Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Nor did he praise those qualities in the sonnets he wrote in 1863 and published in his New Poems of 1867. They were inspired by the biography by Mme de B., and Arnold’s gloom about Rachel’s early death pervades them. The heroine of the sonnets is not the fiery stimulating actress who had once been followed to Paris by a passionate youth, but Tragedy decked out with pathos. It is as if, in response to the caviling of Mme de B., Arnold set about to make a higher-minded monument of his own to the tragedienne of his past. Imagined by him, Rachel’s dying becomes a drama in three acts, a tragic ritual that transforms its central figure into multiple abstractions. Although Arnold does not, like John Graham Bretton, “judge” the actress “as a woman” and damn her as unwomanly, the point of view from which he sees her is nevertheless peculiarly male.

  Echoing two different traditional forms—the elegy for one great artist by another, and the sonnet sequence that numbers a woman’s virtues—Arnold begins with a description of the classical actress, mortally ill, revisiting the Théâtre-Français for a last farewell as she deliberately prepares to go south to die. Mme de B. and others had etched the affecting scene in the popular memory: it was indeed as if audiences had witnessed it. Arnold evokes the tragic heroine approaching her end with noble dignity:

  In Paris all looked hot and like to fade.

  Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,

  Sere with September, drooped the chestnut-trees.

  ’Twas dawn; a brougham rolled through the streets and made

  Halt at the white and silent colonnade

  Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,

  Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,

  Sate in the brougham and those blank walls surveyed.

  She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled

  To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;

  Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?

  Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led,

  All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine;

  And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!

  The flesh is pitted against the spirit, the worldly against the “divine,” and Rachel represents the latter forces. “She represented for him that profound emotional force and inward concentration he desired,” writes a biographer of Arnold. The tableau of the dying Rachel’s return to the place where she had lived most intensely—the theater where she had had her “highest life”—allows an imaginative return of the poet’s own: a French scholar was the first to observe that Arnold identifies Rachel with himself when twice he repeats, “Switzerland and the Rhine,” the names of places where he remembers that his spirit had had its own best and most intense moments. But the actress is hardly acknowledged in this sonnet as a second self. She is distanced, a figure in a foreign city acting out a strange tableau, a ghost in a chilling charade.

  In the next poem Rachel is no longer feverish and fading, and no longer in apparent harmony with what passes for nature in the parks of Paris. Instead, she mimes art. The contrast is neat: being moved from the cool pine forest to a bed shadowed by a marble bust, she acts no longer, but line by line grows colder:

  Unto a lonely villa, in a dell

  Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore,

  The dying Rachel in a chair they bore

  Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

  And laid her in a stately room, where fell

  The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,

  The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore,

  Polymnia, full on her death-bed.—’Twas well!

  The fret and misery of our northern towns,

  In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,

  Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns,

  Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease;

  Sole object of her dying eyes remain

  The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

  It is the inevitable final stage of the Pygmalion motif: the dying actress—the poet’s muse—turns finally to stone, grows cold under the gaze of a “marble Muse,” calm and maternal, Polymnia, not Medusa. The woman dies; what looks on and is left is an antique statue that embodies her soul. Mme de B. emphasized Rachel’s last, alabaster bed, told the story that the dying actress passed her final days running her fingers through the coffers of cold jewels she had vainly collected from kings and princes. Arnold imagines Rachel leaving “our northern towns” (more London than hot Paris?) and chill human misery to attain a final Keatsian union with Provence and the Greek Art which nineteenth-century English writers so often opposed to mortality, bad weather, and urban confusion. The spirit of this art attends her spirit’s departure as her dying eyes rest on the bust of the muse. With this “sole object” in view, the “Greek-souled” artist dies alone; it is as if her sister muse—the muse of mimic art—turns Rachel “naturally,” as it were, into stone.

