Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh
is sold for Balsoms.
Sir Thomas Browne
In his Travels, the English merchant-traveller John Sanderson
describes a visit to the mummy-pits outside Cairo in 1586:
The Momia, which is some five or six miles beyound, ar thowsands
of imbalmed bodies, which weare buried thousands of years past
in a sandie cave, at which ther seemeth to have bine citie in
tim[e]s past. We were lett doune by ropes as into a well, with
wax candles burninge in our hands, and so waulked uppon the bodies
of all sorts and sised [read sizes], great and smaule, and some
imbalmed in little earthen potts, which never had forme; thes
ar sett at the feet of the great bodies. They gave no noysome
smell at all, but ar like pitch, beinge broken: for I broke of[f]
all parts of the bodies to see howe the flesh was turned to drugge,
and brought home divers heads, hands, arms, and feet for a shewe.
We bought allso 600 lb. for the Turkie company in peces, and brought
into lngland in the Hercules, together with a whole bodie. They
ar lapped in 100 doble of cloth, which rotton [rotting?] and pillinge
of[f], you may see the skinne, flesh, fingers, and nayles firme,
onelie altered blacke. One little hand I brought into Ingland
to shewe, and presented it my brother, who gave the same to a
doctor in Oxford. (44-45)
The six hundred pounds of mummy flesh as well as the "whole
bodie" were later sold to London apothecaries, who prescribed
mummy as a sovereign remedy for bleeding, internal and external.
Some two hundred and fifty years later, mummies assume quite a
different role in British culture. Here is an excerpt from the
British Press of Jersey of 1837, describing a species of scientific
spectacle that became highly popular in the 1830s and 1840s--the
unrolling of a mummy:
The learned lecturer assumed with an air of modest triumph his
station at the table on which the Mummy was placed. . . . When
the flowers and fillets were removed the whole body appeared covered
with a sheet that was laced at the back in a manner, said Mr.
P., which might give a lesson to our modern stay-makers (laughter).
. . . The work of unrolling now again proceeded until the joyful
announcement was made that something new was discovered which
had never before been found on a mummy. Mr. P. now exercised his
scissors very freely, and soon released the scarabeus which was
found to be fixed above a plate of metal . . . found to be fashioned
in the shape of a hawk. . . . The wings of the hawk were expanded,
and he held in his talons the emblem of eternal life; it was handed
round for inspection and excited much applause and admiration.
A new description of bandage now appeared, and the arms and legs
were shown to be separately bandaged. . . . At length the left
foot was displayed to sight, and though black and shrivelled,
it excited much applause. . . . (qtd. in Dawson 178)
This moment passes too.[2]
By the end of the nineteenth century the vogue for the unrolling
of mummies was long over, and the mummy's power as spectacle was
confined to the museum. At the same time, the appearance of mummy
fiction suggests that the mummy retains its importance in the
cultural imaginary of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. For
most of the nineteenth century mummies possessed little attraction
as literary material. Between 1880 and 1914, however, more than
a dozen mummy narratives appear, including Arthur Conan
Doyle's "The Ring of Thoth" (1890)
and "Lot No. 249" (1892), H. Rider Haggard's "Smith
and the Pharaohs" (1913), and Bram Stoker's The Jewel of
Seven Stars (1903), as well as pieces which have almost fallen
out of literary history, such as Guy Boothby' s Pharos the Egyptian
(1899), H.D. Everett's Iras, A Mystery (1896), and Ambrose Pratt's
The Living Mummy (1910).[3] If the early modern period is marked
by the literal consumption of mummies as medicine, and the early
nineteenth century by the visual consumption of the mummy as spectacle,
the late nineteenth century is fascinated by the mummy as a sign
that may be consumed in popular fiction.[4]
I want to argue that the mummy is one of the figures through which
changes in the material culture of Britain in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were articulated. This
period sees a shift in the British economy that caused people
intellectuals and popular readers alike to conceive it in terms
of consumption rather than production. Britain's overseas empire
participates in this change. Thomas Richards has shown how in
the late nineteenth century British exports took on a significance
that far exceeded their humble object nature, to the extent that
at times it appeared that commodities themselves were performing
the work of empire without human agency. Imperialists portrayed,
in his words, "commodities as a magic medium through which
English power and influence could be enforced and enlarged in
the colonial world" (Commodity 123).
My essay will explore the other side of the story. At home too
the commodity appeared to possess an imperial force.
In the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851, it seemed, again
in Richards's words, "only a matter of time until this superabundance
of things colonized the country and made committed consumers out
of every man, woman, and child in England" (119). But what
if the things which came to fill the British home were not in
fact British? Mummy fiction provides a new kind of narrative dealing
with this imperial side-effect. The mummy
story emplots the new relations of subjects and commodities, articulating
the connections between the national economy and its less visible
imperial extensions, and so providing
a sort of narrativized commodity theory.
Merchandise Becomes Mummy
It has been argued for some time now that Britain's economy undergoes
an important change after mid-century. If Britain had pushed its
way to the front of world trade by developing its productive power,
after mid-century consumption assumed a new importance, and by
the 1880s consumerism had fundamentally transformed Victorian
culture.[5] The 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition announces a new
form of public entertainment that unites commercial spectacle
with leisure culture. Like the department store that it anticipates,
the exhibition establishes what Walter Benjamin calls a "universe
of commodities" (Reflections 153). This new visibility of
the commodity is also suggested by contemporary theorizations
of Britain's economy. With the appearance of neo-classical economic
theory consumerism might be said to have its own school of economics
(Birken).[6] But it was Karl Marx rather than the neo-classicists
who first analyzed the uncanny power that certain objects had
acquired over consumers in a capitalist economy. If commodities
were on the move, so too were mummies: toward the end of this
period mummies first begin to stalk the pages of popular fiction.
The mummy, and to a lesser extent the collector and the detective,
are figures around which another such theory of the new relations
of subjects and objects finds articulation. Indeed, it could even
be argued that mummy fictions tell us as much about Marx's model
for explaining the inverted relations of subjects and objects
in a nascent consumer culture as Marx can tell us about such fictions.
While his essay on "The Commodity Fetish and its Secret"
cleaves to a production-centered economic model, the mummy suggests
the existence of objects whose commodity-nature is not the effect
of production. The mummy is the type of object which becomes a
commodity simply because it becomes desirable for consumers, and
is thereby drawn into economic exchange. This chasm between production
and consumption is thematicized in Conan Doyle's
"Lot No. 249." The story's title refers to the lot number
assigned to a mummy at the auction where it was bought, and the
story itself explains how this exchange has transformed the mummy
into a pure object: "I don't know his name,' said Bellingham
[the villain of the piece] passing his hand over the shrivelled
head. 'You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is
missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed
on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked
him up"' (192). The story includes only enough of the mummy's
history to mark the disparity beween production and consumption:
"This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after
in the most approved style. They did not serve hodsmen in that
fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated
that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds
in our money" (192). What makes mummies valuable, though,
is not the cost of their production but the fact that people want
them. If Marx wants to hold onto the rational kernel at the center
of the magical commodity form to show that the commodity's seeming
autonomy is the effect of alienated labor, the mummy narrative
implies that the relations of consumers and commodities are fundamentally
irrational--or, in other words, desire-driven.[7] Similarly, in
the stories of Everett, Haggard, Conan Doyle,
and others, the mummy, as a markedly foreign body within the British
economy, articulates precisely the imperial dimension
of the nineteenth-century British economy that Marx underplays.
Commodity Stories
Marx, in his theorization of the new prominence of the object-world,
provides a myth of the fall. In the past, the relations between
producers were relatively clear, and objects knew their places;
but now, through the increasing dominance of commodity production,
relations between people appear as relations between the objects
they exchange, and objects seem to take on the characteristics
of subjects:
The form of wood . . . is altered if a table is made out of it.
Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous
thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into
a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with
its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities,
it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque
ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of
its own free will. (16465)
Marx, of course, wants to demystify this bizarre object world,
to reveal the magic that animates it. The secret, he reveals,
lies in the form of production. Objects begin to misbehave in
this fashion when individuals cease to produce goods simply for
their own use, or for the use of a knowable community, and begin
to produce for an impersonal market:
Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the
products of the labour of private individuals who work independently
of each other. . . . Since the producers do not come into social
contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the
specific social character of their private labours appear only
within this exchange. . . . To the producers, therefore, the social
relations between their private labours appear as what they are,
i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons
in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between
persons and social relations between things. (165-66)
There is nothing fortuitous in this process for Marx. Use value
is only displaced by exchange value "when exchange has already
acquired a sufficient extension and importance to allow useful
things to be produced for the purpose of being exchanged, so that
their character as values has already to be taken into consideration
during production" (166, emphasis added).
Things weren't always like this. In feudal society, Marx argues,
there was no system of independent and mutually invisible producers:
"Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent--serfs
and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics . . . . But
precisely because relations of personal dependence form the given
social foundation, there is no need for labour and its producers
to assume a fantastic form different from their reality"
(170). The problem then would appear to be one of knowledge or
representation: only reveal that the ostensible powers of goods
are bestowed on them by the labor of actual men, and the dominion
of objects over men should cease. In a completely transparent
society, where exchange stayed within clear sight of production,
subject/object relations would be unambiguous. However, Marx argues,
the spell that objects cast over men may only be broken by lived
knowledge, not abstract theoretical knowledge: "The veil
is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process,
i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production
by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and
planned control" (173). It is not enough, in other words,
to simply reveal the relations of the parts to the whole of the
economic system: the relations between, and nature of, the parts
must be changed.
The story of the mummy suggests that the circulation of objects
is more complex than Marx was willing to imagine. What if the
chain of production did not lead one back to the factory or the
mill? Marx' s commodities often have an interestingly homely cast:
the weaver sells his linen and ("being a man of the old school"
[199]) buys a bible; the bookseller uses that money to buy brandy.
What about objects that are not produced for exchange but nevertheless
become objects of exchange? What if the relationship between visibility
and knowledge is complicated by an immense spatial and cultural
gap--of the kind, say, that separated Victorian Manchester and
ancient Egypt? If Marx had wandered out of the British Museum
reading room and visited the Assyrian or Egyptian rooms, he would
have seen one of the world's largest collections of such things,
things that, regardless of their original roles, had entered into
circulation as commodities, before being removed from economic
exchange and placed on display within a very different culture.
While he does not produce an explicit account of this very different
world of goods, it nevertheless makes an appearance in his text.
Imperial Figures
In the dancing table allusion I cited earlier, Marx draws on the
Victorian craze for spiritualism; his unruly tables resemble the
tilting tables of middle-class seances. Marx dismisses such practices
at the same time that he draws on them to describe the behavior
of commodities. In the same way, Capital develops its anatomy
of capitalism and the commodity form by substituting the language
of religion for that of political economy:
In order, therefore, to find an analogy [i.e. for the way commodities
appear to alienated producers] we must take flight into the misty
realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear
as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which
enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.
So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's
hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the
products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities,
and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
(165)
Just as human powers become displaced onto supernatual figures
with which men are reunited through religious rituals, so in a
capitalist economy do the relations between people become projected
onto the world of things. Though Marx draws on the work of Feuerbach
to make this analogy, it is perhaps more important that he is
describing the fetishistic behaviour of certain objects in British
culture at a time when British anthropology is developing an interest
in the religions of "primitive" people.
During the 1860s fetishism became a focal point of intellectual
interest in the emerging discipline of anthropology. 1866 saw
the appearance of a Fortnightly Review article by E.B. Tylor on
"The Religion of Savages." Four years later the same
periodical published J.F. McLennan' s "The Worship of Plants
and Animals, Part 1: Totems and Totemism" (Pietz 132). Tylor's
pioneering Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development
of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom appeared in
1871, the second volume of which contains a discussion of fetish-objects,
which Tylor distinguishes from the other objects collected by
both primitive and modern societies. Marx's analysis of the commodity
form envisages the possibility of its demystification through
an account of its production. But by using the language of primitive
and occult cultural practices to describe the thing in need of
demystification, he pushes these objects beyond the reach of his
narrative account. Objects from "exotic" cultures were
pouring into Britain during this period for display in private
homes, as well as for collections like the Pitt-Rivers at Oxford
(with which Tylor was connected, as it happens)? Weapons, tools,
ritual masks, and objects that would probably have been classified
as fetishes were imported into Britain in increasing numbers as
the net of empire was cast ever wider. These objects clearly entered
the British economy as commodities, yet it is unlikely that all
or even most of them could be described in Marx's terms. The term
commodity fetish, then, as Marx develops if, both acknowledges
and denies the existence of this category of things.
This fetishistic functioning of the commodity in his own discourse
is activated by his transposition of the imperial theme:
"Value . . . transforms every product of labor into a social
hieroglyphic. Later on men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to
get behind the secret of their own social product . . ."(167).
To describe the commodity as a "social hieroglyphic"
is to put in play centuries of discursive production of Egypt
as enigmatic, as a country that is ineffably mysterious- -and
to occult the very process of production he is out to demystify.
Like the term "fetish" itself, his use of such a metaphor
betrays the fact that while he describes the social life of things
in Capital in nostalgically domestic terms--the farmer's wheat
is exchanged for the weaver's cloth, the weaver's cloth is exchanged
for the tradesman' s bible his account retains the vestiges of
the commodity-flow which he is forced to discount in order to
keep his production-centered theory of the commodity. The foreign
objects which begin to pour into Britain in ever-increasing numbers,
who could say how or why they were made? In this light, Marx's
focus on properly English commodities almost seems like a strategy
of containment; the origin-fantasies that surround the flow of
imperial objects are evoked in the language
of primitive religion and of Oriental mystery, but the actual
analysis disavows the other-worldly nature of these commodities.
The National Collection
At the same time that imperialism was effecting enormous changes
in disparate cultures around the world, then, the "home culture"
was also being re-shaped in response to the new global system.
It is also as part of a new empire of objects that we can understand
the museum' s new importance in the British social imaginary.
The museum is part of the particular spectacular regime of nineteenth-century
Europe. This regime, as Timothy Mitchell observes, must be understood
as itself an imperial phenomenon, "since
what was to be rendered as exhibit was reality, the world itself"
(13). The museum often provides the setting for exploring subject-object
relations in mummy fiction. If, as Susan Stewart remarks, "the
museum . . . must serve as the central metaphor of the collection"
this is because it offers the national equivalent of the private
collection (158). The collection provides a way of "domesticating"
objects, making origins and function subservient to a scheme of
classification imposed by the collector.[9] Marx tries to imagine
the reacquistion of conceptual control over the realm of objects
by means of a narrative of origins; the collection seeks to do
the same by giving the object a new origin within the collection.
In the private collection, the ultimate origin is the collector
him or herself: "Not simply a consumer of the objects that
fill the decor, the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes
the producer of those objects, a producer by arrangement and manipulation"
(Stewart 159). The self extends its own boundaries through the
disposition of objects. In Benjamin's words: "for a collector
. . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can
have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who
lives in them" (Illuminations 67). In the public collection
the same principal holds--namely, that objects must be controlled,
must be put in the service of the system of objects. The British
Museum came to represent the ideal of the collection in this period,
a world of exotic objects under a domesticating taxonomic regime.
In the museum, the imagined body of the nation could incorporate
the other, subjecting the unruly parade of foreign objects to
the strict discipline of classification. Richards persuasively
argues that the British Museum operates as one of several fantasy
images for a total imperial knowledge
(Imperial, ch. 1). While this may be true
of the Museum's library, I want to suggest that the Museum operates
somewhat differently--as a fantasy image for the containment of
the material culture, the things, rather than the knowledge, accumulated
with empire. In this way the national collection plays an important
part in mediating between the national body and its imperial
extensions.
For much of its history the British Museum authorities were more
concerned with keeping people out than luring them in, but the
museum movement of the second half of the nineteenth century reimagined
the storehouse- museum as an instrument of popular education.
We can discern this new conception of the museum in the 1860 "Report
of the Select Committee on the power of Parliament to provide,
or of the House to recommend, the placing of institutions supported
by General Taxation for recreation and improvement of the people."
