3. TRAGICOMIC MUSE
The femme artiste is doubly, therefore monstrously, a woman: the truism, solemnly and salaciously propounded by Parisian boulevardiers, was explored throughout the nineteenth century by serious novelists, female and male. The first femme artiste of fiction, the heroine of Corinne, or Italy, is a figure for her mother country (which is not her father’s). Like Italy, Corinne inspires and contains and stands for art. In her, as in all romantic artists, genius is pure instinct; it drives her into the fever of creation and the glare of publicity; but the same pure instinct also impels her to a love which cannot be reconciled with her outward, self-expressive artist’s life. Womanhood binds her to the heterosexual plot; because that plot demands she be something other than an artist, it must have a tragic resolution. (Byron told Germaine de Staël that the moral of her story was more harmful to girls than anything he had ever written.)
The femme artiste, doubly a woman, is doomed. In the course of the century, as novels and plays about performing heroines intersected with the careers of stage performers and excited gossip about them, the theme was reworked with more and less erotic and tragic variations. English women writers—Brontë and Eliot, Geraldine Jewsbury and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—brooded over the irreconcilable obligations imposed by genius, which seeks to show itself, and womanly love, which is private. The different emphasis of men’s writing is suggested by two very different minor novels that were published, in Paris and in London, the same year as Villette: Gérard de Nerval’s wispy, poetic Sylvie and Charles Reade’s comic Peg Woffington have nothing in common but the theme of the actress who is false and flawed and dangerous to men.
Rachel, miniature by Adelaïde Isabelle Antonine Chéreau, dame Lapoter, exhibited at the Salon of 1850 (photo credit 5.1)
Rachel, who seemed to make the inner life of the woman artist manifest, is a haunting dark figure of the femme artiste in Brontë and Eliot, an image of the contradictions between the outward and the buried life of women. Virginia Woolf may be pointing to that image of the actress by giving the name Rachel to the heroine of her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was written in 1911, the year she reviewed the Gribble biography of Rachel. Like Lucy Snowe and Gwendolen Harleth, Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace cannot reconcile the person she feels herself to be and the outer life she lives; she dies young. But in an American novel published a few years later, thoroughly revisionary feminist version of the performing heroine alters the trope: Thea Kronborg, who at the end of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) chooses her career as an opera singer over love—and is happy, and warmly supported by the men in her life, for doing so. Of equal but subtler feminist import is a novel published twenty-five years before Willa Cather’s, Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1890). James reverses the emphasis of nearly a century of moral and not-so-moral fiction by imagining an actress for whom the stage life is the most real life. The story of Miriam Rooth, who wants to be “the English Rachel” and gazes with desire at Gérôme’s “cold portrait” of the French actress, is about the play between the inner and the out ward life, the psyche and the stage, the literal, the metaphorical, and the metonymic.
As if to signal his departure from the earnestness that governs even Goncourtian portraits of femmes artistes in novels, James does not fictionalize a historical actress but imagines, instead, the predicament of a young person who aspires to be a star like one she admires—aspires, that is, to the condition of representation. Miriam aims to make herself an actress and an image of her art. Rachel is her model just as she was Gérôme’s, and just as Miriam herself becomes the model for young Nick Dormer’s painting of The Tragic Muse. In Rachel’s lifetime, Théophile Gautier had identified Rachel’s brittle, nervous, mocking quality as modern; when James’s Miriam, following Rachel, makes herself into an excellent actress and ultimately a great star, she is described as “the great modern personage” by someone who recognizes her as an effect and an image of theatricality—of what we now call the postmodern.
