Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  151 “At the foot of the Pyramids”: “Du bas des Pyramides, je contemple vingt siècles évanouis dans les sables. Ah! mon ami, comme je vois ici le néant des tragédiennes. Je me croyais pyramidale et je reconnais que je ne suis qu’une ombre qui passe … qui a passé. Je suis venue ici pour retrouver la vie qui m’échappe, et je ne vois que la mort autour de moi.” Rachel to Arsène Houssaye, Laplane, p. 233.

  152 “Nothing survives”: The heroine’s last line, in Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur, is: “Rien ne nous survit à nous autres … rien que le souvenir. Le vôtre, n’est-ce pas?”

  153 “Medea is to maternal love”: “Médée est à l’amour maternel ce qu’Othello est à l’amour, l’image de la passion qui tue.” Ernest Legouvé, preface to Médée, Tragédie en 3 actes (Paris, 1874).

  154 “The objections to Madame Ristori’s”: Henry James, “Madame Ristori,” in James, The Scenic Art, edited by Allan Wade (New Brunswick, 1948), p. 31.

  155 Recent critics: On the Medea of Euripides, see Bernard Knox, “The Medea of Euripides,” in his Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, 1979), and Helene P. Foley, “Medea’s Divided Self,” Classical Antiquity, vol. 8, no. 1, April 1989.

  156 This did not stop him: Legouvé claimed that Rachel did receive him on her deathbed, and the story he told about her posing even there has been much recycled. A similar “event” colored reports of Josephine Baker’s end: Phyllis Rose writes, “When she was sick, Maurice Chevalier came to Casablanca to perform and, hearing she was there, tried to pay a call on her. She refused to see him. In addition to her old dislike of him, she knew he had been performing in Paris and regarded him as a collaborator.… [She] would not see him, and he gave out the story that she was dying, penniless, in a Casablanca hospital. ‘Don’t leave me, Maurice,’ he told reporters she had said. ‘I am so unhappy.’ Eventually the story spread and before long newspapers as far away as America were carrying the report that she had died in North Africa.” Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York, 1989), p. 197. But Legouvé must be given his due: he lectured on women’s history at the Collège de France in 1848, and his Histoire morale des femmes (Paris, 1849) was influential in the development of nineteenth-century French feminism. A feminist historian writes that “it appears that Legouvé’s slogan of ‘equality in difference’ became the watchword for the organizers of the French women’s rights movement during the late Second Empire and early Third Republic.” See Karen Offen, “Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of ‘Equality in Difference’ for Women: A Case Study of Male Feminism in Nineteenth-Century French Thought,” Journal of Modern History 58 (June 1986).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1 The quotation from Mario Praz is on page 191 of The Romantic Agony, translated by Angus Davidson (New York, 1956).

  Leo Braudy’s definition of fame is in The Frenzy of Renown, p. 15.

  The quotation from George Rowell’s The Victorian Theatre: A Survey (Oxford, 1956), is on p. 24.

  Matthew Arnold wrote of Rachel to Arthur Hugh Clough, 24 May 1848; Howard Foster Lawry, ed., The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (London, 1952), p. 81. Clough, evidently, did not think much of her. On 1 May 1848, he reported to his sister that he was “a little disappointed by Rachel as Phèdre,” adding, very much in the Arnoldian vein, “but I am going again, to study the thing” (italics mine). Frederick L. Mulhauser, ed., The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough I (Oxford, 1957), p. 203.

  2 “merely mixed in”: Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (New York, 1974), p. 102.