  Reaching the apogee of his hymn to contradictions, Arnold contradicts himself. In his final sonnet he denies that Rachel was simply “Greek-souled,” insisting instead that many nations—“contending powers”—were the source of her spirit and strength. As a mixture of faiths and nations she is, furthermore, not unique and isolated, but “like us” after all; and there are other people at her bedside, it turns out:

  Sprung from the blood of Israel’s scattered race,

  At a mean inn in German Aarau born,

  To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,

  Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face,

  Imparting life renewed, old classic grace;

  Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,

  A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,

  While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place—

  Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone

  She had—one power, which made her breast its home!

  In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers,

  Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.

  The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;

  Her genius and her glory are her own.

  It is not a triumphant conclusion. Arnold begins with Rachel’s Jewishness—the “scattered race,” in a phrase that adds to his emphasis on fragmentation; he complicates it with the story of her reading Thomas à Kempis, which Mme de B. told; then in the end he returns to the hard fact of her origin. He mixes up Moses with Christ, nervously adds Germany to the brew of France and Athens and Rome. Making his monument to her uniqueness, the poet shores up fragments against ruin. Lionel Trilling remarked on the gloom that led Arnold to see Rachel, dying, as a symbol of modern Europe; more striking is the ragtag amassing of observations and names that suggests a clash of ignorant armies. Arnold’s intention is to affirm the truth of Rachel’s heroic uniqueness, an individuality that transcends multiplicity, but his litany of names, people’s mixed with those of places, makes a recalcitrant line: “Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.” The dying actress is forced to encompass too many contraries: the Hebraism and Hellenism that Heine had been the first to formulate, and classicism and romanticism, and multiple political, religious, and aesthetic contrasts, and comparisons of the present with the past. (There is even perhaps an echo of Arnold’s personal past, as the lost accents of the gay young Matt who sang Béranger’s songs are audible in the slangy “tricked out” of line 4.) The actress is imaged as a creature of warring forces, therefore proposed as an aesthetic ideal based on the tensions of opposites; the human ideal she is supposed to represent is of individuality, separateness, and uniqueness, a coherent identity. “Her genius and her glory are her own”: the eulogy ends in the present tense to suggest that in death—in Arnold’s monument? where else?—the actress continues to live and enjoy her selfhood. It is unconvincing.

  Arnold ends by affirming Rachel, Brontë by dismissing her; the latter has, ironically, been a more effective preservative of her memory. Rachel, the tragic actress whose role it was to die, repr
esents death aestheticized, subtly eroticized, as the story of her dying is recounted. Meditating on the pains of existence in the heart of modern muddle, longing for a lost aesthetic absolute, hoping for a solution through synthesis, Arnold fixes on Rachel as symbolic of all three. But in the end—in the last sonnet, specifically—things fall apart. In his poems to her memory, what he shows is the close connection between the hopeless sense of chaos and confusion, on the one hand, and the dream of ideal art and dead women and lost heroics on the other. Rachel is called heroic, but her heroism finally seems to be a graceful submission to death, set up for us to contemplate with pleasure. The connections between the ideals of woman as art object, heroic individuality, and a lost better world—the connection between those ideals and death—are clearly legible.

  2. SEPARATENESS AND CONNECTIONS

  Vashti appears in Villette only onstage: her private and personal history is only (darkly) hinted at, and John Graham Bretton is shown up as worse than stuffy for drowning the artist in the woman, privileging “real” life over the livelier stage. Only an object of the gaze, never seen out of character, the actress lacks what people usually have in life and in novels, a social context and a history. On the one hand she resembles Lucy Snowe, an alienated English Protestant in a Catholic, French-speaking city, who is also cut off from parents and past; on the other hand she is nothing like anyone, less a character in a novel than an image.

