This newsletter has arisen from the dead! Much like Boris Karloff’s character in The Mummy (1932), which figures perfectly for what I feel like exploring and writing about; the proliferation of fin de siècle western literature and cinema about mummies (and ancient Egyptian myths and occultism). In just the 5 decades starting from 1880 to the 1930s nearly all the material that formed our image of the mummy and ancient Egyptian myths were created (I’m ignoring the 90s films with Brendan Fraser as they are just rehashes of the same themes and stereotypes created earlier).
From the 1840s to 1930s Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Ring of Thoth and Lot 249, Edgar Allen Poe’s Some Words with a Mummy, Louisa May Alcott’s The Mummy’s Curse, several HP Lovecraft stories and dozens of others were published, along with the release of the famous Boris Karloff film. Why was that such a prolific period for mummy fiction among Western audiences? Well there are quite a few reasons, some of them being:
Napolean’s campaign in Egypt and his creation of the Institut d'Égypte and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (1798-1799)
European interest in, and pursuit of, Egyptology as a scholarly interest and as a means of profit (selling ancient artefacts)
The 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb
The building of the Suez Canal (1850s-1860s)
The increasing accessibility of travel
General imperialist attitudes and an interest in ‘Orientalism’ and the fetishizing of the ‘exotic’
So to make my Halloween mania less irritating and more culturally responsible as well as literarily educational, I’ll be reading and writing about all this over the next two months… fingers crossed.
