How Bram Stoker Reanimated Mummies

"...the consciousness of the mummy does not rest but is to be reckoned with." - Bram Stoker

Why are mummies so scary? They don't moan and walk around in real life, the way they do in movies, but they are actual things. Mummies are the realest of all the horror movie monsters. Vampires and werewolves come from literature; trolls and ghosts from myths and folklore; but mummies actually exist. Fear of mummies is a projection of European guilt over the colonial project and embodies aspects of that project by making magical monsters out of the colonial other.

Europeans weren't the first to plunder the Great Pyramids, but late-Victorian London is the focus of this blog, so I'm not going to get side-tracked by other plunderers, especially when the influence of writers from 1890s London has such a profound influence on the development of the monster mummy narrative.

The belief that some of the antiquities were cursed had been circulating around Europe since the end of the 17th century, but that didn't stop "collectors," like Lady Meux and Sir William Wilde. Sir William, Oscar Wilde's father, collects Egyptian antiquities that he took directly from Egypt. Bram Stoker later recalled listening to Sir William's stories about Egypt "before all the archeology started." Lady Meux developed one of the largest collections with over 2,000 pieces, including mummies, which she tried to donate to the British Museum upon her death.

This was the social/political climate in which Bram Stoker wrote the first prominent work of fiction featuring mummies as supernatural antagonists: The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Like Stoker's vampires, his mummies became postcolonial pop-culture icons. Before the Jewel was published, mummies' curses were used to explain the deaths of anyone connected to anyone who came into contact with a mummy. After the Jewel was published, the mummies themselves could be reanimated.

"Father, in the Egyptian belief, was the power of resurrection of a mummied body a general one, or was it limited? That is: could it achieve resurrection many times in the course of ages; or only once, and that one final?" 

"There was but one resurrection," he answered. "There were some who believed that this was to be a definite resurrection of the body into the real world. But in the common belief, the Spirit found joy in the Elysian Fields, where there was plenty of food and no fear of famine. Where there was moisture and deep-rooted reeds, and all the joys that are to be expected by the people of an arid land and burning clime." 

Then Margaret spoke with an earnestness which showed the conviction of her inmost soul: 

"To me, then, it is given to understand what was the dream of this great and far-thinking and high-souled lady of old; the dream that held her soul in patient waiting for its realisation through the passing of all those tens of centuries. The dream of a love that might be; a love that she felt she might, even under new conditions, herself evoke. The love that is the dream of every woman's life; of the Old and of the New; Pagan or Christian; under whatever sun; in whatever rank or calling; however may have been the joy or pain of her life in other ways. Oh! I know it! I know it! I am a woman, and I know a woman's heart. [...]" - Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903)

The idea of a mummified Egyptian queen, not dead, but asleep and dreaming of love, was transferred directly into an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, in which the 500 year-old mummy of an Inca princess is brought back to life and falls in love with Zander.

"Inca Mummy Girl," Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
7 October 1997.

Conscious willing desire is what separates pop-culture supernatural antagonistic mummies from their zombie counter parts. Zombies mindlessly wander about seeking brains, but if a mummy feeds on a human it is for strength to carry on a new life, or to maintain guardianship over their afterlife. For Stoker's mummy, it was both. In this scene of the Jewel, Stoker's protagonists are trying to interpret "ka" and "ab" from an Egyptian text:

"It means that for this night the Queen's Double, which is otherwise free, will remain in her heart, which is mortal and cannot leave its prison-place in the mummy-shrouding. It means that when the sun has dropped into the sea, Queen Tera will cease to exist as a conscious power, till sunrise; unless the Great Experiment can recall her to waking life. It means that there will be nothing whatever for you or others to fear from her in such way as we have all cause to remember. Whatever change may come from the working of the Great Experiment, there can come none from the poor, helpless, dead woman who has waited all those centuries for this night; who has given up to the coming hour all the freedom of eternity, won in the old way, in hope of a new life in a new world such as she longed for...!"

George Washington used the term "the Great Experiment" to refer to the United States of America and Stoker was a scholar of American history, so it's not a stretch to say that "the Great Experiment," in this case, refers to modernity. If the experiment is a success the modern world will be everything that the mummy ever dreamed of, and by extension the right place for all other cursed Egyptian antiquities.

