress raises that question all by herself.) I have driven my friends to invent elaborate periphrases so as to avoid saying the name, or to say it with exaggerated archness; others have felt compelled to let me know that they all too clearly recognize the dark forces that brought a middle-aged, middle-class American professor to “identify” with a glamorous French actress. And then there is G., my earnest and complicated colleague, who carefully pronounces Rachel’s name (not mine) as if it were Hebrew—à la juive, as it were—his gutturals giving me to understand that he understands the important thing about her, perceives the unspoken, tragic, soul-to-soul connection between myself and my subject.
About whether people with the same name identify with one another—whatever that means—knowledgeable persons seem to be divided. At the first annual picnic of Bob Josephs in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, on 9 June 1985, two couples grappled with the issue. Martha Joseph, the wife of a Bob from Flint, Michigan, tried to explain how she felt about being in a group of people who were related in name only. “There’s a kinship, you know what I mean? There’s a feeling like automatically you’re O.K.,” she said. Her husband added, “It’s an ego trip to see other little parts of yourself walking around.” But another Mrs. Joseph said that for her part, “Well, it’s different.” And, “Darn sure different,” added her Bob.
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