Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Peter is saved from solving the problem Miriam sets a man like him—a man, that is, who prefers representation to the real thing. Single-minded in her commitment to herself, her art, and her image, Miriam easily decides to turn him down, and choose a husband whose only asset is a willingness to serve her and her success. Like Rachel, she cannot imagine putting love and marriage before glory, and like Rachel she is determined to remain independent. Basil Dashwood is no Svengali; he will manage only the business end of her career. She therefore rejects Peter, who was temporarily useful to her in finding Mme Carré, who formed her for the stage; earlier, she found Nick Dormer useful to the extent that he could make her image real. Otherwise, her shady, shadowy mother and co-conspirator, and her shallow young actor-husband, are all the people she needs, all she wants. Dismissed, Peter Sherringham will learn to make do with reality at the side of the charming, compliant Biddy; he will in other words stay in the family, within the cozy upper-middle-class sphere he was born to, while Miriam goes off into a wider, wilder, riskier world. Gabriel Nash, the other outsider, lazy aesthetic man to Miriam’s hardworking artist-woman, also drifts off—less purposefully—somewhere indeterminate. Before he does so, he speculates brilliantly about what will become of the monstrous brilliant girl. In this novel about painting and surfaces, Miriam’s future is suggestively “brushed in” as Gabriel paints, in words,

  a large bright picture of her progress through the time and round the world, round it and round it again, from continent to continent and clime to clime; with populations and deputations, reporters and photographers, placards and interviews and banquets, steamers, railways, dollars, diamonds, speeches and artistic ruin all jumbled into her train. Regardless of expense the spectacle would be thrilling, though somewhat monotonous, the drama—a drama more bustling than any she would put on the stage and a spectacle that would beat everything for scenery. In the end her divine voice would crack, screaming to foreign ears and antipodal barbarians, and her clever manner would lose all quality, simplified to a few unmistakable knock-down dodges.… It would be curious and magnificent and grotesque.

  Gabriel’s canvas is broad, his strokes impressionistic. In contrast to Gérôme’s academic “cold portrait” of Rachel, this picture places the modern actress in the chaos of the modern world. Behind James’s mordant vision of what a career like Miriam’s would come to in the twentieth century hovers the legend of Rachel’s last journey to America, the story that she was Barnumized there, and destroyed. Enlarged into a spectacle, Miriam is flattened and reduced; hawking herself, hustling others, she is finally transformed into “the pure commodity: as fetish,” in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “saleswoman and wares in one.” Spectacular only, the star is finally “the great modern personage,” a dismaying sign of the modern marriage of commerce and art.

  But James nevertheless insists on Miriam’s brief extraordinariness, the wonder of her creation of herself as “a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman, of a past age and undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience, and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one’s own affairs.” He insists as well that Miriam, on her progress toward inevitable vulgarization and destruction, energetically collaborates in the star-making process—that she herself desires and controls it. (“I am making myself commercial,” Rachel had written from America.) Miriam is not swallowed up by publicity and spectacle and the legend of her life, not managed or owned or victimized by even her admirers. As Rachel did, and Bernhardt did after her, she tells the papers what to say about her.

  She made almost an income out of the photographers (their appreciation of her as a subject knew no bounds), and she supplied the newspapers with columns of irreducible copy. To the gentlemen who sought speech of her on behalf of these organs she poured forth, vindictively, floods of unscrupulous romance; she told them all different tales, and as her mother told them others yet more marvellous publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions, surpassing each other in authenticity. The whole case was remarkable, was unique; for if the girl was advertised by the bewilderment of her readers, she seemed to every sceptic, when he went to see her, as fine as if he had discovered her for himself.

  James wrote elsewhere of Sarah Bernhardt, “She has in a supreme degree what the French call the génie de la réclame—the advertising genius; she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper.” An echo of Villette’s condescension is audible at the end of The Tragic Muse: the papers had the last word about Vashti, too.

  On the other hand, we are told that even the skeptics who see her enjoy a thrill of discovery, think Miriam “fine”; we are asked to think her case unique. She is a marvel precisely because she is altogether and only committed to aesthetic values. Like Rachel, she is low and also high; as Rachel said of herself, she has nothing at all about her that is bourgeois. She is contemptuous of pieties, and frankly avows the materialism and the selfishness that smug, safe, genteel families pretend not to have. “Curious and magnificent and grotesque,” Gabriel calls her, and the last word is perhaps worth pausing over.

