Complicating a Darling of Women’s History by Making the Political Personal

Guest Post by Malayna Evans –

They say, “kill your darlings.” But what if you just want to take a real-world darling down a peg?

The female pharaoh, Hatchepsut, ruled ancient Egypt for more than twenty years in the late fifteenth century BCE. Her reign is widely regarded as a period of peace and prosperity, celebrated for its impressive building programs and heralded for its advancements in international trade. While Hatchepsut was not the only woman to rule Egypt, her reign was the longest of the female pharaohs and was, by all accounts, remarkably successful. As an Egyptologist interested in the role of women in the ancient world, my favorite thing about Hatchepsut is the sense one gets that she promoted women, swelling the ranks of priestesses and elevating the title of wet nurse, to name a few examples in support of that thesis.

And yet…

As with many historical characters, a clear-eyed view of this darling of women’s history renders a more complex picture. For those of us who are so passionate about a time and place that we spend countless hours researching and writing about it, it’s not always comfortable to flag the negatives. But the truth is, Hatchepsut was, like the pharaohs before and after her, an authoritarian ruler who likely ruled with an iron fist, ensuring resources flowed to the powerful and the powerless remained toothless. There’s little question she was a remarkable woman and ruler. But it’s also true that she was not the kind of ruler most of us in the modern world would want to live under.

To my mind, shining a light on complicated realities such as this serves readers well. Readers turn to historical fiction for entertainment, yes. But they expect to learn—to be invited to think and rethink—along the way. History is bursting with warnings best not glossed over. Exploring the tensions that exist between the values our audiences hold and the eras our stories are set in can enlighten. Showing the good, the bad, and the ugly is one way to deliver new information, shed light on a period and its people, and explore some of the ways the world occupied by historical actors was both similar to, and different from, ours.

But how can we as writers keep the worldview of our protagonists authentic while illuminating cultural clashes? After all, our protagonists are usually part of the culture ours clashes with. This can be particularly challenging when writing from the point-of-view of a protagonist who is a member of the dominant group. And casting a negative light on much-loved figures can risk alienating readers, who don’t always appreciate the amplification of their hero’s flaws.

Fortunately for me, wiser writers than me have tackled these challenges again and again. Indeed, the book that first made a much younger me love historical fiction, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, appealed to me in part because it made me question what I thought I knew of the noble Caesar Agusta, who was depicted in the novel through the eyes of a maligned relative as a man managed by his wife. Graves shifted the lens to give us a more complicated, less admirable, emperor. And Augusta is one of many figures humbled by savvy writers. Biblical Adam, for example, is shown as a thin-skinned, power-hungry misogynist in Nikki Marmery’s Lilith. He’s not merely a disappointing ex, but a threat to women and any power or equality they might hope to wield, a threat the protagonist aims to overcome. In The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, Debra Magpie Earling reshapes the traditional depiction of Sacajewea as a helpful interpreter for Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition to show readers a sexually abused young girl forced to mate and work against her will, casting Lewis and Clark as colonialists complicit in the brutality she faces.

In each of these cases, the political is made personal. The emotions and intimacy of the protagonists’ relationships with admired historical characters transformed an emperor, the first man, and two celebrated expeditioners into a clueless husband, a controlling ex, and two men indifferent to the suffering of a young girl under their care. If those who went before me could accomplish that, surely I could position Hatchepsut as an effective ruler while also conveying the authoritative nature of her rule, nodding to Hatchepsut’s achievements and despotism while ensuring Neferura read as a woman of the ancient world. Neferura benefited from her mother’s power. She was no small-d-democrat, nor did I want to make her one. And of course, although both women wielded extraordinary power, their status may not have protected them entirely from the realities imposed on them by their female bodies.

Ultimately, I employed a singular marker of authoritarian regimes, something that might offend a woman from the ancient world, even one who was part of the power structure. When I found that something, I latched on and personalized it. For me, the solution was propaganda. For what is propaganda but lies told often and loudly by the powerful? What if, I imagined, Neferura wasn’t one of the liars, but one of the lied to? Daughters, even those who lived 3,500 years ago, might plausibly take offense at being lied to, especially if the lies hurt them personally. So motivated by political ambition, Hatchepsut tells Neferura some doozies. The lies wound and surprise enough to shift Neferura’s perception of her mother while leaving her cultural and religious beliefs intact.

By personalizing the political, I found a path that enabled me to reveal different sides of Hatchepsut’s rule; keep Neferura authentic to her time; explore the intimate aspects of their patriarchal civic context; and feel confident savvy readers will learn something about the glories of this time and place I’m so fond of and how it compares to the world we share now.

Hopefully fans of ancient Egypt’s most successful female pharaoh will forgive my sometimes-harsh treatment of this remarkable woman and walk away with an expanded sense of her possible strengths and accomplishments as well as her potential challenges, failures, and weaknesses. Sometimes diminishing a darling is worth ruffling a few feathers.