English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

The Love Story of Egyptology

Rider Haggard was drawn to Egyptian themes repeatedly in his career, and he toured Egypt not long after the occupation began, just after the immense successes of King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain, and She (both 1887) had established him as the premier popular novelist of empire. But let’s begin with a later, lesser-known short story, “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1912–1913), which nicely summarizes many of the characteristic tropes and gestures that a generation [End Page 385] of Victorian mummy tales had elaborated between the beginning of the occupation and the First World War. Haggard’s protagonist, James Ebenezer Smith, has suffered some unspecified catastrophe early in his life that threw him “upon the rocky bosom of the world,”³ and has thus been forced to accept a job as a clerk, a position which, in the conventions of imperial romance, is the most degraded a man can hold. A confirmed bachelor, he drifts through a lonely and hollow life until he happens upon the sculpted mask of an enigmatic, beautiful Egyptian queen: “Smith looked at it once, twice, thrice, and at the third look he fell in love.”⁴ Suddenly his dreary life is infused with masculine purpose; he takes up the study of Egyptology and “tackle[s] those books like a man.”⁵ Traveling to Egypt in pursuit of the woman whose mask has inspired him, he at last discovers her unfinished tomb under the “virgin rock” of the Valley of Queens.⁶ Her mummy, however, has been mostly destroyed, leaving only “a mummied hand … a woman’s little hand, most delicately shaped,” which he reverently kisses.⁷ The queen’s name, Smith learns, was Ma-mee.

One is tempted here to pursue the story’s glaring Oedipal leads, to note that the tomb’s “virgin rock” satisfies the desire left by the “rocky bosom” of Smith’s youth, or to emphasize the triple implication of the queen’s name, which can suggest the embalmed “mummy,” the maternal “mummy/mommy/mammy,” and, as a French Egyptologist in the story points out, “Ma mie—my darling!”⁸ Smith finds the tomb, after all, in “the cemetery of old Thebes,”⁹ the ancient stomping grounds of Oedipus himself. But rather than dwell on Freud’s transhistorical account of individual development, better to analyze the story in its local historical context or to read Smith’s desire as symptomatic of imperial Britain’s Oedipal construction of Egypt, which figures both as the timeless mother of Western civilization and the object of its modern desire. It is not a broadly human sexuality that gives Smith his definitively masculine purpose and drive, but sexuality experienced in and through the politically charged discipline of Egyptology.¹⁰ Again and again in mummy fiction, sexual and scholarly desires merge; no sooner does a man feel the intellectual attraction of Pharaonic culture than he finds a woman in whom his desire can be made flesh. Arthur Conan Doyle provides a wonderful example of this substitution in “The Ring of Thoth” (1890), where the protagonist—also named Smith—initially squanders his considerable intellect by “play[ing] the coquette with his subject”: [End Page 386]

The most fickle of wooers, however, is apt to be caught at last, and so it was with John Vansittart Smith. The more he burrowed his way into Egyptology the more impressed he became by the vast field which it opened to the inquirer, and by the extreme importance of a subject which promised to throw a light upon the first germs of human civilization and the origin of the greater part of the arts and sciences. So struck was Mr. Smith that he straightaway married an Egyptological young lady.…¹¹

More often, these tales focus masculine Egyptological desire onto the mummies themselves. In H. D. Everett’s Iras: A Mystery (1896), for instance, the narrator begins by recounting how he had lived “aimlessly enough” until “I found at last the absorbing interest of my life in Egyptian exploration,”¹² and proceeds to tell how he immediately fell in love upon unwrapping a mummy he had smuggled out of Egypt in 1882.

These characters’ tendency to blur together archaeological scholarship and romantic passion, absurdly exaggerated though it may appear, in fact presents a plausible parallel to an emerging understanding of Egyptology popularized after the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund in the pivotal year of 1882. Blessed by the tireless leadership of Amelia Edwards and the inspired choice of the young Flinders Petrie as its agent, the EEF fanned the Victorian public’s enthusiasm over Pharaonic Egypt and doubtless contributed to the interest that would greet mummy stories in the decades to follow. At its outset, the EEF was to have a new kind of relationship with the relics it sought; it was intended to protect Egyptian antiquities from decay and from the depredations of tourists and collectors, including the European museums that had carted off as many monuments as they could seize. Untainted by the pursuit of spoils, the EEF would strive more purely for scientific knowledge. Such new ambitions were met by some established Orientalists with derision; Samuel Birch, the distinguished Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, mocked the notion that excavation should serve any purpose but the enrichment of English collections, dismissing the aims of the EEF as “emotional archaeology.”¹³ This “emotional” desire to protect Egypt’s antiquities might well have seemed naïvely sentimental to scholars more used to seizing or smuggling them, but it was nevertheless entirely complicit with the brutal fact of Britain’s imperial influence. The occupation after 1882 allowed British archaeologists in the region to flourish, even to surpass their French predecessors, who had dominated Egyptian excavation since Napoleon. And Egyptologists repaid the favor to the political system that enabled their work by colonizing Egypt’s history as the object of ever more precise scientific scrutiny, developing a form of knowledge [End Page 387] which—emotionally motivated or not—buttressed the British understanding of their own imperial power.¹⁴

