Ancient/Now - White Feminist Claims of Nefertiti
1950s white feminism and the desire to connect with Nefertiti's patriarchal power
Nefertiti
Kara here with a little ancient-modern anecdote… I was just talking to my mother about book ideas and all the things, and she told me about a late 1950s TV show with Loretta Young that featured Nefertiti. My mother commented to me how strange it was that she never forgot that particular episode. Prescient indeed as my mother did not know she would later have a strange daughter who would devote her life to the study of these ancient Egyptian people.
This particular episode of The Loretta Young Show on YouTube (watch it! It’s short! Loretta Young has AMAZING Nefertiti-like cheekbones!) instructs late 1950’s America about Akhenaten’s religious and righteous fervor, crafting a fiction about Nefertiti’s doubt of her husband’s new religion (“Have you offended all the gods by singling out one?”) and Akhenaten’s determination to have peace and love at all costs, even with the Hittite empire breathing down Egypt’s neck ready to invade, as the chief general with a ridiculous helmet informs the king.
The Loretta Young Show art designers fail in some respects (very bad hieroglyphs thrown haphazardly onto overly straight and white walls) and win in other arenas (the pleated linen garments, thankfully absent *most* of the polyester fake sparkly ridiculousness that styled Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra). Despite the obvious and disturbing amount of Black Face worn by the all-white cast, there is attention given to quotidian details. Even the throne found in the tomb of Tutankhamun makes an appearance in Akhenaten’s palace, its backrest depicting the queen standing in loving attention to her king (a fact that would serendipitously please Nick Reeves who argues that this particular throne was originally made for Akhenaten!).
Watching the episode, I was struck that all the same Egyptological debates about Akhenaten’s profound religious changes and all the same modern obsessions about his beautiful queen Nefertiti (whose name means “The Beautiful One Has Come”) find their way into this short television piece—including discussions about queenship, kingship, and what was potentially behind Akhenaten’s religious agenda. These personages from more than 3,000 years ago still intrigue us; Akhenaten’s religious innovations haunt us.
This Loretta Young episode is reflective of a conservative, post-war America, and Akhenaten’s religion is filtered through that lens, glorifying Akhenaten as the world’s first monotheist, a pacifist and even a feminist, of sorts, who not only gave his wife (kinda) equal play in his regime, but according to the Loretta Young scriptwriters, only had one wife (as if, says the Egyptologist!) and eschewed a harem (whatever…). This 1950s version of Akhenaten even has him inventing monogamy! He tells his courtiers he will have only One Wife as he knows there is only One God (mind you, all the ancient evidence indicates that royal women like Kiya and even Akhenaten’s own daughters belonged to his harem; we will revisit that latter point in a moment).
I was struck by a white, conservative feminist vibe that has claimed women like Nefertiti as its role models—a rich, elite powerful woman with authority and strong opinions, a woman who could work the patriarchy to her own end, able to make men fall mindlessly in love with her, able to slap her servants and daughters around (yes, she beats her servants and strikes her daughter on the face for protesting, a moment that sets up Akhenaten pleading that there is never an excuse for violence, even Bad Help…). We see that Nefertiti has a manipulative and emotional control over the men around her, from her husband, the king, to the artist Thutmose, the latter helpless to her charms as the queen sits for her limestone portrait bust, the former bloodcurdlingly jealous of anyone else’s affection for his precious wife. All of these men are ultimately subservient to Nefertiti’s machinations, emotions, and agenda, and we see one privileged woman’s understanding of female power—Loretta Young’s—commenting on another privileged woman’s female power—Nefertiti. It’s a patriarchal club infiltrated by a few, select ladies; the greatest power a woman can possibly have, according to these screenwriters, is to have the emotional strings of everyone in her household within her grasp. This 1950s Nefertiti is an empowered, evangelist Trad-Wife.
And how is Akhenaten’s regime understood in this black and white TV episode? His family court is presented as a peace-and-love, prosperity gospel, punctuated by performative family togetherness. We learn that this king recognizes and bravely follows the One True God for the first time in all of human history, against the advice of all his elites and generals, even against the advice of his own wife who will later admit the Truth and accept the superior insight of her prophet-husband (again not what really happened, but who really knows on this point).
