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Representing the Self: Arnold and Brontë on Rachel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rachel M. Brownstein
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

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

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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

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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