This dissertation shows how art spaces in nineteenth-century literary works are places where the perception of Cleopatra often entails sensory experiences that are entangled with ideas of gender, race, globalization, and empire. By asking why Cleopatra?, I consider the growing prominence and infinite variety of this Egyptian Queen as a case study for how womens bodies elicit widespread anxieties about national expansion and increasing freedoms of women. Perceiving a body like that of Cleopatra, I argue, is not just a visual transmission of ideas but is also a sensory interpretation of gender expectations and nationality through visual culture. Drawing on theories of literature, affect, feminism, and art, I show how interactions with art objects in texts such as Charlotte Bronts Villette, George Eliots Middlemarch, Nathaniel Hawthornes The Marble Faun, and Vernon Lees Amour Durealso reveal how characters thoughts and emotions are intertwined with the living and aesthetic bodies of these spaces. Though my dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century writing, my investigations of art historical writing, social space, and affect help elucidate how emotions are naturalized in social settings and how these norms instill cultural and social power dynamics in the Victorian period and today.