Set in Paris and England, The Tragic Muse concerns six young people—four of them members of the same family—who either face, or fancy they face, the choice between living a safe, conventional life and devoting themselves to art. Nick Dormer and his sister Biddy are the children of an upper-class but impoverished British family. Nick’s mother wants him to stand for Parliament; a friend of his father has promised him a fortune if he does so; but his desire is to be a portrait painter—to represent people on canvas. Biddy sculpts. Their cousin, the rich, beautiful, domineering Julia Dallow, is in love with Nick, but will marry him only if he gives up art: she is the widow of a collector, and prefers politics to her surfeit of beautiful things. Biddy is in love with Julia’s brother, Peter Sherringham, a diplomat and an impassioned amateur of the theater, but Peter is no more interested in his cousin than Nick is in his. “I’m fond of representation—the representation of life: I like it better, I think, than the real thing,” Peter says. Drama and possibility enter these not-quite-incestuous young people’s lives in the persons of two less than respectable individuals: the drawling, decorative aesthete Gabriel Nash, Nick Dormer’s college friend, and the intense aspiring actress Miriam Rooth, an acquaintance of Gabriel’s. “Ah, you’re a queer family!” says Miriam. From the point of view of the traditional novelist of manners, she, of course, is the queer one—the sort of woman who is usually a minor character in fiction, the daughter of a man originally named Roth, now dead, and an ambiguous, lower-case-bohemian mother. As if to keep Rachel in the knowing reader’s mind, James rings semiprivate, nearly inaudible changes on her legend: Mrs. Rooth reads novels by Sophie Gay (the mother of Delphine de Girardin), and constantly readjusts a paisley shawl reminiscent of the one an English duchess gave la grande Rachel, who passed it on to her mother. James describes the girl’s dead Jewish father wryly as a variant on the peddler, a collector whose “love of old pots and Christian altar-cloths, had supplied, in the girl’s composition, the aesthetic element, the sense of form.”
This man’s daughter has tendencies toward being an object of art; she also wants to be an artist. James shows that the two are connected in parallel theatrical scenes. In the first, which is set in the greenroom of the Théâtre-Français, Peter Sherringham watches as Miriam gazes passionately at “Gérôme’s fine portrait of the pale Rachel, invested with the antique attributes of tragedy.” Looking from the real woman to the painted one, and back, Peter reflects that she “suffered little by the juxtaposition”: Miriam is as pale with her ambitious passion, as clearly marked by the muse, as a muse is. The second scene, set in an artist’s studio, not a theater, echoes the first and underscores it. Julia Dallow, on a surprise visit to Nick, catches Miriam in the act of modeling for his painting of The Tragic Muse. To Julia their intimate joint enterprise seems a nearly sexual transgression, and she grows “so pale that Nick, observing it, instinctively looked back to see what Miriam had done to produce such an effect.” (Pallor like Julia’s, and Miriam’s when she looks at the picture of pale Rachel, has signified desire since Sappho.) Nick finds that his model has merely kept her pose, stayed as still as a painting: “She had done nothing at all, which was precisely what was embarrassing; only staring at the intruder, motionless and superb.” Miriam looks back to more effect than Nick; her “largely gazing eyes” challenge the distinction between those who look and those who are looked at—between actual and painted women, respectable ones like Julia and spectacular ones like herself.
The circumstances of the novel’s production are echoed in the twinned artist-and-actress-model scenes. James was living in London and planning to write for the London stage—although, as the critic Peter Brooks observes in passing, he would have preferred to write for the Comédie-Française. The real-life muse for the novel was his friend, the aged Fanny Kemble. She served him as the model for old Mme Carré, late of the Comédie-Française, the teacher whom Peter Sherringham hires to train Miriam. More importantly, she was the inspiring historical link to Mrs. Sidd
ons—Reynolds’s Tragic Muse was her aunt—and to Rachel. In 1851, Kemble had given readings from Shakespeare, in the afternoons, on the same London stage where Rachel performed in the evenings; in the 1880s, she was doing imitations of the great tragedienne for friends. Still wonderfully talkative, she liked to recall Rachel’s superiority to Ristori, and would not tolerate comparisons of Sarah Bernhardt to Rachel. James was enchanted by the friendship of a woman who “reconciled being alive today with having been alive so long ago,” as he puts it of Mme Carré; he loved being linked, through her, not only to the English theater but to the high traditions and high polish, the “ideal and exemplary world,” of French theatrical productions, a world where, he had admiringly written, although the women were not all beautiful nor the men handsome, there was never “an awkwardness, a roughness, an accident, a crude spot, a rough note.” He was very proud of his knowledge of the French theater (“I may say that I know the Comédie-Française,” he confided to his notebook). Chatting with Fanny Kemble, plotting The Tragic Muse, he was thinking about Rachel, whom he wished he had heard: “Her artistic being, so vivid, yet so purely instinctive,” he jotted in his notebook, apropos of Miriam. “Ignorant, illiterate. Rachel.”
