Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt 9781526141897

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Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt

Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt

Edited by Eleanor Dobson

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 4188 0 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

In memory of Nickianne Moody (1963–2019), without whom this volume would not have been possible

Contents

List of figures page ix List of contributors xi Acknowledgements xiv Introduction 1 Eleanor Dobson 1 Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy 20 Jasmine Day 2 Adam Bede: an ancient Egyptian Book of Genesis Haythem Bastawy 3 Remembering Mrs Potiphar: Victorian reclamations of a biblical temptress Angie Blumberg

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4 Prefiguring the cross: a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra 90 Sara Woodward 5 ‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt Molly Youngkin 6 ‘A Memnon waiting for the day’: ancient Egypt in the aesthetic and decadent imaginary Giles Whiteley

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7 Perfume, cigarettes and gilded boards: Pharos the Egyptian and consumer culture Eleanor Dobson

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8 The intelligibility of the past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars 185 Luz Elena Ramirez Select bibliography 207 Index 222

Figures

1.1 Illustration for ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour; and Poems (London: Henry Vizetelly, 1852), p. 216 (courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society) page 21 4.1 R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 25’, Illustrated London News (25 May 1889), 656 (reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library) 99 4.2 R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 30’, Illustrated London News (15 June 1889), 756 (reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library) 101 5.1 ‘Cleopatra in Paris’, Punch (1 November 1890), 208 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 124 5.2 Untitled illustration for ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 126 5.3 ‘The Last Scene of Antony and Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 127 5.4 ‘The Run of Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 128 7.1 Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1899), front and spine (author’s own) 166

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7.2 John H. Bacon, ‘To Have Wasted a Puff Would Have Been a Sacrilege’, Windsor Magazine (August 1898), 247 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham) 7.3 ‘Egyptian Deities’ (1904), Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f2ba15002987-0133-104d-58d385a7bbd0 (public domain)

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Contributors

Hathem Bastawy holds a PhD in English and History. He is a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a former Teaching Fellow in Drama and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He received the John Murray Prize for his research in 2015 and the SWAPCA Languages and Literatures Award in February 2017, and has published widely on various aspects of English literature and history. Angie Blumberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Auburn University, USA. Her current book project, Our Real Life in Tombs: British Literature and Archaeology, 1880–1930, unearths archaeological discourse at the centre of late Victorian and modernist discussions about gender and sexuality, decadent aesthetics and the First World War. Her work is published in Literature Compass, Victoriographies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and a collection of essays on the novelist Marie Corelli entitled Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (Anthem Press 2019). Jasmine Day is a cultural anthropologist, teacher, Egyptologist and President of the Ancient Egypt Society of Western Australia Inc. She specialises in the history of mummies’ roles in popular media, literature and museums, and the ethics of exhibiting Egyptian mummies. Her work includes The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (Routledge 2006) and papers in Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies (Cambria Press 2013), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (Routledge 2014) and various academic and popular journals. She has been a regular contributor to the International Congress on Mummy Studies and the

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Tea with the Sphinx conferences (University of Birmingham) and has appeared in several television documentaries and podcasts. Eleanor Dobson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. She specialises in the reception of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the Gothic and occult, and has published on subjects including representations of the ghost of Oscar Wilde, jewel imagery in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, ghost stories set in Egyptian hotels and generic crossover between the imperial Gothic and the fairy tale. Luz Elena Ramirez is Professor of English at California State University, USA, where she specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature. She is interested in themes of collection, the intrusion of the past into the present, and the intersections between literary and area studies, which provided the focus for her first book, British Representations of Latin America (University Press of Florida 2007). In addition, she has published scholarship on George Chetwynd Griffith and William Hope Hodgson. Recently, she helped to establish the Mediterranean Studies Academy at CSUSB, an interdisciplinary initiative that includes a partnership with the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art whose collections include Egyptian antiquities. Giles Whiteley is Docent in English Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and philosophy from Romanticism through to early modernism. He is the author of monographs: Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2020), Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum (Legenda 2015) and Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (Legenda 2010). He is currently working on a book on nineteenth-century humour for Routledge and a critical edition of Walter Pater’s 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean for Oxford University Press. Sara Woodward (née Brio) received her PhD from the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the ways in which nineteenth-century authors create and authorise views of ancient Egypt in their fiction as a means of defining their own religious beliefs. Her other published works include ‘The Shocking Truth: Science, Religion, and Ancient Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2018).

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Molly Youngkin is Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA. She has published two critical monographs, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel (Ohio State University Press 2007). She has also published numerous articles and book reviews.

Acknowledgements

This volume has benefited from the input and ideas of many generous scholars, most notably the speakers and attendees of the Tea with the Sphinx conferences based at the University of Birmingham, and in particular to Nickianne Moody, to whom this volume is dedicated. My thanks also extend to Meredith Carroll and the anonymous reviewers for their patience, guidance and expertise.

Introduction Eleanor Dobson

In 1929, in the wake of the death of ‘Mike the cat’, a feline that had frequented the British Museum for some twenty years, F. C. W. Hiley, the Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books, composed a memorial poem. Published in a pamphlet that also included a brief biography and photographs of Mike, as well as a description of his preferences in fish, the poem is a satirical elegy that honours the animal who was, according to Time magazine a year later, ‘probably the most famed British feline of the 20th century’.1 Hiley describes him as nobler in bearing than ancient Egyptian deities and guardians – ‘He’d sit and sun himself sedately, / No Sphinx or Sekhmet looked more stately’ – suggesting a parallel between Mike and the material traces of ancient Egypt that might be found within the Museum’s walls.2 Mike is thus immortalised in a text that casts him as a modern successor to the mummified bodies of his ancient Egyptian kin, collected and displayed in the Egyptian Galleries over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.3 Most significantly, however, Hiley playfully hints that Mike’s resemblance to ancient Egyptian models might be attributed to his friendship with E. A. Wallis Budge, the former Keeper of the British Museum’s Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities: A master of Egyptian lore, No doubt Sir Ernest had a store Of charms and spells decipherèd From feline mummies long since dead, And found a way by magic art To win that savage feline heart.4

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Budge, who began working at the British Museum in 1883 and retired in 1924, is depicted in this excerpt as a kind of sorcerer who accesses Egyptian magic through his translation of ancient spells. While such a short – and, admittedly, unusual – text might seem fairly historically insignificant at first glance, on reconsideration it neatly encapsulates popular perceptions of ancient Egypt, museums with Egyptian collections, and Egyptologists themselves, which all underwent significant cultural developments over the course of the nineteenth century. Without the solid foundation of Victorian culture that preceded it, such a memorial to Mike in the twentieth century – steeped in ideas of the inheritance of ancient Egypt by modern Britain, ancient Egyptian magic as an ever-potent supernatural force and Egyptologists as occult gatekeepers – would not have existed. Nineteenth-century conceptions, reimaginings and redeployments of ancient Egypt as explored in all manner of literary types – much of which has continued to form the basis of engagements with ancient Egypt across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first – are the subject of this volume. The British Museum and Budge provide a useful window into this culture. In the nineteenth century the British Museum was an institution that not only collected and displayed artefacts from across vast geographical and temporal stretches (situated, significantly, in the metropolitan nucleus of the British Empire) but, with its Reading Room (open from 1857 to 1997), was also a significant literary hub.5 While the collections of the Reading Room have since been relocated to the British Library building in Euston, the British Museum continues to attract literary attention, and the narratives that are woven around such institutions continue to have a distinctive ‘Victorian’ flavour. As Roger Luckhurst has demonstrated, for instance, the British Museum and Budge himself were both involved in the explosion of interest in narratives of the mummy’s curse.6 Such stories – with their origins early in the nineteenth century – developed over the following decades, exploding in reach with the death of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon shortly after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922. Ancient Egypt fascinated the Victorians, as it continues to fascinate today. The galleries displaying the bodies and funerary paraphernalia of the ancient Egyptian mummified dead remain the most popular rooms in the Museum. Much has changed in the interim, but a cultural bedrock of how ancient Egypt is received by British audiences has remained solidly in place since the nineteenth century. Ancient Egypt is, to this day, used as a byword for religious fervour, dangerous magic, occult possibilities; as symbolic of cultural decadence, deathly queens and empowered womanhood; as evocative of luxury, wealth and intellectual enlightenment; and held aloft

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at once as the origin of Western civilisation and as a distant culture wholly unknowable. The origins of such ideas mostly predate the nineteenth century, but it was in the age of Victoria that literary culture wrestled with them on an unprecedented scale.7 Readers were eager for subject matter with an ancient Egyptian inflection, and the appetite for ancient Egypt which has proliferated since the nineteenth century has not been satiated. Yet, while public enthusiasm for all things harking back to Egypt’s past has been sustained, academic scrutiny of how ancient Egypt has been reimagined in the modern world has, only in the past couple of decades, begun to flourish. It is these relatively new and exciting critical conversations that this volume seeks to advance. While scholars (including those who have contributed to this book) – as I go on to outline – have recognised the rich seam of literature inspired by ancient Egypt that runs throughout the nineteenth century, these chapters take as their focus a broad range of primary objects of study, from novels and magazine serials to plays and poetry, from illustrations to advertising, that truly demonstrates that ancient Egypt permeated Victorian culture in ways that have heretofore been left undocumented. These chapters bring new sources to light, analyse underused material and re-read canonical and well-known works, highlighting the sheer scale of this multifarious cultural employment of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth century as their backdrop. Recent years have seen a rise in interest in ‘Ancient Egypt Reception Studies’, the most common appellation given to the multidisciplinary meeting point where academics working across literary studies, history, art history, archaeology, Egyptology and beyond investigate how this ancient civilisation has been interpreted after the fact. The nineteenth century is a time of particular importance to such scholarship, largely as a result of French and British imperial involvement in Egypt across this period and subsequently.8 While ancient Egypt had been a source of fascination for Western culture since antiquity, European military presence in Egypt had significant cultural repercussions: these campaigns led directly to the emergence of the field of Egyptology, the increasing accessibility of Egypt to tourists and an influx of antiquities into European museums and private collections.9 In this era, ancient Egypt was, more than ever, scrutinised, studied, debated and enjoyed as entertainment. This has not escaped twenty-first-century scholars. Works including Donald Malcolm Reid’s Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (2002) and Elliott Colla’s Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology. Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (2008) expertly detail the connections between Western imperialism, archaeology, tourism, scholarship and entertainment, as well as developments in modern Egyptian

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identity across the nineteenth century.10 Scott Trafton, in Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (2004), has explored the relationship between Egyptology, racial science and American identification with ancient Egypt. David Gange, meanwhile, in Dialogues With the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (2013), explores Egyptology’s impact on religion, most significantly Christianity, in the context of British Near Eastern archaeology more broadly. Multiple volumes by Stephanie Moser, including Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (2006) and Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace (2012), demonstrate the pervasiveness of Egypt in Victorian culture through spectacle and museum exhibits.11 Collectively, these works provide a vivid picture of nineteenth-century engagements with ancient Egypt out of which the literary culture that this volume addresses sprang. Several scholars have indeed already turned their attention specifically to ancient Egypt within literature of the Victorian age. Keystone volumes such as Lynn Parramore’s Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in NineteenthCentury Literary Culture (2008), Roger Luckhurst’s The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012), Maria Fleischhack’s Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (2015) and Molly Youngkin’s British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (2016) have not only blazed significant trails in our collective understanding of ancient Egypt in Victorian literary culture but have also established the rich cultural context of and the diverse concerns addressed in such literary engagements; works such as the current volume are deeply indebted to the niches carved out by these forerunners. Luckhurst, writing of the emergence of the concept of the mummy’s curse, laments that ‘[t]he question of Egypt, and Egypt at this particular historical conjuncture, tends to be reduced to sketchy background just when specificity might be most valuable’, while Fleischhack ascertains how ‘the image of ancient Egypt’ across the nineteenth century was coloured ‘by … a general Orientalist mind-set’.12 Parramore asserts that, ‘sparked by Napoleon’s campaign, images of [ancient Egypt] had … settled over Europe and America in a way that shaped modern identity’, and Youngkin identifies that while ‘both women and men … represented ancient Egyptian women according to … imperialist discourse’, ‘rather than exoticizing Egyptian culture’, proto-feminist writers ‘avoided references to Egyptian culture … while … expressing their visions for women’s emancipation’.13 Together, they recognise and interrogate interconnected notions of empire and identity, as well as how these have operated for (largely) British audiences, from the nineteenth century to the present.

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This collection adds to the critical conversations in which these aforementioned studies engage: all of the chapters in this volume analyse representations of ancient Egypt that are ultimately interrogations of the Western self. How have diverse aspects of ancient Egyptian culture been imagined by Victorian writers and illustrators? What do such representations suggest about the Victorians’ perceived relationship between themselves and the ancient world? How do the ways in which they persist or develop over the course of the nineteenth century reflect a variety of contemporary concerns? The chapters that make up this book address these questions, provide new readings of canonical authors and texts and introduce a wealth of new material into burgeoning debates. While much of the focus on ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century literature in recent criticism rests on authors such as H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker, this volume – following Youngkin’s lead – brings works by female writers including George Eliot and Louisa Stuart Costello into consideration. Haggard, Stoker and their contemporaries are addressed in this volume, but as part of a much broader cultural spectrum stretching across Victoria’s reign and ranging from the popular and the pulp to the elite contributions of the aesthetes and decadents. This breadth relies upon this volume’s status as the first multi-authored study of ancient Egypt in literary culture. Through uniting essays written by scholars with diverse interests, this collection establishes that the Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt as demonstrated through literature is far more culturally widespread than single-authored studies have previously indicated. The methodologies of this volume are necessarily multifarious given the nature of the project and its wide-ranging subject matter, though all of the chapters are informed by literary theory and historicist approaches. This provides the critical architecture that supports considerations of such distinct literary figures working over the decades in question: each chapter pays attention to the historical context of the focal text and its author, acknowledging and responding to the circumstances which shaped it. Ancient Egyptian history itself was being understood, revised and reconsidered in the light of major shifts in modern understanding of this ancient culture, its customs and language across the nineteenth century. Most modern histories of Egyptology suggest Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1789 as the discipline’s point of origin, and while Egyptology certainly did not become professionalised in a steady linear sense over the course of the nineteenth century, the Victorian era encompasses significant developments in British Egyptology, from the establishment of specific departments for Egyptian antiquities in major museums, through to the creation of academic posts in several universities. While ancient Egyptian civilisation remained fixed in the distant past, new discoveries,

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translations of texts, and publications both scholarly and popular, contributed to a widespread cultural interest in ancient Egypt that relied on a sense of novelty. Modern Egypt was also a dominant subject in the press particularly after Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882. In keeping with Angie Blumberg’s recent suggestion that ‘in a move that seems paradoxical, Victorian authors regularly engaged with the past as a crucial mode of conceptualizing modernity’, these chapters demonstrate that ancient Egypt is a shifting signifier over the course of the Victorian period, metamorphosing as the modern world’s relationship with ancient – and modern – Egypt changed.14 Indeed, the evolution of how ancient Egypt is used, as demonstrated over the course of this volume – from Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker – reflects these wider historical developments. The chapters in this collection tell us much more about the Victorian present than they do about the ancient Egyptian past. Broadly speaking, we begin with debates about the ancient Egyptians’ racial origins and the origins of Christianity. In these early chapters, we see Victorian publics being invited to question their relationship with ancient Egypt on myriad levels, their sense of imperial entitlement to Egypt’s antiquities, and their relationships with Egypt’s religious monuments: these are not simple relationships but complicated and conflicted ones, in which we can detect both imperial pride and guilt, religious doubt and, essentially, the questioning of modern Anglo-American selfhood. Ancient Egypt is, across the century, increasingly bound up in issues of gender, specifically with regards to women’s rights and their involvement in the emerging male-dominated discipline of Egyptology: we see writers and artists fixate on the mummified bodies of the ancient Egyptian female dead, the body becoming a site for assertions of (usually masculine) national pride or anxiety, as well as ancient Egyptian queens and modern Western actresses equated, collapsing thousands of years of history to bring the past and the present into direct conversation in order to interrogate women’s increasing autonomy. And, at the fin de siècle, we observe the sheer variety of people who were exploring their identities through references to ancient Egypt, from the literary and artistic elite, through to the lower-middle classes, to whom mass-produced goods and affordable literature were marketed. Collectively, then, these chapters argue for the significance of ancient Egypt in all manner of debates surrounding modern Western identity, spanning race, religion, gender and class, evolving across the nineteenth century. Through emphasising the variety of literary engagements with ancient Egypt in this era through such diverse essays, a common thread that runs through the chapters, as well as the pertinent linkages between particular pieces, can be drawn out. The chapters are arranged in a broadly

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chronological fashion (though there are, of course, overlaps in the periods that they consider), so that the reader who is interested in this body of work as a whole can get a sense of the development of cultural uses of ancient Egypt over time. After the chapter summaries provided here, I also suggest groupings of the chapters for the reader pursuing a particular theme: the figure of the mummy, gender, visual and material culture, religion and the tension between the highbrow and middlebrow. In this volume’s first chapter, Jasmine Day focuses on a British illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s satirical short story ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) which was published posthumously alongside this tale in an anthology of his works in 1852. This illustration is the earliest known visual depiction of a revived Egyptian mummy, a character that later became an archetypal figure in Victorian literature. Day situates the unknown artist’s vision of the fictional mummy Allamistakeo within the history of visual and literary depictions of mummies and the sociopolitical discourses they articulated, comparing the illustrator’s engagement in contemporary debates with those suggested by Poe’s text. While Poe does not assign a racial identity to Allamistakeo, the illustrator gives the mummy an African appearance, sidestepping Eurocentrism and evoking scientific disputes about the racial origins of the ancient Egyptians. Day is the first to suggest that Poe, similarly, objected to the xenophobia rampant elsewhere in the mummy genre. Through an overview of prominent British and American literary works that likely influenced ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, Day demonstrates Poe’s determination to challenge the common use of mummies to promote modern Western values and denigrate foreign ancient ones. While Poe’s satirical tale has often been treated as a light-hearted piece whose comedy probably derives from the use of mummies as stock characters in stage farces, it was in fact an original fusion and amplification of the critical themes emerging in mummy lore that later evolved into the ‘mummy’s curse’ legends in literature of the mid to late nineteenth century. In bringing to light this illustration and analysing it as part of the wider corpus of mummy literature as well as the racial debates that this body of literature responded to and furthered, Day demonstrates that Poe and his illustrator invited contemporary readers to stop laughing at mummies and to start laughing with them and at themselves, questioning commonly held racial stereotypes and European imperialist ideology. In Chapter 2 Haythem Bastawy scrutinises George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), the first essay to address exclusively the novel’s ancient Egyptian dimensions. Using Eliot’s opening lines likening authorship to Egyptian sorcery as a springboard, Bastawy argues for the continued significance of this reference throughout Adam Bede, demonstrating an interconnectedness between established Christian motifs and ancient Egyptian religion

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and mythology. In addition to the Wesleyan Methodist aspects of the novel, this chapter demonstrates the existence of a discernible recreation of the biblical Genesis story running throughout the text, combined with tangible references to ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses. For example, Bastawy recognises that Seth, one of the novel’s major male characters, is the name of both the third son of Adam in the biblical Book of Genesis and the ancient Egyptian god of disruption and disorder. Hetty, a beautiful but sinful character, might similarly be read as an incarnation of Het Hatour, the ancient Egyptian goddess of beauty, lust, wine, birth and the underworld. Bastawy contextualises this analysis by suggesting texts featuring references to and illustrations of ancient Egypt that likely influenced Eliot, including Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), his translations of The Thousand and One Nights (1838–40) and Charles Knight’s The Pictorial Bible (1836–38). Overall, this chapter argues for a reconsideration of Eliot’s first novel, placing this work within its contemporary Egyptological culture and, in doing so, proposes that Adam Bede retells the biblical story of Adam and Eve with a distinctly ancient Egyptian inflection. Furthering the religious significances of Bastawy’s chapter, in Chapter 3 Angie Blumberg examines the various ways in which nineteenth-century writers and artists remembered the biblical tale of the wife of Potiphar, who attempted to seduce her husband’s enslaved advisor, Joseph, and accused him of attempted rape when her advances were repeatedly rebuffed. Potiphar’s wife was recalled throughout Western history as a prototype for immoral, aggressive female sexuality, a vicious and manipulative temptress. Her profuse reappearances in Victorian writing and art, though, encouraged by the development of Egyptology and the rise of archaeological fantasy, complicate her character and her narrative. Blumberg details the resurgence of Potiphar’s wife across a range of early and mid-Victorian texts, including Charles Wells’s verse drama Joseph and his Brethren (published in 1823, but generally neglected until revised in 1850 and republished in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne), the discussions surrounding Wells’s work by Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne in the 1870s, and an edited poetry collection by Anglo-Irish writer Louisa Stuart Costello (1845). Drawing from the Quran’s version of the tale, and from the medieval adaptations of this story by the fifteenthcentury Persian poet Jami, some of these writers, particularly Costello, reimagine the seduction story as primarily about art and beauty. Writers and artists move beyond the biblical temptress to discuss the idea of a complex, sexually aware female character, and – in their obsession with discovering the woman’s mummified body fuelled by widespread interest in Egyptological excavations – to theorise the connections between the

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sexualised body and experimental aesthetic form. By examining noncanonical, mid-Victorian adaptations of the wife of Potiphar, Blumberg uncovers how the stage was set for fin-de-siècle discussions of other figures of ancient Eastern sexuality, Salome and Cleopatra. Mrs Potiphar’s mid-Victorian revival, she claims, propels the move towards considering ancient Egyptian femininity for models of modern female subjectivity and experimental art that would become more fully realised at the end of the century. The next chapter also pays close attention to the perceived intersections and tensions between ancient Egyptian culture and Christianity. In Chapter 4, Sara Woodward explores the effects of Victorian Egyptomania on nineteenth-century Christian religion, as many began to look to the ‘pagan’ past to define religion’s role in the present. Woodward examines the connection between the rapid influx of print material and growing doubt surrounding the idea of the Christian afterlife, arguing that the Victorians sought to understand and redefine Christianity by examining its relationship and connectedness to ancient Egyptian religion and vice versa. Specifically, she presents a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889), arguing that the novel is both a microcosm of shifting Victorian attitudes towards Christianity and representative of Haggard’s personal struggle with traditional Protestantism. Woodward argues that Haggard capitalised upon the sensationalist discourse that surrounded Egypt and used a loose, typological structure within his serially published Cleopatra to present a complex, imaginative dialogue on religion in the nineteenth century as well as explore his own personal doubts surrounding the Christian faith. The nuanced combination of a typological dialogue and an Egyptian motif, she claims, allowed Haggard to address such topics as the value and implications of Christ’s death as substitutionary atonement, the origins of Christianity and the inherent fear and doubt surrounding the extent of a Christian’s security in eternal life after death. In Cleopatra, Woodward demonstrates, Haggard establishes that what passed long ago in Egypt still resonates with, and could possibly alter, preconceived assumptions regarding faith and humanity in nineteenth-century England. Using Haggard’s posthumously published autobiography The Days of my Life (1926), she explores the author’s conflicting statements on his beliefs, which favour the idea of reincarnation, while simultaneously dismissing Buddhism and affirming Protestantism. Woodward concludes by suggesting that the inherent tensions produced by Haggard’s own fluctuating faith are reflective of a society keen to define its faith in the face of advancing scientific and archaeological discoveries. In Chapter 5, Molly Youngkin considers how theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from the mid to late nineteenth

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century shaped Victorian views about ancient Egypt. Her work builds upon that by Mary Lamb and Jeffrey Richards, who have established how these productions highlighted the ‘spectacle’ of ancient Egypt for Victorian audiences by turning Antony’s first sight of Cleopatra on her barge, Cleopatra’s entry into Alexandria dressed as the goddess Isis, the hoisting of a dying Antony to Cleopatra’s monument, and Cleopatra’s death, into extended tableaux.15 According to Lamb and Richards, such spectacle overshadowed Antony and Cleopatra’s personal dynamics and complemented Victorian views that Britain might emulate the Roman Empire in its defeat of Egypt. Youngkin, however, suggests that such productions were received by audiences as emblematic of Britain’s shaky imperial position. Turning to audience responses, she examines how such imperial anxieties are expressed in relation to views about both English and Egyptian women. Youngkin reviews the development of the stage Cleopatra from a ‘majestic Juno’ to a ‘demonic Venus’ via performances by Isabella Glyn (1849, 1855, 1867), Ellin Wallis (1873) and Lillie Langtry (1890). Using reviews from the Athenaeum, Punch and Truth of Langtry’s 1890 London production, which contrast her performances to Sarah Bernhardt’s 1890 Paris production (suggestive not only of national rivalry but of Britain and France’s historical clashes for domination in Egypt), Youngkin shows how these reviews linked the seductive qualities of Cleopatra to stereotypical aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. She then turns to the text of Shakespeare’s play to re-examine passages in which Cleopatra is referred to as a ‘whore’ whose ‘lust’ for Antony can only mean destruction for Egypt and Rome, suggesting that Britain might be at risk too, if it does not protect itself from Egypt. Youngkin re-reads these passages in light of the cultural context surrounding nineteenth-century productions, which included the excision of offensive passages to appeal to Victorian ‘taste’ and also a reinforcement of the idea that Victorian actresses were no better than ‘whores’. Scrutinising how reviewers used Victorian stereotypes about women and their nationalities to comment on nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras’ appearances, it is evident that Cleopatra’s symbolic role as Egypt in the play is bound not only to Victorian assumptions about women’s sexuality but also to deep-rooted anxieties about Britain’s relationship with Egypt itself. In Chapter 6, Giles Whiteley turns to ancient Egypt in the literature of the aesthetic and decadent movements, exploring how this differs from the so-called classical ‘ideal’ of Greece and Rome. Beginning with Baudelaire’s influential use of ancient Egypt in the ‘Spleen’ poems of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), this chapter locates three interrelated, but also competing and seemingly contradictory, discursive deployments of ancient Egypt in literature of the period: firstly, Egypt as ‘Symbolic’ mystery, whose art is

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underdeveloped in comparison to the ‘Classical Ideal’, waiting for the day of the ‘Greek spirit … with its power of speech’;16 secondly, and concurrently, Egypt as a site of ennui, where the ‘symbolic’ dimensions are linked intrinsically to a melancholic decadence and to death; and thirdly, Egypt as exoticism and Orientalist sensuality, linking also to the significance of contemporary fin-de-siècle Egypt in homosexual culture. Whiteley’s analysis centres on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Pater’s essay on ‘Winckelmann’ from The Renaissance (1873) and Oscar Wilde’s poem The Sphinx (1894). Using these and supplementary materials, Whiteley argues that while the Hegelian ‘Classical Ideal’ was central to their imaginary, ancient Egypt was a marginal but nevertheless significant subject for the aesthetes and decadents. As in Hegel, the significance can be considered architectural: it figures as a site of and for decadence. Precisely in its foreignness, its lack of proximity to Occidental civilisation, the ‘problem’ of Greek ethics (as John Addington Symonds put it) – its ‘perverse’ and decadent eroticism – could be negotiated in a far more forgiving atmosphere when treated through Egypt. However, at the same time, its very mystery eluded attempts at cultural appropriation, and Egypt became overdetermined in this imaginary: a space of polymorphous sensuality, but simultaneously aesthetically ‘petrified’, cold. In contrast to the warmth of Greek and Roman culture, its domesticity, its heimlich closeness-to-home, Whiteley demonstrates, ancient Egyptian culture became a site for the un-heimlich, a space underwritten by a specifically thanatic desire, the pit under the pyramid. My own chapter, Chapter 7, also considers ancient Egypt’s decadent associations at the fin de siècle, considering how the iconography of elite goods trickled down into mass consumer culture. Taking Guy Boothby’s thriller Pharos the Egyptian (1898; 1899) as its starting point, this chapter discusses the titular Pharos, a cursed ancient Egyptian and master of unusual substances. Pharos produces his own cigarettes and perfumes which initially heighten sensations and eventually lead to visions during states of semi-consciousness. Simultaneously stimulating and numbing, these chemicals ready the mind and the body for a languid appreciation of the unique experiences so central to the ideals of decadence. The (anti) heroes of decadent literature are devotees of the rare, the expensive and the unique; in his creation of such intoxicating substances, Pharos might be considered the supplier to these earlier decadents. Yet, towards the end of the nineteenth century, perfume and cigarettes were increasingly mass marketed using ancient Egyptian iconography in a bid to capitalise upon the fashion for ancient Egypt which was pervading consumer culture. Negotiating, on the one hand, decadent circles and the associated culture of recreational drug use at the fin de siècle, and on the other, advertising for mass-market products drawing upon ancient Egypt’s increasing

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attraction, this chapter identifies how Boothby uses cigarettes and perfume in Pharos the Egyptian to navigate the boundaries between the high- and the middlebrow. It also incorporates discussion of the materiality of Boothby’s volume itself, responding to both the recent material turn in the humanities and the significance of physical artefacts in Victorian encounters with ancient Egypt. Originally published in instalments in the Windsor Magazine in 1898, Boothby’s text was reissued as a novel in 1899. Examining the cheaper format, I connect the kinds of consumer products that Boothby’s text evokes to cheap literature, also harnessing the allure of ancient Egypt in a bid for mass appeal. The version of the text as it appeared as a novel is a more expensive item, bound in blue cloth and stamped with Egyptianate gilt designs mimicking the appearance of archaeological relics. I argue that, as with cigarettes and perfume whose advertising displayed such imagery, Boothby’s novel becomes itself an object that is part of a broader material culture which saw markets flooded with glinting Egyptian iconography. The imagery of ancient Egypt invites a reconsideration of the Victorian novel as a material artefact, traversing artistic boundaries and seeking to unify the popular and the elite. In the final chapter, Chapter 8, Luz Elena Ramirez considers Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, written in 1902, the year after the death of Queen Victoria, and first published in 1903, though it was reissued with a revised ending in 1912. Ramirez addresses the novel’s place within the broader context of archaeological fiction, a genre that is characterised by detailed description of artefacts and strategic citation of authorities. Stoker’s credibility as a novice Egyptologist surfaces in his setting of an ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Sorcerer, an obvious parallel to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. Equally significant, Ramirez demonstrates, is his synthesis of the Egyptological writings of E. A. Wallis Budge, Flinders Petrie and Amelia Edwards into his depiction of the journey to the ‘beyond’. Stoker further demonstrates his attention to archaeological discoveries through his presentation of the dormant mummy of Queen Tera, who recalls the historically real pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1479 bce to 1458 bce. Both female pharaohs are patrons of the arts and share the unusual practice of cross-dressing, and both might be seen as asserting their power in male-dominated societies, leaving enduring legacies despite male attempts to obliterate them from history. Ramirez traces parallels between the ancient past and the Victorian present through an exploration of Tera and her modern doppelgänger, Margaret Trelawny, as well as the unique perspective of Ross, the narrator and Margaret’s suitor. Ross learns of Tera’s entombment through a seventeenth-century Dutch travelogue and pieces together her biography in a manner akin to archaeological reconstruction by gathering information

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about the 1884 discovery of her body in Egypt by the Trelawny and Corbeck expedition. Ross’s role is to analyse Trelawny and Corbeck’s research, peruse relevant archaeological studies and scrutinise symbolically charged artefacts, becoming, Ramirez claims, the intermediary who functions as a conduit between not only the ancient past and the modern present, but also the fictional world that Stoker creates and the real world from which he gleans a substantial quantity of Egyptological detail. As she elucidates, Stoker capitalises upon the late Victorian fascination with Egyptology, weaving a distinctly Egyptological thread through his supernatural novel. Ramirez’s chapter brings the collection full circle, beginning and ending discussions with the iconic figure of the mummy, albeit a figure which, as these chapters demonstrate, fundamentally evolves over the period in question. While the chapters in this book are standalone works of scholarship in their own right, they can be considered more fruitfully in dialogue with each other, providing a meaningful picture of ancient Egypt’s employment across literary culture of the mid to late nineteenth century and throwing particular aspects of such reception – including the nuances of how Victorian notions of gender, religion and empire were shifting via references to ancient Egypt – into relief. Day’s and Ramirez’s chapters (Chapters 1 and 8), for example, address the figure of the mummy. Day introduces a humorous mid-century mummy, while Ramirez contextualises monstrous literary mummies within contemporary scientific discourse in the final decades of the century, in keeping with Day’s earlier assertion in The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (2006) of a shift in literary depictions of mummies over the course of the nineteenth century, from the ‘anti-objectification theme’ of mummy satires, before, in later years, ‘[t]he curse overtook romance as the dominant mummy myth’.17 In tandem, these chapters also highlight significant differences in the portrayal of male and female mummies in the early years of the discipline of Egyptology and, towards the end of the century, as the field was being established in museums and universities in Britain. Considering Edgar Allan Poe’s male mummy alongside Bram Stoker’s female mummy, one perceives similar imperial anxieties, but different sexual fears, reflective of the moments of their creation. The mummy that Day discusses – the first known example of an illustration of a reanimated mummy (1852) to accompany Poe’s mummy satire of 1845 – is a figure that evokes fun rather than fear, though still reflects contemporary Egyptological and pseudoEgyptological debate in its ambiguous racial identity. This work offers a contrasting view to the assessment of this particular tale by Parramore, who asserts that ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ ‘shows that a pledge to the future must mean more than conscripting the past into the service of

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empty superiority’.18 Day demonstrates that this tale is far from a jocular cautionary tale about our underappreciation of the achievements of past civilisations but instead gestures towards weighty subject matter including contemporary racial debates within Egyptology and the wider context of American and British culture. Likewise, Ramirez demonstrates how the figure of the mummy – emblematic of the past – also represents cultural currency in terms of its reliance upon modern Egyptological scholarship. Together, these chapters represent the diversity of the mummy as it was depicted across the nineteenth century, and the relationship of these ambiguous figures to the scholarly discipline that sought to define them. In each case the mummy’s resistance of such control calls the subject of Egyptology itself – its largely patriarchal structures and its relationship to the West’s imperial mission – into question. Blumberg’s chapter (Chapter 3) furthers discussion of the ancient Egyptian body especially as it was conceived in the male imagination, emboldened by the development of Egyptology. Ramirez’s chapter also focuses on masculine networks of scholarly exchange, extrapolating the influence of the researches of the Egyptologists E. A. Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie on Bram Stoker. Ramirez posits the protagonist of Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) as the decipherer of (masculine) scholarly record surrounding a female artefact: the body of an ancient Egyptian queen. Blumberg is also concerned with the sexually appealing ancient Egyptian female body, though she emphasises progressive reimaginings of Potiphar’s wife beyond the stereotypical temptress. Read side by side, Blumberg’s and Ramirez’s chapters suggest that the once-depreciated female is far more central to the Egyptological imaginary than previously held; it is no coincidence that the material that forms the basis of both chapters either hails from or is critically reassessed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women’s involvement in archaeology and related fields was rapidly changing (in Blumberg’s chapter, sources such as Charles Wells’s Joseph and his Brethren, first published in 1823 and republished in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne, and in Ramirez’s chapter, Stoker’s novel of 1903 reissued in 1912 with a new ending). Both Blumberg’s and Ramirez’s chapters address questions of gender and authority in the changing academic landscape out of which their focal texts emerge. Youngkin’s contribution to this collection (Chapter 5) further highlights the significance of the twinned themes of gender and imperial context, building on her work in British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910. In this earlier volume, Youngkin claims that ‘British women writers’ encounters with representations of ancient Egyptian women serve as examples of the ways in which British

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imperialism influenced women’s visions for their own emancipation’.19 Female presences that are so central to Blumberg’s and Ramirez’s chapters are key to Youngkin’s own chapter in this volume, in which she documents (usually) male attempts to scrutinise white women performing a liberating ancient Egyptian identity in the form of its most famous queen. Several chapters in this collection move beyond the written word to consider illustrations and visual culture in detail. Day’s chapter focuses on a previously unknown mid-century illustration which colours and informs the reader’s engagement with Poe’s text. Blumberg’s contribution refers to distinct overlaps between literary and artistic culture, especially in how the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti conceived of Potiphar’s wife. Woodward (Chapter 4), similarly, utilises illustrations that accompany Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) as it was first serialised in the Illustrated London News to demonstrate the ways in which word and image work in partnership to create the work’s complex religious symbolism. My chapter (Chapter 7), too, turns to Guy Boothby’s novel Pharos the Egyptian (1898; 1899) as it appears in serialised form, using illustrative material from the text as it was published in the Windsor Magazine and later in novel format to comment on the nature of cheap literature, its relationship to advertising, and the magazines and newspapers themselves which functioned as media for the diffusion of such imagery. These chapters fill a lacuna in discussions of ancient Egypt as represented in literature of the nineteenth century, which has hitherto neglected visual culture in favour of the written word: together they demonstrate the significance of ‘paratexts’ (to borrow Gérard Genette’s term),20 and themselves echo the indistinguishability of the illustrative and the written word in ancient Egyptian culture. In each case, illustrative material is shown to emphasise an aspect of the written text, whether it be explicit or implicit, and in doing so, refer readers to contemporary debates stirred up by Egyptological discoveries and commentaries, including those surrounding the ancient Egyptians’ racial heritage, and the aptness of and purposes for which ancient Egypt might be appropriated by both highbrow and middlebrow cultures, as well as the implications of biblical archaeology and Egypt’s place in contemporary religion. Woodward’s chapter focuses on the significance of Christianity and other religious modes in Cleopatra at a time when alternative spiritualities (such as Spiritualism and Theosophy) were in vogue. She reads Haggard’s text as reflective of the author’s personal interests in contemporary occultism and the concept of reincarnation alongside his assertions of commitment to the Christian faith, where ancient Egypt functions as a meeting point in which these complex spiritual views can overlap and merge. Bastawy’s chapter (Chapter 2) also focuses on Christianity and its relationships to

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other faiths, establishing how George Eliot combines Christian and ancient Egyptian religious references in her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). Eliot’s text, Bastawy claims, represents a reconciliation of faiths and a recovery of universalism at a time of religious conservativism. To a degree, Eliot anticipates the rapid increase in interest in Eastern religions, alternative spiritualities and occultism in the late nineteenth century, ideas with which Haggard and others would be grappling decades after Eliot’s attempts to harmonise such diverse systems in Adam Bede. Literary incorporations of ancient Egyptian religion and Christianity, these chapters show, spanned time and genre in the second half of the nineteenth century. Woodward interrogates David Gange’s claim in Dialogues with the Dead that authors such as Haggard ‘minimized cultural difference and demonstrated emotional continuity across millennia by allowing their own religion to infiltrate the earliest Egyptian beliefs’.21 Certainly, there is a strong Christian element in Cleopatra, though as Woodward demonstrates, Haggard was equally willing to incorporate aspects of other religions into his own Christianity. Bastawy’s chapter further shows how cultural difference was actually essential to an understanding of why ancient Egyptian religion was of such interest to Victorian authors. Eliot and Haggard are rarely considered in tandem, but together Woodward’s and Bastawy’s chapters demonstrate a culturally pervasive interest in ancient Egypt and its connections to Christianity in the work of Eliot – often held as one of the defining and leading voices in nineteenth-century literature – and Haggard, whose popular romances were critiqued as much as they were enjoyed. Such connections between high- and middlebrow culture, particularly with a biblical inflection, also emerge in Blumberg’s chapter. Blumberg’s analysis centres on the figure of Potiphar’s wife as she was reimagined by various nineteenth-century authors and artists, bringing essays from the popular press into conversation with the writings of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and decadent luminaries such as Swinburne. Whiteley’s chapter (Chapter 6) further establishes the widespread use of ancient Egypt across the works of the aesthetes and decadents, commenting specifically on ancient Egypt as simultaneously emblematic of ennui, exoticism and sensuality in their literary output. This chapter is significant in locating ancient Egypt in the highbrow literary and artistic movements of the latter half of the nineteenth century, when ancient Egypt’s importance is usually overlooked by scholars in favour of other ancient cultures, including Greece and Rome. My chapter (Chapter 7), meanwhile, offers a counterpoint which sees such tropes trickle down into middlebrow literature of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to Boothby’s tale of imperial angst Pharos the Egyptian, I observe how the expensive, exotic and rare became commercialised, as demonstrated

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through the words and physical format of Boothby’s text in both novel and serial form. Specifically, indulgence in intoxicating cigarettes and perfumes – activities associated with the aesthetes and decadents, as well as the fictional characters who populated their literary works – became a practice in which a broadening audience could participate. Eastern sensuality was evoked in contemporary literature and advertising, as manufacturers capitalised upon the dangerous allure of the East that the aesthetes and decadents had done so much to glamourise. The chapters that make up this volume break new ground in their introduction and analysis of new source material, re-readings of canonical authors and texts, and reassessments of the authors upon whom much of the previous work in the field has focused. As a collection, they are testament to the widespread fascination with ancient Egypt across the literary culture of the Victorian era, in which an enchanted and romanticised Egypt often comes to stand as the ‘other’ with which to interrogate the Western ‘self ’. The chapters highlight ancient Egypt’s – and the ancient Egyptians’ – unique relationship with modern culture, depicted at different times as emblematic of femininity, racial and religious difference. Ancient Egypt is connected to the supernatural, the threatening, the indulgent, the rare, the elite, the cheap and the titillating, at different points and for different ends. Such binary distinctions in which the foreign and the ancient is seemingly used as a foil to modern culture, once probed, ultimately fall away. Victorian representations of ancient Egypt are shown to be hyper-reflective of decidedly modern concerns, orbiting debates around the emerging discipline of Egyptology, its practitioners and the implications of the events of the past for the modern world. This volume presents a collection of essays which push at the boundaries of existing scholarship, showcasing the exciting and varied work being done in this area. The points at which literary scholarship working within Ancient Egypt Reception Studies as an emerging and significant intersection between academic disciplines might break new ground are multifarious: there is not yet an established dendritic structure which scholars might use as a blueprint for interventions in any one particular subfield, though literary studies to date are all fundamentally concerned to some degree with imperialism and selfhood. The chapters of this volume suggest new routes – or further existing ones – that future scholarship might fruitfully follow. Chapters on representations of Potiphar’s wife and Cleopatra VII, for example, suggest additional ways in which Gender Studies might intersect with Reception Studies and literary criticism, moving from Victorian women writers’ depictions of Egyptian women, as Youngkin has addressed in her monograph, to women performing ancient Egyptian women on stage, or indeed male authors seeking to problematise two-dimensional

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representations of ancient Egyptian women as stereotyped seductresses. The chapters on illustrations of mummies, scenes in ancient Egypt and illuminated book covers, meanwhile, invite further considerations from Book History perspectives, privileging the illustrators and book binders who have heretofore gone overlooked. Such developing and novel considerations are significant in suggesting methodologies that allow scholars working within literary criticism, Victorian Studies and Ancient Egypt Reception Studies to broaden their theoretical arsenals when confronting the source material at their disposal. Notes 1 ‘Animals: Budge on Mike’, Time (20 January 1930). 2 F. C. W. Hiley, ‘To the Memory of “Mike,” the Museum Cat, Died Jan. 15, 1919, Aged Twenty Years’, in E. A. Wallis Budge (ed.), ‘Mike’: The Cat who Assisted in Keeping the Main Gate of the British Museum from February 1909 to January 1929 (Bungay, R. Clay & Sons, 1929), p. 11. 3 In a similar vein, the pamphlet ends with a clipping from The Star in 1927, anticipating Mike’s final years and his ‘pass[ing] into the same Unknown where, for 3,000 years, his fellows in the Egyptian galleries have resided’; Budge (ed.), ‘Mike’, p. 16. 4 Hiley, ‘To the Memory of “Mike,” the Museum Cat’, p. 11. 5 Nicholas Daly, drawing on Thomas Richards, suggests that the Museum and its Reading Room might be collectively seen ‘as a fantasy image for the containment of [both the knowledge and] material culture … accumulated with empire’; Nicholas Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28:1 (1994), 31. See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993). 6 Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7 Many of these associations can be traced back to classical antiquity, particularly the works of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. 8 Lynn Parramore summarises views of Egyptian antiquity from Herodotus onwards in anticipation of nineteenth-century fascination with this ancient culture; see Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in NineteenthCentury Literary Culture (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–16. 9 Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks, ‘Introduction: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Culture’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 40:4 (2018), 311–12. 10 Related works include Trevor Mostyn, Egypt’s Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists (London: Quartet, 1989); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 11 Complementary studies addressing other ancient cultures and nineteenthcentury spectacle and exhibition include Sean Malley, From Archaeology to

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Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845–1854 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 12 Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 21; Maria Fleischhack, Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 16–17. 13 Parramore, Reading the Sphinx, p. 43; Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 2. 14 Angie Blumberg, ‘Victorian Literature and Archaeology: Contemporary Excavations’, Literature Compass, 15:4 (2018), 1. 15 Margaret Lamb, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), pp. 66–71; Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 206–7. 16 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 168. 17 Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 39. 18 Parramore, Reading the Sphinx, p. 90. 19 Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910, p. xiv. 20 Gérard Genette, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 22:2 (1991), 261–72. 21 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 215–16.

1 Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy Jasmine Day

While studying at the American Antiquarian Society library in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2013, I examined a copy of Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour; and Poems (1852), an early British collection of the works of Edgar Allan Poe published in London by Henry Vizetelly and one of the first Poe anthologies published following the author’s death in 1849. Poe is best known for his influential achievements in the mystery and horror genres, but he also created one of the first mummy characters in modern fiction in his satirical 1845 short story about an ancient Egyptian revived by galvanism, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’. The Vizetelly anthology illustrates this story with a line drawing of the mummy Allamistakeo awakening in his coffin and reproaching his terrified resuscitators with a shake of his fist (Figure 1.1). This image is not only the first illustration of Allamistakeo but also the earliest known modern visual depiction of a living mummy,1 the ‘ambulatory mummy’ character,2 which became the archetype for an entire genre of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and cinema.3 The moment in Poe’s text that inspired this historic illustration is as follows: [W]e found the flesh in excellent preservation …. The color was reddish. The skin was hard, smooth and glossy. … The application of electricity to a mummy … was an idea, if not very sage, still sufficiently original, and we all caught at it at once. … [We] applied the fluid to the bisected nerves … the mummy … bestowed a kick upon Doctor Ponnonner which had the effect of discharging that gentleman … through a window into the street below. [W]e made … a profound incision into the tip of the subject’s nose, while the Doctor himself, laying violent hands



allamistakeo awakes

1.1  Illustration for ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour; and Poems (London: Henry Vizetelly, 1852), p. 216 upon it, pulled it into vehement contact with the wire. … [T]he corpse opened its eyes and winked very rapidly … it sneezed … it sat upon end … it shook its fist in Doctor Ponnonner’s face [and] turning to Messieurs Gliddon and Buckingham, it addressed them, in very capital Egyptian, thus: ‘I must say, gentlemen, that I am as much surprised as I am mortified, at your behavior. … What am I to think of your standing quietly by and seeing me thus unhandsomely used? What am I to suppose by your permitting Tom, Dick and Harry to strip me of my coffins, and my clothes, in this wretchedly cold climate? In what light … am I to regard your aiding and abetting that miserable little villain, Doctor Ponnonner, in pulling me by the nose?’ [U]pon hearing this speech under the circumstances, we all either made for the door, or fell into violent hysterics, or went off in a general swoon.4

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From whence did Poe conceive of a living mummy? He was not, as I show, the first writer to use a mummy as a tool of social satire, nor was he the first modern English-language author to conjure an Egyptian corpse or attribute powers of speech to it. Yet he was among the first writers to do so – certainly, the most famous of his era – and it was his vision of a mummy’s resistance to objectification that echoed throughout countless subsequent mummy curse tales and films.5 This resistance, in Poe’s case, was not only to the reduction of human beings to scientific specimens, but also to several other forms of diminution of non-European peoples prevalent during his lifetime. Mummy poetry of the era was reductionist, presuming the existence of some fundamental similarity between ancient Egyptian and contemporary European values and identities. In a society intolerant of cultural difference, proud of its technology and convinced of the superiority of Christianity to paganism, a mummy’s past life could only be imagined to have resembled that of a modern housewife or bourgeois gentleman, and Egyptian technology was either lauded as the equal of its modern counterpart or denigrated as inferior to it.6 Scientific discourses on mummies were equally prejudiced but emphasised racial interpretation; debates as to whether the ancient Egyptians had been ‘Negroid’ or ‘Caucasoid’ intensified as the enslavement of African-Americans divided the United States during the Antebellum period. Mummies, both real and fictional, had become political footballs. Roused by the precedent of their use onstage to mock the social order, as I go on to detail, Poe recognised their potential as weapons of sociopolitical critique. Refraining from exploiting them as mouthpieces for partisan politics or class factions, he created Allamistakeo to puncture the pomposity of science and condemn racial prejudice and the naivety of presumptions that the ancient Egyptians had been ‘just like us’. Allamistakeo is not passive, silent before interrogation by historians or helpless to contradict their speculations, but a human being capable of speaking for himself. Yet his actions speak loudest of all. Upon reviving, he shakes his fist at the men who have stripped and electrified him, speaking for all of the victims not only of antiquities trafficking but also, perhaps, of other forms of abuse, such as enslavement. This watershed moment of mummy literature – the first angry mummy – was arguably the origin of the living mummies of later nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century cinema who took violent revenge for the desecration of their tombs.7 In capturing Allamistakeo’s gesture of defiance, the work of the unnamed illustrator of the Vizetelly edition – likely its publisher Henry Vizetelly himself8 – occupies an important place in the history of modern visual and literary depictions of Egyptian mummies and the sociopolitical discourses that they voiced. The Vizetelly illustration also



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embellishes Poe’s vision, invoking contemporary racial theories about the ethnic identities of ancient Egyptians. An artist must necessarily reference the tone of a subject’s skin, where a writer might leave such physical details unspoken. Published seven years after the original edition of Poe’s story, the illustration engaged with contemporary efforts to claim the ancient Egyptians as ancestors of Europeans, daring – like Poe – to contradict current racial theory. Just as comparisons with earlier literature place ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ into political, social and historical perspective in this chapter, comparison of the Vizetelly illustration with the story that inspired it reveals its significance as a rare voice of opposition to scientific racism. In the context of debates regarding Poe’s attitude towards slavery and the concept of race, his mummy story and its illustration suggest a critical stance when they are considered in conjunction with each other and with reference to contemporary imaginative and scientific literature. Before considering Poe’s sources, I must state that I am unconvinced by Killis Campbell’s longstanding theory of 1910 that an 1832 short humorous article in The New-York Mirror titled ‘Letter from a Revived Mummy’ was Poe’s primary source of inspiration. The ‘Letter’ was ostensibly penned by a British soldier and traveller preserved for a century then revived by galvanism in the United States, who became disoriented after mistaking various American towns for the European and classical originals after which they were named, such as Rome and Troy. This source, while known to Poe, is less likely to have inspired the fundamental themes in his story than any of the other pre-1845 works I discuss, and might at most have influenced his references to galvanic revival and talking mummies;9 it hardly set a precedent for Poe’s savage dissection of cultural and scientific arrogance. Campbell was, of course, unable to access the vast archives of nineteenth-century periodical literature now available through digitisation. It has only lately become apparent that many more mummy-themed literary works were produced during this era than previously reckoned (especially poems),10 and consequently the list of potential influences upon ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ has expanded. These include not only earlier works of fiction,11 but also plays, poems, accounts of the many mummy unwrappings in Britain and the United States, and tours of mummies and their coffins through the United States that occurred during Poe’s lifetime.12 I focus here upon imaginative works that could have motivated Poe. The speech of the mummy The popularisation of ancient Egyptiana in the early nineteenth century in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, the publication

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of the multi-volume Description de l’Egypte (1809–29), Jean-François Champollion’s publication of his first breakthrough in the translation of hieroglyphs in 1822, Giovanni Belzoni’s celebrated acquisitions and British exhibitions of antiquities and the popularity of semi- and un-scientific unwrappings of mummies in Britain and the United States increased the frequency of the depiction of mummies in transatlantic literature. Perceived by some as the wise elders of human history, preserved Egyptians were an ideal means by which writers could draw inspiration from a romantic past or lampoon and condemn the social ills and scientific obsessions of the present age. Poe incorporated current popular subjects into his stories to broaden their appeal. ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ is narrated by a participant in a scientific gentlemen’s late-night unrolling and application of an electric current to a mummy. Unexpectedly, the subject of the experiment awakes with sudden violence, scattering the cowardly company, who later regain sufficient composure to debate the relative merits of Egyptian and modern politics and technology with him. They make sure to win the argument, being too egotistical to accept Allamistakeo’s evidence that his people’s sciences and technologies surpassed their own,13 and misinterpret his final blush and bowed head as a sign of defeat instead of pity for their ignorance.14 ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ was topical, likely influenced by the American public lectures and mummy unwrappings of George Gliddon and James Silk Buckingham (each of whom finds a namesake in Poe’s tale) and by William Bayle Bernard’s popular British play of 1833, The Mummy: A Farce, in One Act,15 itself inspired by Thomas Pettigrew’s mummy unrollings in England. Bernard’s farce featured a pompous scientist in search of a mummy upon which to test an elixir of life. A charlatan seeking access to the scientist’s attractive ward dupes him with a living man disguised as a mummy, which duly ‘revives’. This scenario, in which a ‘living’ (albeit fake) mummy served as a pretext to stage a sex farce, dates to the eighteenth century in the work of noted British playwright John Gay. In Three Hours After Marriage (1717) a young woman, who has just married an elderly scientist expecting the delivery of an Egyptian mummy, contrives to smuggle her lovers into the house disguised as the specimen. By substituting an African-American slave, Ginger Blue, for the mummy-pretender in Bernard’s play to create Virginia Mummy (c. 1835), the American blackface actor and playwright Thomas Rice shifted his play’s focus to issues of racial inequality, demonstrating the subversive potential of mummy comedy,16 a lesson which, perhaps, was not lost on Poe. Like Ginger Blue, Allamistakeo acts as a ventriloquist’s dummy, voicing the author’s political views.17



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Allamistakeo’s first actions under the influence of electricity are comical: fluttering eyelids, sneezing and a kangaroo kick that sends a scientist through an open window.18 Here we can detect the influence of the stage upon Poe’s work, with its tradition of slapstick, scientists portrayed as fools and mummies as objects of comedy. Poe may even have deliberately reversed the usual scenario of contemporary blackface stage comedies, with European scientists substituting for African-American buffoons.19 Yet Allamistakeo’s next gesture, a fist shaken at the company who have ‘unhandsomely used’ him and a severe verbal scolding of their impudence,20 bears more gravitas, questioning the ethics of stripping and dissecting mummies. Perhaps Poe had Bernard’s play in mind, in which a living mummy impersonator, augur in hand, confronts the scientist who almost dissected him: ‘Now, I hope you are convinced I have a brain?’ 21 Concerns about the ethics of collecting, studying and exhibiting human remains from indigenous and ancient cultures, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts, were not debated explicitly until the late twentieth century. Yet misgivings about these practices were first tentatively broached in the early nineteenth century by mummy plays and poems through the device of talking mummies, when the practice of public unwrappings was at its zenith. We must look to these works – especially to an abundance of mummy-themed poetry – for more of Poe’s possible sources of inspiration. Horace Smith’s influential British poem of 1821, ‘Address to the Mummy, at Belzoni’s Exhibition’, interrogated its subject about Egypt’s ancient monuments and his own private life but, frustratingly, received no answer. Poe admired Smith’s work and would have been familiar with the ‘Address’, which likely influenced his short story.22 A score of mummy interrogation poems evidently inspired by the ‘Address’ were produced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; even some of the earliest of these placed words in mummies’ mouths to relieve readers’ longing for closure with contrived tales of life in antiquity that bore suspicious resemblance to the tastes, values and politics of contemporary Britons and Americans.23 The displacement of the voices of subjugated Others by one’s own is a stock strategy of Orientalism,24 a prime example of which was the concoction of ‘delirious biographies’ of ancient Egyptians by early Egyptologists through subjective interpretations of their funerary portraits.25 Similarly, poets made assumptions about their silent subjects. A dead woman, for instance, was exoticised as a queen or princess: ‘The sunken eye with pleasure may have beamed, / Or tears, perhaps, that dusky cheek have wet; / Upon that brow for aught I know hath gleamed / Some queenly coronet’. Yet she was also domesticated, constrained within traditional European feminine roles

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as a tender maiden or an affectionate mother: ‘An infant may have slumbered in those arms, / Which hang so still and nerveless by thy side; / Perchance some Pharoah [sic], yielding to thy charms, / Made thee his royal bride.’ 26 Retorting against this prevailing, comforting vision that ancient Egyptians had been ‘just like us’, other prominent writers returned to the much older tradition of mummy-themed social satire. In Jane Webb’s popular 1827 novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, the contrite former despot, Pharaoh Khufu, sets aright a corrupt English government analogous to its Georgian counterpart.27 In 1834, the British theologian-turned-astronomer Alexander Copland published The Existence of Other Worlds, a quasi-scientific speculation that Purgatory might lie in outer space, which he supported with a pair of mummy poems, ‘The Mummy Awaked’ and ‘The Mummy’s Reply’. The first was an interrogation in the manner of Smith, but with a vaunting determination to prove modern European technology and Christian religion superior to that of the ancients: Could you like us transmute old rags to gold? Or circulate bank notes for solid treasures? For paper money merchandise is sold, But sometimes we see cause to change our measures. Why were ye all deluded by your priests, To worship reptiles, birds, and senseless beasts?28

The probing and boasting continued: We now have men above the clouds who rise, Tied to a bag, for gold, or ev’n for flattery; With hempen string bring light’ning from the skies! Or rouse the dead by a galvanic battery! Were gas and steam known to your fam’d magicians, Had you such folks as lawyers and physicians? 29

This arrogant tone was a deliberate irony, for when the mummy replies she is haughty, taunting her inquirers and chastising their arrogance: Show me some wonders! raise your rods and call Some spirits from the deep or from the sky! Touch my poor frame, and make my body all Just as it was before grim Death stood by. If you can do but this, then I’ll believe That you can all which you have said achieve.30



