'A Woman is a Woman, if She had been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!':Mummy Fiction, Imperialism and the Politics of Gender

• Main Author: Nolwenn Corriou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2015-07-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: archaeological fiction; archaeology; egyptology; mummy fiction; Orientalism; imperialism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6899

This article tackles the way the archaeological fiction of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras constructs the work of Egyptology as a gendered pursuit, which brings about the encounter of an archaeologist, who embodies the masculine values of the British empire, and a female–and highly sexualised–artefact in the guise of the mummy. In the texts of H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker and H.D. Everett which constitute the corpus of this article, this encounter invariably turns into a love encounter, as the mummy sets about seducing the British archaeologist who violated her rest. Seductive, lustful and promiscuous, fictional mummies are indeed represented with the features and attributes of the Oriental female such as she was constructed in Orientalist literature and thought. In the 19th century, archaeology was indeed part of an imperial and Orientalist scientific apparatus whose aim was to elaborate as comprehensive a knowledge of the colonised territories as possible, in order to better control those territories. Archaeological investigations thus contributed to the construction of the image of an eternal Orient, forever frozen in an antique past, and thereby threatening its discoverers of regression to a primitive form of humanity. Taking into account the imperial dimension of Victorian archaeology, the fictional representations of egyptology act as a metaphor of colonial relations by emphasising the power dynamics at stake in the relation or relationship between the antique artefact and the British archaeologist. As a consequence, the motifs of archaeological fiction (the quest, the museum, the mummy's return to life) all become vehicles for the expression of the Victorian fears of regression and degeneration which increased proportionally with the imperial progress.