Closeness to Kemble also encouraged James to be proud of a real or imagined working knowledge of the theater that put him in a position to recognize, criticize, and correct the embourgeoisement to which novelists subject actresses. He mocked, for instance, the diva of Daniel Deronda: her excessive earnestness seemed to him incredible. In a critical essay written as a playlet, or “conversation,” he set two characters to debating her plausibility:
PULCHERIA. I don’t see the princess, in spite of her flame-colored robe. Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious matters?
THEODORA. It was not only that; it was the Jewish race she hated, Jewish manners and looks. You, my dear, ought to understand that.
PULCHERIA. I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am not what Rachel was. If I were, I should have other things to think about.
His Miriam, with her “pale face, a low forehead, and thick, dark hair … [and] largely gazing eyes,” her look from under dark brows that makes her appear “unconciliatory, almost dangerous,” physically resembles Rachel. She is “more than half a Jewess,” but thinks not at all about religious matters—or indeed about very much except herself and her career. In her lack of susceptibility to others (inherited or borrowed from her father’s insensate old pots and the cold portrait she contemplates), Miriam radically contrasts with the performing heroines of two novels of the 1880s: James’s own The Bostonians (1886) and Mary Augusta Ward’s Miss Bretherton (1884).
Verena Tarrant, in the Boston novel, is not an actress but a rhapsode—“an American Corinne,” to adopt the phrase James used to describe Margaret Fuller. Her father, a religious mountebank, exploits her; her other rival would-be possessors are a feminist activist with fantasies of a “Boston marriage” to the beauty, and the reactionary southerner Basil Ransom, who means to take her out of circulation and make her his wife. (In what I take to be an inter-oeuvre joke, his name is recalled by Basil Dashwood, the compliant cipher Miriam Rooth finally marries.) The forces that vie to possess Verena are still in conflict in the novel’s last scene, where Verena weeps as Basil sweeps her off after her final performance. The reader is invited to wonder: what if she had given herself neither to father nor lover, woman or man, and stood up for whatever it was that might be, or pass for, her own self?
When he first read Ward’s Miss Bretherton James had considered such questions. In a graceful letter of congratulation to the author, he confessed his own interest in what seemed to him her subject, “the private history of the public woman, the drama of her feelings, heart, soul, personal relations, and the shock, conflict, complications between these things and her publicity, her career, ambition, artistic life.” James was generously overreading: a better account of Ward’s meaning was given by the Fortnightly Review, on the occasion of the author’s death in 1920, which interpreted Miss Bretherton as “the story of an actress vindicating the honour of her profession.” Ward’s heroine is a moralizing correction of French versions of the femme artiste. Miss Bretherton, who is English, is spontaneous and virtuous; she lacks the sinister craft, polish, and (associated, implicit) sexual promiscuity of the Frenchwoman Mme Desforêts, brilliant in the role of Adrienne Lecouvreur, who is a version of Sarah Bernhardt. Ward’s hero, an Oxbridge don, is a literary scholar (his subjects are Musset and Stendhal) and a connoisseur of the theater. He is enchanted by Miss Bretherton’s beauty but distressed by her lack of art, so he sends her to his sister, Mme de Châteauvieux, for polishing. That lady is married to a Frenchman, and has “that mélange du meilleur ton” which, Ward quotes an authority as saying, “is found in its perfection only in the best society of France.” Being French, she is equipped to instruct Miss Bretherton in artifice; being English, she can ensure that the young woman will remain virtuous. In three weeks, the actress is transformed into an artist. She vindicates her profession, but she must abandon it.