Haggard’s story intensifies Egyptology’s emotional investment, translating the new scientific emphasis on disinterested research into the still more unimpeachable terms of a love story. With this substitution, Haggard forestalls the potential guilt of an archaeological enterprise that could never quite free itself of the subtle taints of imperial coercion or sordid tomb-robbing. When Smith first penetrates Ma-mee’s crypt, he realizes that it has been raided before, and he becomes uncomfortably aware that he is retracing the steps of an ancient thief, that he too is “violating a tomb.”¹⁵ The narrator again compares the protagonist to a thief when, in the story’s climactic episode, Smith finds himself locked overnight in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. As though conjured by his half-realized guilt, a congregation of ghosts appears amid the relics, the ancient kings and queens of Egypt, including Ma-mee, “ten times more beautiful than he had ever pictured her.”¹⁶ The spirits challenge Smith, accusing him of being one of the “vile thieves” who have desecrated their graves. But Smith justifies himself by pointing out the purity of his motivation: “It is true that I have searched in your graves, because my heart has been drawn towards you, and I would learn all that I could concerning you.”¹⁷ He adds that his heart has had a more specific object in Ma-mee, who speaks in his defense. Placated, the ancients absolve him and leave him to speak briefly with the spirit of Ma-mee, who delivers the story’s most telling comment upon the license conferred by Smith’s love:

what is mine has been, is, and shall be yours forever. Gods may change their kingdoms and their names; men may live and die, and live again once more to die; empires may fall and those who ruled them be turned to forgotten dust. Yet true love endures immortal as the souls in which it was conceived, and from it for you and me, the night of woe and separation done, at the daybreak which draws on, there shall be born the splendor and the peace of union.¹⁸

The woodenness of this passage’s central cliché—“true love endures immortal”—knocks us so bluntly in the head that we may miss its more delicate implications for Egyptology. Representing archaeology as an expression of eternal love, Haggard vindicates Smith’s intrusions and claims for him a property right that is just as unshakably eternal. More subtly, Ma-mee’s speech splits time into two superimposed chronologies. On one hand, there is the familiar timescape of historical conflict, of mortal flux and the rise and fall of empires. On the other, there is the promise of a union that exists beyond history’s [End Page 388] strife, the chronological point at which what has been and what is consummate, conceiving and birthing a union of endlessly arrested time, a static present in which nothing need ever change. The eternal love that validates Smith’s explorations also promises to freeze history, to render permanent those relations of power and property that would otherwise be subject to decay and death.

But the promised union never comes. As Smith reaches out for Ma-mee she eludes his grasp and vanishes (Fig. 3). The narrative breaks off, then resumes with Smith awakening the next day, wondering whether his encounter had really happened: “was it all only a dream, or was it—something more—by day and by night he asks of Nothingness? But, be she near or far, no answer comes from the Queen Ma-mee.… So, like the rest of us, Smith must wait to learn the truth concerning many things.”¹⁹ And so the story ends, not with closure but with an unanswered question, one which the narrator warns us at the outset that Smith is “still thinking over.”²⁰ But the state of suspense in which Smith is left need not be understood as a symptom of anxiety. Quite the contrary: to achieve the peace of union would be, according to Ma-mee’s explanation, to put an end to history, to science, to empire itself, along with its handmaiden, archaeology. While the promise of some kind of transcendent goal—the life-defining search for the unattainable “queen of the mask”—must be held out to justify Smith’s explorations, its attainment would render them unnecessary. The actual Egyptologists on whom Smith was modeled, of course, were bound by a parallel constraint. Since the presence of British scholars in Egypt was authorized by the high-minded ideals of protecting and studying vulnerable antiquities, the moment those relics were pronounced safe and well catalogued would be the moment that the British would be forced to cede to the Egyptians the custody of their own history. Suspense, in effect, is productive. The unattained—or the practically or metaphysically unattainable goal—maintains and validates imperial action, and at the same time charges it with the sustained pleasure of the endless striptease, the drive to pursue the impalpable queen behind the mask or to unearth and unwrap an ongoing procession of mummies.

The alluring Ma-mee joins this procession some three decades after it began. Grant Allen’s much earlier “My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies” (1878) describes a man who casts off his British fiancée in favor of the revived mummy of the Princess Hatasou, “a lovely figure, tall, queenly, with smooth dark arms and a neck of polished bronze.”²¹ The image is echoed in the American Julian Hawthorne’s “The Unseen [End Page 389]

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Fig. 3.

“He stretched out his arms to clasp her, and lo, she was gone!”

From “Smith and the Pharaohs,” The Strand Magazine, 45.266 (February 1913), 122.

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Man’s Story” (1893), in which a French Egyptologist tells how he met the resurrected Queen Aumunuhet, “at the sight of whom my heart stood still and my breath failed me. She was dusky as the Nile at evening, and beautiful with a beauty that belongs to the morning of the world. Her eyes were long, black and brilliant; and their gaze was royal.”²² In Everett’s Iras, the titular mummy’s body is described less salaciously—perhaps because Everett was a woman—but the effect of her appearance is the same: “The face I looked on was beautiful, but it was a marvel the more that I did not regard it in the least as one looks on the beauty of a stranger. I knew my heart’s love when I saw her face to face.… I recognized a need filled, an incompleteness suddenly made whole.”²³ In a gesture that signifies at once her exotic appeal and her demure submission, Iras modestly continues to wear a veil after her unwrapping.

