Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue;

  Un trouble s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue;

  Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler;

  Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler.

  I saw, I blushed, I paled at sight of him;

  A strange disquiet seized my stricken soul;

  My eyes could see no more, I could not speak;

  I felt my body burn and freeze in turn. (I, iii)

  The lines echo French translations of a famous lyric by Sappho, the poet from the island of Lesbos whose description of love’s physical symptoms, from the point of view of the suffering woman, first figured female desire as self-consciousness. Phèdre, distracted, is beside herself, and clear-eyed enough to watch herself in Sappho’s way: seeing herself intensifies her passion. She is, as she says, the prey of Venus; she also is obviously in the toils of her own painful self-awareness and self-disgust. The whole play develops this dividedness. When, at the end, a witness reports the horrible death of Hippolyte, whose body is terribly mauled when his horses, frightened by a bull from the sea, drag him behind his chariot across the rocks, it is as if the heroine’s psychological struggle has been projected outward into the world. Phèdre’s bestial part (also figured by her half-bull half-brother) destroys the youth who rebuffed her. Hippolyte literally, like Phèdre metaphorically, is torn apart by monstrous passion.

  The famous representations of Rachel as Phèdre, in which she looks somber, worried, guilty, and queenly, belie the wild stage agonies that terrified her audiences. Annenkov, her most meticulous observer, left a vivid record of what he saw and heard in Russia when Rachel-Phèdre revealed her passion to Hippolyte:

  Rachel begins with full voice the tale of her criminal love. Soon the words, the couplets, as if driven by the thought, begin to run as incredible, barely audible speech. A whisper, which betrays her passion with a rapidity almost convulsive, becomes unbearable. Above it, from time to time, are uttered those contralto shrieks, which rend the soul.… In mid-monologue, Phèdre, giving herself up totally to a single thought, loses self-consciousness and is almost beside herself. Her lips tremble, her eyes blaze with a maniacal fire, a gesture becomes insanely expressive, that ghastly whisper goes on the whole time, and the words run on, filled with agonizing truth. The paroxysm of passion increases even more, when, after Hippolyte’s confusion in striving not to understand his stepmother, she exclaims, “Ah! cruel! tu m’as trop entendue!”, these verses must be heard from Rachel’s lips in order to realize how much irony can be contained in them! And literally having drawn new strength into it, she bursts out in a thundering confession of her criminal passion in the face of heaven and earth until, filled to the brim with horror and self-revulsion, she seizes Hippolyte’s sword and is borne off stage unconscious by her confidante. Only then does the parterre take a breath and rise as one man crying “Rachel!” Such is the scene.

  Always best when most thoroughly rehearsed, Rachel was probably more brilliant in 1853 than she had been ten years earlier. But Gautier had been ravished by her very first performance, writing that in spite of a generally inadequate and awkward production, Phèdre seemed actually to live for two hours. “With her first step on stage, her success was assured,” he had written of Rachel; “never before was a role more completely expressed in an actor’s body and bearing. When she moved forward, pale as her own ghost, her eyes reddened in her marble mask, her arms dangling and lifeless, her body inert beneath its straight-falling robe, we seemed to see not Mlle Rachel, but truly Phèdre herself.” Exhausted by her performance, she had chosen not to come onstage to take her bow, tacitly bowing to the greater reality of the tragedy, showing her respect for Racine, suggesting that the actress had merged with, or been overcome by, the character she played.

  It was inevitable that Rachel, notoriously amorous, should be identified with the sexual sinner who so brazenly solicits Hippolyte. Her most hostile French critics would goad their readers to hate her by drawing parallels between the stage queen and Phèdre that extended to Marie Antoinette, that also foreign queen who, before she was dethroned and beheaded, had been accused of criminal luxury, including incest with her young son. The loyal Gautier identified Rachel with the role of Phèdre on altogether another level, insisting on the spirit, not the flesh, of the suffering tragic heroines. Like Musset, who called her the vessel in which Racinian gold was purified, he stressed Rachel’s truth to a classical ideal. Her Phèdre was no sexual sinner to be condemned from a Christian point of view, Gautier argued, but a being tormented by the gods. “Mlle Rachel understands Phèdre in her own particular way, and it is one that we believe is correct,” wrote the critic. “She plays the role not as a passionate woman but as a victim. Her love is like a kind of madness, a malady inflicted by the vengeful rage of Venus, who does not hesitate to sacrifice an innocent woman in order to punish an insensitive man who refuses to worship her.” One was invited to extend this interpretation into metaphor, and to see Rachel-Phèdre as an image of the artist-actress victimized by her role and by the theater.

