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172 While Elizabeth Taylor was in Rome shooting the spectacular Hollywood epic Cleopatra, women’s magazines began to advise their readers how to create “a new Egyptian look” whose models were Nefertiti and Cleopatra, Egypt’s two most iconic queens.1 An article in Look magazine for 27 February 1962 predicted: Superimpose two such famous glamour girls as Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra, and you are in for a beauty boom. In her role as Egypt’s seductive queen, actress Taylor’s exotic eye makeup, diverse hair styles (devised with 30 wigs), magnificent jewels and gowns are bound to inspire a new Egyptian look every bit as sweeping as the recent tousled B.B. and pale-lipped Italian looks. Alongside a glamour photograph of two models, the text indicates what the staff has done to give them “the new Egyptian look reminiscent of the regal, exotic beauties seen on ancient bas-reliefs”: eyes lined with kohl to cultivate a sensuous, catlike look; mouths boldly painted to create the illusion of a full lower lip; eyebrows heavily outlined in black; Nile-green eye shadow, henna-colored powder, and a Cleopatra coif applied to the blonde; white shadow, very pale powder, and a high-rising Nefertiti hairstyle applied to the brunette; the necks of both decorated with elaborate beaded collars made out of costume jewelry.2 The following page instructs the magazine’s readers “How to change American girls into Egyptian beauties—with new hairdos,” while the article’s final page shows “a Liz Taylor look-alike” successfully kitted out for the evening in the Cleopatra look.3 This essay explores the most personalized and intimate technology of Egyptomania that has been widely disseminated and even inscribed on the bodies of modern women. Starting in the nineteenth century, we trace a range of female †Deceased 23 September 2004 8 Glamour Girls Cleomania in Mass Culture Maria Wyke and Dominic Montserrat† Glamour Girls 173 identifications with Cleopatra and analyze their widespread solicitation in the mass culture of that century and the one that follows. Like the faces of Cleopatra and Nefertiti projected onto those of modern “American girls,” these identifications cross boundaries between past and present made fluid and porous by the familiarity of Egyptian culture and its domestication in popular media. If the American girl becomes the Egyptian beauty, the Egyptian beauty also becomes the American girl. We argue that the thoroughly modern Cleopatras of the Hollywood film stars Theda Bara and Claudette Colbert can be seen as the predictable outcome of many years of such essentialist appropriations of Cleopatra to create star personae. We place these modern embodiments of Cleopatra in their historical contexts, asking what knowledge of Egypt is deployed to shape them and what conceptions of gender and sexuality they parade.4 VICTORIAN CLEOPATRAS Victorian England conveniently provides exemplars of the two popular traditions of Cleopatra that were in place by the beginning of the twentieth century . For the Victorians, the name Cleopatra was a signifier for Egypt itself, a transhistorical signifier that marked any Egyptian cultural material, of whatever period, as Egyptian. The name “Cleopatra’s Needle,” was applied to the obelisk brought from Alexandria to London in 1870, to enormous media attention. The obelisk itself was carved during the reign of Thutmose III, more than 1,400 years before Cleopatra was born. But a huge range of Cleopatras was available to the Victorian Londoners who walked past the newly erected obelisk on the Thames Embankment, a range that reflected the high profile of Egypt in the media of the time. Political events connected with imperialist government, such as the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870 and the establishment of the British Protectorate in Egypt in 1882, reminded people that in antiquity Egypt itself had ruled a great empire, and that Cleopatra, the Eastern opponent of the West, had been its last queen before she was vanquished by Rome. They would have been able to go to the theater and see plays about her: not only Shakespeare’s canonical Antony and Cleopatra, but also burlesques that used the Cleopatra story to satirize contemporary culture and mores, and new treatments by Victorien Sardou and George Bernard Shaw. There was also a proliferation of novels and other fictional treatments that reinforced the connection of Cleopatra with unbridled Eastern sensuality and mystic knowledge, especially those of H. Rider Haggard (1889) and Théophile Gautier (1894). Rider Haggard’s influential Cleopatra had been serialized in an illustrated literary magazine before it was...

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