The frequent appearance of veils and masks in mummy fiction was doubtless suggested by Orientalist images of Egyptian women and by their ready association with mummy wrappings. But masks, veils, and shrouds also had a long tradition in gothic fiction, which established them as conventional signposts of the intersection of dreadful mystery and compelling desire. Late-Victorian writers took up these gothic accoutrements to depict imperial Britain’s relationship with inscrutably exotic others and to consider civilization’s progress in a world haunted by the uncanny survival of the primitive or ancient. But mummy fiction stands apart from other imperial romances by combining elements of the gothic tradition with familiar elements of domestic fiction, especially the marriage plot. In every one of the examples—Ma-mee, Hatasou, Amunuhet, Iras—the Egyptian woman is presented as the ideal partner in an eternal union. The mummy’s cerement thus becomes both the veil of sexualized Orientalism and the bridal veil. On the one hand, then, we find modern British men harboring potentially transgressive desires for veiled women whose magical power and ancient authority threaten to undermine all of the Manichean exclusions with which Britain’s imperial identity is precariously shored up; at the same time, we find them yearning to channel their desire into a legitimate marriage that would unite disparate powers to produce a harmoniously strengthened empire. This goal, as we have already begun to see, is never reached. But we must still ask why mummy fiction should make its potentially monstrous women so marriageable, why the unfulfilled promise of union should so persistently drive the Victorian fantasies of Egypt. The emerging discourse of Egyptology suggests one way to [End Page 391] begin responding to this riddle, but more compelling answers emerge only in the political context of the occupation itself.

An Empire of Veils

The Victorians never intended Egypt to be just another imperial possession; the occupation was characterized from the outset by a marked hesitancy and tentativeness. Its immediate cause was the protonationalist uprising led by Egypt’s Minister of War, Ahmad Urabi (more frequently known to the Victorians as “Arabi Pasha”). To the French and British governments, Urabi’s anticolonialism seemed a threat to European interests and to the strategically vital Suez Canal. After Wolseley’s expeditionary force routed the Egyptians in 1882 at Tel-el Kebir, the British seemed poised to seize Egypt not only from Urabi’s party, but also from the lingering influence of the French, and thereby to claim the country as their own protectorate. Instead, Britain declared its plans to withdraw its troops immediately, an intention announced again and again as the years and decades rolled by. The British presence would persist, in various forms, for seventy years, but it began in a manner almost unexampled in the empire’s history. Gladstone did not simply annex Egypt nor formally declare it a protectorate, but established an informal administration of advisors, led by Lord Cromer, who were to be the guides of an Egypt that was still, in theory, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. One of Cromer’s undersecretaries, Alfred Milner, who in Africa later became one of Britain’s most powerful colonial administrators, called the hybrid system in Egypt “the most absurd experiment in human government,”²⁴ and he admitted that it puzzled even the British: “Thus we did after all establish a Protectorate in Egypt, but not a complete or legitimate one. On the contrary, it was a Protectorate which we could not avow to ourselves, and therefore could not call upon others to recognize. It was a veiled Protectorate of uncertain extent and indefinite duration for the accomplishment of a difficult and distant object.”²⁵ Milner’s famous formulation of a “veiled Protectorate” implies a new image of British power that partakes, at least rhetorically, of the conventional exoticism, mystery, and even the femininity of the Orient. The phrase’s blurring of colonizers and colonized is not accidental, since the operation of imperial influence was imagined as a sort of partnership of Egyptians and their British advisors in the service of Egyptian interests rather than those of London. Cromer would work through the Khedive’s figurehead government to revitalize Egypt, to revive it from crushing debt and defeat the plagues of corruption and anti-European agitation. The ostensible partnership [End Page 392] suggested by this political experiment was easily translatable into the familiar narrative trope of the marriage plot, one in which each partner receives as a dowry the most desirable traits of the other: Egypt receives British industry and protection, while Britain claims not only Egypt itself, but its associations with mystery and permanence, both of which would be particularly appealing in an occupation of “uncertain extent and indefinite duration.” Indeed, this logic helps to explain why fiction’s desirable Egyptians are Pharaonic rather than modern; the timelessness that imperial fantasies would bestow on Britain’s own global influence is less easily symbolized by the potential nationalist of modern Egypt than by the denizen of that world of unaging monuments and preserved bodies that cheated death.