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The mummy’s selective memory frustrates the interrogators: And I, of old, in Haram was confin’d, For fear I’d smile on others than my lord, So even if I could call all to mind Which then took place, ’twould little light afford To such as you, who know so much already – So teaze no longer a just waken’d lady.31

Copland’s scorn for the European sense of technological and moral superiority to foreigners ancient and modern resurfaced in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, posing the question as to whether Poe was influenced by Copland’s poems or at least by some shared anti-Eurocentric zeitgeist.32 One further point of comparison is the reference by both writers to the revival of the dead via galvanism,33 notwithstanding a likely common derivation from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The strident defiance of Copland’s mummy portended that of Allamistakeo, who, before berating them, shakes his fist at those who dared to strip him.34 Another poem of 1834, ‘The Answer of the Egyptian Mummy’, was composed by an anonymous British poet (using the appropriate pseudonym ‘Mummius’) in response to Smith’s ‘Address’, which had remained influential since its publication in 1821. The ‘Answer’ presents a mummy’s replies to some of Smith’s questions and various remarks about life in ancient Egypt, albeit in a humorous tone, mocking the pretensions of scientists: ‘you would not have me throw discredit / On grave historians’.35 One blunder I can fairly set at rest, He says that men were once more big and bony Than now, which is a bouncer at the best, I’ll just refer you to our friend Belzoni, Near seven feet high! in sooth a lofty figure! Now look at me, and tell me, am I bigger?36

The Egyptian suddenly turns boastful, declaring that his people possessed ‘gas-lights’ and constructed temples and obelisks by means of ‘rail-roads and … steam’:37 [W]e men of yore Were versed in all the knowledge you can mention; Who hath not heard of Egypt’s peerless lore? Her patient toil? acuteness of invention? Survey the proofs, – our Pyramids are thriving, – Old Memnon still looks young, and I’m surviving.38

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Like Copland’s ‘The Mummy Awaked’, the ‘Answer’ credits the Egyptians with the possession of modern forms of technology in order to overturn any sense of moral superiority that readers might possess. This was one common train of thought at the time. As an anonymously authored article in the same magazine issue stated, Judging … of the mighty undertakings of [the Egyptians], from what we now see of their relics, but left in the dark as to the mode in which they executed their operations on so grand a scale, we may fairly conclude, that certain inventions and improvements in arts and manufactures, which we call modern, were practised by them; and that, on the other hand, many valuable attainments familiar to the Egyptians, have become, by lapse of years, wholly forgotten, and are therefore concealed from us.39

For all its magnanimity, this vision of the Egyptians rendered them palatable and comprehensible to modern readers by presenting them as de facto Europeans, a contrivance that inadvertently abetted contemporary prejudices against pagans and non-Europeans. Nevertheless, the Copland and ‘Mummius’ poems both take issue with Eurocentrism and the authority of scientists, for which respect had evidently begun to wane by 1834.40 Over a decade later, Poe employed the same technological attributions and expressed the same scepticism about experts in his mummy tale. One more vociferous Egyptian in ‘The Speech of the Mummy’ (1838) preceded Allamistakeo but, in regurgitating an American poet’s own partisan political values, was the kind of mummy-puppet Poe eschewed. Talking mummies necessarily vocalise their writers’ ideas but Poe, who was probably aware of the vogue for these characters and the heavy-handed manner in which opinionated writers exploited them, was determined to prevent Allamistakeo from making incongruous, ahistorical remarks. Allamistakeo is an expert upon the past, not the present, unlike some of his improbable predecessors: The Snoozing Mummy burst his lid, And came to speak of future time From Cheop’s [sic] mighty Pyramid, Upreared by cruelty and crime. … ‘What noisy Roysters break my sleep? – Has Pharaoh Primus got permission His Court on Earth again to keep, By means of some new Whig “Magician?” … No! no! but ’pon my time-dried soul, The shout is from a tipsy Tory – A self-styled Whig, who gained the poll Of Gotham, at the price of glory.41



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There is another, even more crucial difference between Poe’s story and this poem, which was written as the issue of slavery in the United States grew increasingly politicised and divisive. ‘The Speech of the Mummy’, unlike most other early nineteenth-century mummy poetry and fiction, takes race as its theme. It condemns the outspoken abolitionist stance of former United States President John Quincy Adams and his criticism of the anti-abolitionism of senior members of his Whig party. In the Supreme Court in 1841, Adams successfully defended the slaves who had captured the Spanish ship Amistad and attempted to return to Africa.42 While it is uncertain whether Poe was aware of ‘The Speech of the Mummy’, his decision to divest Allamistakeo of racial connotations, discussed below, contrasts with the approach of the ‘Speech’ poet, who implies that his mummy is not black and even uses him to denounce abolitionism. Allamistakeo, however, is of indeterminate race, neither black nor Caucasian but with a skin of unknown colour artificially reddened by mineral pigments.43 Poe’s refusal to exploit mummies as political pawns44 is concomitant with his deracialisation of them, itself a critique of the vanity of scientists whose growing interest in eugenics and racial theory throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century would come to dominate the interpretation of Egyptian mummies. Even a brief overview of the principal and lesser works preceding ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ that might have influenced it or shared some common source or ideology suggests that Poe was not merely following an established tradition of depicting revived mummies for comic effect, but specifically of using these characters to deliver social and political criticism. Allamistakeo’s shaking fist encapsulates this idea – mirroring, perhaps, the notorious petulance of the author – and thus, it is this iconic moment in Poe’s story that the Vizetelly illustration captures. Poe’s critical perspective may have lent impetus to the American curse stories of the 1860s that raged with more explicit violence against the allied ills of patriarchy and imperialism.45 It appears that Poe, ever adept at distilling and refining the essential ideas of a genre, sharpened the mummy as a weapon of sociopolitical critique, utilising its familiar comic context as a vehicle to deliver the blow. Race for the mummy How faithful is the Vizetelly illustration to Poe’s account of Allamistakeo’s appearance, and what might have been the illustrator’s intention in elaborating upon the text? The extent to which the illustration corresponds to the text, or departs from it, relates to the purpose and context of the author’s

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description of an ancient Egyptian. Poe’s narrator describes the mummy’s skin as ‘reddish’ in colour, attributing this to the application of ‘camphor and other sweet-scented gums’ during the embalming process.46 He does not specify to which ethnic group Allamistakeo belongs, speculate about the natural colour of his skin prior to embalming nor ascribe significance to this colour. To Poe, the race of the mummy was not an issue. The illustrator, however, used hashed lines to emphasise that Allamistakeo has darker skin than the Caucasian Americans surrounding him. The knuckles of his fist remain uncoloured to indicate the force with which it is clenched. The darker skin of this mummy, along with his full lips and pendulous earlobes pierced with heavy earrings, produce an African appearance. It is noteworthy that some Victorian and Edwardian illustrators interpreted ancient Egyptians as black Africans.47 This propensity reflected contemporary developments in scientific and medical theories that determined the ‘ethnic and racial identities … assigned to the ancient Egyptians’.48 Debbie Challis explains how an emphasis upon the question of the ancient Egyptians’ race evolved in conjunction with eugenic philosophies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Europeans had envisioned a distinction between themselves and other peoples since the age of ancient Greece, this difference began to be racialised in the eighteenth century with the development of an aesthetic hierarchy that exalted the ideal face and form of the Apollo Belvedere and maligned the appearance of black Africans.49 A revival of the Greek concept of physiognomy – the belief that personality and morality determine facial morphology – lent scientific credibility to this aesthetic.50 The heads of people from different races were measured by phrenologists, and the heads of Africans eventually compared to those of apes.51 By the 1810s to 1830s, phrenology was prevalent in Europe;52 the new science of archaeology became its ally as mummy heads and Egyptian artefacts, representing both Egyptians and the foreigners they encountered, were used to attempt to identify the races of these ancient peoples. Collaborations between the Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie and the scientist Francis Galton were instrumental in lending historical support to modern theories of eugenics. Archaeology came to serve colonialism when invoked to bolster claims that Europeans, by virtue of ‘superior breeding and morality’, were entitled to conquer ‘inferior’ peoples. The collection of skulls, facial casts and cranial measurements by museums and researchers became widespread throughout the nineteenth century; even after the scientific repudiation of phrenology at the end of this period, popular interest in reading the ‘personalities’ of these specimens continued when they were exhibited.53 Physiognomic and eugenic thinking was persistent, culminating



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in the Nazis’ racial segregation and sterilisation programmes and, ultimately, the Holocaust.54 Challis’s study focuses upon Galton’s work until his death in 1911.55 My parameters end earlier: the publications of ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ in 1845 and the Vizetelly illustration in 1852 both preceded the most influential work of Galton and Petrie. Both coincided, however, with the era of enslavement of African-Americans and the development of American Egyptomania. In a unique contextualisation of Poe’s story, Scott Trafton reveals slavery, eugenics and Egyptomania to be closely interwoven phenomena; racial interpretations of the ancient past by some Egyptologists were used to justify slavery.56 Despite the popularity of phrenology during his lifetime and his likely awareness of Thomas Rice’s Virginia Mummy farce (c. 1835) with its African-American mummy impersonator, Poe did not identify Allamistakeo explicitly as African, nor condemn him – with or without reference to his facial features – as morally inferior to his interrogators. On the contrary, as Trafton explains, Allamistakeo rejects both principal contemporary American schools of thought about human racial origins – ‘the American School of polygeny’, in which races’ inequality was deemed a product of their separate origins,57 and its rival, ‘the Christian one of monogeny’, humankind’s descent from Adam – suggesting instead that the Egyptians thought that the first humans sprang in separate but synchronised and racially undifferentiated groups from the earth itself.58 Allamistakeo recalls hearing a rumour ‘concerning the origin of the human race; … [A] spontaneous germination from rank soil … of five vast hordes of men simultaneously upspringing in five distinct and nearly equal divisions of the globe.’ 59 Here, Poe demolishes the credibility of Mr Gliddon,60 a character based upon George Gliddon, an American Egyptologist and polygenist who classified the races supposedly portrayed in ancient Egyptian reliefs and represented by mummies, and asserted that the ancient Egyptians had been Caucasian rather than black Africans.61 It is the fictional Gliddon who debates the reason for the ‘reddish’ tone of Allamistakeo’s skin, discovering that it is the product of chemical preservatives,62 not ethnic origin. The inclusion of this character acknowledges that racial interpretations overshadowed mummy research, but the author arrests Mr Gliddon’s speculations. When Silk Buckingham reads Allamistakeo’s skull as evidence of Egyptians’ inferior intelligence, the mummy states that Egyptian scientists abandoned phrenology long ago.63 It was not only Poe’s suggestion that the ancients had anticipated, even surpassed, modern science and technology64 but also, says Trafton, his refusal to incorporate race into evolutionary considerations and to confer any value upon the concept, that undermined the foundations and pretensions of nineteenth-century scholarship.65 As the past incarnate, the mummy

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is the ultimate authority on ancient Egypt, proving the experts wrong and destabilising their claims to authority.66 The nineteenth-century figure of the ambulatory mummy revived from death threatens not people per se, but their concept of the present as being ‘different, distinct, and safe from the past’.67 Poe’s scorn for scientific racism, expressed through his critique of Gliddon, could not divest his story entirely of racial implications, especially given the sociohistorical context of its creation. According to Trafton, the power relationship between a fictional mummy and scientist was akin to that between a slave and master,68 the captive liable to erupt, escape and prove uncontrollable. The ‘supposedly docile African (if not Negro) bodies held captive onstage in the North’ were comparable to ‘the notoriously restless Negro (if not African) bodies held captive offstage in the South’.69 Like the slave, the fictional or actual mummy was a ‘black’ body subjected to the examination and authority of ‘white’ men, to which it nevertheless posed a constant threat. Trafton interprets the ‘mummy’s curse’ scenario of nineteenth-century literature – the revivification of the ancient dead to seek revenge upon their violators – as ‘a narrative of racialized revenge’.70 It was problematic that mummies, as imported African objects, were treated in some instances as Caucasian subjects, that they could be regarded not as an ‘Other but a type of Self ’ and yet be contained, exhibited and examined like slaves.71 Ideological binaries of objects versus subjects,72 slaves versus masters and Africans versus Caucasians could not be maintained if identifications of the race, and even the sentience of mummies, were inconsistent.73 While ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ was influenced by contemporary scientific and newspaper reports about mummy unwrappings, by deemphasising the natural skin colour of Allamistakeo, Poe attempted to disrupt the racial classifications that were a standard element of scientific mummy examinations. He could not avoid some involuntary racial analogy in the awakening of his African protagonist among Europeans in an age of slavery, but race otherwise remains conspicuous in his story only through its absence. If Poe was doing his best to elide the question of race, the intent of the Vizetelly illustration is less clear. The visual mode of representation forces the artist, more so than the writer, to specify a subject’s skin tone and, in the racialised context of contemporary popular and scientific debate about mummies and slaves – hampered further by a very limited greyscale palette – the Vizetelly illustrator’s choice would inevitably be charged with meaning, intentional or otherwise. Perhaps hashed lines rather than plain black or white blocking constituted an attempt to show the mummy’s un-racialised, artificially reddened skin; perhaps they expressed



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an ambivalence that committed to neither black African nor Caucasian models. Perhaps the artist’s principal sources of reference were drawings of dark-skinned mummies in contemporary scientific works74 rather than the texts of these works, some of which sought to classify mummies racially and apply concomitant moral judgements to them. Still, Allamistakeo’s flesh is clearly darker than that of the scientists with whom he is juxtaposed, and his nose and lips are larger than theirs. This stereotypical African appearance is noteworthy, being an interpretation of a character represented sympathetically by Poe. At the time of the publication of the Vizetelly edition, ethnological researchers were attempting to prove that the ancient Egyptians were not black Africans.75 European Egyptologists now hastened to claim mummies as their own ancestors, justifying their domination of Egyptology and acquisition of antiquities in a colonial context. This development in racial-historical theory later culminated in a statement by E. A. Wallis Budge, who would go on to become Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum: ‘if the ka’s, or doubles, of the ancient Egyptians walk about … many of them must have rejoiced … when … they were no longer considered to be … negroes or savages …. [E]xaminations of the skulls of Egyptian mummies … [show that they] belonged to the Caucasian race’.76 Budge’s faith in phrenology and racial classifications produced dubious science, just as his presumption to know what mummies were thinking generated more ‘delirious biographies’ of ancient Egyptians akin to those invented by poets.77 During his lifetime, however, his statements were regarded as authoritative, so his pronouncement that ancient Egyptians were Caucasians would likely have concluded any academic debate on the subject. Poe’s narrative and its illustration, both of which present a conflict and contrast between Europeans and a non-European (be he black African or not), become redundant under the terms of this new Eurocentrism in which racial as well as temporal gaps are closed. The Vizetelly illustration’s reference to the disappearing paradigm of a biological gulf between ancient Egyptians and modern Europeans, necessitated by reference to a story first published seven years earlier, suggests that the artist emphasised Allamistakeo’s race – his non-Europeanness – intentionally to dispute the ‘Caucasian Egyptian’ paradigm that was gaining hegemony at the time of publication. Physiognomic thought still prevailed in the 1850s, dictating racial delineation as the basis for any artist’s portrayal of ancient Egyptians. The conferment of African attributes upon the Vizetelly Allamistakeo did not render him an antagonist to Poe’s European-American readers, as his personality and predicament attracted sympathy, but it was consistent with the role of fictional mummies as Puck-like, antithetical creatures.78 The mummies of nineteenth-century literature condemned the

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rapaciousness and objectifying effects of the colonial and industrial age. Early nineteenth-century mummies on the stage, probably familiar to Poe, mocked the arrogance and racism of European authority figures.79 By the 1860s, American curse fiction rebuked the despoliation of antiquities with female mummies stripped by male explorers in a figurative rape.80 The revived mummies of late nineteenth-century romance fiction embodied concerns about the reduction of human bodies to trade goods.81 By the twentieth century, in the newly dominant popular medium of cinema, the threat posed by mummies – that colonialism and its allied ills would meet with retribution – finally erupted as Allamistakeo’s successors awoke from centuries of slumber to strangle scores of victims. The Egypt of the European imagination exudes ‘subliminal terror’, overthrowing ‘whatever accepted system of beliefs … allows the present to think of itself as different, distinct, and safe from the past’.82 The mummy, Egypt incarnate, embodies this dormant and dangerous past that is, in truth, not the past of Egypt itself but of modern European nations as they struggle to come to terms with the consequences of their colonial and racist legacies. Conclusion In exposing and elaborating Allamistakeo, the Vizetelly illustration reflects the corporeality, tactility and unabashed curiosity of early nineteenthcentury encounters with Egyptian mummies, as does Poe’s own description of the mummy’s unwrapping. It was an age of frenzied stripping of foreign bodies, an act that epitomised the colonial domination of non-European peoples both modern and ancient. Roger Luckhurst links the British occupation of Egypt after 1882 to the zenith of mummy curse fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its coded expressions of colonial anxiety,83 but mummy poetry – with which Poe, himself a poet, likely had some familiarity – had already broached misgivings about the disinterment, unwrapping and display of mummies in the midst of the mania for unrolling them in the 1830s. The Vizetelly illustration encapsulates this admonition, the artist choosing for his subject the moment when Poe’s mummy shakes his fist. The Vizetelly illustration is significant as the earliest known visual depiction of an ambulatory mummy character, unprecedented not only in its attempt to establish conventions for envisaging a novel and fantastic being, but also in daring to use these visual codes to persuade the reader to adopt the mummy-victim’s subject position. The illustration was responsive to its sociohistorical context, even provocative, entreating readers to question prevailing Eurocentrism and racism. Poe’s story and its illustration



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were historically situated in America’s era of slavery, when popular and scientific interest in physiognomy promoted racial emphases in scientific studies and artistic portrayals of the ancient Egyptians. Although Poe eluded – even derided – this trend with audacious mockery of George Gliddon, his illustrator could not, but achieved the feat of portraying an African figure sympathetically in a decidedly unsympathetic environment. Considered together and with reference to histories of racism and eugenics in Egyptology, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ and the Vizetelly illustration call attention to each other’s critical and progressive stance in relation to contemporary racial ideology. At the dawn of the Victorian era, imperial dogma already had its critics. While the Vizetelly illustration did not become as renowned as the story it accompanied, like that story it can now be situated within the history of mummy discourses: perpetuating but also invigorating the tradition of mummy satire and anticipating the development of the curse narrative with its themes of retribution against wrongdoing and guilt for violating bodies. Poe’s story lies upon the cusp between the first two modern mummy genres, both reproaches of European social, scientific and political folly. Notes I am grateful to Marie Lamoureux and S. J. Wolfe of the American Antiquarian Society for their assistance in reproducing the Vizetelly illustration for publication. 1 An American edition of William Bayle Bernard’s 1833 British play The Mummy: A Farce, in One Act, retitled The Mummy: Or, The Liquor of Life!, is illustrated with a scene featuring the eponymous character; see William Bayle Bernard, The Mummy: Or, The Liquor of Life!; A Farce, in One Act (Philadelphia: Turner & Fisher, c. 1837), frontispiece, p. 4. This edition predates Vizetelly’s Poe anthology but Bernard’s ‘mummy’ is actually a man impersonating a mummy who cannot remain motionless and eventually ‘revives’. Thus the Bernard illustration does not depict a true ambulatory mummy. 2 Frank L. Holt, ‘Egyptomania: Have we Cursed the Pharaohs?’ Archaeology, 39:2 (1986), 60. 3 For a comprehensive account of the evolution and roles of the ambulatory mummy character, see Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006). 4 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science, 1:4 (1845), 364–5. 5 Referencing Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Nicholas Daly interprets late nineteenth-century mummy fiction as ‘a sort of narrativized commodity theory’ (Nicholas Daly, ‘That obscure object of desire: Victorian commodity culture and fictions of the mummy’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28:1 (1994),

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victorian literary culture and ancient egypt 26). The foreign commodities that flooded into Britain from its imperial territories are represented as objects which, having apparently no creators, take on a life of their own, threatening their possessors’ control over them. Imported mummies, being human, pose a particular threat: they are subjects treated as objects, thus bound to revive, even avenge their objectification; see Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 38. This fiction genre, especially curse stories about mummies’ revenge upon those who violate their tombs or bodies, was the probable source of the Universal Pictures and Hammer Studios mummy films of the early to mid-twentieth century, from which other genre films have subsequently been derived; see Day, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 67, 70; Carter Lupton, ‘“Mummymania” for the Masses – is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?’, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt, London: UCL Press pp. 23–46 (especially pp. 24–36). Jasmine Day, ‘The Maid and the Mummy’, in Rachel J. Dann and Karen Exell (eds), Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies (New York: Cambria Press, 2013), pp. 193–232. No evidence for Poe’s direct influence upon nineteenth-century authors or Universal or Hammer screenwriters is known, but the surge in curse-themed fiction, thence films, in the wake of Poe’s story suggests indirect influence or parallel reasoning. Poe encapsulated growing ethical concerns about the objectification of mummies and its racist and imperial implications that had already begun to emerge in mummy poetry; see Jasmine Day, ‘The Maid and the Mummy’. Objectification critiques culminated with the violent revenge of living mummies in American fiction of the 1860s; see Jasmine Day, ‘The Rape of the Mummy: Women, Horror Fiction and the Westernisation of the Curse’, in Pablo Altoche Peña, Conrado Rodríguez Martin, and Ángeles Ramírez Rodriguez (eds), Mummies and Science, World mummies research: Proceedings of the VI World Congress on Mummy Studies (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Academia Canaria de la Historia, 2008), pp. 617–21. The ‘mummy’s revenge’ proliferated in subsequent literature and cinema (see endnotes 5 and 45). Since the foremost artist in the Vizetelly family, Frank (later a Civil War correspondent and illustrator), was fifteen years old in 1852, the eldest son, Henry – a printer and wood engraver – is the most likely candidate; see S. J. Wolfe, ‘Sampler of Mummies and Popular Culture: Allamistakeo (Poe’s Creation)’, 19th Century Mummymania, 2016, http://mummymania.omeka.net/exhibits/ show/sampler-of-mummies-and-popular/allamistakeo–poe-s-creation-. Several passages in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ are evidently based upon phrases in ‘Letter from a Revived Mummy’, but this is superficial rather than thematic influence. For a comparison of phrasing in the two works see Lucille King, ‘Notes on Poe’s Sources’, Texas Studies in English, 10 (1930), pp. 128–34. Day, ‘The Maid and the Mummy’. Scott Trafton, for instance, sees in Poe’s mummy story the influence of Jane Webb’s 1827 novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century; see Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania



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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 133. I argue for the influence of several additional works, notably plays and poems, many of which have not previously drawn the attention of scholars. 12 For an extended study of these American tours of mummies and coffins, their media reportage and social impact, see S. J. Wolfe and Robert Singerman, Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptians as Artifacts (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009). Wolfe believes it likely that Poe saw the famous Padihershef when the mummy’s well-publicised tour passed through Richmond, Virginia in 1823; see Wolfe, ‘Sampler of Mummies and Popular Culture’; Wolfe and Singerman, Mummies in Nineteenth Century America, p. 26, citing Agnes M. Bondurant, Poe’s Richmond (Richmond, VA: Garrett & Massie, 1942), p. 142. For Padihershef, see Joyce Haynes and R. Jackson Wilson, Padihershef: The Egyptian Mummy (Springfield: George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 1985). There are alternative and additional possibilities. Jonathan Elias related to me in personal communication that Dr James Henry Miller, who co-awarded Poe his first literary prize (for ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, on behalf of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833), unwrapped a mummy, a fragment of whose wrappings is in Elias’s possession. Elias suggests that Poe may have been aware of, or even involved in, this unwrapping. For Miller’s role as a mummy unwrapper see Wolfe and Singerman, Mummies in Nineteenth Century America, pp. 140–1, citing ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, Boston Daily Advertiser (26 November 1838). 13 John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 60. 14 Justine S. Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 73. 15 Burton R. Pollin, ‘Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” Reconsidered’, Emerson Society Quarterly, 60, supplement 2 (1970), 60–7. 16 William T. Lhamon Jr, Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 46–53. 17 Charles D. Martin, ‘Can the Mummy Speak? Manifest Destiny, Ventriloquism, and the Silence of the Ancient Egyptian Body’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 31:2 (2009), 113–28. 18 Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 365. 19 Marcia D. Nichols, ‘Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” and Blackface Anatomy’, Poe Studies, 48 (2015), 2–16. 20 Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 365. 21 William Bayle Bernard, The Mummy: A Farce, in One Act (New York: Samuel French, 1833), p. 23. 22 Burton R. Pollin, ‘Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith’, Poe Newsletter, 3 (1970), 8–10. 23 Day, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 54; Day, ‘The Maid and the Mummy’, pp. 193–23. 24 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 208–9.

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25 Dominic Montserrat, ‘“To Make Death Beautiful”: The Other Life of the Fayum Portraits’, Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts, 150:449 (1999), 23. 26 William Howe Cuyler Hosmer, ‘The Memphian Mummy’, Atkinson’s Casket or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, 8:3 (1833), 107. 27 Poe makes no reference to Webb’s celebrated novel and may not have been familiar with it, according to Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe – Volume III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1978), p. 1177. For a contrasting assessment of Poe’s familiarity with Webb’s text see endnote 11. 28 Alexander Copland, The Existence of Other Worlds, Peopled with Living and Intelligent Beings, Deduced from the Nature of the Universe. To which is Added, Modern Discoveries and Times Contrasted with the State of Knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians (London: J., G. & F. Rivington, 1834), p. 172. 29 Ibid., p. 174. 30 Ibid., p. 193. 31 Ibid., p. 194. 32 Belief that ancient peoples possessed modern forms of technology and medical knowledge originated in the late eighteenth century; see Mabbott, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, p. 1176, citing Louis Dutens, Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes, 2 vols (Paris: Chez la Veuve Duchesne, 1766). 33 Copland, The Existence of Other Worlds, p. 174; Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 363–4. 34 Ibid., 365. 35 ‘Mummius’, ‘The Answer of the Egyptian Mummy’, Saturday Magazine, 4:116 (1834), 155. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 156. 38 Ibid. 39 ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, Saturday Magazine, 4:116 (1834), 154. 40 It is unclear which of the two 1834 British poems written respectively by Copland and ‘Mummius’ was published first and whether the second was influenced by its predecessor. The mummy subject, ancient technology theme and anti-Eurocentric stance that they share indicate either parallel thinking or the influence of one work upon the other. Either way, their thematic similarities represent an extant mummy paradigm that may have influenced Poe. Interestingly, when a correspondent to Notes and Queries in 1856 sought to identify some half-remembered narrative about a talking mummy, several respondents identified the three most likely sources as the Copland and ‘Mummius’ poems and Poe’s story; see ‘Poem about a Mummy’, Notes and Queries, 2:33 (1856), 137. 41 ‘The Speech of the Mummy’, United States Democratic Review, 4:12 (1838), 375. 42 See John Quincy Adams, Cinque and Joseph Meredith Toner Collection, Argument of John Quincy Adams, before the Supreme Court of the United



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States: in the case of the United States, appellants, vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the schooner Amistad, by Lieut. Gedney, delivered on the 24th of February and 1st of March, with a review of the case of the Antelope, reported in the 10th, 11th, and 12th volumes of Wheaton’s Reports (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841). Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 364. Poe’s mummy story, like a number of his other works, denounces the contemporary paradigm of ‘Progress’, the assumption that humanity – and the United States in particular – is constantly improving socially, scientifically, technologically and politically; see Richard A. Fusco, ‘Poe and the Perfectability of Man’ (MA dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1982), pp. 56–72. Poe uses Allamistakeo to criticise American democracy, rather than to directly endorse any specific alternative politic. In a series of short stories authored by American women during the 1860s, men who committed figurative rapes by stripping and destroying female mummies were punished by terrifying magical curses; see Day, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 46–7; Day, ‘The Rape of the Mummy’. One of these stories, ‘The Mummy’s Soul’ (Anonymous, 1862), included a revivified mummy, possibly the first in prose literature since Allamistakeo and the earliest known female ambulatory mummy character; see Day, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 56. These protofeminist works were clearly the unacknowledged sources of later, more renowned curse tales, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892) with its murderous animated corpse that in turn inspired twentieth-century mummy curse films. Their vengeful, angry mummies were the successors to the irate Allamistakeo, until the advent of the romance genre attempted to suppress mummies’ critical potential. Mummy romance, including inaugural works by Théophile Gautier (‘Le Pied de la momie’, 1840, produced during Poe’s lifetime, and Le Roman de la momie, 1858) and classic works by Arthur Conan Doyle (‘The Ring of Thoth’, 1890), Bram Stoker (The Jewel of Seven Stars, 1903) and H. Rider Haggard (‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, 1912–13), developed principally during the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries to defeat the symbolic threats posed to European imperial power by exotic imports from colonised realms. By feminising mummies and turning them from dreadful corpses into beautiful apparitions, romances allowed them to be seduced by men, turning insubordinate Egyptians from rebellious subjects back into obedient objects, specifically sex objects; see Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 38. Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 364. See, for instance, Albert Levering’s illustration of an ancient Egyptian for George Ade, In Pastures New (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906), p. 173. Such images were meant to portray ‘typical’ Egyptians, rather than specifically the proportion of the ancient population who were of Nubian descent. This particular stereotype of the ancient Egyptians conflated them with the wider African population to create a symbolic binary contrast of ‘black versus white’ for European readers.

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48 Debbie Challis, The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 6. 49 Ibid., pp. 6–7. Challis refers to Susan Lape, Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion, 2002). 50 Challis, The Archaeology of Race, p. 7. Challis refers to Simon Swain (ed.), Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s ‘Physiognomy’ from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 51 Challis, The Archaeology of Race, p. 7. Challis refers to Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722–1789) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 52 Challis, The Archaeology of Race, p. 8. Challis refers to Martin Kemp and M. Wallace (eds), Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 111. 53 Challis, The Archaeology of Race, p. 9. 54 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 55 Ibid., pp. 18–20. 56 Trafton, Egypt Land, pp. 6–7. Poe’s attitude to race has been examined with particular reference to Allamistakeo’s appearance and account of human origins; see, for instance, B. Ricardo Brown, Until Darwin: Science, Human Variety and the Origin of Race (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp. 81–2; Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, pp. 57–60; J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 383–6; Murison, The Politics of Anxiety, pp. 71–3. These studies concur that Poe was critical of contemporary scientific racism, but do not explore the slavery or eugenic milieux of Allamistakeo at length. Only Trafton examines extensively the nexus between Poe’s mummy, slavery, eugenics and Egyptomania, hence my focus upon his study. 57 Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, p. 59. 58 Ibid., p. 137. As a man ostensibly born from clay it was, perhaps, no coincidence that Allamistakeo had reddened skin; Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 364. This coincides with his translation of ‘Adam’ as ‘Red Earth’, the putative origin of all peoples; Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 368 – but there is another possible source of this idea. One Egyptian legend of the creation held that the god Khnum, the craftsman, created each human being from clay upon his potter’s wheel. Mabbott suggests that Poe, familiar with the works of Gliddon, knew this story; Mabbott, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, p. 1200, citing Gliddon, ‘Ancient Egypt’, New World, 68–9 (1843). 59 Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 368. This ancient polygenic theory that contradicts modern Bible-based monogeny seems itself also the subject of Allamistakeo’s scepticism; see Brown,  Until Darwin, p. 82; Murison, The Politics of Anxiety, p. 72. 60 Trafton, Egypt Land, pp. 133–4.



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61 Gliddon’s Caucasian classification pre-dates Poe’s story; see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 124–9. His most influential work on race, however, was published after Poe’s death; see Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), pp. 210–45. Gliddon was lampooned in the press after unwrapping in Boston on 7 June 1850 a mummy he asserted was female, which was revealed to be male; see Wolfe and Singerman, Mummies in Nineteenth Century America, pp. 150–60. This infamous incident was not, however, the cause of Poe’s derision of Gliddon, as it postdated both the publication of ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ in 1845 and Poe’s death on 7 October 1849. Instead, some aspect of Gliddon’s ideas – his racial conceptions, I contend – must have incensed Poe. Mabbott discusses Poe’s reliance upon Gliddon’s published lectures for Egyptological information; Mabbott, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, p. 1175. 62 Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 364. 63 Ibid., 369. 64 Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, p. 60. 65 Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 137. 66 Ibid., p. 134. 67 Ibid., p. 139. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 140. 70 Ibid., p. 142. While Trafton sees the mummy’s curse legend as a race-revenge narrative, I have cited the figurative rapes of female mummies by male unwrappers in 1860s American mummy fiction as evidence for a rape-revenge metaphor; see Day, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 46–7; Day, ‘The Rape of the Mummy’. Roger Luckhurst demonstrates the use of Egyptian curses in British folklore to condemn class inequality and the privileges of the aristocracy who collected mummies and accomplished the colonial project; see Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 23, 236. The nexus of these three complementary studies is the idea that mummy curse narratives functioned as critiques of the various social, cultural and political manifestations of the wider colonial project, which was supported and enacted by means of racism, patriarchy and class divisions. 71 Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 139. 72 For a discussion of the symbolic threats posed to patriarchy and imperialism by real and fictional mummies’ indefinite subject/object status, see Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 24–51. 73 Scientists were not the only people to disagree about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians. African-Americans debated whether the Egyptians were their ancestors or their original slavemasters; see Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 225.

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74 See, for instance, the frontispiece in Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, A History of Egyptian Mummies (London: Longman, 1834). The Vizetelly Allamistakeo’s drooping eyelids and stretched lips baring teeth resemble the features of many mummies and may be intended to portray the subject realistically, rather than convey a facial expression. The illustration recalls Poe’s description of the mummy’s revival: ‘[T]he orbs … which were originally noticeable for a certain wild stare, were now so far covered by the lids that only a small portion … remained visible’; Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, 364–5. 75 Wolfe, ‘Sampler of Mummies and Popular Culture’. 76 E. A. Wallis Budge, Prefatory Remarks Made on Egyptian Mummies, on the Occasion of Unrolling the Mummy of Bak-Ran (London: Harrison & Sons, 1890), pp. 4–5. 77 Montserrat, ‘“To Make Death Beautiful”’, 23. 78 Day, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 128, 172. 79 Lhamon Jr, Jump Jim Crow, pp. 46–53. 80 Day, ‘The Rape of the Mummy’. 81 Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 24–51. 82 Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 139. 83 Roger Luckhurst, ‘Mummy’s Curse’, in Matt Cardin (ed.), Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015), p. 306.

2 Adam Bede: an ancient Egyptian Book of Genesis Haythem Bastawy

George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) has often been examined from religious and gender studies perspectives. Jon Singleton remarks, for instance, that ‘Adam’s views on the Bible seem to establish the narrative’s frame of reference within a traditional Christian worldview’.1 Tim Dolin, meanwhile, uses Adam Bede to explain that ‘Assumptions about women’s nature and vocation are also carried through into the language of the fiction, where a woman’s very authority to speak must constantly be justified’.2 As Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede is also held to reflect aspects of her early life and religious upbringing. Little attention, however, has yet been directed towards the ancient Egyptian dimension of the novel. In an essay concerned with the influence of the reception of ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century Britain on Eliot, Molly Youngkin asserts that, after she lost her Evangelical faith in the early 1840s, Eliot embarked on ‘reading about the relationships between various cultures’; she ‘came to embrace the idea that Western civilization should be understood in relation to Eastern civilization, that the origins of Western culture came from the East’.3 Youngkin has further claimed that Eliot employs her ‘knowledge of Egyptian mythology … in most of her major works’.4 This chapter continues the work that Youngkin has so recently begun in addressing ancient Egypt and Eliot in tandem, focusing on Adam Bede. Youngkin has shown that Eliot employs ‘Egyptian mythology … in contrast to Christian … mythologies’ across her oeuvre; developing on this, I demonstrate how – in her earliest literary work, at least – Eliot viewed Egypt as the origin of English civilisation and ancient Egyptian myths as a precursor to Christianity.5 In the first lines of the novel, Eliot writes: ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance

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comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.’ 6 Eliot’s invocation of the Egyptian sorcerer’s magic mirror in the prologue might be read as much more than a passing remark. Drawing on David Carroll, Singleton explains that with Eliot’s writing, ‘however one reads a text, event, or a character, different but equally plausible readings must be assumed to exist, even when they are not apparent’.7 In the following pages, I interpret Adam Bede as an ancient Egyptian Book of Genesis, combining both Christian and ancient Egyptian symbolism and motifs. Building on existing scholarship, assessing various plausible interpretations of Adam Bede, and discussing aspects of historical context which may have influenced Eliot’s writing of the novel as well as Eliot’s own beliefs and related writings, this chapter compares Adam Bede’s main characters to both their Genesis counterparts and the relevant gods and goddesses in ancient Egyptian creation mythology. In so doing, I frame Eliot’s vision in Adam Bede within the context of her early career as a translator, asserting that the novel was her attempt at putting forward an alternative to mid-Victorian conservative Christianity. Egypt in the early nineteenth century The time during which Eliot paved the way for her career first as a translator and then as literary author was also one in which Egypt dominated a significant spot on the political scene. The Egyptian Question/Crisis in the 1830s and early 1840s attracted much attention in the press due to the rate at which the newly emerging Egyptian State was engulfing the Ottoman Empire, at one point reaching the doorstep of Istanbul itself, leading to what was perceived as it disrupting ‘the peace of the world’.8 In addition, as nineteenth-century England was starting to veer towards religious conservatism, there had been attempts to explain the Scriptures through existing knowledge about the ancient world and the Holy Land. One of these attempts was launched by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge through popular publications such as their Penny Magazine and, more importantly, The Pictorial Bible.9 According to David Gange, ‘To those who knew their Bible, Egypt was not just the setting of the Exodus but was interleaved through the most splenetic ejaculations of belligerent psalmists and chiliastic prophets’; new archaeological and Egyptological data were used as an aid in enhancing interpretations of the Bible.10 Explaining or understanding the Bible at this time warranted an awareness of new and emerging scientific knowledge about the ancient world.



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Charles Knight explains in his autobiography that during the period when he was entrusted as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s publisher, ‘The Pictorial Bible was the most successful of the more permanent class of such publications; The Thousand and One Nights was the most beautiful’.11 Indeed, a brief glance through the list of illustrations in The Pictorial Bible reveals how depictions of ancient Egyptian figures and bas-reliefs were relied upon for the diffusion of biblical knowledge, imagery purportedly from the oldest known civilisation displayed alongside more recent classical and Persian counterparts. In a clear reference to the new trend for pictorial Bibles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps a subtle allusion to the Society’s very own Pictorial Bible published in parts beginning in 1836, Eliot has Lisbeth request: ‘An’, Seth, thee may’st reach down Adam’s new Bible wi’ th’ pictures in, an’ she shall read a chapter’.12 The publication of The Pictorial Bible anticipated another substantial project with an Egyptian element: Edward William Lane’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights of 1840, his first major publication since The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), which Eliot consulted when working on Adam Bede.13 Lane heavily annotated his translation of the Nights to reflect his life within the Islamic quarter of Cairo, which he treated as a microcosmic neighbourhood of what he referred to as ‘Arabian Manners and Customs’, or rather in the words of his grandnephew and biographer, Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘those Arab, Persian, or Greek, but still Mohammadan, conditions of life and boundaries of the mental horizon which are generally distinguished by the name of Arabian’.14 It seems also that Lane used the Nights as a means not just to convey his experiences in Cairo, but also as a way of smuggling large sections of his unpublished ‘Description of Egypt’ into print. As Stephen Arata observes, ‘Lane mined his earlier manuscript extensively for the edition’s most remarked-upon feature: its detailed, wide-ranging, and often extraordinarily lengthy explanatory notes’.15 Lane’s earlier manuscript, which did not make it to print, contained long sections on ancient Egyptian culture and was likely imitative of the French Description de l’Egypt (1809–22), given the similarity in title to the French encyclopedic work, well known at the time having been born of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, 1798–1801. Further to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s publications, there was a general effort in the mid-Victorian era to combine the newly acquired knowledge of the history of the world with biblical knowledge. Samuel Sharpe’s The History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times till the Conquest by the Arabs (1846), for instance, sought to merge biblical events with the history of Egypt as it was known at the time. Locating

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Egypt at the root of world history, Sharpe attempts to explain how biblical history followed: ‘Greek history begins with the Trojan war; Jewish history begins seven hundred years earlier, with the migration of Abraham from Chaldea; but even when this father of the Hebrew nation led his herds to drink of the waters of the Nile, Egypt was already a highly civilized country’.16 The author’s allusion here to Egypt as ‘a highly civilised country’ at a time when the chosen people were still roaming the desert could be seen as a gesture towards the significance of the study of ancient Egyptian history not only for its own sake but also for the richer contextualisation of biblical events. Eliot, not yet an author but an avid reader in several languages, was likely to have been influenced by such writings; she had met Sharpe in person before writing Adam Bede.17 She had certainly engaged with John Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and of Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), one of the most thorough works detailing ancient Egyptian history and culture to be published in the first half of the nineteenth century.18 Eliot’s understanding of Egyptian mythology would probably have also been informed by Ippolito Rosellini’s four-volume work, Monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia (1843), which was developed with Jean-François Champollion during their final expedition to Egypt, as well as Karl Lepsius’s groundbreaking Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (1849), which advanced Champollion’s techniques of deciphering hieroglyphs.19 Lepsius’s work was also encyclopedic in its inclusion of ancient Egyptian monuments and its commentary and explanations of the myths and inscriptions on them. As with many of her contemporaries, Eliot may well have seen ancient Egypt as the place whence knowledge, whether biblical, cultural, scientific or archaeological, stemmed. Such close associations in the cultural consciousness, fuelled by publications including those of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and individuals like Edward William Lane and Samuel Sharpe, goes some way to suggesting why Eliot wrote her own creative combination of ancient Egyptian religion and the biblical creation story. George Eliot’s (lost) faith Eliot had a conservative and religious upbringing, against which she rebelled in her youth. Her intellectual development and wide readership may have induced her doubts. Dolin explains: ‘She lost her faith suddenly and completely sometime in 1841, the year she and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry …. From that moment on she was untroubled by agnosticism: ultimately the truth or otherwise of religions became unimportant to her.



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She was, however, deeply troubled by her own disbelief.’ 20 Her early career as a translator may have also shaped her later views. Her two most important translations to my purposes here are David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854). The former is said to have had such a grip on her while undertaking the translation that she became ‘Strauss-sick – it made her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion’.21 Dealing with faith from a purely logical perspective was new to a youthful Eliot, and it made a lasting impact on her. We can detect this emphasis on logic when matters of faith and God are discussed in Adam Bede; Adam says of the Wesleyan faith: ‘I thought I could pick a hole or two in their notions’.22 The latter text was also influential. Bearing in mind that its publication was only six years before that of Adam Bede, I quote from it at length here. The logical resonance of The Essence of Christianity must have had a powerful appeal for someone who would later become ‘the greatest novelist of ideas in English’.23 The following extract, for instance, casts great doubts on the notion of God: Every other God, whom thou supposes, is a God thrust upon thy feeling from without. Feeling is atheistic in the sense of the orthodox belief, which attaches religion to an external object; it denies an objective God – it is itself God. In this point of view, only the negation of feeling is the negation of God. Thou art simply too cowardly or too narrow to confess in words what thy feeling tacitly affirms. Fettered by outward considerations, still in bondage to vulgar empiricism, incapable of comprehending the spiritual grandeur of feeling, thou art terrified before the religious atheism of thy heart. By this fear thou destroyest the unity of thy feeling with itself, in imagining to thyself an objective being distinct from thy feeling, and thus necessarily sinking back into the old questions and doubts – is there a God or not?24

On another occasion, Feuerbach distinguishes between Christian and ‘heathen’ eternities: ‘The distinction between the heathen eternity of matter and the Christian creation in this respect, is only that the heathens ascribed to the world a real, objective eternity, whereas the Christians gave it an invisible, immaterial eternity’.25 He paraphrases his ideas later in the text: ‘Christ therefore is the distinction of Christianity from Heathenism’.26 The impact of Feuerbach’s process of systematic deconstruction of Christian faith on Eliot was such, I suggest, that she spent the next six years of her life investigating other forms of ‘heathen’ or polytheistic faiths, as well as trying to create her own reconciliation between Christianity and the oldest form of polytheism: ancient Egyptian religion.

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Eliot conspicuously drew on Methodism in Adam Bede, rather than Christianity in general. I disagree with Clifford J. Marks who claims that Eliot was trying to ‘redeem middle-class Methodism’ by showing how ‘religion’ could be saved. Marks acknowledges Eliot’s cynicism about Christian dogma yet he still believes that Eliot was trying to save religion despite her ‘personal doubts’.27 Nevertheless, Marks makes the rather founded comment that Adam Bede ‘navigates among various social forces, representing early 1800s Wesleyan Methodism as a spiritually charged yet pragmatically hindered religion’.28 It is more plausible to perceive Eliot’s choice of Wesleyan Methodism as a representative of Christianity in the context of how highly spiritual it was perceived to be, in comparison to the rather wealthier and gold-and-silver-clad Anglicanism or even Catholicism. Eliot focused on a denomination of Christianity which was held to be of a more abstemious sort, perhaps making it seem closer to the figure of Christ himself, when attempting to reconcile it with older religions. Dolin explains that she was ‘rejecting traditional religion because she was “too earnest to accept it”’.29 It is such implications of her loss of faith that I believe drew Eliot to other forms of older religions, and particularly Egyptian mythology, and to attempt to combine them with her knowledge of the Bible. Her purpose was to create an alternative amalgam of ancient religions, a more plausible kind of truth. As Henry James explains in an 1885 essay on Eliot, part of her ‘genius’ was ‘her love of general truth’.30 She was indeed ahead of her time in attempting an alternative to the dogmatic narrative of Christianity. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, sixteen years after the publication of Adam Bede to seek just that. In her essay, ‘Is Theosophy a religion?’, largely regarded as the manifesto of the Theosophical Society, the co-founder and matriarch of the Society Helena Petrovna Blavatsky explains that ‘Theosophy claims to reconcile the two foes. It premises by saying that the true spiritual and primitive Christian religion is, as much as the other great and still older philosophies that preceded it – the light of Truth – “the life and the light of men”’.31 Concurrently, Blavatsky asserts that ‘the world has been hitherto sufficiently cursed with the intellectual extinguishers known as dogmatic creeds’ and asserts that ‘the very raison d’être of the Theosophical Society was, from its beginning, to utter a loud protest and lead an open warfare against dogma or any belief based upon blind faith’.32 This statement echoes Eliot’s precedent in Middlemarch: ‘There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked’.33 Thus, Eliot seems to have been in tune with something that developed subsequently, perhaps even influencing its establishment by contributing to the intellectual culture that heralded it.



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Hayslope: the garden of Eden, the flood, and the Primeval Mound Eliot begins Adam Bede with the aforementioned (and unusual) invocation of benign Egyptian magic. Such an invocation is by no means an arbitrary one, and its role as an initiator of the novel can be read as of multitudinous meanings. The first line is a firm indicator towards an Egyptian layer of meaning to Adam Bede. The whole novel is, in a sense, a demonstration within the Egyptian sorcerer’s ‘mirror’ of ‘ink’: a world within a world. The Egyptian sorcerer here could well be the sun god, Ra, the first creator who initiated life out of chaos by using the powers of the Nun, the ancient waters that surrounded the world from which the Nile springs, here referred to as ink, a liquid ripe with literary potential. Indeed, the song that the ‘workman’ sings in the next paragraph is almost a prayer to the sun god: ‘Awake, my soul, and with the sun / Thy daily stage of duty run; / Shake off dull sloth …’.34 Eliot also aligns herself with the ‘Egyptian sorcerer’ as a creator of worlds. Adopting the role of creator god, she addresses the reader directly: ‘This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.’ 35 Thus, the universe of the novel is created for the reader just as the biblical universe is created for Adam (and Eve). In this sense, Eliot takes on the role not only of the creator god of Egyptian mythology but also that of the biblical god of Genesis. On an even higher level and taking Eliot’s agnosticism into account, she also compares herself to the primary biblical writer of Genesis. At the centre of Eliot’s divine ‘mirror’ lies Hayslope, a village representative of the garden of Eden on a biblical level, and of the Primeval Mound on the Egyptian one. The garden of Eden as featured in Genesis as well as Paradise Lost is central to the novel, as has been noted by critics including Clifford J. Marks, Courtney Berger and Ryan Marr.36 The Primeval Mound, on the other hand, like most of the other Egyptian references and motifs in Adam Bede, has, until now, largely passed unnoticed. In Egyptian mythology the Primeval Mound is the first part of the known world to emerge out of the Nun or the ancient life-giving waters that submerged everything and continued to surround the emerging world after creation began: ‘Nun was a personification of the primeval ocean from which all life came after creation, the watery darkness known as the nun continued to surround the world …. As a deity, Nun was considered the oldest of beings.’ 37 Nun is not to be confused with Atum, the first man/god, or Amun, the creator of the egg of the world from which Nun and everything

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else came. Nun was very much present in ancient Egyptian life, being the source of the Nile: ‘During the annual Nile flood, Egypt seemed to revert to its primeval state, and civilization was in danger of being swept away’.38 Nun was similar to the flood which covered the Earth in the biblical story of Noah, from which life and civilisation started anew. The flood receded from a hill where Noah’s ark settled – in the case of Nun the Primeval Mound – then from further lands but still continued as a matter/fluid to surround the world in the form of seas and oceans. The similarities here in narrative and in the names Noah and Nun are unmistakable, and were likely apparent to Eliot too. The risk of drowning and of the destruction of civilisation also recur in the novel, whether in the form of ‘old Thias’ drowning in the ‘brook’,39 or in Hetty’s narration of how she ‘tried to drown’ herself ‘in the pool’,40 or an imaginary apocalyptic event in Dinah’s speech.41 In some versions of the creation myth which imagine the creator in the form of a bird who laid the ‘world egg’, ‘the Mound was its first perch’, and a shell from that first egg the first land.42 There are clear similarities to the story of Noah’s flood, the potential for the destruction of civilisation, as well as Noah’s birds, the raven first and then the dove, which successfully found a mound where the ‘water was abated from the face of the land’; the ark landed safely and civilisation began again.43 In a sense also, the lethal aspect of the flood, whether in its initial form of prehistoric ocean/ Noah’s flood or in the form of the annual Nile flood, is reflected in how the Nun is connected in mythology to ‘an abyss that formed the lowest depths of the underworld’.44 Thus, life and death were closely associated, since the annual flood was vital for the agricultural cycle but always came at the risk of death. Similarly, Noah’s flood gave Noah and his followers a chance for a new beginning by annihilating all others. In the novel also, the brook gives Adam and his brother Seth a new beginning by drowning their father and ridding them of the costly burden of his drunkenness and sloth. Hetty also tries to ‘drown’ herself but is unsuccessful in this cleansing exercise, an indicator of her curse or unredeemed soul until Dinah offers her redemption through her cleansing words and companionship in her final hours. Hayslope stands for both this Primeval Mound, this first garden, this Eden, as well as the centre of the world of Ma’at, the world of order. As Geraldine Pinch explains: The central concept of Egyptian cosmology and ethics was personified as the goddess Maat wearing an ostrich feather on her head. The word maat can mean, truth, justice, righteousness, order, balance, and cosmic law …. The primary duty of an Egyptian king was to be the champion



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of maat. In the afterlife, the dead were judged on whether they had spoken maat.45

In this case, the Primeval Mound was Egypt itself, where the world began and the forces of Ma’at resided, as opposed to the forces of chaos which occupied surrounding deserts and alien lands. This contrasting landscape might be understood in Eliot’s novel as Stonyshire, a rugged town with less ease of living, not as blessed or fortuned as Hayslope. Stonyshire is described as ‘a bleak, treeless region, intersected by lines of cold gray stone’.46 Its ‘barren hills’ are contrasted to its neighbouring ‘rich undulating district of Loamshire to which Hayslope belonged’: High up against the horizon were the huge conical masses of hill, like giant mounds intended to fortify this region of corn and grass against the keen and hungry winds of the north; not distant enough to be clothed in purple mystery, but with sombre greenish sides visibly specked with sheep, whose motion was only revealed by memory, not detected by sight …. And directly above them the eye rested on a more advanced line of hanging woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deepened into the uniform leafy curtain of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash and lime. Then came the valley, where the woods grew thicker …. It was that moment in summer when the sound of the scythe being whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the flowersprinkled tresses of the meadows.47

This idyllic picture of Hayslope, of an exquisite Eden captured in the perfect moment between spring and summer in the early pages of the novel, contrasts with the ‘barren hills’ of the northern snow-ridden Stonyshire. Eliot makes the binary clear: Hayslope is Heaven, Eden, Paradise, the Primeval Mound, whereas Stonyshire is Satan’s land, Hell, the abyss, the underworld.48 It is with this image of paradise on Earth, conceived within an ancient Egyptian sorcerer’s pool of ink, that Eliot opens her narrative. Atum, or the two Adams: Adam and Seth Bede Within this Eden resides another Adam, Eliot’s eponymous protagonist. It is commonly held that Eliot’s Adam was named after both the first man in the Bible and the Venerable Bede, an English monk and theologian whose most famous work is The Ecclesiastical History of the English People

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(731). Clearly Adam’s surname is an indication to a decidedly older English Christianity. I contend that this older English Christianity is combined with an ancient Egyptian dimension in the main character Adam – whom Youngkin also relates to biblical figures with Egyptian associations: Joseph and Moses49 – as well as in aspects of the two secondary male characters: his brother, Seth, and his love rival, Arthur. In Egyptian mythology Atum or Atum-Ra is ‘the father and mother of all things’.50 His first creations were the twins Shu and Tefnut, who were materially the product of ‘his seed and his fingers’ but, in essence, Atum’s ‘powers of thought and utterance’ transformed ‘into the first two gendered deities, … expelled from his mouth or through the nose and mouth’.51 Atum’s initial generative act not only resulted in the formation of the two genders but also gendered him in the process as ‘the father’, and his ‘hand’ as mother. Atum honoured his hand, his ‘consort’, ‘daughter’, mother goddess and ‘sexual partner’.52 Pinch explains that ‘this goddess was often identified with Hathor, who came to be regarded as the female creative principle’,53 making the Hand of Atum a pertinent goddess to my analysis of Adam Bede. Atum or Atum-Ra is not to be confused, however, with Amun/Amen who is rather the equivalent of God in Christianity. Amun is ‘the mysterious creator god whose name meant the Hidden One’, ‘most commonly shown as a bearded man in the prime of life’.54 He created the ‘world egg’ from which all life began.55 The equivalent to Amun or God in Adam Bede is ‘the grandfather’, also referred to as ‘the old squire’. There are various indicators of this, including his mysterious origin and background. Hetty, for instance, questions whether he is at all born to somebody: ‘he might have been earth-born, for what she knew; it had never entered her mind that he had been young like other men’.56 He also features very briefly in the novel, and only in direct contact with Adam as in the promotion scene, otherwise his presence is mainly in people’s conversations. Atum, on the other hand, is the creator deity from whom all living beings came. He was regarded as ‘the father and mother’ of the gods and the ‘ultimate divine and royal ancestor’.57 In this sense, Atum was the equivalent to Adam in Genesis and his consort Het Hathor, the personification of his Hand, the equivalent to Eve. The similarity in name between Adam and Atum, and in having a consort who is the manifestation of a body part (in Eve’s case, Adam’s rib) is striking. We are introduced to Adam/Atum in Eliot’s novel as he sings a song invoking morality and sincerity, followed by this sculpting description: Such a voice could only come from a broad chest, and the broad chest belonged to a large-boned, muscular man, nearly six feet high, with a



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back so flat and a head so well poised that when he drew himself up to take a more distant survey of his work he had the air of a soldier standing at ease. The sleeve rolled up above the elbow showed an arm that was likely to win the prize for feats of strength; yet the long supple hand, with its broad fingertips, looked ready for works of skill …. The face was large and roughly hewn, and when in repose had no other beauty than such as belongs to an expression of good-humored, honest intelligence.58

Such a description of Adam, in spite of its exclusive emphasis on the ‘Saxon’ and ‘Celtic’ mixture of his ‘blood’, recalls both the Hand of Atum which was his aid in creating the world – Adam here is creating works of carpentry – as well as the curse of ‘painful toil’ in the original sin and the repentant Adam whose sentence was: By the sweat of your brow You will eat your food Until you return to the ground, Since from it you were taken; For dust you are And to dust you will return.59

Another scene which evokes Eden in the novel is that when Adam and Hetty ‘gathered the currants’ near the ‘red bushes’ in that idyllic peak of the summer when ‘the level rays piercing the screen of apple-tree boughs, the length of bushy garden beyond, his own emotions as he looked at her and believed that she was thinking of him, and that there was no need for them to talk – Adam remembered it all to the last moments of his life’.60 But ‘Adam was mistaken about Hetty’ as Eliot reveals, just as the Adam of Genesis was mistaken about listening to Eve and eating from the ‘apple-tree boughs’. It was, in Eliot’s terms, ‘a very old story’.61 Later, when Adam reveals to Hetty the foolishness of her situation, she feels a ‘cruel force’ in being aware of this knowledge and, as Adam and Eve ran around the garden plucking ‘fig leaves’ to cover their newly revealed nudity,62 Hetty ‘was plucking the leaves from the filbert trees, and tearing them in her hand’.63 Seth, on the other hand, is a new, younger Adam in Genesis. He was born ‘just like him – in his very image’.64 Although he is Adam’s third son in Genesis, he is Adam’s brother in Eliot’s novel. He is a workman like Adam – another Bede – but he is neither as skilful nor as strong as his brother. We are introduced to his absent-mindedness at work early in the novel when he makes a door and forgets to install its panels, making

