Rachel as Phèdre, drawing by Eugène Delacroix, 1843 (photo credit 5.2)
Brontë prepared for going to the theater in a mood of wary ambivalence. “To-night—(if all be well),” she wrote to a friend, “I expect to see Rachel—at the French Theatre. I wonder whether she will fulfil reasonable expectation—as yet it has not been my lot to set eyes on any serious acting for which I cared a fig.” Brontë was not one of those English ladies bred up to play genteelly at charades. But the country childhood that had taught her to scorn worldliness and display had also prepared her to take playacting very seriously. In her biography of the novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell relays Patrick Brontë’s account of an event he staged in the early years at Haworth Parsonage: “When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under the cover of the mask.” He asked each of the children what they most wanted: “I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of men and women; he answered, ‘By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.’ I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, ‘The Bible.…’ ” Oscar Wilde intended to shock the middle classes when he declared, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Did the Yorkshire parson share his view? Or did he shrink from his children’s clear gaze? As for his dutiful oldest daughter, was she telling him the truth or maintaining a mask that she always wore when she gave him precisely the answer he wanted? Whatever else, the anecdote certainly suggests that Charlotte Brontë, long before she wrote her novels as Currer Bell (and as the first-person narrators William Crimsworth, Jane Eyre, and Lucy Snowe), was well acquainted with the attractions of theatricality, and the connections between self-revealing and self-concealing.
Coming to examine, ready to dismiss Rachel, Brontë stayed to admire her; four days later she reported to her friend Amelia Ringrose Taylor, “I have seen Rachel—her acting was something apart from any other acting it has come in my way to witness—her soul was in it—and a strange soul she has—I shall not discuss it—it is my hope to see her again.” Discussion of Rachel’s soul having been thus deferred, she added only that the actress and Thackeray, whose lectures she had been attending, “are the two living things that have a spell for me in this great London—and one of these is sold to the Great Ladies—and the other—I fear—to Beelzebub.” After she went a second time to see Rachel perform, Brontë gave a milder account of Thackeray to Elizabeth Gaskell. As one novelist writing to another of a third, she sought to be tactful; and the great man had charmed her by introducing her to his mother; but she also was beginning to work at sharpening the contrast between the novelist’s and the actress’s performances. (She never met Rachel.) “Thackeray’s lectures and Rachel’s acting are the two things in this great Babylon which have stirred and interested me most,” she wrote to Gaskell; and to Sydney Dobell, “Thackeray and Rachel have been the two points of attraction for me in town: the one, being a human creature, great, interesting, and sometimes good and kind; the other, I know not what, I think a demon.” She had told Gaskell that in London she had found in Thackeray and Rachel “most of what was genuine, whether for good or ill”; amid the false Great Ladies, in the Vanity Fair of the city, she thrilled to anything that seemed real and authentic, even real evil. “I shall never forget her—” she reiterated to Dobell from Manchester, where she was reflecting on Rachel after talking about her with Gaskell. “She will come to me in sleepless nights again and yet again. Fiends can hate, scorn, rave, wreathe, and agonize as she does, not mere men and women.” With “wreathe” she conjures the image of a snake.
Her last Rachel letter is her most revealing—as a social transaction if not as a text. Deliberate and highly wrought, it was written in November 1851, six months after her visit to the French Theatre, and directed to James Taylor in Bombay. Taylor, an editor at Smith, Elder, had recently been stationed in India—perhaps, one Brontë biographer suggests, because he was George Smith’s rival for the novelist’s affections. Before going abroad, he had visited Haworth to press his suit, and had been firmly turned down. To her close friend Ellen Nussey, Brontë had reported then that “each moment he came near me—and that I could see his eyes fastened on me—my veins ran ice. Now that he is away I feel far more gently towards him—it is only close by that I grow rigid—stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger—which nothing softens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of his manner.” The woman who stiffened when the man came near was relieved when the taxing Taylor went off to India. She wrote to him about Rachel partly by way of keeping him abreast of the cultural news of home, partly because she was drafting or thinking about a crucial section of her novel, but also because Rachel seems to have reminded her of him:
Rachel’s acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror. The tremendous force with which she expresses the very worst passions in their strongest essence forms an exhibition as exciting as the bull-fights of Spain and the gladiatorial combats of old Rome, and (it seemed to me) not one whit more moral than those poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity. It is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a fiend.
Less distanced than the letters to Gaskell and the others, less urgent than the letter to Ellen, this like the violent language of Lucy Snowe describing the transformative impression made on her by the actress she calls Vashti.