The committee recommended the adoption of evening opening hours
to allow the working class to attend the British Museum and other
institutions. More was at stake than providing popular entertainment,
as is evident from the section of the report addressing the possibility
of setting up a loan-scheme for museum exhibits. Educational recreation
was to draw the public from less acceptable pursuits; indeed not
to do so was to risk the museum's transformation into a forbiddingly
exotic, even Gothic space. Being brought face to face with the
objects of empire would disperse the mystery surrounding them:
"Thus instead of our vast national collections being virtually
entombed as at present, or becoming so vast as to bewilder, and
yet so crowded as to be hidden, profitable recreation would be
provided in the various crowded districts of the Metropolis, which
would successfully compete with places of demoralizing amusement"
(172, emphasis added). The museum as a vehicle for self-improvement
was to be made more accessible, but also the "various crowded
districts" were to be improved by a judicious distribution
of the equally crowded national collections.
Nor were antiquities the only possible instruments for the diffusion
of culture. The museum movement, aspiring towards the "diffusion
of instruction and rational amusement," was especially visible
in the development of the local and natural history museums (van
Keuren 271). The attempt by one General Augustus Pitt Rivers to
diffuse culture among the lower orders is a case in point. Pitt
Rivers, founder of the eponymous Museum at Oxford (earlier situated
in the working-class Bethnal Green district), assembled a huge
collection of weapons and tools from around the world. He applied
Darwinist theories of evolution to this collection, arranging
the artefacts to show the step-by-step development of material
culture. Through his seamless displays of the evolution of common
objects he wanted to persuade the working- class museum visitor
that world history observes a continuity of development, that
"Natura non facet saltum"(van Keuren 287).[10] The intelligent
working-class visitor would then apply these universal principles
of gradual change to politics and realise the futility of political
agitation. Pitt Rivers's project is congruent with that of the
Select Committee. Somewhat paradoxically, bringing goods from
"primitive" cultures into working-class London districts
was meant to have a civilizing effect on their inhabitants. In
the museum, then, we see the point of intersection of different
fantasies: what we might designate an explicit political fantasy
of the museum as an instrument of ideology, and the less clearly
formulated fantasy of the museum as the mediator between the foreign
and the domestic. These fantasies are by no means consistent.
The former fantasy endowed objects, albeit arranged objects, with
the power to influence people; the latter returned objects to
the control of the collector or curator, the object-expert.
Homes and Holmes
But the national collection also had its private equivalent. The
bourgeois home was becoming itself museum-like, as, from relatively
spartan beginnings, it came to be more and more a repository for
objects (Davidoff and Hall 375, 378). Managing these objects was
the province of the middle-class woman (Saisselin 53-74).[11]
Books on interior decorating and household management such as
Charles Eastlake's popular Hints on Household Taste in Furniture,
Upholstery and Other Details (1868) and the bestselling Mrs. Beeton's
Book of Household Management (1861) simultaneously created and
filled a need: as Asa Briggs reports, " there were difficulties
in the way of housekeeping, and many modern demands upon it, with
which our grandmothers or even our mothers had not to contend"
(220).
One of these difficulties was "the increase in the number
of things in the home and the number of things about which the
housewife had to know" (Briggs 220). The home, as a sort
of domestic museum for the exotic and antique, becomes a space
for the collector's art. Mrs. Orrinsmith's The Drawing Room nicely
illustrates the character of the domestic collection:
In her drawing room there were to be "shelves with delicate
carving on side and edges, tiles and plates on the lowest, and
Venetian bottles, old Delft vases or old Nankin cups arranged
on the upper shelf." "What shall be added next?"
ought, she said, to be a constantly recurring thought. The answer
was another "object Of taste." "To the appreciative
mind, not spoiled by the luxury Of wealth, what keen pleasure
there is in the possession of one new treasure: a Persian tile,
an Algerian flower-pot, an old Flemish cup . . . an Icelandic
spoon, a Japanese cabinet, a Chinese fan; a hundred things might
be named." (qtd. in Briggs 246)
But if the increasing numbers willing to take Eastlake's household
hints seem to suggest that the British home was able to take happily
to its new role, there are also indications that the house-as-museum
was rather less than heimlich.
In mummy fiction the division between the home and the museum
characteristically breaks down, but often in a disconcerting way
for the inhabitants of these spaces. In Stoker's The Jewel of
Seven Stars, Margaret Trelawny is not sure which space she inhabits:
"I sometimes don't know whether I am in a private house or
the British Museum" (37). Abercrombie Smith of Conan
Doyle's "Lot No. 249" notes a similar transformation
of domestic space: "It was such a chamber as he had never
seen before---a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling
were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt
and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens of weapons
stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were
bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl- headed statues, with
viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange beetle-like deities
cut out of the blue lapis lazuli" (187). In another Conan
Doyle story, "The Ring of Thoth," the substitution
takes place in the other direction. A Louvre attendant, in fact
an ancient Egyptian who has discovered the secret of immortality,
makes one of the museum' s smaller rooms his temporary home (he
has "prevailed upon [the director] to move the few effects
which [he] has retained" [161] into it) while he searches
for his lost love, one of the museum's mummies. A similar convergence
of home and museum occurs in Haggard's "Smith and the Pharaohs,"
when Smith is forced to spend a night in the Cairo museum. In
an effort to make his surroundings less intimidating, he seeks
out the most domestic of the museum's rooms: "He was shut
in a museum, and the question was in what part of it he should
camp for the night. . . . He thought with affection of the lavatory,
where, before going to see the Director, only that afternoon he
had washed his hands" (173). Both the museum as house and
the house as museum stage the exotic interior of an expanding
consumer culture that is also an imperial culture.
If imperialism brought the forces of modernization to bear on
the remotest parts of the globe, imposing the stamp of British
culture on often recalcitrant nations, Britain itself seems to
have felt the cultural recoil. The domestic space in these fictions
is increasingly experienced as foreign; the present is increasingly
infiltrated by what it has designated as archaic.
When the home is experienced as a museum, it is not surprising
that the private collector should find a place in fiction. Dickens's
novels are perhaps the first to meditate on these changes, and
the collection and its designer are already visible in Our Mutual
Friend, Dombey and Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. Indeed, as
Dorothy Van Ghent noted many years ago, the world of Dickens's
novels is marked by the same personification of objects and reification
of people that Marx describes in Capital (125-38). It is the less
surprising, then, that, writing at the threshold of the Exhibition
age, Dickens should also be among the first to deploy the figures
that come to mediate the experience of a transformed object world.
We also encounter the collector in the novels of Wilkie Collins
quite early, as the awful Mr. Fairlie in The Woman in White, and
as Noel Vanstone in No Name. He is much more in evidence, though,
in the later nineteenth century, not only in the fiction of Henry
James or Oscar Wilde, for example, but also as Stein in Conrad's
Lord Jim.[12]
The collector possesses a more adventurous counterpart in the
detective. Detective fiction provides us with a clue to what was
most problematic about the object-rich interior: these new objects
are difficult to read. Meaning has been drained from the world
of objects represented in detective stories, much as it has in
the household guides. Thus the new object-world requires a new
hero--someone who can discriminate with a high degree of accuracy
between one object and another by establishing origins, uses and
values. Benjamin observes how the thickening of the fabric of
modern life first registers in the detective story. Such narratives
exploit the possible threat to the domestic posed by the exoticization
of interiors:
Far more interesting than the Oriental landscapes in detective
novels is that rank Orient inhabiting their interiors: the Persian
carpet and the ottoman, the hanging lamp and the genuine Caucasian
dagger. Behind the heavy, gathered Khilim tapestries the master
of the house has orgies with his share certificates, feels himself
the Eastern merchant, the indolent pasha in the caravanserai of
otiose enchantment, until that dagger in its silver sling above
the divan puts an end, one fine afternoon, to his siesta and himself.
(Reflections, 65)
When the bourgeois subject allows the exotic to overcome the domestic,
"Eastern" appetite displaces educated European taste.
The detective restores the proper relations of objects and contexts.
Like the connoisseur and the tasteful woman addressed by Mrs.
Orrinsmith, he can read this highly textured bourgeois interior?
