New Imperialism and the Problem of Cleopatra

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how, by the closing decades of the century, Rome had eclipsed both Greek and Germanic pasts as a model for figuring ideal imperial masculinity. This is most apparent in late Victorian writing about Egypt. Britain’s newest imperial acquisition in 1882 was also, significantly, the backdrop for ancient Rome’s triumph over the East and over Egypt’s most famous queen, Cleopatra. This chapter demonstrates how Henry Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) and the various stories now referred to collectively as ‘Mummy Fiction’, dramatize the extent to which British imperial identity and experience had become aligned with Roman examples by the end of the century. The New Imperialist is cast as a modern-day Caesar or Antony in his relationship with empire, as territorial and sexual desires become conflated and focused on the figure of Cleopatra herself.