LUCY’S ACCOUNT of her evening at the theater is in the hot center of Villette, the twenty-third of forty-two chapters. She interrupts her relation of her own story to focus on the actress who seems to reflect her. We have come to know Lucy, who calls herself “a looker-on at life,” as a woman who is fascinated and repelled by other women, both the enviably self-contained ones and those who flaunt their feelings. (The way she categorizes people is a clue to her character.) She prides herself on concealing who she is, carefully dressing so as to appear invisible—but she can be “read” by an expert in phrenology, the penetrating Frenchman Paul Emanuel, with whom she will fall in love because he recognizes the self she conceals. (But her self is not simply buried; her reflection can also be “read” when it is set beside another woman’s in a mirror.) Her narrative insists there are two Lucys, inner and outer, also that there is a single contradictory one, which the actress thrills, transfixes, enthralls, enchains, and animates. As Lucy watches Vashti perform, she tells us,
The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit; the sunflower turned from the south to a fierce light, not solar—a rushing, red, cometary light—hot on vision and to sensation. I had seen acting before, but never anything like this; never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception; which, instead of merely irritating imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done, disclosed power like a deep, swollen, winter river, thundering in cataract, and bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steely sweep of its descent.
Watching Marie Dorval, George Sand imagined she could see her own soul on the stage; Hans Christian Andersen, after seeing Rachel in Phèdre, wrote, “You get ice-cold shivers down your back, as if you were watching a sleepwalker who expressed your hidden, deepest feelings.” Lucy’s fusion with Vashti is more difficult: she mirrors the haughty actress who “stood before her audience, neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it … locked in struggle, rigid in resistance.” Lucy, the looker-on who avoids being looked at, identifies with Vashti’s suffering and her disdain of the crowd. She is possessed by Vashti as Va
shti is possessed by her role. Vashti is her alter ego—what Lucy, had she read Baudelaire, might have called her semblable and soeur.
LUCY’S NARRATIVE of her life story is generally adversarial in tone. It alienates the reader by obfuscating vital details, and by using a lot of French words for which the foreign setting provides but a slender pretext. This first-person narrative refuses to take the tone of an intimate confidence. The flirtation with identifying the actress, like the title page that names the author as Currer Bell, author also of Jane Eyre, An Autobiography, is part of an authorial performance that might fairly be termed theatrical. Lucy describes herself as a “rising character,” and tells the story of her emergence from humble obscurity, as a lady’s companion and a children’s governess, to the elevation at the head of a classroom, the stage-like “estrade” on which a teacher rules over her frivolous and sottish girl students. But her position isolates her: outside the classroom, the girls are enviably more powerful—richer, more beautiful, luckier—than their teacher is.
Lucy has a single try at playacting which convinces her that literally as well as figuratively she belongs in the audience. She is half-forced, half-cajoled by Paul Emanuel, her colleague, to take a role in a silly school play—to misrepresent herself, as she sees it, by assuming the part of a foppish man. She cons her part in a hot attic that is infested by rats and black beetles which threaten to climb her skirts; M. Paul feeds her with sweet cakes by way of reward. After a pseudo-erotic struggle over her costume, she succeeds in retaining her woman’s clothes, adding a symbolic cravat to indicate she plays a man. The phallic addition nearly makes Juliet Dusinberre’s point about actresses en travesti: “Disguise makes a woman not a man but a more developed woman.” Lucy becomes involved in the play after she observes—from the stage—how it reflects the sticky social situation into which it is inserted: the story about a beautiful young woman desired by two men resembles the plight of the flirt Ginevra Fanshawe and her two suitors, one of whom is Lucy’s Dr. John. When Lucy, onstage, begins to understand that she is playing the part of Dr. John’s rival for Ginevra, she “recklessly alter[s] the spirit of the role” while “retaining the letter,” and throws herself into the experience. Acting, she is transformed: “Cold, reluctant, apprehensive, I had accepted a part to please another; ere long, warming, becoming interested, taking courage, I acted to please myself.” In the role of the fop, she manages to express herself, to act on her secret ambition “to win and conquer.” Later, she compares the exhilarating experience to an ascent in a balloon. Having learned how much she likes acting, she renounces it, in a characteristically self-punishing, self-abnegating move. It is some months later that she is taken to the theater by Bretton, and sees Vashti.
Villette on the one hand invites us to regard the famous actress as an image of Woman that Lucy compares herself to, a “flat” character who has less substance than the heroine, and meanwhile it takes the invitation back by insisting on Vashti’s extraordinary power. Even John Graham Bretton, that “cool young Briton,” bites his underlip as “the deepening tragedy blackened to the death scene.” And then, as his and Lucy’s and everyone else’s attention is riveted to Vashti in her final struggle, there is the cry of “Fire!” and panic in the theater. Unanswerable questions hang in the air: has Vashti’s passion provoked the flames? has her effect on the audience caused the explosion of popular ferocity, in which people trample one another in panic? does the imagination of danger and death produce the reality? Lucy avoids those issues by shifting her attention to the audience, where long-lost threads of plot are picked up. The polymorphous Vashti is dismissed; the fiery actress who was described as a fallen angel still haloed with Heaven’s light, a shooting star “half lava, half glow,” a creature “wasted like wax in a flame,” vanishes utterly.
On our way back we repassed the theatre. All was silence and darkness: the roaring, rushing crowd all vanished and gone—the lamps, as well as the incipient fire, extinct and forgotten. Next morning’s papers explained that it was but some loose drapery on which a spark had fallen, and which had blazed up and been quenched in a moment.