The detective is anticipated in the work of Dickens and Collins,
just as the collector is. The imperial significance
of the detective is already evident in Collins's The Moonstone,
which traces the metropolitan consequences of the theft of a colonial
treasure. As if to acknowledge this lineage, one of Sherlock Holmes's
earliest adventures, The Sign of Four, is a whittled- down version
of Collins's novel. Holmes's expertise extends over all objects,
though, domestic and foreign. One of the most striking aspects
of the Sherlock Holmes stories is the extent to which the solution
of mystery lies in the proper reading of household objects. For
Benjamin, collectors are the "physiognomists of the world
of objects." One might say the same of Holmes. Boots, tobacco
ash, writing paper all reassuringly tell us of their origins under
Holmes's inspection. His accounts render the inscrutable object
world completely transparent; he deciphers the histories of both
foreign and mass-produced objects at a glance. Like the middle-class
housewife, the detective serves as an expert in material culture.
It is scarcely surprising that Conan Doyle was
a great admirer of Mrs. Beeton (Briggs 215). Even the people who
turn up at Baker Street bear the legible marks of their travels,
trade, and social standing. Seemingly homogeneous commodities
are revealed to be as individual as fingerprints, while apparently
inscrutable individuals are exposed as ex-sailors, members of
particular clerical grades, or former colonial officers. To the
discerning eye of Holmes, all are mere surfaces for the inscription
of the defining marks of their type; from such traces whole histories
can be reconstructed.
The museum and the collector provide the framework for experiencing
and thus for managing the new object world; the figure of the
detective both entertains and contains the possibility that the
world of objects can escape from that rational framework. The
mummy, I want to argue, takes the relation of subjects and objects
in another direction, depicting what happens when the enabling
rational classification of objects breaks down. Exhibits take
on a life of their own, and collectors face their own objectification.
In fact, the fantasies explored in mummy fiction closely resemble
Marx's description of the transactions between people and things
in his chapter on commodity fetishism. That "transposition
of attributes" already nascently present in the fiction of
Dickens becomes the dramatic principle of the mummy story.
The Collector's Passion
Some stories deal with hostile mummies who revenge themselves
on those who have disturbed their original resting places. Others
exploit the erotic possibilities of the mummy. Still others vacillate
between these categories. However, all feature mummies who come
to life or otherwise attain agency in modern Europe. As in Marx's
commodity story, seemingly inert objects take on a will of their
own, and subjects find themselves in danger of reification. The
mummy, as a complex figure sharing both subjective and objective
traits, is the perfect vehicle for this narrativized commodity
theory.[14] Where Marx describes objects that begin to behave
like subjects through the process of commodification, mummy fiction
shows how subjects-turned-objects revert to the status of subjects.
The fictional possibilities of dancing tables may be limited,
but resurrected mummies show considerable narrative flexibility,
entering into a variety of relations with the subjects who revive
them.
The limitations of the collector as object-expert are evident
in one of the very first stories to explore the fictional possibilities
presented by the mummy, Theophile Gautier's "Le Pied de Momie."[15]
Gautier' s story deals with Benjamin's Paris rather than Marx's
London, but the changes in material culture which the story elaborates
are remarkably similar. Gautier's narrator one day enters the
shop of a "marchand de bric-a-brac" in "an idle
mood." He appeals to the shared experience of the new middle-class
shopping culture:
You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of
some of these shops, which have become so numerous now that it
is fashionable to buy antiquated furniture, and that every petty
stockbroker thinks he must have his chambre au moyen age. (52)
The description of the shop's contents (much of which he suggests
are inauthentic) becomes the occasion for an exercise in style,
the dense, noun-laden paragraphs mimicking the space of the cluttered
shop:
All ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous
there. An Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet,
with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass;
a duchess of the court of Louis xv non-chalantly extended her
fawn like feet under a massive table of the time of Louis xiii,
with heavy spiral supports of oak . . . Upon the denticulated
shelves of several sideboards glittered immense Japanese dishes
with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching, side by
side with enamelled works by Bernard Palissy, representing serpents,
frogs, and lizards in relief . . . . Chinese grotesques, vases
of celadon and crackleware, Saxon and old Sevres cups encumbered
the shelves and nooks of the apartment. (52-53)
The description recalls the passage from Mrs. Orrinsmith I quoted
earlier. In Gautier's shop, however, the random collection of
exotica is one that only the taste of a discriminating collector
can bring to order.
The story dwells on the contradictory aspects of commodification,
where uniqueness is rewritten as exchangeability and thus as costliness.
The dealer himself embodies this split between regimes of value:
his close attention to his customer is described as that "of
an antiquarian and a usurer." Usury is suggested again when
the dealer is described as of the "Oriental or Jewish type"
(54). Our narrator seeks a paperweight, but he wants one that
will distinguish his desk from others: he wants, in effect, to
purchase uniqueness. He seeks "a small figure, something
which will suit me for a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those
trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found
on everybody else's desk" (55). A mummy's foot, described
by the dealer as the "foot of the Princess Hermonthis,"
seems to fit the bill. The fate of uniqueness within a money economy
is again foregrounded in the haggling that follows, as the logic
of exchange value struggles with the concept of originality to
establish the object's worth:
"How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?"
"Ah, the highest price I can get, for it is a superb piece.
If I had the match of it you could not have it for less than five
hundred francs. The daughter of a Pharaoh! Nothing is more rare."
"Assuredly that is not a common article, but still how much
do you want?
In the first place let me warn you that all my wealth consists
of just five louis. I can buy anything that costs five louis,
but nothing dearer . . . "
"Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That
is very little, very little indeed. 'Tis an authentic foot . .
. Well, take it and I will give you the bandages into the bargain
. . . "(57)
Gautier explores the paradoxical effects of the new purchase on
the narrator; the process which is meant to bestow the distinction
of the object on its owner actually gives the object a new power
over him, to the extent that the object appears to become a subject
in its own right. Having deposited his new acquisition on his
desk, the narrator goes out "with the gravity and pride becoming
one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the
passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a piece of the Princess
Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh" (58). Uniqueness, it seems,
has been transferred from the commodity to its possessor. The
foot confers upon him a new perception of his superiority to others:
"I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paperweight
so authentically Egyptian as very ridiculous people, and it seemed
to me that the proper occupation of every sensible man should
consist in the mere fact of having a mummy's foot upon his desk"
(59).
However, the foot refuses to accept its part in the narrative
he has in mind for it. In his dreams that night he sees the foot
come to life: "Instead of remaining quiet, as behoved a foot
which had been embalmed for four thousand years, it commenced
to act in a nervous manner, contracted itself and leaped over
the papers like a startled frog" (60). Peeved that his acquisition
could not be of a more "sedentary disposition," he is
further startled by the appearance of the Princess herself looking
for her foot. Having generously returned the foot to her (as a
visitor from a less commerical world, she has no money to buy
it back), he is rewarded by being taken by her to a gathering
of Pharaohs where he asks her father for the Princess's hand in
marriage ("a very proper antithetic recompense for the foot").
Rejected as being too young for the well-preserved Princess, he
wakes to find a friend shaking him, having come to accompany him
to an exhibition. The story ends, then, by returning the collector-hero
to the world where expert knowledge gives him domain over objects.
This fantasy depends on an object-rich culture, in particular
one where the old and the exotic are valued for their own uniqueness,
which in turn suggests that mass-production has already achieved
cultural dominance. The collector, the man of taste, someone who
can read the object-world with a certain assurance is the only
appropriate subject for such a culture. However, in the story,
while the collector seeks to place the object-world at the service
of his personality, to make it an emblem of his own depth, the
object takes on a life of its own. Having "leaped over the
papers like a startled frog" the foot seems, like Marx's
table, to evolve "grotesque ideas" out of its head,
conjuring up its previous contexts (i.e. the missing body of the
Princess, and then Egypt itself). The collector attempts to domesticate
the foreign part-object, removing it from the world of exchange,
and cutting it off, as it were, from its previous associations.