  Vashti’s private life and her exotic religion or race are only hinted at, ambiguously and perversely, by her biblical name: the Vashti of the Book of Esther is not a Jew. The actress’s Jewishness is only lightly and fleetingly alluded to by Brontë in a wild and violent passage in which Lucy compares this living, dying, dominating creature to a painting of a passive, sexy Cleopatra, which she has scornfully described in an earlier chapter: “Place now the Cleopatra, or any other slug, before her as an obstacle, and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove the down cushion. Let Paul Peter Rubens wake from the dead, let him rise out of his cerements, and bring into this presence all the army of his fat women; the magian power or prophet-virtue gifting that slight rod of Moses could, at one waft, release and re-mingle a sea spell-parted, whelming the heavy host with the down-rush of overthrown sea-ramparts.” Picturing the “heavy host”—fat sensual women and the male army of their admirers—as overcome by spiritual power, small, large-souled Lucy imagines her own victory over her enemies: Vashti, the vital, creative, powerful antithesis to woman-as-art-object and woman-as-flesh, is her righteous surrogate. The “slight rod of Moses,” Vashti is an agent of the avenging Old Testament God, more an antique Hebrew than a Jew.

  Rachel in costume, photograph by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve

  G. H. Lewes borrowed the phrase from Brontë for one of his reviews. Lewes was astonished, each time he saw Rachel, by her power and her persuasive demand to be taken seriously. His response was intense: “Scorn, triumph, rage, lust and merciless malignity she could represent in symbols of irresistible power; but she had little tenderness, no womanly caressing softness, no gaiety, no heartiness. She was so graceful and so powerful that her air of dignity was incomparable; but somehow you always felt in her presence an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness … a beautiful devil.” Lewes strung those phrases together in an essay for his book On Actors and the Art of Acting (1875), compiling them from reviews he had been writing since the 1840s. A serious student of dramatic art, he shrewdly located the actress’s seriousness in her play: “Speaking or listening she is wholly absorbed in her character. The effect of this is incalculable. You never take your eyes off from her; because she is so much in earnest, you are so interested.”

  But like nearly everyone else Lewes was bothered by her being a Jew. His early reviews, as John Stokes observes, are marked by “a crude and casual anti-semitism.” In one, for example, he declares, “It will ever remain a curious problem how this little Jewess, this enfant du peuple, should, from the first moments of her appearance on the stage, have adopted—or let us rather say exhibited—the imperial grace and majesty which no one but herself can reach.… If you wish to form an idea of what Rachel would be without her exquisite intelligence, look at her brother Raphaël Félix, who so closely resembles her. Is he not a vulgar Jew Boy? Can anything wipe out the original stain of his birth? Yet Rachel herself physically is no better; and were it not for the ‘o’er-informing spirit,’ she would be as vulgar.” Queen Victoria’s subject agonized over the mystery of the reine de théâtre’s majesty—and the experience of being subjected to the stage passions of a lower-class woman, actress, Jewess. “Where has she learnt her dignity?” he asked in one of many columns he wrote about her as “Adrian” of The Leader. He answered himself promptly, “It was given her by God! This little Jewess picked up from the streets, whose face would be common and insignificant were it not lighted up with an expression which makes it ever-memorable, she carries herself with more queenly grace of deportment than any throned monarchy.” In Lewes’s novel Three Sisters and Three Fortunes, or Rose, Blanche, and Violet (1848), a group of fashionable Londoners talk about Rachel in language just like this, and one character coins a phrase Charlotte Brontë would borrow, describing the actress as “a little Jewess they call Rachel, quite a girl, picked up from the streets, but an empress on the stage.”

