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Christine Riding
Staging The Raft of the Medusa
Knowledge of the shipwreck of the Medusa , which occurred in July 1816 , is at present largely predicated on knowledge of Géricault’s painting (Figure 1 ). But this was not the case in the years immediately following the event. During the exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa in London in 1820 , a reviewer in the Globe newspaper stated that ‘The story of the shipwreck of the Medusa , with all its attendant horrors, is fresh in every body’s mind.’^1 However, for three years
- while there was indeed an accumulation of press reports, survivor accounts and pamphlets to refer to – there was no significant visual response to the shipwreck in the form of a painting before the opening of the Paris Salon in August 1819. This seems also to be true of the theatre and any other forms of entertainment. Yet in 1820 three separate spectacles on the subject of this shipwreck were available to the British public, all based, or claiming to be based, on the narrative of two raft survivors, Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, first published in French in November 1817 and in English in April 1818.^2 These ‘spectacles’ were Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa , exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, from 12 June to 30 December 1820 , William Thomas Moncrieff’s nautical melodrama, The Shipwreck of the Medusa: Or, The Fatal Raft! , at the Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic) from 29 May to 28 June, and Messrs Marshalls’ Grand Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Shipwreck of the Medusa French Frigate with the Fatal Raft , first presented in the Pavilion in Prince’s Street, Edinburgh from November 1820 to January 1821 , before arriving in Dublin from 17 February to 9 June of that year, where it clashed with the onward tour of Géricault’s Medusa (shown at the ‘Rotunda’, 5 February to 31 March 1821 ). The panorama came to London in 1823 , displayed from 1 December at the Great Room, Spring Gardens, as ‘the French panorama of the Shipwreck of the Medusa’.^3 Moncrieff’s play was revived at the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1827 , and crossed the Atlantic to be adapted and performed in 1837 at the Bowery and Franklin theatres in New York City.^4 Although Géricault’s painting and the Marshalls’ panorama appear to be unique versions in their medium on the subject, Moncrieff’s melodrama was the first of three theatrical productions staged in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, two of which were premiered in Paris in 1839 : Le Naufrage de la Méduse , a play in five acts, by Louis-François Charles Desnoyer, first performed at the Théatre de L’Ambigu-Comique on 27 April, and a musical/opera of the same title, in four acts, composed by Auguste Pilati, first performed at the Théatre de la Renaissance on 31 May. While all these spectacles were faithful, to varying degrees, to the events of the original shipwreck – with the authors of the theatrical versions largely confining
themselves to the fact of the Medusa being shipwrecked, after which a raft was built – they were all connected by the painting through plagiarisms or the performance of tableaux, and thereby engaged, consciously or not, with Géricault’s singular interpretation and artistic vision/intentionality. It is the interrelationship between the various spectacles and venues that is the focus of this article.
Painting versus panorama: The Raft of the Medusa as entertainment
But for the opportunity of an all-expenses-paid exhibition in Britain, the painting’s destiny – it remained unsold at the close of the Paris Salon – was to be rolled, stored and unseen.^5 The events surrounding the display of The Raft of the Medusa in London and Dublin were the focus of Lee Johnson’s article in the Burlington Magazine in 1954.^6 From that point, the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall – a diverse gallery cum auction house – has been appraised by historians as ‘a fairly prosaic opportunity’, with the proprietor William Bullock characterized as an entrepreneur and showman, ‘une espèce de Barnum’ to use Henri Houssaye’s description from 1879.^7 Johnson comments that ‘from the start, the exhibition was planned on a popular level’, and promoted ‘to attract a large and undiscriminating clientèle’, his evidence resting on the character of Bullock and the Egyptian Hall’s ‘unaesthetic
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Figure 1. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa , 1819 , oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre. Photograph RMN
audience and taught the general public to accept a certain kind of art. People who went to see The Raft of the Medusa transferred the behaviour and mode of seeing they had learned in panoramas to the flat picture; they treated it like a section of a circular painting, and it was occasionally discussed in such terms.^19
What does Oettermann mean by a ‘mass audience’? And what evidence does he have that visitors treated Géricault’s painting as if it were a section of a panorama? If we take the Royal Academy annual exhibition as an example of a ‘purer’ environment within which to view fine art, we find a ‘mass audience’ of over 90 , 000 visitors within a period of approximately two months by 1822. 20 The Egyptian Hall exhibition attracted an estimated 40 , 000 visitors in six and half months and Haydon’s Christ’s Triumphal Entry had 31 , 000 visitors in a similar period. 21 Given that the one shilling entrance charge was, as noted by Giles Waterfield and C. S. Matheson, sufficient to exclude the ‘lower orders’ from public exhibitions of art (there was the same charge at the Egyptian Hall and panorama exhibitions) I would suggest that the audience for Géricault’s painting constituted a large proportion of those who habitually attended Somerset House. 22 David Solkin has recently argued that ‘Ostensibly designed as a showcase for the laudable achievements of the British School, and as an engine for the edification and improvement of society at large, the [Royal Academy] exhibitions were – all denials to the contrary – a doubly commercial