The political stakes of dramatizing the veiled protectorate as a love story become clear in one of the period’s most celebrated imperial romances, Rider Haggard’s She, which appeared in book form just before Haggard realized his dream of visiting Egypt. Queen Ayesha, the immortal sorceress who ruthlessly rules the lost city of Kôr, is not literally a mummy, but she certainly dresses like one. She first appears as a “swathed mummy-like form,” wrapped head to foot in a “white gauzy material [like] a corpse in its grave-clothes.”²⁶ She undresses like one, too, veiling and unveiling her immortal body in an erotic dance that keeps her both endlessly fascinating and forever out of reach (Fig. 4). Kôr is likewise not Egypt itself, but the hidden home of Egypt’s ancestors,²⁷ and its affinity with Egypt is suggested both by the lingering presence of its perfectly embalmed dead and by the unspeakable antiquity of its relics, which include “a gigantic monument like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx.”²⁸ Kôr is also an explicitly imperial civilization, which once “rule[d] the world, and [whose] navies [went] out to commerce with the world.”²⁹ But Kôr has faded, and its descendants, the Amahagar, now mixed into a “bastard brood” by miscegenous contact with barbarous Africans, have degenerated into savage cannibals.³⁰ The “magnificent build” of the Amahagar implies their preservation of a primeval vigor,³¹ though their bodies are also subject to historical change through Ayesha’s eugenic experiments. The environs of Kôr thus suggest the same competing chronologies we found in Ma-mee’s speech: the Amahagar live a version of imperial time in which glory is transient, riven by historical flux and the waves of evolution and degeneracy, but Ayesha, whose “perfect and imperial shape”³² dwells in the timeless heart of Kôr, transcends the metanarratives of progress and decay. The anachronicity at the heart of Kôr should thus be [End Page 393]

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Fig. 4.

“Ayesha Unveils.”

She. London: Longmans, Green, 1888.

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understood as a particularly Egyptian timelessness rather than as an example of the primordial savagery Haggard usually associates with Africa, represented here by the Amahagar who ring Kôr round. Kôr may be ancient, but it is not primitive, and this crucial difference in the construction of time distinguishes the irresistibly alluring Ayesha from the hideously aged Gagool, the Zulu witch of King Solomon’s Mines. For many Victorians, sub-Saharan Africa was either perilously or invigoratingly primitive, while the Orient was charmingly but backwardly stagnant. But Pharaonic Egypt represented greatness so permanent, so exempt from the usual standards of historical development, that it could be more properly regarded with a feeling of awe.

Many critics have noted that Ayesha’s anachronicity represents a challenge to imperial ideology’s narrative of progress.³³ But as Egyptological fiction makes abundantly clear, British imperial fantasies are neither unanimous nor unequivocal in their representations of historical change, and many of them yearn for an empire immune to history’s vicissitudes. Haggard’s remarkable treatment of time in She transcends the simple binarism of modern/primitive not only because Kôr is temporally fractured, but because the English are, too. The two chief protagonists and representatives of imperial Britain literally embody two divergent chronologies. Leo Vincey, whose genealogy stretches back to ancient Egypt, is heir to the legacy of vengeance that began when Ayesha killed his ancestor, Kallikrates, a priest of Isis. The records of Leo’s ancestry reveal a path that coincides with the rise and fall of Europe’s great powers, flowing from Egypt through Greece to Rome, then to France and finally England. But if Leo is the culmination of two millennia of imperial history, he is also its negation. Leo’s classical beauty—his classmates at Cambridge call him “the Greek god”³⁴—suggests the revelation to come: he is not merely the heir of Kallikrates, but his reincarnation. Nothing has changed in all of those uncounted generations; the vast sweep of history has turned back upon itself in a full circle, returning Leo to where he began. Yet while Leo embodies a vision of history that transcends change—“like a statue of Apollo come to life”³⁵—his partner in adventure, Horace Holly, represents change in all of its evolutionary power. Holly’s body is so simian that his appearance, he admits, amounts to proof of the “monkey theory.”³⁶ But Haggard compensates this walking reminder of Darwinism with gifts of his own. As we learn when Holly battles the Amahagar, he is endowed with an ape-like strength and the capacity to draw upon “that awful lust of battle which will creep into the hearts of [End Page 395] the most civilized of us.”³⁷ Moreover, while Leo is “no scholar,”³⁸ Holly is a mathematician, which suggests that Haggard assigns science and knowledge to the world of human change. He is also the novel’s historian, who brings to Ayesha news of the world. Tellingly, the first questions she asks him are the ones that British politicians were just then trying to decide: “there is yet an Egypt? And what Pharaoh sits upon the throne?”³⁹

Leo and Holly amount to two models of the masculine grounded in divergent constructions of the temporal. On the one hand Haggard gives us a transcendent and timeless ideal of manly beauty, and on the other a plucky struggler amid the forces of change who draws upon both the vitality of atavism and the wisdom that follows from experience. Both masculinities appeal to Haggard, and much of the novel is devoted to depicting the two operating in a loving partnership. “Beauty and the Beast was what they called us,” Holly writes, “when we went out walking together, as we were wont to do every day.”⁴⁰ But Haggard’s imperial fantasy suggests another step that the conventions of the novel will not allow him to stage without the scandal of homoeroticism: a union of these two principles, a synthesis of the continuing struggle for existence and its permanent, unassailable victory. Though Haggard cannot use the marriage plot to join this particular beauty and beast, he flirts with the slightly less scandalous alternative, their mutual desire to marry Ayesha. Holly looks forward to a time when “conditions alter, and a day comes at last when two men may love one woman, and all three be happy in the fact.”⁴¹ Barred from polyandry, the novel can at least propose the marriage of Ayesha and Leo and fantasize about the degree of imperial power such a union would bring.