The notion that preserving antiquities is the burden of the benefactors of societies great experiments is at the heart of the cursed artefact myth and permeates the views of many modern Egyptologists and museum patrons. In the words of Jasmine Day in "The Mummy's Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World" (2006):

Popular archeology's promise of empowerment to its audiences can thus become implicated in a regressive imperialistic fantasy. The 'Humanity Ownership Argument' frequently invoked in debates about control of cultural property, holds that a body of material culture should not be possessed solely by a single ethnic group. This resembles the demand of the Dragon Principle that valuables be ceded to those who can best utilize them. [Some people] believed that indigenous peoples' requests for reparation of their former possessions threatens archeology. They spoke as if their own property were being threatened, because they identified with the archeologists.

In other words, to some, the British Museum is a better caretaker of Egyptian artefacts than Egyptians are. In 1890s terms, British collectors felt they were better caretakers of Egyptian antiquities that Egyptians were.

Bram Stoker might not have invented the mummy, but he animated it and infused its new life with the anxieties of the emerging postcolonial era, the traces of which can still be seen today.

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Sexton Blake and the Penny Dreadful

 

I could here and there see the reflection of light from the window of some student, who was busy at his studies, or throwing away his time over some trashy novel, too many of which find their way into the trunks or carpet-bags of the young men on setting out for college. - William Wells Brown on his visit to Oxford in 1850.

Those were also the days of Edmund Gosse’s terrible childhood.

No fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the house. In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition was due. She had a remarkable, I confess to me still somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story', that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin. - Gosse, Father and Son (1907)

In consequence of the stern ordinance which I have described, not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy. The rapture of the child who delays the process of going to bed by cajoling 'a story' out of his mother or his nurse, as he sits upon her knee, well tucked up, at the corner of the nursery fire—this was unknown to me. Never in all my early childhood did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies—Jack the Giant- Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance; and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication' was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. - Gosse, Father and Son (1907)

Though Gosse was a child in the 1850s, his upbringing was a sign of things to come. By the 1860s, certain types of fiction were considered incredibly dangerous, especially the sensation novel. Drawing from gothic and romantic literary fiction, the sensation novel appealed to the uncultured masses through shocking themes, like adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction, and murder. Other than relying on shock and awe, sensation novels separated themselves from other more respectable genres by using common settings familiar to their poorer middle- and working- class audiences.

By the 1880s, the sensation novel was replaced by the ‘penny dreadful,’ known as ‘dime novels’ in the United States. Stanford's Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection celebrates the era, which “benefited from three mutually reinforcing trends: the vastly increased mechanization of printing, the growth of efficient rail and canal shipping, and ever-growing rates of literacy.”

I’ve always thought of these as serial novels, published in story-based (I hesitate to use the word literary) publications. Again, their low price made them accessible to the uncultured reading masses, filling their minds with the kind of trash Mother Gosse sought to protect her son from in the 1850s.

In the 1890s, the British newspaper and publishing magnate, Alfred Harmsworth, decided to take on the corrupting influence of the penny dreadfuls, but wound up creating the same thing for less: The Half-penny Marvel, The Union Jack and Pluck, all priced at a half-penny. A.A. Milne once said, "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha'penny dreadfuller." But Harmsworth made some thing wonderful happen.

Meet Sexton Blake, who, in the 1890s, was known as “the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes.” Though written by many hands (Harmsworth owned the rights), the first Sexton Blake story, “The Missing Millionaire,” was published on 20 December 1893 and really sought to capitalize on the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, who Arthur Conan Doyle was already getting tired of writing about.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake was a consulting detective operating out of Baker Street. Blake’s Watson is called Tinker, who didn’t appear until 1904 and is more like Batman’s Robin. Blake’s love interest is Yvone Cartier and his housekeeper is Mrs. Bardell. Blake is a little more clean-cut than Holmes, but is actually an educated medical doctor, like the real Sherlock Holmes.

The Sexton Blake franchise continued on through the 1960s and the official fan website calls for a revival in the 21st century.

So why was Sherlock Holmes considered literature, while Sexton Blake was considered trashy? My focus is on the 1890s, so I’m not going to comment on what might have happened to the franchise in the 20th century, but the fact that it actually was a franchise might have had something to do with it. Maybe having multiple authors had something to do with it? During my undergraduate degree, I took a class, in which we read novels of many shapes, my fellow students found that they had a lower opinion of what a book would be like, based on its shape. If it looked like a Harlequin romance book, they expected it to be trashy. They were often surprised by what they found inside. Maybe readers in the 1890s didn’t take Blake seriously because of the cheap quality of the publications?

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