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the other three workmen in the workshop burst out in ‘a loud roar of laughter’.65 As Arthur is a threat to Adam’s courtship of Hetty, Seth is a threat to Adam’s courtship of Dinah. He is the other, other Adam, or the third Adam in the novel. From an Egyptian perspective Seth is not a purely evil god, for the rest of the gods seek his help when confronting monsters from the realm of chaos, where true evil resides; for instance, ‘Seth was needed by the gods to defend the solar barque from the chaos monster’.66 It is this positive dimension of the Egyptian Seth’s character that we see in the Seth of Adam Bede. Indeed, Eliot makes a subtle reference to Seth’s rescue of the ‘solar barque’ when we encounter the villagers’ gossip about his courtship of Dinah, and his strength and bravery: ‘when we saw the old tree all afire … Seth made no more ado, but he up to’t as bold as a constable’.67 Adam, and in some way Seth, performs the role of the Adam of Genesis as well as the father of all beings, Atum. Adam, being a carpenter, might also be seen as Jesus, the new Adam. Adam and Seth are English and Christian, as their surnames indicate, but they are also ancient Egyptian – perhaps incarnations – in their deeds and actions. Hathor, or the two Eves: Dinah and Hetty Hathor is one of the primary creation gods. In Egyptian mythology, when the chief creator god Atum-Ra heard of humanity’s plot against his reign, he asked his council of gods and they advised him that ‘no Eye is more able to smite them. Let it go down as Hathor.’ 68 Hathor was chosen as the personification of Ra’s passion in its various forms, in this case wrath. On the first day of Ra’s punishment, Hathor ‘overpowered humanity’ by slaughtering the rebels and wading in ‘their blood’. Hathor, an unstoppable force, planned to continue ‘her slaughter’ the next day against the rest of humanity. But Ra was now victorious and did not want to punish the rest of humanity for the rebels’ mistakes. In order to stop Hathor he ordered the high priest of Ra in Heliopolis to ‘grind up’ a red mineral for pigment while ‘his maid servants’ mashed ‘barley’. They made ‘7,000 jars of beer’ coloured red to ‘look like blood’. Ra or his servants flooded ‘the fields’ with the ‘red beer’. Hathor saw her ‘beautiful reflection’ in the red ‘flood’ and she ‘drank and it delighted her heart’. She returned to Ra drunk, and oblivious of humanity. Ra ‘welcomed her back and from that day on alcohol was drunk during the festivals of Hathor’.69 In this myth, Het Hathor is characterised by her beauty, uncontrollable passion and, to a large extent, self-indulgence. These traits are also



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dominant in Eliot’s characterisation of Hetty Sorrel. For instance, Eliot narrates: Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity, when her aunt’s back was turned, of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces, for the oak table was usually turned up like a screen, and was more for ornament than for use; and she could see herself sometimes in the great pewter dishes that were ranged on the shelves above the long deal dinner-table, or in the hobs of the grate, which always shone like jasper.70

Hetty’s narcissistic indulgence in the reflection of her beauty on everyday objects such as the ‘oak table’ and the ‘great pewter dishes’ is reminiscent of Het Hathor’s. Moreover, the hobs of the grate which are themselves an indication of the danger of self-indulgence, are particularly reminiscent in their ‘jasper’ glow of the colour of ‘blood’ which flooded the Nile valley and beguiled Hathor into drunkenness and submission. ‘In this state of mind how could Hetty give any feeling to Adam’s troubles, or think much about poor old Thias being drowned’, Eliot writes.71 This state of mind, which in Het Hathor’s case is drunkenness, in Hetty’s is a ‘pleasant delirium’ and a ‘barrier of dreams’. On another occasion, we encounter another reference to Hetty’s preternatural infatuation with herself in a similar fashion to Het Hathor’s, which Eliot depicts as ‘her peculiar form of worship’.72 This act of worship is admiring her reflection under the light of the ‘rising moon’ in the ‘queer old-looking glass’ mirror which ‘had numerous blotches sprinkled over’ it. The frame is also made of solid ‘mahogany’; mahogany as a red wood also recalls the image of Hathor looking at her reflection in the red flood. The ‘brass candle-socket on each side’ of the mirror, or rather on each side of Hetty’s reflection, is also reminiscent of depictions of Hathor in which she is portrayed with bovine horns, or even, at the temple of Hathor at Dendera, protruding, turned-out, cow’s ears.73 On Het Hathor, Pinch writes: Hathor was the golden goddess who helped women to give birth, the dead to be reborn, and the cosmos to be renewed. This complex deity could function as the mother, consort, and daughter of the creator sun god. Many lesser goddesses came to be regarded as ‘names’ of Hathor in her contrasting benevolent and destructive aspects. She was most commonly shown as a beautiful woman wearing a red solar disk between a pair of cow’s horns.74

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Furthermore, ‘As the female creative principle, she could be the most seductive and alluring of deities. The erotic side of her nature made Hathor the patroness of lovers in Egyptian poetry and justified the Greeks in identifying her with Aphrodite.’ 75 This erotic and self-indulgent element of Hathor is recognisable in Hetty. Hetty is, however, only one half of Eve’s character. As there are two Adams, Hetty and Dinah are two Eves, or rather two dimensions of Eve. This dualistic aspect of Eliot’s novel is especially apparent in this passage: ‘Hetty and Dinah both slept in the second story, in rooms adjoining each other, meagrely-furnished rooms, with no blinds to shut out the light, which was now beginning to gather new strength from the rising of the moon’.76 The two ‘adjoining’ rooms in the house, illuminated by the lunar light, give a sense of sisterhood and female strength on one level, but on another suggest an image of the female reproductive system, where the two ovaries – the two rooms in this case – occupy a higher level to the uterus, changing in atmosphere as the monthly lunar cycle progresses. Hetty and Dinah are one and distinct, emblematic of the Victorian female dichotomy of the whore and the angel: the two sides of Eve. Whereas Hetty represents vain and lustful feminine beauty, Dinah’s face ‘was one of those faces that make one think of white flowers with light touches of colour on their pure petals’.77 She is the angelic preacher who, through Methodism, has transcended society’s expectations of female confinement to the domestic sphere. Simultaneously, there is something beyond the angelic in Eliot’s depiction of Dinah. Her ‘eyes had no peculiar beauty beyond that of expression; they looked so simple, so candid, so gravely loving, that no accusing scowl, no light sneer, could help melting away before their glance’.78 Dinah, the antithesis of Hetty, the other dimension of Eve, has a calming effect on others. When Lisbeth is upset about her husband’s death, Dinah visits her and offers herself as a daughter to share her grief. Both Dinah and Seth quickly observe a ‘greater quietness of spirit that had come over Lisbeth’.79 Dinah and Hetty’s function as the two dimensions of Eve by Victorian standards – the angel and the temptress – is also reflected near the end of the novel when Dinah visits Hetty in prison. Dinah shouts twice to an incredulous Hetty, ‘Hetty… Dinah is come to you’. Then they embrace: They stood so a long while, for neither of them felt the impulse to move apart again. Hetty, without any distinct thought of it, hung on this something that was come to clasp her now, while she was sinking in a dark gulf; and Dinah felt a deep joy in the first instance that her love was welcomed by the wretched lost one. The light got fainter, as they stood, and when at last they sat down on the straw pallet together, their faces had become indistinct.80



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As we have seen emphasis on traditional Victorian gender stereotypes in Eliot’s depiction of Adam, so too, by the end of the novel, Dinah takes on the role of the angel in the house. Despite her beginning as a rebel female preacher with a boyish walk, she becomes domesticated by the very suffering to which she was tending in the people around her, such as Mrs Poyser, Hetty and Lisbeth. The moment of the change of heart between Adam and Dinah is a very domestic one where Dinah carries out all kinds of housework with feminine efficiency. Eliot reminds the reader that Dinah was not bad at all ‘eighteen months ago’ when she came to comfort Lisbeth after Thias’s death and that even ‘Lisbeth praised her deft movements, and gave a modified approval of her porridge’. Dinah has been working on her domestic skills, however, and ‘had made great advances in household cleverness’ since then.81 As a typical angel in the house, beautiful Dinah walked into Adam’s writing room and ‘opened the window and let in the fresh morning air’ and the crisp sun rays ‘made a glory about her pale face and pale auburn hair as she held the long brush, and swept, singing to herself … a sweet summer murmur’. Adam walks in as Dinah was ‘singing’ and ‘dusting’.82 This sweet summer murmur turns out to be one of ‘Charles Wesley’s hymns’ and thus Eliot paints a picture of the full domestication of Dinah incorporating her Methodist beliefs, and the reader is led to imagine Adam and Dinah as husband and wife before they marry at the end of the novel. We are also reminded of Dinah’s angelic nature when Lisbeth sees a picture in The Pictorial Bible of ‘the angel seated at the great stone that has been rolled away from the sepulchre’ and shouts, ‘That’s her – that’s Dinah’. Adam even states, ‘Dinah’s prettier, I think’.83 According to Youngkin, ‘Eliot would have known that the Egyptian goddess Hathor and Isis had regenerative, life-giving powers’.84 It is evident from my analysis that Eliot knew far more than that. It could be argued here that the process of domestication is part of Eliot’s imagination of Eve or Hathor. Both Adam and Eve were free in the garden before their sin and their sentence; childbearing and consequently domestication came only as part of the punishment. Similarly, Hathor who ran wild in the marshes of the Nile was eventually led back to Atum’s side. The novel, therefore, mimics or rather reinvents such processes of domestication between Adam and Dinah. Between Adam and Seth: Arthur Donnithorne Captain Donnithorne is introduced in the early pages of the novel in dazzling terms: ‘to the Hayslope tenants he was more intensely a captain

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than all the young gentlemen of the same rank in his majesty’s regulars; he outshone them as the planet Jupiter outshines the Milky Way’.85 Such a luminous description calls to mind Milton’s Lucifer ‘so by allusion called / Of that bright star to Satan paragoned’.86 On another occasion, Arthur Donnithorne refers to himself in these terms: ‘I’m a devil of a fellow’.87 Furthermore, when we catch the first glimpse of Hetty’s infatuation with Arthur, his effect on her is depicted in adjectives like ‘gold’ and ‘white’ and explained as ‘warm rays’ that ‘set poor Hetty’s heart vibrating’.88 Arthur also has great self-esteem; in Satan’s case this is considered dangerous vanity. In Eliot’s depiction of Arthur he is a ‘good fellow’ who is perceived by the ladies as ‘nice’ but who is also the ‘prime offender’ who normally gets away with little ‘consequences’ to his actions ‘in spite of his loudly expressed wish’.89 His primary disagreement with his ‘grandfather’ is summarised in the following lines: ‘there was no having his way in the stables; everything was managed in the stingiest fashion. His grandfather persisted in retaining as head groom an old dolt whom no sort of lever could move out of his old habits, and who was allowed to hire a raw succession of raw Loamshire lads as his subordinates.’ 90 Like Satan who was troubled by the introduction of naive humans to his world, Arthur wants to have ‘his way’ without the interference of these poor commoners. This ambition and vanity is also reflected in Milton’s Lucifer: He trusted to have equalled the Most High, If he opposed, and, with ambitious aim Against the throne and monarchy of God, Raised impious war in Heaven, and battle proud, With vain attempt.91

Similarly, the Egyptian Seth shares this rebellious nature with his successors. He rebelled against the divine order of Atum-Ra, the father of the gods, and murdered his chosen brother, Osiris, in order to usurp his place, suggestive of Cain’s crime of murdering his brother, Abel, as well as Satan’s defiance of God. According to Pinch, ‘Seth acts as a catalyst in Egyptian myth. His thoughtless actions are bad in themselves but can lead to good outcomes.’ 92 Within Hellenistic Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Greek newcomers aligned their gods with their Egyptian counterparts: ‘By the Greco-Roman Period, Seth was vilified in most temples. The Greeks identified Seth with the monster Typhon, who rebelled against the gods and had to be destroyed by Zeus. Seth-Typhon was invoked in spells to kill the magician’s enemies as he had killed his own brother, Osiris, or to separate lovers as he had separated Osiris and Isis.’ 93 Thus, even during the process of Greek and Roman appropriation of Egyptian gods, the



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rebellious nature of Seth was preserved in new narratives. Furthermore, some ‘New Kingdom texts describe Seth as committing a series of sacrilegious crimes such as felling sacred trees and hunting sacred fish, birds, and animals. He was also notorious for breaking sexual taboos. His lustful nature led him into inappropriate heterosexual and homosexual encounters.’ 94 We can see the lustful, albeit exclusively heterosexual, dimension of the Egyptian Seth in Arthur’s actions throughout Adam Bede. In the temptation scene, we are reminded of Arthur’s Egyptian aspect by Eliot’s reference to his eyes as of ‘Egyptian granite’, and of his serpentine nature in Genesis in that ‘he doesn’t know in the least what he is saying’ and the movement of his arm as it ‘is stealing round the waist again, it is tightening its clasp’.95 His threat to Adam’s position as a suitor and the entire story as a new version of Genesis are expressed more explicitly here too: ‘he may be the first youth kissing the first maiden, he may be the Eros himself, sipping the lips of psyche’.96 Psyche as a depiction of Hetty, and the alignment of Het Hathor with Aphrodite and Aphrodite with Psyche, also reinforce the novel’s narrative as a new creation story combining old ones: ‘it is all one’. This ‘kiss’, or rather the memory of it, leads to a symbolic exit out of Eden, a ‘gate at the end of the wood’, to which they walk with ‘beating hearts’, for ‘already something bitter had begun’; Arthur, feeling ‘uncomfortable’, takes his ‘arm off Hetty’s waist’, but it is too late. Transgressing the grandfather’s rules, and flouting class divisions between himself as a ‘gentleman’ and Hetty as a peasant girl, would only lead to ‘misery’.97 When Hetty suffers the consequences of her weakness, ‘she cursed’ Arthur ‘without knowing what her cursing would do’, a curse reminiscent of God’s in Genesis leading to the ‘thorns and thistles’ that the earth grows for Adam.98 The curse is also reminiscent of Het Hathor’s uncontrollable wrath against those who rebelled against Amun, which would have been catastrophic had it not been for Amun’s wisdom. Unlike Satan who metamorphoses into a monster and falls from grace, or the Egyptian Seth who loses the battle to Horus – his brother’s son – and is castrated by him, Arthur passes almost unscathed for he ‘had not an evil feeling in his mind toward any human being’.99 Like Seth, however, Arthur gets struck unconscious by Adam and loses his one child whom Hetty kills, evoking Seth’s castration. Additionally, as Seth retires into the desert in the world of chaos, Arthur banishes himself to a precarious life in the ‘army’.100 The novel’s conclusion contrasts Adam and Dinah’s fruitful union with the two Seths – Arthur and Seth – who remain bachelors without any progeny at all in Seth’s case, and without any surviving offspring or partner in Arthur’s.101 The killing of Arthur’s child is significant on another level, as the offspring of evil were either murdered or pursued in ancient Egypt.

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Crocodiles, for instance, were seen in some places in Upper Egypt as manifestations of Seth. Pinch mentions that, as they were viewed as representatives of the evil god and his offspring, ‘in temple texts at Edfu, the king promises to kill all crocodiles and crush their eggs’.102 Besides the dimension of the Egyptian Seth in Arthur’s character, he also demonstrates elements of Milton’s Lucifer or the serpent in Genesis. At the beginning of Adam Bede, we encounter him planting the seed of ambition in Adam’s head in a speech with strong indicators to my analysis here, such as ‘woods’, ‘devil’, ‘right-hand’. His ‘grandfather’ is of course the owner of the mansion on top of the hill, and the owner of all the green dense woods of Hayslope, a representative of the God of Genesis. As previously mentioned, Edward William Lane’s work on The Thousand and One Nights and Egypt in general was highly influential, and sometimes there was little distinction held between ancient and modern Egypt. We encounter a glimpse of this here when Arthur Donnithorne uses references to The Thousand and One Nights in his depiction of how he would ascend the ranks and lift Adam up with him: When I was a little fellow and Adam was a strapping lad of fifteen, and taught me carpenting, I used to think if ever I was a rich sultan, I would make Adam my grand-vizier. And I believe now he would bear the exaltation as well as any poor wise man in an Eastern story. If ever I live to be a large-acred man, instead of a poor devil, with a mortgaged allowance of pocket-money, I’ll have Adam for my right-hand. He shall manage my woods for me, for he seems to have a better notion of these things than any man I ever met with … I have mentioned the subject to my grandfather once or twice, but for some reason or other he has a dislike to Adam, and I can do nothing.103

In a similar narrative to Genesis, Arthur depicts himself as Adam’s friend. He wants to help him better himself and promote him to manager of the woods, only a step under the ‘grandfather’, instead of being a mere woodland dweller. It is the ‘grandfather’, according to Arthur, who does not like Adam and does not want him to attain this position. Similarly, it is God, according to the serpent in Genesis, who does not want Adam and Eve to ‘be like God, knowing both good and evil’.104 Moreover, Arthur’s surname – Donnithorne – is another reminder of and indicator to the association between Arthur’s character and the curse of the fall from Eden: ‘the ground is cursed because of you. / All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. / It will grow thorns and thistles for you, / though you will eat of its grains.’ 105 The ‘thorns and the thistles’ which the ground ‘will grow’ are the first part of Adam’s punishment for succumbing to temptation. In



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this sense, Arthur is closely associated with both temptation and punishment in the novel, evident in his temptation of Hetty leading to her ultimate fall and banishment from England, as Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan and banished from Eden. Arthur Donnithorne thus fulfils a complex role in Eliot’s gnostic Genesis. In many ways, he is Lucifer, the fallen angel, the tempter, the seducer and the sinner. In other ways, he is also Seth, the evil god who was at times benign and even helpful to the other gods in the face of a larger evil, who is defeated and loses his offspring. Arthur/Seth/Satan is the foil to Adam/ Atum/Jesus, or, as Eliot describes their relationship metaphorically: ‘In this way it happened that Arthur and Adam were walking towards the same spot at the same time’ from opposite directions.106 Thias and Lisbeth Bede: other deities Thias (short for Matthias) is a subtle indication to the apostle Matthias who was chosen as the thirteenth disciple after Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and subsequent suicide. Matthias is also said to be the author of the gnostic gospel of Matthias, which was considered heretical. Matthias’s life and death are uncertain and largely speculative; some accounts claim that he was martyred by Ethiopian cannibals when he went there to preach the gospel, while others record that he travelled to Damascus, and, other sources still, Jerusalem.107 In this sense, considering the uncertainty and opaqueness surrounding the life and death of Matthias and the deeming of his gospel as gnostic and its subsequent exclusion from the Bible, Eliot’s subtle reference to Matthias in the character of the unconventional father figure of Thias Bede is another indication from early in the novel that this is an alternative gnostic narrative of Genesis. On another level, Thias’s death by drowning and its occurrence at night-time is perhaps a reference to the Egyptian god Thoth who rules the ‘night sky’ and whose ‘moon of Thoth’ controls the tides.108 The proximity in name between Thias and Thoth is also conspicuous to the informed reader. Lisbeth Bede, Adam’s mother, largely represents the goddess Isis who ‘is the protective mother of Horus and the loyal wife of Osiris’.109 Lisbeth, in her mourning the death of her husband Thias, is described in words that evoke Isis, who mourned the death of her husband for the good part of her youth, until she managed to find his body parts, revive him temporarily and conceive their son, Horus: ‘Lisbeth Bede loves her son with the love of a woman to whom her first-born has come late in life’.110 The depiction of Lisbeth Bede here could well be that of Isis on one of the reliefs on the wall of a temple, particularly in ‘the strong likeness between

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her and her son’. In addition, Lisbeth is also the matriarch of the house, like Isis, who ‘was the mother of each Egyptian king’ and whose ‘maternal tenderness eventually included all humanity’.111 Like Thias Bede, who, besides his Egyptian dimension has deep Christian significance, Lisbeth is strongly associated with Christianity. On several occasions, we encounter Lisbeth requesting Dinah or one of her sons to read from their pictorial Bible. Furthermore, Isis herself became subsumed into Christian iconography; imagery of Isis nursing her son Horus had a substantial impact on the development of imagery of Mary with the infant Jesus. Later in the nineteenth century, this was perceived as being due to the natural transition from what William Oxley refers to as the Osirian trinity to Christianity.112 Pinch adds: ‘Plutarch suggested that the allpowerful Isis allowed herself to be portrayed as a woman of sorrows to console suffering humanity. This, and her promise to believers of a happy afterlife, made the Isis cult the closest rival to Christianity in the early centuries of the first millennium.’ 113 Slowly, large elements of the Isis cult had been absorbed into a flourishing Christianity as the classical world and its cults and religions receded into the past. In this sense, both Thias and Lisbeth Bede are two different combinations of early Christianity and ancient Egyptian symbolism. Conclusion: implications In Eliot’s translation of The Essence of Christianity, one encounters passages wherein Christianity is openly condemned, which may have been influential in leading Eliot first to question and then to shrug off her Evangelical faith around that time. One such passage, early in the book, chimes with my analysis of Adam Bede: ‘the most excellent, the first, the supreme being; it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy’.114 The presupposition of the excellence of the first human being in Egyptian mythology is something that Eliot echoes in her characterisation of Adam Bede, and against which she pushes in her choreography of the other characters. Following in the footsteps of Milton, Eliot glorifies Arthur, who plays a role at times very similar to Lucifer’s in Paradise Lost. In addition, Seth, instead of being Adam’s offspring, is to a large extent Adam’s equal. Eliot also gives Dinah and Hetty, the two sides of Eve, more independence of action and autonomy of will. Nevertheless, their autonomy is still confined within the traditional stereotypes I have discussed, which the author implements through her agency as modern writer cum Egyptian wizard.

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First, as in Genesis after the fall, both Hetty and Dinah have to bear children, regardless of Dinah’s passion for Methodism or Hetty’s tendencies for self-indulgence. Second, Dinah’s and Hetty’s independence must be viewed alongside the autonomy of all the other main characters who are portrayed as individuals rather than merely Adam’s offspring or spouses, a distinction which Eliot sought, perhaps after writing these words in her translation of The Essence of Christianity: ‘Christianity extinguishes this qualitative distinction; it sets the same stamp on all men alike, and regards them as one and the same individual, because it knows no distinction between species and the individual’.115 Eliot was attempting, in Adam Bede, to recreate an earlier gnostic type of Christianity by blending the main elements of the creation story in Genesis with its earlier ancient Egyptian counterpart. In this work, she creates a transcendent creation story which reaches out to the roots of humanity and offers universal salvation. Singleton explains that ‘ego-transcending religious experience is the ultimate goal of literature for Eliot. For her, the essence of poetry and religion, “which is the same thing”, is a belief structure that recognizes the otherness of existence: a faith that does no violence.’ 116 In light of this, we can read Adam Bede as a covert story of Atum-Ra, a gnostic gospel, a reconciliation of faiths and a recovery of universalism amid aggressive and exclusive Victorian conservatism. Notes 1 Jon Singleton, ‘Malignant Faith and Cognitive Restructuring: Realism in Adam Bede’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39:1 (2011), 240. 2 Tim Dolin, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 138. 3 Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 69. 4 Molly Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works’, in Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper (eds), George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 98. 5 Ibid., pp. 98–9. 6 George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: J. B. Alden, 1884), p. 5. The source for this line appears to be Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians; see Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works’, p. 99; Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Introduction’ in George Eliot, George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879 (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia), p. xxiii. 7 Singleton, ‘Malignant Faith and Cognitive Restructuring’, 253. 8 Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell: Author of a History of England from 1815, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), I, p. 347.

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9 ‘The utilitarians founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) in 1825, which laid the foundations for the emergence of popular scientific and technical education in Britain during the period’; Dolin, George Eliot, p. 66. 10 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 58. 11 Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, 3 vols (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1864), I, p. viii. 12 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 104. A specific allusion to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s pictorial Bible would have been anachronistic, given the setting of the novel’s opening in 1799. 13 Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works’, p. 98. 14 Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘Preface’, in Edward William Lane, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from a Thousand and One Nights, ed. Stanley LanePoole (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), p. vii. 15 Stephen Arata, ‘On E. W. Lane’s Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1838’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (2012), www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=stephen-arata-on-e-w-lanes-edition-of-the-arabian-nightsentertainments-1838. 16 Samuel Sharpe, The History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times till the Conquest by the Arabs A.D. 640 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), p. viii. 17 Valerie A. Dodd, George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 194. 18 Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works’, p. 98. 19 Eliot was familiar with Lepsius, referring to his work several times in her notebooks for Daniel Deronda; it is possible that she had encountered his works prior to or while writing Adam Bede. See George Eliot, George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ Notebooks, ed. Jane Irwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 20 Dolin, George Eliot, p. 168. 21 Ibid., p. 15. 22 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 166. 23 Dolin, George Eliot, p. 4. 24 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (London: John Chapman, 1854), p. 10. 25 Ibid., p. 83. 26 Ibid., p. 149. 27 Clifford Marks, ‘George Eliot’s Pictured Bible: Adam Bede’s redeeming Methodism’, Christianity and Literature, 49:3 (2000), 312. 28 Ibid. 29 Dolin, George Eliot, p. 169. Dolin quotes Basil Willey’s description of Strauss; Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 231. 30 Henry James, ‘Henry James on George Eliot’, in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 498.



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31 H. P. Blavatsky, ‘Is Theosophy a religion?’, Lucifer, 8:15 (1888), 186. 32 Ibid., 1. 33 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Lauriat Comp, 1908), p. 235. 34 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 5. 35 Ibid. 36 Marks, ‘George Eliot’s Pictured Bible’; Courtney Berger, ‘When Bad Things Happen to Bad People: Liability and Individual Consciousness in Adam Bede and Silas Marner’, Novel, 33:3 (2007); Ryan Marr, ‘Dinah Morris as Second Eve: The Fall and Redemption in Adam Bede’, Logos, 17:3 (2014). 37 Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 172. I rely on Pinch’s elaborate work on Egyptian mythology here as it is widely held to be the most complete and up-to-date work on the subject in English. Eliot, of course, read publications of her time, but it is difficult to establish the sources behind her knowledge of ancient Egyptian beliefs since she read in several languages. 38 Ibid., p. 173. 39 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 60. 40 Ibid., p. 484. 41 Ibid., p. 29. 42 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 180. 43 Genesis 8.8. 44 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 172. 45 Ibid., p. 159. 46 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 16. 47 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 48 The stark binary between Hayslope and Stonyshire is disrupted in that Dinah Morris, the angelic preacher and the one-dimensional Eve, is from Snowfield, Stonyshire. Reversing the traditional Christian belief that Hell is solely for demons and condemned souls, Snowfield is the birthplace of the main force of good in Eliot’s novel. Dinah’s preaching is significant here as it only takes place within Hayslope: we do not see her preaching in Snowfield, the land of the condemned. At the same time, Hetty’s sinful journey to and within Stonyshire foreshadows her condemnation and ultimate banishment by the end of the novel. 49 Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works’, p. 100. 50 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 63. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., p. 64. 54 Ibid., p. 100. 55 Ibid., p. 101. 56 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 138. 57 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 11. 58 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 6. 59 Genesis 3.18–19.

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60 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 201. 61 Ibid. 62 Genesis 3.7. 63 Eliot, Adam Bede p. 290. 64 Genesis 5.3. 65 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 7. 66 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 191. 67 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 20. 68 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 74. 69 Ibid., p. 75. 70 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 67. 71 Ibid., p. 93. 72 Ibid., p. 137. 73 Ibid., pp. 136–7. 74 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 137. 75 Ibid., p. 138. 76 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 136. 77 Ibid., p. 21. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 104. 80 Ibid., p. 403. 81 Ibid., p. 441. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 448. 84 Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910, p. 77. 85 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 56. 86 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), book 10, lines 425–6. 87 Eliot Adam Bede, p. 113. 88 Ibid., p. 89. 89 Ibid., p. 114. 90 Ibid., p. 115. 91 Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 40–5. 92 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 191. 93 Ibid., p. 194. 94 Ibid., p. 193. 95 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 125. 96 Ibid., p. 126. 97 Ibid., p. 127. 98 Ibid., p. 347. 99 Ibid., p. 398. 100 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 420. 101 In some Egyptian texts, Seth has a wife goddess referred to as Nephthys. Their marriage was, however, nominal; she was not a willing partner to him



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and lived with her sister and brother, Isis and Osiris. See Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 171. 102 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 127. 103 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 57. 104 Genesis 3.4. 105 Ibid., 3.18–19. 106 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 418. 107 ‘Saint Matthias’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/ Saint-Matthias. 108 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 75. 109 Ibid., p. 149. 110 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 36. 111 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 149. 112 William Oxley, Egypt and the Wonders of the Land of the Pharaohs (London: Trubner and Co., 1884), pp. 233–93. 113 Pinch, Egyptian Mythology, p. 151. 114 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 12. 115 Ibid., p. 158. 116 Singleton, ‘Malignant Faith and Cognitive Restructuring’, 255.

3 Remembering Mrs Potiphar: Victorian reclamations of a biblical temptress Angie Blumberg

Before Salome, before Cleopatra, there was the wife of Potiphar. The story of the wife of Potiphar appears in the thirty-ninth chapter of the Book of Genesis. In this narrative, Joseph’s jealous brothers sell him into slavery. He is taken from Canaan to Egypt, where the captain of the Pharaoh’s guard, Potiphar, purchases him. Potiphar develops great esteem for Joseph and makes him overseer of the household. Potiphar’s wife – never named in the Bible – becomes enamoured of Joseph, who is, according to any translation, quite good-looking. She repeatedly attempts to seduce Joseph, who refuses her tireless advances. In one final attempt, she succeeds only in taking his cloak. Angered and dissatisfied, Potiphar’s wife reports to her servants and her husband that Joseph has tried to rape her, exhibiting the cloak as evidence. As a result, Joseph is imprisoned, and that is the last we hear of Potiphar’s wife.1 With the rise of Egyptology across the nineteenth century, and increased archaeological activity in Egypt, Victorian writers and artists drew extensively from ancient Egyptian imagery, myth and material culture, as the various chapters in this volume demonstrate. As part of this wider interest in Egyptology, ancient Egyptian femininity became a richly suggestive topic for writers and artists involved in modern discussions of female sexuality and women’s shifting roles in the body politic. As several scholars have argued in recent years, Western debates about shifting gender roles were often staged over the Orientalised body of the ancient Egyptian woman – particularly her mummified remains. Most of these studies focus on the late Victorian figure of the New Woman, addressing how, during the British unofficial occupation of Egypt beginning in 1882, gender politics and imperial politics often operated in tandem.2 Such studies



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often focus on H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (She, 1887) or Cleopatra (Cleopatra, 1889), Bram Stoker’s Queen Tera (The Jewel of Seven Stars, 1903), Marie Corelli’s Ziska (Ziska, 1897) and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (Salome, 1891), as well as a few lesser-known examples. But several decades before these fin-de-siècle femmes fatales hit the press, mid-Victorian writers and artists experimented with their more ancient antecedent. Potiphar’s wife has been recalled throughout Western history as a prototype for immoral, aggressive female sexuality. The attempted seduction – especially the moment at which Potiphar’s wife snatches Joseph’s cloak – was a favourite subject for painters during the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century.3 These images generally depict Potiphar’s wife partly nude, reclining on a bed or lunging for Joseph’s garment. In the nineteenth century, though, writers often complicate this image, creatively adapting her character and her narrative. While the tale from the Hebrew Bible would have been the most familiar version to British Victorians, the legend itself takes countless shapes throughout antiquity and across the scriptures of several faiths. ‘Variations of the story’, according to Shalom Goldman, ‘appear in cultures as far flung in place and time as those of the Inuit, Classical Greece, and Ancient Mesopotamia.’ 4 In Jewish and Muslim tradition, Potiphar’s wife is often named Zuleika, and some Victorians came to know her through poetic adaptations of the Quran by the fifteenthcentury Persian poet Jami. Perhaps one of the oldest versions of the story is ‘The Story of the Two Brothers’, an Egyptian myth that possibly pre-dates the text of Genesis, and which British Museum curators describe as ‘one of the more famous of Egyptian literary compositions, variously interpreted in modern times as a fairy tale, a historical allegory and a political satire’.5 This ancient tale (written during Egypt’s Dynasty XIX, c. 1200–1100 bce) is preserved in the D’Orbiney Papyrus, which was acquired by the British Museum in 1857.6 The resurfacing of the wife of Potiphar through various multicultural adaptations during the Victorian era is an invitation to consider how the ancient Egyptian temptress shaped discussions about gender, and prefigured in some ways the more famous Egyptian women in late Victorian fiction. This chapter examines the resurgence of Potiphar’s wife across a range of early and mid-Victorian texts, focusing on Charles Wells’s verse drama Joseph and his Brethren (published in 1823, but generally neglected until republished in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne), the discussions surrounding Wells’s work in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s circle during the 1870s, an edited collection of Persian poetry by Anglo-Irish writer Louisa Stuart Costello (1845) and several pieces from art handbooks and the popular press. Drawing from versions of the tale in Islamic and Jewish traditions, these writers and artists move beyond the biblical

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temptress to discuss the idea of a complex, sexually aware female character. Adapting the ancient Egyptian character, and speculating on the possibility of discovering Mrs Potiphar’s mummified body, mid-Victorian writers theorise the connections between the sexualised body and experimental aesthetic form. This chapter thus recovers how mid-Victorian writers and artists, inspired by Egyptology and the archaeological fantasy, revived the wife of Potiphar to imagine complex female characters and the relationships between the ancient body, nineteenth-century art and gender politics. By examining non-canonical mid-Victorian adaptations of the wife of Potiphar, we uncover how the stage was set for the later fin-de-siècle discussions that have taken up more space in recent scholarship. Mrs Potiphar’s midVictorian revival propels the move towards considering ancient Egyptian femininity for models of modern female subjectivity and experimental art that would become more fully realised at the end of the century. In 1823, a little-known writer named Charles Wells, using the pseudonym H. L. Howard, published a verse drama entitled Joseph and his Brethren. The work was mostly neglected by critics until Wells revised it for publication in 1850. At this time, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote an essay on the play with extensive excerpts. He planned to publish the essay in Fraser’s Magazine, but the piece was rejected. Also around 1850, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith joined Swinburne in fighting for the work to be republished, Rossetti even offering to illustrate the text to encourage publishers – all to no avail.7 Joseph and his Brethren was finally republished in 1876 by Chatto and Windus, with Swinburne’s essay as a preface.8 Critical reviews in the 1870s see the neglect of Wells’s work as a tragedy, particularly within Rossetti’s circle, since Rossetti often recommended the book to friends. These critics frequently compare Wells to Shakespeare and William Blake. Rossetti writes in his supplementary chapter to the first volume of Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake (1880), ‘In what may be called the Anglo-Hebraic order of aphoristic truth, Shakespeare, Blake, and Wells are nearly akin, nor could any fourth poet be named so absolutely in the same connection’.9 In a piece entitled ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells: A Reminiscence of Kelmscott Manor’ – published beside Swinburne’s preface in a 1908 edition of Joseph and his Brethren – Theodore Watts-Dunton, literary critic and friend of Swinburne and Rossetti, cites Edmund Gosse’s assertion that ‘[t]here was a time when Joseph and his Brethren … became a kind of Shibboleth – a rite of initiation into the true poetic culture’. He adds, No young poet at one time dare show his face at 16 Cheyne Walk, or at Madox Brown’s great studio in Fitzroy Square, or at Westland Marston’s midnight gatherings by Chalk Farm, or at Lady Duffus Hardy’s At Homes,



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who could not utter the Shibboleth. The so-called Pre-Raphaelite poets, Arthur O’Shaughnessey, John Payne, Philip Marston, Theo. Marzials, and Edmund Gosse himself, had to read Joseph and his Brethren in order to exist.10

Directing our attention to the significance of Joseph and his Brethren, we uncover not only a remarkable representation of the wife of Potiphar, but also a neglected text apparently central to mid-Victorian aesthetic circles, and their concerns with experimental form and genre. In the Prologue to Act II of Joseph and his Brethren, which follows Joseph’s journey with a caravan of merchants, Wells’s verse revels in the sensual experience of the landscape and cities of ancient Egypt: ‘Anon they come unto the oozy Nile, / Where the sweet wind doth dally with the sedge.’ 11 In the climactic moment of encountering the Nile, Wells invokes the romanticised natural landscape, with the soothing assonance of the first line, and in the second, ‘the sweet wind doth dally with the sedge’, turning to a soft alliteration to highlight the sensuality of the wind. The Nile is ‘oozy’ – a sumptuous, tactile term that Oscar Wilde also uses to describe the notorious river in his 1894 decorated poem The Sphinx. Indeed, the following thirty lines, which scan the sensual impressions of the animals by the riverbank, look forward to the catalogue of heterogeneous Eastern animals and gods in The Sphinx.12 The Prologue continues, addressing ‘insects strange – of gorgeous dyes’; the ‘River of speckled snakes and adders blue’; the ‘armèd crocodiles, whose scales defy / Sol’s penetrative beams, in slothful ease / slumbering upon the bosom of the stream’; ‘The golden snake out-rollèd like a cloud’; and a hawk, ‘with his ardent eye by fear illum’d, and blacker in its lustre than a swan’s’ who ‘Charmeth his object with his dazzling gaze’.13 These lines demonstrate the Prologue’s blend of lush beauty, intense, animalistic energy, and a simultaneous sense of ease and sloth. These qualities, and the rich stylistic excess of the piece, invite us to read the work as (proto-)decadent. Indeed, an anonymous American reviewer in 1876 comments on ‘the directness of the way in which [Wells] sees nature, as well as the opulence, sometimes tending toward excess, of his power of expression’.14 Swinburne, too, addresses Wells’s ‘picture of old Egypt as she will always live in our day-dreams’ and explains, ‘Memphis and the banks of the Nile are brought before us not by description but by suggestion, and the atmosphere seems to surround us and be one with us’.15 It is in part the text’s suggestive style, and manner of providing a sensual impression (as opposed to a description), that appealed to writers in aesthetic circles in the 1870s, and in some ways prefigures works by later writers associated with aestheticism and decadence.

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The continued critical neglect of Joseph and his Brethren might be read as a result of a critical dismissal of Victorian verse drama. As Heather Bozant Witcher has shown, despite the revival of verse dramas at the fin de siècle by writers like Michael Field [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper], Swinburne, Eva Gore Booth, Wilde and Yeats, these works were often dismissed by both late Victorian and early twentieth-century critics such as T. S. Eliot. These disparagers of Victorian verse drama, Bozant Witcher suggests, assumed that new attempts with the genre could not live up to the Elizabethan precedent, and that they ultimately lacked any formal structure. What this should have suggested to Eliot (and late Victorian critics), she claims, was that verse drama provided great opportunities for formal experimentation.16 The anonymous American reviewer compares Wells to Keats, in his ‘swift grasp of what is perceived through the senses, and in the untiring enjoyment of all that is beautiful’, as well as in his shared inheritance of the Elizabethan revival. This reviewer claims that Wells has indeed added to the tradition ‘a sense of dramatic propriety’.17 Though Joseph and his Brethren has escaped much careful attention, we can observe how in some aesthetic circles, this work simultaneously recovered an ancient woman and an often-maligned genre and, through this dual recovery, impelled experiments with gender and form that would become prominent at the end of the century. Watts-Dunton narrates his role in the 1876 revival of Joseph and his Brethren, focusing particularly on his discussions with D. G. Rossetti in the 1870s about the figure of Phraxanor – the name given by Wells to Potiphar’s wife. Though Watts-Dunton is rather vague about dates, we can assume the conversations, which occurred at Kelmscott Manor, took place after 1871, when Rossetti and Morris began renting Kelmscott Manor, and before 1876, when the new edition was finally published. The remembered conversations indicate the extent to which Joseph and his Brethren inspired debate about sexually aggressive and complex female characters in Rossetti’s circle, while also spurring reflections on experimental form and genre. Surrounded by the tapestry of the biblical story of Samson in Rossetti’s studio (reminding us of the aesthetic immersion in Old Testament tales), Watts-Dunton describes his initial reaction to Rossetti’s assertion that Wells had created a nearly Shakespearean dramatic poem about Joseph. He recalls claiming that he could not believe any publisher would accept the work, since ‘the only female interest it suggests is that of Potiphar’s wife, a very unsavoury female’.18 Rossetti responds, in Watts-Dunton’s narration, by asserting that Wells ‘has given us a portrait of a lecherous woman, perfectly unique – perfectly astounding for vigour – you will find that she makes a pretty successful villainess’.19 Watts-Dunton responds to



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Rossetti, speculating on the difficulty of dramatising Joseph’s tale, since, he claims, the ‘frisky matron’ has to take the parts of villainess and heroine both – don’t forget that. Without her there is no female interest at all. And remember that in a poem or a novel, although a lecherous female can be tolerated if she is only stretched out or inclined, let the same lady be painted thoroughly in and she becomes intolerable.20

Watts-Dunton reveals the sexism in his own aesthetic approach to female characters while apparently lamenting the lack of complexity in the Bible’s version of Potiphar’s wife. Rossetti attempts to summarise Watts-Dunton’s argument back to him: ‘[I]n order to treat poetically a story whose heroine is such a woman as Potiphar’s wife, it is necessary to idealize her. You will find, when you come to read the poem, that Wells certainly has not done that.’ 21 Potiphar’s wife thus serves, for Watts-Dunton and Rossetti, as a female figure who presents a unique challenge in terms of characterisation. The misogyny underlying this debate is of course evident – the challenge of creating an interesting and palatable ‘lecherous’ woman being the central controversy. But the debate also highlights how Wells’s Joseph and his Brethren suggests the possibilities of an un-idealised, yet provocative, female character – possibilities that are explored below – through the wife of Potiphar. Following his conversation at Kelmscott Manor with Rossetti, WattsDunton took Rossetti’s advice and visited the British Museum, where the remaining copies of Joseph and his Brethren were kept. Along with Rossetti and Swinburne, and a number of other reviewers of the work in the 1870s, Watts-Dunton declared Wells’s Phraxanor an immense achievement. Despite claiming, ‘No amount of excellence in the portrait will persuade the British public even to glance at such a character [as Phraxanor]’, one critic in the Westminster Review calls her ‘the glory of the poem’.22 Praising Phraxanor’s speech after ‘Joseph has rushed out of the door to escape her lecherous wiles’, Watts-Dunton claims: ‘The Bible does not tell us what the temptress said as she sank back in her rage; but we feel that what she did say is exactly what Wells puts into her mouth … She could not possibly have said anything else.’ 23 He refers here to Phraxanor’s quip: ‘I have a mind / You shall at once walk with those honest limbs / Into your grave’.24 While Watts-Dunton feels this is the best of her lines, Phraxanor is, throughout her role in the drama, intelligent, passionate and confident, with several extensive monologues. Swinburne claims that excerpts are not enough to convey the power of Phraxanor’s speech, a notion that is echoed by the anonymous American

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reviewer who argues that ‘extracts do it no manner of justice’.25 Both of these reviewers are spot-on; however, through extracts we can begin to see how the biblical temptress was adapted not only as an innovative female character, but also as a provocative figure for addressing contemporary gender roles. Discussing the subject of love with an attendant before the final temptation scene, Phraxanor asserts: The soul’s supremacy admits no sex: I am a woman, and am proud of it. We are content that men shall take the lead, Knowing he ever will look back on us With doting eye, not caring how he steps.     So we can beckon him where’er we will, And lead him ever round about his grave, And in whene’er we list. –26

Phraxanor’s reflection on gender relations not only foreshadows her later suggestion that she will lead Joseph into his grave, but also presents a stunning assertion of confidence and pride in her sex. Though seemingly adopting an argument often used to defend women’s limited roles in the public sphere – that women have power indirectly through influence rather than action, and thus perhaps do not need real power – Phraxanor declares that, keeping their eyes always on women’s desires, men follow blind though in front. The final line of this passage, a spondaic trimeter that brings the previous lines of iambic pentameter to an intense and appropriately ‘grave’ conclusion, repeats and emphasises the varied stress of the assertion a few lines above: ‘I am a woman, and am proud of it.’ The stresses in this line might be read as ‘I am | a wo | man, and | am proud | of it,’ falling elsewhere than the punctuation might suggest, on the terms of womanhood and pride, and thus emphasising female agency.27 She continues to explain to her attendant that most acts of male bravery in politics and war are due to a woman’s influence, and are endeavoured to please her will. She adds: Tho’ but the footstool of a royal king, When we betray and trip him to the earth His crown doth roll beneath us. – Horses have not Such power to grace their lords or break their necks As we, for we add passion to our power. They think us gentle, second unto them, And blind them to the wheels whereon we work.28



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Again suggesting that women are positioned beneath men – ‘but the footstool of a royal king’ – she highlights the drastic results of women’s impulses and decisions from this position: ‘His crown doth roll beneath us’, playing with the terms of hierarchy. Just as her language alternates between terms of ascendancy and subjugation, she rapidly contrasts terms of prestige and degradation, noting women’s easy ability to ‘grace their lords or break their necks’. Wells’s Phraxanor is no mere temptress, but a viciously smart philosopher whose worldview positions female desire as a central, and violent, force in the mechanisms of political power. For some Victorian writers, Mrs Potiphar’s body was appropriated to warn against these dangerous possibilities of female sexuality in the body politic. In a February 1872 article in the Overland Monthly (a California periodical) entitled ‘Woman Suffrage – Cui Bono?’ (who benefits?), Sarah B. Cooper argues that only women of the worst kind would be inclined to vote. She is particularly concerned with ‘a lamentable increase of the Mrs. Potiphar-type of womanhood’; ‘Womanhood – cultured, sensitive, and refined – would instinctively shrink from encountering such an element in the body-politic; and thus the dissolute, the depraved, and the vicious, “emballoted” and bold, would dominate the weak, the timid, and the vacillating, and thus occupy the field.’ 29 For, she claims, ‘We have no just reason to suppose that Mrs. Potiphar was hungry for bread; carnal appetite held sway, and there are not a few, to-day, cursed with the same inherent tendency to “moral vertigo”.’ 30 Cooper fears that ‘“emballoted” and bold’ modern women might revert to the kind of sexual aggression she deplores in the wife of Potiphar. Lisa Cochran Higgins argues that in Cooper’s understanding, ‘enfranchisement would inappropriately sexualize women, creating a promiscuous mingling of male and female bodies in the “body-politic”’.31 Cooper’s concern recalls Phraxanor’s suggestion that through their bodies and their will, women already play a major role in the public sphere: ‘All matters that are greater than ourselves’, she tells her attendant, ‘Do trace their secret graces to our hands’.32 Mrs Potiphar’s body was thus appropriated by writers with various agendas – aesthetic and political – eager to intervene in debates about modern femininity and its role in the body politic. Following her declaration of women’s ability to lead men wherever they desire, Wells’s Phraxanor goes on to craft an analogy for women’s will, wit, and beauty as the elements of a ship voyaging through the world. She concludes: Aye, there it is! who can control our wills? Judgement and knowledge, grey-beard wisdom, are

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Devoted straw unto our burning will. – We will not fear: and if we spy a toy We’ll reach it from the moon, with sudden hand – Why – what shall stop us in our enterprise?33

She asserts that men’s judgement and knowledge, the forces which people foolishly believe run the world, are mere kindling for the blazing will of women. The irregular metrical pattern upsets the generally iambic pentameter of the rest of the speech. Dramatically breaking the lines with dashes, exclamation points, question marks and colons, Wells’s speaker undermines any assumptions about rhythm that the reader, and Phraxanor’s attendant, might have. She is in control not only of the situation, but also of the meter. In the concluding lines of this extended monologue, the rhetorical question, ‘Why – what shall stop us in our enterprise?’ prevents any challenging rejoinder. Her attendant’s immediate response – ‘Madam, your speech is fire’ – strikes the modern reader as perfectly apt, and Phraxanor again clutches the conclusion with a spondee in the last foot: ‘Doth it burn you?’ 34 Rossetti’s, Swinburne’s and Meredith’s fascination with Joseph and his Brethren for over twenty years by the 1870s suggests that Wells’s work is partly responsible for inspiring a wave of interest in experimental poetry in the 1860s and 1870s, which would shape further experimentation in the 1880s and 1890s. Elizabeth Helsinger has suggested that, rather than seeing Rossetti’s Poems as a sad end to his (and broader experimental) poetic output, we ought to consider a ‘wave of energetic pursuit of lyric possibilities’ drawing from ‘multiple linguistic traditions’ in the 1870s, pointing to writers like Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and Gerard Manley Hopkins.35 She asks us to envision the story of poetry in the 1870s anew, understanding the publication of Rossetti’s Poems in 1870 as ‘point[ing] toward several decades of re-invention for lyric’s matter’, at a time when ‘[l]yric survival seemed to demand new modes both of writing and of presentation’.36 Wells’s combination of ancient Egyptian myth, Bible story and Elizabethan-style verse drama is an example of the lyric possibilities made available through various mythic and linguistic traditions, one which inspired the more canonical writers often associated with mid-Victorian aesthetic experimentation. Indeed, writers in the 1870s consistently compare Phraxanor with another imperious Egyptian woman from ancient history and Elizabethan drama. Swinburne begins his discussion of Phraxanor by claiming, ‘Only once before had such a character as that of the heroine been given with supreme success’ – Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.37 The insistence on comparing these female characters points to the eagerness with which writers and



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artists turned to ancient Egyptian women to explore female subjectivity. Swinburne’s elaboration of this comparison bears quoting in full: In the Cleopatra of Shakespeare and in the Phraxanor of the present play there is the same imperious conscience of power by right of supreme beauty and supreme strength of will; the same subtle sweetness of speech; the same delicately rendered effect of perfection in word and gesture, never violated or made harsh even by extreme passion; the same evidence of luxurious and patient pleasure found in all things sensually pleasant; the same capacity of bitter shame and wrath, dormant until the insult of resistance or rebellion has been offered; the same contemptuous incapacity to understand a narrower passion or a more external morality than their own; the same rapid and supple power of practical action. All women in literature after these two seem coarse or trivial when they touch on anything sensual; but in their passion there is nothing common or unclean; nothing paltry, no taint of vulgar sin or more vulgar repentance, can touch these two.38

Wells’s Phraxanor apparently succeeds where only Shakespeare’s Cleopatra had before, in mediating her sensuality through an elevated intellect, extreme but balanced passions (both shame and wrath), and a genuine sense of morality that accommodates and validates her sexual desire. She escapes the taint of vulgarity – Swinburne reminds the reader that even repentance can be vulgar – and somehow renders other representations of female sensuality trivial in comparison. In her scenes with Joseph, Phraxanor’s wit and even sarcasm generally outshine Joseph’s honourability and loyalty to Potiphar. During the first seduction attempt, Phraxanor asks Joseph where he is from, commenting that people’s characters often align with their home climate. While he claims that Canaan is ‘[w]arm and congenial’, she remarks that he seems instead ‘like a man that’s nurtur’d upon ice’ and offers, ‘Here, let me touch thy hand – it is cold – cold – / I’ve Egypt’s sun in mine.’ 39 Wells’s Phraxanor invokes nineteenth-century Orientalising discourse which assigns heat and passion to peoples from southern climates. ‘Pure fire indeed’, Joseph responds. She continues to converse with Joseph, referring often to the contrast between her own warmth and Joseph’s physical and moral frigidity. When she grows frustrated with Joseph’s uninteresting appeals to his master’s orders, she gives up for the time being, choosing to ‘muse upon the conquest ere ’tis won – / For won it shall be.’ 40 Here is perhaps a good example of what Swinburne sees as Phraxanor’s dormant ‘capacity of bitter shame and wrath’, holding out – both physically and through the formal interruption of the dash – until the insult arrives.

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In her second and third attempts, Phraxanor’s words and actions become more aggressive, and even threatening, despite Joseph’s pleas. She taunts him, ‘Sir, have a care – blood waits on insult, ha! / One way or other I will have your heart’, and adds, ‘Listen, or else / I’ll set my little foot upon thy neck’, recalling her earlier reference to women’s capacity to break men’s necks.41 Modern readers might at times find her aggression in the face of pathetic refusal more unnerving than Swinburne does. Though she becomes physically aggressive as well, Joseph struggles particularly under the intensity of Phraxanor’s verbal attack, and in an aside calls her ‘A fascinating monster, fatal equally / In action or reaction of her love; / Fair flower of poisonous perfume born to kill’.42 Joseph’s description of Phraxanor resembles, and perhaps informed, Swinburne’s own femmes fatales, which in turn served as paradigms for late Victorian versions of the dangerous historical woman.43 In Swinburne’s ‘Faustine’, published in his 1866 Poems and Ballads, the speaker describes the titular woman as having ‘[c]arved lips that make my lips a cup / To drink, Faustine, / Wine and rank poison, milk and blood, / Being mixed therein’.44 Though the language of monstrosity in relation to a sexually aggressive woman is by no means new in the nineteenth century, and by no means empowering in itself, Phraxanor at times takes ownership of her so-called monstrosity, bandying the language of animalism and monstrosity back and forth with Joseph. She compares him to a ‘beautiful and drowsy snake’ whose coldness her eyes will renovate like the sun.45 Then, growing irate with Joseph’s refusals, she identifies with a serpentine beast: Joseph asks, ‘Are you a lady, madam?’ to which she replies: ‘I was so, but I am a dragon now: / My nostrils are stuff ’d full of splenetive fire; / My tongue is turn’d into a furious sting, / With which I’ll strike you.’ 46 Appropriately employing sibilance throughout her serpentine response, Phraxanor repeatedly strikes with both anger and sarcasm. Finally tiring of Joseph’s protests, she tells him: ‘You grow dull and tedious / That if it were not for my traitorous eyes / You’d cure me of this passion thro’ my ears.’ 47 Joseph’s protestations exhaust and bore her, and the reader too grows weary of Joseph’s honourability, preferring the wit and formal liveliness of Phraxanor’s passionate expressions. Wells’s representation inverts the typical gendered dynamics of seduction scenes, giving voice to female sexual desire in ways that perhaps would not be available (or perhaps palatable, to a Victorian audience) with less notorious and more historically proximate female figures. Phraxanor describes in detail Joseph’s body and her appetite for it. She meditates on ‘That marble front a veinèd tablet fair, / Whereon my lips shall trace my history’, envisioning her longed-for physical encounter with Joseph as an act of inscription and artistry.48 This is perhaps one reason why Well’s adaptation of Potiphar’s wife holds such allure in aesthetic circles. Indeed,



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she continues to imagine their possible encounter as a work of art, praising his simple charm: ‘Oh! for an artist with a subtle hand, / A soul inflam’d, ahunger’d of renown, / To deck my chamber with this undrap’d grace!’ 49 Her almost ekphrastic descriptions of Joseph’s body look forward to the female protagonist in Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891), who ponders the body of Iokanaan: ‘He is like a thin ivory statue. He is like an image of silver. I am sure he is chaste, as the moon is, is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver. His flesh must be very cold, cold as ivory …. I would look closer at him.’ 50 Salome’s attention to Iokanaan’s ivory-like body recalls Phraxanor’s description of Joseph’s ‘marble front’, and her comment about Iokanaan’s coldness likewise gestures back to Phraxanor’s frustrations with Joseph’s frigidity. Indeed, Phraxanor’s attempted seduction of Joseph looks forward also to Haggard’s She and Cleopatra, and Corelli’s Ziska, all of which contain scenes in which the ancient Egyptian or otherwise Eastern woman appeals aggressively to a male character.51 Though Phraxanor repeatedly envisions the aesthetic implications of their sexual encounter, readers are paradoxically reminded that the seduction scene is purely verbal, penned by ‘an artist with a subtle hand’. As a play depicting biblical characters, it would never have been performed in licensed theatre, Wells presumably being aware of the restrictions of the 1737 Licensing Act which prohibited such representations. The verse drama form allows Wells to transform Phraxanor’s unnamed biblical predecessor, whose speaking parts are limited to ‘come lie with me’ and a twice-repeated accusation of Joseph. Phraxanor’s seduction attempts might be read as surpassing in rhetorical skill the attempts of the femmes fatales in the texts listed above. The rich poetic genre additionally allows Wells to move beyond seventeenth-century visual representations of Potiphar’s wife which simultaneously reduce her to the two-dimensional temptress and exploit this role, objectifying her body for the visual pleasure of the viewer. With no likelihood of the drama being staged, readers are invited to revel in the poetically innovative verbalisation of a woman’s sexual desire. Wells’s work, though, was far from the only adaptation of Potiphar’s wife that garnered attention with mid-Victorian writers and artists. Following his first perusal of Joseph and his Brethren at the British Museum, and revelling in the wiles of Wells’s Phraxanor, Watts-Dunton narrates his encounter with an unnamed man, ‘very famous then, but now entirely forgotten’, with whom he discusses the character.52 When Watts-Dunton expresses his surprise at Wells’s achievement in Phraxanor, the man enlightens him that Wells was not nearly the first to do so. ‘The Persian poets have already accomplished the feat’, the man asserts.53 Watts-Dunton then relates their brief conversation, in which the man explains the tradition in Persian poetry of adapting a tale from the Quran. ‘“Step by step they

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have moved”, said he, “till at length, from the somewhat shadowy and uncertain heroine of Ferdusi’s poem, we get, through subsequent poets, to the glorious parable poem of Jámí, in which the coarse Potiphar’s wife of the Bible and of the Quran becomes the tender girl Zulaikha”.’ 54 Watts-Dunton, on hearing a few additional details, reflects, ‘Then they have found a way of making a heroine do the business of the temptress in the play, who is not a mere disgusting foil to the perfect moral beauty of the hero, but who is sufficiently interesting to become the heroine?’ 55 Again, Watts-Dunton recalls his doubts about the possibility of crafting a ‘sufficiently interesting’ character who is both temptress and heroine. He questions how the story might be adapted without the wife of Potiphar being a mere foil to Joseph’s purity. And again he is surprised to find an example of a writer succeeding in this challenge. Though Watts-Dunton was unfamiliar at the time with Mrs Potiphar’s alter egos, other Victorian writers and artists were not. Tracing a parallel strain of representations of the ancient woman, informed by Islamic literary tradition, we uncover how the Persian tale offered new opportunities for both form and character. Watts-Dunton’s unnamed companion alerts him to two famous Persian poets responsible for adapting the tale from the Quran. In the Quran, the wife of the governor attempts to seduce the slave Yusuf, who, though tempted, refuses. They confront her husband, and the wife accuses Yusuf of soliciting her. With the aid of a witness, Yusuf proves her guilt by demonstrating that his shirt was torn from the back (rather than from the front), as he ran away. Then, when she learns that the women in the town mock her for her affection for a slave, she calls the women to her home, provides them with food and gives them each a knife. On her command, Yusuf approaches the women. Amazed at his beauty, they cut themselves instead of their food, ultimately vindicating the governor’s wife for her desire.56 One of the most influential adaptations of this story in the nineteenth century was produced by the fifteenth-century Persian poet and scholar Jami, who names the wife Zuleika. In Jami’s poem, Zuleika is the daughter of the King of Mauritania, rather than an Egyptian by birth. She dreams of a beautiful man, with whom she becomes enamoured. The dream repeats three times, and the third time reveals that the man lives in Egypt. When an embassy arrives in Mauritania soliciting her to marry the Asis, or grand vizier of Pharaoh in Egypt, Zuleika assumes he is the man from her dream and accepts the offer. She travels to Egypt and is enormously disappointed to learn that Potiphar, the grand vizier, is not the man of her dreams. Zuleika soon sees Yusuf for sale as a slave, and purchases him.