  Her triumphant Phèdre made Rachel unquestionably Tragedy’s queen—its empress, even. Sainte-Beuve slyly chose a Napoleonic image to applaud Walewski’s mistress, writing that Rachel, as Phèdre, had won her Battle of Marengo. The queen devoured by her own lustfulness, burdened by the body Venus feeds on, was taken to be an image of the split between brute sex and exquisite self-consciousness, and furthermore of the actress’s self-contradictory, irreconcilable doubleness, in being both Woman and Artist. Sir Theodore Martin was much struck (and stirred) by Rachel as Phèdre, a “woman wasting away by inches in the consuming fires of a passion which she abhorred.” In Goncourt’s La Faustin, the Bernhardtian actress-heroine who painstakingly prepares a Phèdre to rival Rachel’s falls victim to an offstage sexual passion that mimics and travesties Phèdre’s: seeking her lover at his dueling studio and finding him gone, she is stirred by the male smells, and compelled against her will to invite the crude instructor to make love to her. (At the last minute, she pulls herself together and pushes him away.) Phèdre’s criminal sexual desire and her aggressiveness were read as metonymic of the woman artist’s ambition, and of Woman’s aberrant, monstrous, and fatal aspiration toward greatness. Phèdre’s mother mated with a bull; the sister of the Minotaur was herself a monster. Rachel, identified with this role, was no longer just a star but a monstre sacré, recognized by her guilty public as its sacrifice to the gods. For the audience came to witness not only Phèdre’s suffering and Rachel’s great performance, but the spectacle of the star being consumed by her role.

  PHÈDRE’S PASSION destroys her stepson’s life and her confidante’s, and wrecks her husband’s, before she kills herself. Her crime is against marriage and motherhood, society and social relations. Because women are conventionally seen as the sum of their social relations—seen as daughters and wives and mothers, first of all—female criminals are particularly shocking and threatening. A contemporary of Rachel’s, a writer on prison reform, postulated that “female criminality is more dangerous than men’s because it is more contagious.”

  That an actor is similarly contagious is obvious to the least susceptible member of an audience. Rachel as Phèdre seemed to put her audience in peril along with herself. Is that why people flocked to see her, in the dangerous city of Paris? The actress’s growing reputation for greed and sexual excesses bled easily into the images of murderous Roxane and incestuous Phèdre; and as Rachel moved from role to role, it was as if to prove that one crime leads to another. The prejudice that links the stage with sin lent her a sheen of sinister glamour. What might such a woman not do? the virtuous wondered, and the naive filled in the blanks with the sins they recognized. When Rachel performed in Venice in 1851, John and Effie Ruskin did not go to see her, although, as Effie recorded, a couple of their friends had gone on four different nights to Horace and Phèdre, “and think her very grand.” Ruskin’s young and still virgin wife had seen Rachel
in London and judged her “very pretty,” she recalled; but, she commented complacently, “Rachel they say is such a very bad person and although only 32 she looks much older and is killing herself by drinking gin to excess.” In Judith, the play written by Delphine de Girardin for Rachel and produced three months after her first Phèdre, the infatuated, doomed Holopherne says of the heroine, “Her attraction, for me, is the attraction of danger.”