  3 Putnam’s VI, September 1855, and Harper’s XI, October 1855, are quoted by Sylvie Chevalley, Rachel en Amérique, p. 35.

  4 On the Victorian theater and the novel, see Gillian Beer, “ ‘Coming Wonders’: Uses of Theatre in the Victorian Novel,” in English Drama: Form and Development, Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, edited by Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge, 1977). Nina Auerbach has written on the subject in “Alluring Vacancies in the Victorian Character,” Kenyon Review 8 (1986), as well as in her Woman and the Demon; Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time; and Private Theatricals. See also Alan S. Downer, “Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 61 (1946). Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley, 1992) includes stimulating chapters on all three of the novels I discuss here. My thinking was influenced by portions of this book that were published earlier as articles. I am also indebted to Joseph Butwin, who lent me his 1971 Harvard Ph.D. thesis, The Artist As Actor in English Fiction, and to Doris Janet McReynolds, Image of the Theatre in Victorian Literature, University of Minnesota Ph.D. thesis, 1970.

  5 “her distinction, her simple”: G. H. Lewes, “Rachel’s Phèdre and Roxane” (6 July 1850) in William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, eds., Dramatic Essays III (London, 1896), p. 86.

  6 “I am free to walk”: Quotations from Charlotte Brontë’s letters are from Thomas J. Wise, and J. A. Symington, eds. The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence III (Oxford, 1932), pp. 244–53. For a discussion of Brontë and the theater, see David Isenberg, “Charlotte Brontë and the Theatre,” in Brontë Society Transactions, vol. 15, no. 3 (1968).

  7 “When my children were very young”: Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 94.

  8 “each moment he came near me”: Charlotte Brontë, in Wise and Symington III, p. 222.

  9 “Rachel’s acting”: Cf. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert: “On frissonne à la seule idée des horreurs dont on paré la scène française, pour l’amusement du peuple le plus doux et le plus humain qui soit sur la terre! Non …, je le soutiens, et j’en atteste l’effroi des lecteurs, les massacres des gladiateurs n’étaient pas si barbares que ces affreux spectacles. On voyait couler du sang, il est vrai, mais on ne souillait pas son imagination de crimes qui font frémir la Nature.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Paris, 1987), p. 180.

  10 All quotations from Villette are from the Penguin edition, pp. 334–47. For critical commentary on the Vashti episode, see Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York, 1976); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe,” The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, 1979); Steven Millhauser, “Villette,” Grand Street (Winter, 1987); Mary Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Villette,” Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York, 1986); and Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader,” Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988). Christina Crosby, in “Charlotte Brontë’s Haunted Text,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), discusses “specularity” in the novel; Karen Lawrence, “The Cypher: Disclosure and Reticence in Villette,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (March 1988), analyzes the two ways Lucy signifies, as a woman in society and as a writer.

  11 “You get ice-cold shivers”: H. C. Andersen is quoted in a Times Literary Supplement review, 15 February 1991, taken from Patricia Conroy and Sven H. Rossel, eds., The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen (Seattle, 1991).

  12 “Disguise makes a woman”: J. Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (Basingstoke, 1975), p. 233, quoted by Juliet Bair, “Private Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses,” Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, edited by Shirley Ardener (New York, 1981), p. 209.

  13 “After a first sight”: Matthew Arnold, “The French Play in London” (1879), in R. H. Super, ed., Works, IX: English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor, 1973), p. 65.

  14 “full of Parisianisms”: Clough is quoted in Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1949), pp. 21–22. See also p. 270.

  15 “mere head of steam”: George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions II (London, 1917), p. 133, quoted in Alan S. Downer, “Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 61 (1946), p. 561.

  16 For Arnold’s p
oems and useful notes on them, see Kenneth Allott, ed., The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London, 1965). Allott writes that Arnold first saw Rachel in London in July 1846, and that he arrived in Paris the following December and saw her ten times.

  17 “She represented for him”: Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, A Life (New York, 1981), pp. 483–85.