  The feminist theorist Mary Russo has proposed “the female grotesque” as a mode of subversion. Women, Russo argues, are conventionally cautioned to avoid “making a spectacle” of themselves; she suggests that deliberately doing so, flaunting the fact that what’s called “natural” is constructed, can be a way of attacking and undercutting cant and false values. I am not suggesting that James proposes Miriam as a model for a feminist, nor am I proposing her myself: she probably is, just as Peter suspects, shallow. On the other hand, by being so consciously, brilliantly, generously, and grotesquely theatrical, she challenges conventional ideas of what Woman is and must be; she represents something newer and more vivid and vital than a Tragic Muse. Is she its comic opposite? “Never, never …,” says Peter Sherringham, when the suggestion is made. “I’d rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents.” But James leaves it open for us to see her that way, by leaving her free and still thrilling, at least for a while. Her marriage does not impose the closure on her story, the limit on her freedom, that constrains standard heroines of fiction. Gabriel predicts that Miriam will be destroyed by her stardom, but The Tragic Muse stops short of tracing her path to tragedy—if that’s where she is going. She has yet to peak. The narrator is “warned,” he says, “by a sharp sense of modernness” that “renders it difficult … in taking leave of our wonderful Miriam, to do much more than allude to the general impression that her remarkable career is even yet only in its early prime.” The final emphasis is on possibility, and indeterminacy. In Gabriel’s vision of Miriam flattened into a commodity and a celebrity, an indeterminate shimmer of facts and fictions and reflections, she is vulgar and hard to define, but more vital than any of the others.

  CARL SCHURZ, the American politician and journalist, was somewhat older than James; he saw Rachel when he was a young German revolutionary in Berlin, in 1850. In his later life, he recalled the “spell of intense astonishment” when she first stepped upon the scene; the eyes that glowed like two black suns; the voice that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth and carried the soul of the listener through all the sensations of joy, sadness, pain, love, hatred, despair, jealousy, contempt, wrath, and rage, even if he did not understand the language; and finally the force of the climaxes in which the beholder would feel his blood run cold and gasp for breath, and moan, “God help us all.” Schurz insists that “there was in my admiration of Rachel nothing of the infatuation of an ingenuous youth for an actress which we sometimes hear or read of. If anybody would have offered to introduce me personally to Rachel, nothing would have made me accept the invitation. Rachel was to me a demon, a supernatural entity, a mysterious force of nature, anything rather than a woman with whom one might dine, or speak about every-day things, or take a drive in a park. My enchantment was of an entirely spiritual kind.” He even cites the concurrence of other “persons of
ripe years” and “cultivated artistic judgment” to prove that his view of this actress was more than “an extravagant picture produced by the overheated imagination of a young man charmed by a stage-goddess.” This most sublime of actresses whose appeal was higher than sexual did not hold the mirror up to nature, he concludes; rather, she embodied extreme emotions “in an ideal grandeur, in their highest poetic potency, in gigantic reality.” He apologizes for his inadequate language.

  Clearly Schurz—like Matthew Arnold—protests too much; the stress on Rachel’s spirituality and intellectuality suggests a reluctance to acknowledge her vexing corporeal attractiveness, the implication of an unbeautiful, “low” woman’s body in “high” art, great ideas. (“Was that the voice of a woman?” Schurz asks, and goes on to describe the enchanting grace of her palms outstretched beseechingly, and “the disdainful wave of her arm, which seemed to sweep the wretch before her into utter nothingness.”) Keeping high and low separate is basic to a man’s respectability and a culture’s; denial, we have learned, is a common habit. Well before Freud wrote, Germaine de Staël and George Sand suggested that passionate female performers are ambivalently admired by masochistic Northern men, who are threatened by a female sexuality they ultimately condemn as perverse. It is tempting to overread the sexlessness of The Tragic Muse as a function of denial, and to interpret the aesthetic passion the novel analyzes as a mystification of the bodily feelings that are virtually unacknowledged in this text. When Peter Sherringham reflects that there is “nothing to take hold of” in Miriam, the skeptical eyebrow, after Freud, tends to lift; the modern instinct to psychologize stirs. Is the novel “really” about the lure of a forbidden object of desire? Or, perhaps, does Peter’s wish to marry Miriam, along with Nick’s sentimental link with Gabriel, encode a love that dares not speak its name? The problem with such a reading is that Peter’s desire is less interesting than Miriam’s—for all that James shows the latter only from the outside. Her passion is for her art and herself as an artist; and the comical, ironical truth James insists on is that, helped along by much hard work, it gets realized. Readers have long discussed what the theater meant, here and elsewhere, to Henry James, and how he ranks it in relation to that art of the novel which he took so seriously. What Miriam represents in The Tragic Muse—the theater and theatricality—is apparently the shallow opposite of “high” and moral inward-looking art, but also, paradoxically, it is art at its most vital and single-minded. The actress’s evocative figure seems to suggest it would be a mistake to put sexuality on one or another side of a moralized false opposition.