It is supposed to behave metaphorically, and will "stand
in" for his own cultural refinement. Instead, the foot conjures
up the various wholes of which it was once a part, and a metonymic
series overturns his metaphorical scheme. The consumer dreams,
and in his dreams the past life of the commodity comes before
him. However, if his ascendancy over the object-world is threatened,
his reaction is not horror, but rather an immediate wish to possess
the mummy itself in another way--by means of romance. As we shall
see in the later mummy stories, the fantasy of the collector is
abandoned for a fantasy in which the Western consumer woos the
object world. In mummy fiction--as in advertising--objects begin
to behave as sex-objects.
The British mummy stories replace the shopper with the Egyptologist.
If the shopper represents one type of object-expert, the Egyptologist
represents his more specialized avatar. Again, it is the limitations
of these experts that are foregrounded, and they are no more successful
than Gautier's narrator at controlling objects. Haggard's "Smith
and the Pharaohs," for example, follows a similar logic to
Gautier's tale, which drags first Princess Hermonthis and then
Egypt itself into the narrator's study by the foot. In Haggard's
story, though, the commodity world evoked more closely resembles
that sustained by modern advertising, where the images of objects
rather than objects themselves compel the subject's fascination.
Smith, a well-to-do clerk, becomes obsessed with the cast of a
statue of an unidentified woman's head after a desultory visit
to the British Museum. Rather like Gautier' s narrator he "drift[s]
info the British Museum," (150) but following a familar topos,
the dense texture of urban experience seems to ensure that such
contingency always turns into narrative. Smith is inspired by
his fascination with the woman's image to become an amateur Egyptologist,
and he travels to Egypt, which is described to him as a place
where commerce rather than romance is in the ascendant. "I'm
afraid you' ll find it expensive," a superior at work warns
him, "They fleece one in Egypt" (15). After a number
of trips, Smith finds the tomb of the Egyptian queen Ma-Mee, the
woman whose image obsesses him.[16] Her body has been burned by
a tomb-robber, but he recovers her hand ("a woman's little
hand, most delicately shaped" 163), two rings and a broken
statuette. After he shows these finds to the Museum Director in
Cairo he is accidentally locked in the museum after hours, where
he witnesses a convocation of the dead kings and queens of ancient
Egypt, among them his love, Ma-Mee.[17] As in Gautier's narrative,
the collectible part-object seems to generate the lost body and,
by way of further metonymic extension, the environment of that
body. The collected object, rather than remaining a properly classified
and subsidiary part of a whole collection, reproduces its original
context outside itself. Smith himself is revealed as a part of
the object's lost context when we discover that he is the reincarnation
of a sculptor who once loved Ma-Mee. While watching the convocation
of Pharaohs, Smith feels that he has become an object of study
for the reanimated mummies: "he became aware that the eyes
of that dreadful magician were fixed upon him, and that a bone
had a better chance of escaping the search of a Rontgen ray than
he of hiding himself from their baleful glare" (182).[18]
Where Gautier's story explored the possibilities of the collected
object attaining subject status, Haggard's story brings the expert
face to face with the prospect of his own objectification.
The objectification of the self--reversing the positions of collector
and object --is treated most extensively in two of Haggard's novels,
She and The Yellow God. She is in many respects a displaced Egyptian
romance, in which the collected object behaves in the same way
it does in the mummy tales. The Amahagger, Ayesha's subjects,
are very much like the modern Egyptians as the Victorians saw
them: epigones, the inheritors of vast and majestic ruins of which
they have no proper knowledge. The vanished inhabitants of the
city of Kor are explicitly compared to the ancient Egyptians as
a people who "thought more of the dead than the living"
(137). They use the mummified bodies of their greater predecessors
as fuel, much as Mark Twain and other nineteenth- century commentators
accuse the modern Egyptians of doing (386). Haggard invites us
to read She as a mummy story when Holly, the narrator, is presented
with the remains of one such burnt mummy, a perfectly preserved
foot: "it was not shrunk or shriveled, or even black and
unsightly, like the flesh of Egyptian mummies, but plump and fair,
and, except where it had been slightly burned, perfect as on the
day of death--a very triumph of embalming" (85). Billali,
the leader of the Amahagger party which brings the Englishmen
to Ayesha, had fallen in love with the preserved body of this
woman in his youth. His mother had burned it to put an end to
his folly. Thus, in this story, the mummy-fantasy is shared between
Billali and Holly, European and native. We hear no more of the
foot after Holly stows it away in his Gladstone bag. However,
it is possible to see how She replays mummy fiction's fantasy
of the regenerated body through a species of displacement: Ayesha
herself stands in the place of the whole mummy conjured up, as
it were, by the fragment. This connection is borne out by Haggard's
description of her: when Holly first sees Ayesha she is "wrapped
up in soft white gauzy material in such a way as at first sight
to remind me most forcibly of a corpse in its grave-clothes"
(110). Moreover, Holly notes her "swathed mummy-like form"
(111). Like the mummies in "Le Pied de la Momie" and
in "Smith and the Pharaohs, " Ayesha threatens the fantasy
of the collector at the same time that she evokes it, since she
is a collector in her own fight. She has preserved the body of
her long-lost lover, Kallikrates, which, when revealed to the
Englishmen, appears to be identical to that of Holly' s companion
Leo:
With a sudden motion she drew the shroud from the cold form, and
let the lamp-light play upon it. I looked, and then shrunk back
terrified, since, say what she might in explanation, the sight
was an uncanny one . . . For there, stretched upon the stone bier
before us, robed in white and perfectly preserved, was what appeared
to be the body of Leo Vincey. I stared from Leo, standing there
alive, to Leo lying there dead, and could see no difference, except
perhaps, that the body on the bier looked older . . . I can only
sum up the resemblance by saying that I never saw twins so exactly
similar as that dead and living pair. (177-78)
If the strangely attractive preserved foot has metamorphosed into
the living and breathing Ayesha, Leo Vincey comes vis a vis with
his own objectification. The exotic object becomes a subject;
to complete the chiasmus, Leo would have to take the place of
his (reified) ancestor. This is the same unsettling prospect which
confronts Smith in "Smith and the Pharaohs" where another
Englishman faces a reversal of the rational relations between
subject and object.
That what we have here is a fantasy of mummification in reverse
is confirmed by Haggard's later reworking of the scene in The
Yellow God, An Idol of Africa (1908), a novel that combines shady
dealings in the City with a more openly misogynistic retelling
of She. In The Yellow God, the character who takes the place of
Ayesha is the priestess, or "Asika," to a bloodthirsty
idol, and she chooses husbands as she desires. They conveniently
die when she tires of them, whereupon she has their bodies preserved,
rather as Ayesha has done with Kallikrates. Again the collector's
fantasy is reversed along lines of race and gender: the exotic
woman supplants the European collector. The hero, Alan Vernon,
is shown the Asika's ex-husbands: "At first, until the utter
stillness un-deceived him, he thought that they must be men. Then
he understood that this was what they had been; now they were
corpses wrapped in sheets of thin gold and wearing golden masks
with eyes of crystal, each mask being beaten out to a hideous
representation of the man in life" (186).[19] Alan's native
servant spells OUt what will happen to the Asika's present husband
in due course. "In two month's time he nothing [sic],"
he explains, "but gold figure, No. 2403; just like one mummy
in museum" (emphasis added). Alan's fate may be the same,
since she has fallen in love with him, and must dispose of her
present husband in order to marry him. This is the ultimate reversal
of the collector's fantasy. Drawn into the history of the object
he seeks to collect, the would-be collector is likely to become
a collectible object himself rather than enhancing his status
as a subject.
