The Role of Cleopatras Children in Defining Her Character :: Egypt History Queen Essays

The Role of Cleopatra's Children in Defining Her Character Abstract There are few roles that Cleopatra has not been made to fulfill. She is queen, goddess, lover, whore, wife, witch. Yet it is her role as mother that most defines how she is to be perceived, and which of these other roles she will take on in a given work of literature. Cleopatra's children, or the absence of them, play a definitive role in characterizing Cleopatra. When Cleopatra is childless, she acts like a child herself, either petty and selfish or so deeply in love that she ignores all else. When she has children, however, her role as mother extends far beyond her actual offspring and encompasses all of Egypt. Her protectiveness of her children is used to mirror her protectiveness of Egypt-if she is a good mother than she is also a good queen. Whether she is a good mother, a bad mother, or no mother at all is used by every author or director to characterize Cleopatra as a woman and as a symbol. The Total Absence of Children Cleopatra's childlessness in literature and film is meant to allow her to be viewed as childish herself. Egypt is of little importance to her. She cares deeply only for love and pleasure, or for nothing at all. Not only is she not yet a queen, but she may never be. In Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, Cleopatra is both chronologically and mentally a child. Not only do she and Caesar not have children together, they do not even have a sexual relationship. Shaw "makes Cleopatra, who was probably about nineteen or twenty when Caesar arrived in Egypt, into an emotionally and intellectually retarded sixteen year old who pouts and prattles...peeping out from behind her nurse like a bashful toddler" (Hughes-Hallet 252). In order change Caesar from a lover into a father-figure, Shaw turns Cleopatra into a helpless but petty infant; he glorifies Caesar's character at the detriment of Cleopatra's. After her altogether pointless and foolish carpet scene that actually costs the lives of Roman soldiers, Caesar says to a scared and clinging Cleopatra, "My poor child, your life matters little here to anyone but yourself" (Shaw 84). Not only is Shaw's Cleopatra childish and indifferent to the plight of Egypt, but she is completely useless. Even Caesar, with whom she has the closest relationship to in the play, who takes on the role of a father, does not really care whether she lives or dies.