Letter from Rachel to Arsène Houssaye (photo credit 4.15)
To conjecture that Legouvé subsequently wrote Médée in order to kill the thing he imagined himself to have made is not quite fair: simple personal ambition was surely involved. Also, it is a logical step from Phaedra to Medea; people (Lamartine, for instance) urged it on Rachel when they got wind of Legouvé’s project. Initially she seems to have been interested in the role of the mother who kills her children, but she was always a little dubious; Legouvé, however, imagined on the basis of her past behavior that he could overcome her reluctance. But after she agreed to take the role, she set about avoiding both the author and the play. She claimed to be incapacitated, first by anxiety about her sister Rébecca’s illness and then by despair soon after Rébecca’s death; then she said she was obliged to leave town for her health; then she began rehearsals, broke them off, and decided she was in no position to refuse a very profitable offer from the King of Prussia. (She had used the business of a grande tragédienne to get rid of unwanted suitors all her life.) Legouvé, who fancied himself her more than intimate, was enraged. He pursued her into the courts, and she called upon the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux—from whom she had been alienated since the Véron affair—to save her. He tried, but this time he failed. A final court order required Rachel to pay the disappointed playwright five thousand francs for breach of contract.
She was predictably accused of skittishness, vanity, and cowardice, also of maternal sentimentality: she had said that as the mother of two young boys she was reluctant to play the infanticide. A look at the play suggests why Houssaye supported her decision to refuse the role, and why Rachel, who cared so much about money, was willing to risk paying, indeed to pay, to avoid it. If a writer had aimed to travesty her image, he would have been hard put to devise a better vehicle than Legouvé’s Médée. It is a debasement of Greek tragedy so thoroughgoing as to seem deliberate. Where the Medea of Euripides is a heroic figure larger than life, a sorceress who helped Jason to the Golden Fleece, this one is a cast-off wife, a woman scorned and driven mad by a man who is bored by her. Jason, here, is an enterprising rake, compared in the author’s preface to slick Parisian seducers of poor girls from the country; and his proposals to Médée, about divorce and child custody, are hardly evocative of more spacious antique times. Médée’s feelings for her children are narrowly possessive: as Legouvé saw the character, “Medea is to maternal love what Othello is to romantic love, the image of the passion that kills.” The play emphasizes the lust of the young barbarian who is driven to commit terrible crimes for Jason’s sake. She is a foreigner used to strange gods, including a Venus thirsty for human blood. Cast off in Corinth, Médée is bewildered and pathetic, and the pathos of her situation is intensified by her more pathetic children, to whom Legouvé gives names and speaking parts. (In the play by Euripides the unnamed children have a scant two lines.) The two boys—like Rachel’s own Alexandre and Gabriel—whine realistically about how tired and hungry they are; Jason’s new love, Créüse, exclaims over them and covers them with kisses, and declares she longs to adopt them; and they are heart-wrenchingly afraid of their terrible mother, who repels them at one point with the declaration that “Jason’s children are not my children.” In the tragedy by Euripides, Medea agonizes, arguing with herself, over whether to kill the children; here, the decision seems impulsive.
It is, in other words, a vulgar play that might have vulgarized its star. In an essay on Mme Ristori written in 1875, Henry James indicates he knew as much, although he puts the blame on the actress rather than the role: “The objections to Madame Ristori’s Medea are obvious; the lady is too much of a termagant—no wonder poor Jason would not go back to her.” Even if the play itself is “a dense tissue of superb action,” as James would call it, Rachel was right in believing it was not suited to her gifts. She pointed out one problem in a letter to Legouvé: her forte was conveying emotions through a pose or an attitude or a restrained and measured gesture, she wrote, but “at the place where large, energetic pantomime begins, my talents cease.” (Act II, Scene 5, of Legouvé’s play opens with “Medea, distraught, taking great strides.”) The playwright seemed to avoid exploiting or even acknowledging her strengths, not only the graceful gesture that was the more emphatic for being so rare, but the long, brilliantly modulated sustained monologue. Legouvé’s Médée has mostly broken half-lines and staccato exclamations; dignity, along with language, is beyond her, for she suffers from high romantic madness, the delectable “rich anger” of the mistress whose soft hand Keats counsels the man who would be melancholy to imprison—the craziness generally attributed to women who kill. Rachel had made her name and fortune by acting self-possessed and single-minded, as scrupulous Camille, as scornful Hermione and imperious Roxane, even as Phèdre observing her own passion and disintegration. Legouvé’s distracted Médée can pull herself together only with her last breath, in the final, hollow claim that it was really Jason who killed the children.