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Eventually, she confesses her love for him. In the moment of temptation, Yusuf sees a vision of an angel, and he flees, leaving Zuleika heartbroken. Years later, when Zuleika is widowed, she and Yusuf are reunited and marry. The medieval adaptations of the poem vindicate Potiphar’s wife even further than the Quran suggests, presenting her love for Yusuf as a fated longing for beauty and the divine, and ultimately foregrounding her repentance and reward. In 1845, Anglo-Irish writer Louisa Stuart Costello edited a beautifully decorated collection of Persian poetry entitled The Rose Garden of Persia, which includes large sections of Jami’s poem, adapted by Costello and interspersed with her own commentary. Published three years before the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Costello’s decorated text speaks to how the story of the maligned temptress held immense interest for writers invested in aesthetic experimentation and the relationship between image and text. Far more than a story of female weakness and vindictiveness, the tale’s deep history, multicultural richness and invitation to reflect on the nature of beauty itself call to nineteenth-century writers longing for a more provocative aesthetic challenge. She claims that Zuleika’s history, ‘as given by her poetical biographers, presents a very different picture from that which we have been accustomed to look upon. Her love, disappointment, weakness, despair, and final happiness, form the features of a most exciting drama, and one of the most remarkable in Oriental literature.’ 57 In her introduction to Jami, Costello notes, When it is considered that the creed of the Sufis is to adore beauty, because the contemplation thereof leads the creature nearer to the Creator; and to venerate wine, because the power of its spirit is a symbol of that of the Deity, the reader of the Persian poets will not be surprised at the mixture of sacred, and apparently profane, ideas so often found in the same poem.58

Here, Costello invites her reader to interpret Zuleika’s erotic attachment to Yusuf as an admirable desire for the creator, vindicating as sacred what Western readers might mistake as ‘apparently profane’. While Costello buries the sexual nature of the attraction in rather chaste and aesthetic terms, she notes that Yusuf is ‘less insensible to her regard than we are informed’ – privileging Jami’s representation of Yusuf as greatly tempted, over the Christian tradition in which Joseph is steadfast – and adds that ‘some go so far as to say that we ought to follow her example, and should permit the beauty of God to transport us out of ourselves’.59

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In the conclusion of Jami’s adaptation, Zuleika and Yusuf ’s reunion corresponds with Zuleika’s conversion to monotheism. Costello claims: Inspired by love, Zuleika at length renounces idolatry, and her lover hails her as a convert to the religion of the only true God. She presents herself as a believer before Yussuf, and is rewarded by the return of her early youth and beauty, at his prayer; for he now sees no obstacle to his love, and at once acknowledges it, and returns the passion which had been before so fatal to them both.60

In this final passage, Costello describes Zuleika’s conversion from a presumably pagan religion to an unspecified monotheism alongside the consummation of the couple’s passion. In doing so, Costello’s text brings together Islamic, Jewish and Christian monotheistic traditions through an aesthetically innovative mode and the consummation of female sexual desire. This poetic tradition, in which spiritual fervour contributes to the legitimising of female desire, appealed to Costello and provoked later artists interested in the ancient story. After learning of Jami’s adaptation, Watts-Dunton records his subsequent return to Kelmscott Manor, where he takes a moonlight stroll with Rossetti and narrates his own highly stylised explanation of Jami’s work to his friend, who claims he is ‘intensely fond of Oriental stories’.61 When the tale had concluded, Rossetti reportedly replied: ‘Certainly if there is a way of idealizing Potiphar’s wife these Persian poets seem to have managed it …. But, somehow the love-part is a little too novelesque and Tommy Moorish. It seems to mar the primitive simplicity of the Bible story.’ 62 Rossetti apparently prefers the un-idealised wife of Potiphar from the Bible and Wells’s verse drama, and finds the fatalistic love story in the Persian poetic tradition slightly overdetermined and ‘novelesque’. Rossetti’s resistance points again to the difficulties Victorian writers saw in adapting the story of Potiphar’s wife: how to redeem a temptress so wrapped up in religious discourse, how to make her interesting without losing sight of her sin, and what to do with the object of her desire. Rossetti apparently stated, ‘I wonder whether Topsy could do anything with it? I am afraid it would be too much for me.’ 63 Finding this new perspective on Potiphar’s wife a little beyond his reach (or beyond his interest), Rossetti ponders whether William Morris (‘Topsy’) might be interested in taking on the subject. Watts-Dunton notes that Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), in which a princess longs for a man she has never seen, resembles Jami’s story somewhat. Rossetti’s hesitance to adopt the Persian adaptation in his own work possibly relates to concerns about his representations of female figures following the famous fleshly school controversy surrounding Rossetti’s work



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in the earlier 1870s. Following the publication of Rossetti’s Poems in 1870, Robert Buchanan (using the pseudonym Thomas Maitland) published an attack on Pre-Raphaelite poetry and Rossetti as its figurehead, entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry – D.G. Rossetti’ (1871). Buchanan addresses Rossetti’s Poems, but also William Morris’s 1858 Defense of Guenevere and Swinburne’s 1866 Poems and Ballads, criticising what he sees as an excess of sensuality and a corruptive morality. Excerpting several lines from ‘A Last Confession’, Buchanan condemns Rossetti’s representations of female characters who (using words from the excerpt) ‘bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, twist, wriggle, foam, and slaver, in a style frightful to hear of ’.64 He adds, ‘We get very weary of this protracted hankering after a person of the other sex; it seems meat, drink, thought, sinew, religion for the fleshly school. There is no limit to the fleshliness, and Mr. Rossetti finds in it his own religious justification much in the same way as Holy Willie’ (a satirical figure created by Robert Burns in a 1785 poem to critique religious hypocrisy).65 Buchanan’s attack condemns what he sees not only as Rossetti’s overly sexualised and vulgar female characters, but also as a quasi-religious aesthetic hypocrisy. Rossetti defended himself in a response, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’, asserting that the lines thoughtlessly excerpted from his poem and given no context by Buchanan, serve as an impetus for the speaker’s motive to murder, and are thus supposed to be ‘as repulsive to the reader as it was to the hearer and beholder’.66 He addresses the charge of fleshliness with the assertion: That I may, nevertheless, take a wider view than some poets or critics, of how much, in the material conditions absolutely given to man to deal with as distinct from his spiritual aspirations, is admissible within the limits of Art, – this, I say, is possible enough. But to state that I do so to the ignoring or overshadowing of spiritual beauty, is an absolute falsehood, impossible to be put forward except in the indulgence of prejudice or rancour.67

This justification of his more capacious approach to the relationship between spiritual aspirations and material beauty might suggest that Zuleika’s tale should seem wonderfully inviting to Rossetti. However, the vitriol of Buchanan’s attack, which included a denunciation of Rossetti’s poem ‘Lilith’ and the corresponding painting, perhaps made Rossetti uneasy about taking on a sexually assertive biblical character just a few years later. Rossetti’s one artistic approach to Potiphar’s wife was created years before these conversations with Watts-Dunton, in 1860. In Joseph Accused before Potiphar, a pen-and-ink drawing, Rossetti depicts the confrontation between Potiphar and Joseph, with Potiphar’s wife at left of centre.68

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Wearing an authoritative bird-like headdress with wings over her hair, a light-coloured gown with intricate designs, a simple beaded necklace and bracelet, Potiphar’s wife looks quite different from the supine figures in seventeenth-century paintings. Though the dress drapes around her legs, her covered chest and legs create a far more modest appearance than in these earlier representations. She stands upright, leaning slightly on one leg, with one fist aggressively clenched in front of her, and the other apparently clenched on some fabric behind her. She glares slightly forwards and to the left, towards Joseph or perhaps slightly past him at the guards who hold him in place, while Joseph gazes pleadingly up at his master’s face. While not in the centre of the image, her intense glare and tense posture – her hands clenched in pent-up frustration, yet leaning back slightly as if contemplating her guilt – draw the viewer’s eye to Potiphar’s wife. Perhaps informed by Wells’s Joseph and his Brethren, which Rossetti had read as early as 1850, Rossetti’s wife of Potiphar sheds her overly simplified persona as a ‘lecherous’ temptress and takes on a more complex set of features and attitudes. As the appeal of Potiphar’s wife among Rossetti’s circle might suggest, in addition to shaping Victorian discussions about sexually aggressive female characters, the wife of Potiphar was also appropriated to signal fears about, or delight in, the power of ancient femininity to transform contemporary aesthetic media, and by extension, to subvert art itself. Fuelled by the prevalence of Egyptian mummies discovered, traded and ultimately commodified throughout the nineteenth century, the spectre of Mrs Potiphar’s undiscovered corpse haunts discussions of aesthetic media. Ground mummy was used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a pigment (often called ‘Mummy Brown’) for both oil paint and glazes, and was in use by artists including Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Its colour, though variable, was a light brown with sometimes a grey tinge.69 In a compilation of texts by Augustus Bouvier entitled the Handbook of Young Artists and Amateurs in Oilpainting (1845), the editor, an American artist named Laughton Osborn, notes Bouvier’s comments on Mummy Brown. Osborn remarks on the unreliability of this pigment, the true contents of which one can never be sure. ‘[W]e ourselves,’ asserts Osborn, ‘though quite enamored of experiment, have never yet felt the least desire to essay this pigment, seeing nothing to be gained by smearing our canvas with a part perhaps of the wife of Potiphar, that might not be as easily secured by materials less frail and of more sober character.’ 70 Osborn’s not-so-subtle parallel of the moral shortcomings of Potiphar’s wife with the unreliability of the paint suggests a suspicion that the vices of ancient (foreign, female) bodies might infiltrate and subvert nineteenth-century art.71



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This possibility, worrying to Osborn, is expressed as an enthusiastic wish by other commentators on Mummy Brown and its rejuvenating potential. When the price of paper rose in 1855, a New York geologist named Isaiah Deck suggested that Egyptian mummies in enormous quantities be dug up, shipped to New York, unwound, and their linen wrappings converted into paper. He imagines a modern-day version of Heloise and Abelard – the medieval abbess and her teacher legendary for their forbidden affair and secret marriage – ‘transcrib[ing] their amorous epistles on “ivory satin”, once the chemisette enveloping the bosom of Joseph’s fair temptress’.72 In Deck’s textual fantasy, he envisions Mrs Potiphar’s lingerie unearthed and transformed into an aesthetic medium, proposing the tantalising possibility of the ancient temptress physically aiding both romantic affairs and literary production. Whether ground into Mummy Brown or processed into paper, the highly sought-after remains of Joseph’s fair temptress promised fascinating aesthetic experiments merging content and medium. In 1886, just ten years after the Pre-Raphaelites succeeded in bringing Wells’s Phraxanor to public attention, H. Rider Haggard acquired a mummy snatched by his brother Andrew (a lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army) from the pits of Akhmim in Egypt. Andrew reported in his military memoir Under Crescent and Star (1895) that the mummy was ‘popularly supposed to be that of Potiphar’s wife’.73 Named Nesmin, the mummy occupied the study in which Haggard penned his 1887 novel She. Elaborating in 1895 on a story that eventually became a sort of family legend, Haggard’s brother playfully writes: ‘Potiphar’s wife or not, she was quite a lady, and never created any disturbance except once, when she was distinctly heard one night by the wife and servants walking about the house of an eminent novelist, a near relation of my own who has told the world plenty about mummies’.74 Regardless, this story, which has now become a rather famous anecdote among Haggard scholars, ought to be read not as an isolated event, or as an obsession unique to these late Victorian adventure writers, but as part of a decades-long Victorian tradition of unearthing Potiphar’s wife to explore the relationship between ancient women’s sexual subjectivity and nineteenth-century art.

Notes 1 Genesis 39.1–20. 2 See Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); LeeAnne Richardson, New Woman and Colonial Adventure

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Fiction: Gender, Genre, and Empire (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006); Catherine Delyfer, ‘New Woman Fiction, Gender and Empire: Egyptian Encounters and Subversions in Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1896) and Victoria Cross’s Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903)’, in Christine Reynier (ed.), CrossCultural Encounters between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking Worlds (Bern; Peter Lang, 2011); Nolwenn Corriou, ‘“A Woman is a Woman, if she Had Been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!”: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism, and the Politics of Gender’, Miranda, 11 (2015), 10.4000/Miranda.6899; Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Angie Blumberg, ‘Victorian Literature and Archaeology: Contemporary Excavations’, Literature Compass, 15:4 (2018). 3 See, for example, Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, Joseph and the Wife of Potiphar (c. 1555); Guido Reni, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (c. 1630); Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, Joseph and the Wife of Potiphar (1640); Guercino, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (1649); Rembrandt van Rijn, Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655). 4 Shalom Goldman, The Wiles of Women / The Wiles of Men: Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, and Islamic Folklore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. xii. 5 Goldman, Wiles of Women / Wiles of Men, p. xii; ‘The D’Orbiney Papyrus’, British Museum Collection Online, www.britishmuseum.org/research/ collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=113985&partId=1. 6 In this rich tale (not easily summarised), the semi-divine Anubis, his unnamed wife, and his younger brother Bata live together happily until Anubis’s wife attempts unsuccessfully to seduce Bata. She claims Bata attacked and beat her, and Anubis believes her, planning to kill Bata but ultimately chasing him into exile. Anubis soon discovers his wife’s deceit and kills her. The story continues to relate the reunion of the brothers, Bata’s divine transformations and his ascendance to king of Egypt, with Anubis at his side. See ‘The D’Orbiney Papyrus’; and Goldman, Wiles of Women / Wiles of men, pp. xxviii–xxxi. A translation of the tale by French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero was advertised in Athenaeum, 2426 (April 1874), in a list of several ancient Egyptian texts soon to be released for the public. 7 Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells: A Reminiscence on Kelmscott Manor’, in Charles Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, a Dramatic Poem (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. lvi. 8 To encourage interest in the work, Swinburne’s essay was published in the Fortnightly Review just before the whole work was released. 9 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Supplementary’, in Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, Volume I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), p. 427. 10 Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells’, p. xix. 11 Charles Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, a Dramatic Poem, 1823 (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 89. Wells does not number his lines, thus references to the poem indicate page numbers.



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12 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume I: Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See line 135 for the reference to the Nile’s ‘black and oozy bed’. 13 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, p. 90. 14 ‘Review’, North American Review, 123:252 (1876), 182. 15 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Introduction’ to Charles Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, a Dramatic Poem (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. xxx. 16 Heather Bozant Witcher, ‘“A Royal Lady [Re]born”: Balladry, Transport, and Transgression in Michael Field’s The Tragic Mary’, Victorian Poetry, 55:4 (2017), 512–13. 17 ‘Review’, 184. 18 Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells’, p. xxiii. 19 Ibid., p. xxiv. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 105 (1876), 282. 23 Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells’, p. xxviii. 24 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, p. 121. 25 ‘Review’, 181. 26 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, pp. 104–5. 27 Thank you to Heather Bozant Witcher for her help in working through various lines from Phraxanor’s monologues, as well as her recommendation to read Rossetti’s interest in Phraxanor in connection with the ‘Fleshly School’ controversy. 28 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, pp. 105–6. 29 Sarah B. Cooper, ‘Woman Suffrage – Cui Bono?’, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, 8:2 (1872), 160. 30 Ibid., 161. 31 Lisa Cochran Higgins, ‘Adulterous Individualism, Socialism, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Suffrage Writing’, Legacy, 21:2 (2004), 194. 32 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, p. 105. 33 Ibid., p. 106. 34 Ibid. 35 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Lyric Poetry and the Event of Poems, 1870’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=lyric-poetry-and-the-event-ofpoems-1870, paras 3–4. 36 Ibid., para. 5. 37 Swinburne, Introduction, p. xii. 38 Ibid., pp. xii–xiii. 39 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, p. 100. 40 Ibid., p. 103. 41 Ibid., p. 117. 42 Ibid.

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43 See Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham’s notes in Appendix A of their edition of Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), pp. 279–85. In their introduction to ‘From Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence” (1868, 1875)’, they argue that these notes ‘[set] up an influential literary touchstone for the late nineteenth-century femme fatale’; p. 279. While Phraxanor is not mentioned in these notes, we might with reason consider Swinburne’s interest in Phraxanor (developed as early as 1850) as informing, or at least in connection with, his references to Eastern women Cleopatra, Lamia, Amestris (wife of Xerxes) and Jezebel in these notes. 44 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Faustine’, in Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 86, lines 15–18. 45 Wells, Joseph and his Brethren, p. 118. 46 Ibid., p. 121. 47 Ibid., p. 128. 48 Ibid., p. 112. 49 Ibid. 50 Oscar Wilde, Salome, 1891, in Oscar Wilde: The Major Works including The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 308. 51 See H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, 1887 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), in which Ayesha, after murdering Leo’s paramour, calls to him, ‘Come’ (much like the wife of Potiphar in Genesis), and Leo succumbs quickly; p. 212; H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (Toronto: William Bryce, 1889), Chapter V, in which Cleopatra wins Harmachis’s esteem and affection the night before he is set to betray her; and Chapter VII in which Cleopatra calmly, confidently seduces Harmachis, upsetting his plot to murder her, stealing his dagger and drugging him. See also Marie Corelli’s Ziska, 1897 (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2009), p. 149 in which a reincarnated Egyptian woman torments her reincarnated lover, and in the conclusion of the novel, set in his own ancient tomb, calls to him, ‘Take all your fill of burning wickedness – of cursed joy! and then – sleep!’. 52 Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells’, p. xxxiv. 53 Ibid., p. xxxv. 54 Ibid., p. xxxvi. 55 Ibid., p. xxxv. 56 Qur’an, Sura 12: 23–35, excerpted in Goldman, The Wiles of Women / The Wiles of Men, pp. xxvii–xxviii. 57 Louisa Stuart Costello, The Rose Garden of Persia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1845), p. 124. 58 Ibid., pp. 3–4. 59 Ibid., p. 135. 60 Ibid., p. 140. Costello uses the spelling Yussuf, but I have used the more usual Yusuf elsewhere. 61 Watts-Dunton, ‘Rossetti and Charles Wells’, p. xxxviii.



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62 Ibid., p. xlii. 63 Ibid. 64 Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (London: Strahan & Co., 1872), p. 44. 65 Ibid., p. 45. 66 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume I (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1901), p. 483. 67 Ibid., pp. 485–6. 68 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Joseph Accused before Potiphar, 1860, Rossetti Archive, www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s122.rap.html. 69 Philip McCouat, ‘The Life and Death of Mummy Brown’, Journal of Art in Society (2013; 2019), www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummybrown.html; Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Volume II (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 70. 70 Laughton Osborn (ed.), Handbook of Young Artists and Amateurs in Oilpainting (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), p. 57. 71 Though comprehensive documentation of the use of Mummy Brown in nineteenth-century paintings is lacking, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s work indicates that Lawrence Alma-Tadema was likely using Mummy Brown in his work. It is tempting to consider whether his Antony and Cleopatra, replete with brown shades in the structure and canopy of Cleopatra’s barge, might itself have been painted with a mummy. Such a possibility illuminates the network of associations between the figure of Cleopatra in Victorian culture and the archaeological discovery of ancient female bodies. 72 Isaiah Deck, ‘On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt’, Annual Report of the American Institute of the City of New York, 144 (1855), 92. 73 Andrew Haggard, Under Crescent and Star (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1895), p. 339. 74 Ibid. The Haggard brothers may have been disappointed to learn that the mummy, which is now on exhibit at the World Museum in Liverpool, has been identified as male. See ‘Human Remains, Mummy of Nesmin’, National Museums Liverpool, www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/collections/ antiquities/ancient-egypt/item-299423.aspx.

4 Prefiguring the cross: a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra Sara Woodward

In Egyptology’s infancy, scholars and archaeologists presented Egypt’s history in such ways that suggested that England’s theological history stretched all the way back to the Egyptian sands. Archaeological societies such as the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) and the Society of Biblical Archaeology, for instance, portrayed ancient Egypt as a spiritual descendant of British Protestantism as a means of garnering financial support for their digs.1 Stephanie Moser has suggested that, by creating such connections between ancient and modern culture, ‘British society sought to define its own culture via multiple engagements with classical antiquity’.2 In this chapter, I develop further Moser’s suggestion that ‘[t]he reception of ancient Egypt … is not passive or derivative (from scholarly traditions), but has played a driving role in the creation of knowledge about Egyptian antiquity’.3 I examine the theological body of knowledge which nineteenth-century Egyptological societies created in order to link ancient Egypt and nineteenth-century Britain through a typological reading of one of H. Rider Haggard’s rarely read pieces of Egyptianising fiction, Cleopatra (1889).4 In so doing, I suggest that Haggard challenges the theological reception of ancient Egypt which presented British Protestantism as a more evolved form of ancient religions. Haggard fashions his ancient Egypt as a land of perceived spiritual insight, a place to raise questions about the role of atonement in the afterlife. Cleopatra challenges a strict Calvinist view of eternal damnation by hinting at an Egyptian form of reincarnation as a means of atoning for sin throughout the ages. The novel ultimately leaves its questions about the afterlife unresolved: whatever ancient Egypt’s wisdom about the role of atonement in the afterlife may be, that wisdom remains undeciphered.



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Writing at the zenith of Egyptianising fiction’s sensationalism, H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was among the many writers who saw the marketable potential for novels with Egyptian motifs. Haggard co-published The World’s Desire (1890) with Andrew Lang and utilised Egyptian motifs in Morning Star (1916), Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales (1912–13) and Queen of the Dawn (1925). However, it is his Cleopatra, which first appeared serially in the Illustrated London News between January and June 1889, as well as in a single-volume first edition published by Longmans, Green, and Co. also in June of 1889, which offers a unique perspective on the role of ancient Egypt in the literary field of the nineteenth century. The sensational style of Cleopatra’s publication medium connected Haggard’s novel to a very tangible moment in history. Eleanor Dobson has noted that the Illustrated London News published excavation reports alongside the narrative. ‘Associated with factual writing’, Dobson writes, ‘this layout actively encourages the ironic imagination of the fictional text as “real”’.5 Haggard capitalised on this combined effect of the public’s clamour for all things Egyptian and their expectation of the sensational in fiction in the very publication format of Cleopatra. Andrew Griffiths has argued that fact and fiction were becoming ever more closely connected, so much so that ‘[t]he boundaries between novels and news, and between news and the events it reported, were increasingly blurred from the mid1880s’.6 This meant that ‘British readers experienced their empire as a polyglossic discourse formed from the contact between novels, news and imperial activity’.7 Haggard himself appears to capitalise on these blurred boundaries. As Dobson has observed, Haggard strategically begins the novel with an account of an excavation and uses a narrator at the beginning to ‘transcribe’ the story from papyrus discovered within an unmarked tomb. This papyrus relates the story of the high priest of Isis, Harmachis, and his divine charge to kill the Ptolemy usurper Cleopatra. However, Harmachis falls in love with the beautiful pharaoh and fails to kill her. Realising his mission, Cleopatra orders Harmachis’s death, but he escapes with the help of Cleopatra’s servant, Charmion. Harmachis hides in the desert, perfecting his skills in magic under the pseudonym Olympus until Cleopatra believes him to be dead. Years later, rumours of his magical abilities reach Cleopatra who, by this time, has fallen in love with the Roman leader Antony. She orders her guards to bring Olympus to her and, through this reunion, Harmachis is able to fulfil his divine calling and facilitate Cleopatra’s death. Having gripped his readers with the sensational Gothic elements of a concealed secret diary buried within archaeological ruins, Haggard incorporates a loose but complex typological layering into his narrative.8 He involves the common invocation of the type of Jesus with the historical

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types of Moses and David as well as the legal type of atonement. In theological and literary critical contexts, typology is a form of interpreting religious symbols and certain characters, concepts or circumstances as anticipations of Jesus Christ. Haggard reads Egypt through a distinctly Protestant lens, but that lens does not prevent him from seeing the inherent merits of religious beliefs other than Christianity. While Roger Luckhurst notes that Haggard’s belief in reincarnation was ‘something he considered entirely consistent with his orthodox Christian faith’,9 as one of his earlier works, Cleopatra’s blend of Christianity and reincarnation is present but hesitant. As J. Jeffrey Franklin records, both Haggard’s and his contemporary Marie Corelli’s later works make ‘explicit and unapologetic use’ of Hindu and Buddhist reincarnation, while their earlier works are more ‘indirect’.10 Haggard uses a typological narrative structure in Cleopatra not only to posit his fictitious representations of Egypt in relation to biblical texts as a response to the popularity of archaeological digs which appropriated ancient Egypt as a precursor to Christianity, but also, and more significantly, as a way to engage with his own doubts surrounding the limits of Protestantism. Instead of reading Cleopatra as an example of how Haggard ‘minimized cultural difference and demonstrated emotional continuity across millennia’ which, David Gange suggests, was a common trope for fiction addressing ancient Egypt,11 I argue that Haggard presented a more holistic view of religion. Haggard does not use ancient Egyptian religion solely to promote Christianity; instead, through a typological dialogue, he engages and wrestles with his own religious doubt and offers a narrative which looks to the past as a means to enlighten and guide Victorian faith. Common in the nineteenth century as a means of spiritual allusion, typology was often associated with Victorian artwork, most notably William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1856). Applying the same principles to Haggard’s Cleopatra illuminates the richly complex religious discourse that runs throughout the novel. ‘Typology is a Christian form of scriptural interpretation’, writes George Landow; it ‘claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament’.12 Typology necessarily functions through a type/ antitype relationship, which Landow illuminates using the English theologian, librarian and author Thomas Hartwell Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818). Horne illustrates that ‘types’ refer to an imperfect form of something or, in the more theological sense, can be ‘prepared and evidently designed by God to prefigure that future thing’.13 The antitype is found in the perfect fulfilment of God’s design: Jesus Christ. Landow suggests that encountering typology in paintings and sermons caused Victorian readers to ‘cultivate a love of paradox and enigma’, and



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to develop a habit of identifying biblical symbols and allusions.14 What is paradoxical and enigmatic about typology is the fact that it combines something equally physical and spiritual. Using the example of Christ, Landow shows how Christ’s identity combines a historical, physical corporeality with a ‘higher, more complete reality’, which typological symbolism seeks to connect. Harmachis, although not a tangible historical figure, represents a concrete period of human history and simultaneously symbolises the physical/spiritual person of Christ and Moses, as well as the obscure concept of atonement. As Horne notes, a type can be manifested in three distinct ways: historical, legal and prophetic. I argue that Harmachis’s narrative interweaves historical and legal types, and that Haggard, perhaps unconsciously, ‘prepared’ and ‘designed’ them in Horne’s theological sense to prefigure the antitype of Christ in order to wrestle with his own complicated relationship to traditional Protestantism. By transposing a loose typological symbolism onto his novel, Haggard creates an imaginative space through which his readers can engage with thoughts on faith, atonement and the afterlife. This space allows them to look at Harmachis’s narrative not as a microcosm of the pagan past but instead as an active participant in their own Judaeo-Christian story. Harmachis is not just a fallen priest of Isis; he is a type of Christ and mirrors the historical type of Moses whose shortcomings and failings teach nineteenth-century readers that the allure of sin was equally as dangerous for the shrivelled mummies in the British Museum as it is for the flesh-and-blood Victorian viewer standing before them. Haggard’s Egyptomania and Victorian biblical archaeology Historical fiction set in ancient Egypt was itself a popular subgenre which many authors capitalised upon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writing about ancient Egypt was, however, more personal for Haggard. He was keenly interested in Egyptology and the links between biblical archaeology and modern society. Haggard felt a deep connection to the ancient cultures of Iceland and Egypt. He visited both countries – Egypt in 1887 and 1904 and Iceland in 1888 – and took much inspiration from their ancient customs. In his autobiography The Days of my Life, written between 1910 and 1912 but published posthumously in 1926, he states, ‘with the old Norse and the old Egyptians I am at home. I can enter into their thoughts and feelings; I can even understand their theologies. I have a respect for Thor and Odin, I venerate Isis, and always feel inclined to bow to the moon!’ 15 Haggard was informed by a mystic friend that in two former lives, Haggard had lived in the time of ancient Egypt ‘one as

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a noble in the time of Pepi II who lived somewhere about 4000 B.C., and the second as one of the minor Pharaohs’.16 He had also lived as ‘a Norseman of the seventh century, who was one of the first to sail to the Nile’.17 While Haggard claimed to be sceptical of his friend’s mystical claims ‘since the reincarnation business seems to me to be quite insusceptible of proof ’,18 he continued to be fascinated by ancient Egypt and the concept of reincarnation throughout his life. Part of this veneration manifested itself in a dogged commitment to learning ancient Egyptian history. Haggard devoted much time to studying at the British Museum under one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent Egyptologists: E. A. Wallis Budge. Budge was Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924 as well as the translator of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1895), and he was knighted in 1920 for distinguished contributions to Egyptology. Haggard dedicated Morning Star to Budge in 1910, claiming that it was only because of their friendship that he would dare dedicate a story of Egypt to ‘you, one of the world’s masters of the language and lore of the great people’.19 In The Days of my Life, Haggard even goes so far as to christen Budge ‘the most industrious and the most learned man of my acquaintance’.20 Haggard’s love for ancient Egyptian culture was something that the author actively enjoyed, even integrating Egyptian artefacts into the decor of his home. Indeed, he owned so many Egyptian artefacts that the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology catalogued his collection, describing plaques, numerous scarabs, signet rings and a bronze head.21 This attention to studying his narrative settings, and entrenching himself so deeply in research about their histories, was something for which Haggard was mocked: ‘I remember that I was a good deal sneered at for my habit of actually investigating the countries where the events had happened about which I intended to write’. He continues, ‘[l]iterature, I was told, should be independent of such base actualities’.22 This ‘sneering’ is evident in Andrew Lang’s critique of the first volume of Cleopatra. Lang (1844–1912) was a renowned folklorist, mythologist and pioneering psychical researcher. One of Haggard’s closest friends and critics, Lang found the first volume of Cleopatra to be ‘too long, too full of antiquarian detail, and too slow in movement to carry the general public with it’.23 Haggard refused to part with these sections of the novel, viewing them too much as a ‘brick built from a wall’.24 In his author’s preface he defends the amount of historical detail, signalling its connection to an understanding of religion as a whole: ‘[f]or such students as seek a story only, and are not interested in the Faith, ceremonies, or customs of the Mother of Religion and Civilisation, ancient Egypt, it is, however, respectfully suggested that they should exercise the art of skipping and open this tale at its second book’.25



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Ancient Egypt is recast here as the ‘Mother of Religion’. Using Egypt’s authority as spiritual matriarch was an important way for Haggard to investigate his own attraction to religions outside of the bounds of Protestantism. In doing so, Haggard challenges nineteenth-century practices of biblical archaeology, which used exploration into Egypt’s past as a lens to sharpen its practitioners’ understanding of their faith’s origins. For instance, the EEF often utilised the sensationalism surrounding excavations in Amarna to entice Christian sponsors to fund digs which unearthed the pagan past. In Akhenaten: History, Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt (2000), Dominic Montserrat examines the history of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten and shows how nineteenth-century Egyptologists – particularly John Gardner Wilkinson, William Osburn and William Matthew Flinders Petrie – seemingly venerated Akhenaten’s controversial relocation of the Egyptian capital from Thebes to Amarna in order to worship the sun god Aten as the first step to modern monotheism.26 When Budge published his translation of The Book of the Dead in 1895, Egyptologists and Christians alike sought ways to connect the otherworldly, polytheistic language of the religious text to traditional Christian writings. Readers attempted to identify elements that could be harmonised with familiar Christian homilies or Bible verses. ‘They found in the Book of the Dead a litany of “hymns and prayers and confessions”’, writes Gange, ‘[t]his biblical harmonizing was not just rhetorical: it was essential to drawing readers into Egyptian texts and it defined how they read them. In this way, the positive revaluation of Egypt amongst orthodox writers actually began to alter orthodox categories.’ 27 As Gange notes, when Christians began to delve into the history of Egypt, their examinations altered the ways in which they approached their own faith. Cultural icons and artefacts were thus reappropriated as precursors to Christianity. Instead of drawing parallels for the sake of promoting Christianity, Haggard’s writing connects ancient Egypt to Victorian Britain in order to engage with ideas about atonement, sacrifice and tensions between traditional Christianity and paganism. As Julia Reid observes, Haggard ‘recognized the romance author’s part in opening up inaccessible regions of the world’.28 He therefore used ancient Egypt as a means to explore the unexplainable and fantastic elements of Christian faith. The somewhat complicated typological structure of Cleopatra evinces an author in conflict between the traditional, limited theological tenets of Protestantism and the more liberal assertions of universalism and doctrines of reincarnation that a consideration of ancient Egypt facilitated. This was as much for himself as it was for his reader; the tension was personal for Haggard, especially considering the circumstances under which Cleopatra was published. He dedicated the novel to his ailing mother,

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Ella Haggard, ‘because I thought it the best book I had written or was likely to write’, viewing it as the pinnacle of his authorial career.29 In The Days of my Life, Haggard discusses his mother’s own writing and transcribes an excerpt from one of her poems, believed to be the last words she wrote before she died: Lo! in the shadowy valley here He stands:   My soul pale sliding down Earth’s icy slope Descends to meet Him, with beseeching hands   Trembling with Fear – and yet upraised in Hope.30

That this poem mirrors Harmachis’s spiritual journey throughout Cleopatra is eerie; awaiting his death for betraying Isis, Harmachis writes of the same ‘trembling’ ‘hope’ of Haggard’s mother’s poem: Now all things end in darkness and in ashes, and I prepare to face the terrors that are to come in other worlds than this. I go, but not without hope I go: for, though I see Her not, though no more She answers to my prayers, still I am aware of the Holy Isis, who is with me for evermore, and whom yet I shall again behold face to face.31

Both passages address the hope of atonement found beyond the grave from a respective deity: the Judaeo-Christian God for Ella Haggard and Isis for Harmachis. Although Haggard’s mother died after the novel was published, he never knew if she had been able to read it herself because of her failing eyesight.32 Whether or not there was a familial trend of contemplating the soul’s fate in the afterlife in both poetry and prose, it is worth bearing in mind that these verses do connect to Cleopatra’s central conflict and show Haggard wrestling with the theme of the spiritual afterlife from the Egyptian temples through to the Protestant Church. Just before he introduces his mother’s verses, Haggard confesses ‘[t]he Protestant Faith seems vaguely to inculcate that we should not pray for the dead. If so, I differ from the Protestant Faith, who hold that we should not only pray for them but to them, that they will judge our frailties with tenderness and will not forget us who do not forget them.’ 33 These uncertainties surrounding the dead’s role in the lives of the living as well as their influence on the soul’s posthumous judgement are ones that can be directly engaged through the medium of ancient Egyptian texts. As his mother’s life waned and Haggard worked to complete what he believed would be his best work and the one which he would dedicate to her, he attempted to reconcile tensions between ideas of atonement and self-sacrifice through a complex typological dialogue.



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Typology and doubt in Cleopatra The inherently religious nature of Harmachis’s role as a priest of Isis allows Haggard to connect Cleopatra’s narrative easily to Christian figures and types. The novel begins by casting Harmachis as a type of Christ through his divine birth. Like the Judaeo-Christian messiah, Harmachis is believed to be the product of divine conception, a child of an earthly woman and the Knepth, whom Haggard casts in the role of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one said to have ‘come upon’ Mary to enable her to conceive Jesus.34 As Harmachis’s mother lies dying, she is filled with a prophetic voice and proclaims that her son will ‘purge the land’ and ‘rule and deliver Egypt’ from the oppressive, colonial rule of the Ptolemies.35 Employing a divine birth at the beginning of the narrative prompts readers to undertake a typological reading of the novel. Readers accustomed to typological symbolism would likely recognise the Judaeo-Christian messianic structure to Harmachis’s birth in relation to Christ’s. Harmachis’s birth is a prefiguration of Jesus’, whose mother also received a holy prophecy regarding her son’s destiny. When visited by an angel, Mary is told that she is pregnant and that her son will become a great ruler who will ‘reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end’.36 Both Harmachis and Jesus are destined to rule, uniting their subjects under one religion. If Harmachis is a type of Christ, then at some point in his story he must fail or fall short of being mankind’s redeemer; only in the antitype of a typological structure is perfect fulfilment found since a type is, by Horne’s definition, ‘a rough draught, or less accurate model, from which a more perfect image is made’.37 Harmachis’s failure is understood from the beginning of the novel; the story begins with the discovery of a scroll written by Harmachis wherein he refers to himself as ‘the doomed Egyptian’ who cries out ‘from that dim Amenti, where to-day he wears out his long atoning time’.38 Richard Pearson argues that the early revelation of the narrative drive is connected to ‘a fatal sexual desire’.39 However, studying Cleopatra through a typological reading suggests that Harmachis’s sexual transgression relates more broadly to his inability to fulfil the type of Christ and his own messianic mission, since the type prefigures that which will be perfected in the antitype. Although Harmachis can be read as a type of Christ in his own right, adding a further typological layering – a historical type – creates a tangible link between Cleopatra and the practices of biblical archaeological societies and shows how Haggard’s narrative subtly challenges their cultural appropriation. As a historical type, Harmachis represents ‘some eminent persons recorded in the Old Testament, so ordered by Divine Providence

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as to be exact prefigurations of the characters, actions, and fortunes of future persons who should arise under Gospel dispensation’.40 Harmachis’s story also aligns with the historical type of Moses, whose representation of Old Testament Levitical law places him as the antitype to Christ’s atoning sacrifice in the New Testament. Within their narratives, both Harmachis and Moses are chosen messengers of God, who are selected in miraculous ways and tasked with leading their god’s people. Both also fail in their divine calling. Moses fails when he angrily strikes a rock in the desert of Kadesh to produce water for the Israelites: a symbol of his distrust of God. As punishment for his disbelief, God tells Moses that he will see the Promised Land but not be the one to lead his people there (Numbers 20.12). This vision of the Promised Land and representation of a view of future atonement without participation in it was a commonly represented type referred to as the Pisgah sight. The term ‘Pisgah’ refers to Mount Pisgah, where Moses was given this glimpse of the Promised Land he would never inhabit. The Pisgah sight is used in various typological ways in literature and art, as Landow notes, but one of its overarching themes is of unfulfilled anticipation which reaches its fulfilment in the redemption of Christ’s sacrifice.41 Moses, the representative of Levitical law, is shown to be incapable of bringing the Israelites into perfect community; only Christ’s atonement can bring the Israelites from the law into freedom. The illustrations by R. Caton Woodville that ran alongside the serial publication of Cleopatra in the Illustrated London News on 25 May and 15 June picture Harmachis in two variations of the Pisgah sight. The first (Figure 4.1) shows Harmachis looking out of the tomb of Rameses II where he hides after the death of his father. Harmachis has been hiding here, perfecting his skills in magic and using them to astonish the local people under the pseudonym ‘Olympus’. Eventually, this draws the attention of Cleopatra, who commands her soldiers to bring Olympus to her. The illustration shows the Roman soldiers standing before Harmachis/Olympus at the mouth of Rameses’ tomb. Light flows from behind the soldiers into the darkness of the tomb behind Harmachis, who wears a long, flowing white robe and headdress like the desert-dwellers. Harmachis, shorter than the soldiers, looks up at them and out onto the ‘Valley of the Dead’. His hands are open before him, as he willingly submits to the guards’ demands, which will ultimately lead to his death and the rebirth of Egypt at the hands of the Romans, a land he will never inhabit. In this rendition of the Pisgah sight, Harmachis looks out at the future of Egypt, a future of invasion, as Isis has prophesied. The ancient customs of Egypt, reflected in the hieroglyphs on the wall of the tomb and a statue,



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4.1  R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 25’, Illustrated London News (25 May 1889), 656

placed as a guardian of the pharaoh’s afterlife, are cloaked in shadow. The floor of the tomb is covered in rock and rubble, evidence of Egypt’s future burial in the sands of the desert. They are part of the old order that will pass away as Egypt is brought into the future, eventually resulting in the same tombs being unearthed, excavated and recast in the light of biblical archaeology. Placing Harmachis within the tomb of Rameses II

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conflates the historical and spiritual narratives and connects Harmachis’s narrative to the biblical Mosaic narrative. Just as Victorian Egyptologists believed that the Israelites escaped from slavery under the (supposed) rule of Rameses II and fled to the desert to worship God, many supporters of religious archaeology believed that Christianity ‘escaped’ from connection to the pagan past to eventually evolve into the Protestant Christianity of Haggard’s day. This Pisgah sight is inverted in the second illustration, from 15 June (Figure 4.2). Harmachis has once again re-joined Cleopatra, though she still believes him to be the magician Olympus and not Harmachis, whom she assumes has died. Dressed in similar flowing robes, the wizened Harmachis looks down on a dying Antony. Cleopatra, bedraggled and unkempt, kneels at Antony’s side, lamenting his impending death. Whereas in the previous illustration the focus of the gaze is drawn outward, in this illustration Harmachis’s sight is drawn downward onto Antony and Cleopatra. He sees the future of destruction, death and chaos his sin has wrought, but he looks at it through a gaze of judgement indicative of his Old Testament type. His mouth is set in a hard line and his pointed features all bespeak the judgement and condemnation of Levitical law which is transformed by Christ’s atoning sacrifice in the New Testament. Harmachis’s and Cleopatra’s deaths are required as part of the atonement for Harmachis’s wrongs at the end of the novel, but Isis tells Harmachis he must await true redemption in Amenti while ‘new Religions … arise and wither within the shadows’ of Egypt’s pyramids.42 Viewed as a historical type, Harmachis is representative of a leader unable to redeem his people. His sin – the initial failure to kill Cleopatra and rid Egypt of her oppressive rule and his love for her – prevents him from leading Egypt into the future. Whereas Isis commands Harmachis to remain pure in order to ‘sit upon that kingly throne and restore my ancient worship in its purity’,43 once Harmachis has failed, redemption and purity must come to Egypt via other means. In his last communion with Isis, Harmachis receives an ominous prophecy. This prophecy becomes a form of the Pisgah sight itself, connecting the pagan nature of Egypt’s past to the atoning salvation of Great Britain’s Christianity. ‘Khem [Egypt] shall no more be free till all its temples are as the desert dust’, Isis tells Harmachis, ‘still when the very name by which thou knowest Me has become a meaningless mystery to those who shall be after thee …. If thou wilt but atone and forget Me no more, I shall be with thee, waiting thine hour of redemption.’ 44 Just as Moses cannot enter the Promised Land because the true redemption of the Israelite nation comes through Jesus, Harmachis cannot succeed in his messianic mission. Here, as he stands looking upon Isis for the last time, is his Pisgah sight. He is given a glimpse



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4.2  R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 30’, Illustrated London News (15 June 1889), 756

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into the future of Egypt, when pagan religion has been stripped away and Isis’ name is a ‘meaningless mystery’.45 He awaits redemption in the form of religions ‘rising and withering’ until the ‘hour of redemption’, when divinity is once again brought to Egypt in the form of the seeming antitype to Isis worship: Christianity’s Jesus Christ. What appears to be a clear typological relationship between the type of ancient Egyptian religion and the antitype of Christianity is complicated by Isis’ final prophecy to Harmachis. She tells Harmachis that she has ‘watched Universes wither, wane, and, ’neath the breath of Time, melt into nothingness; again to gather, and, re-born, thread the vast maze of space’.46 This statement views history as a long chain of reincarnations, whereby Isis dies out in Egypt to be reborn again as the Christian messiah who will bring the ‘hour of redemption’. In his ‘Note on Religion’ from The Days of my Life, Haggard inherently contradicts himself when discussing belief in the continued existence of the human spirit. He believes that humans are often ‘coming into active Being and departing out of Being more than once’,47 but rejects this statement as having any connection to reincarnation as connected to Buddhism. He aligns his views with Christianity which he calls: ‘a religion of Life, of continued individual being, full, glorious, sinless and eternal’ while suggesting that Buddhism is the opposite.48 Haggard’s view of reincarnation as the annihilation of the individual soul was a common objection to Buddhism in the nineteenth century. Buddhism had been translated and represented by and for the West since the early nineteenth century. Philip C. Almond suggests that the British understanding of Buddhism was founded upon an ‘an ideal textual Buddhism’.49 This was the result of textual analysis of primarily non-Buddhist texts, such as the accounts of Buddhism from Christian missionaries, throughout the early nineteenth century which contributed to an overarching mode of discoursing about the religion predicated upon Western ideals.50 These discourses were developed in the popular representations of Buddhism’s founder, Gautama Buddha, in three book-length poems, the most popular of which was Sir Edwin Arnold’s bestseller The Light of Asia: Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (1879).51 Despite Buddhism’s popularity, Almond notes that certain elements of Buddhism ‘remained essentially Oriental, essentially other’, such as the understanding of nirvana, the goal of Buddhist life.52 While Buddhist ethics were lauded, even by Buddhism’s fiercest critics, the atheistic cessation of the individual soul in nirvana was difficult to reconcile. Building on this popular understanding of Buddhism as leading to the cessation of individual existence, Haggard labels it ‘a religion of Death’.53



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However, despite discrediting the religion, a few pages later he states that ‘like the Buddhists, I am strongly inclined to believe that the Personality which animates each of us is immeasurably ancient, having been forged in so many fires, and that, as its past is immeasurable, so will its future be’.54 These tensions between the two differing beliefs on life after death remain unresolved in Haggard’s own statements on faith as well as in his novels. Franklin notes that both Haggard and his literary characters ‘preached religious tolerance, but he struggled to understand the similarities and contradictions between his tacit Anglicanism, his attraction to the occult, and his belief in reincarnation and karma’.55 Franklin suggests that Haggard adopts a blend of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs along with an Egyptian metempsychosis in his novels as an attempt to resolve these contradictions.56 This metempsychosis, which Franklin defines as a nineteenth-century synonym for reincarnation, connected to ancient Egypt offered more of an unknown, blank space ‘onto which Victorians could paint their own projections and fantasies’.57 As Morton Cohen notes, ‘by the time he wrote She’, Haggard was ‘already steeped in Egyptian lore and fascinated by Egyptian beliefs. His particular brand of metempsychosis comes primarily from ancient Egypt’.58 Cohen suggests that Haggard was drawn to this Egyptian metempsychosis ‘as explaining the mystery of life and death’ in a similar way to many others who were shaken by the destabilisation of Christianity by Higher Criticism and scientific advancement.59 While he was attracted to other religious ideas about the afterlife, religious tensions remain unresolved in both The Days of my Life and Cleopatra. Readers are left with a vague understanding of Haggard’s faith as embracing something of a Buddhism-Christianity hybrid that incorporates a belief in reincarnation, connected to an Egyptian form of metempsychosis, with faith in a Christian afterlife achieved by belief in Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Haggard carefully roots his statements of untraditional beliefs, which his audience could misconstrue as falling more in line ‘pagan’ ideas, within a strong affirmation of Protestantism. Haggard’s faith sought beyond the confines of traditional concepts of life and death, which is made even more evident in his implications of the legal type of atonement and the effect of sin on one’s afterlife. Landow defines legal types as prefigurations of the Christian doctrine of atonement which held that ‘only the sacrifice of innocent blood could atone for man’s sinning against God’.60 Traditionally, legal types hearken back to Judaeo-Christian Levitical law and the use of myriad sacrifices to atone for sin. The book of Leviticus details how the Israelites were expected to atone for various sins and offences, all of which required a sacrifice for the sin to be forgiven and the Israelite allowed to move from

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the status of unclean to ceremonially clean. If atonement was not made for lesser sins – ones that did not require capital punishment – the offender suffered various social and spiritual consequences, the gravest of which was being refused access to the temple, the locus around which Hebrew life revolved. To be cut off from the temple meant being cut off from the very centre of Israelite culture. The only way to make reparation for sins and be restored to the community and the sanctuary was through atonement before God, which could take various forms: animal or harvest sacrifice, monetary reparation, or both. It was essential that the animals used for sacrifice be ‘without blemish’; other translations of the Bible use the word: ‘spotless’.61 For atonement to be effective, the sacrifice had to be innocent and without defect. Only through offering perfection could the soul’s perfection before God be redeemed. This mirrors the innocent, spotless death of Christ in the New Testament, which produced a powerful shift in the way that sin and sacrifice were viewed. In Judaeo-Christian tradition, there had never existed a perfect human being and therefore, when Christ was sacrificed, it altered the nature of atonement itself. Levitical law was a type, inherently imperfect, because the only sacrifices available were not powerful enough to redeem the person from more than one sin at a time. Christ’s death, in presenting a truly ‘perfect’ sacrifice that could satisfy a just God, differed radically from the offerings of Levitical law: ‘Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things,  as  silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot’.62 Christ’s death was an ‘incorruptible’ sacrifice compared to the sacrifices of ‘corruptible’ things which were required according to the ‘tradition’ of Old Testament, Levitical law. Furthermore, Jesus acts as an antitype to the legal type of Levitical law through his dual role as God and man: priest and judge. Harmachis’s sin against Isis in Cleopatra and his journey towards atonement allow Haggard the imaginative space to explore the nature of atonement and the afterlife, doctrines he struggled to understand from a solely Protestant perspective. Isis commands Harmachis at the beginning of the narrative to remain ‘pure’ and cleanse Egypt of foreign gods and rulers. To do this, he must kill Cleopatra and assume the throne himself. As has already been shown, he fails, but the root of his failure itself is imperative in understanding the nature of the specific atonement required. His sin lies in his love of and lust for Cleopatra, which Pearson suggests is a ‘gothic perversity of desire’ that Haggard connects to archaeology and Egypt specifically throughout his novels.63 This trope of a man seeking atonement for his sins with a woman is also common in typological



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narratives. Within this legal type lies another historical type in the form of a connection to the story of David and Bathsheba. Scholars of typology also view King David, a ‘man after God’s own heart’, as a prefiguration of Christ.64 He, like Harmachis, was called into God’s service at a young age when he was anointed by the prophet Samuel and destined to rule as king over Israel.65 Just as Harmachis was cautioned by his mother’s prophecy, his priesthood and Isis herself to live a life of purity, David is also commanded to live a holy life according to Levitical law. However, like Harmachis, David is tempted and led astray by a woman: Bathsheba. Psalm 51 is widely believed by biblical scholars to have been penned by David after he brought about the death of Bathsheba’s husband to conceal their adultery. This act and subsequent psalm bear consideration here because they present a discourse on biblical atonement. Although David would have been expected to offer sacrifices for his sin, he muses on the nature of sacrifice in the psalm and says that ‘[t]he sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise’.66 Despite the fact that Levitical law demanded David’s and Bathsheba’s deaths,67 instead of losing his life for his sin, David is forgiven. That the sacrifices of a ‘broken and a contrite heart’ were acceptable is evident from the fact that David is included in the lineage of Christ according to Matthew 1.6.68 Sacrifices of a ‘broken and contrite’ heart also make up part of Harmachis’s atonement to Isis. After failing to kill Cleopatra, he immediately acknowledges that the physical act of kissing her was ‘more deadly and more strong than the embrace of Death’, in which ‘were forgotten Isis, my heavenly Hope, Oaths, Honour, Country, Friends, all things – all things save that Cleopatra clasped me in her arms, and called me Love and Lord’.69 Cleopatra recognises the severity of Harmachis’s spiritual betrayal and mocks him for it: ‘With what eyes, thinkest thou, will the Heavenly Mother look upon Her son who, shamed in all things and false to his most sacred vow, comes to greet Her, his life-blood on his hands?’ she asks: ‘Where, then, will be the space for thy atonement? – if, indeed, thou mayest atone!’ Then I could bear no more, for my heart was broken within me. Alas! it was too true – I dared not die! To such a pass was I come that I did not even dare to die! I flung myself upon the couch and wept – wept tears of blood and anguish.70

Harmachis fears death because he feels, as Cleopatra articulates, that without any hope of atonement the only afterlife awaiting him is one of eternal punishment and damnation. It is not surprising that a discussion

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of the consequences of life’s decisions and their aftermath in the afterlife are raised in a novel whose narrative reflects Haggard’s own difficulty accepting a traditional Christian view of the afterlife. If death is simply a means to a reawakening of consciousness via reincarnation, as Haggard seems keen to believe, then atonement need not be achieved in one lifetime on earth. Reparation for wrongs can be worked out through various reincarnations; a life lived well – with strong morals and good deeds – results in a person returning to a higher, more privileged existence, whereas a life of evil requires atonement by being born into difficulties such as poverty or a lower life form. In contrast, if life on earth decides a singular, eternal existence then atonement is a much more pressing issue. Although Haggard vacillates between ideas of reincarnation and a traditional, Christian view of the afterlife as one continuous, eternal life in Heaven, in Cleopatra, Harmachis’s fear of death indicates some kind of belief in an afterlife wherein one would be required to pay for one’s sins in an unpleasant, eternal manner. Therefore, atoning on earth as much as possible is of vast importance for the fate of his afterlife. Firstly, Harmachis seeks spiritual atonement from Isis herself. In his final communion with the goddess he brings to her the ‘sacrifices of God’ of which David writes in Psalm 51. He prays that Isis will ‘put away Thy wrath, and of Thine infinite pity, O Thou all pitiful, hearken to the voice of the anguish of him who was Thy son and servant, but who by sin hath fallen from the vision of Thy love’.71 Expecting to be smote by the power of her fury, Harmachis is surprised by the grace the goddess offers. Isis cautions Harmachis to return to his duty, promising that ‘if thou wilt but atone and forget Me no more, I shall be with thee, waiting thine hour of redemption. For this is the nature of the love Divine, wherewith It loves that which doth partake of its divinity and hath once by the holy tie been bound to it.’ 72 The concept of ‘love Divine’ redeeming whatever ‘partakes of its divinity’ suggests a combination of a Levitical, sacrificial method of atonement in connection with the power of a divine, atoning sacrifice. After facilitating Cleopatra’s death, Harmachis ultimately pays for his sin with his life, in concordance with the Levitical capital punishment for crimes such as adultery and idolatry. The priesthood of Isis assures that this punishment is fulfilled by burying Harmachis alive in an unmarked tomb without the necessary funeral rites and passages from The Book of the Dead that would enable him to reach the afterlife. The nature of salvation in the cult of Isis as well as its parallels to Christianity seem to indicate that Harmachis will reach Amenti and be brought before Isis once again after death. However, it is not clear whether Harmachis’s atonement on earth will completely restore their relationship when they meet face to face.



