“AND YOUR NAME AGAIN IS …,” the brisk British telephone voice says impatiently. The librarian has reluctantly agreed to let me go through the archives for materials relating to the great French tragedienne who performed to worshipful crowds in London nearly every summer in the 1840s; she wants me to hear that she’s made a great exception for an American researcher who neglected to write ahead for an appointment. I repeat my surname; to underscore my gratitude, I spell it out, and add my first name. “Oh, how appropriate,” she takes the time to perkily rejoin.
What’s odd, of course, is that I should be taken aback. But the sense of its being, precisely, inappropriate that my subject has my name on it has nearly melted away in the course of my reading about la grande Rachel, sometimes called simply La Grande. Which is not to imply that the difference between us has collapsed or even diminished. On the contrary. Said à la française (as the English refuse to say things), with a frog in the throat to start and a short “a,” then an “sh” opening the stressed second syllable that closes with a deliciously light French “l,” the name of the actress Rachel sounds nothing like my own name; to me, it has even begun to look different on a French page, where the upright Puritan rectitude of the letters softens somehow.
When I meet her in the reading room, the youthful British librarian allows herself one amused, assessing look—so-you-want-to-be-a-star—then proves friendly. Crackpot onomasticians and half-cocked genealogists are commonplace in her country, where it is also understood that the sun will never set on the labors of minorities working to whiten their kind. More to the point, perhaps, theater libraries attract assiduous fans of even bit players, as well as serious historians avid for all kinds of facts. My accent and clothes give her no clue as to which I might be. As she smilingly hands over the scrapbooks, I reflect that they order these matters differently in France.
In Paris I visit the archive where Rachel’s tiny slipper is lovingly preserved. It strikes me that it is offered as evidence of her innate rank; I remember Byron’s boasting to his mother that his small ears had been admired as signs of nobility by the Eastern tyrant Ali Pasha. But Byron was nobly born, while Rachel, as everyone who ever heard of her knows, was the daughter of Jewish peddlers from Alsace, and had no real claim to rank. No better claim than my own? The thought occurs to me, in France, uninvited, a grandiose, get-even hallucination induced by socio-linguistic and gender-based insecurities, and yes, standard-issue Jewish paranoia. Is the iron-haired French librarian hostile because she sees me as an imperialistic American intruder, or am I making her nervous by being so clearly (labeled as) a Jew? Do I only imagine they think that my (husband’s) surname, not only Jewish but markedly American—with its “w” so troubling to the French—threatens to dim the luster of “Rachel”?
What difference is made by a name? What arbitrary or false connections can names make effectively true? Barthes coined the term “amphibology” to designate a word in which two separate meanings resonate at the same time. He distinguishes it from ambiguity or polysemy: “it is quite precisely amphibology, duplicity; the fantasy is not to hear everything (anything), it is to hear something else.” I don’t mean my reader to hear my name in or behind the actress’s. (I might have made the point by modeling my title page on the program of an American play about the actress: “Rachel [Pronounced Rashell]”.) For me, the name works as a sign that she was different from me and from what I am able to imagine her to have been. It handily marks her strangeness and familiarity, as it begins to suggest what I think was important about her: her (feminine) gender, her (Jewish) genre, her appearance of singularity. I read the name as a sign of the paradoxical fact and fiction of unique personal identity.
WHEN I WAS A GIRL, a friend’s father enjoyed singing out loud and strong, “Rachel, quand du Seigneur,” when I came over after school. I assumed that Mr. Bloch had made the song up about me; I had never heard or heard of the aria or the opera it comes from—Halévy’s La Juive—which, I later discovered, had its first performance in Paris the year before la grande Rachel’s debut. I still don’t know whether or not Mr. Bloch had read Proust: the mistress of St. Loup, who begins as a cheap little prostitute and becomes a rival of the great actress Berma, is (archly) called Rachel-quand-du-Seigneur. Proust’s reference to the historical tragedienne Rachel, whose Phèdre Sarah Bernhardt’s was much compared to, is evasive and even ironic. If his novel has helped to preserve Rachel’s memory, it has also managed to confuse the facts: Rachel-quand-du-Seigneur is not only the lesser actress but the younger one, the rivalrous successor who embitters the old greathearted actress’s last years. While his first French readers would have caught the little joke, many latter-day Proustians have been misled to think that Rachel came after Bernhardt, the miraculous “Berma” of his boyhood.