Recent critics have argued that the classical Medea was, for the ancients, a figure of the archaic heroic that was meant to horrify. Legouvé’s version of Euripides does not interrogate concepts of heroism, as the Greek play does; instead, it makes Médée a sentimental, banal heroine. Had Rachel consented to play the role at the end of her career, she would have seemed to be revealing some secret cracked self she had hidden behind her smooth marble facade, and to be acknowledging—finally—that she was really a welter of disordered, horrific female passion, a mad mother pathetically without a man, needy and violent and guilty even of the least forgivable of crimes. Fidelity to her image and herself demanded that she turn the role down; and Adelaide Ristori arrived in Paris just in time to take it up. Legouvé’s journalist friends encouraged audiences to love Ristori as Médée—love her, quite pointedly, more than they loved Rachel. The hero of the day was the playwright, who had been thwarted by a temperamental woman’s promise; the heroine was the lusty, new foreign actress, who performed operatically in Italian. Ristori was commended as the true romantic woman, passionate rather than artful, a successor to the timid, tradition-bound Rachel; also a mother, she was hailed as more thoroughly the artist for being willing to act the role of the woman who kills her own children.
Unlike Rachel, Ristori was also safely a wife, as well as a genuine foreigner from another country, and an actress unencumbered by a legend. Rachel’s children had hardly figured in her myth—had been hard to assimilate into it. Although François Ponsard, who adored her, had described her as a tender mother, his version of Rachel did not catch on; most biographers have preferred the stereotype of the egotistical actress, who left Napoleon’s grandson in the care of that slatternly wife of a vendor of eyeglasses, her mother, who taught him to repeat vile things about his father and other actresses. An unmarried star is supposed to be a bad mother: it is part of the fantasy of her monstrous unwomanliness. In the early 1840s, childless Delphine de Girardin, writing as Vicomte de Launay, had mocked the idealization of secular maternity; it only increased as the century wore on. Legouvé’s Médée, about a woman driven so mad by love for a man that she sacrifices her two children, did a standard lurid turn on the reigning stereotype. It would have been that much more lurid had it starred Rachel. The story of Rachel’s refusal of Médée did cast her finally, ironically, in the maternal role, however—as it was explained that her nervous, out-of-control superstitiousness about miming the murder of her sons had made her break her contract with Legouvé. In the event, as a capping irony, she was indelibly fixed as Médée after all: the expression of Medea about to kill her children, in a painting by Delacroix, recalls—or did to Gautier, in 1855—not Ristori’s face but Rachel’s.
On her deathbed, Rachel refused Legouvé’s request to visit her. (This did not stop him from describing the statuesque poses she struck there.) In the gracious little note turning him down, the tragedienne wrote that if she were to return to the stage, she would have him write her rôle de rentrée, but begge
d him not to take her to court if she proved unable to fulfill the obligation.
CHAPTER FIVE
During the first stage of Romanticism, up till about the middle of the nineteenth century, we meet with several Fatal Women in literature, but there is no established type of Fatal Woman in the way that there is an established type of Byronic Hero. For a type—which is, in actual fact, a cliché—to be created, it is essential that some particular figure should have made a profound impression on the popular mind.
MARIO PRAZ, The Romantic Agony
Fame is made up of four elements: a person and an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity has thought about them ever since.
