Reclaiming Desire: Cleopatra's Sexuality from the Augustan Era to the Present Time

Abstract

Cleopatra VII was the last pharaoh of Egypt, and perhaps she has been the greatest female ruler in all history, but she has been best known because of her affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, her alleged beauty and sexual excesses. Since only a limited number of facts of her actual life can be ascertained, Cleopatra has become a myth, a feminine archetype, an iconic figure whose name is still remembered after two millennia. Romans’ distaste for powerful women and Octavius’s need to consolidate his rise to dictator gave rise to her legend while she was still alive. Over the centuries she has continued to be an object of mythmaking, to such an extent that the historical figure has been swamped with fiction. In particular, there seems to be one aspect of Cleopatra which, more than any other, has captured the imagination of writers, poets, playwrights and audiences around the world, and this is her sexuality. The aim of this work is to offer an excursus on the multiple representations of Cleopatra in literature, by examining how her sexuality has been portrayed differently at different stages in history, but how it has always represented an essential component of her controversial characterisation from the imperial poetry produced under Octavius’s reign, to the Victorian age, passing through William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Alexander Pushkin and Théophile Gautier. Eventually, a subjective analysis of a contemporary reception of the Egyptian queen’s myth, "Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra" by Barbara Chase-Riboud, has been provided to highlight how postcolonial and feminist literary appropriations have recently attempted to reject and subvert the woman’s stereotypical portrayals.