From Isis to Elizabeth Taylor and on
Sara Maitland
CLEOPATRA: HISTORIES, DREAMS AND DISTORTIONS by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Bloomsbury, £16.95, pp.338
This book is an instance of a growing genre, somewhere between biography and cultural history. Take an historic character, usually a female one, and explore not only the actual 'objective' events of her life but also her (or his) continuing history — the cultural history of how her life has been retold, understood and used. It is a valu- able populist use of modern theories of representation; and it makes good reading. Marina Warner's two books, Alone of All her Sex and St Joan are very fine examples of this sort of writing.
Cleopatra is an obvious subject for this approach. Her 'after life' exists in two contrasting cultures — the Middle East as well as Europe. Two thousand years is long enough to have attracted the attention of artists and historians of very diverse view- points; she has been celebrated in a wide range of media. Shakespeare's `Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety' has proved so apt that I am amazed that Hughes-Hallett was able to resist using it as a subtitle for her book — Cleopatra: Her Infinite Variety would have made a good title.
Hughes-Hallett has done a fine job. If occasionally her understanding of women's roles feels a bit dogged and simplistic she compensates with lively writing and a wide canvas. The three opening chapters are the most fascinating. Here the author explores the origins of the mythology, and reveals that Cleopatra, even in her lifetime, was a `cultural construct', deliberately and pains- takingly created to serve very material ends. Both she and Octavius were brilliant propagandists for their own causes. The war between them was more than a battle for supremacy in the eastern Mediterran- ean, it was a war for cultural dominance.
From Octavius' point of view it was vital to establish that Egypt was not and never could be again the great imperial power of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond: the Ptolemaic dynasty, being both Hellenic and Egyptian, representing both the major challenges to Rome, had to be destroyed, had to be demonstrated as weak, decadent, outmoded and everything that was not Roman. Cleopatra was a perfect target Egyptians have women rulers and look what happens; depravity and extrava- gance. Under her baleful influence, Antony is ruined; his virility, his self- discipline, his military skills, his very Roman-ness is destroyed. Cleopatra, not Antony, was Rome's enemy.
Cleopatra's projected self-image was the exact opposite. Romans are vulgar, uncul- tured and brutish; out of Egypt come the ancient truths and the ancient gods, and Cleopatra is their avatar. In the most theatrical of pageants, throughout the Mid- dle East, she presented herself as Isis, an abundant, maternal liberator of the East. Even her death was staged with consum mate care.
Hughes-Hallett takes up the tale from there; showing Cleopatra being put to use as moral exemplar of almost anything that anyone wanted: the faithful martyr of love to Chaucer, the retarded sexual infant to Shaw, the sado-masochistic killer to Heine, the priestess of high camp to Mankiewicz. Whatever is most desirable, most danger- ous and most extreme in any society's view of women, there is a new Cleopatra ready for reconstruction. Hughes-Hallett has chosen to use her material chronologically rather than thematically which may have been an error since it flattens the complex- ity of each period's understandings, but has the advantage of making the book very straightforward to read and underlining the cultural evolution in the representation of women.
Although gender is the primary issue here, Hughes-Hallett broadens her work by her sensitivity to the parallel issue of race. Cleopatra is not just woman, she is also foreign and all the cultural stereotypes that go with those concepts further compli- cate the uses to which her life has been put.
Hughes-Hallett ends, a bit too apologeti- cally, with some suggestions for yet another reconstruction: this is a bold idea and I wish she had developed it further. It would be fun and appropriate to have Cleopatra get off her barge and into her clothes and stand as a symbol of unification between West and East, love and power, male and female. One of Hughes-Hallett's main points is about the power of narrative, of story-telling and icon-making. With a cultural past as long and rich as Cleopatra's is revealed to be, a little futuristic fiction writing would have been justified and would have added something original to an already useful book.
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