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Figure 2. Thomas Rowlandson, Mr Bullock’s Exhibition of Laplanders , 1822 , aquatint on paper, Guildhall Library, Corporation of London
enterprise, operating as both a highly profitable spectacle and a market place for expensive luxury goods [my emphasis].’ Solkin concludes that most visitors to Somerset House ‘came simply to be entertained’.^23 So, was there, in this context, an appreciable difference between the Royal Academy (apart from its grandiose surroundings and the cachet of its royal associations) and the Egyptian Hall as venues for fine art, or the expectations of the publics who frequented them? Johnson’s article also established the assumption that the exhibition of Géricault’s painting was a relative failure (in visitor numbers) in Dublin because of the competition posed by the Marshalls’ panorama, which, the argument goes, presented a more comprehensive entertainment of 10 , 000 square feet of painted canvas, a printed description, seating, music, artificial lighting and heating.^24 Perhaps most significant for this interpretation, as Richard Altick has noted, was that the Marshalls ‘had the inestimable advantage over Géricault of providing a running pictorial narrative of the dreadful sequence of events, whereas the French painter could portray only one moment’. 25 Thus, given that the ‘majority of people still knew the difference between an ordinary painting and panorama’, according to Oettermann, ‘they instinctively preferred the latter’. 26 But the exhibition in Dublin was not a straightforward competition between a painting and a panorama on the same subject, which admittedly may have dissuaded some visitors from viewing both. The peristrephic or moving panorama used by the
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Figure 3. Anonymous, ‘Roman Gallery or exhibition rooms’, line engraving, reproduced in [William Bullock], A Descriptive Synopsis of the Roman Gallery (in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly) … Including the Picture of the Judgement of Brutus Upon his Sons … , 1816 , London. Photograph courtesy British Library
after it (most likely the one Géricault executed for the London exhibition) and that they certainly read a copy of Bullock’s description ( The Raft of the Medusa was on public exhibition from 12 June, and the panorama opened in Edinburgh on 12 November).^32 By incorporating the painting’s composition into the panorama, the Marshalls cancelled out Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as a separate and exclusive exhibition experience.
The Salon and the Egyptian Hall: one painting, different perspectives
In 1972 , Lorenz Eitner opined that ‘Devoid of political implications for the general British public’, Géricault’s painting was ‘appreciated by them for the sake of its subject [that is, in showing the last remaining survivors on the raft], as much for the “power of art and ability of the artist”’.^33 While it is impossible, given the paucity of evidence, to state just how ‘the general British public’ appreciated The Raft of the Medusa , published critical responses do give the impression of greater clarity and focus than those in Paris, in appreciating the painting as a ‘work of art’ rather than as a political statement or reportage. Reviews dwell on the subject (in particular the challenge it posed to the artist) and the success and failures of Géricault’s response to it, and position the painting in the context of contemporary French art, largely agreeing that the artist had ‘broken the trammels of [Jacques-Louis David’s] system’ and had produced a work of significance and originality.^34 However, the exhibition experiences at the Paris Salon and the Egyptian Hall differed significantly, beyond the greater political relevance of the Medusa controversy which inevitably influenced critical responses in Paris. At the Salon, The Raft of the Medusa was one (albeit the largest) of 100 large-scale paintings out of a collective total of over 1 , 200 easel works. In London, the painting was the star attraction. Unlike other large subject paintings presented in the Salon’s printed catalogue with specific titles and a short description, Géricault’s painting was given the generic title of ‘Scène de naufrage’.^35 At the Egyptian Hall, the newspaper advertisements and 15 -page printed description, which included a summary of the events of the shipwreck and a description of the painting itself, gave the specific context and the moment depicted. At the Salon, the painting was hung high in the Louvre’s Salon Carré, over the entrance to the long gallery, thus occupying the wall space traditionally reserved for history painting, but surrounded, frame to frame, by other works of art. As Solkin noted, the Royal Academy employed a similar ‘cheek by jowl’ hanging policy, which elicited complaints from contemporary observers that ‘the setting made it impossible to give individual works of art the close attention they deserved’.^36 This must also have been true of the Salon. In 1816 , Bullock described the Roman Gallery at the Egyptian Hall, where The Raft of the Medusa was exhibited, as an ‘apartment … sixty feet in length, by twenty-seven feet in breadth, and is of proportionate height’.^37 At 24 feet by 18 , Géricault’s painting must have been placed low, perhaps within a few feet of the ground (especially given its status as an exhibit) and without doubt dominated (if not overwhelmed) the rest of the room, hung ‘with about two hundred Cabinet and Gallery Pictures, chiefly by eminent Masters of the Old School’.^38 The significance of the hanging height in terms of compositional legibility and artistic intention – given the manner in which the
