Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt by Eleanor Dobson

Author:Eleanor Dobson [Dobson, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526141880
Goodreads: 49920669
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

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‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt

Molly Youngkin

In September 1890, while commenting on Sarah Bernhardt's and Lillie Langtry's performances in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in Paris and London, a reviewer for the periodical Truth posed an intriguing question: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Cleopatra was the culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt?’1 This question was followed with some provocative commentary: ‘We never make to ourselves a god of any kind that we do not end by resembling’; ‘Egyptian ladies were too deep in cat-worship not to have found in the mousing deity a model for imitation in their domestic lives. There is nothing that a cat does which Cleopatra did not do without exquisite cattish grace. Her goings on with Antony were those of a cat playing with a mouse’.2

The reviewer's thoughts about Cleopatra – as a representative for ancient Egyptian women's embrace of cat-worship and adoption of the graceful but also manipulative qualities of cat goddesses – reflect a revealing mixture of cultural influences on Victorian views of ancient Egypt in the late nineteenth century. Egyptology, which grew steadily as British explorers excavated artefacts from sacred tombs, drew Victorians to a variety of art forms, including theatre, that told stories of ancient Egypt. The lasting literary influence of Shakespeare – promoted by new editions, theatrical productions and visual representations of his work – encouraged Victorians to see Shakespeare's plays as allegories for Britain's relationship to its colonies. In Egypt, this included the 1882 British occupation, which sparked discussion in the periodical press about ‘the Egyptian Question’: should Britain be involved in the daily operations of Egypt? Concern over this, as well as ‘the Woman Question’, which focused on whether British women should have the same legal rights as their male counterparts, engaged Victorian men and women in debates about their relationships with each other. To use a phrase from Truth's review, how was the graceful but manipulative cat, as she manifested herself in the modern British woman, playing with the mouse (or the modern British man) to assert her desire for emancipation from old laws about marriage and family?

This chapter examines this mixture of cultural influences on Victorian views about ancient Egypt, as reflected in reviews of Bernhardt's and Langtry's portrayals of Cleopatra in the periodical press. Drawing on critical and historical work about the spectacle of nineteenth-century theatre, the spectacle of late Victorian actresses’ bodies (including their feline-like forms), Victorian knowledge about Egyptian cat-worship, and the rehabilitation of the cat as a friendly pet in the Victorian period, this chapter lays out important cultural contexts for understanding audience reaction to Bernhardt's and Langtry's portrayals. I especially focus on how Cleopatra embodied the duality of the Egyptian cat, who possessed the threatening qualities of the lion goddess Sekhmet but also the protective qualities of the domesticated cat goddess Bastet. I also scrutinise the duality of Victorian womanhood, the mother/‘whore’ binary that perpetuated the view that women were either nurturing mothers or alluring seductresses.

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