The long critical tradition that regards Ayesha as a monstrous threat to British ideals—a femme fatale inspired by the New Woman’s subversive challenges or a specter of reverse colonization⁴²—gravely underestimates the degree to which the novel positions her as the perfect imperial bride. It is true that the Englishmen begin the story with an injunction to kill her, that she herself is capable of cold-blooded murder, and that her destruction at the end suggests a humiliating punishment for her hubris. But it is equally true that the characters quickly abandon their project of vengeance, that they forgive and forget her sins, and that her disappearance at the novel’s end leaves them profoundly bereft and unfulfilled rather than secure and triumphant. Her character is equivocal, encompassing both menace and promise; to read her merely as monster to be contained is to ignore that ambivalence [End Page 396] and indeed to overlook the degree to which the English heroes lean more towards the other side of the balance: “Her wickedness had not detracted from her charm,” concludes Holly. “We both loved her now and for all time.”⁴³ Ayesha is likewise ambivalent as a symbol of imperial ambition. Holly predicts that “in the end she would … assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.”⁴⁴ Yet we should remember that this cost is one that Holly and Leo are prepared to accept, and that Holly decides in the following paragraph that this “marvelous creature … was now about to be used by the hand of Providence as a means to change the order of the world, and possibly, by the building up of a power that could no more be rebelled against or questioned than the decrees of Fate, to change it materially for the better.”⁴⁵ There are shades of nightmare in this imperial dream, but they are no more pronounced than in Haggard’s other protofascist and notoriously bloody adventure tales, and in the end Holly sympathizes with Leo’s decision to accept the marriage bond Ayesha offers.

In setting the stage for this wedding and the union it conventionally represents, the novel pushes the couple toward more conventional roles. Ayesha softens, becoming more traditionally feminine and submissive. With “infinite tenderness in her voice,” she tells him that his love is necessary for her redemption, and, as Holly explains, Leo eagerly responds to this more dominant position in their relationship: “Hitherto he had been fascinated against his better judgment, somewhat as a bird is fascinated by a snake, but now I think that all this passed away, and he knew that he really loved this strange and glorious creature, as, alas! I loved her also.”⁴⁶ Maurice Greiffenhagen’s illustration of this scene for the novel’s 1888 edition nicely captures Ayesha’s new submission to Leo’s loving protection (Fig. 5), and it closely prefigures the representational logic of the political cartoon with which we began. Although Ayesha begins to weaken in this scene, the dowry she offers Leo remains rich in imperial power. “For a bridal gift I crown thee,” she tells him, “with my beauty’s crown, and enduring life, and wisdom without measure, and wealth that none can count. Behold! The great ones of the earth shall creep about thy feet.…I give to thee dominion over sea and earth, over the peasant in his hovel, over the monarch in his palace halls, and cities crowned with towers, and all who breathe therein.”⁴⁷ The promise of this marriage is the fusion of undying occult [End Page 397]

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Fig. 5.

“She paused, and the infinite tenderness in her voice seemed to hover round us like some memory of the dead.”

She. London: Longmans, Green, 1888.

[End Page 398]

power with the noble masculinity of the modern British hero, who, after all, has already one foot in the great empires of history. And fittingly, Ayesha offers a metaphor for Leo’s potential dominion derived not from fallen Kôr, but from the timeless mystery of Britain’s newest possession: “Like that old Sphinx of Egypt thou shalt sit aloft from age to age, and ever shall they cry to thee to solve the riddle of thy greatness, that doth not pass away, and ever shall thou mock them with thy silence!”⁴⁸

The marriage represents the possibility of an imperial power so audaciously absolute as to be nearly unrepresentable; certainly it is unnarratable. It is a dream of the consummation of imperial history, but one that can drive imperial ideology only by remaining unrealized. The marriage plans must be, if not called off, at least indefinitely postponed. And so when Ayesha brings Leo to the pillar of magical fire that gave her immortality, he hesitates. She steps in herself to reassure him and is violently thrust back into the brutal current of historical and evolutionary time. Her body ages immediately, first taking on the appearance of a “badly preserved Egyptian mummy”⁴⁹ then the devolutionary aspects of an ape, a monkey, and a tortoise. Still, with her last words, Ayesha claims another kind of immortality: “I die not. I shall come again, and shall once more be beautiful. I swear it—it is true!”⁵⁰ Haggard’s heroes take her at her word, and as the novel’s “editor” informs us, the two of them have since set off for Tibet to seek her out.⁵¹ Despite the elaborate fireworks of the ending, the questions raised by the narrative remain unanswered and the desires unsatisfied. In effect, the novel ultimately chooses the unfulfilled prospect of marriage over marriage itself, the dream of pursuit over the dream of completion, the veil over the bride. In death, Ayesha takes up the position foreshadowed by the huge statue of Truth they find in the ruins of Kôr, which Holly calls “the grandest allegorical work of Art” ever made.⁵² The statue represents a beautiful woman, naked but veiled, arms outstretched, forever beckoning but never reached. But Haggard also hints at the kind of Truth that is fundamentally at stake in this imperial adventure: his allegorical woman stands atop the globe.