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raft itself is contrived to ‘project’ into the viewer’s plain, thus blurring the line between spectator and participant – is demonstrated by the lowering of The Raft of the Medusa during the Salon exhibition at the behest of Géricault.^39 As Eitner has noted, the Salon of 1819 ‘was one of the last uncontested manifestations by the pupils of David and his many imitators and vulgarizers, who constituted what was called the French School’.^40 And, as the most significant Salon since the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the Napoleonic Wars, the official art there reflected the change of government, with royal and religious/biblical subjects ousting imperial and outstripping classical ones.^41 Within this loaded artistic and spatial context The Raft of the Medusa was compared, contrasted and judged. And in this context, the novelty of Géricault’s subject, interpretation and formal innovations would have been all the more striking. Thus the criticisms at the Salon concerning the painting and suggestions for its improvement, summarized by Eitner as about its ‘somber monochromy, its inappropriate monumentality [as a genre subject], its lack of an “interesting” narrative’ and ‘mistakes in the choice of dramatic moment’ are consequently more complex than simply denoting political or artistic prejudices. 42 Indeed complaints concerning the narrative and choice of dramatic moment are viewed by subsequent commentators, with the benefit of hindsight and detachment from the Medusa controversy itself, as evidence of a lack of understanding concerning artistic intention and ambition.^43 But given that most reviewers in 1819 had little difficulty in discerning the Medusa shipwreck as the generic subject/ inspiration, the general events of which would have been known to all the reviewers (if not the Salon visitors in general), one might forgive them for thinking that Géricault had selected a relatively obscure moment of hoped-for rescue, in comparison to more politically charged and Medusa -specific episodes, in particular the abandonment of the raft by those in command. While it is beyond the scope of this article to detail Géricault’s approximations with and departures from Savigny and Corréard’s text, and the bearing these may have had on spectator reactions, I will demonstrate my point with the line from the Medusa narrative quoted above: ‘each of us believed his deliverance certain, and we gave a thousand thanks to God’. In the painting, Géricault de-emphasizes the act of praying, the signifier of the survivors’ belief/hope in a providential delivery (as described by the authors) by placing the only praying man in the absolute background, thus subverting the viewer’s expectation of a scene of potential deliverance (after all, most attendees at the Paris Salon would have known that the men represented in the painting survived). This serves not only to bring to prominence the sheer physical effort of a group of men attempting to save themselves by signalling towards the ship but also the uncertainty they feel in the outcome. As Savigny and Corréard stated, ‘fears mingled with our hopes’. In this context, the dramatic force of The Raft of the Medusa derives from its representation of perpetual suspense. In parallel, earlier studies for the final composition depict the Argus clearly visible on the horizon (see Figure 4 ). But as the project developed, the ship receded into the far distance, thus exaggerating the disparity in scale between the ship and the raft survivors, between, Géricault
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Nothing can mitigate these horrors. All must die, there is no chance of salvation, since none of them raises his arms towards Him whom the winds and seas obey [my emphasis]. Shut unto themselves, they will sink from the abyss of the waters into that of Eternity. For as they have forgotten God, so they have forgotten one another. They receive no consolation and they offer none: egoism has reached its last extreme.^45
In his discussion on the content of the Salon as influencing critical responses to The Raft of the Medusa , Brian Grosskurth suggests that O’Mahoney noted the emphasis on physical suffering over spiritual deliverance in part because of the juxtaposition of subjects denoting traditional Christian piety and above all those images showing life triumphing over death through divine intervention. 46 In this context, Jean-Bruno Gassies’ painting (no. 492 , Jésus et St.-Pierre marchant sur la mer ) showing Christ in a storm upbraiding the terrified apostle for his lack of faith – ‘Homme de peu de foi, pourquoi avez- vous douté?’ – may well have struck Salon visitors as pertinent to the men in Géricault’s painting.^47 But the significance of O’Mahoney’s comment is that Géricault’s interpretation not only instils a similar state of uncertainty in the spectator as that experienced by the raft survivors, but allows or encourages a re-interpretation of the known events: the painting represents men who in reality survived, but for O’Mahoney because of their lack of Christian faith, ‘All must die’. This raises the question of how Géricault’s interpretation impinges on, reworks and perhaps supplants Savigny and Corréard’s version of events, as demonstrated by the ‘father and son’ group (to be discussed later). But, equally, in attempting to textually define the moment within the original narrative, Bullock and others may be said to have diffused the dramatic power of the painting, reducing it to pictorial reportage. In fact Bullock’s description conflates the events from the first sighting of the brig Argus to the final rescue and significantly re-emphasizes prayer as an action denoting faith in the raft survivors. In doing so, he breaks the moment of suspense and relocates Géricault’s painting within a sequence of events with a known outcome: The Raft of the Medusa is now an unequivocal scene of impending salvation. 