LEO BRAUDY, The Frenzy of Renown
A subjective account by an impressionable spectator of one of the most mercurial of human activities, an actor’s performance, is open to the widest misinterpretation, and the Victorian era, with its plethora of newspapers and periodicals, further confuses the picture by sheer abundance of detail.
GEORGE ROWELL, The Victorian Theatre
What do you think of Rachel—greater in what she is than in her creativity, eh?
MATTHEW ARNOLD, letter to Arthur Hugh Clough
REAL PEOPLE are special effects in fictions. When Edward Waverley is received by Prince Charles James Stuart in person in Walter Scott’s novel, or Napoleon himself appears in War and Peace, or when Steve Rojack, in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, recalls the time he first met “Jack Kennedy,” the reader thrills to the superior glamour of historical fact. In imaginary worlds, real persons thicken the illusion of verisimilitude, also remind us of the private and fabricated nature of the novel and the self. The fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie once lived would argue that Waverley did too; on the other hand, at the prince’s side Scott’s hero is shown up as a fiction, so that one nearly begins to wonder how real the fabled Stuart was. Roland Barthes remarks that when historical persons play disproportionately small roles in fictions, being “merely mixed in with their fictional neighbors, mentioned as having simply been present at some social gathering, their modesty, like a lock between two levels of water, equalizes novel and history.” He sees them as serving as “superlative effects of the real.” By conspicuously standing out as “effects,” he suggests, they call attention to the line between novel and history that they seem to challenge or erase. Men like the prince, or the emperor, or the president, importantly world-historical but half-legendary as well, also draw our attention to the difference between public and private persons, the fact that (in fiction, at least) only members of the second group can be satisfactorily known.
The name of the famous actress Berma in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu does not have the same resonance as “M. Grévy” or “Maréchal MacMahon” in that novel. First of all, it is not in fact a name from real life, being only evocative of Sarah Bernhardt’s surname; and secondly, it names an actress, a public woman, not at all the same thing as a public man. While the name reminds us of Sarah Bernhardt and inspires us to savor her historicity as we savor Bonnie Prince Charlie’s, it also suggests that she was not quite, not altogether, and not only a person in history. It begins to raise the questions, explored by the text, about the extent to which she is a living image of something in the narrator’s mind. In other words, her very name suggests the equivocal nature of her identity, as does “Vashti,” the name of the actress in Villette. Single and singular, these names mark the actress’s difference from ordinary persons, real and fictitious, and suggest something about the spectator-narrator who names her. Proust’s narrator sees his actress and Lucy Snowe sees hers as not altogether separate beings. Berma and Vashti stimulate and extend the narrators’ selves. They are symbols as well as persons, arbitrary signs of persons, creatures in the phenomenal world and also openings into a place at which the self bleeds into that world, into another self. Signs of the self, they are also signs of its instability.
WRITING UP Rachel’s New York tour of 1855, Putnam’s and Harper’s magazines reminded American readers that she was the original of Brontë’s Vashti. Having been mentioned in a novel lent her a certain importance and a glamorous increment of fictitiousness. The novel readers of her time might have been primed for Rachel’s appearance in Brontë’s novel by earlier works—Balzac’s La Cousine Bette (1846) and Disraeli’s Tancred (1847); they might even have noted the difference between the Frenchman’s Josépha and Josephine, the child actress imagined by the English writer. Josépha evokes Rachel less directly and specifically than Josephine does. She is not a tragedienne but a diva—born in 1814, the pseudo-historian painstakingly tells us, and a star at the Opéra, in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, in 1843. A Jew (the natural daughter of a rich German banker), she is compared to a portrait of Judith in the Pitti Palace, which may be an allusion to Rachel’s role in Mme de Girardin’s play; but Balzac means his character to remind us of prominent Jewish divas, such as Pasta and Grisi, as well. She recalls one legendary aspect of La Grande largely by her manner of being confidently and effectively superb. The scene between her and poor Mme Hulot, who comes to her in an effort to find her straying husband, sets up the large-souled, free and generous public woman against the pinched and virtuous little wife. Triumphantly aware of their relative positions, the courtesan makes a deliberately theatrical appearance in greeting the other woman, and follows it up with a grandly generous offer to help her.