  18 “a crude and casual”: For Lewes as a critic of Rachel, and his influence on the novels of Brontë, Disraeli, and George Eliot, see John Stokes, “Rachel’s ‘Terrible Beauty’: An Actress Among the Novelists,” ELH (Winter, 1984), pp. 771–93. The phrase I quote is on p. 776, where Stokes observes in connection with it that Lewes had “acted Shylock as a sympathetic and wronged character in 1849.” I am much indebted to this essay. For Lewes on Rachel, see his On Actors and the Art of Acting, and William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, eds., Dramatic Essays: John Forster and George Henry Lewes (London, 1896).

  19 Rose, Blanche, and Violet: Patricia Thomson, in George Sand and the Victorians, notes that in Sand’s Rose et Blanche (1831), which the title of Lewes’s novel echoes, one of the heroines “goes to the theatre and sees Judith Pasta as Tancred, and is overwhelmed by the magnificence of the hall, the brilliance of the lights, the crowd of spectators. It is midnight when she returns through the dark streets to the convent, gliding along furtively, so much under the spell of the emotion which had been aroused that she does not know whether it is night or day.” Thomson, p. 75, compares her to Lucy Snowe.

  20 “enslaved by an impassioned sensibility”: Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 103–4.

  21 “a Sarah Siddons, a Rachel”: Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (Leipzig, 1860), pp. 45–50.

  22 “Women, when they are young”: Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (New York, 1979), p. 41. Helena Michie, in The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (New York, 1987), comments on these passages in Craik and Nightingale on pp. 67–68.

  23 “the Rachels, the Duses”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York, 1953; 1974), pp. 782–83.

  24 All quotations from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda are from the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth, 1967). For a discussion of theatricality in Daniel Deronda, see Litvak, Caught in the Act, as well as Nina Auerbach, “Secret Performances: George Eliot and the Art of Acting,” in Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment (New York, 1986); Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Woman Question,” in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983–84 (Baltimore, 1986); Jacqueline Rose, “George Eliot and the Spectacle of the Woman,” in Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, 1986). See also Simon During, “The Strange Case of Monomania: Patriarchy in Literature, Murder in Middlemarch, Drowning in Daniel Deronda,” Representations 23 (Summer, 1988).

  25 how their names inform the way: Leonora Charisi or Alcharisi, The Princess Halm-Eberstein, remarks that for Jews one name is as real as another: “The Jews have always been changing their names,” p. 701.

  26 a stepfather: For conjectures that Gwendolen had an abusive stepfather see Judith Wilt, “ ‘He would come back’: The Fathers of Daughters in Daniel Deronda,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 3 (1987).

  27 “We went to see Rachel”: George Eliot to Mrs. Charles Bray and Sara Sophia Hennell, 17 June 1853, in Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters II, p. 104. “Her acting is not acting”: G. H. Lewes, Three Sisters and Three Fortunes, or Rose, Blanche, and Violet (New York, n.d.), p. 23.

  28 “The belief”: Daniel Deronda, pp. 298, 305. See Mary Wilson Carpenter, “ ‘A Bit of Her Flesh’: Circumcision and ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Daniel Deronda,” Genders 1 (March 1988).

  29 “He wished I had been”: Daniel Deronda, p. 694. The two interviews with the princess are in Chapter 51 and Chapter 53 of Book VII, “The Mother and the Son.”

  30 Helen Faucit: See George Eliot to Cara Bray, 16 April 1853: “I fell in love with Helen Faucit. She is the most poetic woman I have seen for a long while. Her conversation is not remarkable in any way but there is the ineffable charm of a fine character which makes itself felt in her face, voice and manner.” The George Eliot Letters II, p. 98.

  31 “Everything specifically Jewish”: Joseph Litvak writes that there is a “power struggle between the good Jewishness of poetry and the bad Jewishness of theatricality” in Daniel Deronda (Caught in the Act, pp. 189–90). I would speculate that good and bad Jewishness seemed to George Eliot to be (agonizingly) collapsed in Rachel, and that to that extent the actress’s figure inspired the novel.

  32 Woolfs Rachel: Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J., 1980), pp. 69–70, comments on the connection between Woolf’s review and her first novel, the heroine of which is named Rachel.