48 The practical reason for this reworking may be the inclusion by Géricault of the tent (centre, left) which Savigny and Corréard describe as being constructed after the raft survivors lost sight of the Argus.^49 This is one of a number of examples where Géricault’s interpretation is made to fit the event itself. Bullock’s description is the first printed account, for example, identifying three portraits within the painting, those of Savigny, Corréard and Lavallette.^50 The Marshalls’ description goes further, assigning to the various figures the names of all the raft survivors listed in Savigny and Corréard’s narrative, excepting Coudin, a midshipman. The purpose of ‘naming’, certainly in the case of the panorama, is to persuade the spectators that they are witnessing a factual and thus authentic representation. At the beginning of their description the Marshalls state that the panorama was ‘executed under the immediate directions of one of the survivors’ and ‘the Proprietors therefore pledge themselves as to its accuracy’.^51 But, despite these assurances, neither Géricault’s painting nor the Marshalls’ panorama is an authentic representation, which Bullock at least acknowledges in his description:
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Who can hope to paint the expression of countenances worn by such varied suffering? … Art has its limits which human skill cannot pass, but Imagination, like Nature, knows no bounds, and happy is the painter if he succeeds in only inducing in the spectator a frame of mind susceptible of conceiving the scene [my emphasis] which he has endeavoured to trace.^52
But perhaps the hidden agenda for the Marshalls was to disguise their debt to Géricault’s painting, thus undermining it as a singular artistic response (supporting my view that, by plagiarizing the painting, the Marshalls cancelled it out as a distinct exhibit). This is above all true of a group within the composition consisting of a white-haired and bearded man who crouches, holding the outstretched body of a youth across his knee (situated in the centre foreground). Savigny and Corréard do not mention a father and son in this context, but do describe an event that occurred in the narrative before the sighting of the Argus , of a boy aged 12 who ‘expired in the arms of Mr. Coudin, who had not ceased to show him the kindest attention’.^53 As noted by Eitner, the older man, depicted by Géricault as a type, was a cliché in French art of ‘the father’ or ‘the father in despair’ and it is therefore not surprising that critics at the Salon, irrespective of their familiarity with Savigny and Corréard’s text, should have designated the group as ‘father and son’.^54 In addition, one critic in Le Courrier Royal noted the group’s resemblance to Joshua Reynolds’ painting of Ugolino and his sons, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773 (other critics alluded to Ugolino as part of a general response to Géricault’s painting, rather than in relation to this specific group). Ugolino is a cruel and, in the context of the Medusa shipwreck, resonant episode from Dante’s Inferno , involving incarceration, prolonged suffering, despair, cannibalism and death. It was thus a signifier of a number of nightmarish events, including cannibalism, which occurred on the raft. That Géricault had this episode from Dante in mind is demonstrated by a drawing he made of Ugolino in 1817 prior to executing a composition drawing with cannibalism as a theme for his painting. 55 But even though the inclusion of the group was primarily a complex and loaded artistic invention/conceit, the identification of ‘the father and son’ appears in Bullock’s description, thus establishing the group as authentic participants on the raft: ‘a young man has just expired in the arms of his aged father, the violence of whose parental grief renders him insensible to the joyful tidings which wholly engross the rest; life is no longer desirable to him, he has lost all he loved on earth, his only child is dead! and horror and despair are irrevocably fixed upon his countenance!’^56 The Marshalls, having plagiarized this detail of Géricault’s composition, copied the passage almost verbatim, with the exception of identifying the ‘aged father’ erroneously as one of the raft survivors.^57 Corréard appended a very similar description (gleaned from Bullock’s text?) to an engraved version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in the third edition ( 1821 ) of his and Savigny’s narrative, in the knowledge that the ‘father and son’ identification was not true to their version of events (see Figure 5 ). For Corréard, the Medusa shipwreck was a live issue in 1821 and Géricault’s painting, as a powerful visual testimony to the injustice for which he continued to demand correction and compensation, was not on public display. Clearly, Corréard sought to re-
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ourselves, and to who[m] the sight of misery was now become habitual.’^61 Thus the ‘father and son’ motif within The Raft of the Medusa , invented by Géricault and ‘authenticated’ by Bullock, the Marshalls and Corréard, had a wider social currency as a symbol of supreme suffering and despair and thus served as a cue to the spectator for an empathetic rather than a judgemental reading of the subject.
