For writers outside Muslim countries, the focus is no longer on Akhenaten as a religious and political innovator but as a sexual being. Akhenaten was being made into a homoerotic object as early as the 1920s: Thomas Mann portrays him wearing make-up and henna on his nails and looking like a decadent English aristocrat, with all that that implies. Novels of more permissive times emphasise the sexuality, corruption and decadence of Amarna. Akhenaten's knowledge is no longer of higher thought, but of the wrong kind of sexual secrets: 'he knew things no prince should know, and almost nothing that a prince should'.49 The novel from which this came, David Stacton's On a Balcony (1958) is an early example of fascination with Akhenaten's sexuality, which sometimes takes on quite bizarre forms. Here Akhenaten has a fetishistic obsession with the body of Horemheb, whose 'navel was like a concave nipple. It was dark; it was warm; it was deep, and no doubt it had a very special smell. The prince very much wanted to stick his finger in it.' We also get to hear about Akhenaten's penis (it looked and smelled like a persimmon fruit), and his fondness for wearing gloves made of human skin to avoid being touched by ordinary mortals.50 This may all have seemed topical in 1958, with the much-publicised serial killings of Ed Gein, which influenced the 1960 Hitchcock film Psycho. Norman Bates and Akhenaten are, after all, two of culture's greatest mummy's boys.
The mid-1990s, fascinated with the sex lives of celebrities, have seen fictions of Akhenaten coming full circle from those first anodyne portrayals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amarna has become reincarnated as an Orientalist site of sensual visioning instead of a garden suburb; Akhenaten has become pansexual, having passionate physical relationships with his mother, wives (several of them), various daughters as well as the enigmatic Smenkhkare'. Stacton's novel exemplifies this, especially a scene where Nefertiti teaches Akhenaten how to make love to his harem of male catamites by fellating them; so does Akhenaten (1992), a cycle of poems by the Australian writer Dorothy Porter which narrates the story of Akhenaten and Nefertiti from beginning to end. Her poems emphasise sex and sexuality and use modern vernacular, but still have an oddly anachronistic quality. The unbounded sexuality of Porter's Akhenaten recalls the protagonists of early nineteenth-century Orientalist pornography like The Lustful Turk, while her use of cliched soap-opera situations seems jarringly familiar. In the following poem, She Said Look in the Mirror, Nefertiti is about to leave Akhenaten, whose infidelities and obsessions have got too much for her:
She told me to look
in the mirror.
She was leaving.
I wouldn't see a God
she said
I'd see myself.
I'd see why she was leaving.
She is my mirror.
I saw Meki's face outlined in mummy cloths I saw
with a pitiless indecency Smenkhkare's heaving hips as he comcs in my mouth My dead daughter my debauched little brother oh! my love! '1
Porter demotes Akhenaten from the quasi-Christ of Rawnsley and Lorimer to the individual entirely constructed around his sexuality that one would expect in a world after Freud, where the orgasm has replaced the crucifix as the symbol of universal longing. Akhenaten has turned from a saviour figure into the soap-opera character whose betrayed wife yells, 'Just take a look at yourself!' before she walks out and slams the front door.
The Amarna fictions show how the basic facts of Akhenaten's reign offer great dramatic and romantic possibilities. The ways in which these facts have been endlessly recyclcd and re-emphasised throughout the twentieth century are proof of the flexibility that gives legends their immortal quality. Akhenaten has been reincarnated as everything from proto-Christ to proto-Fascist. From a 1990s perspective, the popularly presented Amarna story resembles a kitsch soap opera. Its fulfils all the essential formulae: a simple and predictable plot; the sort of wealth and luxury most people can only imagine; a garnish of moral idealism and a bigger helping of the kind of human tragedy with which anyone could identify - the last two, in spite of all the evidence, seeming to make Akhenaten 'one of us'. This is the common denominator to all the Amarna novels. They are reminders of how strong is this desire to recognise ourselves in the past, and of the ways the past has been pillaged for confirmation of who we are and what we most want to be. Akhenaten is someone who participates in our struggles, conflicts and desires. This is particularly true of homosexual versions of Akhenaten produced in the 1980s and 1990s, which are the subject of the next and final chapter.