In her autobiography, Bernhardt recalls that as a child she saw Rachel, who visited her convent school. “She went all over the convent and into the garden, and she had to sit down because she could not get her breath. They fetched something to bring her round, and she was so pale, oh, so pale! I was very sorry for her and Sister Appoline told me that what she did was killing her, for she was an actress.” Sarah saw another little girl put her tongue out at Rachel, and resolved never to be an actress herself: “I did not want people to put out their tongues at me when I was grown up.” Whether or not this early “memory” was a fact, Rachel and her fame were formative influences on Bernhardt’s career and image. And in turn Bernhardt’s image warped Rachel’s: in her afterlife, it even began to approximate the shape of a character she never played, Marguérite Gautier of Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias (1852), which Bernhardt performed with great éclat after Rachel’s death.
With Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849), the popular playwrights Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé first tailored the role of The Actress to Rachel’s exact measurements; later, as players and playwrights and audiences, journalists and novelists, developed the image in the course of the nineteenth century, her particularity was elaborated and also blurred. To Bernhardt’s fans, the later actress seemed to bring all the Rachel themes to more dramatic point. Half-Jewish and also from a shady background, she too lived theatrically, and made an even greater show of artistic temperament. She too amassed a fortune, and fought for independence with the Comédie-Française—and managed to found a theater of her own, as Rachel had not done. Like Rachel, she had many lovers (including a few men who had formerly loved Rachel); as Rachel’s fame was famously threatened by the Italian Adelaide Ristori, Bernhardt’s was menaced by Eleonora Duse; and in 1900, with her brilliant success in Rostand’s L’Aiglon, Bernhardt even made her own triumphant identification with Napoleon, creating the role of the emperor’s short-lived son, the Duke of Reichstadt. She toured and conquered Russia and America, as Rachel had done; like Rachel she chanted La Marseillaise and was acclaimed at home as Marianne, the symbol of France. Rachel had been insistently compared to a statue, and Sarah did her one better, exhibiting as a sculptor. As in Rachel’s case there were anti-Semitic murmurs against her, for though Sarah was not so Jewish by half, it was the time of the Dreyfus affair. Like Rachel, Bernhardt provoked gossipy biographies and scandalous romans à clef; her physical attack, in 1883, on the author of The Memoirs of Sarah Barnum, her “friend” Marie Colombier, became part of her legend. Surely that story informed the “memory” of the American physician who, in an article for a magazine, “recalled” having seen Rachel fly at her sister’s throat, in a New York hotel room, when she lost at cards. (Napoleon before her had been a famous sore loser at whist.)
Because she was a star Rachel was open for reinterpretation—and fictionalization—as ordinary people are not. Her single name continued to embrace images of other real and fictitious women, as it insisted on her specificity, and its own meanings. “What becomes a legend most?” went the advertising copy running under a photograph of a famous woman wearing a brand-name mink coat. Lillian Hellman, when she was photographed for the ad, is said to have initially misrea
d the line as asking, “What kind of woman is most likely to become a legend?” A good question, to which the answer probably is, A woman who lends herself to being conflated with legends.
IT IS NOT CLEAR what name Jacques and Thérèse Félix gave their second daughter. When she was born in a roadside inn in Switzerland, they were peddlers so marginal, or so leery of the gentile authorities who wanted no part of them either, that they filed no official record of her birth. They themselves claimed to be uncertain of the exact date. It was not until after the quarrel between her father and the management of the Théâtre-Français, about the contract she had signed as a minor, that her age became a particularly vital statistic. Drawn up at the company’s request, a certification of her birth was translated and filed with the Swiss consul in March 1840, duly inscribed with a name. One of Rachel’s first biographers, Mme de B, whose own proud pseudonym claimed she was both married and aristocratic, crowed over the documentary proof—by documentary gap—of the characterlessness of actors, savoring the irony that “the great tragedienne of our age, she whose renown has been proclaimed in all Europe and confirmed in the New World, can not boast of that which is the patrimony of the humblest and poorest child of the people—an act that proves her identity!”
