Nolwenn Corriou’s research while affiliated with Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and other places

The discovery of the Ancient Egyptian conception of the soul (“Ka” and “Ba”) is contemporaneous with a sense of disenchantment brought about by the scientific positivism which marks the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea of the transmigration of the soul offered fascinating possibilities for writers of Gothic fiction. Bram Stoker in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), Henry Rider Haggard in “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913) and Algernon Blackwood in The Wave (1916) imagined the devastating effects of the awakening of an Egyptian soul within a modern character. In these texts, the archaeological work undertaken by Egyptologists to excavate the buried past of Ancient Egypt soon becomes an archaeology of the modern psyche, a psyche haunted by the return of an archaic and imperial repressed.

This article considers the way the late nineteenth-century genre of mummy fiction represents the exhibition of Egyptian mummies in the space of private or public museums. In the context of the constitution of the ‘imperial archive’ (Thomas Richards), the museum plays a substantial role and the interactions between the archaeologist or museum visitor and the mummy in fiction can be interpreted in imperial terms, archaeological processes of excavation, classification and exhibition mirroring imperial dynamics. The motif of the gaze in particular gives us an insight into Victorian and Edwardian notions of knowledge and its links with imperial domination at the turn of the century. In texts such as Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and Henry Rider Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1913), the scientific and aesthetising gaze of the archaeologist is challenged by the eyes of the mummy who, in turn, gazes at the museum visitor and thus defeats the imperial order of the museum. My contention is that the showcasing of mummies in these two texts leads to a critique of imperialism as the mummy’s gaze, by offering a mirror image to the museum visitor, can mediate imperial anxieties and put on display the repressed parts of the imperial psyche.

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.