The Ishmaelite of Femininity
• Amorous Pop Culture
From a cultural history of the images of Cleopatra:
Romantics and decadents alike adored the story. Cleopatra was reborn as the femme fatale, the personification of the bourgeois male’s sexual guilt and the realisation of his most deliciously painful self-castigating fantasies. Plutarch had recorded that, in preparation for her own death, she tested poisons on her household slaves … Sarah Bernhardt starred repeatedly over three decades (doggedly continuing even after she had lost a leg) was not Shakespeare’s, but one written to the actress’s order by Victorien Sardou, in which the queen is a sadistic voluptuary given to performing elaborate striptease. Meanwhile, the bestselling novelist H Rider Haggard came up with a new twist when he revealed that the youth Cleopatra took to bed was actually her own son.
Cleopatra had become the personification of vice, flouter of every convention, breacher of every taboo. She was barely human. … Ruthless, beautiful, bestial, this fantastic Cleopatra seemed to offer Europeans, feeling cramped in an increasingly regulated society, an escape into a Nietzschean wonderland of moral irresponsibility and violent pleasure.