LAUSR

In 1808, the Romantic poet Robert Southey lamented the fashion for Egypt that swept across Europe in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition, using an invented character, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, as a mouthpiece. One of his oft-quoted complaints refers to an exotic trend in interior design, which saw walls adorned “with the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed” (275). At a time when the meanings of the hieroglyphs were still unknown (major advancements in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs yet to be made by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young in the 1820s), Espriella’s discomfort when surrounded by such symbolism suggests mistrust of the foreign, the ancient, the mysterious and the strange, along with an illogical fear that ancient Egyptian iconography, once seen, might re-emerge during sleep, its chilling qualities reified. Yet Espriella is careful to establish that, his ownmisgivings aside, the psychological unease which this fashionable wallpaper conjures up is experienced only by the children who look upon it. Ancient Egypt makes little impact upon the more robust adult mind (besides being aesthetically displeasing to those, like Espriella, of superior taste); ladies are comfortable sporting “crocodile ornaments” (275), as well as introducing such morbid décor into their homes. While the notion that ancient Egyptian iconography and artefacts might be held as nightmarish evidently has a literary history stretching back to the early nineteenth century, it was in the final decades of the Victorian era that ancient Egyptian artefacts —specifically the bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead—began to be held as objects which might trigger moments of psychological disturbance, not just in the minds of imaginative and impressionable children, but in adult men and women. With the development of the field of psychology at the fin de siècle these monstrous bodies began to assert their power through an affront on gender and sexual norms, in particular, unmanning male characters in mummy fiction by stimulating hysterical responses. As a psychiatric diagnosis applied primarily to women in the nineteenth century—and often connected to the womb in medical documents, stretching back to ancient Egyptian civilisation itself (Micale 5, 8)—hysteria appears to be a fitting psychological state for those threatened by a monster whose rather Freudian name—“mummy”—evokes the notion of a supernatural and eternal feminine. A “triad of complementary interests” in archaeology, the supernatural, and psychology arose at the fin de siècle, and fascination with ancient Egypt played a part in contemporary