The Egyptian Museum in Fiction: The Mummy’s Eyes as the ‘Black Mirror’ of the Empire

Abstract

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.