Most biographers think that her parents probably gave her a composite name, Elisa- or Elisabeth-Rachel. Three of her sisters, Sophie-Sarah the first-born, and Adélaïde-Lia and Mélanie-Dinah, were equipped with both a saint’s name and an Old Testament name: Jews who have aspired to assimilation, or flirted with it, have often given their children this kind of scope or choice. On the other hand, the only boy in the family, Raphaël, born just after Rachel, and the sister born after him, Rébecca, had only one Old Testament name apiece. Some believe that the younger girl was called Rachel-Rébecca, and that the enterprising Elisa simply took one of her sister’s names. “Elisa” is how she signed herself, when she wrote to her parents at nine or ten from the school where she was being trained as a performer—and sometimes, jokingly, “Pierrot.”
When she went onstage she shucked her surname more or less for good. This invites being read as a meaningful act. One early commentator, recalling that Rachel and her sister were registered at school as “Mlles de Saint-Félix,” characterizes the act of paring her name down as a proud assertion of Jewish identity: “Rachel did not accept a pseudonym that was given her; as soon as she was free, the name she chose to immortalize was her own name, the name of a daughter of Israel.” By dropping her surname, Rachel seemed implicitly to embrace tragic identity, too. “Félix,” Latin for happy, is a fairly common name among Jews, a translation of the Hebrew “Baruch,” which means blessed. How better to signal the birth of a tragedienne than to cast it off? To make a stage name “real” is always to invite interpretation. Michael Rogin, arguing that Ronald Reagan found out who he was from the movies, points out that before he became an actor he was known by his nickname, “Dutch”: Hollywood, which changes most actors’ names, gave this one back his own, Rogin acerbly observes. The case of Rachel, part of whose name proved better for business than the whole, is equally suggestive.
The surname Félix was probably adopted by her father’s family or conferred upon it by the edict of Napoleon I of 20 July 1808, which sought to integrate Jews into French society and make them subject to its authority by mandating that they take last names. Here as elsewhere, the best interests of the Jews were not Napoleon’s only consideration in legitimizing them. A family name inscribes one into the social network of families, marks one as belonging to a group. Women who have refused to take their husbands’ names, women and men who prefer to claim the suppressed surnames of their mothers, African-Americans who reject inherited “slave names”—all these recognize that bearing a family name marks one as owned. Refusing such a name, an individual signals independence and self-possession: so must have thought Rachel’s contemporary, the photographer Félix Tournachon, who called himself simply and mysteriously “Nadar.”
Creative artists have frequently chosen to mark their separation from the network of families by taking a name that is single, like a legendary character’s or a king’s or queen’s. The most notable, perhaps, was the actor-playwright Molière; since him there have been a variety of one-named writers (Colette, Vercors) and performers (Mistinguette, Arletty, Miou-Miou, Fernandel, and, beyond France, Liberace, Cher, Madonna). To take such a name is to claim unusual personal freedom—a claim also staked by those who make a very different move. Celebrating the self-naming of Honoré de Balzac, who made his social pretensions more real with a homemade aristocratic particule, Stefan Zweig wrote that poetry had triumphed over history. But poetry—and language more generally—has its own constraints. A solitary prénom—the French term is especially useful in Rachel’s story, as it avoids the awkwardness of “Christian name”—is suggestive in its own right. The performing heroine of Corinne goes by one name only: her “last name was not known; her first work [was] signed only Corinne.” Before he even sees her, the morose Englishman Lord Nelvil finds his curiosity piqued by “the combination of mystery and public notice—this woman everyone discussed without even knowing her real name.” He will fall in love with her. Writing about fiction, Roland Barthes asserts that “what is proper to narrative is not action but character as Proper Name.”