For all its fatalistic mysticism and vague metaphysics, Haggard’s novel unmistakably reproduces, both structurally and ideologically, the very real politics of the occupation. Always conceived as temporary, the protracted British presence in Egypt depended on a careful political dance that constantly raised but never resolved the question of the occupation’s completion. In his Modern Egypt (1908), Cromer reflects [End Page 399] on the twenty-five years of his unofficial reign and concludes that the job is not yet done:

I make no pretension to the gift of political prophecy. I can only state my deliberate opinion, formed after many years of experience and in the face of decided predisposition to favour the policy of evacuation, that at present, and for a long time to come, the results of executing such a policy would be disastrous.… It may be that at some future period the Egyptians may be rendered capable of taking care of themselves without the presence of a foreign army in their midst, and without guidance in civil and military affairs, but that period is far distant.⁵³

In part, Cromer’s assessment illustrates a general tension within imperial ideology: the justifying project of improving subject peoples must always fall short of allowing that the civilizing mission has been accomplished. But the still greater murkiness surrounding the Egyptian Question had also to do with the problem it posed to the delicate balance of European powers. To claim an official relationship with Egypt would be to provoke war with France, so Cromer’s veiled protectorate had to operate under an unusual degree of indeterminacy. The Entente Cordiale of 1904, in which Britain agreed to support French claims to Morocco in return for French acknowledgment of Britain’s claim to Egypt, lessened the need for the veil of mystery and euphemism, though Britain did not yet discard it. Cromer writes of the 1904 agreement that “the ‘Egyptian Question,’ in the sense in which that phrase had heretofore been used, was partially settled,”⁵⁴ but he quickly adds that “a further Egyptian Question remains behind. It consists in gradually adapting the institutions of the country to the growing needs of the population. Possibly time will also solve that problem, but, unless disaster is to ensue, it must be a long time.”⁵⁵ One of the more politically useful aspects of the Egyptian Question was that the question itself proved so protean. There need be no end to a question that keeps changing.

Among the many duties of his role as Consul General, Cromer describes one that stands out as an intriguing admission: “I had to keep the Egyptian question simmering, and to avoid any action which might tend to force on its premature consideration.”⁵⁶ While we might expect him to have tried to resolve the question, to put an end to the occupation’s peculiar ambiguities and contradictions, Cromer’s comment suggests that his authority was in fact sustained by his ability to enshroud Britain’s power in a veil of indeterminacy. It is precisely this political need to forestall change and blur time that Victorian mummy fiction embodies in its alluring women, whose beauty is enhanced by its permanence, [End Page 400] whose erotic appeal depends on a striptease that defers consummation like an endlessly simmering question. The point is not that She and other mummy stories may be read as simple allegories whose plots correspond directly and sequentially to the history of the occupation, but that they are more deeply structured by the same narrative strategies of suspense and irresolution that were the fundamental conditions of British power in Egypt.

Rather than reading Ayesha as a threat to British supremacy, then, we should recognize in her promise to Leo of a “greatness that doth not pass away” the fondest wish of the empire. In the context of the occupation, her (temporary) death reads less like a punishment than an irresolution calculated to hold open a space of adventure in which the protagonists experience the psychic pleasures typical of imperial masculinity, such as exploration, hunting, and fighting “like very men.”⁵⁷ But Ayesha has masculine qualities of her own, and Haggard does not treat her merely as an object of desire. If Ayesha is more complicated than Ma-mee or Iras—alternately self-effacing bride and figure of terrible power—it may be because her character is overdetermined, condensing multiple aspects of the Egyptian occupation. Enthroned amid the ruins of a city she did not build, ruling a people she regards as barbaric by means of mystery, intimidation, and “the wisdom that is power,”⁵⁸ Ayesha sometimes appears less an image of Egypt than of Egypt’s occupiers. Swathed in her mummy wrappings, she resembles the wearer of the protectorate’s metaphorical veil, the Consul General himself. Like Ayesha, Cromer knew that his “vague and preponderant power,” as he calls it, was all the more unassailable for remaining mysterious: “In the Egyptian body politic,” he writes, “the unseen is often more important than the seen.”⁵⁹ As Timothy Mitchell has observed, Cromer constructs colonial authority as a “metaphysical power,” a core of “meaning or truth” concealed behind the “visible, material apparatus” of control.⁶⁰ Prefiguring the novel’s own metaphysics of veiled truth, Cromer established his ambiguous and enduring influence as a Sphinxlike riddle.

