Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  “Everybody here is now raving about her,” Fanny Kemble wrote in June 1841, at the height of Rachel’s first London season. The English actress had heard Rachel declaim at a private party, and had also seen her play Hermione at the St. James Theatre. “Her reply to Andromaque’s appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen on the stage,” she wrote. “The cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment of her rival’s humiliation,—the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially excel in delineations and expressions of this order of emotion, while in the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears comparatively less successful.” Scrupulously fair, Kemble judiciously added that “Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille’s ‘Cinna,’ are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M—— saw her the other day in ‘Marie Stuart,’ and cried her eyes almost out, so she must have some pathetic power.” The question was critical. Like the question of her looks, and her sincerity, it was about whether Rachel was, as they put it then, womanly (i.e., lovable). In the course of the debate, antitheatrical and gender stereotypes intersected with national ones to strengthen one another. The critic of The Era, reviewing a performance of Marie Stuart that had been attended by Queen Victoria, condemned the French play as “unworthy her acknowledged talent,” but praised “the great intellectual acumen and concentrated power of Mlle Rachel.” A month before, the reviewer had agreed with Fanny Kemble’s friend Lady M——: “We think, despite the French critics, that in passages of tenderness, and not of terror, consists Mlle Rachel’s forte.”

  She was given a welcome fit for a queen when she first came to England. Victoria invited her to dine and perform at Windsor Castle, where she was duly dazzled by the splendor—it included a stuffed tiger from India—and the honor. The queen presented her with a bracelet that people in France (mistakenly) said was engraved “Victoria à Rachel,” one queen’s tribute to another. (“Victoria Reine, à Mlle Rachel,” was in fact the more conventional inscription.) But as Rachel reported to Mme Samson, the queen herself placed the bracelet on her arm: “My dear Mme Samson, if I did not succumb to my emotion, it was because I understood the obligations such a great honor imposed on me in the future.” In London, the prominent actor Macready gave a party for her, and titled ladies vied with one another for her presence at their gatherings: she recited at the Countess of Jersey’s, the Marchioness of Aylesbury’s, and Countess Cadogan’s. The clash of classes was wonderful to contemplate. Benjamin Lumley, the impresario, recalls in his memoirs that Rachel told him she was “greatly embarrassed by the conventions of the table, and the question that once arose in her mind, at a grand dinner, as to the proper use of the knife and fork in the consumption of asparagus, was infinitely embarrassing.” The Paris papers reported gleefully that the old Duke of Wellington had escorted Rachel to dinner at one evening party, and later called to ask after her health, and advised her to bathe in “eau sale” (dirty water), meaning to recommend “eau salée” (salt water). The pulse of French national pride was quickened by the evidence of British impotence: Napoleon’s conqueror fallen for Rachel, the hoary general at the twenty-year-old actress’s feet, eager but unable to master her language. Smugly, the French savored the triumph, in England, of France’s national literature and national theater, the triumph, sub specie aeternitatis, of France—which effectively reduced the sublunary event at Waterloo to dust, a passing show.

  Rachel as Hermione, photo illustration from Jules Janins Rachel et la tragédie

  The year before Rachel’s first appearance in London, the cultural event of the spring season there had been a series of lectures by Thomas Carlyle, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Had Carlyle come before to show the way for her, or did he set up a fixed idea she would interrogate and unsettle? His six lectures had traced the emergence of the heroic ideal from the mists of time into history, through the agency of writer-heroes: The Hero as Prophet, Poet, Priest, and Man of Letters. The History of the World, Carlyle repeated, is the Biography of Great Men. He had begun, on 5 May 1840, with the subject of “The Hero as Divinity,” and in the course of the month he went from Norse mythology to Napoleon (“The Hero as King”)—“a great ébaucbe, a. rude draught never completed, as indeed what great man is other?” But he insisted that the personal quality which distinguished such men was transcendence of history: “The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be, in declaring himself abroad.” The paradoxes attendant on a hero of modern times—the hero since Cervantes, since Fielding, since Byron—invited counter-concepts inflected by increasing irony: of the antihero and perhaps also of the actress-heroine, that ambiguous avatar and undercutter of the romantic Fatal Woman.

  IN RETROSPECT, it seems ironic that Queen Victoria led her people in rapt response to Rachel, from the summer of the engraved bracelet on through the rest of the decade. In 1846, she wrote in her journal that “Mlle Rachel’s wonderful impersonation of Phèdre excited the most unbounded enthusiasm from first to last,” adding that although she found French tragedy “not pleasing and extremely unnatural,” she thought “Mme Rachel’s acting was very fine.” (Victoria’s use of “Mile” and “Mme” indiscriminately is fairly standard, but possibly it is evidence that the queen might have got wind by then of whispers about Rachel’s private life, and perhaps about the plot of Phèdre as well.) In London it soon became fashionable to have seen Rachel the year before, to be able to compare and contrast her performances. Professional critics competed in observing subtle changes, some despairing of the task of praising her year after year: “It becomes somewhat difficult for the dramatic critic to find fresh phrases in which he can commend the excellences of this great actress,” wrote the man from the Illustrated London News. The Times reviewer suffered similar fatigue, confessing that “we really do not know whether there is really a change in Mademoiselle’s performance, or whether it is the power of genius to give the air of novelty even to its repetitions.”