In other words, all the fuss was over nothing: Vashti’s fuss on the stage, Lucy’s fuss over Vashti, as well as the rumor of fire. Lucy’s resumption of her narrative suggests that Bretton’s calm reality is the stuff of the real world, the world of ordinary phenomenal bourgeois reality, of realistic novels. What had flamed up so wildly had been only bits of rag; what had moved Lucy to poetry is written off by that reliable record of facts, the daily paper.
Like the paper, the novel tells us nothing about the play. We know only that it is a tragedy. The absence of plot summary or description—which the ordinary visitor to the theater would report on—allows us to separate character from plot, to attend to Lucy’s fusion with the actress who is fusing with her role. At first Lucy looks askance at Vashti, as if at any woman publicly displaying herself. But then Vashti’s spirit visibly takes her body over, consumes it; her flesh is transfigured into light (suggesting Lucy’s first name?); therefore she can only be described in images, of stars, candles, daylight. Transcending her womanly body, she transcends the physical condition of woman, indeed of humanity:
For awhile—a long while—I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength—for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit!
“The pit” is the haunt of devils such as sit in Vashti’s eyes, but also the place where the audience sits. Lucy’s pun suggests Brontë’s awareness that the evil forces twisting the queenly face have sources on both sides of the tragic mask: that in the pleasure-pain of tragic acting and tragedy-viewing, audience and actress melt together in an acutely felt agon. The respectable audience helps transform the performer into a fiend. She openly experiences the violent passions that middle-class people do not acknowledge, the ones they repress and deny; she reflects them, caters to them, produces them. Brontë picks up the bloody imagery of gladiatorial combat she used in her letter to Taylor:
Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, make a meeker vision for the public—a milder condiment for a people’s palate—than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcized.
The actress, their agent and scapegoat, is suffering for the audience’s blood lust; her acting is suffering. Watching the other woman, Lucy is divided by what she sees, and by the difference between what she sees and the words to describe it—other people’s words and also her own: “Vashti was not good, I was told; and I have said she did not look good.” Vashti, standing “draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture,” against a background “of deepest crimson,” is “white like alabaster—like silver: rather be it said, like Death.” She dies excruciatingly at each night’s performance (her terrible struggle surely recalling, to Emily Brontë’s surviving sister, that other thin woman’s last agony); her acting is awesomely transformative and regenerative, but on the other hand it seems to be killing her. Lucy must ward her off: the baseless rumor of fire is a bitter, dismissive last image of the passionate woman, a reiteration of Lucy’s first observation about the meteoric performance and career of the dead star she saw in her youth. To insist that her effect was but fleeting is, like Brontë’s claim that Vashti is dead, a way of arguing against its force.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, the stern critic of the “hunger, rebellion, and rage” that marred Charlotte Brontë’s fiction, could not possibly have read the private letter in which the novelist wrote that if she “could bear the high mental stimulus,” she would go every night to see Rachel. But in an essay recalling the days
of his youth, he precisely echoes the sentiment. Arnold was free to go every night to the theater, if he chose, and he did. “After a first sight of the divine Rachel at the Edinburgh Theatre, in the part of Hermione,” he remembers, “I followed her to Paris, and for two months never missed one of her representations.”
A comparison of his Rachel and Brontë’s is unfair. The vivid chapter that stops Villette in its tracks not only introduced Rachel to her audiences in America before she went there, but remains most of what most English-speaking readers know of her; in sharp contrast, Arnold’s three didactic sonnets are forgotten, except in the playful allusion, in Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution (1954), to the “accents of Matthew Arnold appreciating Rachel.” I make the contrast in order to suggest why Brontë’s vision begins to be true to Rachel: because Brontë takes her more personally than Arnold does; because instead of universalizing her as a symbol, she implicates her in a tissue of fictions; and because she refuses to resolve the lambent contradictions Rachel presented.
Arnold’s accents, in his sonnets, are different not only from Brontë’s but from those we might reasonably expect of the young Matt who, his friend Clough reported in a letter in 1847, was “full of Parisianisms; Theatres in general, & Rachel in special: he enters the room with a chanson of Béranger’s on his lips—for the sake of French words almost conscious of tune: his carriage shows him in fancy parading the Rue de Rivoli; & his hair is guiltless of English scissors: he breakfasts at 12, and never dines in Hall, and in the week or 8 days rather (for 2 Sundays must be included) he has been to chapel Once.” It was a much more sober Arnold who wrote the sonnets—one more like the man who, on the occasion of Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to London in 1879, would praise Rachel as Bernhardt’s superior in “intellectual power.” In the cloud of Bernhardt’s steam—Shaw later disparaged the “mere head of steam needed to produce Bernhardtian explosions with requisite regularity”—the memory of Rachel’s star shone in England with a cool, cerebral light. In his essay on French drama, Arnold duly praises Rachel for putting Shakespearean fire in Racine: she and Talma before her, he writes, had “filled out with their own life and warmth the parts into which they threw themselves, [given] body to what was meagre, fire to what was cold.” But life and warmth are not what he praises her for, in the end.
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