The Horror Behind the Veil

The marriage plots of mummy fiction articulate imperial identity through an unrealized ideal of complementarity, whereby the Egyptian bride holds out to the British groom the fulfilling prospect of eternal possession (as in “Smith and the Pharaohs”) or enduring power (as in She). But as the example of Ayesha suggests, sometimes the Egyptians [End Page 401] are not only complements of the British, but their doubles. In these cases, mummy fiction draws not only on the marriage conventions of domestic fiction, but also on the tendency of gothic novels to destabilize identity through the uncanny repetition of the familiar in apparently alien forms. In treatments of Egypt, these supernatural doublings are just as bound up in questions of time and permanence, and they find their greatest expression in one of mummy fiction’s most characteristic themes: reincarnation. The notion of an uncanny rebirth through which the present reiterates the ancient past is nearly ubiquitous in Victorian tales of Egypt, with or without mummies. Leo Vincey is a reincarnation, and so too, it turns out, is James Ebenezer Smith; the same theme appears in Hawthorne’s “Unseen Man’s Story,” Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), Guy Boothby’s “A Professor of Egyptology” (1904), and C. J. Cutliffe Hyne’s “The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt” (1904).⁶¹ Where other fin-de-siècle romances concern themselves with dreams of progress and evolution—or their darker corollaries, decline and degeneracy—mummy fiction is fascinated by reincarnation’s immunity to historical change. Like the unfinished narratives of marriage, reincarnation disrupts the advance of time, and is thus particularly suited to the anomalous ideals of the occupation. Imperialism in Egypt was not served by the ideology of progress, but by a dream of time arrested.

Still, the gothic elements of mummy fiction bear traces of that genre’s supernatural horrors. Leo and Holly are terrified, for instance, when they confront the “uncanny” sight of the preserved body of Leo’s ancestral self.⁶² The modern British characters’ discovery that they are really ancient Egyptians, like the projection of imperial power onto immortal queens, threatens to dissolve many of the oppositions that typically structure British identity: science/magic, Christianity/paganism, rationality/superstition, modernity/antiquity, colonizer/colonized, and, at times, masculinity/femininity. For the most part, Victorian mummy stories remain relatively untroubled by the blurring of these differences; the resulting ambiguities become wonders of imperial discovery. Occasionally, however, the collapse of distinctions suggests a darker fragmentation of identity and an emasculating reversal of the imperial hierarchy. In Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892), for instance, the mummy is a male, mindless but strong and swift, who threatens to defeat a young Oxford athlete in a terrifying footrace (Fig. 6). In such moments we see the first steps of the mummy story’s later migration into the precincts of pure horror.⁶³ [End Page 402]

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Fig. 6.

“Nearer yet sounded the clatter from behind.”

From “Lot. No. 249.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 85 (September 1892), 541.

[End Page 403]

The darkest mummy story of the occupation period, and the one which has proven most influential in the subsequent mummy film tradition,⁶⁴ is Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Stoker employs many of the conventions that had emerged in the previous two decades—a surpassingly beautiful reanimated mummy, an uncanny reincarnation, a marriage plot, an unsettling of the distinctions between ancient powers and those of modernity—and he weaves the problems of time and change into the novel’s narrative structure. The book opens in the middle of a dream, and for much of its first half continues to drift along in a slow, hypnotic pace that reflects the characters’ tendency to fall into trances and surreal waking dreams. But the second half quickly gathers momentum and intensifies suspense until it finally hurtles into what may be the most stunningly abrupt and inconclusive ending in Victorian fiction.

The mummy in this case is the perfectly preserved body of Queen Tera, a ruler of Egypt and a powerful sorceress dead for five thousand years. Her modern adventures begin when a wealthy Egyptologist named Abel Trelawney leads an armed expedition to discover her tomb “soon after Arabi Pasha’s revolt,”⁶⁵ which is to say, in the immediate aftermath of Wolseley’s invasion. In the tomb, Trelawney falls into a mysterious trance for three days. During this episode of lost time, Trelawney’s wife back in England gives birth to a daughter, Margaret, who is eventually revealed to be a reincarnation of Tera. Margaret, in short, is a true daughter of the veiled protectorate, the offspring of undying occult power and imperial archaeology. The novel’s plot opens eighteen years later, when the narrator, Malcolm Ross, falls deliriously in love with Margaret and seeks her hand in marriage. Combining feminine vulnerability and self-sacrifice with an ability “to rule all around her with a sort of high-bred dominance,”⁶⁶ Margaret leads what Malcolm calls a “dual existence” that “reconciled opposites.”⁶⁷ In her all binarisms dissolve, producing an object of desire who literally embodies the notion of time as static, locked in a present that is merely the indefinite repetition of the past.

But it is Margaret’s ancient double who more compellingly reveals the imperial ideologies by which the novel is sustained. Trelawney has brought Tera’s mummy back to England, where he intends, according to her own ancient ambitions, to accomplish her resurrection in the flesh. This effort, in which he is assisted by all the other characters, is likewise characterized by a desire to restore to the modern world the wisdom of the Egyptians, who, they agree, possessed a “loftier intelligence [End Page 404] and learning greater than our own”: “The whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed to be coming into contact with the New Civilization.” Trelawney’s determination to restore Tera is less a matter of kindness or sympathy than an expression of a will to power in the form of omniscience:

Oh what possibilities are there in the coming of such a being into our midst! One whose experience began before the concrete teaching of our Bible; whose experiences were antecedent to the formulation of the Gods of Greece; who can link together the Old and the New, Earth and Heaven, and yield to the known worlds of thought and physical existence the mystery of the Unknown…!⁶⁸