The episode starts with the serene family tableau of Akhenaten and Nefertiti holding their daughters on their laps with loving attention. When the artist Thutmose wants to carve the scene into stone, a court official is aghast at the inappropriate and personal nature of the scene. But the king protests! He sees it as a way to spread his Good News! The people will see that following the One True God will get any patriarch a beautiful wife and loving attention! It is a lovely family scene on a superficial level, but nowadays many Egyptologists see a clearly sexualized message as Akhenaten holds the body of his eldest daughter—she is at once tiny and yet fully developed with breasts and hips—with his arm and hand between her legs, kissing her full on the lips.
Egyptologists surmise that Akhenaten sired children with his eldest daughters whom he officially married and elevated to Great Royal Wives (alas, no One Wife for One God, after all!). We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy, and Eisenhower’s gingham and picket fence America has since morphed into Donald Trump’s grabbing ‘em by the pussy and oodles of obvious patriarchal self-dealing replete with evangelical prosperity-gospel excess. It’s not that those patriarchal things didn’t exist in 1958; it’s just that we weren’t allowed to see them. Our current Zeitgeist pushes us to finally admit the abuse of the fanatical authoritarian for what it is. (For more on this, see my chapter on Akhenaten in my book THE GOOD KINGS where I made the annoying assertion that Tutankhamun was the offspring of Akhenaten and one of his daughters).
All history is filtered through its many writers with their many perspectives embedded within their own Zeitgeist. Loretta Young herself was a conservative Catholic, on the one hand, who, on the other hand, led an unusual, path-breaking life, including a vibrant career starring in and producing her own tv show and multiple marriages after early, out-of-wedlock motherhood to a daughter fathered by Clark Gable, a union she would eventually understand was nothing less than rape. Young’s desire to connect with Nefertiti’s beauty and power is palpable and representative of many modern elite women who aggrandize these ancient Egyptian queens as proof that we have already broken the glass ceiling and that no more work needs to be done, all the while clinging to the patriarchal systems that granted them such might. It is pious-apologist-patriarchal-exclusive-feminism wearing Blackface. But that’s not Loretta Young’s fault; that’s just her Zeitgeist. It’s our Feminist Inheritance. And if that’s the only feminism we have been able to muster thus far, then that’s the only feminism we deserve. Fantasies about Nefertiti cannot save us.
Pre-order Kara’s new book!
Looks like my latest book Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse and the Theban Royal Caches is available for pre-order on Amazon! It costs a very reasonable (trust me on this) $125, not bad for an academic volume in late capitalism (!!). The book has almost 1,000–YES, ONE THOUSAND—color images lovingly and personally (just ask Kylie Thomsen) laid out into InDesign. Nefertiti’s body and coffin did not make it into the Royal Caches, but a whole lot of other kings and queens did. The female-patriarchal power is amply represented in the coffins of Ahmes-Nefertari, Ahhotep, and Nodjmet.
Anyway, please pre-order this coffins book so AUC knows if they must print more than the 1,200 they have planned; it’s taken me 10 years to and craft and almost put me into a coffin, given the two visits I took to Urgent Care in the last month of edits (!).
What have we been reading this week?
Women in Archaeology: Intersectionalities in Practice Worldwide
Neolithic and Predynastic Egypt
In ancient California matrilocal society, daughters got to breastfeed longer and women accumulated greater wealth
At the Met, She Holds Court. At Home, She Held 71 Looted Antiquities.
Hidden details of Egyptian paintings revealed by chemical imaging
Copper Age Grave: Male Chief was Actually a Woman
An Israeli First-Grader Stumbled on a 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Amulet on a School Trip
Art Moves: Three Vatican Parthenon Fragments go to Greek Archbishopric, then Acropolis Museum
A Norwegian Dad Hiking With His Family Discovered a Rock Face Covered With Bronze Age Paintings
Benin Bronzes Lawsuit Against Smithsonian: Deadria Farmer-Paellmann & Bruce Afran Interview
One more thing…
Looks like there is a fancy, ancient Armenian wine with my name on it. I own it, I tell you. It just needs the apostrophe. Send all bottles you can source to my UCLA address.
Im so excited for your book to come out