  Lewes and Brontë read one another’s work with nearly the same ardent attention they gave Rachel, and Brontë may perhaps rightly be read as deliberately rejecting Lewes’s emphasis in her portrait of a not-particularly-Jewish, purely artistic Rachel. He is more pointedly, painstakingly, and passionately corrected by a woman novelist who was much closer to him. George Eliot wrote her last novel, Daniel Deronda, while Lewes assembled his essays on acting—minus the anti-Semitic slurs—in another room in the house they shared. For her, Rachel’s being a Jew mattered more than it had to Brontë—and Rachel’s woman’s body meant something different from what it meant to Lewes.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, when Rachel was at the summit of her glory, women writers were beginning to redefine the actress as a sign of female power. They did so in a gingerly fashion, with a perceptible anxiety focused on the body: the unspeakable issue between their lines is the connection of women’s moral strength and worldly ambition with female sexual desire. Rachel was the appropriate muse for these writers. On the one hand, haloed by Racine and Euripides, her spectral body chastely draped in Attic folds, she presented the actress as a legitimate subject for moral people’s attention; but then there was the other hand, not only the gossip about her “real life” but the terrifying hyper-reality of the stage passions that so shake Lucy Snowe. Margaret Fuller invokes her as an example of the woman of genius, “enslaved by an impassioned sensibility,” who is detested by imperious men; in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), she pleads that given “room enough,” the “electric fluid” in women like Rachel will “invigorate and embellish, not destroy life.” The power of such a woman is “direct from the spirit,” Fuller argues: a force like magnetism or mesmerism is manifest in her “depth of eye and powerful motion.” Manifest in the body, this powerful natural spiritual force threatens to destroy it, as if to prove soul and body are at odds. “Sickness is the frequent result of this overcharged existence,” according to Fuller, whom James called “the American Corinne.” She sees the actress as a type of woman whose art is an expression of her character, a vocation rather than a profession.

  The more conventional Dinah Craik is more radical. In A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1860), Craik argues piously—as Elizabeth Gaskell did about Charlotte Brontë—that talents given by God should not be denied. She protests that “a Sarah Siddons, a Rachel, or a Jenny Lind, being created, was certainly not created for nothing”—that gifts like theirs should not “be hid under a bushel.” But the female performer’s display of herself disturbs Craik, who laments the “sad selfishness” of the artiste, the fact that “she needs to be constantly before the public, n
ot only mentally, but physically: the general eye becomes familiar, not merely with her genius, but her corporeality; and every comment of admiration or blame awarded to her, is necessarily an immediate personal criticism.” Craik’s main concern nevertheless is to exonerate the acting profession as one of several legitimately open to women. In defense of acting, she elevates it into a calling: she writes that it is no “small thing for any woman—be she governess, painter, author, or artiste—to feel that, higher or lower, according to her degree, she ranks among that crowned band who, whether or not they are the happy ones, are elected to the heaven-given honour of being the Workers of the world.” Redefined as workers, women who are governesses, painters, authors, and even actors may be defended against the sexual innuendo that was often directed against them all in Victorian England. As Helena Michie points out, the ideal of useful work, central to the bourgeois ideology of domesticity, is invoked here to validate the use outside the home of the female body—including even its pleasure-giving and pleasurable display.

  Craik’s actress ranks, at best, where “good” men and women would place her, among the lower and less happy respectable women. Florence Nightingale, more radically, refuses to concede that point. In Cassandra (1852), she raises the actress into middle-class society by refusing to look as usual at her body. The emphasis is deliberately eccentric. “Women, when they are young, sometimes think that an actress’s life is a happy one—not for the sake of the admiration, not for the sake of the fame,” Nightingale writes, “but because in the morning she studies, in the evening she embodies those studies.” Embodying what she takes in is redefined as a stage in that most unimpeachable nineteenth-century process, self-improvement; by studying in the morning and testing herself in evening performances, Nightingale observes, the actress may make progress “even after middle age.” The actress figure is purified; in her, of all people, mind and body are reconciled. A related feminist paradox would be presented in different terms by Simone de Beauvoir nearly a hundred years later. Having made the polemical point that in a man’s world a woman is confined to immanence and narcissism, Le Deuxiéme sexe (1949) concludes that only the extraordinary rare actress can achieve transcendence. While the usual run of third-rate actresses virtually caricature women’s plight, de Beauvoir writes, the great women performers renowned for intellectual and spiritual power—“the Rachels, the Duses”—manage marvellously to “make their persons the instruments of their art instead of seeing in art a servant of their egos.” They are, she insists, the rare exceptions; but her peculiar plurals are promising.