  33 Quotations from The Tragic Muse are from the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth, 1978). Adeline R. Tintner has analyzed the narrative process through which Miriam Rooth is identified with Rachel in “Miriam as the English Rachel: Gérôme’s Portrait of the Tragic Muse,” Critical Essays on Henry James: The Early Novels, edited by James W. Gargano (Boston, 1987). See her Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Fiction (Baton Rouge, 1993).

  34 parallel theatrical scenes: Mary Ann Caws connects these two scenes and comments on them illuminatingly as instances of “framing” in Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton, 1985), pp. 137–38.

  35 For James and Fanny Kemble, see his essay, “Frances Anne Kemble,” in Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York, 1893). See also Margaret Armstrong, Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (New York, 1938), esp. pp. 369–70.

  36 “I may say that I know”: F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York, 1947), p. 26. In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks observes that James would have preferred to write for the Comédie-Française. For James on that “ideal and exemplary world,” see Henry James, Jr., “The Théâtre François,” in French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878), pp. 410–11. For James on Rachel, see Notebooks, p. 64.

  37 “I don’t see the princess”: “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” in James, Partial Portraits (London, 1919), p. 85.

  38 About Ward’s “tempting, challenging subject,” James wrote to her more critically, “It seems to me, however, that, as I said, you have rather limited yourself—you have seen that concussion too simply, refused perhaps even to face it. I am afraid I have a certain reputation for being censorious and cynical: let me therefore profit by it with you and insist on one or two points in which I should have liked your story to be a little different; or at least upon one. I am capable of wishing that the actress might have been carried away from Kendal altogether, carried away by the current of her artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement, the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I mean…) which the effort to create, to ‘arrive’ … would have brought with it.” See Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters III (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 59.

  39 “the story of an actress”: Fortnightly Review (April 1920), p. 857. Patricia Thomson is certain that Miss Bretherton “started James off on” The Tragic Muse. Conceding that the actress Mary Anderson inspired Ward’s story, she argues that George Sand was “the vital source” for which Ward (and Geraldine Jewsbury) received “their literary stimulus to tackle the problems of the actress in society.” Thomson, p. 238. It is perhaps also relevant here that Mary Augusta Ward wrote introductions to Villette and the other Brontë novels. A president of the Brontë Society, she remarked—in her farewell address to that group on 30 March 1917—on her own friendship with Charlotte Bronte’s publisher and friend George Smith, “Dr. John in Villette,” and proudly claimed another personal connection with Brontë through her uncle Matthew Arnold, who had met the novelist when he was a young man.

  40 “
a woman whose only being was to make believe”: Joseph Litvak emphasizes the sexual coloration of this passage, and reads allusions that link Medusa with Miriam as signs of the heroine’s gendered monstrousness; I think that the irony and the emphasis on the aesthetic rather desexualizes Miriam, and makes her a revisionary version of the femme artiste. My argument that Miriam Rooth, commodified and spectacularized, denatures and unsettles the stock image of the femme artiste, has been influenced by Catherine Gallagher’s discussion of the manipulation by women authors of the image of the prostitute. See her articles: “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Woman Question” in Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Baltimore, 1986), and “Who Was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn” in Regina Barreca, ed., Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (New York, 1988). For the aesthetic and theatrical underpinnings of James’s novel and on its sources, see the important long article by D. J. Gordon and John Stokes, “The Reference of The Tragic Muse,” in John Goode, ed., The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London, 1972).

  41 Single-minded in her commitment: R. P. Blackmur observed of Miriam that she “almost alone among James heroines never resigned, never gave up, never renounced, whether in submission or to gain extra strength of being.” See his introduction to the Laurel Edition of The Tragic Muse.

  42 “a large bright picture”: The Tragic Muse, p. 375.

  43 “the pure commodity”: Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Benjamin, Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1979), p. 152.