Society and national identity: Géricault, Byron and Moncrieff’s melodrama
That 1819 should have produced two controversial (and seemingly independently conceived) interpretations of shipwrecks, by Géricault and by Byron, is remarkable. Thus the timing alone may explain Moncrieff’s utilization of both within his Medusa melodrama of 1820. Clearly he aimed to exploit the dramatic potential of ‘shipwreck’ as a theatrical event, spurred by its integration as a mainstay of popular culture at this time. Indeed, remarking on the Medusa melodrama in 1830 , Moncrieff acknowledged the fascination and thus marketability of ‘shipwreck’ in the context of sublime/gothic horror:
Tales of shipwreck possess a wild and melancholy interest: like ghost-stories, they draw us closer round the fire on long winter nights; and when we hear ‘a brother sailor sing the dangers of the sea,’ the rain rattling against the casement, and the wind whistling down the chimney, realize the fearful illusion, and terror pictures to the haunted imagination, the spirit of the storm.^62
Moncrieff’s melodrama is generally held by scholars to be the first fully fledged nautical melodrama, the genre coming to maturity only in the 1820 s and 1830 s. And the theatre world was ever vigilant in gauging and exploiting trends and events that had captured the public’s imagination. Moncrieff’s choice of subject – perhaps influenced by the furore generated by Géricault’s painting in 1819 or its projected exhibition in London – underlines the topicality and, I argue, the particular resonance of this shipwreck for a British public and the audience/patronage base of the Royal Coburg Theatre. But while these considerations undoubtedly drew Moncrieff to the subject, the Medusa disaster itself was filtered through the conventions of melodrama, which inevitably meant a drastic reworking of all but the very basic structure of Savigny and Corréard’s text. Thus the play includes a cast of good and evil stereotypes – only two of whom correlate with the actual Medusa shipwreck – villain-crossed lovers (necessitating the inclusion of a disguised heroine, Eugenie), musical accompaniment, a nautical ballet and spectacular stage scenery, which comprised, according to the theatre’s playbill, of ‘Various Panoramic Views of the Ocean and Red Deserts of Zaara [sic]’ and a ‘View of the Raft, sailing amidst Novel and Extensive Moving Scenery, calculated to shew [sic] the horrible situation of the sufferers on board’. 63 From Théophile Gautier’s descriptions of the Paris theatre productions it is clear that tableaux of Géricault’s painting were integral to the theatrical direction from 1839.^64 In the case of Moncrieff’s melodrama, performed nearly two decades previously, the adoption of a tableau is less precisely determined. In 1831 , the melodrama’s script (or ‘acted copy’ as it is described) was
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published in Richardson’s New Minor Drama , accompanied by an engraving by Mr G. Armstrong, as stated in the preface written by Moncrieff, ‘from a Drawing taken in the Theatre by Mr. Seymour’, which bears a resemblance to The Raft of the Medusa , with the signalling figure and the ‘father and son’ group (see Figure 6 ).^65 This suggests that the tableau was performed in the 1827 revival. However, as Martin Meisel has noted, the theatre playbill for 19 June 1820 (that is, a week after the opening of the Egyptian Hall exhibition) advertised additional performances of the melodrama because of:
the great anxiety expressed by many of the Patrons of this Theatre, to witness the Representation of ‘the shipwreck of the medusa; or, the fatal raft,’ – in which the deplorable state of the surviving Crew of that Vessel on the Raft a short time previous to their Discovery & Preservation, as depicted in the Great Picture now Exhibiting in Pall Mall, 15 only remaining, after thirteen days abandonment, out of one hundred and fifty that had originally embarked, is so pathetically and correctly delineated, has determined the Proprietors to continue it, as an Afterpiece, for a few Nights longer.^66
Given the specific mention of The Raft of the Medusa , the subsequent two-week overlap of the theatre run and the Egyptian Hall exhibition, and the recognition factor for a proportion of the audience who may have seen Géricault’s painting, it seems likely that a tableau was performed as early as 1820. The 1828 volume of Richardson’s New Minor Drama includes the acted copy of a burletta entitled ‘A New Don Juan’ by John Baldwin Buckstone.^67 The preface, again written by Moncrieff and dated May 1828 , makes reference to the notoriety of Byron’s Don Juan and his own admiration for the poet and the poem. 68 But while Buckstone omitted the shipwreck of the Trinidada entirely, Moncrieff incorporated two incidents from Canto II (Stanza 74 , involving the casting of lots using Julia’s love letter to Juan, and Stanza 99 , with the sighting and capture of a turtle, which is viewed as both food and a ‘good omen’) into the Medusa melodrama at the moment when the survivors on the raft consider cannibalism.