The object/commodity turned subject does not necessarily involve
the hero's reification, however. Iras, A Mystery begins as a smuggling
story and ends as a love story; the Iras of the title is in rapid
succession a contraband mummy, a young woman, a bride, and (again)
a mummy. Lavenham, the hero of the piece, illegally imports a
mummy in a crate of sponges, which he plans to use for a chemical
investigation of the embalming process. In the coffin he finds
a tablet identifying the mummy as a young woman who was put to
sleep by the priest, Savak, when she refused to marry him. The
priest can only claim her if she fails to wake or if he defeats
her future lover, who will be "not of this land or generation"
(75). She does awaken and immediately falls in love with Lavenham;
as in the other mummy stories the attraction of collector and
collected is immediate. Remembering his Shakespeare, Lavenham
names her Iras, for one of Cleopatra's handmaidens. Iras' s docility
and unswerving affection for Lavenham, together with this Robinson
Crusoe-like christening, suggest that she is a sort of anti- New
Woman. Lavenham naturally experiences some difficulty in explaining
her presence to his landlady, and in procuring modern dress for
her, but these problems are surmounted and the amorous couple
take a train to Scotland to be married. The transition from contraband
to marriage partner does not go quite so smoothly, because the
vengeful Savak follows them in spirit form, seeking to foreshorten
Iras's new life by removing beads from her magical necklace. Their
honeymoon in Scotland is disrupted by Savak's attacks, each of
which destroys a few more beads. As a result, Iras fades away,
to the point where at times only Lavenham can see her. Eventually,
she re-enters the object-world, and he is discovered delirious
in the snow with a mummy dressed in modern clothes beside him.
Even such traces as her signature in the marriage register begin
to disappear. When Lavenham finds her trunk of clothes intact,
with all of the clothes she once wore lying there as is they had
never been worn, he is prompted to speculate on the spiritual
life of objects: "Have inanimate things souls--spiritual
doubles? and could it have been these she used and I saw?"
(224) Not only do such exotic commodities as mummies have secret
lives, then; so do such sensible materials as tweed.
Objects of Desire
Mummies, like Marx's animated tables, seem to live out the logic
of the commodity fetish. There are, however, crucial distinctions
beween the theory of the commodity advanced by Marx and that developed
in the figure of the mummy. Exploring these distinctions will
allow us to theorize the cultural significance of the craze for
mummy fiction. The mummy stories' contribution to commodity theory
relates to the way they gender the roles of collector and collected,
and on their figuration of empire. In one variety of the mummy
story, gender becomes the category through which the relations
of subjects and objects are re-established. Iras, A Mystery is
in fact a less unusual mummy narrative than one might expect.
The majority of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
mummy stories deal not with the vengeful mummies popularized by
Hollywood, but with male collectors and Egyptologists who fall
in love with revitalized female mummies.[20] This basic plot allows
for numerous displacements without altering the fundamental fantasy
that first threatens and then re-establishes the subject's domination
over the object world. In Conan Doyle's
"The Ring of Thoth, " for example, the Egyptologist
is a voyeur at the scene of resurrection performed on a beautiful
female mummy by an ancient Egyptian. The plot of Stoker's Jewel
of Seven Stars turns on the revival of another royal mummy, Again
there is a degree of mediation involved in the fantasy. The narrator
is not in love with Queen Tera, but with the daughter of the Egyptologist,
Trelawny, who wants to revive the dead queen. Margaret Trelawny,
however, is the double of Tera, born at the moment when her father
discovers her tomb. The revival in this case goes disastrously
wrong, for Queen Tera's body is destroyed and Margaret is killed.[21]
Grant Allen's lighter "My New Year's Eve Among the Mummies"
pokes fun at this pattern. The narrator finds his way into an
unopened pyramid, where he finds "a living Egyptian king,
surrounded by his coiffeured court" (130) who wake every
thousand years to feast. He wastes no time in falling in love
with Hatasou, the king's daughter, and in order to stay with her
decides to become a mummy himself. A priest will carry out the
mummification with the help of chloroform (one of a whole series
of jokes suggesting that the ancient Egyptians were more "advanced"
than the people who now study them). When he wakes from the operation,
however, the narrator finds himself in Shepheard's hotel in Cairo.
As in "Le Pied de Momie, " "Smith and the Pharaohs,"
and "The Ring of Thoth," the hero emerges unsure as
to the ontological status of his experience."
Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249"
appears at first glance to offer an exception to the rule, insofar
as the mummy is a vengeful male. A sinister Oxford undergraduate,
Bellingham, revives a mummy in order to initiate a reign of terror.
Abercrombie Smith, the hero of the piece, at first suspects Bellingham
of having a woman in his rooms in flagrant breach of college regulations:
"He knew that the step which he had heard upon the stairs
was not the step of an animal. But if it were not, then what could
it be? There was old Styles's statement about the something which
used to pace the room when the owner was absent. Could it be a
woman? Smith rather inclined to the view" (198). Subsequent
events prove otherwise, of course, but the presence of the fantasy
of the mummy as a love-object suggests that the vengeful mummy
is a later form of the mummy fantasy, perhaps even a defence against
the fantasy of the mummy as love-object. In short, then, while
the fantasy of the vengeful mummy governs the mummy's appearance
in twentieth- century popular culture, the late Victorian and
Edwardian imagination seems to have dwelt more on the mummy's
romance potential. In these stories the relations of subjects
and objects are problematized so that objects become subjects,
and subjects come under the spell of objects that embody their
desire.
It is important to recognize that the difference between subjects
and objects is not so much erased as sublated through this inversion.
In a novel like Iras, the illicitly imported object becomes a
love- object: the potentially refractory commodity is replaced
by the docile woman. In effect, late nineteenth-century mummy
fiction temporarily problematizes the subject/object division
only to reinscribe that division at another level, as a "natural"
gender difference. Where the mummy fragment conjures up a female
body who does not obey this logic, that body remains a narrative
problem--as in She where Ayesha' s body has to be destroyed before
the narrative conflict can be resolved. The relationships between
collectors and collected are temporarily suspended, then, but
only in order for a stronger domestic narrative to be put into
action. The "romance revival" of the late nineteenth
century represents itself as a departure from the domestic fiction
that dominated mid-Victorian letters, but what we see here is
a retooling of one of the characteristic tropes of domestic fiction,
the intersubjective bond, for a new purpose within the adventure
romance. We have grown accustomed to thinking of domestic fiction
as a vehicle for the rewriting of political dissymmetries in gendered,
personal terms; the Victorian novel relentlessly translates class
conflicts into relations between men and women, seemingly the
most natural and self-evident form of binary opposition.[23] Such
figuration thus provides an obvious and convincing strategy of
containment, making political conflicts susceptible to narrative
resolution through love and marriage without any real disturbance
of class divisions. The mummy narrative makes this same trope
available for a different sort of problem, the apparently unstable
opposition of commodity and consumer.
This narrative solution is not without its own problems, however.
That mummy fiction can translate subject/object relations into
gender relations also testifies to a new aspect of the relations
between consumers and commodities during this period. By linking
value to the desire of the consumer, mummy fiction makes explicit
a further power that the commodity possesses. The Egyptologist-heroes
have a penchant for falling in love with mummified princesses
and queens, but it is hardly the high standards reached in their
mummification that makes these objects so desirable. To the contrary,
the attraction is sudden and inexplicable, quite outside of rational
calculation. This is most certainly true of Smith's reaction to
the plaster-cast of Ma-Mee's head: "Smith looked at it once,
twice, thrice, and at the third look he fell in love" (150).
One is reminded of Benjamin' s characterization of fashion as
the ritual form of commodity fetishism, "coupl[ing] the living
body to the inorganic world" (Reflections 153). This translation
of the relations between subjects and objects into a sexual relation
is double-edged. While it looks back at one of the principal resolving
tropes of Victorian fiction, it also looks forward to one of the
most pervasive features of twentieth-century commodity culture:
the marriage Of sex and the commodity under the aegis of advertising.
In mummy fiction, as in advertising, the object or commodity is
replaced by its fantastic, eroticized image, or rather an intermediate
class of things, part object, part image is created. What drives
Smith to Egypt in "Smith in the Pharaohs" is not an
object so much as an image endowed with certain powers. Similarly,
in the other mummy stories, it is their desire for the objects-as-human,
not the objects per se, that threatens to invert the relationship
between subject and object. Rather than giving him power over
the domain of objects, the collector's gaze threatens to vitiate
that power, as the object turned love-object draws the subject
into its own narrative. In his account of the way consumer culture
remoulds human subjectivity, W.F. Haug has described this "tendency
of all objects of use in commodity-form to assume a sexual form
to some extent" (55). Haug locates the origins of this tendency
in the nature of the commodity exchange relation itself. Where
goods are produced for exchange, it is the moment of sale, not
the moment of consumption, that concerns the seller. This results
in a tendency to enhance the commodity's appearance of use-value,
to emphasize the surface or " skin" of the commodity,
its packaging.
