Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease

A political cartoon published in Punch in 1896 illustrates the Victorian tendency to imagine the complicated politics of the “Egyptian Question” as a peculiar revision of the riddle of the Sphinx. Before that enduring and impassive monument stand the representatives of a very timely imperial dilemma. Egypt, depicted as the translucently shrouded woman of Orientalist fantasy, cowers for protection at the side of John Bull, dressed as a soldier with his rifle held casually over his shoulder. Confronting them stands the Turkish Sultan, asking England to consider whether the time had not come to restore Egypt to her loving uncle (Fig. 1). Well might he ask, for Egypt was not at the time a place where Britain had any official business; nominally a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was theoretically controlled by a Khedive answerable to Constantinople. Yet as everyone knew, the real power in Egypt was held by the British Consul General, Lord Cromer, along with his administration of advisors and an army of occupation, which had no more official standing than the boatloads of tourists steaming up and down the Nile. What claim might the British make to prolong their presence in this unacknowledged but strategically vital corner of their empire? Or, in the gendered logic of the cartoon, what exactly is the relationship of John Bull to this distressed Oriental beauty? Clearly he is her protector in the melodramatic mode, but is he another relative? Perhaps a lover?

The problem recalls a more explicitly erotic Punch cartoon published directly after General Garnet Wolseley seized the country in 1882. Here Egypt, as Cleopatra, presents herself alluringly to that unlikely Victorian Caesar, William Gladstone, who, flanked by Wolseley in Roman armor, looks up from his interrupted work in consternation (Fig. 2). The temptation Egypt offers to this reluctant imperialist is presented even

Fig. 1.

“Turk the Sublime! Sultan (loq.).” “Now, Mr. Bull, you have been Miss Egypt’s Guardian long enough, so I invite you to consider whether the time has not now arrived for her return to the arms of her loving Uncle.”

Punch, 110 (7 March 1896), 110.

Fig. 2.

“Cleopatra before Caesar; or, the Egyptian Difficulty.”

Punch, 83 (July–December 1882), 163.

more aggressively to Punch’s readers: while she gazes down at Gladstone, she twists her body in three-quarter profile towards the spectator, having just stripped off the carpet in which she had concealed herself. At the cartoon’s focal point, toward which Wolseley gestures and Gladstone stares, the label “EGYPT” is printed across a thin strap just beneath her gauze-veiled breasts: here political and sexual possibilities salaciously converge. In both cartoons, the riddle of imperial policy towards Egypt is allegorized for the public as a problem of sexuality staged against an equally problematic backdrop of anachronistic time. Egypt’s future would depend upon the uncertain outcome of this erotically charged encounter of its colonial present and its Pharaonic past.

During the unofficial occupation of Egypt (1882–1914), British writers discovered a way to combine these two female characters—the contemporary veiled Arab woman and the majestic queen of classical antiquity—into a single fanciful figure that could embody the sexual and historical themes through which the “Egyptian Question” was popularly represented: the living mummy. Late-Victorian Britain experienced a minor craze for this creature of imperial fantasy,¹ and mummy stories continued to fascinate Edwardian readers and became a staple of twentieth-century film. We are now more accustomed to the extensive cinematic tradition of grotesquely desiccated male monsters relentlessly avenging the violation of their tombs, but Victorian and Edwardian mummies embody Egypt in terms strikingly like those of the prurient Punch cartoons. The typical mummy of Victorian and Edwardian fiction is a woman, and one who, perfectly preserved in her youthful beauty, strongly attracts the libidinous attention of modern British men. While their desire is certainly a cause of some ambivalence, it is nevertheless the case that the men in these stories are less inclined...