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When Harmachis first comes before the goddess Isis, in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the cleansing rituals of Israelite priests, he is shown a series of visions which teach him the many mysteries of his religion, only revealed to the highest order of the priests of Isis. One such vision mirrors the Christian narrative of Christ’s death and substitutionary sacrifice. Harmachis sees: [T]hen did the bright spirit of Good, who is of us called Osiris, but who hath many names, offer himself up for the evil-doing of the race that had dethroned him. And from him and the Divine Mother, of whom all nature is, sprang another spirit who is the Protector of us on earth, as Osiris is our justifier in Amenti. For this is the mystery of the Osiris …. I understood the secret of religion.73

Osiris’s sacrifice, ‘the secret of religion’ can easily be recast as the atoning sacrifice of Christ, since Osiris ‘has many names’. Such a sacrifice justifies the believer in the afterlife: Amenti for Harmachis and Heaven for the Christian. However, the term ‘justified’ is vague in relation to Harmachis’s afterlife. The sacrifice of Osiris, and presumably the sacrifice of Jesus, assures a believer entrance into the afterlife upon death, but it would appear from the narrative that atonement might still be required once the afterlife is reached. The end of the narrative finds Harmachis fearfully awaiting death. ‘Now all things end in darkness and in ashes, and I prepare to face the terrors that are to come in other worlds than this,’ he writes, ‘I go, but not without hope I go: for, though I see her not, though no more She answers to my prayers, still I am aware of the Holy Isis, who is with me for evermore and whom yet I shall again behold face to face. And then at last in that far day I shall find forgiveness’.74 Although he has attempted to atone for his sins, the nature of his relationship with Isis in Amenti is uncertain. This fear does not prevent Harmachis from doing everything within his power to redeem his actions on earth. He devotes eight years to the study of magic and astrology to work out his ‘penance and make atonement’ for his sin.75 The skills he learns during this time allow him once again to be admitted into Cleopatra’s presence so he can fulfil his original mission and facilitate her death. In this way, he atones for his sin by adhering to Isis’s command to ‘forget me no more’. Harmachis remembers his original call to rid Egypt of its usurper and gives Cleopatra a poison that ensures a slow, terrifying death. Having achieved as much atonement as he can on earth, Harmachis willingly partakes in the last rite of atonement: his own sacrifice. Speaking of the quest for supernatural knowledge evident in She, Cohen suggests that ‘in the end, Haggard knows, unconsciously if not consciously, that

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the answers to his questions about life, death, and immortality are not to be had in this world’.76 Harmachis, too, must accept an ambiguous fate. He trusts that the ‘secret of religion’, Osiris’s sacrifice, as well as Isis’s promise of redemption, will follow him to the afterlife. The end of the novel returns the narrative voice to the present with an insertion by the British archaeologist, who writes, ‘Here the writing on the third roll of papyrus abruptly ends. It would almost seem that the writer was at this moment broken in upon by those who came to lead him to his doom.’ 77 Harmachis is led to the grave with as clear a conscience as possible, but this is not enough to ensure a definite picture of his eternal life. Pearson suggests that, for Harmachis, ‘[t]he Tomb reveals the conflicts of desire still being fought out in death’.78 While Pearson reads this as Harmachis’s ‘never-resolved desire’ for Cleopatra, I argue that Haggard gestures more widely to the conflicting nature of atonement and eternal life.79 Pearson’s suggestion that the ‘terror of the male never quite dying’ wherein ‘vitality is never quite extinguished, but never quite fulfilled either’ can also be more broadly applied to the vitality of the individual soul and the tensions found between reincarnation and atonement in Haggard’s early works.80 While Harmachis is eternally separated from Cleopatra, there is also the potential of separation from Isis. Both Harmachis’s earthly desires and eternal hopes remain unresolved. Uniting ancient history and Victorian religious practice The complex discussion of Haggard’s Christianity is presented in Cleopatra through an overarching spiritual history, one that sees Christianity as having evolutionary links in Egyptian polytheism. ‘Then what we behold is but a few threads, apparently so tangled’, writes Haggard in The Days of my Life, ‘that go to weave the Sphinx’s seamless veil, or some stupendous tapestry that enwraps the whole Universe of Creation which, when seen at last, will picture forth the Truth in all its splendour, and with it the wondrous story and the meaning of our lives’.81 In this paradoxical idea of a rebirth of one god in the form of another and the interconnectedness of religion, Haggard merges the history of Egyptian religion with the popular trend of seeking Judaeo-Christian types to form that ‘wondrous story’. Considered in this manner, Harmachis’s role as historical type is not just ordered by divine providence to be an exact prefiguration ‘of the characters, actions, and fortunes of future persons who should arise under Gospel dispensation’ but is instead an active character in a story of universal truth. Writing on Haggard’s earlier work She (1886–87), Reid suggests



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that ‘the novel’s representation of degeneration, its thematic insistence on survival, and its movement from scepticism to belief in the occult’ works to ‘unsettle faith in linear temporality and to suggest the enduring potency of the past’.82 This same destabilisation is evident in Cleopatra. The typological structure of Cleopatra allows the gods of Egypt to stand alongside the Judaeo-Christian God in a dialogue which connects to the shared human experience. Isis, reborn as the Judaeo-Christian God, returns to Egypt via an influx of religious Victorian archaeologists and becomes linked with Christianity. Rooting the prehistory of Haggard’s own religion within that of the ancient Egyptians shows how the polytheistic religion of the ancient Egyptians need not be a distant and alien concept, but should instead be an active participant in the shaping of Victorian faith. Landow indeed suggests that typology is effective in transforming ‘arcane rituals of an alien religion’.83 In Cleopatra, the ‘alien’ aspects of the Egyptians’ worship of multiple gods transforms into an early prefiguration of Judaeo-Christian monotheism which focused on the importance of atonement and sacrifice. Weaving together this typological narrative within an ancient Egyptian setting connects Haggard’s novel to the practices of biblical archaeological societies in the nineteenth century, but Cleopatra presents a unique imaginative space wherein readers can see the past influencing religion in the present. Haggard roots his discussion of Christianity within a sensational Egyptian narrative which speaks to the practice of cultural appropriation. While the EEF and the Society of Biblical Archaeology recast the pagan past as part of the story of the prehistory of Christianity, Haggard uses the imaginative space of an Egyptian narrative to allow conversation between foreign religions and Christianity to explore the possibilities that lay beyond the strictures of a strictly Protestant understanding of sacrificial atonement as leading to a specific, non-reincarnational afterlife. He presents a more holistic view of religion as interconnected and integral to an informed understanding of faith. The complex typological structure of Cleopatra creates an imaginative space in which Haggard could wrestle with his fluctuating faith. Cleopatra’s complicated typological narrative offers a unique perspective on the history of biblical archaeology in the nineteenth century and probes the possibility that cohesion of ancient and modern religious thought – a commingling of pagan and Christian – might exist outside the boundaries of legalistic Protestantism. Whether Cleopatra illustrates an evolutionary view of Christianity or Haggard’s own religious struggles, the one guarantee that remains is the divine voice which promised Harmachis at the beginning of his journey that: ‘Always will I be with thee, my servant, for my love

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once given can never be taken away, though by sin it may seem lost to thee’.84 Notes 1 For further reading on the role of archaeological societies in shaping the public reception of ancient Egypt, see: Thomas W. Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Dominic Montserrat,  Akhenaten History Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2000). 2 Stephanie Moser, ‘Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies, Archaeological Representation and the Interpretation of Ancient Egypt’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 22:4 (2015), 1271. 3 Ibid., 1264. 4 I use the term Egyptianising fiction to label texts which position ancient Egypt as a land of ancient wisdom that continually defers its answers. Maria Fleischhack uses both the longer ‘Egyptianising fantastic fiction’ and ‘Egyptianising literature’. Drawing on Edward Said, she defines Egyptianising literature as ‘fiction which features aspects of ancient Egypt, which describes it and makes use of it’; Maria Fleischhack, Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early TwentiethCentury Fantastic Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), p. 20. Here, I build on Fleischhack’s definition to suggest that Egyptianising fiction specifically describes and makes use of ancient Egypt as a land of ancient religious wisdom which England attempts to understand but can never fully penetrate. 5 Eleanor Dobson, ‘Science, Magic, and Ancient Egypt in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature’ (MA dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2013), p. 41. For further discussion on the serialisation of Cleopatra, see also Richard Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in Ruth Robins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 218–44. 6 Andrew Griffiths, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism, and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 2. 7 Ibid. 8 For further reading on the Haggard and the Gothic, see Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire’. 9 Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 192. 10 J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 107. 11 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 215–16. 12 George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 3.



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13 Thomas Hartwell Horne, Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1818), I, p. 609. 14 George Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), p. 13. 15 H. Rider Haggard, The Days of my Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), II, p. 255. 16 Ibid., II, p. 254. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 H. Rider Haggard, Morning Star (New York: McKinlay, Stone, and McKenzie, 1916), p. v. 20 Haggard, The Days of my Life, II, p. 30. 21 Aylward Blackman, ‘The Nugent and Haggard Collections of Egyptian Antiquities’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 4:1 (1917), 43–6. For further reading on Haggard’s collection of Egyptian antiquities and Haggard’s travels to Egypt see Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 193–9. 22 Haggard, The Days of my Life, I, p. 279. 23 Ibid., I, p. 269. 24 Ibid., I, p. 271. 25 Ibid. 26 John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), often referred to as the ‘Father of British Egyptology’, was the author of Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837 and 1841). William Osburn (1793–1875) was the author of Ancient Egypt, her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible (1846), Genesis and Exodus Illustrated from Existing Monuments (1856) and The Religions of the World (1857). Sir William Matthews Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) was made Edwards Professor of Egyptology at University College London in 1892 – the first professor of Egyptology to be appointed, excavator for the Egyptian Exploration Fund 1884–86 and 1896–1905, and knighted in 1923 for services to British archaeology and Egyptology. See Montserrat, Akhenaten History Fantasy, pp. 64–6. 27 Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 210. 28 Julia Reid, ‘Gladstone Bags, Shooting Boots, and Bryant & May’s Matches: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic’s Serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Studies in the Novel, 43:2 (2011), 167. 29 Haggard, Days of my Life, I, p. 271. 30 Ibid., p. 25. 31 R. Haggard, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by His Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (29 June 1889), 816. As this is the serialised version of Cleopatra, subsequent references to the text as it appeared in the Illustrated London News abbreviate Haggard’s name and the narrative’s title. 32 Haggard, The Days of my Life, I, p. 272. 33 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 34 Luke 1.35. All subsequent biblical references are taken from the King James Version.

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35 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (5 January 1889), 12. 36 Luke 1.32–3. 37 Horne, Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, I, p. 609. 38 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (5 January 1889), 11. 39 Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire’, p. 232. 40 Horne, Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, I, p. 609. 41 Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, p. 205. 42 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (18 May 1889), 624–5 (p. 624). 43 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (2 February 1889), 140–1 (p. 140). 44 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (18 May 1889), 624. 45 The fact that Isis’s name will become a ‘meaningless mystery’, could be interpreted as a nod to a time when British archaeologists were still learning to decipher hieroglyphs, literally making the names carved on Isis’ temple – for a time – ‘meaningless’. 46 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (18 May 1889), 624. 47 Haggard, Days of my Life, II, p. 241. 48 Ibid., II, p. 238. 49 Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 40. 50 Ibid. 51 While Franklin notes that Haggard’s sources for his knowledge of Buddhism are unclear, he ‘certainly’ would have read Arnold’s work; Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion, p. 94. 52 Almond, p. 41. 53 Haggard, The Days of my Life, II, p. 238. 54 Ibid., p. 241. 55 Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion, p. 113. 56 Ibid., p. 107. 57 Ibid., p. 97. 58 Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1960), p. 111. 59 Ibid., p. 111. 60 Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, p. 26. 61 Leviticus 4.3. 62 1 Peter 1.18–19. 63 Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire’, p. 226. 64 Acts 13.22: ‘And when he had removed him, he raised up unto them David to be their king; to whom also he gave their testimony, and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will.’ 65 1 Samuel 16.12–13. 66 Psalm 51.17. 67 Leviticus 20.10.



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68 ‘And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias.’ 69 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (23 March 1889), 366. 70 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (30 March 1889), 392. 71 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (18 May 1889), 624. 72 Ibid. 73 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (2 February 1889), 140. 74 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (29 June 1889), 816. 75 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (25 May 1889), 656. 76 Cohen, 114. 77 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (29 June 1889), 816. 78 Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire’, p. 230. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., pp. 242–3. 81 Haggard, The Days of my Life, II, p. 243. 82 Julia Reid, ‘“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20:3 (2015), 369. 83 Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, p. 26. 84 Haggard, ‘Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News (2 February 1889), 140.

5 ‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt Molly Youngkin In September 1890, while commenting on Sarah Bernhardt’s and Lillie Langtry’s performances in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in Paris and London, a reviewer for the periodical Truth posed an intriguing question: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Cleopatra was the culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt?’ 1 This question was followed with some provocative commentary: ‘We never make to ourselves a god of any kind that we do not end by resembling’; ‘Egyptian ladies were too deep in cat-worship not to have found in the mousing deity a model for imitation in their domestic lives. There is nothing that a cat does which Cleopatra did not do without exquisite cattish grace. Her goings on with Antony were those of a cat playing with a mouse’.2 The reviewer’s thoughts about Cleopatra – as a representative for ancient Egyptian women’s embrace of cat-worship and adoption of the graceful but also manipulative qualities of cat goddesses – reflect a revealing mixture of cultural influences on Victorian views of ancient Egypt in the late nineteenth century. Egyptology, which grew steadily as British explorers excavated artefacts from sacred tombs, drew Victorians to a variety of art forms, including theatre, that told stories of ancient Egypt. The lasting literary influence of Shakespeare – promoted by new editions, theatrical productions and visual representations of his work – encouraged Victorians to see Shakespeare’s plays as allegories for Britain’s relationship to its colonies. In Egypt, this included the 1882 British occupation, which sparked discussion in the periodical press about ‘the Egyptian Question’: should Britain be involved in the daily operations of Egypt? Concern over this, as well as ‘the Woman Question’, which focused on whether British women should have the same legal rights as their male counterparts, engaged



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Victorian men and women in debates about their relationships with each other. To use a phrase from Truth’s review, how was the graceful but manipulative cat, as she manifested herself in the modern British woman, playing with the mouse (or the modern British man) to assert her desire for emancipation from old laws about marriage and family? This chapter examines this mixture of cultural influences on Victorian views about ancient Egypt, as reflected in reviews of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s portrayals of Cleopatra in the periodical press. Drawing on critical and historical work about the spectacle of nineteenth-century theatre, the spectacle of late Victorian actresses’ bodies (including their feline-like forms), Victorian knowledge about Egyptian cat-worship, and the rehabilitation of the cat as a friendly pet in the Victorian period, this chapter lays out important cultural contexts for understanding audience reaction to Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s portrayals. I especially focus on how Cleopatra embodied the duality of the Egyptian cat, who possessed the threatening qualities of the lion goddess Sekhmet but also the protective qualities of the domesticated cat goddess Bastet. I also scrutinise the duality of Victorian womanhood, the mother/‘whore’ binary that perpetuated the view that women were either nurturing mothers or alluring seductresses.3 Having established these contexts, this chapter examines reviews of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances in the Athenaeum, Punch and Truth – longstanding weeklies that articulated Victorian perspectives on literature, the arts and other cultural phenomena. There has been some critical discussion of the reviews of these productions, but little analysis of reviews in these particular periodicals and how they reflected and shaped Victorian views about ancient Egypt.4 As the Curran Index shows, most Victorian periodical reviewers were men,5 and they typically upheld the authority of Shakespeare’s play and criticised nineteenth-century productions for their spectacular diversions from the original, with reviews in the Athenaeum capturing this trend most fully. These mostly male reviewers linked the alluring but also threatening qualities of Cleopatra to Victorian womanhood and ancient Egyptian cat-worship, as seen in Punch’s and Truth’s coverage of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances. They interpreted the success of stage Cleopatras through a gender- and nation-biased lens, in which actresses of different nationalities were presented as beautiful felines who drew in Victorian audiences; best suited for the role were those whose nationalities inherently constructed them as seductresses, and even whores, in the minds of the English public.6 After analysing these reviews, this chapter returns to Shakespeare’s play to re-examine passages in which Cleopatra is represented as a lover and a mother to show how these extracts – retrospectively – capture the duality of the ancient Egyptian cat and of Victorian womanhood. Although

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Bernhard Klein and Mary Thomas Crane have argued that Cleopatra is unrepresentable due to a lack of physical description of her in the play,7 I claim the reverse, since nineteenth-century directors filled in textual gaps via costume, hair and makeup to create a specific image of her in the minds of Victorian theatre-goers. The judgements expressed in Victorian periodicals can, and should, be used to re-contextualise passages in the play, leading to a better understanding that Cleopatra’s symbolic role as Egypt was fashioned by complicated views about the sexuality of English, French and Egyptian women. Even as nineteenth-century theatrical productions of Antony and Cleopatra shaped Victorian views about ancient Egypt, Victorian assumptions about women and their roles in modern Europe and ancient Egypt shaped what took place on the stage.     Margaret Lamb articulates how spectacle in nineteenth-century productions of Antony and Cleopatra reinforced imperialist pride by highlighting how Britain might emulate Rome in its defeat of Egypt. Spectacle was a key component well before the nineteenth century, since the surviving Folio includes ‘hints for performance’ that included ‘bold stage business, use of music, [and] occasions for pageantry’; David Garrick’s 1759 production, the first after a century-long lull in performances of the play, was ‘lavish’. 8 In the nineteenth century, competition among larger theatres for audiences and a belief that the theatre was a place to affirm imperialist values resulted in even more spectacle.9 For example, Philip Kemble’s 1813 Covent Garden production included a ‘revival of classical motifs’, showing that ancient Rome had ‘a special imaginative appeal in England’s own imperial century’.10 Productions from 1833 to 1906 were more and more ‘sumptuous’, combining spectacle with realism to achieve what audiences thought was ‘authentic archaeological detail’,11 yet, by the 1890s, audiences were tired of spectacular realism. Effects that once added to the ‘authenticity’ of the play now felt ‘pseudo-archaeological’, and ‘novelties’, such as the presence of mummies in the feast scenes, were no longer interesting.12 Jeffrey Richards emphasises more fully how Victorian productions reflect the prevalence of an imperialist mindset. Especially as British travel to and archaeological work in Egypt increased, and as popular art forms such as the Egyptian Court in London’s Crystal Palace brought ancient Egypt to those who could not travel, audiences were encouraged to interpret Antony and Cleopatra as a ‘lesson for imperialists’ about ‘what happened when you put private passion ahead of public duty’.13 This drove late Victorian directors to amplify spectacular elements, despite frustration from audiences. One avid theatre-goer, Richard Dickins, thought that Lewis Wingfield’s 1890 production – which starred Langtry as Cleopatra and which reviewers thought ‘bewilder[ed]’ and ‘exhaust[ed]’ audiences14



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– featured ‘characters who [had] fallen so low as to fill us with feelings of disgust’ and showed that ‘life … in Egypt is bestial in its gross animalism’.15 Dickins’s use of the present tense here shows how reviewers extrapolated ideas about Britain’s relationship with modern Egypt, despite the fact that the play was set in antiquity. Further, even praise of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production assumed a contemporary imperialist standard for success, with the Daily Telegraph claiming that Tree used ‘the subtle glamour of the East’ to help audience members become aware of ‘the fatal spell which the conquest of Egypt laid upon its Western invaders’.16 Through this lens, Egypt was held as having a beauty that could not be matched in the West, but it fell to the Western world to take responsibility for the East, a perspective with particular currency during Britain’s occupation of Egypt. Lamb’s and Richards’s important work on the spectacle of nineteenthcentury theatre can be fruitfully supplemented by that of critics who focus on Victorian actresses’ bodies, including their feline-like forms, since the presentation of women’s bodies contributed significantly to theatrical spectacle. Although Cleopatra is never referred to as a cat in Shakespeare’s play, her body came to be thoroughly associated with felines, particularly the tiger, by the early twentieth century.17 Constance Collier, who performed the role in Tree’s production, was described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘barbaric’, illustrating ‘how close the tiger’s cruelty lies under the sleek skin of cultivated woman’, and an image from this production shows the death of Cleopatra with what looks to be a tiger-skin rug nearby.18 This representation is informed by earlier representations of Victorian actresses depicting women rulers dying on tiger-skin rugs, such as Bernhardt’s portrayal of the Byzantine empress Theodora dying on such a rug in Victorien Sardou’s 1884 production of Théodora.19 Cleopatra as a wild cat also is informed by representations of the Egyptian queen in later nineteenth-century poetry and painting. William Wetmore Story’s poem ‘Cleopatra’ (1868) portrays the Egyptian queen as a ‘smooth and velvety tiger’ that makes love so wildly with Antony, also represented as a tiger, that he sinks his teeth into her back and draws blood, and Story’s 1884 sculpture of a reclining Cleopatra (which did not survive, though his 1860 sculpture of a sitting Cleopatra did) is thought to have portrayed the queen with a tiger-skin rug laid over her body.20 Further, paintings such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Antony and Cleopatra (1883), Alexandre Cabanel’s Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Men (1887), John William Waterhouse’s Cleopatra (1887) and John Collier’s Death of Cleopatra (1890) all depict Cleopatra with a wild cat, a tiger-skin rug, or both, nearby. By the time Elinor Glyn’s 1907 bestselling novel, Three Weeks, was transformed into film in 1924, the use of the tiger-skin rug by women to

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seduce men was infamous, with Glyn herself the topic of a verse, ‘Would you like to sin / with Elinor Glyn / on a tiger skin rug?’.21 In Glyn’s novel, when the Lady, the main female character who is frequently compared to Cleopatra, seduces Paul Verdayne, the main male character, she ‘writhes orgasmically upon a tiger skin’, and in the film she ‘spreads herself languorously over the tiger fur, … narrowing her eyes to feline slits’.22 The literary and artistic tradition through which Cleopatra was associated with the cat, then, is well established by the early twentieth century, and as actresses portraying Cleopatra during the period in which this association developed, Bernhardt and Langtry responded to and contributed to this tradition. Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s embrace of bodily spectacle, including its feline aspects, is highlighted by critics such as Sos Eltis, Despina Kakoudaki and Doris Adler. Eltis makes it clear that Bernhardt’s ‘lithe’ body (a characterisation that aligns with the alluring aspects of the cat) had already made her famous by the early 1880s, nearly a decade before she became a stage Cleopatra.23 Although Bernhardt and Langtry were born almost a decade apart, both embodied the ‘natural woman’ of the 1890s; Kakoudaki points out that they were ‘thinner’ than previous actresses, ‘replac[ing] the “voluptuous” woman of earlier times’.24 Further, they both ‘favored exercise’ and remained ‘youthful’ into late life,25 giving them the sort of graceful mobility associated with felines. While both occupied ‘a position of sexual vulnerability’ by virtue of being actresses (and this vulnerability may have been heightened by their association with felines), they capitalised on their sexuality by founding their own companies, picking roles that appealed to them and portraying ‘sexually transgressive’ women.26 While Eltis and Kakoudaki provide relevant details about Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s bodies, Adler places the two actresses in a broader context, laying out the development of stage Cleopatras from ‘majestic Juno’ to ‘demonic Venus’. This contrast highlights the duality of woman/feline, not only because of the shift in body type but also because Juno, goddess of marriage and mother of two children, and Venus, goddess of sexuality and an unmarried mother, are Roman deities who represent different aspects of love. Juno and Venus parallel the duality of mother and seductress in Egyptian cat goddesses, as characterised in both ancient Egypt and Victorian England. According to Adler, Harriet Faucit’s 1813 portrayal initiated the ‘majestic Juno’ interpretation, with her physical appearance capturing ‘the voluptuous magnificence of the Queen of Egypt’, but it was Isabella Glyn’s 1849 portrayal that ‘fully realized’ this interpretation, with the Illustrated London News referring to Glyn as Juno in its review.27 Although Glyn would incorporate some elements of the demonic Venus in her 1867 revival of the role, this interpretation was not completely



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developed until 1890, when Bernhardt and Langtry performed in Paris and London, basing their portrayals on Cora Potter’s depiction of Cleopatra in New York in the previous year.28 Potter, who has received little attention in comparison to Bernhardt and Langtry, was described by the mostly male reviewers as not only a ‘sinuous, purring feline’ but also a ‘lithe, clinging, alluring Egyptian woman, never an impressive or commanding queen’.29 As a lithe feline, Potter was a model for Bernhardt and Langtry as they embraced the cat-like qualities of Cleopatra, and they followed Potter’s lead in the specifics of her physical appearance. Bernhardt and Langtry adopted Potter’s costumes, which were ‘gauzy’ dresses she changed for each act, as well as her hair and makeup, a more natural look of ‘unstained cheeks’ and ‘unbound hair’.30 Further, Bernhardt’s use of live asps on stage, which would become world famous, was based on Potter’s employment of them. The Morning Journal describes Potter as ‘unbosoming’ herself in the act: ‘to put the asp to her breast, she indulged in a piece of realistic business that made the audience catch its breath’; ‘this unbosoming was accompanied by so many frantic clutches and yells and moanings that the apparent bodily torment did not make the exhibit pleasing’.31 As I discuss later in this chapter, Potter’s ‘unbosoming’ might be seen as an act of reclaiming Cleopatra’s role as mother,32 but the Morning Journal gave the impression that Potter’s portrayal was sexually provocative. Bernhardt’s interpretation of the Egyptian queen was also seen in this light, and she ceased using live asps after the first month, as the audience focused obsessively on this moment in her performance.33 Part of the spectacle, then, was the presentation of women’s bodies, and recent historical work on cat-worship in ancient Egypt adds another important layer to the cultural contexts through which to consider Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances, especially when Victorian reviewers, including the one who wrote for Truth, linked certain ancient Egyptian practices, such as cat-worship, to the decay of Victorian womanhood. Cat goddesses were especially popular during the period in which Cleopatra ruled Egypt, and rituals around cat-worship focused on the goddesses Sekhmet and Bastet, who were ‘paired as opposites’ beginning in 1850 bce, mirroring the geographical opposition of Lower and Upper Egypt.34 At first, both Sekhmet and Bastet were portrayed as lionesses, but later became ‘aspects of the same goddess, one threatening and dangerous, the other protective, peaceful and maternal’.35 Artistic representations of the two goddesses became varied, with Sekhmet remaining a ‘terrifying lioness’ and Bastet depicted as a domestic cat, a woman with a cat’s head, or a woman with a lion head and a domestic cat next to her.36 Cat-worship also was linked to the better-known mother goddesses Isis and Hathor, with women worshippers of these goddesses travelling

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to Bubastis, the city with which Bastet is associated and the site of the largest annual festival in ancient Egypt.37 En route to this festival, which attracted 700,000 pilgrims, women worshippers ‘expos[ed]’ their genitals to villagers along the Nile.38 Modern historians hold that women exposed themselves as a sign of their fertility and in imitation of Isis and Hathor, both of whom are portrayed as participating in this activity in a similar fashion in ancient Egyptian visual art and oral tales.39 The festival at Bubastis was probably held in the autumn, at the time the Nile rose and crops along the river grew extensively, connecting the fertility of the goddesses to the fertility of the country.40 Yet the early Greek historian Herodotus, representing himself as a witness to the festival in the fifth century bce, described the women worshippers without acknowledging their actions in the context of a fertility celebration, focusing instead on the display of genitals in relation to other activities he perceived as objectionable, such as cursing and drinking.41 Furthermore, the Greek clergyman Epiphanius, writing in the fourth century ce, characterised Egyptian festivals, including the one at Bubastis, as ‘orgies’ where women ‘abandon their modesty’.42 Educated Victorians relied on Herodotus as an important source on ancient cultures, and likely would have known a fictional version of Epiphanius’s views about ‘heretical’ women at Bubastis through Thomas Wimberley Mossman’s 1874 novel, Epiphanius, in which Epiphanius is seduced by Gnostic women, not unlike the women worshippers of Isis and Hathor.43 The patriarchal views of early Greek men about ancient Egyptian women, then, became ‘history’, and this history shaped how ancient Egyptian women were perceived by Victorians. The comments of Herodotus and Epiphanius align with similar comments by the nineteenthcentury male theatrical critics who expressed concern about the perceived promiscuity in Victorian actresses’ portrayals of Cleopatra. Still, it is important to recognise that patriarchal views about ancient Egyptian women might have been balanced by the Victorian view that cats were likeable and even human-like. As Katharine Rogers explains, cats were brought into European homes as pets by the tenth century ce though they were initially viewed as ‘demonic’, associated with witches and seen as an ‘agent of the devil’.44 By the eighteenth century, however, Europeans developed ‘affection’ for them, since ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘secularism’ facilitated a kinder view.45 As more people had pet cats and began to see them as ‘friends’, there followed a rehabilitation of the cat, especially through literary representations of cats as reflecting human qualities, such as ‘sensitivity’ in the novels of the Brontë sisters.46 Still, the view that cats were ‘demonic’ would continue into the Victorian period, with writers such as Charles Dickens depicting them thus.47 Rogers argues that when men write about cats, regardless of the historical period, they



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‘slide automatically into comparisons with women, as if the connection were so obvious that it did not need to be explained’.48 These comparisons capture the duality of the ancient Egyptian cat, with felines used to indicate ‘what was wrong’ with women, especially those who intended to ‘mislead men’, but also to show positive qualities, such as women as ‘attentive mother[s]’.49     With these contexts in mind, we can turn to nineteenth-century reviews about Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances of Cleopatra. Focusing on critical appraisals in the Athenaeum, Punch and Truth is useful, since all were longstanding weeklies that commented on contemporary culture. Still, each took a slightly different approach to the cultural production of knowledge. The Athenaeum (1828–1921), comprising mostly literary reviews, was initially considered ‘dull’ by some readers but became ‘an index … of current thought and taste’.50 With its combination of satirical writing and images, Punch (1841–1992) became ‘the most famous of Victorian comic newspapers’, using a ‘formula of cartoons and short comic items which made an immediate appeal to the English middle classes’.51 Finally, as one of the ‘new weeklies’ that emerged in the 1870s, Truth (1877–1957) practised ‘society journalism’, in which ‘clever gossip about the aristocratic and fashionable, witty reviews of current entertainment, exposés of financial scandal, and serious political commentary’ were the focus.52 In the months leading up to Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances, the Athenaeum framed its coverage by highlighting the cultural authority of Shakespeare’s play and its circulation through a variety of artistic forms. A May 1890 review of a Royal Academy exhibit includes discussion of the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier’s Death of Cleopatra (1890), and short notices about musical accompaniments to Antony and Cleopatra, including the French composer Xavier Leroux’s involvement in Bernhardt’s production, appear in August and October 1890. These references illustrate the cultural currency Shakespeare’s play carried in the latter part of the century, with multiple artistic forms taking Antony and Cleopatra as a subject for expression. Additionally, the Athenaeum’s book reviews illustrate how Cleopatra was used to warn against the dangers of modern women’s power. Lewis Thornton’s book Opposites: A Series of Essays on the Unpopular Sides of Popular Questions (1890) used Cleopatra as a reason to reject ‘modern ideas of the position and the rights of women’, and Thomas Tyler’s new edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1890) compared Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ to Cleopatra because of her lustful behaviour.53 Although the first review included some questioning of traditional beliefs about women, the attention given to Thornton’s and Tyler’s ideas reinforced a view of

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women as dangerous that informs the Athenaeum’s reception of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances. Commentary about Langtry’s performance is anticipated in August 1890, with notices indicating she would ‘in the course of the autumn be seen as Cleopatra’ and that the play likely would be staged at the Princess’s Theatre,54 the site of Glyn’s 1867 performance. By early November, anticipation about Langtry’s performance had been heightened by a review of Bernhardt’s performance claiming that Bernhardt was the ‘only attraction’ in an otherwise uninteresting production by Sardou.55 This review placed pressure on Langtry to outdo Bernhardt, since the reviewer states, ‘As a spectacle the whole is creditable … but there will be cause for regret if the forthcoming revival at the Princess’s does not eclipse the production’.56 A late November review of Langtry’s performance refers to these comments, as well as the standard set by Shakespeare, through opening remarks about the viewer’s inability to ‘escape’ from the spectacle of this production.57 While Langtry is ‘picturesque, handsome, and womanly’ and ‘stir[s]’ the ‘pulse’ of the audience, the reviewer primarily focuses on how this production distorts Shakespeare, to the degree that it can only be seen as an ‘adaptation’ of the play.58 Still, Langtry’s performance seems to have been adequate, if not better than Bernhardt’s, and in November 1891, the Athenaeum recalled her performance in an obituary for the director Wingfield, noting that she had revived the role of Cleopatra.59 The Athenaeum also continued to promote the cultural authority of Shakespeare’s play by running notices about new editions of the text, including its inclusion in the ‘influential’ Cassell’s National Library series.60 Yet, the notion that Cleopatra was a stain on ancient Egypt’s history and that Victorian women should look to other models also persisted, as evident in a December 1891 review of Mrs M. E. Bewsher’s 1876 novel Zipporah, the Jewish Maiden, which contrasts the ‘pious’ Zipporah to the ‘heathen’ Cleopatra.61 Clearly, the Athenaeum’s coverage of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances was influenced by its approach to the cultural production of knowledge, which emphasised adherence to tradition both in new productions of Shakespeare’s work and in terms of expectations for women. This commentary lays the groundwork for understanding reviews in Punch, which satirised Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances, and Truth, which commented more thoroughly on how their performances could be connected to ancient Egyptian cat-worship and women’s roles in Egyptian, French and British culture. The nationality-based gender biases found in these reviews reflect competing interests in Egypt by Britain and France that date to the late eighteenth century. As Jason Thompson explains, Napoleon Bonaparte’s travel to Egypt in 1798 to interrupt British contact with India prompted



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the arrival of British troops shortly thereafter.62 Although both countries retreated after several years (France in 1801 and Britain in 1803), France’s brief ‘occupation brought Egypt squarely into the diplomatic sights of both Paris and London, and it remained there for the next century and a half ’.63 David Gange details how French and British rivalry over Egypt was alive and well in Europe via public debate in books and the periodical press. For example, the first steps in the modern Western decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion in 1822 elicited expressions of serious doubt from British commentators well into the 1840s, who had hoped their own Thomas Young would be credited with the earliest linguistic breakthroughs.64 With this level of competition continuing, it is not surprising that gender biases in reviews of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances would also be infused with biases based on nationality. Punch’s coverage of their performances is presented in the periodical’s typical fashion, through text and image, and should be understood in the context of its representations of Cleopatra before the 1890s. Recent critics such as Donald Reid and Bradley Deane have focused on Punch’s 1882 publication of the cartoon ‘Cleopatra before Caesar; Or, the Egyptian Difficulty’, which revises Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1866 oil painting Cleopatra and Caesar by replacing Caesar with British prime minister William Gladstone, who initiated Britain’s occupation of Egypt.65 In this cartoon, a scantily dressed Cleopatra is clearly identified according to nationality, via an under-breast sash bearing the word ‘Egypt’. The cartoon suggests that the ‘Egyptian difficulty’ for Britain, represented by a seductive woman presenting herself to a man, was similar to that faced by Rome in Caesar’s time. Deane has delineated this cartoon as ‘explicitly erotic’ and indicative of the ways ‘political and sexual possibilities salaciously converge’; ‘imperialist policy toward Egypt is allegorized for the public as a problem of sexuality staged against an equally problematic backdrop of anachronistic time’.66 This point confirms that part of the spectacle of Cleopatra/Egypt was the sexualised presentation of her body, a perspective evident in Punch’s commentary about Bernhardt and Langtry. Still, much had changed in Britain’s perception of its relationship to Egypt by 1890, when these performances were reviewed. Britons were more ‘anxious’ about the threat Egypt posed but also wearied by so much discussion of the topic in the press.67 A satirical poem appearing in Punch on 20 July 1889 confirms this feeling by characterising H. Rider Haggard’s 1889 novel Cleopatra as just as ‘dull’ and ‘stale’ as the Egyptian Question.68 Yet there was enthusiasm for Cleopatra in other forms of entertainment. A humorous piece about the Shah of Iran’s 1889 visit to London reports that the Shah ‘positively smiled’ when he saw the ballet Cleopatra at the Empire Theatre,69 and the author of the 21 September 1889 ‘Our

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Booking-Office’ column, possibly one of the daughters of Punch editor Francis Cowley Burnand,70 expresses a desire to see Bernhardt as Cleopatra, exclaiming ‘What a Cleopatra she would make!’ 71 The gender of the writer may explain the more enthusiastic response to Cleopatra, though it also is true that many Victorian women were as immersed in patriarchal culture as their male counterparts. For more traditional women and men, Cleopatra still was a woman to be feared, even as she entertained. Only a month before one reviewer expresses excitement about seeing Bernhardt in the role of Cleopatra, another reviewer, ‘the Baron de Book-Worms & Co.’, comments that if Cleopatra really smoked opium in order to ‘lure Mark Antony’, she might not have been ‘disposed to “stick daggers and carvingknives into the gizzards” of … her slaves and temporary lovers’.72 Although references to Cleopatra abound in Punch, its commentary of Bernhardt’s performance appears in only one cartoon, titled ‘Cleopatra in Paris’ (Figure 5.1). The cartoon depicts Cleopatra in bed, looking not just lithe but gaunt, suggesting that Punch was offering a critical view of Bernhardt’s use of her body to appeal to Victorian audiences. Unlike other

5.1  ‘Cleopatra in Paris’, Punch (1 November 1890), 208



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periodicals, which had played up the sensationalism of late Victorian actresses using their lithe, feline bodies to seduce their audiences, Punch suggests that the actress who becomes too cat-like may be using her body for dangerous purposes. Interestingly, Bernhardt does not look especially Egyptian in the cartoon, wearing a plain white gown and stocking cap instead of the ornate and form-to-body costumes she wore for her performances, but the caption for the cartoon iterates the potentially dangerous actions of Cleopatra. As Bernhardt/Cleopatra eats from a platter of asparagus, held by a black servant in more identifiably Egyptian dress, the caption explains her activity: ‘The true History. Queen Cleopatra dying from the effects of several Bites of Asp-aragus. Or is it truer that Queen Cleopatra died from eating too much of something ‘En Aspic’? Ask Sardou, Sara, & Co.’ 73 The cartoon pokes fun at Bernhardt’s use of live asps by turning the snakes into vegetables and by suggesting Cleopatra may have died from eating too many jellied items (‘en aspic’ in French), rather than from snake bites. This joke iterates the point that women who use their bodies in particular manners may be dangerous, but it also shifts the commentary from Cleopatra as representative of ancient Egypt to Bernhardt as representative of French culture, a shift worth noting, since the sexual characteristics thought to be unique to French women were to be highlighted in Truth’s commentary. Punch’s review of Langtry’s performance is more extensive, via a wellillustrated article titled ‘A Pair of Spectacles’ that parallels the Athenaeum’s coverage by criticising contemporary productions of Antony and Cleopatra for overemphasis on spectacle while still affirming the cultural authority of Shakespeare’s original. The review opens by identifying the production as a ‘spectacle classic’, a comment that is reinforced by the first illustration (Figure 5.2): Cleopatra sits on her throne, surrounded by her barge, looming Egyptian statues, and other props while the director Wingfield remarks to Shakespeare, whose head barely peeps into the illustration, ‘Ah! The Divine William. Yes – let’s se[e] – I think we can squeeze you in somewhere’.74 Still, even as this text and image affirms Shakespeare’s authority, elsewhere the article presents this production as popular entertainment: Enobarbus is ‘clever and careful’; Octavius is ‘courteous and gentlemanly’; and Antony is a ‘rantin’, roarin’ boy’.75 Langtry, described as ‘Her Graceful Majesty’ and ‘Queen of Egyptian Witchery’ by the reviewer, is superior to other actresses who have performed the role.76 Although the reviewer thinks that there are better roles for women, Cleopatra’s death scene is ‘beyond all compare her best’, and the reviewer urges audience members to stay until the end, when ‘the Curtain has descended on that gracious figure of the Queen of Egypt, attired in her regal robes … but dead in her chair of state’.77

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5.2  Untitled illustration for ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268

This review encourages readers of Punch to take Langtry’s performance at least somewhat seriously, but the illustrations that accompany the discussion of Cleopatra’s death scene complicate this. One (Figure 5.3) – which depicts a mature Cleopatra dying in front of two large statues transformed from traditional looming Egyptians to black performers with bowties, pigeon-toed feet and tambourines – suggests the play is akin to minstrelsy.78 Another (Figure 5.4), in which a younger Cleopatra runs after a carriage called ‘All the Way to the Monument’ 79 – suggests Langtry’s portrayal of Cleopatra’s death is as comic as it is tragic. As Bernhardt’s gaunt body in ‘Cleopatra in Paris’ is used to satirise her performance, the body types here – a more mature, bustier Cleopatra/Langtry in the first two illustrations and a younger, even girlish Cleopatra/Langtry in the third illustration – are used to satirise Langtry’s performance. The tragedy of Cleopatra’s death, manifested in the mature body, turns comedic, as Langtry’s body grows younger as she runs to the monument, the scene of tragedy. Punch’s satirical commentary reveals some of the ways in which Victorian views about women shaped how ancient Egypt was represented, and this



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5.3  ‘The Last Scene of Antony and Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268

is more fully exposed in Truth, where these views are used to highlight the promiscuity of ancient Egyptian women and modern European women, even as the reviews in Truth acknowledge both groups of women as possessing the sexual maturity needed to capture the duality of ancient Egyptian cat. The first mention of Bernhardt’s Cleopatra occurs on 28 August 1890, when the author of a regular column titled ‘Notes from Paris’ states that Bernhardt will play the role well, based on the writer’s belief that Cleopatra is of the same ‘savage stock’ as the Somali people

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5.4  ‘The Run of Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268

whom the writer has seen at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a ‘human zoo’ in Paris.80 As Sadiah Qureshi has shown, the notion that ‘foreign’ performers were ‘profession “savages”’ was well established in the nineteenth century through ‘human displays’ that featured colonised people as ‘spectacular entertainment’ but also ‘specimens’ who could be ‘exploited’ to promote racist perspectives.81 In identifying Bernhardt/Cleopatra as similar to the professional Somali performers/‘savages’, Truth conflated perceived characteristics of at least two African nationalities (Somali and Egyptian) with perceived characteristics of the French and women actresses, groups that were also ‘othered’ in British culture. Two weeks after this reference to Bernhardt as a ‘savage’ performer, the author of ‘Notes from Paris’ explains more fully why Bernhardt is a good choice for the role, writing that Cleopatra ‘will … give Sarah Bernhardt rich opportunities to appear in the love passages and the cruel ones – a feline metamorphosed into a woman’; ‘Sarah having feline qualities, her acting is sure to be good’.82 In contrast, the writer doubts that Langtry will play Cleopatra well, since her nationality does not harmonise with the role. Langtry is better suited for ‘a drawing-room comedy’, since ‘Cleopatra is a kittle character for a London theatre, unless played by some French actress who has no character to lose’; ‘Cleopatra truthfully impersonated by an English actress must be regarded by the Bishops and



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clergymen who now patronise the British stage as objectionable’.83 Truth, then, distinguishes English women from French women based on their inherent character, and this contrast is extended in a 27 November 1890 review of Langtry’s performance, ‘Cleopatra Lilyised’. According to the writer, Langtry appears as ‘a pretty woman dressed up for a fancy ball’ who ‘hankers after the coins and bangles and the Egyptian frippery of Cleopatra’, simply imitating Bernhardt.84 While Bernhardt has not lived up to the original Cleopatra, the writer believes that Bernhardt possesses the ‘sinuousness’, ‘grace’, ‘variety’ and ‘charm’ needed to perform the role well.85 Ultimately, ‘Cleopatra is a woman, … a grand creature’, and Bernhardt, because she is a French woman, is best suited for the part.86 In discussing these performances, Truth comments not only on women’s roles in the theatre but also on ancient Egyptian culture, as understood from an imperialist perspective that promoted biases about gender, nationality and race. In the 11 September 1890 ‘Notes from Paris’ column in which Bernhardt is most overtly described as having feline qualities, the writer turns from this characterisation to raise the question with which I began this chapter, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Cleopatra was the culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt?’ and the accompanying comments about Egyptian women’s involvement in cat-worship.87 The writer’s depiction of Cleopatra as a cat toying with her mouse Antony captures the notion that Cleopatra, ruling Egypt during a time when cat-worship was at its height, was both alluring and manipulative, and linking Bernhardt’s Cleopatra to the cat-like tendencies of a generalised ancient Egyptian woman creates a stereotype through which Truth’s audience might view Egyptian culture. Interestingly, the writer frames this stereotyping with commentary about the age and procreative faculties of European actresses, stating that the role of Cleopatra is ‘ideal’ for ‘a brilliant actress, well advanced in middle age, and not resigned to sink to stage motherhood’.88 Furthermore, the reviewer believes that Cleopatra played by a girl who is not yet able to bear children could not be successful: ‘Kittenishness would be fatal to the character’, since the actress who plays Cleopatra must be a ‘feline … adroit’ enough to ‘[slip] through Caesar’s fingers’ when she cannot ‘twist him round hers’.89 In other words, both Bernhardt and Langtry needed to be mature women capable of exhibiting the duality of the fierce and protective mother cat in a role too complex for a younger actress. Truth’s use of pan-cultural ideas about women’s ageing to perpetuate stereotypes about ancient Egypt continues in the 23 October 1890 ‘Notes from Paris’ column, wherein the writer contrasts Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances in the context of images of Cleopatra on coins held by the National Library: ‘Cleopatra, on these coins, is far nearer to Sarah

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Bernhardt than to Mrs. Langtry’.90 With Bernhardt’s likeness to Cleopatra established, the writer describes Cleopatra’s physical features – her ‘full, luscious lips’, the ‘prominence’ of her ‘forehead’, her ‘sinister eye’, and the ‘aquiline curve of the nose’ – and suggests that these features confirm that Cleopatra is a ‘woman prone to sensual joys, cynical, fond of a cruel joke, and contemptuous’.91 As described here, Cleopatra is the manipulative feline, but the writer also suggests that Cleopatra grew into this role, since the coins portray her ‘at all ages’, with some of her physical features changing over time and others remaining the same.92 The writer prefers the ‘historically accurate’ Cleopatra portrayed by Bernhardt to Langtry’s version of her,93 but his analysis of Cleopatra’s character according to her physical features betrays the nineteenth-century European bias towards physiognomic ways of assessing character, since he also links her features to the Somali people mentioned in the 28 August 1890 column. The writer uses physiognomy for more than one purpose, reinforcing an imperialist way of looking at race in ancient Egyptian culture but also advancing stereotypes about women across historical periods and cultural contexts. Finally, on 27 November 1890, the ‘Notes from Paris’ writer provides one last comment about Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances in relation to ancient Egyptian culture. The writer recounts a conversation with a French critic who had seen Langtry’s performance in London and thought she was ‘adorablement jolie’ but ‘much more Queen of the Alhambra, which furnishes its dancing corps, than of ancient Egypt’.94 The expectation that Cleopatra should represent ancient Egypt, but that Langtry had failed to do so, highlights the ways in which Shakespeare’s play affected Victorian views of ancient Egypt but also how Victorian views about women shaped audience reaction to productions of the play. On the one hand, this comment reinforces a Victorian view that women were either pretty English dolls or manipulative Egyptian women who, like Cleopatra, played with men as cats played with mice. On the other hand, read in the context of Truth’s more complex analysis of how mature women were better fit to perform Cleopatra, this comment suggests that Langtry failed to be successful in the role because she did not have Bernhardt’s maturity. Truth presented Egypt as a gendered nation, and one that threatened to destroy England via its ‘dangerous’ women, but it also presented France and England as gendered in particular ways, with France closely aligned with the feminine threat of Egypt while England could separate itself from this threat. Egyptian and French women were inherently promiscuous, and English women should be protected from falling into this category, though the challenge of performing the role of Cleopatra might make such a decline more probable.   



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Having examined the similarities and differences among reviews of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances in three Victorian periodicals, and how these reviews reflect conflicted views about ancient Egypt and women, it is prudent to return to Shakespeare’s text, to re-examine passages that characterise Cleopatra in traditionally contrasting women’s roles: lover and mother. Marga Munkelt has shown that although most nineteenthcentury directors cut scenes from their productions in order to allow for spectacle, most of the passages in which Cleopatra is referred to as both lover and mother remained, including in Langtry’s production.95 I am particularly interested in how Cleopatra is referred to as a ‘whore’ whose ‘lust’ for Antony can only mean destruction for Egypt and Rome but also a ‘nurse’ or mother, who embraces the ‘baby’ asp in her dying moments in order to recover her maternal identity.96 These passages, as well as others that describe Cleopatra/Egypt as lover and mother, read with consideration of the cultural contexts established in this chapter, illuminates more fully Cleopatra’s symbolic role as Egypt. Recent scholars acknowledge that Cleopatra embodies Egypt but have not adequately shown how, in this symbolic role, Cleopatra serves as a vehicle for nineteenth-century reviewers, as producers of cultural knowledge, to warn women about the dangers of becoming promiscuous, even as Cleopatra also is a protective maternal figure. Some critics have even argued that Cleopatra is unrepresentable, based on the lack of physical description of her in the text. Bernhard Klein acknowledges that sexualised descriptions of Cleopatra should be seen as ‘propaganda’ of the period yet underemphasises the material impact of this propaganda by arguing that Cleopatra is unrepresentable because of disagreement about her skin colour and lack of other physical description.97 Likewise, Mary Thomas Crane provides a compelling argument about representations of the Roman world and the Egyptian earth in the play but argues, as Klein does, that Cleopatra is unrepresentable, based on Enobarbus’s statement that ‘her own person, / It beggar’d all description’.98 The periodical reviews discussed in this chapter confirm that costume, hair and makeup were used to satisfy any absences regarding Cleopatra’s physical appearance. The view that Cleopatra is unrepresentable ignores the myriad interpretations of her in diverse contexts – including those laid out in this chapter – as well as the many passages in Shakespeare’s text that show she fulfils multiple roles, including lover and mother. Among passages in the play that refer, either explicitly or implicitly, to Cleopatra as a lover, and even a ‘whore’ who engages in ‘lustful’ behaviour, are: lines I.i.1–13, in which Philo describes how Antony has turned his attention to Cleopatra and will become ‘the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust’; lines III.x.12–45, in which Scarrus describes Caesar’s victory

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and the flight from battle by Antony and Cleopatra, who is characterised as ‘a ribaudred nag of Egypt’; and lines IV.xii.12–32, in which Antony himself describes how Cleopatra has ‘betrayed’ him, calling her a ‘Tripleturned whore’ who has ‘sold’ him to Caesar. ‘Gipsy’ and ‘nag’, as Bate and Rasmussen indicate in their edition of the play, are coded language for ‘whore’,99 and in all three passages Cleopatra’s ‘lust’, or sexual desire, is to blame for Antony’s defeat, suggesting Egypt is a seductive woman who has lured Rome to its defeat. In addition, there are many other passages that use sexual metaphors to refer to Cleopatra/Egypt, solidifying Shakespeare’s presentation of Egypt as a nation defined by excessive feminine sexuality. For example, in lines I.ii.142–8, Enobarbus describes Cleopatra as a woman who ‘dies instantly’ and has ‘die[d] twenty times’. The word ‘die’ implies sexual orgasm,100 and Antony immediately recognises that he/Rome is in danger by interacting with Cleopatra/Egypt, since he responds to Enobarbus’s statement by saying, ‘She is cunning past men’s thought … Would I had never seen her’.101 Further, in line I.v.36, Cleopatra describes herself as a ‘morsel for a monarch’, meaning that she is a ‘sexual mouthful’ for the Roman Pompey, who ‘die[s] / With looking on his life’, and in lines II.i.43–4, Pompey, knowing the effect Cleopatra has on men, says they must ‘pluck / The ne’er lust-wearied Antony’ from the ‘lap of Egypt’s widow’, a reference to removing Antony from Cleopatra’s vagina.102 All of these references develop further the symbolism of Cleopatra/Egypt as a seductive woman/nation, signifying the wide range of methods women/threatened nations use in order to triumph over men/hostile nations, much like the mousing cat described in Truth. That said, there also are passages that reject long-held binaries of womanhood by characterising Cleopatra as a role culturally held as the ‘opposite’ of seductive lover: a procreative mother. Leading up to the representation of Cleopatra as a ‘nurse’ or mother who puts the ‘baby’ asp to her ‘breast’ as she is dying,103 there are significant references to Cleopatra’s fertility and potential for procreation. During Cleopatra and Antony’s conversation about the death of Fulvia, Antony’s wife and mother of two of his children, Antony says that he will leave Egypt just as the ‘fire … quickens Nilus’ slime’, a reference to the sun making the river fertile, and Cleopatra depicts herself through an image of childbirth, claiming that watching Antony leave her is like ‘sweating labour’.104 Later in the play, when Antony accuses Cleopatra of disloyalty, she refers to the ‘memory of my womb’, or her procreative ability, in order to assuage his anger, and very late in the play, as Cleopatra is prevented from killing herself with a sword, she characterises herself as a ‘queen / Worthy many babes’ as she asks ‘death’ to take her.105 These passages confirm that Cleopatra



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is as much a mother as she is a lover, balancing out the whore/mother binary in the play. Janet Adelman has argued that Cleopatra ‘carries the taint of the whoremother’ via her relationship with Antony, but she also is ‘the agent of salvation’ through her association with Isis.106 For Adelman, Cleopatra, as ‘mother of the world’, nurtures Antony back into being by ‘memorializing’ him after his death and sacrifices herself for him by committing suicide.107 Karl Zender, building on Adelman’s interpretation but also rejecting her view of Cleopatra’s death, suggests that Cleopatra, through her death, embraces multiple roles for women. Her suicide is an act of restoring her own ‘nobleness’, precisely because she reclaims the roles of ‘wife, queen, lass, and nurse or mother’.108 While Zender provides evidence that Cleopatra is representable as a complex woman, he does not connect the complexity of Cleopatra’s identity as a woman to the identities of ancient Egyptian women or modern European women. Like the ancient Egyptian women worshippers and Victorian European actresses discussed in this chapter, Cleopatra is both the seductive and the nurturing feline. The influence of culturally constructed expectations about sexuality and gender on Victorian perceptions of ancient Egypt, established in the text of Shakespeare’s play and reinforced in nineteenth-century productions of it, should be more fully recognised. Judgements about the success of stage Cleopatras were influenced by Victorian attitudes towards women, and these attitudes – towards English, French and Egyptian women – shaped how ancient Egypt was presented to nineteenth-century audiences. Egypt was, in the mind of reviewers, both the land of immodest women because Cleopatra represented Egypt through sexually promiscuous behaviour, and a land where fertile women were powerful rulers, since she was also associated with mother goddesses such as Isis, Hathor and Bastet. By recognising the complex interrelationship between the theatre, history and contemporary culture, the seemingly offhand comment in Truth with which this chapter began – that Cleopatra and other ancient Egyptian women were graceful but manipulative cats, playing with men as though they were mice – signifies more complicated and intriguing meanings and points to the distinct advantages of interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian culture.

Notes My thanks to the librarians – especially Andrea Grimes – at Book Arts and Special Collections, San Francisco Public Library, for their assistance in accessing volumes of Punch.

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1 ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (11 September 1890), 526. 2 Ibid. 3 I use quotation marks around the word ‘whore’ here to indicate that this is a misogynist term used to refer to the threatening aspects of women’s sexuality. Except when quoting the word in Shakespeare’s play, I omit quotation marks after this instance, with the understanding that I do not advocate the use of this word to describe women. 4 See, for example, Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Duncan highlights how periodical coverage illuminates Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s use of their sexuality to portray Cleopatra, focusing on how Bernhardt, Langtry and Janet Achurch, who played Cleopatra in the 1897 production at the Queen’s Theatre in Manchester, ‘embodied fin-de-siècle fantasies and fears about disruptive women’ (p. 179). However, Duncan does not discuss reviews from the Athenaeum, Punch or Truth, using the Pall Mall Gazette, Graphic and Review of Reviews instead. 5 Anonymity in nineteenth-century periodical reviewing creates significant challenges in determining the gender breakdown of reviewers, but the Curran Index provides general conclusions about the dominance of men in this field. Of the indexed reviews written between 1837 and 1900, 3,348 were written by men, while only 152 were written by women. Thanks to Gary Simons, editor of the Curran Index, for this information. 6 See Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) and Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for an examination of the categorisation of Victorian actresses as whores. Although few nineteenth-century women reported working as both actresses and prostitutes, the perception that they were one and the same was advanced by writers such as William Acton, who emphasised the proximity of the stage and the street in London (Davis, Actresses as Working Women, pp. 78–86). Writers such as George Moore, in A Mummer’s Wife (1885), and Harriett Jay, in Through the Stage Door (1884), perpetuated this idea through fiction, showing that male and female authors were complicit in advancing myths about working women (Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, pp. 32–3). 7 Bernhard Klein, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 458–9; Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Roman World, Egyptian Earth: Cognitive Difference and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’, in Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 111. 8 Margaret Lamb, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), pp. 25, 44. 9 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 10 Ibid., p. 53.



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11 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 12 Ibid., p. 83. 13 Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 206–7. 14 Lamb, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage, p. 83. 15 Richards, The Ancient World, p. 208. 16 Ibid., p. 210. 17 Katherine M. Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 34; In fact, Shakespeare rarely uses the cat as a symbol in any of his plays, though he does refer to it briefly in Much Ado about Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, and Macbeth (Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination, pp. 34–5). 18 John Russell Brown, Shakespeare/Antony and Cleopatra: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 53; William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Modern Library, 2009), p. 160. 19 Eric Salmon (ed.), Bernhardt and the Theatre of her Time (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 153. 20 William Wetmore Story, ‘Cleopatra’, Graffiti d’Italia (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1868), lines 81, 117–20; Mary Elizabeth Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1897), p. 229. 21 Laura Horak, ‘“Would you Like to Sin with Elinor Glyn?”: Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education’, Camera Obscura, 25:2 (2010), 105. 22 Ibid., 78, 93. 23 Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 112. 24 Despina Kakoudaki, ‘Pinup and Cyborg: Exaggerated Gender and Artificial Intelligence’, in Marleen S. Barr (ed.), Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 175. 25 Ibid. 26 Eltis, Acts of Desire, p. 153. 27 Doris Adler, ‘The Unlacing of Cleopatra’, Theatre Journal, 34:4 (1982), 455. 28 Ibid., 456–7. 29 Ibid., 457–9. 30 Ibid., 460–1. 31 Ibid., 463. 32 Karl F. Zender, Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 52. 33 ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (20 November 1890), 1050. 34 Barbara Allen, ‘Animals in Ancient Egyptian Religion and Mythology’, in Barbara Allen (ed.), Animals in Religion: Devotion, Symbol and Ritual (London: Reaktion, 2016), pp. 105, 107. 35 Ibid., p. 107.

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36 Ibid., p. 107. 37 Ian Rutherford, ‘Down-Stream to the Cat-Goddess: Herodotus on Egyptian Pilgrimage’, in Jaś Elsner and Ian Rutherford (eds), Pilgrimage in GraecoRoman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 147–8. Bubastis was also an extensive repository for cat mummies, with enough mummies that European explorers transported these mummies back to their home countries for use as land fertilizer (ibid., p. 144). 38 Ibid., pp. 142–3. 39 David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 104; Dominic Montserrat, Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), p. 168. 40 Rutherford, ‘Down-Stream to the Cat-Goddess’, p. 141. 41 Ibid., p. 142. 42 Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, pp. 59–60. 43 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 61, 78; A. Jacobs, Epiphanies of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), p. 247. 44 Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination, pp. 19, 45. 45 Ibid., p. 39. 46 Ibid., pp. 91, 98. 47 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 48 Ibid., p. 166. 49 Ibid., pp. 169, 171. 50 Leslie A. Marchand, The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture (New York: Octagon, 1971), pp. 20, 27. 51 John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 515. 52 Claire Hirshfield, ‘Truth’, in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 424. 53 ‘Literature’, Athenaeum (19 July 1890), 88; ‘Literature,’ Athenaeum (26 July 1890), 124. 54 ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (2 August 1890), 172; ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (9 August 1890), 204. 55 ‘M. Sardou’s New Play’, Athenaeum (8 November 1890), 634. 56 Ibid. 57 ‘Drama’, Athenaeum (22 November 1890), 707. 58 Ibid., 708. 59 ‘Drama’, Athenaeum (21 November 1891), 694; ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (21 November 1891), 694. 60 The Story of the House of Cassell (London: Cassell, 1922), pp. 160–1. 61 M. E. Bewsher, Zipporah, the Jewish Maiden (London: Griffith and Farran, 1876), p. 5. See also Sara Woodward’s chapter in this volume, which details



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how, in H. Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889), the eponymous queen tempts the protagonist away from his duties to the goddess Isis. 62 Jason Thompson, History of Egypt: From Earliest Times to the Present (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), pp. 219–20. 63 Ibid., p. 222. 64 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 33–5. 65 Dominic Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 154, 156; Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 172. 66 Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism, p. 172. 67 Ailise Bulfin, ‘The Curse of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 54:4 (2011), 416–17; Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 21. 68 ‘The Whirlgig of Time’, Punch (20 July 1889), 25. For more on Haggard’s novel, see Sara Woodward’s chapter in this volume. 69 ‘Nichts Twa wi’ the Shah’, Punch (13 July 1889), 16. 70 Katy Birch, ‘List of Contributors by Year’, Ladies who Punch: Female Punch Contributors, 1859–1918, https://ladieswhopunchbiogs.wordpress.com. 71 ‘Our Booking-Office’, Punch (21 September 1889), 137. 72 ‘Our Booking-Office’, Punch (10 August 1889), 72. 73 ‘Cleopatra in Paris’, Punch (1 November 1890), 208. 74 ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. Punch’s source for this illustration appears to have been its rival periodical, Fun, which ran a similar illustration on 21 May 1890, in which the bow-tied figures are identified as ‘Collier Minstrels’ who constituted ‘Cleopatra’s Nightmare after a Visit to the British Museum’. See ‘Another Academy Puzzle’, Fun (21 May 1890), 216. The fact that Punch and Fun reference black people in marginalised roles in their coverage of Bernhardt’s and Langtry’s performances suggests that the periodicals likely also were commenting more widely on racial identity in ancient Egypt. For more about this topic, see Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 186–7, as well as Jasmine Day’s chapter in this volume. 79 ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, 268. 80 ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (28 August 1890), 431–2. 81 Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 4–5.

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‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (11 September 1890), 526. Ibid. ‘Cleopatra Lilyised’, Truth (27 November 1890), 1101. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (11 September 1890), 526. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (23 October 1890), 831. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (27 November 1890), 1104. Marga Munkelt, ‘Restoring Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra on the Nineteenth-Century Stage: Samuel Phelps and Isabella Glyn’, Theatre History Studies, 12 (1992), 2, 5–6, 8–9. 96 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV.xii.15, I.i.10, V.ii.354; Zender, Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity, p. 52. 97 Klein, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, pp. 461, 458–9. 98 Crane, ‘Roman World, Egyptian Earth’, p. 111. 99 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Bate and Rasmussen, pp. 4, 76. 100 Ibid., p. 12 101 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I.ii.149, 155. 102 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Bate and Rasmussen, pp. 12, 24, 28. 103 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.354. 104 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.79–80, 113; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Bate and Rasmussen, pp. 16–17. 105 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, III.xiii.163, V.ii.56–7. 106 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge Press, 1992), pp. 179, 183. 107 Ibid., pp. 184, 187. 108 Zender, Shakespeare, Midlife and Generativity, pp. 50, 55. 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

6 ‘A Memnon waiting for the day’: ancient Egypt in the aesthetic and decadent imaginary Giles Whiteley

You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread, Slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands, An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood Sings only in the glow of setting sun.

So ends Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen (II)’ (1857, lines 20–4), capturing and delineating an image of Egypt which would fascinate a whole generation of writers and artists.1 The persona of Baudelaire’s poem is riddled by ‘ennui’ (line 17), his mind haunted by ‘more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years’ (line 1). He figures this mind as ‘a pyramid, a giant vault / Holding more corpses than a common grave’ (lines 6–7). The connotations are thanatic: the pyramid is the monumental grave which memorialises death-in-life and life-in-death. It images an unconscious abyss, a crypt which serves as a repository for unwelcome, unholy desires.2 These Egyptian connotations return at the poem’s conclusion, where the persona is compared with another Egyptian monument, this time ‘an ancient sphinx’ (line 22) found ‘slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands’ (line 21). In classical literature, the Sphinx is the riddler, who is only defeated by Oedipus, in an incident which figures in Greek mythology for the moment when man first became ‘Greek’, a moment of man’s coming-to-selfconsciousness.3 But knowledge, too, has its cost for Baudelaire’s persona, so that his sphinx is ‘wrapped in some vague dread’ (line 20). His sphinx is melancholic, since its dread is without definite object.4 In ‘Spleen (II)’, Baudelaire is not so much writing Egypt as redeploying and recoding an image of Egypt in his poetry. His use of Egypt is significant,

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since it would in many ways circumscribe what would become the aesthetic and decadent imaginary. While critics have long been interested in the central importance of the classical ideal of ancient Greece for the aesthetes and decadents, and their corresponding reception of ancient Rome, mapping the ways in which Greek homoerotic culture and conceptions of masculinity were productively appropriated by these writers, far less attention has been given to the strategies these writers used in representing ancient Egypt. For instance, while critics such as Lynn Parramore in Reading the Sphinx (2008) and Maria Fleischhack in Narrating Ancient Egypt (2015) both deal briefly with Wilde during the course of their respective studies of nineteenth-century British reception of Egypt, neither considers the complex responses of the wider movements of aestheticism and decadence explicitly.5 But while it is no doubt the case that, broadly speaking, the classical ideal remained central to the aesthetic imaginary, this chapter demonstrates that the seemingly marginal topic of ancient Egypt retained a significant role in aesthetic literature. In what follows, I locate three interrelated discursive deployments of ancient Egypt in the literature of the period: firstly, in an argument derived from Hegel’s Aesthetics (1818–29), Egypt is figured as a ‘Symbolic’ mystery, whose art is underdeveloped by comparison to the ‘Classical Ideal’;6 secondly, and concurrently, Egypt is figured as a site of ennui, where these symbolic aesthetic dimensions are linked intrinsically to a melancholic decadence and to death; thirdly, and finally, Egypt is figured for its eroticism. The three discourses relate insofar as the philosophical ideas rely upon the (supposedly) inherent distance that divided the classical world of order, reason and rationality, from Egypt. It is this distance which is mobilised productively by the aesthetic and decadent tradition so that Egypt becomes a space of ‘irrational’ forces, be those of ennui, death or jouissance. It is these three competing but complementary discourses operating in the aesthetic and decadent literature of the period that this chapter begins to map. Egyptian monuments: obelisks, sphinxes, colossi ‘Spleen (II)’ was not the only poem in Les Fleurs du mal in which Baudelaire mobilises Egyptian imagery. In ‘La Beauté’, beauty, personified, is figured as cold and alienating (line 1), ‘reign[ing] in the air like a puzzling sphinx’ (line 5). The image recalls the Greek myth: there, the Sphinx, half-lion, half-woman, lived in the mountains at the western edge of Theban territory, where she would intercept passers-by, killing anyone who incorrectly answered her riddle: ‘What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?’ 7 Eventually Oedipus replied



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‘a man’, ending her reign of tyranny, and with this answer, the Greek world supplanted the Egyptian. In Baudelaire’s poem, beauty is associated less with the classical ideal than with the Egyptian sphinx, resisting attempts to answer its mysteries. As such, Baudelaire suggests that beauty, the central aesthetic concern, is allied with the Egyptian rather than the Greek: its meaning is like a hieroglyph which remains stubbornly untranslatable. Sphinxes return in two other poems in Les Fleurs du mal, ‘Avec ses vêtements’, discussed below, and ‘Les Chats’. In this sonnet, the felines are described as ‘Great sphinxes in the desert solitudes, / Who seem to be entranced by endless dreams’ (lines 10–11), recalling ‘Spleen (II)’. The desert itself was associated with spleen in the literature of the period, as Claude Pichois has shown in suggesting that Baudelaire’s imagery relies on connotations developed by Théophile Gautier, another important French precursor and influence on British aestheticism and decadence.8 In his pair of poems, ‘Nostalgies d’obélisques’, from Émaux et camées (1852), influential on Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and published while Gautier was touring the Middle East, he writes about two obelisks which once stood together outside the Luxor temple.9 In ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’, Gautier considers the monumental afterlife of what came to be known as L’Aiguille de Cléopâtre, displaced from Luxor to Paris. Erected in 1833 ‘on the spot where Louis Seize / Died’ (lines 25–6) when he was executed in 1793 on what was to become the Place de la Concorde, this obelisk harbours a ‘secret which outweighs / Cycles of forgetfulness’ (lines 27–8). The memorial function of the monument speaks to a violent past,10 recalling the way in which another Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, eventually erected at its present site on London’s Victoria Embankment in 1878, would later be politicised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in ‘Tiber, Nile, and Thames’ – originally titled ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ and published in Ballads and Sonnets (1881) – and, more subtly, by Oscar Wilde in the short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ (1887).11 But Gautier’s real interest in the poem is in how the monument has been resituated, so that the ennui of Egypt infects Paris. For Gautier, L’Aiguille de Cléopâtre overlooks a modern city itself riddled with ‘ennui’ (line 2). It finds itself ‘defiled’ by sparrows ‘where the ibis used to light’ (lines 29–30) and gazes at the Seine, that ‘unclean river, crime’s abyss’ (line 34). Gautier’s ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’ is recalled by Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891), where the protagonist reads the 1872 Charpentier edition of Émaux et camées.12 Dorian, it is worth noting from the outset, is himself something of an Egyptian figure, a Gothic monster, half-alive half-dead. Basil tells us Dorian had lent miniatures to the Dudley Gallery at the Egyptian Hall, 170–1 Piccadilly, completed in 1812 and designed by Peter Frederick Robinson, originally to house Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s

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1820–21 exhibition of a facsimile of the tomb of Seti I.13 When Dorian attempts to distract his mind from his murder of Basil, he turns to Émaux et camées: He read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotuscovered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud.14

Here, Dorian’s reading allies with a decadent eroticism: it metonymically carries the reader from the phallic obelisk, ‘weeping’ its tears, to the river, associated psychoanalytically with femininity, and from there onwards to a teeming animal life of sphinxes, ibises, vultures and crocodiles,15 and then to a Nile figured as primordial, ‘steaming’. Unsurprisingly, in this context, the next sentence sees Dorian turn from reading ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’ to another poem from Émaux et camées, ‘Contralto’, musing on the Borghese Hermaphroditus, held at the Louvre. The slippage here suggests a ‘perverse’ eroticism, with the hermaphroditic body troubling genders in a manner which becomes more and more associated with the image of Egypt in the aesthetic and decadent imaginary.16 In ‘L’Obélisque de Luxor’, the companion poem to ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’, Gautier had written of L’Aiguille de Cléopâtre’s twin, still in situ, standing outside the Luxor temple. The latter obelisk, attended by its own guardian sphinx (lines 30–2), offers itself to be read as a monument to a melancholia proper to Egypt: ‘Is there an ennui like to thine, / Spleen of luminous Orient?’ (lines 35–6). Such an ennui is accentuated by the way in which the monument, resistant to time, finds itself untimely, and in its spleen, the obelisk constructs a fantasy of the cosmopolitan life supposedly enjoyed by L’Aiguille de Cléopâtre: ‘In a Paris wondrous, grand, / With its stately form to bide, / In the public place to stand!’ (lines 58–60). ‘He is living and I am dead’ (line 72), the obelisk announces in the final line, oblivious to the fact that its ‘brother’ in Paris (line 57) is far from ‘growing young once more’ (line 68), but is itself almost mummified, living-dead, riddled by ressentiment.17 Ultimately, wherever the Egyptian monument finds itself, be that in Luxor or Paris, the two obelisks alike stand ‘lonely’ (line 2), ‘brooding’ (line 1) ‘in eternal solitude / Facing all infinity’ (lines 3–4). But if there is something generic in the association of the Egyptian monument and the desert with spleen and ennui which Baudelaire mobilises here from Gautier, there is something which remains curious about the sphinx in ‘Spleen (II)’. ‘Sing[ing] in the glow of setting sun’ (line 24), Baudelaire’s allusion refers less to the Great Sphinx of Giza, as one might initially imagine, but rather to the Colossi of Memnon, a point which



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Antoine Adam has noted.18 The legend is related by Pausanias, who recalls crossing the Nile at Thebes and seeing two statues, inscribed with the name of Amenophis III, noting how ‘every day at the rising of the sun’ they began to ‘sing’.19 In translating the legend from the Colossi to the sphinx, Baudelaire changes the moment of the monument’s song from dawn, suggesting rebirth and renaissance, to dusk, ‘le crépuscule du soir’, that hour which releases the forces of corruption which Baudelaire sees as proper to modernity. The sphinx speaks of its mysteries at ‘the witching hour’, the moment of ‘uncertain light’,20 suggesting their revelation as a prelude to death: their message comes into the world late in the day, almost already posthumous. In the context of Baudelaire’s slippage, it is interesting to find that the myth of the Colossi of Memnon returns in significant circumstances in Walter Pater’s essay ‘Winckelmann’, first published in the Westminster Review, January 1867, and later collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).21 In this early essay, Pater proposes a progressive historical approach to understanding the history of art, one which he claims Winckelmann had in common with Hegel, and it is the latter’s argument in Aesthetics which he broadly follows in these passages.22 Discussing the relative weakness of what Hegel calls ‘Symbolic’ art, Pater suggests that ‘architecture which begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or symbol, the spirit of the mind of the artist’.23 For Hegel, the Ideal form of art was Greek sculpture, which he considers the high point of Classical art, and which, in its desire to represent the human form in motion, came as close as possible to capturing the sensible appearance of the Idea.24 Egyptian art, by contrast, was Symbolic rather than Classical, coming too early. In the course of his discussion of Symbolic art in Aesthetics, Hegel devotes consideration to the paradoxical ‘monumentalism’ of the pyramids, inflected by a death-drive and characterised by a ‘double architecture, one above ground, the other subterranean’.25 For Hegel, the pyramids are ‘prodigious crystals which conceal in themselves an inner meaning … separated from pure nature and only in relation to this meaning’, the ‘realm of death’. ‘The Pyramids are such an external environment in which an inner meaning lies concealed’, one which is less developed than the Classical Ideal of sculpture insofar as Egyptian art ‘remains just an external form and veil for the definite content of that meaning’.26 Hegel considers the Egyptian subject as intrinsically melancholic, an idea, as we have seen, which Baudelaire too was to mobilise in a different context years later. Pater follows them both, considering the Egyptian artist as one who ‘closes his sadness over him’,27 so that the Symbolic is forever subordinated to the Classical Ideal which follows it. ‘The art of Egypt, with its supreme architectural effects’, Pater writes, ‘is, according to Hegel’s beautiful comparison, a Memnon waiting for the day, the day

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of the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit, with its power of speech’.28 ‘Taken as symbols’, Hegel clarifies, ‘the meaning ascribed to these colossi is that they do not have the spiritual soul freely in themselves’, so that ‘instead of being able to draw animation from within, … they require for it light from without which alone liberates the soul from them’.29 ‘The inner life of the human form is still dumb in Egypt’, Hegel concludes,30 and the British aesthetic movement in its privileging of the Classical Ideal seems to have concurred. In Plato and Platonism (1893), for instance, Pater’s late series of lectures on the subject, Egypt figures as the ‘unconscious’ precursor of Greek thought, both in terms of the subject’s rational command over its own body and mind, and in more broadly political terms, where Egypt is characterised as ‘lifeless’ and ‘unprogressive’, a realm in which ‘the unconscious social aggregate had been everything’.31 Pater’s language recalls not only Hegel, but also Gautier in ‘L’Obélisque de Luxor’ on the ‘immobility’ of Egypt. ‘In this changing universe, / Only Egypt changeth not!’ (lines 43–4), Gautier has his obelisk exclaim, and we are reminded of the ways in which Pater’s aestheticism privileges various motifs of movement and change as the image of an intellectual development which constitutes ‘success in life’.32 For aesthetes such as Pater, it seems, Egypt is petrified, always already posthumous in both the life of the Spirit (Geist), and of the life led in the spirit of art. Egypt and death: pyramids and cenotaphs It is worth remembering something else in the image of Egypt, however, something intrinsic to the philosophical approach of Hegel, but which is revived, reworked and revalued in the literature of Baudelaire and his British followers: the focus on death. Of course, to state that the aesthetes were fascinated with the way in which Egyptian art and culture treated death is not to suggest that they did not also identify a thanatic element in classical art. Pater himself would emphasise not only the ‘Dorian’ element of the Greeks and the god Apollo, associated with ‘κόσμος; order; reasonable, delightful, order’, but also ‘a certain darker side’ to Greek culture, in particular in his writing on Dionysus. 33 It is nonetheless also the case, though, that Egyptian imagery is mobilised by these writers in a manner suggesting that the aesthetes associated Egypt with these ‘darker’ forces, with the death-drive, the unconscious mind and decadent desire. In this sense, the monumental in Egypt precisely commemorates the aporia of death. Wilde’s early poetry offers a case in point.34 Take ‘Athanasia’ (Greek for ‘immortality’), originally published under the title of ‘The Conqueror of



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Time’ in the inaugural issue of a new archaeological magazine, Time: A Monthly Miscellany of Interesting and Amusing Literature, April 1879. In the poem, Wilde developed Matthew Arnold’s thoughts in ‘Mycerinus’ (1844), whose Egyptian theme, stanzaic form and rhyme structure he adopts, but while the two poems alike focus on melancholia, they differ in emphasis. Arnold’s poem sees an initial pessimism give way to an unbridled but morally insecure hedonism, one which the poet stands critically against, but Wilde charts how the poet or reader may utilise the power of an archaeology to hold fast to that hard, gem-like Paterean flame which promises a kind of aesthetic immortality.35 Wilde’s interest in Egyptian artefacts and contemporary archaeology evidenced in ‘Athanasia’ was timely. Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae had been published in December 1877 (dated 1878) and was a text which Wilde read. He had made it to the site during a trip of April 1877, taking time out from his studies at Oxford and travelling with John Mahaffey, his tutor from Trinity, Dublin. Richard Ellmann erroneously suggests that the party met Schliemann himself, with the excavations concluded the previous year, but the experience was nevertheless formative for the young scholar.36 Nor was Wilde alone in his reading of Schliemann; he would have been encouraged in his studies by Pater, who must have been waiting for the Brasenose College Library to buy Mycenae, because he borrowed the book as soon as it arrived on 27 December. Likewise, Pater would borrow John Gardiner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1878) on 30 April the following year,37 so that we can conclude that if he minimised the historical and aesthetic significance of the Egyptians in his theoretical writings, Pater was clearly interested enough in the subject to devote significant time to reading about Egyptian art and culture. Wilde’s ‘Athanasia’ begins in the ‘House of Art’ (line 1), presumably the British Museum, where ‘great things’ have been ‘saved from Time’ (line 2), and where The withered body of a girl was brought Dead ere the world’s glad youth had touched its prime, And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid In the dim womb of some black pyramid.     But when they had unloosed the linen band Which swathed the Egyptian’s body, – lo! was found Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand A little seed, which sown in English ground Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear And spread rich odours through our spring-tide air. (lines 3–12)

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The girl’s beauty resists the ravages of time, and she is associated with the Egyptian: her immortality is figured through the monumental. The pyramid is black, suggesting death, or perhaps meant to evoke the ‘symbolic’ mystery of the monument-as-tomb, and figures as uncanny, womb-like, associated with death-in-life.38 The girl is seemingly part-mummified, swathed in linen, connoting the ritualistic function of death rites in Egypt, but carries in her dead hands the seed of new life, now transported to ‘English ground’. This seed disseminates, becoming allegorical of the power of ancient Egyptian art to kindle new aesthetic passions in Victorian England. But it also recalls Percy Shelley, less the monumental Egypt of ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), rather the perverse eroticism of ‘The Witch of Atlas’ (1824), one of Wilde’s favourite poems, in which the witch steals ‘a strange seed, and wrapped it up in mould, / And sowed it in her mother’s star’ (lines 301–2).39 Wilde’s subtle allusion associates the Egyptian seed with a transgressive decadence, with an Oriental sensualism which is ‘foreign’ and ‘strange’ in English soil. As a monument to death, Egyptian art is associated with the funereal. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we find that Egyptian motifs reoccur in the elegiac tradition of the literature of the period, where authors visited the graves of their precursors in a poetics which also served to commemorate a kind of cult of the dead. The pyramid in ‘Athanasia’ recalls Wilde’s earlier sonnet, ‘The Grave of Shelley’. Written in 1877–78 after he had travelled to Rome and visited the Protestant Cemetery where both Keats and Shelley were buried, Wilde considers how ‘In the still chamber of yon pyramid / Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid, / Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead’ (lines 6–8). The monument in question is not actually Egyptian, however, but the Pyramid of Cestius. Built in the first decade bce as a tomb for Gaius Cestius, and lying at the fork of the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, it figures as that ‘keen pyramid with wedge sublime, / Pavilioning the dust of him who planned / This refuge for his memory’ (lines 444–6) for Shelley in Adonais (1821), his own elegy to Keats.40 The Pyramid of Cestius offers itself to be read as a simulacrum of Egypt, yet while not itself an Egyptian monument, this same pyramid is invoked in ‘The Grave of Shelley’ as haunted by the spectre of the Egyptian, since ‘some Old-World Sphinx’ lurks in its ‘mysterious’ kernel. Wilde makes a similar point in ‘The Tomb of Keats’, published in the Irish Monthly in July 1877, speaking of the Pyramid of Cestius as the ‘symbol of the world’s age, and filled with the memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the memories of old Nile’.41 Not itself Egyptian, the pyramid is explicitly a ‘symbol’, so that Wilde may be said to be following Hegel, whom he was reading during these same undergraduate years, and who speaks of the Egyptian sphinx as ‘the symbol of the symbolic itself ’.42 For



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Wilde, the pyramid is a ‘symbol of the world’s age’, which is to say, both a symbolic monument and one which stands for the unconscious age before the classical period. Inside it, haunting it from within, lie ‘memories’, as in ‘Spleen (II)’. But if the Pyramid of Cestius promises a form of immortality, a living-on, recalling the monument of ‘Athanasia’, it is also associated with λωτοφάγοι (lotus-eaters) and with a sensualism and forgetting. These mythological figures were famously discussed in Homer’s Odyssey, and Wilde links his aestheticism to the lotus-eaters explicitly in two other poems from the period, ‘Lotus Land’ (written in 1876) and ‘Lotus Leaves’ (published in 1877). Wilde associates the figures with Egypt through the Nymphaea lotus and opposes his aestheticism to the conservative Victorian critique of otium epitomised by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1832). Yet if the image of the lotus suggests a forgetting of the self which is deemed quintessentially Egyptian in this imaginary, then the pyramid itself memorialises this forgetting, here specifically enshrining ‘the memories of old Nile’, quoting Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and thereby associating these memories with an eroticised, Occidental image of Egypt.43 This pyramid is another monument to life-in-death and figures as another uncanny space, ‘a restless tomb’ (line 11), as Wilde puts it in ‘The Grave of Shelley’, and one which is once again figured explicitly as a ‘womb’ (line 9). Wilde’s sonnet is clearly influenced not only by Shelley’s Adonais and the poetry of the graveyard school, but Stéphane Mallarmé’s elegy on ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, published the year before Wilde visited Rome in December 1876, and written at the request of Swinburne. But more significant for our purposes is a later elegy by Mallarmé, ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’, written after he had met and befriended Wilde in Paris in February 1891, and first published in La Plume in January 1895, a few months before Wilde’s fall from grace. Mallarmé’s interest in the topic of Egypt was no doubt informed by the work of his friend, the Egyptologist Eugène Lefébure, who, as an archaeologist with the French Archaeological Mission, worked on the tombs of Rameses IV and Seti I in the Valley of the Kings.44 In ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’, Mallarmé takes up the Egyptian imagery of ‘Spleen (II)’ in particular, but expands its significance, suggesting that the whole of Baudelaire’s poetic contribution must be approached as a kind of Egyptian pyramid, a monument to lifein-death: ‘The buried shrine disgorges through its foul / Sepulchral sewer-mouth slobbering sod / And ruby vilely some Anubis-god / Its muzzle blazing like a savage howl’ (lines 1–4).45 As Roger Pearson puts it, ‘the “buriedness” of Baudelaire seems to have the timeless irremediability of Egyptian entombment’.46 As such, Mallarmé’s image suggests not so much the poet’s actual grave, located in division

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six of Cimetière de Montparnasse, Paris, but José de Charmoy’s cenotaph, located at the junction of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh divisions. Charmoy’s cenotaph features Baudelaire lying down, wrapped in linen like an Egyptian mummy, while a statue of a Thinker stands above, meditating on his remains.47 In this sense, the Egyptian imagery on his cenotaph compares with that of Wilde’s own tomb, located in Cimetière du Père Lachaise, cut by Jacob Epstein, and which features a prominent sphinx. But in Mallarmé’s reading of Baudelaire, if the Egyptian is allied with death, this is not simply a question of lifelessness: far from figuring as a petrified ‘granite’ or ‘lifeless’ monument, Mallarmé’s version of Baudelaire’s tomb reveals death as a teeming, divided state of unconscious drives and forces. Anubis, half-man, half-jackal (recalling the double-figure of the sphinx), was the Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife, but Mallarmé’s image focuses on the connotations of his becoming-animal. This Egyptian god compares implicitly with the ‘rational’ image of the Greeks, governed by light and reason, and with their ‘power of speech’.48 Baudelaire, instead, promises a ‘savageness’ which bypasses a simple signifying discourse in a guttural ‘howl’. Mallarmé’s elegy (itself a form of sur-vival or living-on) images Baudelaire’s corpus as a thanatic underground realm of violence. This, Mallarmé seems to be suggesting, is the Egyptian element which lies somewhat hidden, a silent labyrinth underwriting the pyramidlike surface of the discourse of aestheticism. Egypt and eroticism: from Cleopatra to the sphinx Baudelaire’s ‘Avec ses vêtements’, written about his lover and muse, the Haitian dancer Jeanne Duval, whom Édouard Manet had painted in Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining (1862), again mobilises the Egyptian. In the sonnet, Duval is associated with ‘serpents’ (line 3), anguine imagery which is simultaneously biblical and connotative of Cleopatra and those ‘asps of Egypt’ (line 87) which ‘herald eternal sleep’ (line 90), as Wilde puts it in his encomium to the actress Lillie Langtry, ‘The New Helen’ (1879). But Baudelaire’s sonnet also associates Duval with ‘desert sands’ (line 5), and thereby ennui. Duval’s ‘essence’, he continues, is one in which ‘the natures mix / Of holy angel and the ancient sphinx’ (lines 10–11), so that the figure of the sphinx is opposed to that of the angel, and holiness or spiritual purity to an age which speaks implicitly to pleasures which escape the Christian’s normative vision of the proper. The sphinx here evokes an image of Egypt’s decadence; while this was a strategy by no means unique to the aesthetes and decadents, found for instance in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), the aesthetes mobilised this



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eroticism in particular ways, associating the Egyptian with their own version of what constituted ‘decadent’ desires. The sensuality of Cleopatra became the quintessential image of the Orient for the classical tradition. In Antony and Cleopatra, she stands both for Egypt, and through her Egypt stands for limitless erotic forces, so that both Egypt and her queen alike figure for ‘a gypsy’s lust’.49 The aesthetes responded to Cleopatra’s sexuality in a manner in some ways determined by this classical heritage. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the lovers who published under the penname ‘Michael Field’, wrote that Cleopatra was ‘disgustingly sexual and nothing else’, bemoaning how Shakespeare’s creation lacked ‘intellect’ in their eyes.50 Swinburne, on the other hand, spoke of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as the image of ‘the incarnate sex’,51 and it was under her influence that he would write his poem ‘Cleopatra’, to accompany a drawing by Frederick Shields, first published in the Cornhill Magazine, September 1866. In the poem, Swinburne’s language eroticises Cleopatra while simultaneously associating her with decadence. Cleopatra’s ‘low large lids’ conceal a knowledge of ‘the histories of all time’ (lines 36–7).52 She sees The shape and shadow of mystic things, Things that fate fashions or forbids; The staff of time-forgotten Kings Whose name falls off the Pyramids, Their coffin-lids and grave-clothings. (lines 56–60)

But the desire Cleopatra mobilises is paradoxical, edging on the masochistic. Her ‘beauty stings’ (line 33), Swinburne exclaims, and ‘all Egypt aches’ (line 66), a verb perhaps recalling the ‘aching Pleasure … / Turning to poison’ (lines 22–3) of stanza three of Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1819).53 Cleopatra’s ‘great grave beauty’ (line 76) sees Swinburne’s adjective punning on the association of beauty and death, and she is figured as ‘tread[ing] on gods and god-like things / On fate and fear and life and death’ (lines 81–2), with his polysyndeton drawing fate into fear and life into death, so that Cleopatra’s power of indifference towards both ‘gods and god-like things’ means losing a sense of the differences between the limits proper to finite life and the decadence proper to her deathly eroticism. Similar imagery and connotations are also mobilised by Wilde in The Sphinx, the culmination of the aesthetic and decadent fascination with Egypt. Wilde had begun writing the poem while an undergraduate, with the earliest version completed in 1877–78; it was, however, a piece on which he continued to work. A second version, expanded in length, dates

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to Wilde’s April 1883 stay in Paris, but a return two months later to ‘the splendid whirl and swirl of life in London’ curtailed his endeavours.54 Eventually, nearly a decade later, Wilde signed a contract with John Lane of Bodley Head in 1892 to publish the poem with illustrations and decorations provided by Charles Ricketts, and The Sphinx eventually appeared in June 1894, dedicated ‘in friendship and in admiration’ to the Symbolist poet Marcel Schwob, whom Wilde had met in Paris in early 1891, and who had helped him by correcting the French for Salome (1892). While Regenia Gagnier suggests the poem’s persona is modelled on Schwob, making the poet himself the sphinx-figure so that Wilde allies his own sexuality with that of his monster, the dates of composition make this unlikely (Schwob would have been a young child when Wilde began the poem in 1877).55 Nevertheless, the dedication was perhaps significant for other reasons: Schwob’s father, George, who was a friend of both Gautier and Théodore de Banville, had headed the cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Egypt for ten years, returning to France just before Marcel’s birth in 1867, and his short stories subtly associate the Egyptian with sexual licentiousness on numerous occasions. Iain Ross has suggested that Wilde’s poem might be aptly renamed ‘Ode on an Egyptian Sphinx’. As he convincingly argues, The Sphinx was inspired by and compares with another of Keats’s poems, the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), but in a targeted manner, so that Wilde rewrites ‘Keats’ Hellenist, romantic poem as an Egyptologically decadent one’.56 Whereas Keats’s ode directly addresses the urn, the first ten lines of Wilde’s poem see ‘the beautiful and silent Sphinx’ (line 2) sat in the shadows, watching the speaker. In this subtle manner, the initial power relations which open Keats’s poem are reversed: his urn, object of classical antiquity, submits itself as an object of the speaker’s analytical gaze, whereas Wilde’s Sphinx refuses to show itself, shrouded in mystery. It suggests that whereas ancient Greek culture is bathed in a radiance which allows its artefacts to be illuminated and read, the Egyptian in the aesthetic and decadent imaginary remains somewhat hidden. After this initial staging, a volta occurs, precipitating a set of anaphoric invocations: ‘Come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque! / Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!’ (line 11–12; my emphasis). The sibilance (marked by italics) eroticises the Sphinx (a word itself sibilant) in its soft and soothing attempt to coax it out of its ‘dim corner of the room’ (line 1). The hard caesuras, balancing the line while simultaneously cutting it sharply in two, speak to the Sphinx as being in-between, ‘half woman and half animal’. Wilde’s speaker seeks submission from the Egyptian creature, attempting to lull it into alliterative and assonant acquiescence: ‘Come forth my lovely languorous Sphinx! and put your head upon my



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knee!’ (line 13). Full of tactile, sensuous imagery, the speaker asks to ‘stroke your throat and see your body’ (line 14), a request tinged with an implicit masochism in his desire to ‘touch’ her ‘curving claws’ and ‘grasp’ her ‘tail’, likened to ‘a monstrous Asp’ (lines 15–16). The second section of the poem (with section breaks indicated in the 1894 version of the poem by asterisks) compares the Sphinx’s antiquity with the speaker’s youth, perhaps standing for the cultural confrontation mapped between the modern British speaker and the ancient Egyptian object of his desires. ‘A thousand weary centuries are thine’ (line 17), he remarks, gesturing to an ancientness which promises the Sphinx a secret knowledge to ‘read the hieroglyphs on the great sandstone obelisks’ (line 19). The Sphinx is privy to the limits of life and death, supposedly ‘standing by when Isis to Osiris knelt’ (line 21), and witnessing the exploits of Cleopatra, here simply named ‘the Egyptian’ (line 22), symbolising the entire country and its culture. Presumably, the speaker’s sexual desire here is indistinguishable from a decadent version of what Foucault calls ‘la volonté de savoir’, ‘the will to knowledge’.57 Fittingly, in this context, Wilde’s language shifts, formulated as a series of erotemas (lines 22–8) which compare to those of Keats’s speaker in the ode (lines 7–10). But whereas Keats’s erotemas interrogate the urn, which gives itself up to be known, Wilde’s poem sees the Sphinx as too Egyptian, refusing to answer his speaker’s questions. The pattern is repeated in the following sections of the poem. The speaker demands ‘Faun at my feet fantastic Sphinx’ (line 30; my emphasis), another richly alliterative line, eroticising her and marking her out as an object of fantasy, before asking her to ‘sing me all your memories’ (line 30), picking up on Baudelaire’s singing sphinx of ‘Spleen (II)’. Vision now mobilises the speaker’s (male) gaze, but this gaze is one which seeks to displace itself into the decadent Sphinx: the speaker desires to see through her in order to thereby realise his homoerotic desires. He speaks of watching Antinous drown himself in the Nile, referring to the beautiful young lover of Hadrian, here called Adrian and riding on a ‘gilded barge’ (line 34), language subtly refiguring the Roman leader as Cleopatra, troubling gender.58 Through the eyes of the Sphinx, he ‘watche[s] with hot and hungry stare / The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth!’ (lines 34–5). The speaker continues, speaking of the night you crawled across the Temple’s granite plinth When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew In terror, … And the great torpid crocodile within the tank shed slimy tears, And tare the jewels from his ears and staggered back into the Nile. (lines 38–42)

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The vaginal imagery of the ‘purple corridors’ is simultaneously associated with ‘tears’, and those tears with the ibis and crocodile in a series of intertextual allusions, recalling that these ‘tears’ weep from the phallic obelisk in Dorian’s reading of Gautier’s Emaux et camées. But the Sphinx’s mobilisation of erotic forces is now deemed transgressive even by the Egyptians, their ‘priests’ cursing her ‘as in your claws you seized their snake / And crept away with it to slake your passion by the shuddering palms’ (lines 43–4), the final noun perhaps punning on the manual, and the final adjective thereby suggesting an autoerotic jouissance. In the fourth section, the speaker’s desire becomes more interrogative, and he demands to hear of the Sphinx’s sexual conquests: ‘Who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust? / Which was the vessel of your Lust? What Leman had you, every day?’ (lines 45–6). ‘Half woman and half animal’ (line 12), the Sphinx’s animality is emphasised, and her lovers are imagined to include various real and mythological creatures (lines 47–52). In the following section, the pyramid returns once again, the speaker imagining the Sphinx ‘slink[ing] into the vault and mak[ing] the Pyramid your Lúpanar / Till from each black sarcophagus r[i]se[s] up the painted swathèd dead’ (lines 63–4). The ‘vault’-like structure of this pyramid suggests ‘Spleen (II)’ once again, ‘a pyramid, a giant vault’ (line 6), but here Wilde openly associates decadence, spleen and ennui with the erotic (‘Lúpanar’ is Latin for ‘brothel’). He mobilises the unconscious as the force of thanatos, and thence death, and life-in-death, the ‘swathèd’ mummies rising from their sarcophagi, with the dead bodies here themselves aesthetic objects, ‘painted’. After speculating further on her lovers, including the pagan gods themselves (lines 65–8), and noting the Sphinx’s ‘subtle-secret smile’ (line 73), associated by Ross with sixth-century Greek sculpture, but surely also meant to allude to Pater’s famous discussion of La Gioconda,59 the speaker imagines the Sphinx sleeping with the god Ammon (lines 73–86). In their embrace, the Sphinx ‘made the hornèd God your own’ (line 81), almost cuckolding him (‘hornèd’), again troubling gender in taking the active rather than passive sexual role, and ‘whisper[ing] monstrous oracles into the caverns of his ears’ (line 83). In a further displacement, the speaker once more takes the role of the Sphinx, openly eroticising the male form, Ammon’s ‘marble limbs’ (line 88), his face and ‘the perfect azure of his eyes’ (lines 91–2) and ‘his thick soft throat’, again phallic, ‘threaded with thin veins of blue’ (line 93). After listing the pomp and ceremony attending her lover Ammon (lines 99–108), the speaker suggests their erotic encounter pollutes the very monuments of Egypt, ‘for ruined is the house and prone the great rose-marble monolith!’ (line 110), linked to the force of a Dionysian excess, with



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‘Wild satyrs call[ing] unto their mates across the fallen fluted drums’ (line 112). In these millenarian movements, monumental Egypt is seen as already ruined, fragmented. Wilde’s language is suggestive of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, with its associated themes of the fall of great power in the face of time: ‘The god is scattered here and there: deep hidden in the windy sand / I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in impotent despair’ (lines 115–16). It is the Sphinx itself, the speaker suggests, who prompts the destruction of Egypt: her decadence consumes Egypt from within, like an unconscious labyrinth undermining the pyramid’s vault, causing the monument to collapse upon itself. She is ordered to ‘seek his [Ammon’s] fragments … / And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated paramour!’ (lines 121–2). The Promethean operation also constitutes a fetishism, the Sphinx ‘wak[ing] mad passions in the senseless stone’ (line 124), reanimating dead matter at the same time as eroticising it. The speaker asks her to mummify this body, to ‘wind soft rolls of linen round his limbs’ (line 126), in an act that also openly eroticises his corpse: ‘Stain with red fruits those pallid lips! / Weave purple for his shrunken hips! and purple for his barren loins!’ (lines 127–8). The speaker momentarily appears to be armed with the redemptive spirit of Christ, the ‘only God [that] has ever died’ (line 129), attempting to banish the Sphinx ‘away to Egypt’ in the eleventh section of the poem. But his resolution is short-lived, for ‘These, thy lovers, are not dead’ (line 130). The Egyptian never properly dies, the speaker suggests, but is always already living-on, with ‘Dog-faced Anubis’ imagined waiting to crown the Sphinx ‘with lotus-lilies’ (line 131). It is this secret, of a life-in-death which is a becoming-animal, teeming with unconscious forces, which Wilde’s speaker suggests as the true secret to be told by the ‘porphyry gaunt Memnon [who] strains his lidless eyes / Across the empty land, and cries each yellow morning unto thee’ (lines 133–4). In The Sphinx, the Memnon is no longer ‘waiting for the day’ of Greece ‘with its power of speech’,60 but instead promises the rise of the living-dead (line 137). In Wilde’s version of the myth, the Colossi sing of a frenzied violence in which sex and death are inextricably intertwined, where the Sphinx first mates with a lion while setting her ‘white teeth in his throat’ (line 143), and then a tiger, toying with him ‘in amorous jests’ and ‘smiting’ him ‘when he turns, and snarls, and gnaws’ (line 147). The poem associates Egypt with an eroticism that pushes both the speaker and the Sphinx further and further beyond the pleasure principle. In the twelfth and penultimate section of the poem (lines 149–62), the tone shifts, and the melancholia which Hegel and Baudelaire in different ways associate with Egypt is displaced into the speaker of Wilde’s poem,

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who wearies of the Sphinx’s ‘sullen ways’, her ‘steadfast gaze’ (lines 149–50), which makes him the passive object of her active vision (again, reversing the ‘proper’ archaeological relationship with antiquity delineated by Keats’s Grecian urn). In the final section, the speaker demands that the Sphinx, ‘loathsome mystery’ and ‘hideous animal’, ‘get hence’ (line 167). ‘You wake in me each bestial sense’, he remarks, suggesting that her desires are infecting him, so that he also becomes animal. She ‘make[s] me what I would not be’ (line 168), dividing or doubling the speaker from his ideal ego by revealing the split in the subject that was already there. Thus he decries her as a ‘False Sphinx! False Sphinx!’ (line 171). The secrets of the Sphinx must be false, or so this speaker, who is revealed in these last moments to be a classically trained Oxford student (line 163), has to maintain. If Hegel is correct in thinking that the sphinx symbolises all of Egypt, Wilde’s Sphinx reveals that an intrinsic decadence lies hidden at the heart of this pyramid. Egypt ancient and modern When Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) left Oxford in June 1893, having failed to take his degree, Wilde reacted by suggesting that his mother Lady Queensberry should arrange for him to spend time ‘abroad for four or five months, to the Cromers in Egypt if that could be managed, where he would have new surroundings, proper friends, and a different atmosphere’.61 Douglas was duly sent away. It was a trip that, in spite of Wilde’s intentions, would eventually play a subtle role in his eventual fall, for it was at the Hotel de Louxor that Douglas would meet Robert Hichens, keen to strike up a friendship in part to garner material for his scandalous novel The Green Carnation (1894). While Douglas was not overly impressed with Egypt, complaining to his mother that ‘I wouldn’t give one little bronze Greek head or one broken marble statue for the whole of Egypt put together’, he reserved praise for the Great Sphinx, ‘really beautiful besides being really awesome and splendid’.62 Arriving at the British Agency in Cairo late in 1893, Douglas would pen his sonnet on ‘The Sphinx’, first published in his volume of Sonnets (1900). Meditating on the ‘stillness of the dead’ (line 8) associated with the ancient monuments, Douglas’s speaker looks north from his position before the Sphinx, glimpsing ‘the peaks / of the tall pyramids’ (lines 9–10) over the palm trees: ‘I know that on the sand / Crouches a thing of stone that in some wise / Broods on my heart; and from the darkening land / Creeps Fear and to my soul in whisper speaks’ (lines 11–14).63 The pyramids, as the centre of this ‘darkening’ Egyptian land, precipitate a creeping ‘Fear’, melancholic insofar as they lack an object,



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‘whispering’ inaudible secrets to Douglas, the British traveller, secrets which seemingly escape the discourse of modernity. As this sonnet already suggests, Douglas was unlikely to have taken his stay in Egypt as the salve or balm to heal his decadent soul, too fascinated by the Sphinx’s decadent secrets from the outset. Indeed, if Wilde had hoped to tame his lover, Douglas apparently found a somewhat ‘different atmosphere’ in Egypt than that he had likely had in mind when he suggested the trip to Lady Queensberry. Wilde’s biographer Neil McKenna argues that ‘Egypt had other attractions which were perhaps more to Bosie’s taste’, with homosexual sex widely available in fin-de-siècle Cairo.64 Indeed, perhaps this penchant caught up with Bosie in Egypt as it had in Oxford and would in London: he departed Cairo in February 1894 to take up the role of official attaché to Lord Currie, the British ambassador to Turkey, but Robbie Ross claimed that Bosie was ‘hurled out of the official residence’ of the Cromers, ‘in consequence of the way in which he carried on in Egypt’.65 Wilde himself certainly gave credence to the rumours, writing indignantly in ‘Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’ (1897), his letter to Douglas from prison, published in a highly expurgated version by Ross as De Profundis (1905), of how Bosie ranked his ‘intellectual attractions’ alongside ‘the flesh-pots of Egypt’.66 While we lack sufficient evidence to fully reconstruct Douglas’s sojourn in Cairo, tainted by rumour and innuendo, it nevertheless perhaps tells us something important about the ways in which the aesthetes approached Egypt. As Linda Dowling and others have demonstrated, during the late nineteenth century the writers associated with the aesthetic movement sought to re-appropriate Greek literature and philosophy in order to recode the discourse around male beauty in terms which sought to idealise homoerotic desire.67 It was partly for this reason that the classical ideal held a privileged position at the centre of the aesthetic debates of the period. But if ancient Egypt was a more marginal presence in this discourse, this also meant that by mobilising this imagery, the aesthetes could touch on some more transgressive subjects a little more openly. My phrasing here is deliberately tentative, not only because this operation was not limited to the aesthetes and decadents during the period, but also because these writers investigated similar themes, if often somewhat sanitised by the cold, dry light of archaeology, in their writings on Greece.68 Nevertheless, it seems possible to conjecture that if modern Egypt figured for a more relaxed and permissive homosexual economy, ancient Egypt stood for a more openly decadent sexuality than one finds in the majority of the aesthetic writing on ancient Greece. In this sense, the marginal status of Egypt belies its situation as a kind of subterranean centre underwriting a number of important aesthetic and decadent works from the period. It presents itself as the pit beneath the

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Egyptian pyramid that links a whole generation of writers, from Gautier and Baudelaire and on to a British tradition taking in Swinburne, Pater and Wilde. Egypt figures as a vault lying as the unconscious realm undergirding the discourse of Occidental rationality: hidden in its kernel lay a teeming world of erotic forces. These decadent desires threatened the fabric of Western civilisation, its narrative of power and superiority, and the very stability of the singular subject itself. It is that secret which Wilde’s Sphinx promises: Egypt as that transgressive power which shows us what we deny, and makes us what we would not be, becoming-otherwise. Notes 1 I quote from the bilingual edition of Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. James McGowan as The Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2 In this sense, Baudelaire’s pyramid recalls Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Hegel’s treatment of the Egyptian, the hieroglyphic, the pit and the pyramid in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 69–108. 3 See for instance, G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I, pp. 360–1. 4 Which is to say, Baudelaire’s sphinx is melancholic in the clinical sense: compare Sigmund Freud’s discussion of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), XIV, pp. 243–58. For an influential psychoanalytic reading of Baudelaire, see Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). The Egyptian in psychoanalytic theory is a significant topic in its own right, with Freud calling The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) his ‘Egyptian dream book’. See Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 366, and on Freud’s various different responses to Egypt and its place in the history of psychoanalytic thought, see Richard A. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 72–5, and Robert W. Rieber, Freud on Interpretation: The Ancient Magical Egyptian and Jewish Traditions (London: Springer, 2012). 5 See Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 38, 40, and Maria Fleischhack, Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 92–5, 222–3. An exception to the relative absence of critical attention paid to the aesthetes and decadents on Egypt is Molly Youngkin’s chapter on Michael Field in British Women Writers and the Reception



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of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 99–130. See also Eleanor Dobson, ‘Literature and Culture in the Golden Age of Egyptology’ (PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2016), for more on ancient Egypt in the works of Wilde, Field, and others associated with aestheticism and decadence, including Richard Le Gallienne. On the reception of ancient Greece in the aesthetic movement, see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) and Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (London: Yale University Press, 1981), and for author-specific studies, see Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Stefano Evangelista, Charles Martindale and Elisabeth Prettejohn (eds), Pater the Classicist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On homoeroticism and the classicism of aestheticism and decadence, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and on masculinity, see Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the reception of classical Rome in particular, see Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London: Harper Collins, 1992) and Stefano Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Timothy Saunders et al. (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 305–26. 6 In this chapter I capitalise the term ‘Classical’ only when using it in the Hegelian sense. 7 Apollodorus, The Library, Volume I: Books 1–3.9, trans. James G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 3.5.8. See Albert Schachter, ‘Sphinx’, in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 746. 8 See Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76), II, p. 976 n. 9 See Théophile Gautier, The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume 24: Enamels and Cameos, ed. F. C. de Sumichrast, trans. Agnes Lee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1906), pp. 80–7; Théophile Gautier, Œuvres poétiques completes, ed. Michel Brix (Paris: Bartillat, 2004), pp. 480–5. 10 In focusing on the hidden violence of the monument, Gautier’s ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’ anticipates Georges Bataille’s important 1938 modernist essay on ‘The Obelisk’, in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 213–22. 11 On the political implications of Cleopatra’s Needle in his short story, see Giles Whiteley, ‘Cosmopolitan Space: Political Topographies in Oscar Wilde’s London’, Victoriographies, 7.2 (2017), 134–6. 12 This is not the place to go more deeply into the question of the ways in which British aesthetic and decadent writers were informed by and responded to their French counterparts. For a nuanced introduction by way of the French reception of Wilde himself in the late 1880s and 1890s, dealing in particular

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victorian literary culture and ancient egypt with Wilde’s relationship with Stéphane Mallarmé, see Richard Hibbitt, ‘The Artist as Aesthete: The French Creation of Wilde’, in Stefano Evangelista (ed.), The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 65–79. On the formative role of Baudelaire on Wilde, see Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 140–83. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 293. I quote from the 1891 version of the novel, which Wilde extensively revised for publication as a book. Ibid., p. 305. In this, Dorian seems to pass silently from reading ‘L’Obélisque de Paris’ to ‘L’Obélisque de Luxor’, his description (if taken out of order) suggesting the fourth to eighth stanzas of this second poem, beginning with the Nile (line 13), describing the ‘Hot, rapacious crocodiles’ on the sand (line 19), the ‘Ibis, bird of classic fame’ perching on the ‘carven slab of stone’ (lines 23–4), before finally describing the ‘sphinxes [which] yawn and doze’ (line 30). For more on the significance of Wilde’s interest in the Borghese Hermaphroditus, see Giles Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum: The Truth of Masks (Oxford: Legenda, 2015), pp. 189–9. The association of ressentiment with ‘Egypticity’ is one which Nietzsche makes in Twilight of the Idols (1888): ‘Be a philosopher, be a mummy, put on your gravedigger’s face and show the world what monotono-theism is all about! – And above all, get rid of the body, this miserable idée fixe of the senses!’; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 167. See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 363 n. See Pausanias, Description of Greece, Volume I: Books 1–2 (Attica and Corinth), trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 1.42.3. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), p. 401; Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, II, p. 693. ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ is the title of a poem from Les Fleurs du mal. On Pater’s reading of Baudelaire, see Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition, pp. 77–139, and more broadly on the French influence on his work, see John J. Colon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982). On Pater’s reading of Hegel, see Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 21–48. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, the 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 167.



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24 On the sensible appearance of the Idea as the aim of art, see Hegel, Aesthetics, I, p. 111. 25 Hegel, Aesthetics, I, p. 356. 26 Ibid. 27 Pater, Renaissance, p. 167. 28 Ibid., p. 168. 29 Hegel, Aesthetics, I, p. 358. Emphasis in original. 30 Ibid. 31 Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 16, and see also p. 3. 32 Pater, Renaissance, p. 189. On Pater and the motif of motion, see William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 2–5. 33 Pater, Plato and Platonism, p. 29; Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 42. 34 Quotations from Wilde’s poems are given by line number from Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume I: Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 35 See Fong and Beckson’s editorial comments in Poems and Poems in Prose, p. 271. On Arnold’s poem, see Alan Grob, ‘Arnold’s “Mycerinus”: The Fate of Pleasure’, Victorian Poetry, 20:1 (1982), 1–20. Grob develops the argument later in Alan Grob, A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 65–74. 36 See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 73. For an account of the trip and its significance, see Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, pp. 40–53. 37 See Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and his Reading: With a Bibliography of his Library Borrowings, 1874–1877 (London: Garland, 1990), pp. 407, 432. 38 Compare with Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition, XVII, p. 245. 39 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, in Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 39. 40 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, ed. H. B. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1877), p. 27.. 41 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Tomb of Keats’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume VI: Journalism Part I, ed. John Stokes and Mark W. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 12. 42 Hegel, Aesthetics, I, 360. On Wilde’s undergraduate reading of Hegel, see Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, ‘Introduction’ to Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); for a problematisation of the idea of Wilde as a doctrinal Hegelian, even in his early years, see Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum, pp. 4–9.

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43 ‘He’s speaking now, / Or murmuring “Where’s my serpent of old Nile?” For so he calls me’; William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), I.v.25–7. 44 On Mallarmé’s friendship with Lefébure, see Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 27–53. 45 I quote from the bilingual edition of Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 71. 46 Roger Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 170. 47 On the cenotaph, see Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 198–202. 48 Pater, Renaissance, p. 168. 49 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I.i.10. 50 From an unpublished manuscript, quoted by Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, p. 103. 51 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), p. 227. 52 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Cleopatra’, in Major Poems and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 415–18. 53 John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 374–5. 54 See Wilde, letter to R. H. Sherard, May–June 1883, in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 211, and see also an earlier letter to Sherard, April 1883, expressing his intention to develop ‘the rhythmical value of prose … as soon as I have sung my Sphinx to sleep’, ibid., pp. 205–6. 55 See Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 45, and on this see Frank Meier, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Myth of the Femme Fatale in Fin de Siècle Culture’, in Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis and Julie A. Hibbard (eds), The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde in the Last 100 Years (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2002), p. 128. 56 Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, p. 76. 57 See Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). 58 Wilde’s phrasing and imagery recall Shakespeare’s Enobarbus on Cleopatra: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, / Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes’; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.201–7. 59 See Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, p. 78. For Pater’s famous analysis of the secrets of La Gioconda’s ‘unfathomable smile’, see Renaissance, pp. 97–9.



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60 Pater, Renaissance, p. 168. 61 Oscar Wilde, letter to Lady Queensberry, 8 November 1893, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 575. The reference is to Evelyn Baring, agent and consulgeneral in Egypt from 1883–1907, made Lord Cromer in 1892. 62 Quoted by Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Sceptre, 2000), p. 54. 63 Alfred Douglas, ‘The Sphinx’, in The Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Martin Secker, 1919), p. 22. 64 Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Century, 2003), p. 271. 65 Quoted by McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 278. 66 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 63. 67 See Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. 68 On this point, see Linda Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with the Earth’, Victorian Studies, 31:2 (1988), 209–31.

7 Perfume, cigarettes and gilded boards: Pharos the Egyptian and consumer culture Eleanor Dobson

In Guy Boothby’s thriller Pharos the Egyptian (1898; 1899), the eponymous Pharos, a cursed ancient Egyptian, is a master of unusual substances. He produces his own unique brand of cigarettes, potions and ‘sweet-smelling essences’ with strange properties that seem to, initially, heighten sensations, and eventually lead to visions during states of semi-consciousness.1 The novel’s protagonist, Cyril Forrester, notes ‘a gentle languor’ under the influence of the cigarettes, intensifying his ‘capacity of enjoyment’ and making his ‘senses … abnormally acute’.2 The perfumes produce similar effects – the ‘sharpening of the wits’ and ‘the feeling of peculiar physical enjoyment’ – but also create a hallucinatory ‘rose-coloured mist’ that appears to signal a state of hypnotic suggestibility.3 Simultaneously stimulating and numbing, these chemicals ready the mind and the body for a languid appreciation of the unique and novel experiences so central to the ideals of decadence. The (anti)heroes of decadent literature – from Joris-Karl Huysman’s Jean des Esseintes to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray – are devotees of the rare, the expensive and the unique. In his own creation of intoxicating substances, though not partaking himself, Pharos might be considered the supplier to these earlier decadents. Yet, towards the end of the nineteenth century, perfume and cigarettes were increasingly marketed using ancient Egyptian iconography in a bid to capitalise upon the fashion for ancient Egypt which was pervading consumer culture; while his products are elite, as a character in popular fiction with an ancient Egyptian element, Pharos is caught between exclusivity and mass appeal. Negotiating, on the one hand, decadent circles and the associated culture of recreational drug use at the fin de siècle,4 and on the other, advertising for mass-market



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products drawing upon ancient Egypt’s increasing attraction, this chapter identifies how Boothby uses cigarettes and perfume in Pharos the Egyptian to suggest the dissolving of the boundaries between high and low culture, or rather counter-culture and popular culture. The manipulation of the consumer craze for all things ancient Egyptian is discernible within the text itself, which, through its grappling with this very subject matter, declares itself consumable in much the same vein. While Nicholas Daly has explored the late nineteenth-century literary trend in which ‘the mummy [is held] as a sign that may be consumed in popular fiction’,5 this chapter establishes how Egypt as consumable extends far beyond the bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead, and indeed, how these bodies – in the sinister figure of Pharos – might themselves take charge of European consumer habits for their own ends. I also turn to the materiality of Boothby’s volume itself as a physical artefact (Figure 7.1), following Gérard Genette’s call for scholars to consider a work’s ‘paratexts’ as ‘assur[ing] its “reception” and its consumption’.6 Originally published in six monthly instalments in the Windsor Magazine from June to November 1898, Boothby’s text was reissued as a single volume in 1899. Examining the cheaper format of the Windsor Magazine, as well as the illustrations by John H. Bacon accompanying Boothby’s story, I connect the kinds of consumer products that Boothby’s text evokes to affordable literature, which also harnessed the allure of ancient Egypt in a bid to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The version of the text as it appeared as a standalone novel is, as we would expect, a more expensive item, bound in blue cloth and stamped with gilt designs depicting a winged solar disc flanked by royal cobras on the front board, and a lotus plant on the book’s spine. These motifs, I claim, were selected not so much for their direct relevance to the plot of Boothby’s tale, but to represent a generalised (and glamourised) ancient Egypt, defined by recognisable iconography and evoking perhaps the most famous ancient Egyptian colour palette of gold and royal blue. I argue that, as with cigarettes and perfume whose advertising displayed such imagery, inspired in part by the ‘archaeological’ paintings by figures as eminent as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Boothby’s novel – on a physical level – itself functions as part of a broader material culture which saw markets flooded with glinting sun discs and rearing cobras. This chapter ultimately serves as a case study whereby references to and the iconography of ancient Egypt invite us to reconsider the Victorian novel as a material as well as a textual artefact, responsive to an everbroadening pool of genuine relics, their replicas and representations, on the one hand, and participating itself as an object within consumer culture, on the other. It has long been the case that artistic boundaries

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have been perceived to exist between movements such as decadence and the more mainstream culture against which its participants reacted and from which they sought to break free. Reinforcing these divides in academic criticism is, as I hope this chapter demonstrates, to commit oneself to an oversimplification of the fuzzy areas where the highbrow and the popular merge; rather than re-asserting their existence, looking closely at a work that exists on this hazy boundary reveals both ancient Egypt’s extraordinarily wide-ranging appeal at the fin de siècle and also in which directions this appeal shifted under the twin pressures of elitism and fashion. From serial to single volume: Pharos the Egyptian’s two forms Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian is most often considered a sensational romance: a work of ‘Egyptian Gothic’.7 The narrative, like many of the fin-de-siècle texts held to fall into this bracket, is centred around an act of reverse colonisation, a response to the ‘turbulent time’ in ‘Anglo-Egyptian history’ subsequent to the British military occupation of Egypt in 1882 in which this text was conceived.8 Critical work on Boothby’s novel, which has only recently drawn the attention of literary scholars, has ranged from discussions of its relation to contemporary psychology through to the political implications of its translation into Arabic in 1906.9 Scholarship has not yet addressed the original publication formats of this text, its binding in single-volume form, illustrations by John H. Bacon across the standalone and serialised versions, or its place in late Victorian culture both visually and materially. The novel’s frame narrative itself invites such a consideration, the text purportedly being derived from a manuscript written by the protagonist, Cyril Forrester, who sends his account to a pair of his friends requesting that they ‘arrange with some publishing house to put it before the world’.10 A period of ‘six months later’, we learn, Forrester’s friends have indeed ‘discovered a publisher’ for the manuscript, presumably Ward, Lock & Co., who oversaw the publication of both the Windsor Magazine and the single-volume version of Boothby’s text, if we are to indulge in the suspension of disbelief with regards to his tonguein-cheek narrative frame.11 The novel’s plot sees Pharos, an ancient Egyptian magician once known as Ptahmes, seek revenge on the son of the Egyptologist who seized his mummified body from his tomb around twenty years prior. Repulsed by Pharos, whom he knows to be a murderer, yet captivated by his beautiful ward, Forrester follows Pharos from Britain to Luxor, where Pharos claims to want to reinter his mummified remains. Here in Egypt, Pharos injects



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Forrester with a pathogen. Forrester falls ill, recovers under Pharos’s care and, unaware that he is still a carrier of the disease, spreads a deadly plague as he travels back to London, via Constantinople, Vienna and Prague. In the devastation that Forrester leaves in his wake through the spread of the disease it is evident that Pharos’s vengeance is not just reserved for the son of the man who removed his body from its resting place but for European culture more broadly. Pharos is, as the novel draws to a close, determined to have betrayed his religion and is psychically executed for his crimes. Forrester and Pharos’s ward leave with the hopes of beginning a new life together. Boothby’s story first appeared across six issues of the Windsor Magazine from June to November 1898, with each issue costing sixpence, making the full assembly of the text on the part of Boothby’s magazine readership three shillings in total. When the text appeared as a single volume published by Ward, Lock & Co. the next year it was priced at five shillings.12 These versions of the text were both marketed towards a broad middle-class readership with some disposable income for literature as well as a taste for fiction (the Windsor Magazine predominantly comprised serialised novels, short stories and poetry, though it also included non-fiction articles). What has heretofore gone unnoticed, in Boothby’s text as well as in the comparable works of his contemporaries, is that across these formats the novel both evokes and is itself part of a network of popular consumer goods that cater to a market with an appetite for the ancient East; furthermore, a significant portion of this appeal is derived from evocations of luxury associated with elite products which these more affordable forms attempt to emulate. The front cover and spine of the single-volume edition of Pharos the Egyptian, for example, immediately suggest ancient Egypt (Figure 7.1). The pages are bound between blue cloth boards stamped with eye-catching gilt motifs. On the front, a winged solar disc is flanked by two cobras. The cobras are uraei, symbolic of royalty, divinity and the serpent goddess Wadjet. The sun disc between them carries similar connotations, connected variously with the solar deity Ra and an iteration of the god Horus (Horus Behdety).13 The spine, meanwhile, is adorned with a lotus plant (suggestive of rebirth in ancient Egyptian culture)14 with a knotted stem; one of the three buds has opened into a full flower. All of the text that adorns the cover and spine is written in a font that appears somewhat exotic, and colons are substituted at times for spaces that would appear between words – ‘Pharos:the:Egyptian’, ‘Guy:Boothby’, ‘Ward:Lock:&:Co’ – suggestive of the ways in which ancient Egyptian names might be split into component parts by the use of dots or hyphens in contemporary transliterations. The combination of gold and royal blue, reminiscent of lapis lazuli, is particularly

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7.1  Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1899), front and spine

amuletic, being the respective colours of the skin and hair of the Egyptian deities.15 While this symbolism is undoubtedly rich, it reflects little of the novel’s actual content aside from the general ancient Egyptian flavour. Pharos himself is neither royal nor a deity, though in the ancient world he did enjoy the privileged position of being the pharaoh’s chief magician. The connotations of rebirth evoked by the lotus plant might lend themselves well to a text that features a reanimated mummy,16 though how Pharos simultaneously exists as a living walking man and as a mummified corpse is never explained. Most likely, rather than representing something specific



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about Boothby’s text itself, the lotus motif, uraei and winged solar disc hark back to other texts that use similar iconography on their covers, including Egyptological volumes as well as Egyptian-themed fiction. It is possible, furthermore, that the lack of explicit relationship between the subject matter of the novel and the generalised ancient-Egyptian-themed designs on the book’s front board and spine hint that Boothby himself may not have had a hand in the creation or selection of these motifs, which likely fell instead to his publisher. With ancient Egypt increasingly of cultural interest towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ward, Lock & Co. may have even attempted to keep the imagery generic, so as to appeal to the broadest possible market. As Gerard Curtis relates, ‘[b]y the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries books had become explicitly decorative objects for an ever-widening class of reader’.17 And, as Daly observes, the Victorian home was ‘a sort of domestic museum for the exotic and antique, … a space for the collector’s art’.18 In less affluent homes, therefore, might not the decorative mass-produced book, emblazoned with identical gilt motifs, be an appropriate simulacrum for the more exclusive and unique Egyptian antiquity? In keeping with and unifying these claims, Boothby’s text might be understood to have been packaged in such a way as to catch the eye of the reader seeking a text not only for its content but for its visually appealing form evoking both the ‘exotic’ and the ‘antique’. The symbolism that adorns Boothby’s novel functions as a kind of shorthand for potential readers with an interest in ancient Egypt, visually evoking other works that they may have already enjoyed or, at least, valued for their beauty as objects. Indeed, these and similar visual references adorned packaging and advertisements for many products that gestured to the perceived opulence of ancient Egypt, such as cigarettes and perfume.19 The frequency with which these images abound in visual culture does, however, make the process of tracing the original sources difficult. Guides to visual style through the ages, most famously Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856) and later H. Dolmetsch’s The Historic Styles of Ornament (1898), which themselves often referred to original archaeological sources, increased the availability of such imagery. Similar motifs could be recycled, adapted and tweaked for a variety of purposes, though often – in the case of ancient Egypt – put to comparable ends. The desired effect was usually to entice a consumer keen to indulge in a gilded piece of the Orient, adorned with recognisable ancient Egyptian symbolism, such as the metallic winged sun that graces the front of Boothby’s novel. Moving beyond the tantalising covers of the text as it appeared as a single volume, several of the large illustrations first created for the serialisation were reproduced as full-page images in the single-volume edition;

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other full-page illustrations were added and the smaller illustrations that framed or were themselves framed by text in the Windsor Magazine format were excised. The images across both formats, though specific to the narrative rather than general markers of an ancient Egyptian quality to the text, also themselves replicate generic imagery that was used to market products with the potential to be advertised as hailing from an exoticised Orient – such as camels and palm trees – and also the archaeological visual language of ancient Egypt specifically – from landmarks such as the Sphinx of Giza and pyramids to temple columns, wall paintings and sarcophagi. The illustrator John H. Bacon satisfies readerly expectations that these recognisable elements will feature, often using them as a backdrop against which he sets the central figures in the foreground. There is also, in the serialised version of the text, a sense both of eclecticism and repetitiveness which reflects the methods, conventions and pressures of periodical publishing.20 In the first instalment, Boothby’s narrative is introduced with what appears to be a bespoke title image though this, because of the generic Egyptian symbols used, as with the cover of the text as it appeared in single-volume format, might realistically be used for any piece with ancient Egyptian subject matter. A winged sun disc and cobras again top the narrative’s title; either side of this motif are columns, a pyramid, a section of – presumably – the river Nile, the pschent crown (worn by pharaohs) and a sistrum (a sacred musical instrument). This illustrated title does not appear with each instalment of the text, but seems to have been included for the sake of filling space that would otherwise have remained blank in certain issues. The repeated but sporadic return of this image suggests a bid on the editors’ part to make the most of a particular design for the sake of cost-effectiveness. Some inclusions, contrasting with the specificity of Bacon’s illustrations to the immediate narrative events, are far more arbitrary. At the end of one instalment the empty space below Boothby’s text has been filled by a charming picture of owls by illustrator Louis Wane, bearing no relation to the story that precedes it.21 Another is taken up by what appears to be a fragment of a larger illustration of a tiger by an artist by the name of B. Boese, again, an image that has no relevance to Boothby’s text, aside from, perhaps, general connotations of exoticism or danger.22 Concluding the narrative in its final instalment is an image of medieval knights jousting, accompanied by the words ‘ye ende’.23 These features explicitly reaffirm that Boothby’s text, as it appears in this format, is itself just a component of a larger product; the magazine’s editors’ decisions are based on providing appealing material to their readership, filling blank spaces that would otherwise appear unsightly with material that could otherwise extend the length of the issue (and thus production costs) if placed elsewhere, and



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balancing these considerations with the fees due to their authors and illustrators, among other financial concerns. The reader of the text in this format is, with each instalment, presented with such textual and visual markers of the very industry that provides them with the magazine as commodity. While in the single-volume format there are, as we would expect, no intrusions into the presentation of the text itself, and instead occasional blank spaces signifying a slightly higher production value (in, for instance, the printing of images on inserted plates with blank reverses), commercial features are detectable. After the narrative has drawn to a close, six pages of advertisements follow. These promote the Windsor Magazine itself (‘bigger, brighter, better’ than ‘every other sixpenny magazine’), as well as other novels by Guy Boothby, in which the ‘special and original designs’ of the volumes are emphasised, ‘each volume [being] attractively illustrated by Stanley L. Wood’, bound in ‘cloth gilt’ and priced at five shillings a piece.24 Advertisements for other Ward, Lock & Co. texts note when certain editions of works are ‘printed from type specially cast’, made from ‘best antique paper’ or have ‘gilt edges’ or a ‘gilt top’.25 They also quote from reviews of these works that mention that they are ‘well printed’, ‘comfortable to hold’ and are presented ‘in a fitting form’ for the text itself, evidencing the publishers’ awareness that their consumers are not buying these products for the words on the page alone, but for a volume’s quality, appearance and the sensory pleasures offered by the act of reading from a well-made and attractive book.26 Boothby’s text further draws attention to its own status as a material ‘object’ shaped and made available by the publishing industry in several ways. One particular moment appears to be a joking self-referential gesture to the text itself; after Forrester’s first encounter with Pharos he tries to distract himself from the horrors he has witnessed by reading a book; ‘[o]ut of the centre of every page’, however, ‘peered that wicked old face, with its pallid, wrinkled skin, and lack-lustre eyes’.27 The unnamed volume that Forrester picks up could, in this fleeting description, be Pharos the Egyptian, with its many illustrations of its central antagonist. Forrester’s profession as an artist, furthermore, ties to the text’s illustrations (across both versions) and illustrated capitals (at the beginning of each instalment in the serialisation only).28 Indeed, there are several descriptions of Forrester’s artwork in the text itself, a process of ekphrasis that in a sense mirrors Bacon’s own depiction of moments in Boothby’s text, underscoring a cyclical or back-and-forth exchange between the visual and the textual. In fact, Boothby’s allusions to visual culture are so detailed that, I claim, Forrester appears to have been based on the Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who was known for his lavish scenes of the ancient world

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and his keen eye for archaeological detail. Forrester’s father having been ‘a famous Egyptologist’ – ‘one of the greatest authorities upon the subject the world has ever known’ – is held to be the reason for Forrester’s own ‘remarkable’ ‘knowledge … of the country and the period’ conveyed in his paintings.29 At the opening of the narrative, Forrester, an Associate of the Royal Academy,30 has recently completed a work which is being exhibited at Burlington House: It represented Merenptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, learning from the magicians the effect of his obstinacy in the death of his first-born son. The canvas showed him seated on his throne, clad in his robes of state. His head was pushed a little forward, his chin rested on his hand, while his eyes looked straight before him as though he were endeavouring to peer into the future in the hope of reading there the answer to the troubled thoughts inside his brain. Behind him stood the sorcerers, one of whom had found courage to announce the baneful tidings.31

The subject matter and even the composition evoke Alma-Tadema’s 1872 painting Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son, a work that depicts the pharaoh cradling the body of his child. It is a moody, crowded night-time interior, emotionally fraught, dramatically illuminated with a golden glow by burning braziers. The painting is noteworthy for its darkness compared to Alma-Tadema’s other works with ancient Egyptian subject matter – with the exception of An Egyptian Widow, also painted in 1872, which, while set during the day, is another example of shadowy Egyptian melancholy. His subsequent Egyptian-themed paintings, including Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh’s Granaries (1874), The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra (1883) and The Finding of Moses (1904), are lighter in subject matter and tone, the latter work being produced after Alma-Tadema visited Egypt for himself for the first time; it would appear here especially that the startling luminosity of Egypt made a profound impression on the artist. Alma-Tadema was working on the peripheries of several movements which are significant for the purposes of this chapter; he rubbed shoulders with some of the major figures in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and his interest in the ‘house beautiful’ and furniture design connect him to the Arts and Crafts movement.32 The ancient world with which he was enamoured was also of interest to both the aesthetes and the decadents. His neoclassical and Orientalist subject matter link him, also, to other celebrated artists such as Frederick Goodall and Edward Poynter.33 AlmaTadema’s works may have received mixed reviews during his lifetime, with critics either lauding or lamenting his devotion to historical accuracy according to their individual preferences, but he was undoubtedly celebrated



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for his achievements, winning several major prizes over the course of his career, and being knighted in 1899. Despite his renown, it was not long before, with the rise of modernist art, his work was devalued. His output was, in 1913, to be compared to ‘highly-scented soap’ by the art critic Roger Fry, a quality reflective ‘not … of his profound archæological researches, but … commercial customs’.34 ‘He gave his pictures’, Fry claims, referring to Alma-Tadema’s smooth, sleek paintwork, ‘the expensive quality of shop-finish’.35 Fry’s focus on commerce, shopping and materialism in his critique suggests not only an aversion to Alma-Tadema’s close attention to ‘things’ – the abundance of objects reproduced with painstaking detail – but also the significance of the settings, subject matter and aesthetic in the late Victorian commercial world. Alma-Tadema’s subject matter indeed frequently overlaps with packaging and advertising for products that were often marketed as exotic and luxurious like ‘highly-scented soap’, but which also attracted a broad range of consumers. Moreover, it is the middle-class commodity culture to which Fry believes Alma-Tadema especially appeals that he specifically berates, referring to this ‘as the culture of the Sixpenny Magazine’ – that of ‘the half-educated members of the lower middle-class’.36 The Windsor Magazine was itself a sixpenny periodical; Alma-Tadema and Pharos the Egyptian would be, in Fry’s view, culturally on a level. Fry’s attack on Alma-Tadema’s art is one clearly bound up in notions of class and taste; it is the lower-middle-class appeal of his artwork, paintings which were extolled by the elite art world in Alma-Tadema’s own lifetime, that appears most to motivate Fry’s criticism. If Forrester is based on Alma-Tadema, he is working within the same exclusive artistic culture, and producing artworks which are at once recognisable for their historical veracity with regards to the ancient Egyptian details and saturated with iconography held to appeal strongly to ‘the half-educated members of the lower-middle class’. As Maria Wyke and Dominic Montserrat record, speaking of widespread consumption of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘people were able to bring Cleopatra into their own homes via a variety of objects that ran the gamut from expensive to humble; from … a framed lithograph of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting of Cleopatra, down to cigarette paper with an image of Cleopatra based on an ancient relief, or postcard of the actress Lillie Langtry in pseudo-Egyptian costume’.37 While AlmaTadema’s paintings themselves would change hands for enormous sums, cheap reproductions meant that his imagery could actually infiltrate all manner of homes.38 Depictions of Forrester in the illustrations across the formats of Pharos the Egyptian quite literally situate him within the world of middle-class consumers, bridging a divide between the

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exclusivity of Burlington House exhibitions and the universality of sixpenny magazines. Cigarettes and perfume: decadence and mass consumption Wyke and Monserrat’s observation about Egyptian imagery on cigarette paper is especially pertinent to this chapter’s considerations. AlmaTadema’s images of ancient Egypt had themselves become emblematic of the luxuriousness of this ancient civilisation; Lisebeth Grotenhuis cites an example of a cigarette tin from the 1910s featuring a design based on his The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, for example, which may suggest further reasons for Fry’s associations between Alma-Tadema and ‘commercial customs’ specifically.39 As previously mentioned, Pharos produces his own brand of cigarettes; he is clearly an ancient Egyptian with an entrepreneurial streak. In the August 1898 issue of the Windsor Magazine the moment in the text in which Pharos first offers Forrester his own tobacco is accompanied by an illustration that does not make its way into the single-volume edition. This image (Figure 7.2) is closer to a piece of contemporary advertising than any of Bacon’s other illustrations for this narrative. It depicts Forrester and Pharos sitting at a table, replete with a decanter and glasses, themselves suggesting intoxicating indulgence. Forrester holds a cigarette in one hand, smoke undulating upwards from its tip, while he blows a cloud of smoke from between his lips. Pharos looks on approvingly, and Forrester observes – inwardly, to himself – that ‘[t] o have wasted a puff would have been a sacrilege’.40 The illustration is an image of relaxation and gratification, and its positioning cutting across the

7.2  John H. Bacon, ‘To Have Wasted a Puff Would Have Been a Sacrilege’, Windsor Magazine (August 1898), 247



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page of text emulates that of a well-placed advertisement, taking up the central space. Egyptian cigarettes had opulent associations in fin-de-siècle literary culture. In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) they ‘signif[y] cost and rarity’, encompassing ‘both sexual and racial connotations’ and suggesting ‘a blurred perceptual boundary between consumable product and addictive drug’.41 The addictiveness of Egyptian cigarettes also features in popular literature. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’ (1904), set in 1894, one Professor Coram consumes a thousand Egyptian cigarettes ‘especially prepared by Ionides, of Alexandria’ every fortnight.42 While Coram’s study is ‘fetid with stale tobacco-smoke’, at times having the appearance of ‘a London fog’, and his hands and beard ‘stained yellow with nicotine’, the cigarettes appear to be enjoyed by Holmes – himself no stranger to psychoactive drugs through his cocaine habit – who declares them ‘excellent’.43 Holmes smokes ‘cigarette after cigarette’ ‘with extraordinary rapidity’, announcing himself to be ‘a connoisseur’ and, while we later learn that his true purpose is to disperse the ash in front of what he believes to be a secret door, there is a clear sense that Holmes enjoys these decadent products, which encourage (over)indulgence rather than occasional sampling.44 One of the foremost figures in literary decadence in Britain, Oscar Wilde famously ‘smoked gold-tipped Egyptian cigarettes’, choosing ‘quite deliberately and self-consciously a luxury item associated with exoticism and expense’, the use of gold leaf suggesting an ostentatious visual quality to these products shared by the single-volume edition of Boothby’s text, with its gilt motifs.45 In the sixth chapter of this volume Giles Whiteley suggests particular associations that ancient Egypt called forth in the imaginations of the aesthetes and decadents. If ennui and eroticism were bound up in their visions of Egyptian antiquity, then Wilde’s choice in cigarettes channels this as well. The variety that he consumed while he ate, according to Marcel Schwob, were ‘trempées d’opium’ (‘soaked with opium’).46 Alternately eating and ingesting potent chemicals, Wilde’s habit suggests a desire for sensory bombardment, an almost gluttonous consumption. It might also indicate dependency and addiction suggested, too, by Conan Doyle. The drug-like effects of certain blends are also emphasised in ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ (written in 1897 and published in Vogue in 1900), a short story by the American author Kate Chopin who was herself ‘a smoker of both cigarettes and cigars’.47 The narrator is given Egyptian cigarettes as a gift and, smoking one, hallucinates a vision of romantic betrayal in the desert; she throws away the rest of the cigarettes unsmoked. While this oft-anthologised short story is regularly referred to as an example of

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decadent women’s writing, the tension between exclusive decadent experience and mass-marketed product is, however, palpable. As Relli Shechter observes, the narrator’s hallucinatory vision of the East conjured up by the smoking of the cigarette facilitates an encounter with ‘the Egypt of Oriental painting and popular packet advertising, rather than the representation of a real country’.48 A pertinent example of such advertising is a promotional image for ‘Egyptian Deities’ (Figure 7.3), one of several ‘[b]rands of “luxury” Egyptian cigarettes’ that ‘flooded the English and American markets’.49 Over the course of the following decades Egyptian Deities were advertised with slogans appealing to the consumer’s sense of taste: ‘Still highest in quality; still most renowned, now as for years, the choice everywhere of connoisseurs’; ‘The men who smoke them, and the places where you find them – these are the truest tests of cigarette quality’; ‘Egyptian Deities cigarettes have so long and so exclusively represented the highest quality obtainable that to smoke them is usually considered the best evidence of good taste’; ‘They are invariably first choice in the most exclusive clubs and among the most critical smokers’; ‘People of culture, refinement and education invariably prefer Deities to any other cigarette’. While such slogans announce the product as luxurious and elite (and echoing Holmes’s assertion of himself as ‘connoisseur’, employing the language of expertise and authority), their price suggests that they are affordable: a taste of opulence is within the means of the comfortable middle-class consumer. Shechter, in his study Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East (2006), has analysed the tobacco industry’s employment of iconography from several different ancient cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He records that, in the nineteenth century, ‘[a] typical packet [of Egyptian cigarettes] carried architecture, sculptures, and paintings of ancient Egypt. Most popular among these images were the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and obelisks.’ 50 Shechter asserts that there was more to this imagery than a mere harnessing of the glamorous associations of ancient Egypt, however: ‘Packet designs … suggested to consumers that the cigarette originated in Pharaonic, ancient Greek, or medieval Arab cultures. They thereby obscured the modern and industrial nature of their commodities, and associated their smokes with ancient practices. Suggesting that cigarettes carried exotic and timeless tastes and aromas, they mystified smoking itself.’ 51 This is certainly the case with the Egyptian Deities advertisement, and Boothby notably employs a similar process of mystification in Pharos the Egyptian. The images of the pyramids, Great Sphinx, and of the most famous obelisk in Britain (Cleopatra’s Needle) are all present in this novel, both in Boothby’s text, and within the accompanying illustrations and in the binding of the work as it appeared in single-volume format.



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7.3  ‘Egyptian Deities’ (1904), Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections

The Egyptian Deities advertisement relies upon much of the same imagery. A winged sun disc flanked by uraei underlines the imposing title ‘Egyptian Deities’ and surmounts the temple in which a goddess sits. The goddess appears to be holding a staff topped with a lotus flower, a staff associated with many deities, both male and female; the lotus was, however, particularly associated with the goddess Isis, suggesting

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that we as viewers may be confronted with the imposing figure of the mother goddess herself. She looks out under heavy, dreamy eyelids, akin to depictions of Cleopatra by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse.52 Her scant clothing leaves little to the imagination; she wears nothing more than a headdress, sandals and a skirt, upon which can be seen a cartouche similar to that of the pharaoh Thutmose II of Dynasty XVIII, whose wife, Hatshepsut would, after his death, assume power for herself. Perhaps this slightly shaky hieroglyphic reference provides the viewer with an alternative model of female authority to Isis in the form of a female pharaoh.53 A depiction of the product itself is positioned in front of the goddess and some of the details of the packet are discernible: two seated goddesses either side of another goddess figure, all bare breasted.54 The columns of the temple are redolent of those used in various structures at the complex at Philae, designed to resemble bundles of papyrus stalks topped with lotus blossoms. The temple may well be based on that known variously as ‘Trajan’s Kiosk’ and ‘Pharaoh’s Bed’, given the columns’ appearance and the water’s close proximity. The foreground of the scene is framed by lush lotus plants emerging from the water, whose flowers are a creamy colour tinged with pink. A description of Philae from Amelia B. Edwards’ travelogue A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) seems to support this genuine location as the inspiration for the advertisement; the level of historical detail – echoing particular archaeological sites – suggests something of Alma-Tadema’s impulse for historical accuracy. Edwards refers to the columns and the ancient Egyptians’ use of colour in decorating their architecture at Philae: These exquisite capitals have long been the wonder and delight of travellers in Egypt. They are all studied from natural forms – from the lotus in bud and blossom, the papyrus, and the palm. Conventionalised with consummate skill, they are at the same time so justly proportioned to the height and girth of the columns as to give an air of wonderful lightness to the whole structure. But above all, it is with the colour … that one is most fascinated. Of these delicate half-tones, not even the carefree facsimile in the ‘Grammar of Ornament’ [by Owen Jones] conveys the remotest idea. Every tint is softened, intermixed, degraded. The pinks are coralline; the greens are tempered with verditer; the blues are of a greenish turquoise, like the western half of an autumnal evening sky.55

While much of the architecture is left unpainted in the ‘Egyptian Deities’ advertisement, evoking the appearance of ancient ruins rather than a modern temple in its contemporary moment, Edwards’ description is



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very much of the same muted colour palette of the image. The ‘degraded’ ‘delicate half-tones’ suggest the sophisticated shades favoured by the aesthetes rather than anything excessively gaudy, and again speak to the luxuriousness of elite culture rather than the garishness of mass consumerism. That said, their target market is not the counter-cultural privileged few, but the many who sought to emulate them within their own means, the imagery of elite aestheticism and decadence filtering down into magazine advertisements in a bid to associate affordable products with something of the exclusiveness and glamour of these movements. Cheryl Krueger sums up this tension in late nineteenth-century consumer culture elegantly: Curling cigarette smoke and clouds of exotic perfume infuse decadent art and fiction at the fin de siècle. They suggest timeless indulgence, profusion, and erotic excess, but they also articulate a sophisticated urban aesthetic and a bourgeois hankering for the Orient. The passively overconsuming male aesthete … was a symbol of new economic circumstances in the late-nineteenth century. He stood in contrast to the bourgeois and eschewed the demands of the marketplace and the exigencies of middle-class consumer culture. He stood at a well-judged distance, preoccupied with beauty and constantly in search of new sensations.56

Pharos is not a consumer of Egyptian Deities, or their like, though they would have been very much within the financial reach of Boothby’s readership. Pharos keeps his cigarettes in ‘a silver case’, suggestive of their high value.57 Forrester describes them as ‘delicacies’, noting their ‘wonderful soothing effect’.58 At one point listening to music while he smokes, Forrester notes that his ‘senses became abnormally acute’; the result is akin to synaesthesia, a common trope in decadent literature: ‘new dreams of colour … crowded upon me thick and fast’.59 Such descriptions’ emphasis on ‘beauty’ and ‘new sensations’ relate to the decadent movement’s privileging of novelty and the multi-sensory; Pharos’s cigarettes are unique elite goods that bring with them transcendental experience. In the 1890s in particular, with the rise of decadence came ‘a retreat into the individual with an emphasis on separation and inner consciousness and experience, rather than the vulgar materialism of the external world’.60 This culture elevated expensive tobacco, but was also known for its consumption of more potent chemicals. The drugs that these counter-cultural participants favoured – hashish and opium – were often smoked; such practices, ‘a well-judged distance’ from middle-class consumerism, were, however, easily mimicked by those who sought to emulate the decadents within their more modest means through the substitution of a ‘luxury’ cigarette.

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Packaging, for instance, could be used to suggest hallucinatory visions of an ancient past. Bare-breasted goddesses surrounded by an abundance of lotus flowers speak to the ‘profusion’ and ‘erotic excess’ associated with decadence and, when printed on cheap paper packaging rather than called forth in a drug-induced reverie, are accessible at a fraction of the price. The visions conjured up by the inhalation of Pharos’s substances call forth suggestions of opium rather than unadulterated tobacco; indeed, Pharos employs opiates when he wants to exert even greater control over Forrester.61 Similarly, Pharos’s ‘inoculation’ of Boothby with the pathogen that causes plague might be read more figuratively as the injection of a cocaine solution, morphine or other opiates. It is, however, Pharos’s perfumes that call forth visions with the most occult connotations, harking back to the scenes depicted in all manner of advertising. Speaking of the Egyptian cigarette, Roger Luckhurst declares the experience of smoking one ‘the apotheosis of the immersive experience of commercial exoticism, letting the East enter the lungs and permeate the bloodstream of the Western body’.62 This might also be considered true of perfumes, which were branded with similar imagery and Egyptianate names. While these marketing ploys date back to the early nineteenth century, the particular vogue for Egypt at the fin de siècle meant that this is when such imagery – of ‘Egyptian princesses’ touting ‘highly-scented’ products, to return to Fry’s term – truly proliferated.63 The connection between cigarettes and perfume as comparable commodities has an ancient origin. As Catherine Maxwell asserts, ‘“perfume” deriv[es] from the Latin per fumum, meaning “through smoke”’; ‘[f]rom antiquity, religious rites have used scent in the form of offerings of flowers and incense’, ‘[t]hose scented fumes aspiring heavenwards’ encouraging ‘meditation on the divine’.64 Certainly, the inhalation – inspiration – of perfumes in Pharos the Egyptian results in visions of the ancient Egyptian past. Forrester is led to a subterranean chamber in the temple of Amun at Karnak ‘filled with an overpowering odour of dried herbs’.65 Here, he lies on an alabaster slab while Pharos’s attendants began to anoint my face and hands with some sweet-smelling essences taken from the bottles they had brought with them. The perfume of these unguents was indescribably soothing, and gradually I found myself losing the feeling of excitement and distrust which had hitherto possessed me. The cigarettes Pharos had given me … must have contained something of a like nature, for the effect was similar in more than one essential. I refer in particular to the feeling of peculiar physical enjoyment, and to the dulling of every sense of fear.66



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Slipping into a ‘state of exquisite semi-consciousness’ accompanied by the visualisation of a ‘rose-coloured mist’ (the choice of rose suggesting fragrance as well as tint, another allusion, perhaps, to synaesthesia), Forrester falls asleep.67 When he wakes he experiences a heightening of the senses in contrast to the previous ‘dulling’ effect – ‘the sense of hearing, of sight, of smell, and of touch were each abnormally acute’ – and experiences visions of the past.68 The sights that he witnesses are again akin to an Alma-Tadema painting. Forrester invites us to ‘picture the blue sky overhead, the sunshine, the mighty pylons and temples, the palm trees, the glittering procession, the gorgeous uniforms, the avenues of kriosphinxes, and the waters of the Nile showing in the background’, terms such as ‘picture’ and ‘background’ relating to painting, and with ‘picture’ having multiple connotations including the psychical process of calling forth an image in the mind’s eye.69 This is a rich vision of the physical beauty of the ancient Egyptian past, but it is equally an airbrushed, glamourised, Orientalist scene, taken from a contemporary cigarette packet or perfume bottle.70 We are, once again, caught between decadent phantasmagoria and consumer commonplace. Conclusion I alluded, at the beginning of this chapter, to the elements of Boothby’s novel that have most concerned critics. Most notably, these include the implications of Pharos’s vengeance on the culture that has invaded his homeland. My considerations here and the novel’s broader imperial context can be fruitfully reconciled. The novel’s setting in the 1880s is, of course, suggestive of the early years of the British occupation of Egypt as a backdrop to Pharos’s revenge. It was during the British occupation that the market for Egyptian cigarettes exploded. Greek entrepreneurs in Egypt sold their Turkish tobacco (native Egyptian tobacco was poor quality) to British soldiers;71 these products were then exported to Europe and the United States of America. Elsewhere, on Western soil, cigarettes were rolled using imported Turkish tobacco and marketed using Egyptian motifs, again an industry led by Greek entrepreneurs: New York-based Sotirios Anargyros was the man behind Egyptian Deities.72 Egyptian cigarettes invaded Britain just as Pharos himself does. There is a kind of poetic justice in his plying of Forrester with substances that had so thoroughly infiltrated commodity culture to further exert his will over him in a reversal of imperial power relations. Pharos himself has been made commodity in the transferring of his mummified body from its resting place to a London artist’s studio. He is imperial plunder incarnate,

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and his revenge for the removal of his remains from his homeland drives the novel’s plot; he exerts his power over Forrester by drugging him with substances that seem variously to desensitise him and to overstimulate him, just as consumer goods claimed to be able to allow purchasers to be able to relax and luxuriate, but also to engage in an invigorating sensory experience. As I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter, the paper packaging of perfume, cigarettes and other consumables – namely novels and literary magazines – are part of the same visual genealogy. Perhaps it should strike us as significant, as it has done Harriet Kramer Linkin, that in Chopin’s ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’, for instance, the cigarettes seem to function as a double of literary products: ‘The narrator caches her description of the gift cigarette box in writing metaphors: observing it “covered with glazed, yellow paper” she turns “it stupidly around as one turns a sealed letter,” and opens it with a paper cutter”’.73 Chopin may well be making a point about the ephemerality and disposability of fiction, much like these other products that capitalise upon the allure of ancient Egypt. ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ appeared between the covers of a magazine; The House of Mirth and Pharos the Egyptian were both serialised. ‘Victorian serials were’, as Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg record, ‘regarded, by many contemporary critics, as symptomatic of a consumer society mad with the frenzy of consumption. Serials were seen … as something devoured, in frequent doses, by readers behaving with all the restraint of addicts.’ 74 The very act of serialisation encourages the purchase of the subsequent volume so as to continue an enjoyment which has not reached its conclusion. As with magazine fiction, the cigarette is enjoyed periodically: there is a stretch of time during which the appetite for smoking is sated, while a perfume slowly fades away to indiscernibility before the next application, while a reader awaits the next instalment in a narrative. Whether tobacco, perfume or literature, all of these goods, graced with images of a tantalising ancient Egyptian past, target consumers with an end to encouraging the reinforcement of a habit. Repeat purchasing, the manufacturers hope, may well develop into an addiction.

Notes 1 Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1899), p. 217. While I refer to the text both as it appeared in a single volume and serialised in the Windsor Magazine, I reference Boothby’s text in the novel format wherever possible for the sake of concision. 2 Ibid., pp. 127, 218.



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3 Ibid., pp. 217, 218. 4 Virginia Berridge, ‘The Origins of the English Drug “Scene” 1890–1930’, Medical History, 32 (1988), 53. 5 Nicholas Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28:1 (1994), 25. 6 Gérard Genette, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 22:2 (1991), 261. 7 See, for instance, Ailise Bulfin, ‘The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 54:4 (2011), 412; Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Mummy’s Curse: A Genealogy’, in Jarmila Mildorf, Hans-Ulrich Seeber and Martin Windisch (eds), Magic, Science, Technology and Literature (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006), p. 123. 8 Bulfin, ‘The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia’, 413. 9 Eleanor Dobson, ‘Emasculating Mummies: Gender and Psychological Threat in Fin-de-Siècle Mummy Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40:4 (2018); Samah Selim, ‘Pharaohs’ Revenge: Translation, Literary History and Colonial Ambivalence’, in Dyala Hamzah (ed.), The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2012). 10 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 18. 11 Ibid., p. 20. Emphasis in original. 12 Most of Ward, Lock & Co.’s other books advertised in the back of this volume were priced at three shillings and sixpence, making Pharos the Egyptian and other novels by Boothby more expensive than many of their other publications. 13 Farrin Chwalkowski, Symbols in Arts, Religion and Culture: The Soul of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), p. 467. 14 Ibid., p. 249. 15 Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 57. 16 In Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Lost in a Pyramid; Or, The Mummy’s Curse’ (1869), for example, this symbolism of rebirth is inverted; seeds are discovered with the mummified remains of an ancient Egyptian woman, and when planted sap the life force from the modern female protagonist. When she wears the flower on her wedding day she slips into a permanent comatose state. 17 Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 206. 18 Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 33. 19 Bernadette Schnitzler, ‘Hijacked Images: Ancient Egypt in French Commercial Advertising’, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 167. Daly also makes a connection between the sexualisation of the (female) mummy in fiction of the fin de siècle and ‘one of the most pervasive features of twentieth-century commodity culture: the marriage of sex and the commodity under the aegis of advertising’; Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 44.

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20 James Mussell’s work on seriality and repetition is pertinent here; James Mussell, ‘Repetition: or, “In our Last”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48.3 (2015). 21 Guy Boothby, ‘Pharos the Egyptian’, Windsor Magazine, 8 (1898), 415. The edition from which I quote when referring to the narrative as it appeared in the Windsor Magazine is a hardbound collection of the issues of the periodical from June to November 1898, with page numbers that run on from one issue to the next. The individual issues in their original uncollected format are listed in the Select bibliography. 22 Ibid., 539. 23 Ibid., 648. 24 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, pp. 377, 384. 25 Ibid., pp. 378, 381. 26 Ibid., p. 379. 27 Ibid., p. 38. 28 The illustrated capitals do not appear to have been commissioned for Boothby’s text, being somewhat generic floral designs. Specially-created ancient Egyptianthemed illustrated capitals can be found in the single-volume first edition of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889). For more on Cleopatra, see Sara Woodward’s chapter in this volume. 29 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, pp. 23, 46. 30 Alma-Tadema was himself a Royal Academician. 31 Boothby, p. 23. 32 Giuliana Pieri, ‘D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema: Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism’, Modern Language Review, 96:2 (2001). 33 Robert Verhoogt, ‘Alma-Tadema’s Egyptian Dream: Ancient Egypt in the Work of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 40.4 (2018), 387–90. 34 Roger Fry, ‘The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M.’, Nation, 12:16 (1913), 667. For more on Fry’s assessment of Alma-Tadema and commerce, see Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism’, Visual Culture in Britain, 6:2 (2005). 35 Fry, ‘The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’, 667. 36 Ibid., 666. 37 Maria Wyke and Dominic Montserrat, ‘Glamour Girls: Cleomania in Mass Culture’, in Margaret M. Miles (ed.), Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 174. For more on Victorian iterations of Cleopatra on the stage, see Molly Youngkin’s chapter in this volume. 38 For more on the demand for prints of paintings, including those by AlmaTadema, see Robert Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israels and Ary Scheffer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). 39 Lisebeth Grotenhuis, ‘Smoking Hot: The Odalisque’s Eroticizing Cigarette’, Via, 11–12 (2017), http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/1842.



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40 This is the text as it appears in the caption for Bacon’s image. In Boothby’s text the corresponding passage reads, ‘[t]o have wasted a puff of that precious smoke in conversation would have been a sacrilege that I was determined not to commit’; Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 127. 41 Meredith Goldsmith, ‘Cigarettes, Tea, Cards, and Chloral: Addictive Habits and Consumer Culture in The House of Mirth’, American Literary Realism, 43.3 (2011), 246. 42 A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes’, Strand Magazine, 28:163 (1904), 11. 43 Ibid., 11, 12, 16. 44 Ibid., 11. 45 Ruth Robbins, ‘Always Leave Them Wanting More: Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the Failed Circulations of Desire’, in Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 22. 46 Pierre Champion, Marcel Schwob et son temps (Paris: Grosset, 1927), p. 99. 47 Harriet Kramer Linkin, ‘“Call the Roller of Big Cigars”: Smoking out the Patriarchy in The Awakening’, Legacy, 11.2 (1994), 131. 48 Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850–2000 (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 56. 49 Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 117. This brand was founded by 1893. 50 Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, p. 54. 51 Ibid. 52 See, for instance, John William Waterhouse, Cleopatra (1888). Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted the Egyptian queen several times, often in profile and at times, from this rather uncomfortable angle, meeting the viewer’s gaze. 53 For more on Hatshepsut as she was imagined in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture, see Luz Elena Ramirez’s chapter in this volume. 54 Such reliance on female nudity calls to mind Daly’s assertion that, in advertising, as in mummy fiction, ‘exotic goods turn into desirable women; the act of purchasing or acquisition is filled with sexual promise’; Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, 45. 55 Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877), p. 318. 56 Jane Desmarais, ‘Perfume Clouds: Olfaction, Memory, and Desire in Arthur Symons’s London Nights (1895)’, in Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 62. 57 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 329. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., pp. 128–9. 60 Berridge, ‘The Origins of the English Drug “Scene” 1890–1930’, 53. 61 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 180. 62 Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 117.

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63 Lauren E. Talalay, ‘The Past as Commodity: Archaeological Images in Modern Advertising’, Public Archaeology, 3:4 (2004), 205. 64 Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 17. 65 Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 216. 66 Ibid., p. 217. 67 Ibid., p. 218. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 222. 70 As Maxwell notes, ‘towards the end of the nineteenth century … because of increased production and new cheaper aroma chemicals, perfume became more affordable to those on lower incomes’; Marwell, Scents and Sensibility, p. 12. 71 Pharos’s own tobacco ‘is grown on one of my estates in Turkey’; Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, p. 126. 72 Bob Brier, Egypt-omania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 104; Nan Enstad, The Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 34. 73 Linkin, ‘“Call the Roller of Big Cigars”’, 132. 74 Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, ‘Introduction’, in Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 3.

8 The intelligibility of the past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars Luz Elena Ramirez

I met a Traveller from an antique land, Who said – ‘Two vast, and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ 1

In the contemplation of Rameses II’s broken statue, settled deep in the Egyptian sand, Percy Bysshe Shelley prompts us, in his 1818 sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, to reckon with an ontological puzzle. What clues to the Egyptian past do monuments, mummies and artefacts offer about the pharaohs, and who can make intelligible their inscriptions and stories? How does one interpret the pharaohs’ desire to exist beyond the expanse of human life, without imposing the coldly rational perspectives of the present? Shelley published his sonnet, named after the pharaoh’s alias in Greek sources, twenty years after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, a campaign which would open up the country and its antiquities to specialists such as Jean-François Champollion, whose work on the Rosetta Stone

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unlocked the mystery of the ancient Egyptian language in the modern Western world. In the decades that followed, European writers, collectors, and archaeologists worked together to try to decipher the secrets of ancient Egypt and laid the groundwork for authors such as Bram Stoker (1847–1912), who takes up the intelligibility of the past in his 1903 archaeological thriller, The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker seizes upon the multiplicity of interpretations involved in examining the records of Queen Tera’s reign of 2500 bce; unlike Shelley, however, who was writing when Egyptological study was in its infancy, by the time Stoker published The Jewel of Seven Stars, the field had evolved tremendously and Stoker benefited from the works of a new generation of Egyptologists. These included the writer, artist and archaeologist Amelia Edwards, author of A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) and Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers (1891), her protégé Flinders Petrie, author of Ten Years’ Digging in Egypt 1881–1891 (1893) and E. A. Wallis Budge, who amassed artefacts for the British Museum, translated The Book of the Dead (1895) and published, among other Egyptological studies, Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (1899), a guide for novice linguists. Building on the work of Champollion, his contemporaries and successors, Edwards, Petrie and Budge provided a treasure trove of concepts, images and arguments which Stoker incorporated in The Jewel of Seven Stars, taking up where Shelley left off in seeking to make the Egyptian past intelligible. Set in Edwardian England with flashbacks to nineteenth-century Egypt, the novel recounts the fictional Trelawny–Corbeck 1884 excavation of the tomb of Queen Tera, who, as we shall see, has much in common with the historically real female pharaoh, Hatshepsut. The novel’s narrator, barrister Malcolm Ross, is summoned to the Kensington manor of Abel Trelawny after the archaeologist is attacked and left in a catatonic state. Falling in love with Trelawny’s daughter, who asks for his help, Ross investigates why Trelawny has been brutally and repeatedly cut and discovers that these sinister events lead back to Tera’s mummy and artefacts taken from burial chamber. It is through Ross that readers piece together the records and mortuary effects of Tera’s reign: the scarab-shaped jewel once held in Tera’s seven-fingered hand; the great seven-toed tiger cat who, mummified, would accompany the female pharaoh on her metaphysical journey to the Beyond; the seven cedar oil lamps and seven-sided ‘magic coffer’, which together are crucial to her astrological plan for resurrection under the seven-starred constellation of the Plough. Queen Tera has chosen the early twentieth century as the moment for her reawakening, as it is only at this time that the stars will be aligned to open the coffer and shed a life-giving light.2



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Only since the 1990s has The Jewel of Seven Stars elicited sustained scholarly attention. In 1994, William Hughes investigated the idea of self-censorship to address Stoker’s two radically different endings of The Jewel of Seven Stars, that of 1903 in which everyone except Malcolm dies during the Great Experiment, and the revision of 1912 in which Malcolm and Margaret marry.3 In 1998, Lisa Hopkins examined the spectre of motherhood in the linguistic jouissance of the term ‘mummy’, approaching this text and Stoker’s other works psychoanalytically.4 More recently, Susanne Duesterberg has adopted a Lacanian lens to interpret the dream states and sensory experiences of The Jewel of Seven Stars, with particular attention to Ross’s sensitivity to the ‘mummy smell’ and stirrings of the past.5 Jasmine Day has established the much wider tradition of ‘mummymania’ within which The Jewel of Seven Stars functions, and, in their convincing postcolonial critiques, Bradley Deane, Ailise Bulfin and Roger Luckhurst have read The Jewel of Seven Stars, among other works, as a manifestation of reverse colonisation whereby Egypt comes back to haunt England, what Luckhurst calls a ‘post-occupation curse narrative’.6 All of these critics acknowledge – to varying extents – the role of the artefacts in the novel, but through bibliographic, psychoanalytic or postcolonial lenses. My work builds on this existing criticism to illustrate how archaeological and astrological elements of this thriller illuminate Tera’s instructions for her future awakening, making intelligible both the annals of the past and the path to the Beyond. In so doing, I argue that Stoker deepens our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian Egyptology, a field which had become specialised by the 1890s and early 1900s, demanding discrete knowledge bases of architecture, mythology, astrology and linguistics, and which created its own metatextual discourse. Stoker embeds several elements of late Victorian and early Edwardian culture into his narrative, as The Jewel of Seven Stars announces its contemporary cultural context, calling attention to its own literary construction and engagement with archaeological developments over time, from Egyptology’s infancy to its sophisticated, interdisciplinary approach in the late Victorian period. Egypt’s status as a veiled British protectorate in the 1880s facilitated exploration of the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, the Giza pyramid complex, and the study of colossal hieroglyphic inscriptions at Aswan. The colonial practices of excavation, collecting and tourism, along with the late Victorian fascination with the occult, launched what is now a recognisable corpus of archaeological fiction, which calls into question processes of knowledgemaking as well as the present’s uneasy relationship with the past. Ancient Egypt was, in today’s parlance, a thing to write about, as suggested by

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The Jewel of Seven Stars’ metatextual performance. Dr Winchester observes, Fact and – Fancy! In the first there is this whole thing: attacks; attempts at robbery and murder; stupefyings; organised catalepsy, which points to either criminal hypnotism and thought suggestion, or some simple form of poisoning unclassified yet in our toxicology. In the other there is some influence at work which is not classified in any book that I know – outside the pages of romance.7

Similarly, Professor Frere cautions Margaret, But I trust that you will see your way, as a good daughter to my mind should, to looking to your Father’s health and sanity rather than to any whim of his – whether supported or not by a foregoing fear, or by any number of ‘penny dreadful’ mysteries. The day has hardly come yet, I am glad to say, when the British Museum and St. Thomas’s Hospital have exchanged their normal functions.8

Both of these instances are knowing nods on Stoker’s part to his text’s own generic inheritance and its self-referential participation in these traditions. The immediate literary context of The Jewel of Seven Stars includes works such as H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889), G. A. Henty’s The Cat of Bubastes (1889), Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) and ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892), Theo Douglas’s Iras, a Mystery (1896), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1898; 1899). Such stories share thematic terrain in their visitations to Egypt or imaginations of ancient Egypt surfacing in the present. Taken together, they offer a macabre dance around what is reality and what a flight of fancy. Egypt erupts into the Victorian present in the Beetle’s shape-shifting and genderbending invasion of London in Marsh’s urban Gothic imagining. The intrigues and legacies of Egyptian nobility, conveyed through the translation of hieroglyphs on papyri and stelae, come to life in Cleopatra and The Jewel of Seven Stars. Worship of the cat and the power of the Egyptian priesthood inform the young adult adventure novel, The Cat of Bubastes, the title evoking the feline deity Bast who was worshipped for her protection of the home.9 We find mummies awaken on English soil in The Jewel of Seven Stars, ‘Lot No. 249’, and Iras. Given, however, the playful self-awareness of writers such as Stoker, Conan Doyle and Douglas, one is invited to question whether these mummies have really come to life, or whether there is a mental exhaustion, delusion or intoxication on the part of the narrators or observers which makes the corpses seem animated; doubt is



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often cast on the perceived authority of the – usually – white, male, British narrator or protagonist. Such irony and self-reflectiveness have generated a wave of literary critiques, most of them postcolonial in approach.10 Britain’s ‘Egyptomania’ – a term of nineteenth-century origin to describe widespread enthusiasm for all things ancient Egyptian – was expressed as a motif woven into a fabric of imperial threads that expanded over the course of the century. For example, Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt painted a young, dark-haired and dark-eyed woman clothed in a headscarf and Mediterranean blue dress hanging in graceful folds; confident, graceful and strong, the woman, unveiled, gazes directly at the viewer in Afterglow of Egypt (1861), the portrait inspired by Hunt’s travels to the titular country. Egypt surfaces in such diverse contexts as Punch cartoons, which satirise Britain’s involvement in the veiled protectorate of the late nineteenth century, and in densely allusive novels such as George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Daniel Deronda (1876), which evoke images and figures of Egyptian mythology.11 Stoker benefited from a rich tradition of intellectual inquiry and artistic expression inspired by ancient Egypt that postdated Shelley’s sonnet and – as the chapters in this volume attest – continued to develop into the early years of the twentieth century with the publication of The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker’s novel is profound and expansive in its conception of the afterlife and commentary on how the combination of astrology and mortuary items energises and directs the pharaoh’s journey to the Beyond. Ross, as narrator-protagonist, performs important cultural work as he functions as Stoker’s audience themselves do in piecing together clues about the artefacts, mummification process and especially the timing necessary for resurrection. Ross meticulously examines physical evidence, reflects carefully on the sequence of events and attends to linguistic ambiguities in the interpretation of texts and hieroglyphs; taken together, this approach mirrors the methods of detection in figures such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Stoker’s own Van Helsing. And yet such detection at times is undercut with suggestions of dream-like hallucination or catatonia that hinder an utterly objective assessment of ‘the facts’. On many levels, then, The Jewel of Seven Stars reads as mystery, an ontological puzzle about Tera’s plans for resurrection, built upon a foundation of Egyptological knowledge that is – occasionally – shaken by ancient Egypt’s continued magical potency in the modern world and expressed meta-narratively. Late Victorian audiences expected a high level of authenticity and sophistication in their reading of archaeological fiction.12 They were accustomed to mediating screens – stories within stories; lost and rediscovered manuscripts; translations of cryptic texts – which gave narratives substance. Stoker took obvious care in investing Ross’s narrative with deep

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description and citation of well-known Egyptologists, as well as the invention of fictional sources presented as real that lend an air of authenticity to his text. These fictional accounts include the chronicle of the Dutch ‘traveller’/’explorer’ Nicholas Van Huyn who first enters Tera’s mortuary chamber in the late 1640s and draws on the observations of John Greaves, author of the real Pyramidographia: A Study of the Pyramids of Aegypt (1646) to inspire his own travelogue published in 1650.13 Van Huyn is followed by English ‘Egyptologists’ Trelawny and Corbeck who, literate in hieroglyphs, make Tera’s mummy and tomb their life’s work. Tethered to 2500 bce, when female sovereignty was the exception rather than the norm, and awaiting in a death-sleep her revival in the early twentieth century through the careful arrangement of artefacts, the interpretation of hieroglyphs in her chamber, and a special alignment of the stars, Tera cannot speak for herself.14 Van Huyn’s, Trelawny’s and Corbeck’s accounts are shaped by knowledge that Stoker himself gleaned from real Egyptological sources to make intelligible the ancient inscriptions that document Tera’s existence and her designs on the modern world. Egyptomania and Egyptology The Jewel of Seven Stars begins in Edwardian London with Malcolm Ross’s dreamed memory of himself on a skiff accompanied by the raven-haired, ivory-skinned Margaret Trelawny. He is entranced by the image of Margaret and her beautiful hand trailing along the surface of the water. One of the words repeated in the opening is ‘again’, which establishes that Ross’s dream state, the past, and the present are all inextricably connected; this – like the academic discipline of Egyptology itself, which brings modern knowledge to bear on the traces of the ancient past – is the novel’s unifying logic.15 Ross is abruptly roused from slumber by the insistent footman of the Trelawny household; the barrister has been summoned in the early hours of the morning to attend to Margaret in a moment of crisis. The Egyptologist Abel Trelawny, her father, has been attacked and has fallen into an unconsciousness from which he cannot be awakened. What follows is an exploration of why Trelawny is the target of assault. When attending to his unconscious patient, Dr Winchester remarks that Trelawny’s ‘disease or condition is in some way connected to Egypt’.16 His professional insight helps Ross to shed light on the perplexing attack on Trelawny which leads, in turn, to the mystifying and complex motives of Tera. In one of many self-referential moves, Stoker signals the cultural climate which has inspired his own story. That the ‘disease or condition’ from which Trelawny suffers is ‘Egyptomania’ is evident in his collection



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of amulets, scarabs, weapons, sarcophagi, mortuary furniture and ushabtis (figurines fashioned to complete tasks for the Egyptian in the afterlife).17 The medicalised suffix ‘-mania’ encourages a certain creativity on Stoker’s part, as in his interpretation of the unspoken term, skirted around by a medical professional, he suggests that Trelawny’s ‘Egyptomania’ goes beyond acquisitiveness into obsessive territory. Trelawny has transformed his Kensington manor into a museum of antiquities.18 When touring the home, Ross observes: ‘the great hall, the staircase landings, the study, and even the boudoir were full of antique pieces which would have made a collector’s mouth water’, the knowing phrase ‘even the boudoir’ revealing how Trelawny’s passion for antiquities has penetrated the most intimate of spaces.19 Corbeck, too, succumbs to this mania; he compares his study of ancient Egypt to an illness. ‘I must have been bitten by some powerful scarab,’ he relates, ‘for I took it bad.’ 20 A sense of Stoker’s own ‘Egyptomania’ is evident upon a consideration of the novel’s archaeological density. Stoker’s placement of Tera’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Sorcerer’ may have been inspired by the discovery of what is believed to be Hatshepsut’s tomb by the now-famed Egyptologist Howard Carter.21 The Valley of the Sorcerer is an obvious parallel to the Valley of the Kings, where Rameses II was buried, and Valley of the Queens, where wives of pharaohs and elites were entombed. Among several real Egyptologists mentioned by name in Stoker’s novel is Flinders Petrie (1852–1942), who developed a scientific method of excavation. The systematic way in which Trelawny and Corbeck extract Tera’s mummy and other items from the chamber – as opposed to reckless plundering, a distinction that Stoker and his characters are attune to – and the care they take in transporting these artefacts correspond with Petrie’s meticulous methodologies. Stoker also calls attention to the contributions of E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934), who published, along with The Mummy (1893), The Book of the Dead and Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (1899), a work upon which Stoker seems to have relied.22 In this latter text, Budge explains the concept of the Ka, the ‘double’ or spirit of an individual.23 The Ka is one of the most important concepts in Stoker’s novel as it explains how Tera has a spiritual presence separate from her corporeal one. As Corbeck has ‘a faculty for learning languages’ – the translation of hieroglyphs to him being mere ‘child’s play’ – as well as a string of formal qualifications, he appears to be based on Budge.24 Petrie, in contrast, was not formally educated, and as his biographer Margaret S. Drower records, ‘did not feel equipped to teach hieroglyphics’ even after taking up his professorship at University College London in 1892, a post to which he was appointed by Amelia Edwards.25 Stoker embodies aspects of the respective strengths in method and research of

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Budge and Petrie in The Jewel of Seven Stars’ fictional doubles, Trelawny and Corbeck, who use their knowledge to help transport Queen Tera from 2500 bce, when she was entombed, to the present. The historical framework of the novel provides clues to Tera’s vision of the future, a vision sculpted from the past. While there are, in Stoker’s imagining of Egypt, a multitude of one-to-one correlations with archaeological sites excavated in the nineteenth century, one such example has heretofore escaped scholarly attention. The colossal hieroglyphs of the Famine Stela on Sehel Island near Aswan, which Petrie studied and photographed, seem to have inspired Stoker’s description of inscriptions on Tera’s rock-faced tomb, also located near Aswan. Corbeck explains to Ross that Theban priests, in an act of hatred, sought to conceal the smoothed stone entrance of Tera’s tomb with hieroglyphs, the meaning of which were lost to the sands of time until his and Trelawny’s arrival. Corbeck and Trelawny have at this point retraced the footsteps of Dutch pyramidist Van Huyn who, in the seventeenth century, discovered the entrance to Tera’s burial chamber: we came at last at nightfall on just such a valley as Van Huyn had described. A valley with high, steep cliffs …. At daylight we were opposite the cliff and could easily note the opening high up in the rock, and the hieroglyphic figures which were evidently intended originally to conceal it. But the signs which had baffled Van Huyn and those of his time – and later – were no secrets to us. The host of scholars who have given their brains and their lives to this work, had wrested open the mysterious prison-house of Egyptian language. On the hewn face of the rocky cliff we, who had learned the secrets, could read what the Theban priesthood had had there inscribed nearly fifty centuries before.26

What the Egyptian priests inscribe is a message to stay away, lest the vengeance of the gods condemn to oblivion the trespasser. The intelligibility of the message is lost on Van Huyn. But, owing to the 1799 discovery of the of the Rosetta Stone, the pioneering work of the French philologist Champollion and later scholars including Budge – specialists who make Trelawny and Corbeck’s work possible – the warning is clear. With characteristic bravado, the English adventurers ignore the curse on those who enter, and they employ ropes and ladders – as Petrie did in his explorations – to gain access to Tera’s lofty tomb. This is one instance in the novel in which Stoker suppresses the mystical – the priests’ curse – and lets prevail in his characters a defiant rationality, a faith in Egyptology with its power to categorise and neutralise. Yet on other occasions, notably the undertaking of the Great Experiment, a moment to which



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I shall return, occult energies shape the destinies of Trelawny, Corbeck and Ross. While acknowledging Petrie and Budge and other Egyptologists, Stoker is quiet about Amelia Edwards’ monumental contributions to archaeology. Perhaps this is because his Egyptological authorities are coded as male; even the Egyptologist Corbeck turns to Ross rather than Margaret for answers – ‘with a strong man’s natural impulse to learn from a man rather than a woman’ – despite the fact that Margaret has been surrounded by her father’s ancient Egyptian collection and over time has absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the artefacts.27 Perhaps the omission is because the connection between Hatshepsut and Tera is already so close; it is plausible that Stoker wanted readers to decipher the allusion without further prompts. This would account, as well, for the novel’s silence about Howard Carter’s discoveries. In 1891, Edwards (1831–1892) documented her tour of pyramids and tombs in a series of lectures published as Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers. The argument throughout is that ancient monuments should be conserved and pillaging held in check so that we can apprehend, more fully, how the ancient Egyptians lived and benefit from their records and legacies. In this handsomely illustrated volume, Edwards examines material evidence, notably a throne chair with solar cartouche, to restore Hatshepsut – whom she calls Hatasu and who ruled from 1479 bce to 1458 bce – to her rightful place in history, effaced from the architectural record, as she was, by her half-brother. Edwards goes on to celebrate Hatshepsut’s achievements as sovereign. As we shall see, the ways in which Hatshepsut was represented pictorially and the vision she had for her funerary temple anticipate the picture that Stoker draws of Tera’s reign and tomb. While Stoker does not explicitly cite Edwards, then, he certainly follows in her footsteps, writing a doppelgänger of Hatshepsut into his archaeological fiction. Doppelgängers: Hatshepsut and Tera Stoker dedicates significant effort to authenticate his narrative, which depends not only on references to famed archaeologists, deep description of artefacts and evocative locations such as the Valley of the Sorcerer, but also on the doubling of female pharaohs Hatshepsut and Tera. The archaeological literacy of the late Victorians and early Edwardians – presumably audiences attentive to nineteenth-century discoveries of the tombs of Seti I and Rameses II, which were widely reported in the press, and conversant with the popular works of Budge, Petrie and Edwards – demanded much from novelists such as Stoker. On the one hand, Stoker

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could not adhere too closely to the historical equivalent of Tera, as that would leave him little room for creative licence, perhaps even inviting criticism for perceived historical discrepancies. On the other hand, his portrait of Tera should not be too far removed from one of its obvious inspirations so as not to lose its plausibility. He manages this challenge expertly in the way that Tera approximates the life of the historical Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 1479 bce to 1458 bce, and Tera, who rules in roughly 2500 bce, are both patrons of the arts, share the unusual practice of cross-dressing (if not in life, then in their iconographical representations), assert their power in a patriarchal society and unify two kingdoms. As Edwards notes of Hatshepsut, ‘In contemporary wall-paintings and bas-relief sculptures, we see Queen Hatasu in male attire, wearing the short kilt and sandals, and crowned with the  Kepersh, or war-helmet, habitually worn by the pharaohs on the field of battle. Sometimes we see her adorned with a false beard; but this is perhaps a touch of delicate flattery on the part of the artist.’ 28 The representation of Hatshepsut in male dress is mirrored in Stoker’s portrait of Tera. Corbeck educates Ross as to how Tera appears in the architectural record: ‘In one place she was pictured in man’s dress, and wearing the White and Red Crowns. In the following picture she was in female dress, but still wearing the Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, while the discarded male raiment lay at her feet.’ 29 It is especially significant that the ‘male raiment’ lies at Tera’s feet because it suggests an active dressing and cross-dressing, a theatrical manifestation of her female identity and male power.30 Moreover, both female pharaohs wear the double crowns to signal their domain over two lands. Edwards further observes, One startling peculiarity in the inscriptions of Hatasu, not only upon her obelisks at Karnak, but upon the walls of her temple at Dayr-el-Bahari, consists in the employment of masculine titles with feminine pronouns. As hereditary sovereign of Egypt, she was Pharaoh and King, head alike of the sacerdotal and military castes. Hence, in one and the same sentence, she appears as Hon-f (His Majesty), while the suffixes used in the grammatical construction are feminine.31

Corbeck again relates an analogue in Tera: ‘Prominence was given to the fact that she, though a Queen, claimed all the privileges of kingship and masculinity’.32 The legacies of Stoker’s Tera and her historical counterpart Hatshepsut endure, despite attempts to obliterate them from history. Edwards records that Hatshepsut’s stepson and nephew, Thutmose III, effaced her cartouche



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and inscriptions. Similarly, Corbeck points out in his reading of Tera’s stela: it was plainly set forth that the hatred of the priests was, she knew, stored up for her, and that they would after her death try to suppress her name. This was a terrible revenge, I may tell you, in Egyptian mythology; for without a name no one can after death be introduced to the Gods, or have prayers said for him.33

Tera’s tomb, moreover, resembles the mortuary temple Hatshepsut had built in Dayr el-Bahari. In recalling their entry into Tera’s resting place, Corbeck states: The tomb was one of the most magnificent and beautiful which either of us had ever seen. From the elaborate nature of the sculpture and painting, and the perfection of the workmanship, it was evident that the tomb was prepared during the lifetime of her for whose resting-place it was intended. The drawing of the hieroglyphic pictures was fine and the colouring superb; and in that high cavern, far away from even the damp of the Nile-flood, all was as fresh as when the artists had laid down their palettes.34

Generally speaking, the most powerful and most respected of pharaohs would have the benefit of highly skilled and inventive architects and artisans. Stoker’s mention of colour signals his awareness that it was essential to Egyptian symbolism and that application of pigments was an art unto itself, with richly coloured and well-painted art reserved for the most elite. Edwards, among other Egyptologists, explains that colour was applied with great care and skill, for poor application of pigment would mean that colour would fade or it would escape the margins of the figures.35 There are also important architectural details that unite Hatshepsut and Tera, specifically the sculpting of their temples out of a cliff, and which, in design, evoke the womb of the female body. Edwards observes of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple that: ‘This superb structure is architecturally unlike any other temple in Egypt. It stands at the far end of a deep bay, or natural amphitheatre, formed by the steep limestone cliffs which divide the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings from the Valley of the Nile.’ 36 This lays the groundwork for Stoker’s vision of Tera’s tomb chiselled from rock: ‘the smoothing of the cliff face was probably a part of the tombbuilder’s original design. The symbolism of the painting and cutting within all gave the same idea. The outer cavern, partly natural and partly hewn, was regarded architecturally as only an ante-chamber.’ 37 There is in Queen

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Tera’s tomb also something suggestive of the female form in the way it is carved out of the natural recess of the rock; Stoker makes this association even more explicit when Van Huyn hammers – forces – his way into her burial chamber.38 Hatshepsut and Tera are further linked in their association with Hathor, the Egyptian fertility goddess and protector of the newly born. Edwards writes of Hatshepsut’s terrace that it is adorned with ‘Hathor-headed capitals’; the Chamber of the Cow is ‘[h]ewn out of the solid cliff-side and lined with blocks of the finest limestone’ and that its speos, a rock-cut cave or temple, contains two bas-relief subjects representing Queen Hatasu, in the costume of a royal prince, kneeling beside the Goddess Hathor, who is represented as a large red cow. The Queen, with a naiveté peculiar to Egyptian art, is show as in the act of sucking the milk of the Divine Cow, thus signifying that she was the very foster-child of the goddess.39

Similarly, Stoker describes seven lamps essential to Tera’s resurrection, as emblematic of the Hathor goddesses; ‘Hathor is the goddess who in Egyptian mythology answers to the Venus of the Greeks, in as far as she is the presiding deity of beauty and pleasure. In the Egyptian mythology, however, each God has many forms; and in some aspects Hathor has to do with the idea of resurrection’, Trelawny relates.40 When depicted as a multiple of seven cows, the Hathor goddesses protect the newborn.41 In planning her reawakening under the constellation of the Plough, as she holds the seven-sided ruby-coloured jewel in her seven-fingered hand, Queen Tera will be as one newly born, in the life-giving light of the seven lamps. Stoker suggests through numerological details and description of artefacts and temples how Egyptians might have used astrology to plan for the afterlife. In keeping with his training at Trinity College Dublin as a mathematician and with his library research, which demonstrates a fascination with arcane knowledge, religious controversies and other humanist debates, Stoker expresses a profound understanding of the dynamic movement of planets in their constellations and the cosmological interface between Egyptian architecture and alignment of the stars. The Marsh Library reader log shows he cultivated this interest early, when he requested in the 1860s, among other volumes, William Ramesey’s Astrologia Restaurata; Or, Astrologie Restored: Being an Introduction to General and Chief Part of the Language of the Stars  (1653), a defence of astrology which points out its practice among the ancients, its place in scripture, its basis in the movement of the planets and other celestial bodies, and its application to terrestrial life (such as management of health and husbandry).42 The



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word sidereal means ‘related to the stars’ and in astrology it was the stars, along with the planets, sun and their relation to the earth, that informed the horoscope. Timing is everything; the horoscope determines when best to act or embark on a particular path. Although Stoker does not name sidereal astrology specifically, it appears that it is this practice of astrology, rather than tropical, that informs Tera’s resurrection.43 The interpretation involved in sidereal astrology recognises that planets move through constellations, that none of them is fixed in the cosmos but always in flux. At the same time, the movement of the planets does follow some patterns – discernible on earth as solstices, seasons, tides and the rising and setting of the sun. Stoker imbues The Jewel of Seven Stars with astrological significance, for graven on the rubycoloured jewel – which fell from the sky as an aerolite – is the constellation of the Plough, seven stars, with the point of orientation the Pole Star. Tera planned for her reawakening to be at the seventh hour of the seventh month – when she was born – and under the rising of the Pole Star. This alignment would create a special illumination to open the seven-sided ‘magic coffer’ and re-animate her corporeal body. While one suspends disbelief about the magic qualities of the coffer, it is indisputable that the ancient Egyptians used their understanding of astronomy to build their temples, tombs and pyramids and that they regarded light as the essence of life. After all, Ra, the sun god, was one of their most important deities and the pharaohs were held to have descended from Ra.44 The ancient Egyptians apparently knew that looking at one constellation in one moment would be necessarily different from looking at it again three or four thousand years later. Stoker’s probable use of sidereal astrology establishes an Egyptologically informed framework with which to detail Tera’s reawakening in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, the most powerful, technologically connected, economically fortified and culturally enriched empire in the world. The Great Experiment Having, then, established the verisimilitude of The Jewel of Seven Stars with the doubling of Hatshepsut and Tera, the archaeological contributions of Petrie, Budge and Edwards, and Tera’s astrologically inspired design for resurrection, we can progress to Stoker’s depiction of Tera as she is physically and metaphysically transported from antiquity to Edwardian modernity. Trelawny and Corbeck defy the warning of the Theban priesthood and take great pains to make intelligible Tera’s wishes for resurrection in the north, a lengthy and complicated process which involves the

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excavation of her tomb in 1884, the transportation of her mummy across the desert, the embarkation upon the Nile and the traversing of the Mediterranean to England. Trelawny devotes about sixteen years to collecting artefacts in order to recreate on British soil the arrangement of Queen Tera’s tomb. He then faces the conundrum posed earlier by Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’: how does one at the same time appreciate and honour the past without modern intervention? Trelawny recognises that he has trespassed and removed funerary artefacts from Queen Tera’s tomb, not the least of which is her exquisitely preserved mummified body. While Stoker refers to the Egyptian Arabs who pillage Tera’s tomb as grave-robbers, he uses the refrain ‘we took’ to refer to Corbeck and Trelawny’s acquisitions. What is theft is recast acquisition, and justified through allusions to the advancement of scientific knowledge, as well as the supposed carrying-out of Tera’s own wishes for her resurrection: The Queen did undoubtedly intend isolation; and, all told, it would be best that her experiment should be made as she arranged it. But just think, that became impossible when once the Dutch explorer had broken into her tomb. That was not my doing. I am innocent of it, though it was the cause of my setting out to rediscover the sepulchre. Mind, I do not say for a moment that I would not have done just the same as Van Huyn. I went into the tomb from curiosity; and I took away what I did, being fired with the zeal of acquisitiveness which animates the collector.45

Trelawny’s argument that Van Huyn had already broken into Tera’s chamber is one that would come to be oft repeated in archaeological and museum studies, for it at once justifies subsequent entries and, as importantly, it allows for the dissemination of ancient knowledge and, through collecting and exhibition, offers a rare snapshot into the lives of the pharaohs.46 This is not a debate that can be settled here, but it is important to appreciate how it both informs the contemporary tensions and revelations of The Jewel of Seven Stars and colours modern receptions of Stoker’s text. Because of the Trelawny–Corbeck acquisitions, Ross sees materially and to some extent metaphysically how the ancient Egyptians conceived of what museum curator Eva Kirsch calls ‘The Journey to the Beyond’. Ancient Egyptians devoted great energy and care in preparing the dead and equipping them for their journey. Such preparation involved embalming the body, storing certain organs in canopic jars, wrapping the deceased in linen and inscribing spells and prayers on linens, stelae and sarcophagi. The elite were entombed with precious items, such as amulets made of gold or jewellery of carnelian, lapis lazuli or amethyst, and ushabtis typically



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made of faience, to equip the deceased in their passage from this world to the other.47 Tera orchestrates her passage to the Beyond by assembling items such as the ruby-coloured jewel engraved with hieroglyphs to summon the gods, her coffer carved from the otherworldly yellow aerolite and her mortuary furniture exquisitely inscribed in blue and vermillion pigments. Taken together these constitute what Kirsch calls a set of ‘assurances’: objects and practices which would allow the deceased success in her afterlife.48 Stoker, however, reserves his right to creative licence. First, there is Tera’s body, layered with (rather than dressed in) fine, white wedding robes and then wrapped in linen; her seven-fingered hand is left unwrapped and holds the ruby-coloured eponymous jewel of seven stars. Next, there are the four alabaster canopic jars which, ordinarily, would hold organs of the deceased but in this case are filled with cedar oil, suggesting that Tera’s organs are intact and that she needs them in her resurrection. Finally, there is Tera’s magnificent mummified tiger cat, whose seven toes match her own seven fingers. The British Museum, referenced in Stoker’s text, acquired in 1902 a mummified cat;49 archaeological enthusiasts would have been aware that cats were companions of the Egyptians and were honoured in their death – the higher-quality the linen, skill in wrapping and artistic inscription, the more beloved the pet (and, of course, the more affluent its owner). Awakened from his deathlike slumber, Tera’s tiger cat arises early in the morning before the rising of the sun to do his mistress’s bidding. It is he who has attacked Trelawny at the beginning of the novel, trying to get at the key to open a safe where Tera’s jewel is kept. The tiger cat is, in short, Tera’s familiar. The tiger cat and ceremonial items function as part of a metaphysical matrix in time and space and do not seem to operate singly. It is their timely arrangement which would bring everything together for Tera: the seven lamps filled with cedar oil must sit in the specially arranged places on the magic coffer positioned to catch the starlight of the seven-starred constellation, the Plough, which will rise above the horizon on the seventh day of the seventh month that marks both Tera’s birth and her destiny. Although everything is painstakingly arranged for resurrection, the novel’s conclusion is dramatic and ambiguous. The ‘resolution’ of the narrative is marked by Trelawny’s placement of Queen Tera’s body on display in his seaside manor in Cornwall where she has been moved. When he unwraps the linens protecting Tera’s body, his daughter, Margaret, endeavours to defend the queen from the penetrating male gaze. The men assemble in a scene reminiscent of Thomas Pettigrew’s unwrapping parties of the 1830s and 1840s; these spectacles, both public and private, declined in number subsequent to this zenith, though they continued into the late

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nineteenth century, the most notable instance in this period taking place in December of 1889 at University College London, and presided over by Budge himself.50 Margaret vicariously feels the heated desire of the men in the room while Tera is insensible to the proceedings but nevertheless their object. Ross observes: Mr. Trelawny bent over, and with hands that trembled slightly, raised this linen cloth which was of the same fineness as the robe. As he stood back and the whole glorious beauty of the Queen was revealed, I felt a rush of shame sweep over me. It was not right that we should be there, gazing with irreverent eyes on such unclad beauty: it was indecent; it was almost sacrilegious! And yet the white wonder of that beautiful form was something to dream of …. All the pores of the body seemed to have been preserved in some wonderful way. The flesh was full and round, as in a living person; and the skin was as smooth as satin.51

Tera is as stunning and stimulating as she must have been before she was entombed. In a scene at once sacred, sensual and profane, with the removal of cloth erotic excitement fills the air. We know that Tera had, nearly five millennia before, entered a death-sleep in order to thwart attempts by Theban priests to obliterate her name from history; the priests’ inscription on her tomb forbids passage into it. She enters her sarcophagus with a bridal robe with hopes of awakening in a different time, and here Stoker’s conception of the north as a chosen land affiliates Britain with the pharaohs of Egypt, joining the two great civilisations, in keeping with the late Victorian adventures of writers such as H. Rider Haggard, George Griffith and G. A. Henty who conceived of interracial romances between the English and the exotic ‘other’.52 The final installation of The Jewel of Seven Stars unfolds with everything in place for the Great Experiment. But the metaphysical matrix Queen Tera had planned begins to fall apart. Ostensibly to test his daughter’s connection to Tera, Trelawny burns Tera’s beloved tiger cat – beloved as indicated by its fine wrappings and its entombment with her. So, one key part of Tera’s vision has been annihilated. Winds blow fiercely at the shutters enclosing the seaside chamber and the gust threatens to blow out the life-giving light of the cedar oil lamps. Still, Ross believes he sees Tera animated for a moment before she disappears in a cloud of smoke emerging from the sarcophagus. Everyone in the rock chamber, with the exception of Ross, dies. The question arises as to what extent Trelawny is manipulating the artefacts in his desire to possess, at the cost of his own life, these remnants of the past, and to what degree Tera has orchestrated this grand and complex experiment and decided to hold her own life in abeyance.



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She evocates an ‘unspeakable terror’, as Unspeakable Tera.53 In a linguistic play, ‘Tera’, as Glennis Byron notes, could be read as ‘terror’, derivative of the Greek word teras for monster, something for the forces of good, light, reason and nature to attempt to annihilate.54 This reading would account for the death of Trelawny, Corbeck, Margaret and Dr Winchester. Alternatively, I would add, ‘Tera’ might be read as an approximation of the Latin terra, of the earth and part of the cosmos whose being surfaces in and then abandons the Edwardian period. Her corporeal form indisputably has vanished, the lamps are extinguished, the magic coffer open and empty. However, as Kirsch explains in the Journey to the Beyond exhibition, a set of assurances are arranged so that if one measure fails, another can be used.55 The jewel with its inscription to invoke the gods, along with the stela which records Tera’s life, remains, and her rock-hewn chamber near Aswan endures. Tera lives on in these ancient records and in Ross’s documentation of events; he, alone, lives to tell the tale, a chronicler who, as Shelley would say of the pharaoh, ‘well those passions read’. Perhaps Tera waits to resurface in another age, one better primed for her ruthless female sovereignty and supernatural power. As this chapter has demonstrated, Stoker’s mummy tale bears the weight of a long tradition of Western engagements with ancient Egypt, harking back to the linguistic efforts of philologists such as Champollion and the imaginative works of poets such as Shelley early in the nineteenth century. But it was the full emergence of Egyptology as a colonial tool and nascent academic discipline that encouraged its use as fuel for the popular imperial romance. Stoker’s work is tethered indivisibly to the works of Egyptological pioneers such as Edwards, Budge and Petrie, to discoveries by the likes of Carter and to institutions including the British Museum. Unlike Shelley’s Ozymandias, who lies in inert pieces in barren sands perpetually announcing the futility of his bid for immortality, Stoker’s astrological vision is one in which Egyptological knowledge can piece together the fragments of the past to allow them to speak indefinitely, as magically potent in the modern world as they were in antiquity.

Notes 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume III, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 327. 2 The association of light and life cuts across cultures and over time. Ra, the Egyptian sun god, is one example. The Christian God in the Bible’s Book of Genesis proclaims, ‘Let there be light’; Genesis 1.3. The Inca and Aztecs also

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victorian literary culture and ancient egypt worshipped sun gods. In idiomatic Spanish, dar a luz means ‘to shed light on’ and ‘to give birth to’. William Hughes, ‘Profane Resurrections: Bram Stoker’s Self-Censorship in The Jewel of Seven Stars’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 132–40. There is no general consensus as to whether Stoker chose to change the ending in 1912 – one in which no one dies and Malcolm and Margaret marry – or whether the publisher manipulated the ending to make the novel more marketable. Lisa Hopkins, ‘Crowning the King, Mourning his Mother: The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lady of the Shroud’, in William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 134–50. Susanne Duesterberg, Popular Receptions of Archaeology: Fictional and Factual Texts in 19th and Early 20th Century Britain (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 185–96. Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006); Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 6; Ailise Bulfin, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), especially chapter 2. Along with Jewel of Seven Stars, Luckhurst sees as expressing this curse Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899) and Sax Rohmer’s Tales of Secret Egypt (1918). Deane discusses, among other subjects, the Egyptian romance adventure threads of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912–13). Deane also notes important precedents for Smith, including Grant Allen’s ‘My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies’ (1880). Bulfin considers Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899) and examines popular Punch cartoons which expressed Victorian sentiment about Britain’s involvement with Egypt. Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (New York: W. R. Caldwell, 1904), p. 84. Ibid., p. 68. Henty named his novel after the city Bubastis, site of the Temple of Bastet, which was excavated in 1887 by French Egyptologist Édouard-Henri Naville. See the Queens of Egypt exhibition at the National Geographic Museum in Washington DC; Irene Cordón, ‘How Egypt’s Ancient City of Divine Cats Was Rediscovered’, National Geographic, 7 May 2019, www.nationalgeographic.com/ archaeology-and-history/magazine/2019/05–06/bubastis-egyptian-sacred-cityof-cats/. For the various associations of Bastet or Bast in nineteenth-century culture, see Molly Youngkin’s chapter in this volume. Following Stoker’s 1903 edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars is George Griffith’s The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension (1906).



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On the heels of the 1912 edition is Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’. My view is that with each new publication, writers such as Stoker, Griffith and Haggard dipped their pens into the inkwell to contribute one more Egyptian mystery or fantasy. 11 See Molly Youngkin, ‘Egyptian Mythology in George Eliot’s Major Works’, in Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper (eds), George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). For a discussion of Western imaginations of the Near East, including Egypt, see Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Perceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 12 H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–87) is one of the most successful works of archaeological fiction not because it wholly mirrors any one civilisation, but because Haggard adopts elements from several different cultures, notably ancient Egypt and Greece. More culturally-specific archaeological fiction can be found in G. A. Henty’s portrait of the Aztec and Tezcucan in G. A. Henty’s By Right of Conquest (1890), the Aztec and Otomie in Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), the Inca in George Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897) and in Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902). 13 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 110. 14 I am grateful to Communication Studies scholar Mihaela Popescu for recognising the dynamic sense of the phrase ‘stuck in the past’ in her feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. 15 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 1. 16 Ibid., p. 132. 17 I would like to acknowledge here Eva Kirsch in her curation of the Journey to the Beyond exhibit at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art in San Bernardino, California. Multiple tours of this exhibit allowed me to better understand the complex passage to the afterworld and to correlate specific artefacts, such as the canopic jars, the female mummy’s hand and the jewellery entombed with the deceased, with my reading of The Jewel of Seven Stars. 18 On the Victorian impulse to collect, see Jacqueline Yallop’s Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London: Atlantic, 2011). 19 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 111. 20 Ibid., p. 98. 21 Roger Luckhurst connects the publication date of The Jewel of Seven Stars with the discovery of Hatshepsut’s tomb; see Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 173. Hopkins, before him, suggests Hatshepsut as a model for Tera; Hopkins, ‘Crowning the King, Mourning his Mother’, p. 137. While it is still under debate as to where the pharaoh’s body is, there is confidence that her family members were entombed in the Valley of the Kings. On the discovery of Hatshepsut’s tomb, see Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor, Howard Carter before Tutankhamun (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1992). 22 Stoker’s naming of Budge, Petrie and other Egyptologists suggest a familiarity with their works. He certainly owned volumes by both of these scholars (at least five by Budge) and, in The Jewel of Seven Stars, relied heavily upon Budge’s The Mummy and used passages of his Egyptian Ideas of the Future

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Life near verbatim; see William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 37–8; Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 173. We also know from library logs that Stoker requested items from Marsh’s Library in Dublin and the British Museum’s Reading Room when conducting research for his novels. Of the British Museum’s Reading Room, Stoker wrote, on 24 May 1905: ‘I have used the Rooms since 1879 or thereabouts’; see ‘Bram Stoker’s Application for a Ticket for the British Museum Library’, Tumblr, https://britishmuseum.tumblr.com/ post/144956073592/bram-stokers-application-for-a-ticket-for-the. 23 E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, 2nd edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1900), p. 36. 24 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, pp. 127, 151. 25 Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology, 2nd edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 204. 26 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 155. 27 Ibid., p. 101. 28 Amelia Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891), p. 267. 29 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 162. 30 On this subject, see, for instance, Eleanor Dobson, ‘Cross-Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag: Egyptology and Queer Identity’, Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt, 4 (2019). 31 Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, p. 270. 32 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 162. 33 Ibid., p. 163. 34 Ibid., p. 157. 35 Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, pp. 73–4. An artist herself (as was Howard Carter, who discovered Hatshepsut’s tomb), Edwards dedicates a chapter to Egyptian painting, specifically discussing colour. Edwards recommends, for further inquiry, Gaston Maspero,  Egyptian Archæology, trans. Amelia B. Edwards (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887), pp. 164–201. 36 Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, p. 270. 37 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 157. 38 On this subject, see also Jasmine Day’s assessment of mummy unwrapping as figurative rape; Day, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 43. 39 Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, p. 274. 40 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 180. 41 See George Hart, The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (New York: Routledge, 2005). Hart writes of the goddess Hathor that ‘Representations in tombs, such as that of Queen Nefertari (Dynasty XIX), and in the Book of the Dead show seven cows whose role is to determine the destiny of a child at birth. Each Hathor has her own name: i Lady of the universe; ii Sky-storm; iii You from the land of silence; iv You from Khemmis; v Red-hair; vi Bright red; vii Your name flourishes through skill’; p. 64.



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42 The exhibit’s curator and director of Marsh’s Library, Jason McElligott, records that William Ramesey believed himself to be the descendent of the historical Rameses. See ‘Bram Stoker and the Haunting of Marsh’s Library’, Marsh’s Library, www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/haunting. The log of Marsh’s Library also reveals Stoker’s specific interest in works of the seventeenth century; one might note Van Huyn’s Egyptian travelogue in The Jewel of Seven Stars is said to have been published in 1650. 43 I am grateful to sidereal astrologer Carol Eleanor Ramirez née Glancy (1933–2014) for awakening me to the important distinction between sidereal and tropical astrology, and the way that ancient peoples such as the Egyptians built their monuments to align with the light of the solstices. This chapter is written in her memory. Recent archaeologists point out that Hatshepsut’s temple is oriented to capture the light of the winter solstice; see, for instance, Molsalam Shaltout and Juan Antonio Belmonte, ‘On the Orientation of Ancient Egyptian Temples I: Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 36:3 (2005), 284–6. 44 Ancient Egyptian culture was – usually – polytheistic. Still, Ra’s importance and association with the sun can be seen in the ubiquity of Ra iconography, a slender male figure with a sun disc atop a hawk head. In her chapter on the literature and religion of Egypt in Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers, Edwards acknowledges the importance of Ra as a creator figure, though she also points out that his characteristics could be attributed to other deities such as Ptah and Amen; Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, p. 232. 45 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 267. 46 Ramirez and Kirsch’s team-taught seminar, Museums as Models of Innovative Management and Creativity, offered in 2017 at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Ljubljana, addressed the politics and cultural tensions of preserving the past. 47 I am appreciative of Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art director Eva Kirsch for helping me to specify the kinds of precious materials used in items entombed with the deceased. 48 See the Journey of the Beyond exhibit (2018–20) curated by Eva Kirsch, Robert and Frances Fullerton, at the Museum of Art, San Bernardino, California. 49 While the British Museum already had several mummified cats as part of their Egyptian collections, the date of this acquisition seems significant given Stoker’s reference to other important archaeological landmarks in 1902. The artefact in question is listed under the museum number EA37348. 50 H. Rider Haggard and the artists Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter (both of whom produced works with ancient Egyptian subject matter) were in attendance at Budge’s 1889 mummy unwrapping. On Thomas Pettigrew, see, for example, Gabriel Moshenska, ‘Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew and the Study of Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in William Carruthers (ed.), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 201–14. See also Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 144; Day, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 27, 30.

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51 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 299. 52 See, for example, the interracial romances of Henty’s By Right of Conquest (Anglo-Tezcucan), Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (Anglo-Aztec) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (Anglo-Incan). 53 Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 310. 54 Glennis Byron, ‘Bram Stoker’s Gothic and the Resources of Science’, Critical Survey, 19:2 (2007), 61. 55 See the Journey of the Beyond exhibit (2018–20) curated by Eva Kirsch, Robert and Frances Fullerton, at the Museum of Art, San Bernardino, California.

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Crane, Mary Thomas, ‘Roman World, Egyptian Earth: Cognitive Difference and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’, in Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Curtis, Gerard, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) Daly, Nicholas, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28:1 (1994) Davis, Thomas W., Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) Day, Jasmine, ‘The Maid and the Mummy’, in Rachel J. Dann and Karen Exell (eds), Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies (New York: Cambria Press, 2013) Day, Jasmine, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006) Day, Jasmine, ‘The Rape of the Mummy: Women, Horror Fiction and the Westernisation of the Curse’, in Pablo Altoche Peña, Conrado Rodríguez Martin, and Ángeles Ramírez Rodriguez (eds), Mummies and Science, World Mummies Research: Proceedings of the VI World Congress on Mummy Studies (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Academia Canaria de la Historia, 2008) Deane, Bradley, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Deck, Isaiah, ‘On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt’, Annual Report of the American Institute of the City of New York, 144 (1855) Delyfer, Catherine, ‘New Woman Fiction, Gender and Empire: Egyptian Encounters and Subversions in Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1896) and Victoria Cross’s Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903)’, in Christine Reynier (ed.), Cross-Cultural Encounters between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking Worlds (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) Desmarais, Jane, ‘Perfume Clouds: Olfaction, Memory, and Desire in Arthur Symons’s London Nights (1895)’, in Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (London: Routledge, 2016) Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Cross-Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag: Egyptology and Queer Identity’, Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt, 4 (2019) Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Emasculating Mummies: Gender and Psychological Threat in Fin-de-Siècle Mummy Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40:4 (2018) Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Gods and Ghost-Light: Ancient Egypt, Electricity, and X-Rays’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45 (2017) Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Literature and Culture in the Golden Age of Egyptology’ (PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2016) Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Science, Magic, and Ancient Egypt in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature’ (MA dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2013)



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Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Mummies and the Fairy-Tale Genre at the Fin de Siècle’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18:3 (2017) Dobson, Eleanor and Nichola Tonks, ‘Introduction: Ancient Egypt in NineteenthCentury Culture’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 40:4 (2018) Dodd, Valerie A., George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) Dolin, Tim, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ‘The D’Orbiney Papyrus’, British Museum Collection Online, www.britishmuseum.org/ research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=113985&p artId=1 Douglas, Alfred, ‘The Sphinx’, in The Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Martin Secker, 1919) Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) Dowling, Linda, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with the Earth’, Victorian Studies, 31:2 (1988) Doyle, A. Conan, ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes’, Strand Magazine, 28:163 (1904) ‘Drama’, Athenaeum (22 November 1890) ‘Drama’, Athenaeum (21 November 1891) ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (2 August 1890) ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (9 August 1890) ‘Dramatic Gossip’, Athenaeum (21 November 1891) Drower, Margaret S., Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology, 2nd edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) Duesterberg, Susanne, Popular Receptions of Archaeology: Fictional and Factual Texts in 19th and Early 20th Century Britain (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015) Duncan, Sophie, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Dutens, Louis, Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes, 2 vols (Paris: Chez la Veuve Duchesne, 1766) Edwards, Amelia B., A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877) Edwards, Amelia B., Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891) ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, Boston Daily Advertiser (26 November 1838) ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, Saturday Magazine, 4:116 (1834) Eliot, George, Adam Bede (New York: J. B. Alden, 1884) Eliot, George, Middlemarch (Boston: Lauriat Comp, 1908) Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) Eltis, Sos, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Enstad, Nan, The Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) Evangelista, Stefano, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

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Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Timothy Saunders et al. (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Evangelista, Stefano, Charles Martindale and Elisabeth Prettejohn (eds), Pater the Classicist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (London: John Chapman, 1854) Fleischhack, Maria, Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015) Fletcher, Pamela M., ‘Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism’, Visual Culture in Britain, 6:2 (2005) Foucault, Michel, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998) Frankfurter, David, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) Franklin, J. Jeffrey, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001) Fry, Roger, ‘The Case of the Late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M.’, Nation, 12:16 (1913) Fusco, Richard A., ‘Poe and the Perfectability of Man’ (MA dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1982) Gagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) Gange, David, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Gautier, Théophile, Œuvres poétiques completes, ed. Michel Brix (Paris: Bartillat, 2004) Gautier, Théophile, The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume 24: Enamels and Cameos, ed. F. C. de Sumichrast, trans. Agnes Lee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1906) Genette, Gérard, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 22:2 (1991) Gliddon, George Robbins, ‘Ancient Egypt’, New World, 68–9 (1843) Goldman, Shalom, The Wiles of Women / The Wiles of Men: Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish, and Islamic Folklore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) Goldsmith, Meredith, ‘Cigarettes, Tea, Cards, and Chloral: Addictive Habits and Consumer Culture in The House of Mirth’, American Literary Realism, 43.3 (2011)



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Griffiths, Andrew, The New Journalism, the New Imperialism, and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Grob, Alan, A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) Grob, Alan, ‘Arnold’s “Mycerinus”: The Fate of Pleasure’, Victorian Poetry, 20:1 (1982) Grotenhuis, Lisebeth, ‘Smoking Hot: The Odalisque’s Eroticizing Cigarette’, Via, 11–12 (2017), http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/1842 Haggard, Andrew, Under Crescent and Star (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1895) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (5 January 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (2 February 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (23 March 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (30 March 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (18 May 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (25 May 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, ‘Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand’, Illustrated London News (29 June 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, Cleopatra (Toronto: William Bryce, 1889) Haggard, H. Rider, Morning Star (New York: McKinlay, Stone, and McKenzie, 1916) Haggard, H. Rider, She: A History of Adventure, 1887 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006) Haggard, H. Rider, The Days of my Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926) Hart, George, The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (New York: Routledge, 2005) Haynes, Joyce and R. Jackson Wilson, Padihershef: The Egyptian Mummy (Springfield: George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 1985) Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) Helsinger, Elizabeth, ‘Lyric Poetry and the Event of Poems, 1870’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=lyric-poetry-and-the-event-of-poems-1870

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Hibbitt, Richard, ‘The Artist as Aesthete: The French Creation of Wilde’, in Stefano Evangelista (ed.), The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) Higgins, Lisa Cochran, ‘Adulterous Individualism, Socialism, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Suffrage Writing’, Legacy, 21:2 (2004) Hiley, F. C. W., ‘To the Memory of “Mike,” the Museum Cat, Died Jan. 15, 1919, Aged Twenty Years’, in E. A. Wallis Budge (ed.), ‘Mike’: The Cat who Assisted in Keeping the Main Gate of the British Museum from February 1909 to January 1929 (Bungay, R. Clay & Sons, 1929) Hirshfield, Claire, ‘Truth’, in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984) Holt, Frank L., ‘Egyptomania: Have we Cursed the Pharaohs?’ Archaeology, 39:2 (1986) Hopkins, Lisa, ‘Crowning the King, Mourning his Mother: The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lady of the Shroud’, in William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) Horne, Thomas Hartwell, Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1818) Hosmer, William Howe Cuyler, ‘The Memphian Mummy’, Atkinson’s Casket or Gems of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, 8:3 (1833) Hughes, William, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Hughes, William, ‘Profane Resurrections: Bram Stoker’s Self-Censorship in The Jewel of Seven Stars’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) ‘Human Remains, Mummy of Nesmin’, National Museums Liverpool, www. liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/collections/antiquities/ancient-egypt/item299423.aspx Inman, Billie Andrew, Walter Pater and his Reading: With a Bibliography of his Library Borrowings, 1874–1877 (London: Garland, 1990) Irwin, John T., American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) Jacobs, Andrew S., Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016) James, Henry, ‘Henry James on George Eliot’, in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2000) Jenkyns, Richard, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London: Harper Collins, 1992) Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) Kakoudaki, Despiina, ‘Pinup and Cyborg: Exaggerated Gender and Artificial Intelligence’, in Marleen S. Barr (ed.), Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Keats, John, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978)



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Kemp, Martin and M. Wallace (eds), Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) Kennedy, J. Gerald, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) King, Lucille, ‘Notes on Poe’s Sources’, Texas Studies in English, 10 (1930) Klein, Bernhard, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Knight, Charles, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, 3 vols (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1864) Lamb, Margaret, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980) Landow, George P., Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (London: Routledge, 1980) Landow, George P., William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) Lane-Poole, Stanley, ‘Preface’, in Edward William Lane, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from a Thousand and One Nights, ed. Stanley Lane-Poole (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883) Lape, Susan, Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Lee, Vernon, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006) Lhamon, William T., Jr, Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) Linkin, Harriet Kramer, ‘“Call the Roller of Big Cigars”: Smoking Out the Patriarchy in The Awakening’, Legacy, 11.2 (1994) ‘Literature’, Athenaeum (19 July 1890) ‘Literature’, Athenaeum (26 July 1890) Lloyd, Rosemary, Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Mummy’s Curse’, in Matt Cardin (ed.), Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015) Luckhurst, Roger, ‘The Mummy’s Curse: A Genealogy’, in Jarmila Mildorf, Hans-Ulrich Seeber and Martin Windisch (eds), Magic, Science, Technology and Literature (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006) Luckhurst, Roger, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Lupton, Carter, ‘“Mummymania” for the Masses – Is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?’, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt (London: UCL Press, 2003) ‘M. Sardou’s New Play’, Athenaeum (8 November 1890) Mallarmé, Stéphane, Collected Poems, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

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Malley, Sean, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845–1854 (Farnham, Ashgate: 2012) Marchand, Leslie A., The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture (New York: Octagon, 1971) Marks, Clifford, ‘George Eliot’s Pictured Bible: Adam Bede’s Redeeming Methodism’, Christianity and Literature, 49:3 (2000) Marr, Ryan, ‘Dinah Morris as Second Eve: The Fall and Redemption in Adam Bede’, Logos, 17:3 (2014) Martin, Charles D., ‘Can the Mummy Speak? Manifest Destiny, Ventriloquism, and the Silence of the Ancient Egyptian Body’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 31:2 (2009) Maspero, Gaston, Egyptian Archæology, trans. Amelia B. Edwards (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887) Maxwell, Catherine, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) McCouat, Philip, ‘The Life and Death of Mummy Brown’, Journal of Art in Society (2013; 2019), www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brown.html McKenna, Neil, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Century, 2003) Meeks, Dimitri and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) Meier, Frank, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Myth of the Femme Fatale in Fin de Siècle Culture’, in Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis and Julie A. Hibbard (eds), The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde in the Last 100 Years (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2002) Meijer, Miriam Claude, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722–1789) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) Meltzer, Françoise, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Montserrat, Dominic, Akhenaten History Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2000) Montserrat, Dominic, Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996) Montserrat, Dominic, ‘“To Make Death Beautiful”: The Other Life of the Fayum Portraits’, Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts, 150:449 (1999) Moser, Stephanie, Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) Moser, Stephanie, ‘Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies, Archaeological Representation and the Interpretation of Ancient Egypt’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 22:4 (2015) Moser, Stephanie, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) Moshenska, Gabriel, ‘Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew and the Study of Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in William Carruthers (ed.), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (New York: Routledge, 2015)



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Mostyn, Trevor, Egypt’s Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists (London: Quartet, 1989) ‘Mummius’, ‘The Answer of the Egyptian Mummy’, Saturday Magazine, 4:116 (1834) Munkelt, Marge, ‘Restoring Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra on the NineteenthCentury Stage: Samuel Phelps and Isabella Glyn’, Theatre History Studies, 12 (1992) Murison, Justine S., The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Murray, Douglas, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Sceptre, 2000) Mussell, James, ‘Repetition: or, “In our Last”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48.3 (2015) Nichols, Marcia D., ‘Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” and Blackface Anatomy’, Poe Studies, 48 (2015) ‘Nichts Twa wi’ the Shah’, Punch (13 July 1889) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (28 August 1890) ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (11 September 1890) ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (23 October 1890) ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (20 November 1890) ‘Notes from Paris’, Truth (27 November 1890) Nott, Josiah Clark and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854) Orrells, Daniel, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Osborn, Laughton (ed.), Handbook of Young Artists and Amateurs in Oilpainting (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845) ‘Our Booking-Office’, Punch (10 August 1889) ‘Our Booking-Office’, Punch (21 September 1889) Oxley, William, Egypt and the Wonders of the Land of the Pharaohs (London: Trubner and Co., 1884) Parramore, Lynn, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Pater, Walter, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910) Pater, Walter, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1910) Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) Pausanias, Description of Greece, Volume I: Books 1–2 (Attica and Corinth), trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918) Pearson, Richard, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in Ruth Robins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) Pearson, Roger, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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Pettigrew, Thomas Joseph, A History of Egyptian Mummies (London: Longman, 1834) Pieri, Giuliana, ‘D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema: Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism’, Modern Language Review, 96:2 (2001) Pinch, Geraldine, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Poe, Edgar Allan, The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1978) Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science, 1:4 (1845) ‘Poem about a Mummy’, Notes and Queries, 2:33 (1856) Pollin, Burton R., ‘Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith’, Poe Newsletter, 3 (1970) Pollin, Burton R., ‘Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” Reconsidered’, Emerson Society Quarterly, 60, supplement 2 (1970) Powell, Kerry, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Qureshi, Sadiah, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) Reeves, Nicholas and John H. Taylor, Howard Carter before Tutankhamun (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1992) Reid, Donald Malcolm, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) Reid, Julia, ‘Gladstone Bags, Shooting Boots, and Bryant & May’s Matches: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic’s Serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Studies in the Novel, 43:2 (2011) Reid, Julia, ‘“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”: Anthropology and matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20:3 (2015) ‘Review’, North American Review, 123:252 (1876) Richards, Jeffrey, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993) Richardson, LeeAnne, New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction: Gender, Genre, and Empire (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006) Rieber, Robert W., Freud on Interpretation: The Ancient Magical Egyptian and Jewish Traditions (London: Springer, 2012) Robbins, Ruth, ‘Always Leave them Wanting More: Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the Failed Circulations of Desire’, in Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (London: Routledge, 2016) Rogers, Katharine M., The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) Ross, Iain, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)



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Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume I (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1901) Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Joseph Accused before Potiphar, 1860, Rossetti Archive, www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s122.rap.html Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, ‘Supplementary’, in Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, Volume I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880) Rutherford, Ian, ‘Down-Stream to the Cat-Goddess: Herodotus on Egyptian Pilgrimage’, in Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford (eds), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978) ‘Saint Matthias’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/ Saint-Matthias Schachter, Albert, ‘Sphinx’, in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Selim, Samah, ‘Pharaohs’ Revenge: Translation, Literary History and Colonial Ambivalence’, in Dyala Hamzah (ed.), The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2012) Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Modern Library, 2009) Shaltout, Mosalam and Juan Antonio Belmonte, ‘On the Orientation of Ancient Egyptian Temples I: Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 36:3 (2005) Sharpe, Samuel, The History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times till the Conquest by the Arabs A.D. 640 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846) Shechter, Relli, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850–2000 (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Adonais, ed. H. B. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1877) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Ozymandias’, Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume III, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, in Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Shuter, William, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Singleton, Jon, ‘Malignant Faith and Cognitive Restructuring: Realism in Adam Bede’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39:1 (2011) Smith, Philip E. II and Michael S. Helfand, ‘Introduction’, in Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) ‘The Speech of the Mummy’, United States Democratic Review, 4:12 (1838) Stoker, Bram, The Jewel of Seven Stars (New York: W. R. Caldwell, 1904) The Story of the House of Cassell (London: Cassell, 1922)

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Index

Adam (Genesis) 40n.58, 52, 53–4, 57, 60–1 Adams, John Quincy 29 advertising 11, 15, 17, 162, 163, 167, 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 177, 178 aesthetic movement 5, 10–11, 16, 17, 71, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148–9, 150, 155, 157n.5, 170, 173, 177 Alcott, Louisa May 181n.16 Allen, Grant 202n.6 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 84, 89n.71, 117, 163, 169, 170–1, 176, 179, 183n.52, 205n.50 Amenophis III 143 Amun 49, 52, 59, 152 Antinous 151 Antony, Mark 10, 91, 100, 114, 117, 124, 129, 132, 133 Anubis 147, 148, 153 archaeology 3, 9, 12, 13, 15, 30, 46, 89n.71, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109, 111n.26, 116, 145, 147, 163, 168, 170, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192, 193, 198, 203n.12 Arnold, Edwin 102 Arnold, Matthew 145 Arts and Crafts movement 170 astrology 107, 187, 196–7, 205n.43 astronomy 26, 58

Athenaeum 10, 86n.6, 115, 121, 122, 125 Atum 49, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, 63 Bacon, John H. 163, 164, 168, 169, 172 Bastet 115, 119, 120, 133, 202n.9 Baudelaire, Charles 10, 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 151, 153, 156 beauty 8, 54, 55, 56, 68, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 140–1, 146, 149, 151, 155, 177, 179, 196, 200 Belzoni, Giovanni 24, 25, 27, 141–2 Bernard, William Bayle 24, 25 Bernhardt, Sarah 10, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124–5, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 137n.78 Bewsher, M. E. 122 Bible 8, 16, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 57, 59, 60–1, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72, 73, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 92, 95, 100, 104, 105, 148, 170, 201n.2 Blake, William 70 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 48 Bonaparte, Napoleon 5, 23, 45, 122, 185 Booth, Eva Gore 72 Boothby, Guy 11–12, 15, 16–17, 162–7, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 188, 202n.6 Bradley, Katherine see Field, Michael British Empire 2, 4, 10, 13, 197 see also imperialism

index British Museum 1–2, 18n.5, 33, 69, 73, 79, 94, 145, 186, 201, 204n.22, 205n.49 Brontë sisters 120 Buchanan, Robert 83 Buckingham, James Silk 24, 31 Buddhism 9, 92, 102–3 Budge, E. A. Wallis 1–2, 12, 14, 33, 94, 186, 191, 192, 193, 197, 199, 201, 203n.22, 205n.50 Burnand, Francis Cowley 124 Burne-Jones, Edward 84 Cabanel, Alexandre 117 Caesar, Julius 123, 129, 131, 132 Carter, Howard 191, 193, 201, 204n.35 cats 1, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120–1, 122, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135n.17, 136n.37, 186, 188, 199, 200, 205n.49 Cestius, Gaius 146, 147 Champollion, Jean-François 24, 46, 123, 185, 186, 192, 201 Chopin, Kate 173, 180 Christianity 3, 6, 7, 9, 15–16, 22, 26, 31, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65n.48, 82, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109 see also Bible; Jesus; Moses class 6, 22, 41n.70, 59, 121, 165, 171, 174, 177 Cleopatra VII 9–10, 17, 68, 76–7, 88n.51, 89n.71, 91, 98, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 114, 115–16, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122–7, 128, 129–30, 131–3, 134n.4, 148, 149, 151, 160n.58, 171, 175, 183n.52 Collier, Constance 117 Collier, John 117, 121 consumer culture 12, 162–3, 171, 174, 178, 179, 180 Cooper, Edith see Field, Michael Copland, Alexander 26–7, 28 Corelli, Marie 69, 79, 92 Cornhill Magazine 149

223

Costello, Louisa Stuart 5, 8, 69, 81 curse see mummy’s curse Daily Telegraph 117 death 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 32, 50, 61, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 107, 108, 117, 125, 126, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 152, 153, 154 decadent movement 5, 10–11, 16, 17, 71, 140, 141, 142, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 157n.5, 162, 164, 170, 173, 174, 177–8, 179 Dickens, Charles 120 Dolmetsch, H. 167 Douglas, Alfred 154–5 Douglas, Theo 188 Doyle, Arthur Conan 39n.45, 173, 188, 189 Duval, Jeanne 148 Eden 50, 51, 52, 59 Edwards, Amelia 12, 176–7, 186, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 201, 204n.35 Egyptology 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 25, 30, 31, 33, 35, 41n.61, 45, 46, 68, 70, 86n.6, 90, 93, 94, 100, 109, 111n.26, 114, 147, 150, 164, 167, 170, 185–6, 187, 189–90, 191, 192–5, 197, 201, 202n.9 Eliot, George 5, 7, 16, 43–4, 45, 46–9, 51, 52–5, 56–8, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 189 Eliot, T. S. 72 Epiphanius 120 Epstein, Jacob 148 eugenics 29, 30–1, 35 Eve (Genesis) 52, 53, 56, 57, 60–1, 62, 65n.48 Faucit, Harriet 118 Feuerbach, Ludwig 47 Field, Michael 72, 149, 156–7n.5 France 3, 10, 45, 122–3, 125, 128, 129, 130, 133, 147 Fraser’s Magazine 70

224

index

Freud, Sigmund 156n.4 Fry, Roger 171 Galton, Francis 30–1 Garden of Eden see Eden Gautier, Théophile 39n.45, 141, 142, 144, 150, 152, 156 Gay, John 24 gender 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17–18, 25–6, 41n.70, 43, 52, 55–7, 62, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74–7, 81, 83, 84, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134n.5, 142, 151, 152, 188, 194, 195–6, 200, 201 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 123 Gilchrist, Alexander 70 Gladstone, William 123 Gliddon, George 24, 31, 32, 35, 40n.58, 41n.61 Glyn, Elinor 117–18 Glyn, Isabella 10, 118, 122 Goodall, Frederick 170 Gosse, Edmund 70 Great Sphinx see Sphinx of Giza Greaves, John 190 Greece 10, 11, 16, 30, 56, 58, 120, 139, 140–1, 143, 144, 150, 153, 155, 157, 203n.12 Griffith, George 200, 202n.10, 203n.12 Hadrian 151 Haggard, H. Rider 5, 9, 15, 16, 39n.45, 69, 79, 85, 88n.51, 90, 91–7, 100, 102–3, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 123, 182n.28, 188, 200, 202n.6, 203n.10, 203n.12, 205n.50 Hathor 8, 52, 54, 55–6, 57, 59, 119, 120, 133, 196, 204n.41 Hatshepsut 12, 176, 186, 193, 194–5, 196, 197, 203n.21, 205n.43 Hegel, Georg 11, 140, 143–4, 146, 153 Henty, G. A. 188, 200, 203n.12 Herodotus 18n.7, 18n.8, 120 Hichens, Robert 154 highbrow 7, 16 Hinduism 92, 103 Homer 147 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 76

Horne, Thomas Hartwell 92 Horus 59, 61, 62, 165 Howard, H. L. see Wells, Charles Hunt, William Holman 92, 189 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 162 Illustrated London News 15, 91, 98, 118 illustration 7, 15, 20, 22–3, 29–30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 35n.1, 39n.47, 42n.74, 45, 70, 81, 98, 100, 123, 124–5, 137n.78, 150, 163, 164, 167–9, 171–3, 182n.28 imperialism 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36n.5, 39n.45, 41n.70, 41n.72, 68, 114, 116, 117, 123, 129, 130, 164, 179, 185, 187, 197, 201 Isis 10, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67n.101, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112n.45, 119, 120, 133, 151, 175 Islam 68, 69, 82 see also Quran James, Henry 48 Jami 8, 69, 80, 81, 82 Jesus 48, 54, 61, 62, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 153 Jones, Owen 167, 176 Joseph (Genesis) 8, 52, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 170 Judaism 69, 82, 93, 96, 97, 104, 108, 109 see also Moses Keats, John 72, 146, 149, 150, 154 Knight, Charles 8 Lane, Edward William 8, 45, 46, 60, 63n.6 Lane, John 150 Lane-Poole, Stanley 45 Lang, Andrew 91, 94 Langtry, Lillie 10, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125–6, 128, 129–30, 131, 137n.78, 148, 171 Le Gallienne, Richard 157n.5 Lefébure, Eugène 147

index Lepsius, Karl 46, 64n.19 Leroux, Xavier 121 Lucifer see Satan Ma’at 50–1 magic 2, 7, 44, 49, 51, 91, 98, 107, 164, 166, 170, 189, 197, 201 Mallarmé, Stéphane 147, 148 Manet, Édouard 148 Marsh, Richard 188, 202n.6 Maspero, Gaston 86n.6 Meredith, George 70, 76 middlebrow 7, 11–12, 16 Mike the cat 1, 2, 18n.3 Milton, John 58, 60, 62 Morning Journal 119 Morris, William 82, 83 Moses 92, 93, 98, 100 Mossman, Thomas Wimberley 120 mummies 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 18, 20–3, 24–30, 31–5, 35n.1, 35–6n.5, 37n.12, 38n.40, 39n.44, 40n.56, 41n.61, 41n.72, 68, 70, 84, 89n.71, 89n.74, 116, 136n.37, 152, 153, 163, 164, 166, 179–80, 181n.16, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 198, 199–200 mummy’s curse 2, 4, 7, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36n.7, 39n.45, 41n.70, 148, 187, 192, 202n.6 museums 3, 4, 5, 30, 142, 191 see also British Museum Naville, Édouard-Henri 202n.9 Nephthys 66n.101 Nun 49–50 obelisks 141, 142, 144, 151, 152, 174 occult 2, 15, 16, 103, 109, 178, 187, 193 Oedipus 139, 140 One Thousand and One Nights see Thousand and One Nights, The Orientalism 11, 25, 68, 77, 102, 146, 147, 149, 156, 167, 168, 170, 174, 179 Osburn, William 95, 111n.26 Osiris 58, 61, 67n.101, 107, 108, 151

225

Pater, Walter 11, 143–4, 145, 152, 156 Pausanias 143 Penny Magazine 44 Pepi II 94 Petrie, Flinders 12, 14, 30, 31, 95, 111n.26, 186, 191, 192, 193, 197, 201, 203n.22 Pettigrew, Thomas 24, 199 phrenology 30, 31, 33 Poe, Edgar Allan 6, 13, 15, 20–3, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29–30, 31–2, 33–4, 36n.7, 37n.12, 38n.27, 38n.40, 39n.44, 40n.56, 40n.58, 41n.61, 42n.74, 147 Potiphar 68, 77, 80, 83, 84 Potiphar’s wife 8–9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73–82, 83, 84, 85, 88n.51 Potter, Cora 119 Poynter, Edward 170, 205n.50 Pre-Raphaelites 8, 16, 71, 83, 121, 170, 189 Punch 10, 115, 121, 122, 123–5, 126, 137n.78, 189 pyramid 29, 139, 143, 145, 146–7, 152, 153, 154, 156, 156n.2, 168, 174 Quran 69, 79, 80, 81 Ra 49, 54, 165, 197, 201n.2, 205n.44 race 3, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32–5, 39n.47, 40n.56, 40n.58, 41n.61, 41n.70, 41n.73, 126, 128, 129, 130, 137n.78 Rameses II 98, 99, 100, 185, 191, 193 Rameses IV 147 Ramesey, William 196 reincarnation 9, 15, 88n.51, 90, 92, 94, 95, 102, 103, 106, 108 religion 3, 6, 7, 9, 15, 16, 17, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 63, 83, 92, 93, 102, 107, 108, 109, 165 see also Buddhism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism Ricketts, Charles 150 Rohmer, Sax 202n.6 Rome 10, 11, 16, 58, 98, 116, 118, 123, 131, 132, 140, 146, 147, 151

226

index

Rosellini, Ippolito 46 Rossetti, Christina 76 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 15, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 82–3, 87n.27, 141 Royal Academy 121, 170 Salome 9, 68, 69, 79, 150 Sardou, Victorien 117, 122 Satan 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 Schliemann, Heinrich 145 Schwob, Marcel 150 Sekhmet 115, 119 Seth 8, 54, 58–9, 60, 61, 66n.101 Seti I 141, 147, 193 sexuality 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 56, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 97, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134n.4, 140, 142, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156 homosexuality 11, 142, 150, 151, 155 Shakespeare, William 9, 70, 72, 76–7, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 130, 131–2, 135n.17, 147, 148, 149, 160n.58 Sharpe, Samuel 45–6 Shelley, Mary 27 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 146, 147, 153, 185, 186, 198, 201 Shields, Frederick 149 Siculus, Diodorus 18n.7 slavery 22, 24, 29, 31, 32, 35, 40n.56, 41n.73, 68 Smith, Horace 25 sphinx 1, 11, 71, 139, 140–1, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 150–4, 155, 156, 179 Sphinx of Giza 142, 143, 154–5, 168, 174 Spiritualism 15, 44 Stoker, Bram 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 39n.45, 69, 186–201 Story, William Wetmore 117 Strauss, David 47

Swinburne, Algernon Charles 8, 14, 16, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76–7, 78, 83, 88n.43, 141, 147, 149, 156 Symonds, John Addington 11 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 147 Theosophy 48 Thornton, Lewis 121 Thoth 61 Thousand and One Nights, The 44, 45, 60 Thutmose II 176 Thutmose III 194 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 117 Truth 10, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 128–9, 130 Tyler, Thomas 121 Vizetelly, Henry 20, 22–3, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42n.74 Vogue 173 Wadjet 165 Wallis, Ellin 10 Waterhouse, John William 117, 176, 183n.52 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 70, 72, 73 Webb, Jane 26, 36n.11, 38n.27 Wells, Charles 8, 14, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 84, 85 Westminster Review 73 Wharton, Edith 173 Wilde, Oscar 11, 69, 72, 79, 140, 141, 144–7, 148, 149–54, 156, 157n.5, 162, 173 Wilkinson, John Gardner 46, 95, 111n.26, 145 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 143 Windsor Magazine 12, 15, 163, 164, 165, 168–9, 171, 172 Woodville, R. Caton 98 Yeats, William Butler 72 Young, Thomas 123 Zuleika see Potiphar’s wife