Chapter 3 - On the Other Hand

Summary

Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.