دانلود رمان رجینا: تاریخ جدیدی از زنان و قدرت

The woman is at the back of the temple, a beautiful carving in stone. She is making offerings to the gods, behind a taller man. Slight and youthful, dressed to the ankles, she is huge, over six foot tall, but then all the gures are huge. She wears a simple gown, holds the sistrum, a sacred musical instrument, in her hand, with the young man in front of her depicted as more important. To the passing eye, she might be a temple priestess. Visitors hurry past, preferring the exquisite carvings and the sensational zodiac clock inside the bustling main temple. Yet she is Cleopatra VII, queen of Upper and Lower Egypt, the terror of Rome, speaker of over seven languages, war leader, economist, a survivor who fought and won against her siblings for power, held Egypt’s independence against all the odds. In front of her is Caesarion, her child with Julius Caesar; he wears the crown of the ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt, while she wears the smaller crown of Hathor, goddess of fertility, love and motherhood. Here at Dendera Temple near Luxor one of the greatest female rulers in history is displayed as she wished to be remembered: as a holy mother-queen, founder of a new dynasty and a queen who ruled thinking of her son. Cleopatra is called a sex goddess, a tragic failure, a cautionary tale about what can happen if you give women power: showy theatrics, death. This was how she was written about by her enemies, not how she had herself depicted, here at her favourite temple and across Egypt. In the respectable guidebook I bought at the Egyptian Museum, the author declared it ‘odd’ to see Cleopatra at Dendera thus, in this ‘anonymous form’ rather than ‘ esh and blood’, the ‘centre-spread fold out who bedded the two most powerful Romans of her day’.1 Centre-spread! This reduces Cleopatra to a seductive nude model, a sex queen, the object of men’s desires who is punished for provoking them, with the associations of ‘spread’ and ‘ esh and blood’. The ‘real’ Cleopatra is not a ruler portraying herself to her people as a queen making offerings to the god, mother of a king, but rather a woman who poses undressed for male magazine readers. The divine mother representation of her wasn’t ‘odd’ but probably in many temples across Egypt. But the ‘spread’ is only a slightly more extreme version of the Cleopatra that the world likes to think of: glamorous, led by her desires, the woman who ruined Egypt due to her passion for men. Not the queen of incredible courage who did more to stave off occupation than any other ruler, the first of her line to speak Egyptian, the bureaucrat who saved her country from famine and in ation. We are served up sexy, sex-mad Cleopatra, reclining, whether in Shakespeare’s barge or a centrefold magazine. Our images of women and women leaders are constructed, mostly by men, even when the queens might try to present themselves. If Cleopatra, the most famous queen in history, is cast as being led by vanity, sexual desire and emotion (anger, an emotion associated with men, is never seen as a problem), it plays into a deep-rooted fear of giving women power, for they waste it, lose their country. Across society, throughout history, there is an impulse to reduce queens to a single image: tragic sex goddess, warrior queen, doomed queen. Queens are criticised, portrayed as failures or seductresses to save the reputations of husbands or other male rulers. Cleopatra is castigated to make the Roman men look better, just one example of an intelligent, successful, adept ruler, reduced to a ‘centrefold’, a cartoon, a caricature. This book investigates 3,000 years of female rulers – queens regnant, consorts, princesses and queens-in-waiting – and shows how female power is oen erased, compromised and twisted by words and images. Sometimes, women are literally scraped off their monuments. Or if, like Cleopatra, they hang too heavily over history to be excluded, they are instead reduced to lurid examples of sex and destruction. Why do we see queens and royal women in the way we do? They are either feted beyond measure as warrior queens, saints or fairy princesses or castigated as monsters, sexual obsessives, feminine failures. Queens are mythological beings. They are so woven round with myths and stories, legends that dress them more vitally than their crowns. Cleopatra becomes a seductress, Catherine the Great loved a horse, any male counsellor is assumed to be a lover. Their contribution tends to be minimised. Marie Antoinette’s shoe-shopping threw a whole nation into debt; she was so reviled that she had to be executed along with her husband in a much less fair trial, while her husband’s brothers, the male heirs to the throne, were le alive (and later took the throne). Cutting off the queen consort’s head was to symbolise the end of the monarchy. Ranavalona of Madagascar was a monster, Mary I is not known as the rst queen regnant of England but ‘Bloody Mary’ because she burned over 280 at the stake – while her father, Henry VIII, had executed tens of thousands and her cousin’s child, James I, would burn around 2,500 Scottish women because he decided they were witches (spoiler: they weren’t). Joanna of Spain was declared mad by her husband and father and even her son so they could seize her country. Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawaii was imprisoned in her own palace aer being presented as despotically hanging on to royal privilege, not allowed to write in prison but permitted a needle and thread, she sewed her story of resistance into a quilt. Even the ‘good’ queens, whom history has presented as protecting and improving their country, get swamped by their image, whether warrior like Boudica or Zenobia, or virgin queen like Elizabeth I. And most royal woman are, particularly Elizabeth, seemingly, punished for ‘vanity’, a catch-all that encompasses wearing royal jewels or being portrayed as the mythological gure the public wanted, Venus or Gloriana, or at the top of the social tree at Versailles. Even suffering from an eating disorder is cast as ‘vanity’. The portrayal of queens and royal women matters. They are oen the most visible women in history, and in some periods of history they are the only women we really know about. What is said about them impacts the perception of all women. If a queen, meant to be above all women, can’t hold power or manage money or stay faithful, why should any female be given any self-determination, independent income or freedom in real life? Early monastic chroniclers wrote about shocking queens as cautionary moral tales, later we have satirists or newspaper reporters who create caricatures for public consumption, and then, in the modern day, repeatedly come accusations that women are self-indulgent, vain, lacking intellect, seducing, ruling men, blamed for their own sexual assault. Even though royal women live in gilded cages of money and privilege, exercising power over the lives of thousands, still their representations matter. They rebound on all women. We live on a planet on which women in many regions are denied a voice; even in the most powerful country in the world it looks pretty unlikely that a woman will be voted president – and what we say about female rulers in the past impacts on how we see the likelihood of being led by women again. By placing all these royal women in one book we see how narratives are repeated, across countries, across centuries.