The unspecified “possibilities” about which Trelawney dreams are, like his own Egyptological research, linked in the novel to imperial power. This potential is emphasized by the history of Tera herself, the mighty and ruthless queen who was bent on “the conquering of unknown worlds” and so driven by her desire for power that she had “waded to it through blood.”⁶⁹ Tera’s own use of her unrivalled wisdom for violent and imperial ends highlights possible implications of Trelawney’s project. She is a figure of power as much as one of knowledge and, as Malcolm reports when they strip her of her cerements, a figure of mesmerizing desirability:

We all stood awed at the beauty of the figure which, save for the face cloth, now lay completely nude before us. Mr. Trelawney bent over, and with hands that trembled slightly, raised this linen cloth.… As he stood back and the whole glorious beauty of the Queen was revealed, I felt a rush of shame sweep over me. It was not right that we should be there, gazing with irreverent eyes on such unclad beauty: it was indecent; it was almost sacrilegious! And yet the white wonder of that beautiful form was something to dream of.… This woman—I could not think of her as a mummy or a corpse—was the image of Margaret as my eyes had first lit on her.⁷⁰

Like Margaret, Tera is represented as a potential bride: the Englishmen discover that her wrappings conceal a “marriage robe.”⁷¹ But betrothal to Tera proves to be a far more dangerous proposition, and at the moment of her resurrection—the consummation of the “Great Experiment”—things go abruptly and horribly awry. Though the ending is astonishingly inconclusive and vague, it would appear that Tera’s rebirth has killed all the characters except Malcolm, who, in the darkness and confusion of the fatal scene, carries her away under the impression that he is rescuing Margaret. The novel concludes—or at any [End Page 405] rate ends—with the Queen vanished, Malcolm in hopeless despair, and nearly all of the story’s great metaphysical questions unanswered.

The hopelessness of the story’s end might be understood as a vision of the veiled protectorate twisted into nightmare, one in which an incarnate Egypt repays those who have revived and protected her with destruction. While we should acknowledge the novel’s anxieties, however, we need not conclude that they entirely undermine the imperial fantasies that animate its plot.⁷² As a whole, the story is driven by a seductive synthesis of self and other, the union of what the sixteenth chapter title calls “Powers—Old and New.” The characters’ desires are consistent with Egypt’s unique place in the imperial imagination, and indeed they do not stray from the ideology of the veiled protectorate until they complete their experiment and restore Tera to self-sufficiency; in effect, they have accomplished the result that Cromer worked so long to postpone. The finale of Tera’s long striptease is the moment at which she no longer finds them necessary, and the consummation that sets her free devastates them. This is not the horror of empire, but of empire’s end.

Stoker’s final chapter was disturbing enough that when the novel was republished in 1912 it was given an entirely different ending, which Stoker himself may not have written. In this later version, the experiment fails and Tera is never revived. Malcolm marries Margaret, who dresses in Tera’s marriage robe for the occasion. This happier version thus departs from the logic of the occupation: the space of adventure has been closed, and the profound allure of Egyptian power has been reduced to a curious detour on the way to a cheerful British wedding. But by that time, the veiled protectorate had nearly reached its own conclusion. With the outbreak of war with the Ottomans in 1914, the fiction of Turkish suzerainty was discarded and Egypt became officially and unambiguously a protectorate. After the political veil dropped, popular culture grew less interested in portrayals of mummies as elusively seductive brides and in Pharaonic Egypt as a symbol of enduring power that could complement Britain’s own. In the 1920s, as Elliot Colla has shown, Egyptians themselves embraced Pharaonic history as the foundation of a new nationalist discourse, capable of “responding to, and even subverting, British claims of cultural superiority.”⁷³ With the transformation of occupation’s peculiar politics and the emergence of Egyptian Pharaonism as a counterimperial cultural movement, British fiction about Egypt likewise changed, and mummies began more frequently to arise in the form that has since become so familiar: male [End Page 406] competitors, irredeemably monstrous, vengefully bearing an implacable curse.

Just as the precise causal connections underlying the structural parallel between the occupation of Egypt and narratives about mummies are impossible to substantiate, we cannot ultimately gauge the influence of the stories on popular British attitudes toward empire. Yet it seems probable that mummy fiction was not merely a passive reflection of existing sentiments about Egypt. British readers who supported the occupation, or who were simply intrigued by the relationship of Britain and Egypt, would find much in these tales to encourage them. In the same way Orientalist assumptions about the Middle East cemented Britain’s sense of superiority (and hence its imperial mandate), the prolonged eroticism of mummy fiction helped to sustain popular interest in the particular mysteries of the veiled protectorate. The psychoanalytic term for this kind of investment of libidinous fascination in an idea is “cathexis,” though in this case it is more illuminating to recall the German word Freud himself used: Besetzung (or “occupation”). Mummy fiction occupied Egypt in its way just as Cromer did in his, feeding the British public titillating images of adventure and power, teaching it the erotic pleasures of regarding Egypt with the patient attention of the voyeur.