“It will break her down,” Mme de Châteauvieux tells her brother on her deathbed. “You can save her and cherish her—you will. It seems as if I saw you—together!” Of course they marry. Plausibility requires that the actress be less than perfectly genteel, but Miss Bretherton is luckily nearly good enough for Kendal, being the daughter of the Scottish overseer of a sugar plantation in Jamaica, who “married an Italian, one of your fair Venetian types—a strange race-combination.” Emphatically, she is not “one of your thin, French, snake-like creatures who have nothing but their art, as you call it; nothing but what they have laboriously learnt with time and trouble.” She reconciles spontaneity and goodness, art and nature, France and England, as Kendal and Mme de Châteauvieux manage to do; but to marry the public and the private woman remains beyond her. Having been perfected by the stage, to suit Kendal’s exquisite taste, she must give up the theater, and give herself up to love or connoisseurship.
KENDAL FIRST SEES Miss Bretherton at an art exhibition at the Royal Academy, where a friend points her out as the most beautiful object on display. James copied Ward’s opening strategy exactly in the first chapter of The Tragic Muse, where Miriam Rooth presents herself to public view in the garden of the Palais de l’Industrie, at the annual exhibition of the Salon, among sculptures that raise bourgeois eyebrows. Like Vashti, like the Princess Halm-Eberstein (and Gwendolen Harleth at the gambling casino where we first see her), like Miss Bretherton at the Royal Academy, Miriam Rooth is there to be seen, filtered by the regard of those who consider her and perhaps altered by her admirers into someone more complex and serious and substantive than she might really be. She is partly other people’s projection. Disingenuously, James evades the mystery of her inner life, which “would be cleared up only if it were open to us to regard this young lady through some other medium than the mind of her friends.” The theatrical approach to an actress is chosen as the most appropriate and most telling: “We have chosen, as it happens, for some of the advantages it carries with it, the indirect vision.”
Miriam is interesting rather than beautiful; she is messy and vulgar, with a troubling appeal that is not altogether erotic. The matter of her sexual availability is elaborately and euphemistically danced around, conflated as always with matters of class and even of species: “Miriam Rooth was neither fish nor flesh: one had with her neither the guarantees of one’s own class nor the immunities of hers.” What is different and distinguished about her is her “instinct” for art, which is genuine and innate. Unlike de Staël’s rhapsode, Corinne, she is by nature a deliberate and self-conscious artist—not that she is able to discuss Diderot’s or Talma’s aesthetic creed, or Coquelin’s or James’s own. “She had no knowledge that it was publicly discussed; she was just practically on the side of those who hold that at the moment of production the artist cannot have his wits too much about him. When Peter told her there were people who
maintained that in such a crisis he must lose himself in the flurry she stared with surprise and then broke out: ‘Ah, the idiots!’ ” Ignorant about everything else, she is no idiot where art is concerned. It is her life: to make herself an artist, she becomes “a drudge,” for art’s sake. She does not succeed by being polished into a lady, like Miss Bretherton; instead, she earnestly studies Shakespeare and the techniques of her craft.
Peter Sherringham is shamelessly in love with the theater, and when he begs Miriam to marry him he offers her the comfortable role of ambassadress, telling her she can play it all her life. Nevertheless he is wary of the actress, and has doubts about Miriam’s character. What bothers him is not exactly her class or her morals, but something that embraces and evades both: the accessibility and outwardness of the public woman seems to him to threaten something beyond her womanhood—her very humanness. Peter wonders about the substance of “a woman whose only being was to make believe, to make believe that she had any and every being that you liked, that would serve a purpose, produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration—such a woman was a kind of monster, in whom of necessity there would be nothing to like, because there would be nothing to take hold of.” Monstrousness here is not, as in Brontë and George Eliot, contingent on the refusal of normative female “goodness.” The indictment of the actress here is less obviously gender-based, and more devastating. Miriam is more frankly vulgar and available than Vashti, or the princess, but less sexual: she has less of a secret dimension. Peter’s male emphasis on taking hold is almost ironic. What the actress refuses or simply lacks—it is unclear which—is character. She wants the complexity and privacy and personal richness that heroines of fiction conventionally represent, the psychological denseness which the tradition of Richardson and Brontë and Eliot and James never tires of identifying as the highest human value. Constantly acting, impersonating, living only to display herself, Miriam is a character of whom it might be said—Peter says it—that “the representation was the substance.” She embodies her art; it is her most real being.
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