In a further step, commodity and appearance part company altogether:
"under capitalist production, the commodity is created in
the image of the consumer's desires. Later on, this image, divorced
from its commodity, is the subject of advertising promotion"
(Haug 24). Under such conditions, the consumer replaces the product
as the real subject of this advertising. What is offered to the
consumer in exchange for the purchase of the commodity is a feeling,
an impression, an association- -as we already see in Gautier's
"Le Pied de Momie." Advertising effects the replacement
of the object by a fantasy or dream image in what Haug calls the
"general sexualization of commodities" (56). While Haug
is largely speaking of twentieth-century consumer culture, one
can observe the very features he identifies in nascent form in
late Victorian culture. The crusades of the conservative National
Vigilance Association against certain advertisers suggest that
the commercial value of sexuality in commodity-promotion was already
seen as a source of moral corruption (Fraser 136-37). Given that
mummy fiction seemed to manage the relations of consumers to commodities
by rewriting them in terms of gender, then, we can understand
how such a rhetorical move might have opened the way for another
assault on the sovereignty of the British subject. Even if these
stories promise control of the refractory object by gendering
it female, this same translation into sexual terms grants to that
object the power of a seductive woman, which is to suggest that
in these stories the moment of modern advertising has already
arrived: exotic goods turn into desirable women; the act of purchasing
or acquisition is filled with sexual promise.
Dreams of Empire
How does the question of object-love impinge on the question of
empire? Mummy fiction, like Marx's table story, is a species of
descriptive theory where the relations of consumption and production,
consumers and objects, are worked out as narrative. On the one
hand, mummy fiction witnesses that very transformation Of the
nature of value and desire that neoclassical economics describes.
Mummies are valuable objects because someone wants them; the source
of value is therefore personal and subjective. On the other, these
stories also link the desired foreign body/object to the dissolution
of the consuming subject, and thus to England's identity as a
productive economy. The revived mummies of The Jewel of Seven
Stars and "Lot No. 249" are dangerous. In She and The
Yellow God the subject's own objectification seems to be a possible
consequence of the affective relation to the foreign body/commodity;
the consumer makes himself vulnerable. In Iras the revival of
the beloved object brings with it not only a docile woman, but
also a threat and a rival in the person of the vengeful priest,
Savak.
Does mummy fiction gloomily anticipate the fall of an imperial
nation given over to consumption, while production
becomes the prerogative of others? I think not. This would scarcely
explain the popularity of mummy fiction in these years. Rather,
the temporary destabilization of subject/object relations that
we find in mummy fiction reconfigures imperial power
relations, and offers metropolitan subjects a way of positioning
themselves in the new imperial economy.
This is neither to suggest that mummy fiction homogeneously purveys
false consciousness, nor that readers of popular and middlebrow
fiction read passively and uncritically. As I hope I have made
clear throughout this essay, I read this fiction as a form of
popular theory, not as the degenerate form of some properly critical
high culture, nor as the innocent object of our own more knowing
reading practice. To the extent that mummy fiction offers a descriptive
commodity theory, it is indeed critical or theoretical. If that
theory should then turn out to enable rather than militate against
certain historical processes, it is no less theoretical for that.
To say that these stories are facilitative is not to deny that
they play on the dangers of the consumer's position. While the
language of gender offers a partial solution to the problem of
the commodity, as we have seen, it also brings its own problems:
the collector's gaze becomes the means through which his mastery
over the foreign object is undermined rather than confirmed. Fantastic
images of objects, foreign commodities turned into Oriental bodies,
solicit the collector' s desire. The appealing image, divorced
from any object-body, as in "Smith and the Pharaohs,"
leads the subject further into the phantasmagoric world of the
commodity. Thus the attempt to re-establish the priority of the
subject over the object-world in terms of gender is at least in
part compromised by the power it confers on the commodity; the
commodity aesthetics of advertising threaten to supersede the
reassuring gender logic of the Victorian novel. Faced with this
dilemma, mummy fiction steps back, as it were, from the commodity
fantasy. It makes the subject's encounter doubtful--much as Marx
does--by displacing it onto another realm---as afterlife or dream.
In lras, where the fantasy marriage of the consumer and the commodity
is most fully developed, Iras in the end returns to her object-status.
Lavenham looks forward to their meeting again after his own death,
when they will both exist only as spiritual entities. Smith, of
"Smith and the Pharaohs," is left unsure of the objective
nature of his museum experience. Gautier' s "Le Pied de Momie"
explicitly treats the narrator's encounter with the animated mummy
as a dream. In other words, mummy fiction provides a space in
which fantasies of an intermediate category of phenomena, part
object and part image are allowed to enjoy momentary ascendancy
over the subject, only to be expelled from the narrative. Because
the mummy is so obviously fantastic, it allows for a convincing
restoration of nor-malcy--namely, a distinction between subjects
and objects that allows one to dominate the other. At a moment
when Britain's expanding commodity culture, increasingly dependent
on imports, threatened the British subject's sense of national
identity, mummy fiction provides a carefully delimited space for
the entertainment of fantasies of the commodity's power.
Advertising, the new department stores, and the other resources
of "the commodity culture of Victorian Britain," to
use Thomas Richards' s term, were combining to annihilate the
distinctions not only between subjects and objects, but also between
England and its outside. At the same time, mummy fiction, itself
part of the expanding culture industry, was attempting to stabilize
those oppositions. While mummy fiction is deeply implicated in
the disappearance of the earlier structures of Victorian culture,
then, it also nostalgically evokes it. Announcing itself as fantasy,
representing the dissolution of older hierarchies as the very
stuff of make-believe, the mummy story paradoxically makes a plea
for the values of realism. In these stories the revived mummy,
the animated object, is ultimately represented as a projection
of an over-imaginative subject on the object-world, and the crumbling
of Britain's borders before a protean army of foreign objects
is firmly labeled as fantasy. But to speak of projection, of a
simple failure of objectivity, is to assume a prior distinction
between subjects and objects--which is also to adopt the premises
of realism.
In the end, then, the mummy story, like realism, insists on the
very opposition between subject and object that was increasingly
problematic in an expanding consumer culture. Placing its characters'
troubling encounters in quotes, as it were, the mummy story affects
to return the reader to a more stable world. Like the late twentieth-century
theme park, the mummy story seems to insist that outside its boundaries
the real world exists in all its reliable density.[24] In her
1925 essay, "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf laments
the "materialism" of her immediate predecessors, the
deadening solidity of their characters and set-rings. Perhaps
mummy fiction allows us to see that the fictional universe of
"softly padded first-class railway carriage[s]" that
Woolf found so oppressive masked a deeper awareness that such
a world had vanished. Yet I suspect that it is in the fantasy
stories of Everett, Haggard, Stoker, and their like, and not in
the staid novels of Bennett or Galsworthy, that we see the greatest
longing for the lost world of solid objects. Mummy fiction, in
its confinement of the unruly commodity to the realm of fantasy,
may suggest that mass culture is the final flowering of Victorian
realism.
1 The condensed version of a longer piece, this essay has benefited
from the comments of many people, but especially Nancy Armstrong,
Neil Lazarus, Ian Duncan, and the Victorian Readers Group at Brown
University.
2 Discussion of the different parts that mummies played in British
culture in the early modern period and in the early nineteenth
century- -two bizarre instances of what Arjun Appadurai has called
the "social life of things"--is unfortunately outside
the ambit of this essay. The resemblance of the bituminous substance
used in mummification to an established remedy, pissasphalt, may
have been the basis for the widespread use of mummy flesh in materia
medica. This use led to Sir Thomas Browne's observation in Urne
Burial that 'Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds,
and Pharaoh is sold for Balsoms," which I have taken as my
epigraph. Mummy's familiarity as a remedy in Britain is suggested
by passing references in Shakespeare. Beaumont, and Fletcher,
and John Donna, but also by more detailed remarks in the writings
of Browse, Francis Bacon, and Sir Robert Boyle (Browse 459-63;
Boyle 451; Bacon 153-54). For an overview see Dannenfeldt; see
also Wortham and Fagan. On the vogue for unrollings in the 1830s
and 184Os see Dawson, Taylor, and El Mahdy 176.
3 This is not to say that there were no literary mummies before
the 1880s. In Jane Webb Loudon's The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second
Century (1827), one of the characters revives a mummy, who then
occasionally turns up to play Mephistopheles to the novel's various
political schemers. The futuristic and supernatural trappings
thinly coat what is in effect a moral tale. In the end the mummy
meals that it was really God who revived him, and spells out the
novel's message: "that knowledge above the sphere of man's
capacity produces only wretchedness, and that to be contented
with our station, and to make ourselves useful to our fellow-creatures,
is the only true path to happiness" (302). Some time elapses
before we see anything that resembles the mummy fiction of the
fin de siecle. In France, the mummy as love object appears in
Theopaile Gautier's Le Roman de la Momie (1858), while [n England
Bulwer Lytton's The Ring of Amasis (1863), though not a mummy
story of the later sort, provides an early example of the theme
of Egyptiana in the English home.
4 This process of progressive derealization resembles that which
Allon White sees at work in the attenuation and marginalizion
of the culture of carnival in nineteenth-century Europe. He argues
that the other of the bourgeois self-image, the 'grotesque body"
summoned up in carnival is not so much forgotten as it is banished
into the realms of literary culture and privatized consciousness.
In effect, there takes place a "sublimation of a material,
physical practice into purely textual semiosis" (White 168).
5 See, for example, Fraser. The literary and cultural implications
of this shift have been discussed by a number of critics In the
last fifteen years or so. Among the landmarks one might count
Bowlby's exploration of the effects of the new phenomenology,
of the commodity in lust Looking,: Consumer Culture in Dreiser,
Gissing and Zola; Armstrong' s description of the role of this
new object-culture in the definition of the Victorian subject
of desire in "'The Occidental Alice"; and Richards's
account of the representational strategies of Victorian commodity
culture in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising
and Spectacle 1851-1914. See also Birken, chapter 1. For an argument
that a consumer society is already discernible in the previous
century see McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer
Society: The Commercialization of 18th-Century England.
6 Attempts to historicize the marginalist trend in economic theory
are by no means new. Nikolai Bukharin undertook to do just that
in Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1927). Bukharin saw marginalism
as the typical expression of the point of view of a rentier class,
outside of the process of production. See Blaug 316.
7 Marx is not, of course, oblivious to the role that consumers
play in the economy, for the first thing he tells us about the
commodity is that it "satisfies human needs of whatever kind"
(125). Nor are these needs necessarily objective or physical:
"whether they arise . . . from the stomach or the imagination
makes no difference" (125). For an object to be of value,
it must be an object of utility for someone (131); there must
be a market for the commodity produced. Nevertheless, Marx dearly
makes value depend on production, and on intention. From the point
of view of exchange, commodities are valuable because "human
labour-power has been expended to produce them . . . As crystals
of this social substance . . . they are values--commodity values"
(128). Moreover, the commodity form only appears when 'exchange
has already acquired a sufficient extension and importance to
allow useful things to be produced for the purpose of being exchanged,
so that their character as values has already to be taken into
consideration during production" (166, emphasis added).
8 Saisselin, while he is more concerned with the American home,
gives a useful account of the middle-class drive to collect objects
from other cultures, as well as from the past of their own. See
also Armstrong, "Occidental" 26. On the specific interest
in Egyptiana, and on Egyptian motifs in European design, see Curl.
By the turn of the century there existed a flourishing market
in fake Egyptiana, as the supply of the genuine article lagged
behind demand. See Wakeling.
9 On the cultural significance of collections in general see Benjamin'
s "Unpacking my Library" in Illuminations, Stewart,
and Clifford. On the role of collectibles in nineteenth-century
American and European middle-class culture see Saisselin.
10 While the tag natura non facit [not facet] saltum is pre-Darwinian,
it is significant that Darwin gives it new currency by citing
it with approval on several occasions in The Origin of Species,
especially in chapter 6. He sees it as an old canon "which
every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to confirm" (Darwin
468, and chapter 6 passim).
11 Armstrong argues that the handling of these new commodities
had consequences for the way women were perceived as appetitive:
"Englishwomen were responsible for putting the objects that
flooded in from the colonies in place. To do so, women had to
want such objects, and once they did, women became dangerous"
("Occidental" 34).
12 Fredric Jameson sees Stein's butterfly collecting as part of
the "ideology of the image" that he identifies in Conrad's
proto-modernist style (238). To the extent that various kinds
of aestheticism are also modes of response to the new commodity
culture this is accurate enough.
13 "To live means to leave traces. In the interior these
are emphasized. An abundance of covers and protectors, liners
and cases is devised, on which the traces of objects of everday
use are imprinted. The traces of the occupant also leave their
impression on the interior. The detective story that follows these
traces comes into being" (Benjamin, Illuminations 29).
14 The OED reveals that mummies also entered the commercial imagination
in quite a different way in the early twentieth century: "mummies"
became a stock exchange slang term for Egyptian securities.
15 The resistance of the mummy to collection features prominently
in non-literary museum stories too. During Wallis Budge's tenure
as Keeper of Egyptian antiquities, one of the museum's coffin
lids (no. 22542), that of a chantress of Amen-Ra, became a rich.
source of urban myth. The tortured expression of the face depicted
on the lid led to proposals to put the soul to rest through a
seance. As Caygill recounts, "Publicity about the seance
merged with other wild tales and then became transmuted into a
legend that, following considerable death and destruction in the
British Museum, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities sold the coffin
lid to an American who transported his new purchase on the Titanic
thereby occasioning that vessel's collision with an iceberg. Although
a large proportion of the passengers perished, the coffin lid
was said to have obtained a place in a lifeboat and gone on to
spread calamities in the United States and Canada before sinking
the Empress of Ireland and ending up in the St Lawrence River"
(51). See also Budge 2: 392-93.
16 As one of the characters points out, the name suggests the
French ma mie, my darling, though the more colloquial pun on "mammy"
[mother] is also possible.
17 They are in fact discussing the violation of their tombs by
the living. It is interesting to collate "Smith and the Pharaohs"
with Haggard's criticism of the destruction of mummies in a newspaper
article he contributed to the Daily Mail on "The Trade in
the Dead."
18 Shortly after their discovery at the end of the nineteenth
century, X-rays were used in studying mommies, obviating the need
to unroll them.
19 One is also reminded here of the preservation of the bodies
of the dead kings in King Solomon's Mines, who are, in effect,
fosselized in their cave through stalactite formation--a sort
of natural mummification.
20 The Carter/Carnarvon discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1923
sparked a revival of interest in mummies, and may have been in
part responsible for the popularity of narratives that dwelt on
the mummy's curse, displacing the mummy stories that had appealed
to the previous generation. The Hollywood films actually start
in the 1930s with The Mummy (1932), which had a partial sequel
in the 1940 The Mummy's Hand. The sequel in turn spawned The Mummy's
Tomb (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1944), and The Mummy's Curse (1994).
The British series was launched with Terence Fisher's The Mummy
(1959), and continued with Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), The
Mummy's Shroud (1966), and Blood from the Mummy's Tom (1971).
The latter film, like the 1980 The Awakening, was based on Stoker's
The Jewel of Seven Stars.
21 In most editions of the novel the ending has actually been
changed, allowing Margaret to survive the revival but there is
no evidence that Stoker himself supplied this more upbeat resolution.
22 The story also resembles in many respects Julian Hawthorne's
mummy story, "The Unseen Man's Story" in Six Cent Sam's
(1893).
23 See for example Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction. Jameson
also provides an influential account of the way nineteenth-century
fiction encodes the political at the level of character, though
gender is not an important category for him.
24 I am thinking of Baudrillard's claim that "Disneyland
is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the
rest is real" (172).
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~~~~~~~~
By NICHOLAS DALY
Copyright 1994 by Novel Corporation. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Novel Corporation.
Daly, Nicholas, That obscure object of desire: Victorian commodity culture and fictions of the mummy.., Vol. 28, Novel, 09-01-1994, pp 24.
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