^69 As previously stated, Moncrieff’s utilization of Géricault’s and Byron’s work may have been simply opportune. But the playwright may also have recognized in their separate representations certain parities of theme and emphasis, a notion that permeated comparisons between painter and poet throughout the nineteenth century. In 1879 , for example, Barbey D’Aurevilly suggested that ‘the painter of the Raft of the Medusa certainly has a glorious consanguinity with the poet who has given us the anguish and afflictions of another raft, in the shipwreck of the second canto of Don Juan ’. 70 As noted by Eitner and others, Géricault’s appropriation from the 1820 s as a paradigm of ‘the Romantic Artist’ was constructed with Byron, or the Byronic hero, in mind (both men died at a similar age in 1824 ). And this association has even extended to The Raft of the Medusa itself, described by Jules Michelet as being of Byronic inspiration. 71 In fact Géricault’s painting and Canto II – the so-called ‘shipwreck canto’ – of Don Juan , which in terms of subject is the most relevant potential influence on Géricault, are exact contemporaries: the first two cantos of the poem were published in July 1819 , the same month that Géricault submitted his painting for exhibition. But what of D’Aurevilly’s notion of ‘consanguinity’?
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the notions of commonality between the painting and the poem in the minds of subsequent commentators. The Monthly Review described Byron as both a painter and a writer and the Edinburgh Review noted that ‘the best and worst part of the whole is without doubt the description of the shipwreck. As a piece of terrible painting, it is as much superior as can be to every description of the kind … that has ever been created.’^72 But the correlation between The Raft of the Medusa and Don Juan may also have arisen from a shared inspiration. In narrating the storm and shipwreck of the Trinidada in Canto II, Byron incorporated incidents from actual shipwrecks largely gleaned from John Graham Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea ( 1812 ). The suggestion has also been made that he was influenced by the Medusa shipwreck. 73 Certainly Byron, who despised the Bourbon monarchy and even refused to visit Restoration Paris, may, like Géricault, have perceived the Medusa story as symbolic of the tyranny of the new government and the political and social flux of post-Waterloo France and Europe as a whole. It is highly probable not only that Byron knew of the disaster through press reports but, as Peter Cochran has noted, that ‘the book by Savigny and Corréard arrived on Byron’s desk at an opportune moment’, an opinion previously espoused by Eitner, who stated that ‘it would be difficult to account otherwise for the many parallels in incident and significance between [Byron’s] poem, and Géricault’s picture’. 74 Byron’s reference to a raft in Don Juan is one such incident and given the timing it would surely have resonated with British and French readers as a reference to the Medusa. Indeed the New Bon Ton magazine published a review of Don Juan in August 1819 stating that Byron’s shipwreck passage ‘is neither more nor less than the dreadful tale of the French frigate, La Meduse , with the horrors of the Raft related verbatim’.^75 The same assumption was made by David Carey in his review of Géricault’s painting at the Paris Salon, published in the Monthly Magazine in June 1820 , which constitutes, on current evidence, the first printed co-reference to Don Juan and The Raft of the Medusa :
The dreadful account of the ‘Shipwreck of the Medusa’ affords a distressing picture of calamitous and hideous circumstances to the imagination; but a painter hazards much in attempting to convey the particulars of that event to the canvas. Lord Byron has tried his able and eccentric pen on the subject, – he has succeeded in exciting disgust, more than commiseration, for the fate of the sufferers, or admiration for his own talents.^76
On the basis of fact, these assumptions are unfounded but they may reflect the topicality of the shipwreck, previously mentioned. But if the events of the Savigny and Corréard’s text were condensed – the fear and confusion when the Medusa runs aground, the futile attempts to save the ship, the abandonment of the ship to board lifeboats and a raft, the impulse of the crew and soldiers to drink, madness, cannibalism, and so on – the shipwreck appears to correlate with Don Juan , although such incidents were by no means unique to the Medusa and arguably the most politically and socially charged elements (excepting cannibalism) – such as the incompetence of the Royalist captain, the abandonment of the raft by those in command, the bloody mutinies against the officers or the execution of the weaker survivors to save provisions – do not find parallels in the poem. If Byron omitted the episodes of