  THE TRAGIC MUSE plays out most of the themes implicit in the legend of Rachel, neatly pulling my themes together. For many reasons, it seems appropriate to end this book about Rachel with a reading of that novel. But even the ambivalent biographer must yearn for more theatrical closure than a reading of James’s portrait of the actress—cold like Gérôme’s—provides. And while it is only an appropriate act of homage to bathe the image of Rachel in the flattering afterglow of high culture, that image also demands wider notice and applause. Finally, for all the fascinating rewritings that followed it, Brontë’s remains the most vivid vision of Rachel. And therefore two novels by women that in different ways recall Brontë’s present themselves here to give Rachel something like a curtain call.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show was published in London and New York in 1936, a hundred years after Rachel’s Paris debut in the legitimist-Bonapartist-Orléanist melodrama La Vendéenne. The author of the novel, a communist, went off to Spain to support the anti-fascists soon after finishing it. The Rachel she evokes (without ever naming her) in her novel about the 1848 revolution is a far cry from a heroine of a Napoleon play. She is the spirit of popular revolution, of La Marseillaise—not the tool of government who calmed the mob, as cynical versions of Rachel’s legend have it, but the child of the people who voiced its righteous fury. Recognizably a rewriting of very different French and English nineteenth-century novels—of Flaubert’s novel about 1848, L’Education sentimentale, and of a tradition of English novels about passionate, genteel heroines—it celebrates, as Charlotte Brontë’s Vashti chapter began to do, the twinning of a repressed Englishwoman and her opposite, counterpart, and reflection. Here the usually marginal figure of the dangerous, foreign, fallen woman, the femme artiste who unsettlingly combines Nature and Art, is drawn, with clearly subversive intent, into the center of the narrative.

  Warner’s novel tells of the erotic and political liberation of Sophia Willoughby, a Victorian lady with a talent for commanding. We first see her reigning severely over her estate, her horses, her servants, and her two young children. Her estranged husband, hardly the man she herself might have been, is living, she reflects contemptuously, in Paris with his mistress—a “byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians, and circus-riders snuffling at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly.…” When Sophia’s two children die of smallpox, she abruptly decides to go after Frederick in Paris—in order to get him to impregnate her, she thinks, but really because she is drawn by Minna Lemuel’s compelling voice, which Frederick echoed at the bed of his dying little daughter, repeating the French phrase, Ma fleur.

  Arrived in Paris, Sophia soon finds herself at a bohemian evening party on the Left Bank, at the home of this mistress, where Minna is at the center of an international crowd of worshipers. Pressed to recite a fairy tale—reciting is her métier—she tells instead, by flickering candlelight, the true story of her own girlhood in Lithuania. The child of religious, persecuted, poor Jews, she was spiritually nourished, she says, on “the stories of good Jewesses, faithful women: Jael, who slew Sisera, and Judith, who slew Holofernes; Deborah, who led an army, and Esther, who saved a people.” As Minna’s beautiful contralto continues, Sophia thinks, “You are exactly like a Jewish shopkeeper, the Jew who kept the antique shop at Mayence, staring, gloating round his shelves, with a joy in possession so absorbing that it was almost a kind of innocence. In a moment you should rub your hands, the shopkeeper’s gesture.” And as if in response to her auditor’s derisive thought, Minna does. For Minna, as she will tell her later, is addressing and responding to only Sophia. The common fantasy of members of audiences, the delusion that the performer on the stage speaks directly and specifically to oneself alone, miraculously comes true.

  The two women’s rapturous love affair takes place against a background of radical upheaval. Caught up by her passion for Minna, caught by history, Sophia becomes a traitor to her class, increasingly radical. She gives what money she has to the revolution; she collects metal to be made into bullets by the insurgents; she ends up, together with Minna, on the barricades in June. Minna is a sloven and the opposite of a lady, but like Vashti, like Rachel, she carries herself with queenly dignity, as if she were ennobled, not so much by her art as by her honesty in presenting her self. She is a defiant rewriting of the cliché that the public woman is the lady’s traditional opposite, “fallen” and inferior. Here as in Brontë’s novel, the Rachel-figure reiterates the traditional identification of Woman with art and emotion, redefining art in romantic terms to mean rapture and freedom, not artifice and pattern and enclosure and control. Minna the rhapsode began her career by memorizing and declaiming French classical tragedy, but she transcended alexandrines to become the more original and more personal artist—a Jewish Corinne. Loving Minna, glorying in the power of her own body and her own life, the lady of the English manor becomes a human being—a loving and useful and finally a violent one, a woman who kills a man in revenge, after Minna is stabbed. The ending of the novel leaves Sophia alone, absorbed in reading The Communist Manifesto, dreaming of a time of liberation for all. As at the end of Villette, the heroine’s lover is probably—but not definitely—dead; as in Brontë’s novel, the focus widens, in conclusion, from t
he personal into the universal, by means of a borrowed rhetoric (here, literally a borrowed quotation) that conveys the flavor and the promise of another, better world. The ending of Villette is rewritten in atheist terms: the language of Marx and Engels replaces Brontë’s echoes of the Bible.