  It was not until five years after she first appeared in Phèdre that Rachel, on tour in the provinces, took time to visit the notorious criminal Mme Lafarge, who was in a prison in Montpellier. The woman had been condemned to death for murdering her husband, after a highly publicized trial in the summer of 1840. Marie Lafarge had then been twenty-four, an orphan of remotely aristocratic parentage, her maternal grandmother having been one of the natural daughters of Philippe Egalité, father of Louis-Philippe, and the celebrated writer Mme de Genlis, his children’s governess. Her family had married her off to a much older, loutish ironmaster who had falsely claimed he was rich. (Making the best of things, initially, the romantic youthful bride devised a family crest that included hammers.) Her accusers claimed she had sent her husband a cake laced with arsenic when he was away from home on business, and proceeded to dose him daily with more when he came home to be nursed. Mme Lafarge maintained she was innocent. The celebrity of the case illustrates the vogue for criminal women in the mid-nineteenth century, and suggests some reasons for the enthusiasm for Phèdre. During the Lafarge trial, writes the historian Mary Hartman, women had fought “for hours to catch a glimpse of the accused … and … for tickets for seats in court in the specially constructed ladies’ gallery.” Engravings of the heroine were sold in the streets, and in the newspapers writers debated whether or not she was beautiful: some observed “that her profile was not really good, that her forehead was too prominent, and her nose and mouth too large. But nearly everyone agreed that her eyes were extraordinary, her smile enchanting, and her soft, deep voice both appealing and seductive.” The parallel with Rachel is alarming. The newspapers made Marie Lafarge a national figure, and she followed this up in a memoir she wrote in prison, which portrays her as a proleptic Madame Bovary. Her mind, she wrote, had been molded by books: the plays of Racine and Corneille, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s sentimental story, Paul et Virginie. She identified herself with George Sand’s Lélia, “who has suffered all sorrows, doubts, and discouragement; who was riveted to earth by evil passions and raised to the heavens by sublime instincts; who possessed equally the power for good and for evil; who did not want to be a weak woman, and who was unable to become an angel.”

  It was 1848 when Rachel came to see Marie Lafarge in prison. Her motive was probably rather like that of the actress in Jules Dassin’s 1978 film A Dream of Passion, who, in the course of rehearsing the role of Medea in Greece, discovers that an American woman has been jailed there for murdering her children. Maia (Melina Mercouri) wants to visit the woman in order to fabricate publicity for herself, and to do some quick research into the mind and heart of a criminal. But a feeling of close kinship with the other develops, which eventually nourishes her play, and makes it better. Rachel, who recorded no such aggrandizement of her art, experienced a more immediate rush of fellow feeling, and a raised feminist consciousness, as a result of her meeting with Mme Lafarge.

  She was touring the provinces in her usual repertoire of tragic roles, also rendering those exhortatory recitations of La Marseillaise which had led the Republic to sponsor the tour. In the cities outside Paris, the women in the audience were especially enthusiastic: complaints that the tragedienne’s visits disrupted family life had already appeared in provincial papers years before. In 1848, the mix of art and politics was particularly heady: at Nîmes the tragedienne was cheered for donating a hundred francs to the unemployed. By visiting an accused murderess in Montpellier she was making another timely gesture toward the unfortunate, as well as satisfying what she called (in a letter to Delphine de Girardin) her “predilection for prisons.” The account of the interview she wrote to her sister Sarah suggests that both parties were strongly affected. To the tragedienne’s gratification, Mme Lafarge recalled having seen her in Iphigénie en Aulide; but when Rachel offered to recite for her she refused to hear her, saying it would make her regret the world too much. Rachel felt intense pity for a person who had been married off without love, and condemned by a petty jury. Such a woman might have done greater things in a different world, where women had more opportunity, she wrote to Sarah in an unaccustomed spirit of revolutionary sisterhood. And she pitied Mme Lafarge for being a victim of tuberculosis: better a tile on the head or a bullet in the breast than such a death, she wrote, in language suggestive of the revolution. (In the event, Mme Lafarge was released from prison in the final stages of her illness, and died of the disease.) Did Rachel see herself in the other young woman who also had extraordinary eyes and a stirring voice, and literary dreams, and violent passions—the other poitrinaire? Did destiny, the tragedienne’s familiar, grant her a premonitory chill? Had she gone to the prison in the first place seeking sensation, out of curiosity, or looking for a muse? Did she seek deliberately to be affected by another woman as her audiences were by her, as if by contagion? In James’s The Tragic Muse, Miriam Rooth, whose ambition is to be “the English Rachel,” stands before Gérôme’s portrait of the actress in the Théâtre-Français, preparing for her own career of self-doubling by battening on the other woman’s image.

