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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Like Proust's Berma, Vashti in Charlotte Brontë's Villette is a literary image of an actress who was legendary to begin with. Rachel (1821–58), before Sarah Bernhardt, was “one of the greatest actresses France, or perhaps the world, has ever known.” Named Élisa- or Élisabeth-Rachel Félix at her birth, she chose to be called “Rachel” tout court, professionally, and only that name is carved on her monument in the Paris cemetery of Pere Lachaise – marking a victory of choice over accident, art over nature. Single like a queen's, the name reflects her singularity and also suggests her emblematic, hypostasized dimension, her status as an abstraction. “Mlle Rachel est un principe,” wrote one enthusiast of her time, arguing that she symbolized the theater.
1. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Hartnell, Phyllis (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).Google Scholar
2. The line is used, scornfully, as the epigraph for an attack on Rachel, la Vérité-Rachel, Examen du talent de la première tragédienne du Théātre-Français, by Maurice, Charles (Paris, 1850).Google Scholar
3. Stokes, John makes this point in a recent article. See “Rachel's ‘Terrible Beauty’: An Actress Among the Novelists,” English Literary History, Winter, 1984, pp. 771–91.Google Scholar
4. Arnold, Matthew to Arthur Hugh Clough, 24 05 1848, in The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Lawry, Howard Foster (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 81.Google Scholar
5. Brontë, Charlotte to James Taylor, 15 11 1851, in The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondences, ed. Wise, T.J. and Symington, J.A., 4 vols. (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1932), III, p. 289. Helene Moglen quotes all but the last sentence of this passage in a footnote on p. 216 of Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).Google Scholar
6. Lewes, G.H. “Rachel,” in On Actors and Acting (London, 1875), P. 23. John Stokes argues that Lewes's phrase influenced Brontë.Google Scholar
7. See Musset, Alfred de, “de la Tragedie,” 1839, p. 81; Theophile Gautier, Portraits Contemporains (Paris, 1914); and especially Jules Janin, Rachel et la Tragedie (Paris, 1859), where Janin repeats all his very influential statements, made originally in feuilletons, about Rachel.Google Scholar
8. Journal de Rheims, 8 09 1839 (my translation).Google Scholar
9. Kemble, Frances Anne, Records of Later Life, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1882), II, p.101.Google Scholar
10. Herzen, is quoted by Nikolai Solnzev, “Rachel, vue par les Artistes et les Écrivains Russes,” Revue de l'sHistoire du Theatre, 1958, IV, p. 356 (my translation).Google Scholar
11. Quoted in Richardson, Joanna, Rachel (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1957), p. 211.Google Scholar
12. Quoted in Imbert de Saint-Arnaud, Mme de Cirardin (Paris: Plon, 1875), p. 190 (my translation).Google Scholar
13. Janin, Jules, Feuilleton du fournal des Debats, 13 10 1855 (my translation).Google Scholar
14. These photographs are in the archives of the Musee Carnavalet in Paris.Google Scholar
15. Donoghue, Denis, “Portrait of a Critic,” The New Republic, 04 1, 1985, p. 32.Google Scholar
16. On the woman-centered novel and the ideal of the lady, see Brownstein, Rachel M., Becoming a Heroine (New York: Viking, 1982) and, in another key, Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar
17. Brontë, Charlotte, Villette (New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 211 (Chapter 14). All quotations are from this badly proofread but most accessible edition; all quotations that have to do with “Vashti” are from Chapter 23, pp. 334–47.Google Scholar
18. The anecdote, recounted by Legouve, Ernest in his memoirs, is retold in all the biographies of Rachel and, often, in the program notes that accompany performances of the opera Adriana Lecouvreur. Brontë could not have known that the role of Adrienne was to be the one Rachel would perform in her last onstage appearance, in America.Google Scholar
19. See Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). P. 423. The whole of their chapter entitled “The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe” is useful and important.Google Scholar
20. An unsigned article by Lewes, in which this phrase occurs is discussed by John Stokes, who carefully documents the influence on Brontë of Lewes's statements about Rachel, but does not note that the critic parrots the novelist in this particular case. Stokes observes the anti-semitic tone of much of what Lewes wrote about Rachel.Google Scholar
21. Quoted by Isenberg, David, “Charlotte Brontë and the Theatre,” in Bronte Society Transactions, 15, No. 3 (1968), 239. I am indebted to Helene Moglen, p. 217, for directing me to this passage.Google Scholar
22. On the transformative power attributed to women, and actresses in particular, in Victorian mythology, see Auerbach, Nina, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
23. Arnold, Matthew, “The French Play in London” (1879), in Works, IX: English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. Super, R.H. (Ann Arbor, 1973), p. 65.Google Scholar
24. Jarrell, Randall, Pictures from an Institution (New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 17.Google Scholar
25. Quoted in Trilling, Lionel, Matthew Arnold (New York: Meridian Books, 1949), pp. 21–22.Google Scholar
26. Arnold, , “The French Play in London,” Works IX, p. 75.Google Scholar
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29. I copy the sonnets from The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Kenneth (London: Longman, 1965), pp. 483–85.Google Scholar
30. Honan, Park, Matthew Arnold, A Life (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1981), p. 110.Google Scholar
31. See The Poems of Matthew Arnold, p. 483.Google Scholar
32. Legouve, Ernest, Sixty Years of Recollections, tr. Vandam, Albert D., 2 vols. (London: Eden, Remington & Co., 1893), II, 202–203.Google Scholar
33. Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1984), p. 47.Google Scholar
34. Trilling, , p. 270.Google Scholar
35. Benjamin, Walter, in “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” might be characterizing the remarkable popularity of Rachel the “Greek-soul'd artist” playing Racine in the nineteenth century. As if beginning to account for the sources of her myth, he writes that “it is precisely modernity that is always quoting primeval history. This happens through the ambiguity attending the social relationships and products of this epoch. Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill. This standstill is Utopia and the dialectic image therefore a dream image.” Benjamin sees this image presented “by the pure commodity: as fetish,” and by “the prostitute, who is saleswoman and wares in one” - as, one might argue, the actress is. Benjamin's essay is reprinted in Reflections, tr. Jephcott, Edmund (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979).Google Scholar