Victorian Cleopatras: Sexuality, Race and Empire at the Fin de Siecle.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: Department of English Literature
Abstract
While the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall described Cleopatra as a tragic mother, writers for the Spectator and Tinsley's Magazine cast her as a royal harlot who seduced and ruined Marc Antony. Drawing on Graeco Roman biography (Plutarch, Pliny, Suetonius, and Lucan), Victorian Cleopatras occupied spaces between feminine and masculine, mother and whore, civilised and savage, Greek and Egyptian. With Britain's territorial expansion into Africa, and the emergence of sexually-ambiguous Aesthetes and politically active New Women, the fin de siècle saw once rigid categories of race, sexuality and gender dissolve. Cleopatra's positioning between such binaries reflects the contemporaneous dissolution of established Victorian values. By analysing visual culture including artwork by Edward Poynter, adaptations of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, fiction by authors including Marie Corelli and Bram Stoker, as well as pertinent archives, this project will demonstrate how Cleopatra was used to explore finde-siecle concerns.
Chapter One will focus on the Victorian fascination with ancient Egyptian jewellery. Curse narratives like Stoker's 'The Jewel of Seven Stars' (1903) portray jewellery as corrupting women who seek liberation by emulating Cleopatra. Chapter Two will investigate Cleopatra's impact on fashion and theatrical costumes with particular attention to H. D. Everett's Iras (1896). Chapter Three will demonstrate how invasion fiction, like H. Rider Haggard's 'Cleopatra' (1889) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), reveal anxieties generated by Egyptian resistance to British expansion. Chapter Four will show how Poynter and Corelli use Cleopatra's status as a female Egyptian Pharaoh of Greek heritage to explore race and sexuality. This project questions: how did Victorian Cleopatras stimulate discussions about women's rights? How was the Cleopatra of Greek and Roman sources radically reimagined in late-Victorian fiction? What political possibilities were unleashed once Cleopatra transformed from antiheroine of classical antiquity into ubiquitous icon of popular culture?
Chapter One will focus on the Victorian fascination with ancient Egyptian jewellery. Curse narratives like Stoker's 'The Jewel of Seven Stars' (1903) portray jewellery as corrupting women who seek liberation by emulating Cleopatra. Chapter Two will investigate Cleopatra's impact on fashion and theatrical costumes with particular attention to H. D. Everett's Iras (1896). Chapter Three will demonstrate how invasion fiction, like H. Rider Haggard's 'Cleopatra' (1889) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), reveal anxieties generated by Egyptian resistance to British expansion. Chapter Four will show how Poynter and Corelli use Cleopatra's status as a female Egyptian Pharaoh of Greek heritage to explore race and sexuality. This project questions: how did Victorian Cleopatras stimulate discussions about women's rights? How was the Cleopatra of Greek and Roman sources radically reimagined in late-Victorian fiction? What political possibilities were unleashed once Cleopatra transformed from antiheroine of classical antiquity into ubiquitous icon of popular culture?