  THE MOST SIGNIFICANT other woman in Rachel’s life—apart from her mother and her sisters Rébecca and Sarah, and Rose, her faithful maid—was Delphine de Girardin. As the Vicomte de Launay, writing chronicles of Paris life in La Presse, she was an early author of Rachel’s fame: one of her columns is a witty account of how the actress’s visit to the Chamber of Deputies turned the seat of government into a theater, as the nation’s leaders craned their necks to get a look at the woman who was sitting in the gallery in order to watch them. The three roles Delphine wrote for Rachel suggest the stages of her career: first, the heroic Jewess of the Bible, Judith; then Cleopatra; and finally Virginie de Blossac, the socialite heroine of Lady Tartuffe. Delphine’s own life imitated art with the literalness of her husband’s: and in her life story, as in Emile de Girardin’s and Rachel’s, character seemed more than usually implicated in a proper name.

  She had been named Delphine after one of Germaine de Staël’s heroines. Her mother, Sophie Gay, herself a writer, was one of the so-called “Muses” of the period of Napoleon’s Directorate. Sophie was, in the appropriately lush words of a contemporary, one of “those beautiful Grecian idols that, for a moment, made the people of Paris … dream of Athens.” Young Delphine—her mother’s finest work, Arsène Houssaye wrote—was raised to play the role of another de Staël heroine, the rhapsode and poet Corinne. She reveled in it. “Distinguished and crowned by the French Academy in 1822 …, Mlle Gay has not ceased to celebrate in verse every important public event,” Sainte-Beuve wrote without enthusiasm. “On one day, she could be seen on the top of the dome of the Panthéon, reciting her hymn to Sainte Genevièeve in honor of Gros’s paintings.” She came even closer than that to duplicating Corinne’s achievement of being crowned on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. “During a trip to Rome in 1827, she was received at the Capitol as a member of the Tiber Academy.… All this created the pretext for people to speak of her (and for her to think of herself) not just as an elegiac muse but as the Muse of the Fatherland.” Delphine wrote tributes to her own remarkable “blonde crown”; as Mme de Girardin, she presented her distinguished self to chosen celebrities in her salon. Some gossips whispered about a lesbian relationship between her and Rachel, but on the whole they found female rivalry a more titillating theme and compelling structure.

  Anecdotes stress the dramatic differences between the regal well-born blonde and the waif from the gutter: when Rachel first undertook to charm Delphine, people said, she was obliged to subject her complexion to a
salon that had been decorated in acid green so as to flatter no one but the hostess. She came out sufficiently in the older woman’s good graces to inspire plays and sustain a long relationship. To Delphine Rachel wrote many of her best letters, though not her most unbuttoned ones: the difference in social status, and the fact that Delphine was a journalist, easily account for the palpable constraint. (Before and after her affair with him, Rachel’s allusions to “M. de Girardin” are equally distant and respectful.) Judith, their first joint effort, was condemned by critics disposed to hoot at the showy collaboration of two women who took themselves—and their subject, the biblical murderess—so seriously. But Delphine’s friend, the poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine, hailed her on the occasion: “No woman has had such a virile triumph since Vittoria Colonna, whom you resemble in features, in genius, and in heroism.” For better and worse, Rachel and Delphine were identified with one another and their heroines: the patriotic murderess; the passionate, dissolute, suicidal queen; and finally the hypocritical Lady Tartuffe, whom, Delphine explained, she had concocted from the characteristics of several society women she knew. Secretly annoyed by Delphine’s self-importance, but effusive on paper (“I think of nothing but Judith,” she wrote to the author who was drafting it), Rachel honored the connection that literature and legend and their joined talents had made between them. When Delphine died, Rachel sent a wreath with a card that read, “Rachel à Cléopâtre.”

  IS A WOMAN MONSTROUS for being too much or too little of a woman? Too much like, or unlike, women generally? Self-hatred or dislike of her acting, or both, made Heine, who was a Jew, consistently critical of Rachel. He jeered at her pretensions to rank; backing up distaste with rationalization, he argued romantically that (like that other Jew, Felix Mendelssohn) she lacked the naïveté a great artist needs. The monster-tragedienne is more profane than sacred in a comic story Heine liked to tell about a visit to the actress at home. It ironically underwrites the image of Rachel-Phèdre as a monster, and neatly complements Musset’s romantic “Souper”: