The character Vashti in Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette

The character Vashti in Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette was based on Rachel, whom Brontë had seen perform in London.

French classical actress, the daughter of Alsatian-Jewish traveling peddlers. Her talent was discovered when she was singing in the streets as a young girl, and nurtured in drama school in Paris.  Her fame spread throughout Europe following a sensational success in London in 1841, and became particularly associated with the works of Racine, Voltaire, and Corneille, touring in Brussels, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. When Rachel first stepped on the stage of Comedie Francaise, French classical tragedy was not dying but dead. Regardless, Rachel would remain true to her classical roots. She aroused audiences with an undeniable craving for the tragic style of great writers like Corneille, Racine and Molière. She evoked a high demand for classical tragedy to remain on the stage. She created the title role in Eugène Scribe's Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her acting style was characterized by clear diction and economy of gesture, and represented a major change from the exaggerated style of those days. Out the doors of Rachel’s theatre was a battle of artistic desires. Society was beginning to demand the highly emotional, realistic, instinctual acting styles of the Romantics. Rachel completely turned her back on the Romantic Drama movement happening in nineteenth century France. She was best known for her portrayal of the title rôle in Phèdre. Eliza Rachel, as the actress was also known, was reportedly a great tragédienne.
wiki/Rachel_(actress)

Rachel’s private life was scandalous, and was chronicled with lip-licking relish by the European press: the Leeds Intelligencer, for example, noting her withdrawal from the role of Cleopatra, said her “success was becoming more questionable every day,” as if an immaculate private life was essential for success in that role ( Leeds Intelligencer , 8 Jan 1848). Her health was as fragile as her morals, and she died of consumption. Blackwell Reference  Rachel_(actress) Rachel
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During the summer of 1851, Charlotte Brontë visited London and saw Rachel Felix, the famous French actress, perform in several plays. "Thackeray's lectures and Rachel's acting," she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell, "are the two things in this great Babylon which have stirred and interested me most -- simply because in them I found most of what was genuine whether for good or evil...." Brontë's adjective, "genuine," affiliates her assessment of Rachel with a mid-century theatrical discourse that increasingly represented the stage and the most favored acting styles as "natural." Although it turns up in many texts and contexts, George Henry Lewes, in his role as drama critic, articulated principles of "natural acting" that influentially framed the discourse for both its onstage and offstage versions. When he too saw Rachel on stage in 1851, Lewes, echoing Brontë, accordingly pronounced the actress "exquisitely natural" and set her up as a positive exemplar for what he perceived to be a theater in decline.
 

Brontë's and Lewes's assessments register a paradoxical cultural impulse that led them both to specify a controversial actress as the embodiment of naturalness. Recent studies of theatricality have underscored its potential to upset traditional gender categories; in particular, such studies have recognized women's capacities to elude naturalized sexual and gender roles in the theatre and to construct their own identities on stage. While these studies have influenced my arguments, I also suggest that the structure of mid-Victorian theatricality accommodated an essentialist version of gendered identity. In the context of the 1850s, moreover, a careful assessment of some such conceptions of identity must modify what we usually see as the restrictive tendencies of essentialism. Jonathan Dollimore has recently argued for the transgressive potential of certain appropriations of dominant ideologies, even essentialist ones, at specific historical moments. My readings of Lewes and Brontë support Dollimore's point: while they both viewed Rachel as essentially "natural," they surveyed her from markedly different gendered positions within Victorian culture. Their affiliated constructions of theatricality thus instantiate nature in the service of divergent cultural goals.

The discourse of natural acting exhibits the prominent features of a high culture conception of Victorian theatricality. This conception distinguished "genuine" or "natural" essence from a material and artificial medium of performance, a distinction that speaks to our current theoretical debates about identity. In postmodern critiques of the coherent humanist subject, theatricality often functions to disrupt conceptions of an originary self and essential identity that ostensibly exist apart from the discourses and practices of specific cultures. Delineating this disruptive theatricality is a project integral to many feminist dismantlings of monolithic, ahistorical conceptions of "the Feminine." These welcome efforts at cultural concreteness, however, cannot fully explain the Victorians' yoking of theatricality and gender, for their theatricality prefigured but was not a prototype of the postmodern version. Unlike postmodernists, many Victorians believed in a theatricality that sometimes revealed and sometimes obscured a timeless, innate self; in this view, an authentic core identity is separated from an external, performing, artificial self. If the portents of postmodern disintegration lurk in the fissures of this divided self, the binary construction nonetheless permitted the Victorians to privilege the "authentic core" in an effort to maintain what they saw as the integrity of a coherent identity. muse.jhu.edu/journals
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