  At the St. James Theatre (“decidedly the worst ventilated in London”) in the 1840s, one could see a number of French actresses—Miles Déjazet and Plessy, and Mme Doche—and such wonders as Barnum’s prodigies from the United States, the sisters Kate and Ellen Bateman, only eight and six years old, who recited the dialogues of Richard and Richmond, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Shylock and Portia. But Rachel, who appeared there yearly after her first season at Lumley’s theater, seemed more than a mere entertainment to Victorians. “It is delightful to be popular on your side of the water,… for you all take things so intensely seriously,” Sarah Bernhardt told an English reporter in 1894. They had been quite as serious fifty years earlier. Rachel inspired religious awe and earnest didactics in England. Her severe, violent tragic passions seemed to Anglo-Saxons to translate and disembody female ardor, transmuting it into safe, high-minded, and foreign poetic language. Macready praised “the intellectual variation of her sweet and classic features”; Emerson saw in her smile “a kind of universal intelligence.” That she spoke in an archaic form of a language that you had to go to school to learn made her somehow intellectual. “No voluptuous sinner, she seems a victim of an irresistible fate.… There can be nothing less joyous than this love,” The Times commented approvingly of her Phèdre in 1847. The grotesque, when it touched her, was interpreted as sublime. In Paris, the critics had jeered when a cat walked across the stage at a crucial moment in Mme de Girardin’s Judith; in London a parallel incident was deemed “rather singular”: “Mlle Rachel fainted away in the last act of ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur.’ Just at the moment she was receiving the poisoned bouquet, a dog introduced into the theatre began to bark, and the offended tragedienne tottered and fell. The shock upon her nerves, in a state of unusual excitement,
was too much.” The reporter did concede it was a matter for interpretation, adding, “Had this accident happened to a young actress, it would have been attributed to inexperience.”

  Deaf to the rumors about her scandalous sex life, English critics recommended Rachel with something like moral fervor: “Our readers must see Rachel; and not only see, not only hear her, but study her. It is a fine lesson.” The difference between “the great mistress of the passions” and the ordinary run of actors inspired critical enthusiasm that drowned patriotic feelings: she had, in her stillness, “the severer style of high art,” therefore was pleasing to “an intelligent and brilliant audience.” Mid-Victorian admirers of Dickens and Thackeray—who had presumed on their readers’ prejudice against Frenchwomen when they sketched murderous Mlle Hortense of Bleak House and the flighty mother of Becky Sharp—were fascinated by Rachel. As a lesson and a sign of art and intelligence, she posed an agonizing problem that complicated the standard binary oppositions of high and low, restraint and passion, virtue and vice, the schoolroom and the theater—in two words, England and France.

  WHEN G. H. LEWES, writing about Rachel’s performances in classical and modern drama, pronounced that “Phèdre is separated from Adrienne by a chasm as wide, deep, and impassable as that which separates Phidias from Tussaud,” he neatly suggested some of the charged oppositions she focused for Victorians: between ancient and modern, elite and popular, deathless and morbid, male and female, hard and soft, the original and the copy. What he fudged was the always significant difference between the two rival nations. Invoking “Phidias,” Lewes confounds Racine with Euripides, while with “Tussaud” he ranges (modern) Frenchness with the forces of darkness, against ancient Greece and (illogically, as Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum was in fact one of the tourist attractions of London) England. To the Victorians who idealized Greece, France was its worldly opposite. The shallowness and display of the ancien régime, the succession of fearful events since 1789, the amenities and luxuries of Parisian life, made the British equally nervous; France stood for radical democratic politics, vice and violence, sexuality and shallowness, and it was hard to tell which was worst. In Mary Wollstone-craft’s posthumous political novel, Maria (1798), a trial judge rebukes the heroine in divorce court by saying, “We did not want French principles in public or private life—and, if women were allowed to plead their feelings, as an excuse or palliation of infidelity, it was opening a floodgate for immorality.” From the English point of view, “French principles” was an oxymoron.

  Frenchwomen haunt the margins of Victorian novels about virtuous heroines. On the other hand, since the eighteenth century, middle-class young ladies in England had been required to learn French: Becky Sharp is accepted at her London school because she can help to teach the language. It was one of the standard accomplishments expected of so-called elegant females: Charlotte Brontë, when she decided to open a school together with her sisters, went off to Brussels to improve her French. But at least since bluff young King Harry wooed his queen in Shakespeare’s play, French has been laughed at by English writers as effeminate and absurdly fancy. In Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848–50), the French phrases and phony French name of Blanche Amory (who was originally plain Betsy) are clear signs of her shallowness. (The affectation of Anglicisms by Odette de Crécy in Du Côté de chez Swann indicates a matching dynamic on the other side of the Channel.) French was the language of hypocrisy for the Victorians: the first of the merely modern languages seemed the flashy opposite of the honest ancient ones. In Disraeli’s Coningsby, the hero’s pragmatic businessman grandfather shows how cynical he is when he counsels the young man not to study the classics at the expense of French:

  A classical education, he said, was a very admirable thing, and one which all gentlemen should enjoy; but Coningsby would find some day that there were two educations, one which his position required, and another which was demanded by the world. “French, my dear Harry,” he continued, “is the key to this second education. In a couple of years or so you will enter the world; it is a different thing to what you read about. It is a masquerade; a motley, sparkling multitude, in which you may mark all forms and colours, and listen to all sentiments and opinions; but where all you see and hear has only one object, plunder. When you get into this crowd you will find that Greek and Latin are not so much diffused as you imagine. I was glad to hear you speaking French yesterday. Study your accent. There are a good many foreigners here with whom you may try your wing a little; don’t talk to any of them too much.”

  French was the language of dangerous foreigners, of pretense and parties, of falsification, (shady) business, and very questionable pleasure. France was feminine and effeminate: the French count who turns out to be a cook in Pendennis is the descendant of many a dressy Frenchified rake in a Restoration play. In his letters to the English papers from France, Thackeray is always ready to express disgust for cold damp alien foods like frogs’ legs and snails, and praise of the roast beef and foaming ale of home and England. Nations share the shortsighted views of people whose nearest friends and relations seem their only really threatening rivals, and distinctions between self and other lend themselves to infection by gender prejudices. If England is to be plain and frank and male, France must be artificial, effeminate, perverse.

  Frenchwomen were fascinating, of course, to the normal (English) male, but also foolishly and unreasonably vain, stingy, false, selfish, and self-indulgently theatrical to the point of madness and murderousness. One of the first of the line in fiction is the eponymous heroine of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), a Huguenot refugee who gets the only name we know her by when, as she dances in Turkish costume, a man in the audience cries out, “Roxana, Roxana, by ——!” Roxana, like the heroine of that name in Racine’s Bajazet, becomes a murderess. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s popular novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the heroine—who has inherited insanity from her mother—is actress enough to assume an artificial identity. When she is finally incarcerated in a Continental madhouse, at the novel’s end, and violently hisses out her real feelings of hatred, she reminds the man who watches her of Mlle Mars. (Braddon’s sensational novel—the work of a former actress—was very successful as a play.) French actresses in the dominant tradition of moral English fiction usually turn up in connection with a man’s misspent youth (but the grandfather in Coningsby is in his dotage when he is preyed upon by a couple of gold-digging actresses from the Comédie-Française). The dead mother of the child Adèle in Jane Eyre (1847) is a case in point. The sad brief tale of faithless, silly, dependent, French Céline Varens is a foil to the stern and virtuous English heroine’s life story; Céline is a mere episode in the history of Rochester, whereas Jane—his true love—is the subject of a proud “autobiography,” the very writing of which proves that she is in charge of her own life.

  “People of England!” Rachel being hawked to the British by her family, from a caricature by Pruche, 1841 (photo credit 4.4)

  More sinister than Céline is the French actress in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), who figures in the early career of the physician Tertius Lydgate. As a medical student in Paris in the 1820s, Lydgate falls in love with a sultry actress of melodramas and goes repeatedly to see her perform. Her husband is an actor who performs opposite her, and one night, in the course of a scene, she actually stabs him. He dies. Acquitted by the predictably lax French authorities, Laure goes off to live in the country, where Lydgate repairs to adore his bovine beauty. In their final interview, she relieves him of the notion of her innocence. “I meant to do it,” she insists about the murder. By way of explanation she tells him her husband annoyed her, wanted to live in the city while she preferred the country; she adds that her impulse “came to me in the play.”

  Since Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), English novelists have explored the charge that acting is injurious to the character, first of all because the roles of “bad” characters are contaminating, secondly because assuming any character at a
ll that is not one’s own encourages a softness and malleability of the self and leads by easy degrees to mortal sin. Fanny Price, Austen’s heroine, virtuously opposes her cousins’ project of putting on a play. (The young people who attempt amateur theatricals in a house in the country are portrayed more sympathetically in Goethe’s Elective Affinities [1809], and certainly in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin [1835].) George Eliot’s Lydgate is morally weak, being overly susceptible to theatricality. His self-destroying taste for women who seem decorative and are worse leads him to marry Rosamond Vincy, whose artificiality finally destroys him. Eliot continued to mull over the fatal attractions of theatrical women and the slide from moral malleability to hardness and murder in her last novel. Early on in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth turns rigid in fear when she suddenly sees a picture of a “dead face” and a “female figure fleeing” while she performs in a tableau vivant. At the end of her sad story, she sits motionless, frozen, unable and unwilling to act as her hated husband drowns before her eyes. Gwendolen has been born and brought up to shine in a society that overvalues appearances, and her success there makes her think she can be a professional actress; dissuaded when she is told she should have started studying the art of acting long before, she sells herself in the socially sanctioned way, by marrying for money. Like Laure and like Rosamond, she effectively kills a man, refusing to throw the dying Grandcourt a rope. “I saw my wish outside me,” is how she explains her (in)action, echoing Laure.