SEXUALITIES
My theory is that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were one and the same person! 'He' was an hermaphroditic transvestite who periodically made appearances as himself and his queen. Comment from the visitors' book of an exhibition of Amarna art at the Brooklyn Museum, quoted in Wedge 1977: 1 15
The novels I surveyed in the previous chapter showed the considerable curiosity about Akhenaten's sexual and emotional life from the very beginning of western interest in him. Victorian and Edwardian views of him were firmly heterosexual. Openly proclaiming 'the domestic pleasures of a monogamist', as Petrie put it in 1892, Akhenaten stood out like a beacon in a sea of uxorious pharaohs, and was the first family man. This optimistic picture soon began to be thrown into question, however. In 1910 the first psychoanalysts jumped on Breasted's eulogistic writings about Akhenaten, reading them as Ocdipal narratives. The discovery in the 1920s and 1930s of apparently androgynous images of Akhenaten such as the east Karnak colossi (Plate 2.1) made people wonder whether Akhenaten was a eunuch, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. As speculation about Akhenaten's sexual biology flourished, people also wondered about the nature of his personal relationships. In the 1920s the notion of an Akhenaten with homosexual interests creeps in, partly derived from contemporary ideas about homosexuality as a physical disease. He is described in words and phrases redolent of effeminacy, like languid, delicate, epicene, 'a feeble eccentric and dccadent aesthete'.' This feeling that things were not quite as they ought to be was apparently confirmed by a limestone stela found at Amarna (now in Berlin) which shows Akhenaten in close and intimate physical proximity with a male figure believed in the 1920s to be his successor Smenkhkare', though different identities are now ascribed to the figures (see Figure 7.1).2 This carving and other images of Akhenaten influenced Thomas Mann's portrayal of him in Joseph and his Brothers. Akhenaten, according to Mann, resembled 'an aristocratic young Englishman of somewhat decadent stock', weak-chinned, and with 'deeply, dreamily overshadowed eyes with lids he could never open quite wide'.'5 Decadent, dreamy, with heavy-lidded eyes: Mann's Akhenaten is a classic description of a 'sad young man', perhaps the most persistent visual cliche for representing homosexual men in western
Figure 7.1 Limestone stela from Amarna showing Akhenaten enthroned with another ruler, probably Amunhotep III or Nefertiti. The cartouches identifying the rulers were perhaps inscribed in paint or ink which has not survived. Height 21.7cm, width 16.5 cm. Agyptischcs Museum, Berlin, inv. 17813.
culture.4 Portrait miniatures of Akhenaten and Smenkhkare', painted on ivory by Winifred Brunton (1880-1959) in the late 1920s, reflect this characterisation. Brunton was no stranger to Egyptological circles - her husband was a keeper at the Cairo Museum. In her portraits, Brunton surrounds Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' with signifiers of femininity. Akhenaten, effete and hairless, wears a necklace of pink flowers; Smenkhkare', slight and in a diaphanous skirt, toys limp-wristedly with an ostrich-feather fan (see Plate 7.1). Others spelled out what Mann and Brunton only hinted at. In 1928 the Egyptologist Percy Newberry (1868-1949), who had dug with Petrie at Amarna, wrote of the Berlin stela: 'The intimate relations between the Pharaoh and the boy as shown by the scene on this stela recall the relationship between the Emperor Hadrian and the youth Anti- nous.'5 The comparison of Akhenaten with Hadrian and Smenkhkare' with Hadrian's lover Antinous is telling, because the latter were notoriously regarded as 'the most famous fairies in history'.6 But Newberry implies that Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' were challenging Hadrian and Antinous for that particular title. Perhaps the Egyptian link reflects the growing importance of the ancient and modern east, as opposed to the Greek world, as the central metaphor for male- male desire in the 1920s, as found in the novels of Ronald Firbank and others.7 At any rate, by 1928 Akhenaten was starting to shrug off his wholesome identity as the first family man to become a symbol of deviant sexual desire - the first homosexual in recorded history.