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD actress went onstage as Rachel tout court for the first time at the Théâtre du Gymnase, one of the boulevard theaters, in a melodrama that had been written expressly for her. It was 1836—one year after the premiere of La Juive; the aria “Rachel, quand du Seigneur” was all the rage in Paris. The name that evoked the eponymous tragic Jewess of the opera—who by the way turns out to have been a Christian by birth—marked the new actress as a Jewess, marked her also perhaps as a little bit fictional, stagy, no more genuinely what she called herself than an actress was expected to be. More generally, it recalled the Hebrew Bible in which Rachel is the name of Jacob’s second, more beloved and more beautiful wife (her tomb in Palestine had been a shrine for Jewish pilgrims for centuries). The name also occurs in a verse in the Book of Jeremiah about Rachel weeping for her children (the ship that picks up the orphaned survivors at the end of Melville’s Moby-Dick is called the Rachel). Of the four mothers of Israel—Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel—the last is an archetype of maternal woman in medieval Christianity, probably because of the prophet’s verse. The Old Testament Rachel was seen by medieval Christians as a prototype of Mary. For the romantics, certainly, her Jewishness remained important: in Edgar Quinet’s play Ahasvérus (1833), based on the legend of the Wandering Jew, “l’ange Rachel” looks down from heaven and takes pity on the Jew who refused Christ comfort on the way to Calvary, and she is condemned to share the torment of his eternal life, comforting him.
In mid-nineteenth-century Paris, as a dark-eyed young actress brought it forward, the particular symbolic resonances of the name were probably less important than the sense of its having all that extra weight: “Rachel” signified legendary, literary, tragic Jewish Woman. Several Jewish actresses bore only prénoms, like hers—her contemporaries Mlle Judith, Mlle Nathalie, and eventually, if only colloquially, “the divine Sarah”—names that stood out in a Catholic country where saints’ names were the norm. After Rachel, women like her would be seen as a type in France; someone thin, dark, Jewish, nervous, passionate, serious, and maybe a little desperate might be called une vraie Rachel.
The Greeks called all nouns “names.” How different are “proper” names from ordinary, not-improper ones? What difference does a name make to its bearer? Nicole Toussaint du Wast’s biography of the actress begins, “Rachel, there is something of Racine in the name borne by one of the nineteenth century’s greatest tragediennes.” The name, she fancifully ventures, suggests a princess whose family roots “(meines)” are deep in a legendary past—but in fact, Toussaint du Wast concludes, “Tout autre est la réalité.” Her point is that Rachel was no poet’s creation but a real woman, no princess
but a poor man’s daughter—in other words, that the name seems to say who she is but doesn’t.
La grande Rachel herself liked to invoke her name and play with it. From America, she wrote home triumphantly and a little plaintively that she had carried her name as far as she could; earlier, she had professed that her “most cherished wish is to leave a great name in the theater, and a fine and honorable fortune to my parents.” She savored her uncommonness, anticipated her place in history, insisted on the personal uniqueness expressed by her single name. Her great name in the figurative sense—her fame—has meant much to those of her biographers who like to contrast the chaos and obscurity of her origins with the fact that she came to be famous: “If Rachel’s life remains widely unknown, in its details, in spite of the many biographies devoted to her, her name has retained all of its meaning and greatness. It evokes a talent that has never again been equalled. The name of Rachel also embodies the memory of a prodigious and moving life, is the image of the most extraordinary destiny.”
One of several crowns given Rachel in her heyday was studded with precious and semiprecious stones—Ruby, Amethyst, Cornelian, Hematite, Emerald, Lapis lazuli—arranged so that the first letters of the words that name them—and the roles of Roxane, Aménaïde, Camille, Hermione, Emilie, Laodice—spell “Rachel.” A sign that these six fictitious characters epitomized or composed her, or that all of them were subsumed in her uniqueness? The paradox is at the heart of the actor’s enterprise, and challenges the biographer.
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