The difference between French and English literary versions of Rachel continued to prevail in her afterlife. In her own country, especially after her image was conflated with Sarah Bernhardt’s, Rachel was sunk into the stereotype of the glamorous demimondaine; in England she remained a (problematic) sign of high seriousness and of art. Disraeli, George Henry Lewes, and Matthew Arnold helped define the English Rachel, Lewes insisting influentially on “her distinction, her simple dignity.” But Charlotte Brontë’s vision of Rachel has most effectively preserved her memory. Brontë brought her figure into the moral tradition of British fiction—the tradition of Richardson, in which Woman represents the inner life. Figuring a sort of conduit between inner and outer, real and fantastic, private and public worlds, revisionary versions of Brontë’s Rachel haunt later novels by George Eliot and Henry James. These writers in the English tradition insist, as the French do not, on the actress’s uniqueness and her genius, and on the charged play of oppositions she embodied; they invoke her as a compelling link between psychosocial reality and aesthetic ideals, the provocative sign of a set of unstable opposites that especially interest them: between novelistic density and theatrical illusion; fiction and history; singularity and representativity. Above all, in the most psychologically minded of literary forms, she figures the attractive idea and unstable substance of character.
1. A WOMAN AND AN ARTIST: VASHTI
When Charlotte Brontë went to London in the early summer of 1851 she was an accomplished and well-known novelist, and a painfully lonely person. Her brother and two sisters had very recently been consigned in swift succession to the graveyard beside Haworth Parsonage, leaving her with a father whose irascibility had been intensified by tragedy, illness, and age. Even the countryside she had lived in and deeply loved since childhood seemed alien: “I am free to walk on the moors,” she wrote from Yorkshire, “but when I go out there alone everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening.” Her friends hoped a visit to London would cheer her with the balm of fellowship: there were people she knew there, and a wider literary society eager to honor the author of Jane Eyre, as well as a range of convivial distractions. It was the year of the Great Exhibition, and Brontë went five times to the Crystal Palace, though “under coercion rather than my own free will,” to see scientific wonders she confessed she did not know enough to appreciate. She—who had shrunk almost ostentatiously from being known—began to flirt, finally, with celebrity. She heard Thackeray lecture, and finally met him; she breakfasted and dined
with various other prominent persons. And she went twice to the St. James Theatre, to see Rachel in Horace and in Adrienne Lecouvreur.
To Brontë in 1851, the metropolis was an alien place; “this great London” and “this great Babylon” are interchangeable phrases in her letters. The cranky parson’s spiky daughter was not disposed to be enthusiastic about people or crowds. In the St. James Theatre in 1851, she would have felt further isolated by feelings of superiority: unlike the others who came to gape at a star, she was proficient in Rachel’s language. (She would have shared the scorn of G. H. Lewes, who was embarrassed by the provinciality and ignorance of Rachel’s English audiences. “We once saw a lady in a private box not content with her book, but absolutely hunting out the words in her dictionary!” Lewes reported, in a review of 1850.) She, after all, had lived abroad, had even written love letters in French. Her memory of the passionate feelings she had expressed on paper for Constantin Héger, the teacher she fell in love with in Brussels, would have complicated the emotions that going to the French Theatre stirred. Her companions for the evening were her publisher and sometime suitor George Smith, a tall fair man, and his mother. John Graham Bretton, the bland, blond, handsome English doctor who takes Lucy Snowe to see Vashti in Villette, is based on Smith: in the novel Lucy gets to go because his mother has decided to give up her ticket. Lucy’s story develops a contrast between the tall Englishman, her first love, and her second, a passionate, peppery, French-speaking little professor rather like the one Brontë had known when she was a student.
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