That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy

Daly, Nicholas

doi:10.2307/1345912

Cited by 42 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The museumification of antique objects also enacts a desire for the perfect control of colonial otherness: unveiled, packed away to England, locked in a case and labelled according to an alien scientific order, the antique woman is nothing more than one of the archaeologist's possessions, one that can be purchased and exchanged like any other commercial product 22 . Iras, for instance, is smuggled out of Egypt bearing the label "Turkey sponges" before she is delivered to Lavenham as a result of his ordering an unopened mummy-case.…”

Section: Knowing and Controllingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Corriou¹

2015

miranda

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Although the mummy has come to be known in popular media 1 under the features of a stumbling, decaying pharaoh hungry for revenge against those who disturbed his eternal rest, the first mummies that came to life in popular fiction were, for the most part, female. More than just female mummies, they are described as women: "this woman-I could not think of her as a mummy or a corpse" (Stoker 236), says Malcolm Ross, the narrator of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars 2 , as he gazes on the unwrapped mummy of Queen Tera during the "Great Experiment" that is supposed to bring her back to life. Indeed, when the wrappings are torn away and the body of the queen is revealed, she loses her status as a mere archaeological object (a mummy) or even as a dead body (a corpse) to be reborn as a woman and a strongly sexual being. 2 ' A Woman is a Woman, if She had been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!':Mummy Fic...

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Section: Knowing and Controllingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Corriou¹

2015

miranda

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“…Finally, mummymania fiction continued to flourish in the early twentieth century with stories of reanimated mummies, curses of revenge, and death. It was especially after the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter and the subsequent mysterious death of Lord Carnarvon, who had attended the opening of the tomb, when the stories of curses and death associated with Egyptian mummies proliferated (Daly 1994, 42). The cinema was quick to absorb and portray the fictional literature, the most famous of which may be the 1932 film, The Mummy , starring Boris Karloff as an ancient Egyptian looking for his lost love (Freund 1932).…”

Section: Public Mummy Unwrappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers

Sheppard¹

2012

Sci Context

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ArgumentThis article explores the history of mummy unwrappings in the West, culminating in Margaret Murray's public unrolling of two mummies in Manchester in 1908. Mummy unwrappings as a practice have shifted often between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life. Although others have looked at Murray's work in the context of the history of mummy studies, I argue that her work should be viewed culturally as poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day. Murray's main goal was to excite the interest of the public while at the same time educating them in the true history of ancient Egypt, while ascertaining new scientific information and contributing to the scholarly interpretations of ancient Egypt.

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“…What's yours is mine The filmic portraits of Egypt form the classic and well-known arena for depictions of cultural appropriation and of controlling dangerous non-European cultures. Many of the films are well recognized as part of a wider phenomenon of 'Egyptomania' (Curl 1994;Daly 1994;Frayling 1992;Hamer 1993;Lant 1992;Meskell 1998a;Shohat and Stam 1994).…”

Section: Cultural Appropriation and Contested Groundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Romancing the Stones: Archaeology in Popular Cinema

Hall¹

2004

Eur. j. archaeol.

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This article looks at the depiction of archaeology and archaeologists in popular cinema. A number of key films are discussed to address the article's main themes of cultural appropriation and contested ground (encompassing treasure, the public, politics and gender). Archaeology in film cannot be divorced from the wider cultural contexts in which it operates and, though portrayals of archaeology and archaeologists are frequently unsatisfactory, a positive conclusion is attempted which seeks to understand the narrative drive of popular fiction and a long history of public exclusion from archaeology. Most of the films considered do not warrant labelling as great works of art, but they are part of a cultural form with perceptions to offer, able to stimulate debate within a vital framework of cultural practices by which identity -individual and social -is constructed and evolved.

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That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy

Cited by 42 publications

References 18 publications

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

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

Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers

Romancing the Stones: Archaeology in Popular Cinema

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