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abandonment and mutiny, so, of course, did Géricault, who progressively moved away from episodes of treachery and violence between men, so evident in the early stages of Savigny and Corréard’s narrative, towards a visualization of a monumental struggle to survive, or, more accurately, of man’s will to survive. Equally in Don Juan , human beings on the whole do not react to each other but to the external and internal forces of nature, against which they seem to be largely powerless. The execution of Pedrillo to be consumed by the shipwreck survivors is, of course, a violent act by man against man. But the act, as Byron presents it, is not gratuitous but expedient. As he informs the reader, ‘None in particular had sought or planned it;/ T’was nature gnawed them to this resolution’ (II, 75 , v–vi). With the raft survivors cast as hapless victims of circumstance, Géricault also suggests that none of their actions were sought or planned. In his discussion on ambiguity and scepticism in relation to the ‘shipwreck canto’, Andrew Cooper has noted that Byron ‘articulates the descent [of the shipwrecked into Hell] as a series of mishaps in which hopes are raised only to be dashed’.^77 In this context, prayer, as in The Raft of the Medusa , becomes simply one of a number of actions or reactions acted out by desperate, dying men. The theme of ‘hopes raised only to be dashed’ is integral to the narrative and, of course, Géricault’s interpretation. As Savigny and Corréard concluded, ‘Our destiny, on the fatal raft, was to be incessantly tossed between transitory illusions and continued torments, and we never experienced an agreeable sensation without being, in a manner, condemned to atone for it, by the anguish of some new suffering, by the irritating pangs of hope always deceived.’ 78 What Géricault and Byron thus visualize/realize, to use Cooper’s phrase, is ‘the law of attrition at sea’, both physical and psychological, when, as Byron describes it, ‘Famine, despair, cold, thirst, and heat had done/ Their work on them by turns’ (II, 102 , i–ii).^79 Doubt replaces conviction; disunity replaces common purpose. And the sighting of land or a ship at the close of their respective ordeals brings only further confusion and disbelief:
The boat made way; yet now they were so low, They knew not where nor what they were about. Some fancied they saw land, and some said, ‘No!’ (II, 96 , iii–v)
And the rest rubbed their eyes and saw a bay Or thought they saw, and shaped their course for the shore … (II, 97 , v–vi) And then of these some part burst into tears, And others, looking with a stupid stare, Could not yet separate their hopes from fears And seemed as if they had no further care … (II, 98 , i–iv)
Here, then, is the ‘consanguinity’ between the poet and the painter in their representations of shipwreck, the resonance of which is not particularized to those experiencing the shipwrecks of the Trinidada or Medusa , but to the human race as a whole. To quote Cooper once more, ‘ Don Juan baffled
Christine Riding 17
the societal chaos of The Raft of the Medusa , and by association Don Juan , to a satisfactory conclusion. Thus when Eugenie spies the ship, Jack parallels the notion of the Argus in the narrative and painting as an illusion, but one which speedily becomes reality, followed by certainty and salvation: ‘Tis [sic] but delusion, lady. Hey! That shot! ... hurrah! it is a boat, and we are saved!’^84 And significantly, in the tableau as represented by Armstrong’s engraving, Jack replaces the black figure signalling towards the Argus at the apex of Géricault’s composition. Clearly Jack gratified existing notions of national character, the comic/serious inference being that, had a British sailor been on board the Medusa in reality, the outcome would have been altogether different. As Marvin Carlson has noted in relation to the development of the Jack Tar character in nautical melodrama after the Napoleonic Wars, these ‘expressions of bravery, pride, defiance, and patriotism are almost universal in such plays and compatible enough with the reputation of the victorious English navy’.^85 And identical notions of national character were evident in British reactions to the Medusa shipwreck itself, published in newspapers, journals and prefaces to translations of survivor accounts (with which Moncrieff seems to have been familiar), the general conclusion being that, given the courage, moral strength and sense of duty characteristic of the native seaman, no such disaster could have befallen a British ship. As one commentator observed,
It is but candour, however, to assert, that the British … are superior to the people of any other country, in the calmness with which they face the most imminent danger, in the fortitude with which they bear up against misfortune, and in the unanimity with which they will exert themselves for the common safety ; these qualities form, in fact, a part of the national character, from whatever cause they proceed.^86
Thus the inclusion of Jack Gallant appears to be a straightforward registering of national self-esteem and congratulation in the years following the Napoleonic War. However, the reputation of the British Navy may not have been so uncontested. In his discussion of Jane Austen and her portrayal of the Navy, Brian Southam has noted that after Trafalgar ( 1805 ) and St Domingo ( 1806 ) the naval record of containment ‘was tame and unmemorable, with no engagement of such magnitude and none to provide such a stirring brew of tragedy and triumph’. The Army’s success at Waterloo ( 1815 ), in contrast, ‘was fresh in memory’.^87 Interestingly, Byron acknowledges this displacement in the popular perception of the Navy for the Army in Canto I of Don Juan ( 1819 ) which, of course, Moncrieff had read:
Nelson was once Britainnia’s god of war And still should be so, but the tide has turned. There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar; ’Tis with our hero quietly inurned, Because the army’s grown more popular, At which the naval people are concerned. Besides the Prince is all for the land service. Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis. (I, 4 , i–viii)
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In the Medusa melodrama, Jack Gallant accepts the position of boatswain on the Medusa because he is unemployed:
I’ve fought and bled for old England – I’ve been wrecked and lost my all, and past my life in her service, and though she neglects and deserts her brave tars just now, damn me if I’ll ever desert her: she may one day reflect on our services and reward them; but whether she does or no, when the hour of peril comes and a presumptuous enemy dares to invade her shores, Old England will find, as she always has done, her best defenses in her wooden walls. 88
This passage not only explains the presence of a British sailor on a French ship, but also highlights an issue perhaps close to the hearts of Moncrieff’s audience. The Royal Coburg Theatre and the Surrey Theatre (called the Royal Circus up to 1810 ) were located on the South Bank and had close associations with the navy and shipping in general, with off-duty (or even unemployed?) sailors attending theatre productions.^89 Thus the Royal Coburg theatre had a vested interest not only in presenting flattering portrayals of British sailors to the gratification of specific patrons, but also to give a voice to their concerns and grievances. The Medusa shipwreck, mediated through the melodramatic formula of sensation, certainty and resolution, not only reasserted/affirmed social conceptions and structures, but perhaps sought to reinstate the British Navy and the British sailor at the forefront of the national consciousness.
The subject of this article develops themes pursued from my curatorial involvement in an exhibition held at Tate Britain entitled Constable to Delacroix: British Art and French Romantics ( 2003 ). All quotations from Byron’s Don Juan cited in this article are taken from Lord Byron, Don Juan, T. G. Stephens, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt eds., Penguin Classics, reprinted 1996.
Notes
1 The Globe , 12 June 1820 , p. 3. As numerous commentators have observed, the Medusa was more than just another (albeit sensational) maritime disaster. In France it became a cause célèbre , embroiled in the complexities of Bourbon-restoration politics and tensions between the Liberal and Royalist factions, the nation’s fraught colonial ambitions (the Medusa was the flagship of a convoy taking soldiers and official passengers to re-establish the French colony at Senegal) and, as events progressed, with the highly emotive subject of the slave trade. However, in the context of the present article, it is worth laying out here the main events concerning those abandoned on the raft, as described by Jean-Baptiste- Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard in Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse , Paris, 1817 ( 2 nd edition 1818 ; 3 rd, 4 th, 5 th editions, 1821 ). According to Savigny and Corréard (and history) responsibility for the catastrophe that claimed over 150 lives lay with the Medusa ’s captain, Hugues Deroys de Chaumareys, an aristocrat recently returned from exile, and by extension the Minister of the Marine, Vicomte Dubouchage, who appointed him. Determined to exclude naval officers who had fought for Napoleon, Dubouchage made his selection on the basis of de Chaumareys’ aristocratic pedigree and pro-Bourbon sympathies, not on his merits as a sea captain: at the time the Medusa set sail in June 1816 , de Chaumareys had not served on board a French ship for twenty years. His incompetence, both in terms of seamanship and above all leadership, led to the grounding of the Medusa on 2 July and encouraged the panic that swept those on board. After attempts to re-float the stricken vessel, the decision was made to abandon her. Approximately 250 people made their disorganized way into small boats, leaving the rest, the vast majority of whom were ordinary soldiers, with sailors and a handful of low-ranking officers and civilians, to a makeshift raft. This, it was agreed, would be towed to safety. In the haste to get to shore, the towropes were (according to Savigny and Corréard) deliberately untied, leaving 149 men and one woman stranded. With few provisions and no navigational equipment, the situation on the raft rapidly deteriorated. Outbreaks of mutiny and acts of mindless violence occurred from the second day, and by the fourth all the survivors were practicing cannibalism. On the eighth day, in order to extend the remaining provisions, the fittest among the survivors elected to throw the badly injured and dying overboard. The final 15 men survived for another five days until their rescue by the brig the Argus. Five died shortly afterwards in St Louis, the colonial capital of Senegal, leaving 10 survivors of the original group.
20 staging THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA
